A Portrait of Richard Nixon as a Comedic Muse

I didn’t get any work done during February of my junior year of high school. My entire focus was fixated on the fortieth anniversary of Saturday Night Live and the special NBC was airing to celebrate it. A lifelong lover of comedy, SNL 40 consumed my brain as it promised to unite my comedy heroes across generations. It eventually became a special I watched endlessly.

Following its initial airing, I wrote constantly. Screenplays, short stories, sketches. I just wanted to be funny like the parade of comedians who delighted me across hundreds of SNL episodes. They inspired a number of my favorite ideas, including a musical adaptation of House Hunters that I wrote after the school’s drama teacher mentioned she would like to adapt the work of a student to the stage one day. Writing about houses that came to life tickled me and when I found myself laughing at the idea of the White House gaining sentience with the goal of devouring Richard Nixon, I knew I wanted to pursue this love of writing further. Like many of my SNL heroes, I applied to college to major in English.

At the orientation for new students, I eagerly anticipated course selection because I wanted to take courses that were actually geared towards the kind of writing I wanted to do. I proposed the idea to the student tasked with helping me navigate the UMass website.

“Eh, I don’t know. I’d suggest looking into more literature classes. There’s a writing requirement or something, but you’re going to want to focus on some of these,” he said, pointing at the list of requirements.

“Can I take one of each?”

“Maybe later?” he said, scratching his beard. “For now, let’s just do literature courses.”

Enrolling for two literary analysis-based classes, I intrepidly began to figure out a routine that worked for me to ace the classes. The routine was comfortable and it felt like what I had learned in high school was genuinely applicable to college so I kept it going and I sacrificed my adoration of writing for what came most naturally to me. I was fortunate in that I could write an academic essay on the fourteenth floor of the library with the same amount of ease required to operate the elevator to get there in the first place.

For three semesters, I stuck with that routine, allowing the English major to become a process of “going through the motions.” It was like I was in an old marriage with my major. What first drew me to it had dimmed and I resigned myself to comfort over passion. The child we had together, my expansive Google Drive folder full of writing, was extremely neglected. I had become a bad husband and a bad father to my love, flirting with my mistress of an education minor and, on top of it all, starting to believe that SNL really wasn’t that funny anymore. I was getting older and I wanted to start sleeping in separate beds.

 

When I finally made the decision to shake up the routine, I did not return to writing. Instead, I pursued an internship in another state that took me away from UMass and from academics altogether. Part of me considered it a break from the same old routine and part of me considered it a reckoning with the way I was spending my time as a student. I wasn’t struggling academically and I was preparing myself to become an English teacher, but I wasn’t feeling the same affection that propelled me from The Blues Brothers to Humanities and Fine Arts.

This feeling was only deepened when a friend from high school reconnected with me while I was working at my spring internship in Florida.

I was in my apartment selecting courses for the upcoming fall semester at UMass when I was interrupted by an unexpected text message that read, “Hey Dave! I was just thinking about that House Hunters musical you wrote back in high school. It was so funny. Did you write any other musicals? Can you share them with my email?”

I was flattered to have the compliment, but ashamed to share nothing with them. “Something’s in the works,” I wrote back, feigning sincerity. “Thank you very much!”

Closing the messaging app and returning to Spire, I stared down at my course list that included two more literary analysis courses. Curious, I searched the catalog for “writing” and found a standard creative writing class that still had one spot open. I enrolled immediately and dropped a literature course.

 

As much as I missed Florida, it was refreshing to feel the air actually get cold again that autumn. I missed leaves that did not belong to palm trees and I missed wearing sweaters and jeans. What I didn’t miss was UMass and I cursed myself for making my loss of a comfortable routine so much worse by adding a creative writing class to the mix. Having never navigated a course on writing in the English department before, I could feel anxiety flares setting off in my brain as I forced myself out of my comfort zone.

On my way to the first creative writing class of the semester, my progress was stopped harshly when I stepped in gum in my residence hall’s elevator. While stopping to scrape gum off my shoe on the ground outside of the building, I dropped my metal water bottle. It caught my headphones as it fell, roughly yanking them out of my ears and leaving a dent in both when they collided with the pavement.

