The Ballad of DBM

I have several indelible memories from appearing in the Mask & Bauble production of OPERATION: SIDEWINDER at Georgetown University's Stage One theater, written by Sam Shepherd with music by the Holy Modal Rounders, but only one involves a midnight run to the E.R. and a subsequent police interview.

OPERATION: SIDEWINDER was originally staged at Lincoln Center in 1970, and fellow GU student Jack Hofsiss wasted no time in garnering the rights to direct the first D.C. area production at G.U. It was an interesting piece about, among other things, the expansion of the West and the destruction of indigenous cultures who stood in the way.

(For the record, I should say that to my knowledge Shepherd’s play has no connection to the real-life Operation Sidewinder, which was later conducted in Iraq as a part of Operation Desert Scorpion in the summer of 2006, despite a parallel storyline about the expansion of the West and several other similarly psychedelic elements of the era.)

As always, our faculty advisor Donn B. Murphy, known affectionately to all his students as "DBM," encouraged us to do more, to take risks, to push the envelope, or whatever the phrase was back in the early ‘70s, to stage this experimental piece in new and unexpected ways. As undergraduates trying to make sense of our lives before we became eligible for the draft at the height of the Vietnam War, we responded wholeheartedly to his infectious enthusiasm.

So one interesting element we introduced to the production staged in the tiny theater-in-the-round named Stage One, where we were never more than 2 or 3 feet from the audience, was live snakes. Toward the end of the second act fellow cast member Paul Hume and I entered brandishing live 4-foot rat snakes for a scene depicting Shepherd’s take on a mystical Native American religious ritual.

Each evening, it was the same – the audience members chuckled when they first saw snakes coiled in our hands, thinking they were made of rubber. “Oh, look, it’s a snake! Ooh…” Once the snakes started to move, however, the mood changed in a heartbeat with a sharp intake of breath by the entire room.

One night, as Paul and I softly stepped close to the audience, undulating reptiles in our hands, a fellow sitting in front of me jerked back suddenly. My snake reared back itself, sliding off my hand. A moment before it fell free to the floor, I instinctively grabbed the snake by the end of its tail. It began whipping around like a spinning lasso as I reached for the head with my other hand.

Before I could seize it, though, the snake embedded its teeth in the webbing between my right thumb and forefinger. I jerked my hand away in reflex, but it managed to bite me twice more before I finally got a grip just behind its head.

Fortunately, Paul had moved quickly to take his snake offstage at the first hiss of trouble and place it back in its cage before returning to see how he might help. I remember that his eyes were very big as I reached out to hand him my snake—“Could you do me a favor?”—but he silently took it and disappeared quickly offstage before returning to continue the scene.

I later learned that all animal bites must by law be reported to the police. Around midnight in the hospital I was still waiting for my tetanus shot among that evenings’ casualties when a tired-looking policeman shuffled up to me, clipboard in hand.

“You the guy with the dog bite?”

The next morning I was still sleeping off the previous night’s adrenalin when the phone rang. It was a cub reporter new to his job at The Washington Post, though he tried hard to sound like it was the fourth snakebite story he’d written that week.

When the piece broke later that day, the headline was, Snake Bites GU Actor, Show Goes On and the first sentence read, “A 4-foot-long yellow rat snake starring in a Georgetown University performance of the play OPERATION: SIDEWINDER became annoyed with one of his fellow actors Saturday night and bit him three times…”

That afternoon I went to Stage One, where several other cast members were concerned that the newspaper write-up would result in the show being closed early. Jack, however, knew better. “Wait ‘til we hear from DBM,” he said.

When Donn appeared, he walked right up to me, a look of real concern on his face. “Bill, are you all right?” When I waved my bandaged hand with a sheepish smile, he said, “Thank you for holding on to that snake. If you’d dropped it in the audience, well, that wouldn’t have been good, would it?”

I shook my head in agreement. Then he flashed me that DBM smile.

“But what exciting theater that was!”

I couldn’t have felt prouder if I’d planned the whole thing.