I got down and into the chairs and maybe Mike did too, and we got the snake out without incident he did not, that is to say, bite us in the face, which we were presenting to him perfectly had he wanted to. Maybe prudence had been abdicated when we decided to pull a snake tumor out of a person onstage. The prudent thing would have been to put my foot on the rubber foot of the leading leaning chair to secure the stack and ask Mike Wilkerson to get the snake, or, if Mike Wilkerson had had enough of the snake, to have him replace my foot with his and get the snake myself. I am in charge and the snake has survived a fan event without security and is now under a ton of metal that can, with less jostling than dropped him to the floor, slide, shear, crash, and in my agile twelve-year-old brain cut him to pieces or merely crush him to one multiply bolused piece. I have been allowed access to him to put him in the play. ![]() The snake will not be declared federally protected until 1978, but already in 1964 it is a rare animal. She has him because she has friends at the Jacksonville Zoo reptile house, whence he comes to her on loan. The snake has been put in my charge by my fifth-grade teacher, Shirley Brown. I am an agile twelve-year-old boy with a good sense of physics, which is what confers agility. We have a large snake under a long stack of leaning, heavy chairs. I do remember that after the show the snake was enjoying his stardom until too many children touched and grabbed at him and it became a kind of rock star–fandom event that needed security and there was no security and the snake having had enough decided he was his own security and he bit Mike Wilkerson on the thumb, and Mike Wilkerson shook him off his thumb and in that jostle we dropped the snake, who crawled under a long leaning stack of metal chairs for surcease from his admirers.Īnd let us pause. We did not know him well, and I do not even often think of James Gregory in this or any other context. I like to think that the patient was James Gregory, and that yada yada we were exorcising a demon from him, but in fact I do not recall who played the patient and doubt that it was James Gregory. ![]() We got the gasp from the audience that we wanted. The tumor was a live six-foot snake that in the projection must have looked fifteen feet long. We put on a school play in which we surgically removed a tumor from a patient using backlit projection on a bedsheet to better show the ghastly tumor lifted from the patient. ![]() We never talked to James Gregory about it. James Gregory’s father, we were told, was stabbed twenty-seven times in a shell parking lot outside a liquor store in Jacksonville, Florida, where, possibly, he worked.
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