BLOG

Monday

by James Anthony Zoccoli (Jaz), Actor/Writer of Wiggerlover [white boy + black dad = grey areas]

WHAT ARE YOU?

“Half-Italian, half-Polish, all Black.” That’s my joke.

It’s funny ‘cuz it’s true…& truth is stranger than fiction.

As a kid, I was pretty darn funny & pretty darn smart: smart enough to know better than to feel responsible for the fact that my mother & father were divorced when I was three years old; funny enough to be able to keep a sense of humor when times got tough.

If humor is a defense mechanism, I was Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and the television was my Shaolin Temple.  His style was Tiger.  Mine was Python.  Monty Python.  My special move would have been the Banana Split.  My impossible mission was to make my family laugh.  I was James Bond in a Tennessee Tuxedo; my drink was a Tom & Jerry.

Though I didn’t know why, I knew at a young age that Chicago was called “The Second City” & I was proud that our town was the birthplace of SCTV.

After the divorce, my mom & I moved from Orland Park to Rogers Park.

We zigged & zagged; South Side to North Side & back again…

Then, my mom married my dad & we moved to Hyde Park.

It was summertime, so with all of the packing & moving & unpacking, there was hardly anything for me to do during the week & few opportunities for me to meet other kids.  So, I spent a lot of time organizing my action figure, comic book & baseball card collections, listening to my portable turntable and watching TV.

ONTV.  Remember ONTV?  It was cable television before cable television had cables.  Every month they premiered a new movie & they would show that movie four times a day.  Every day.  Seriously: 7am; Noon; 7pm; Midnight.  The movie that was ONTV when we first moved in; the movie that I have seen the most ever; the movie that I can pretty confidently say that I have watched more often than any other person in the world (& I wish I had documented it for Guinness Book of World Records eligibility): was The Jerk.

During our first few weeks there, that was all I did: watch The Jerk.  Over and over and over again. Navin R. Johnson was my hero.  He had replaced Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Spiderman and my own grandfather as the person with whom I identified most.  The first line of the film is “It was never easy for me.  I was born a poor black child…”

& I thought, “Rap on, brother.  Rap on.”