Dead presidents, thespian dreams, and the meaning of life

I’m not sure, but I don’t think our fathers’ generation had this problem. If this is all another attempt to make us measure up to our daddies, well, I’ll just pass, thanks. (Besides, my father was in the Navy, and there is now a paucity of U-boats against which to test myself anyway.) Not only that, but the economic downturn has put rather a crimp in anyone’s grand design. We all have to do the bucket on a budget these days. It seems to me that the only way to do a bucket list on the cheap, and not in such a way that you make a complete fool of yourself, is simply to commit to doing things that you’d never have done before -- like audition for a play or learn to fire a gun -- even if those things don’t involve plummeting to earth like a sack of rocks. That way, it isn’t about competing against a literal deadline. It’s about starting fresh again. If everything is new, I figure, then the bucket can stay on the shelf for a while.

1. My Monticello Before Stephen Colbert developed and promoted the concept of “truthiness,” there already existed a phenomenon we could call “historiness,” by which the American past could be mined, not entirely for hints as to where we might be headed as a nation and/or where we ought to be headed as a nation, but for a genteel kind of high-toned entertainment. For example, David McCullough’s 2001 bestseller John Adams sparked such a tsunami of interest in the old grump who’d married so well that HBO made a thickly honored miniseries out of it that included not only the Declaration of Independence and the Alien and Sedition Acts but also (ewww!) the smallpox vaccinations of the Adams children and (double ewwwww!) wigless sex between John and Abigail.

“Our visitation doubled when the McCullough book came out,” reports Caroline Keinath, deputy superintendent for the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy. “It not only affected our numbers but, in a less measurable way, the kind of audience we drew. Before the movie, many of our visitors had read biographies before, and they were interested in history and the presidency. With the McCullough book, we began to see people who had never visited a national park or a presidential site before.” I’m a bit more ambivalent about the old blatherskite; glad he was there in 1776, no fan of his prickly, perpetually wounded self-regard. However, a trip to Monticello is as far out of my budget as finishing Monticello was out of Thomas Jefferson’s, and it’s pretty much just a T fare to get to the Adams place.

The Adams National Historical Park is really three locations: a visitor’s center in downtown Quincy; the “birthplaces,” adjoining Colonial homes up on the heights away from downtown where both presidents Adams (John and John Quincy) were born; and Peacefield, the ivy-covered, flower-drenched mansion into which the family moved in 1788. I also visited the United First Parish Church, operated separately, near the visitor’s center, where John and John Quincy and their wives are buried. Considering that John Adams was notoriously insecure about his own place in history, he surely would have enjoyed his current renown. He and Abigail get pride of place in the family crypt, down a winding staircase in the church basement. Somewhat cheated in memory is Louisa, John Quincy’s wife, whose primary achievement apparently was to make her frosty husband’s presence tolerable to Washington society. On her plaque in the crypt, she is described as a “model of domestic worth,” as though she were a particularly charming chifforobe, and not a woman who survived a troubled marriage with sufficient courage that both houses of Congress adjourned upon hearing of her death.

Rattly trolleys playing sedate period music moved us from one spot to another. A lot of the people on my trolley had read McCullough’s book or had seen the HBO drama or both. I kept my mouth shut rather than ruin the mood by starting arguments about the Alien and Sedition Acts. By far, the most impressive place on the tour is the stone library that Charles Francis Adams built in 1870 in order to fulfill a bequest in the will of his father, John Quincy, that the family library of about 12,000 volumes be housed in a place where its contents would be relatively safe from a fire. The place is cool and dark. Time slows, as though gradually freezing.

2. Thar She Blows! (the Whales, Not the Kids) When I was young, I got a serious jones for the New England whaling industry. The Melville edition, that is. I devoured Moby-Dick, even the long how-to-dress-a-whale-for-oil passages, even though I was fairly sure I would never have any need for the skills I learned there. (Mowing my lawn is the closest I’ve come to rendering a living thing.) To this day, whenever the great 1956 John Huston version comes on one of the cable movie stations, I’m locked in until Gregory (“He rises!”) Peck goes under for the last time and Richard Basehart climbs aboard

Queequeg’s coffin. (“The great shroud of the sea” is still a hall of fame metaphor, by the way.) Yet, for all that, I’d never seen an actual whale, only skeletons hanging from the ceilings of museums, which hardly count. There being no way for me to sign aboard the Pequod, on a damp, drizzly November of a day last month -- Thanks, Herman! -- I wandered onto a ship parked next to the New England Aquarium that would soon put to sea in search of whales. I was accompanied this day by students from two boisterous middle school classes, most of whom, upon boarding the ship, tucked deeply into whatever snacks they’d brought with them. There being a 3- to 5-foot chop on the open sea, this would not end well, although it threatened to bring an entirely new level of meaning to the concept of a bucket list.

