Rikki Magee of the PCC Dance Department came to me one day with a request.

My incredible wife Shirley was a Member of the Royal Academy of Dancing and was much known in the community.

I myself was not unknown.

Rikki said, “We want someone to narrate our new production.”

I said, “ok.”

“We want you to read “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson.”

I said, “OK.”

“We want you to be The Voice of God.”

I said, “OK” in CAPITAL LETTERS.

They had me go down to the basement of the administration building where the audiovisual people hold sway.

There they set me up with earphones and a microphone and said, “When the light comes on, start reading. You can stop whenever you need to, and we can do re-takes.”

Then they went behind a glass window and the light went on.

I read the poem, which I had read before, pausing where I thought there should be a break, because sections were being choreographed individually.

I finished, took off my earphones, turned off the mike.

They rushed in, impressed.

“You did it in one take! Is there any part you want to do over?”

“No,” I said. “You told me to read it when the light came on. I read it.”

“But people usually need several takes, corrections, re-dos. You must be a professional!”

“No,” I said. “I’m just a high school English teacher. We read a lot of poetry to our classes.”

The dancers practiced to my tape.

Then, the day of the performance.

They set up a chair for me in the corner. A music stand to hold the script, and a reading lamp over my shoulder focused on the text.

I read a section, tried to watch the dancers interpreting it, then the next, then the next.

Applause!

I applauded the dancers, who bowed to the audience.

The applause continued.

I guess they were expecting me to take a bow. I didn’t know what to do. No one told me.

I nodded to the audience, took my chair and walked into the wings.

I watched the rest of the program from my chair in the wings.

At the end, everyone rushed on stage for their series of bows, herded by Rikki.

Then they turned and gestured to me.

I didn’t know what I should do. No one told me. I had no rehearsal. I waved at the dancers from the invisible wings.

The dancers came back into the wings after the bows and said, “You should have come out to take a bow.”

I said, “No one told me.”

Apparently I was like a guest soloist, a celebrity, a star.

I thought I just read the poem into the microphone, but on the second night, it was a two-performance run, I came out and bowed to the public.

I was given lavish praise for what I felt was nothing special, just what I do every day in class.

At the end of the performance, a couple sitting in the front row like reserved seats, the man came up to me on the stage and introduced himself.

“David Jacobs,” nodding to his seated wife Jackie, the President of the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Coalition, of which he was Vice President, and he said, “I want to take you to lunch. We have things to discuss, an offer to make.”

Some time later, I wanted to tease him by saying, “You owe me a lunch,” but I didn’t because he and Jackie more than made up for it. We all became close dear friends. Shirley and I joined the Board of the Coalition and for years gave much of ourselves and our lives to this, another worthy cause, which we were always doing to help make the world better.

Those were the days when we shared the stage with notables, mayors, congress people, senators.

Adam Schiff, of recent national prominence even beyond those earlier times, he and I would hang out like buddies, chatting about the video they showed, and the current events of the world. We were mutual advocates, and he may even remember me because I sang spirituals solo a cappella on stage.

One time, when I sang “Old Man River,” with Paul Robeson’s altered text because he felt the original was insufficiently contemporaneously progressive, a gentleman came up to me from the audience and said, “I closed my eyes and thought it was Paul Robeson.”

“Oh no,” I said, “thank you for the kind thought, but Paul Robeson was greatness, I’m just a high school English teacher, though,” I added modestly, “there was that time not so long ago when I was The Voice of God.”