My sister’s life has taken a turn toward trouble—a trial, a prison sentence, Jerry given custody of her children—and home’s begun to feel unmoored, unpredictable, but I’m enjoying the beginnings of a resurgence anyway. (Can you have a resurgence, when you’ve barely surged at all?) I let go of Rudy, or he of me, and suddenly I find I don’t have the least interest in Catholicism, except for the lives of the weirder saints. (Saint ______, whose name has slipped into a dark crevice of my memory, irretrievable, although the fact that she lay on a wooden board till violets sprouted and bloomed beneath her mortified flesh rightfully granted her immortality; Saint Christina the Astonishing, who died for an hour, then returned to life, only to find the smell of human flesh so revolting that she had to fly to the rafters of the chapel to escape the mortal stench.) I’m finding my way toward some kind of social acceptance again, a certain degree of cool, in Mr. Frakes’s realm.

Mr. Frakes, the prince of our theatrical zone, is one of those rare teachers of young people who have no interest in holding power over anyone. He is courtly, self-possessed, consistently well mannered in any circumstance. Dapper and donnish in rimless glasses and salt-and-pepper hair, he has such an obvious respect for intelligence and creativity that it startles me. I have never met anyone whose intellectual life is so democratic: he likes ideas themselves, not just his idea. He likes the arts, not merely his art.

His overriding passion is for the theater itself, and he assumes that anyone who’s entered into the little city over which he presides (black box theater, dressing rooms, workshops, warehouse of old props) shares his passion, or wishes to. This assumption amounts to respect; what we do is collaborative work, our common shoulders turned to the play at hand, which is sometimes tired and crowd pleasing (You Can’t Take It with You or Dark of the Moon) but more often something Mr. Frakes loves: Beckett, Anouilh, Shaw. We can’t do Sam Shepard (too much profanity) but we do—unheard of in a high school—Jean-Claude van Itallie and Megan Terry, the new plays of the hour.

And so we find our way downstairs, to him and to one another, the kids who belong exactly there, the ones too thoughtful and idiosyncratic to find their place upstairs or, God forbid, in the gym. We’re the kids who seem to carry our inner lives right in front of our faces, and in the Drama Department it is suddenly just right, just perfect that you live in your interiority. Here we prize strangeness; one of the new words that enters my vocabulary is “bizarre,” offered as a compliment, in admiration, an all-purpose assertion of praise.