The whale watch went out about 25 miles onto the Stellwagen Bank, an underwater plateau shoved up by glaciers at roughly the same time as the outer parts of Cape Cod. Formally discovered by Navy Lieutenant Henry Stellwagen in 1854, it’s always been a plentiful ground not only for haddock, but for bluefin tuna and sharks as well. Whales come to feed there on the vast array of cetacean goodies, from plankton to sand eels. In turn, the whales bring out the tourists, including me and my young shipmates, many of whom were now lying in various postures of distress a few degrees astern the snack bar in the rear of the ship. By the time we slowed upon reaching the banks, Voyager III had taken on several aspects of a hospital ship. My own stomach seemed to be having a bit of a chat with my chin.

You learn quickly how to look for the telltale sign of a whale’s respiration -- “Thar she blows!” and all that -- and, more subtly, for what are called “footprints,” curiously still patches of water caused by the movement of a whale’s fin beneath the surface. Then comes the great gliding black back, almost impossibly long and smooth, like a living current through the gray-blue water. There’s some oohin’ and aahin’, and the low snap of cameras, but there is also a deep kind of silence. For all the emphasis placed on doing things in this kind of exercise, the simple act of observing something for the first time carries its own measure of risk. What if whales turned out to be boring? Whatever satisfaction I was looking for in carrying out this list, it was more than provided by the presence of something this solid and primal.

The stars of this day’s performance were a female humpback that naturalists have named “Fulcrum” and one of her calves, a year-old who doesn’t have a name yet. The crew can pick out Fulcrum because she lost most of her dorsal fin in a collision with a ship several years ago. There was only muted excitement until the calf hurled himself completely out of the water, corkscrewing over onto his back, and reentering with a mighty splash. It is said that whales do this to rid themselves of parasites that cling to their skin, but it looks a great deal like play, as well. I chose to take it as such as the boat turned to make its long way back to the dock. The rain fell a little harder. “A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!” Melville wrote of the doomed Pequod, gone off to kill these creatures. “All noble things are touched with that.”

3. Lights, Curtains, Catatonia You realize,” said the voice in my head, “that you sound like a duck.”

This was a voice with which I was unfamiliar. It does not appear when I am writing or when I am doing my occasional radio appearances. Even during my brief stints as a TV pundit, when I had a director in my ear and Chris Matthews all up in my grill, I don’t recall hearing this voice, but, nonetheless, there it was.

I had come this night to the old Unitarian church in Winchester to audition for the Winchester Players’ production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, which will be staged this fall. Now, two of my children have been involved for years in the theater program in the Newton public schools, which is pretty much what David Merrick would have done had he had some ambition. So I’ve spent a decade or so hearing about auditions and callbacks and cast lists and tech week and all the rest of it. Anyway, my own theatrical career heretofore had consisted of running spotlights for my high school’s annual spring musical extravaganza. I always wondered what the whole thing would be like. Now I know. There is a voice in your head telling you that you sound like a duck.

The Winchester Players are one of the oldest and most respected community theater groups in the area -- first organized in 1932, and operating more or less continuously since 1950, when they were revived by the Rev. Robert Storer as part of his church’s community outreach. (The group, once known as the Winchester Unitarian Players, changed the name after a while because people had come to the conclusion that you had to be a Unitarian to perform. This was not -- and is not -- the case.) On the night I arrived, there already were a number of people in Metcalf Hall, the old church gathering spot that doubles as the group’s theater, a startlingly deep stage at the front of it. I was shortstopped at the door by producer Susan Harrington, who collected my information -- “theatrical experience: none” -- and took my picture against a blank wall.

The play, of course, is the Kaufman and Hart classic about critic Sheridan Whiteside -- who is based on Algonquin habitue Alexander Woollcott -- and how he comes to be marooned in a suburban household, which he proceeds to turn upside down. One of my fellow actors told me that, because my hair is gray and I am not by any means underweight, I actually looked like she thought Whiteside might look. I took it on faith that this was a compliment. The director, Ben Delatizky, a bustling guy in a Red Sox hat, put the lot of us through “cold readings” of various scenes in the play, and, sure enough, I wound up reading Whiteside more often than not.