Feeling worse about my decision to return to UMass, I finally began to walk towards my class when rain sprinkled from overhead storm clouds that seemingly appeared from nowhere. With my forgotten umbrella resting comfortably dry by the side of my closet, I felt as if Charles Schulz was drawing every moment of my day.

When I finally arrived in class, I immediately noticed the dank smell that accompanies so many classrooms in Bartlett Hall and I resigned myself to it. I was soaking wet, sticking occasionally to the floor, and trying to discreetly cover my nose without drawing too much attention to myself. My frown was the most natural part of the day as I waited for my professor, who was, of course, running ten minutes late.

This frown perpetuated as my professor spoke in riddles, clarifying nothing from their syllabus and leaving me to comb the Spire course catalog for a class that could replace creative writing. I needed structure and this creative writing course seemed too chaotically free-wheeling to adequately satiate my discomfort at being back someplace that felt so unfamiliar. English itself felt unfamiliar and I hated that I was no longer the same student who won my high school’s English department award.

As Spire’s options proved fruitless, I took my concerns to the professor and explained how uncomfortable the syllabus made me.

“Why does it make you uncomfortable?” they said to me.

“I don’t know what’s expected of me. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get an A.”

“Just write. Well, that and participate. But yeah, just write.”

“Write about what?”

“Write about anything,” they said.

“But, like, what’s off limits?”

“Well, don’t write anything offensive.”

“But, like, I can’t write about whatever story I want to tell, right?”

“Why not?”

I nodded uncertainly and thanked the professor for their time before returning to the library and pressing the fourteenth button. I sat at my preferred desk for a long time with a blank Google Document taunting me. For one of the first times at UMass, I allowed my mind to wander with an assignment. Looking to my left, I saw the spine of a Bobby Kennedy biography looking back at me and I began to wonder what it would be like if Kennedy was my professor instead. What advice would Bobby Kennedy give me? Would Bobby Kennedy be proud of me?

And so, I returned to my laptop and began to write about how Bobby Kennedy was proud of me. For an assignment. At a university.

 

When the end of the year came around, it began to feel more like Florida again. At least, that’s how it felt when I finished helping my roommate move out of our dorm and the sweaty atmosphere engulfed my completely. My internship had officially ended a year ago and there I was, waving goodbye to my roommate with the knowledge that we only had one year left together.

When he drove out of sight, I opened my phone’s email app to double check the meeting spot for the reunion of my creative writing class. I embarked in the direction of the Morill greenhouses, excited to see my class again. Bringing a cheesecake I purchased with my remaining dining dollars, the entire group of us savored our impromptu potluck gathering on an emptying campus, dotted with people who gave us a double take when they noticed our party.

We spent hours in the grass reminiscing about our writing with one classmate saying to me, “I still think about that Bobby Kennedy story. Did you ever do more with it?” 

Refreshingly, I told them I had and that I would be happy to share it with them over Google Drive and we exchanged email addresses.

As the event dissipated, I said goodbye to my professor, who left my heart brimming with affection once again with a hug. Parting from the rest, my professor followed after me and asked if they could program their cell phone number into my phone.

“Of course,” I said.

Finishing, they said to me, “If you’re ever in New York, let’s meet up. Don’t stop sending me your writing. Don’t stop writing.”

With the reminder of why I loved majoring in English firmly instilled in me once more, I returned to my dorm room, just in time to flick the season finale of SNL on the television. Keeping it on in the background, I returned to my “Creative Writing” folder on Google Drive to share my Bobby Kennedy story with my peer and noticed the script for the House Hunters musical was still there. I remembered how the last great idea I had for the script involved President Nixon doing battle with a living version of the White House. It still made me laugh, but I knew people wouldn’t care about Nixon, a man who resigned from the office of the presidency, as much as they seemed to care about Kennedy, a man who is only remembered for shining.

I wanted Nixon to be affable and relatable. I wanted readers to be filled with pathos when they saw his character come to life. Like he was someone who would have second-guessed his passions and his academic path while in college. The more I thought about this, the more I tuned out SNL. By the time the credits on the episode were rolling, I was already on the fourth verse of a romantic ballad between Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. It had nothing to do with House Hunters, but the creative writing process allowed for it to happen. It didn’t always have to make sense.

Image Source: BBC