At first, I just read. I forgot I was supposed to be doing things like reacting to the other actors on the stage with me. A stage direction required a woman to kiss me, and I jumped about 2 feet sideways. Gradually, though, I began to do things like pulling my glasses down the bridge of my nose and puffing myself out even more at the waistline. There seemed to be some sort of accent -- half Jeeves, half Tanqueray gin commercial -- popping up sporadically in the middle of my sentences. Of course, I became conscious of these quirks while I was reading, which is what set off the voice in my head. It was about then that I realized I was commenting on myself as though I were outside myself.

Do they all have this voice? I wondered. Did Laurence Olivier have the plummy voice of John Gielgud in his head, telling him he sounded like the duck, the first time he read for Hamlet? How about Mel Blanc? When he brought Daffy Duck to life, did he have a voice telling him he sounded like a duck? What would that have done to someone? These were all the thoughts that were running through my mind as I was doing my readings. My head sounded like Park Street Station at rush hour. I think my concentration suffered a bit. Ben was kind, though. A few days later, he called and offered me my choice of parts. I could play one of the radio technicians or the Plainclothes Detective. I declined, but only because of time considerations. After all, there are no small parts. Only small actors, with tiny voices in their heads.

4. Packin’ Once, when I was very young, I came upon my father at the kitchen table. His father had been a detective sergeant in the Worcester Police Department and had inculcated in my father and his siblings a deep and abiding fear of the service revolver he kept locked away in their home. (My father, a combat veteran of World War II, always said that the only guns he was interested in shooting were bolted to the deck of a ship.) That morning, I saw him methodically taking apart his father’s revolver, which my aunt had found among my grandmother’s things after she’d died. He then took each piece and put it in a separate plastic bag. He then took each bag to a different dump. He told me not only did he not want anyone to find the gun, he also didn’t want anyone to find the pieces and put the gun back together. And that is the way we thought about guns in my house.

Of course, this also lodged in me a fascination with guns that has never quite gone away. I have tired of the endless debates centering on one misbegotten dependent clause that begins the badly written Second Amendment to the Constitution. For all that, I never actually had fired a gun in my life, and I always had wanted to, not an uncommon desire in this country. So, in a spring in which politically motivated gun violence seemed to be at high tide, I drove up to the Manchester Firing Line Range in Manchester, New Hampshire, to shoot a gun for the first time.

My guide was Jim McLoud Jr., a young former Army sniper. The range’s lobby is done in military chic, right down to the belt-fed machine gun on display. “Most of the time,” Jim told me, “people come up here feeling one way about guns and they leave feeling differently.” For the next 20 minutes

(I was there for about 90 total), we talked over the counter about how safely to use the three weapons -- handgun, rifle, and machine gun -- that I’d be shooting today. Always aim down the range. Always check to see if there is a round in the chamber. Always wear ear protection. Of course, I immediately picked up the handgun in the fashion I thought I saw people do it in the movies -- both hands, straight out in front. Jim explained that the “slide” was about to take off the top of my right thumb. This was a good tip, I thought.

The range looks something like an abandoned concrete bowling alley, with individual lanes, each of which has a pulley above it that takes the paper target downrange a specific distance. Jim set me up at 5 yards and handed me the handgun. “Remember,” he said, “don’t use the knuckle of your trigger finger. Use the pad. And squeeze gently. The shot should surprise you a little when it comes.” I sighted down toward the target, and the report was both louder and brighter than I thought it would be. A very strange sense of concentration came over me. I could feel every breath I took. There was me, and the thing at the end of my fingertips, and the other thing down the line a ways. It was as though the world had narrowed to a corridor.

I didn’t get that same feeling with the rifle or the machine gun; the former I found unwieldy, and the latter was too fast for me to follow. But the handgun -- a Glock 19 semiautomatic -- felt like an unusually lethal extension of myself, which was unnerving and fascinating, even as I brought the target back toward me and saw that I had torn a pretty good hole in the bull’s-eye. Jim was very complimentary, but I was still rather outside myself as I pulled out of the parking lot and back onto I-93 toward home. My senses were heightened. I felt alert and alive and new again. I could shoot holes in the bucket, if I wanted to.

Charles P. Pierce is a Globe Magazine staff writer. His latest book is Idiot America. E-mail him at cpierce@globe.com.