I Am What I Am, John Barrowman [smart ebook reader .txt] 📗

As the family grew, a few rules had to be created. For example, you couldn’t perform twice in a row. This should have been called Alex’s Rule because my dad’s youngest brother had the habit of sometimes holding onto the ring when it came round to his fist.

When the Barrowmans got together, the fun often started at the dinner table. When Carole was born, she was the first girl in the Barrowman family in over fifty years, and so this bestowed on her a distinct honour. Carole always had to sit between my Uncle Alex and my Uncle Charlie at family dinners, where she was subjected to merciless teasing, a full array of jokes, silly stories and general food-snorting-out-of-the-nose goofiness throughout the entire meal – until my Gran Emily would charge out of the kitchen, grab a spoon from her place setting, and rap Charlie and Alex’s knuckles until they promised to ‘leave the wean alone and let her eat’.12 I think watching my dad and his brothers tease and laugh with their nieces and nephews at these parties gave me a lot of good examples to draw on when I became ‘Unckie John’.13

Of course, the rest of the cousins loved that Charlie and Alex created such rambunctiousness at the table … because it always meant that nothing we kids could do was ever as bad.

After dinner, while the ring was being passed through all our hands,14 once again my Uncle Charlie would quietly disappear. The fellowship of the ring continued, until suddenly the doorbell sounded. My gran was always made to answer it, usually with one or two of us grandchildren in tow.

Later, when I was old enough to be in on the game, I realized that this was all part of the fun, too. My dad, and the other brothers, Neil and Alex, would stall, holding everyone back so that their mother would have to answer the door. For her part, Emily knew exactly what was going on and I think she secretly enjoyed the whole performance. Even so, she’d ‘hrump’ her way down the hall, muttering under her breath that ‘the totties15 are no gonna peel themselves’ and she’d make it seem as if all this ‘kerry-on’ was one more thing she had to put up with as a mother of these particular four men-boys.

‘Who is it, Emily?’16 her sons would call from the front room.

Emily would open the door and, of course, she’d pretend that she couldn’t see anything or anyone. Then she’d look down … down … down, and see, standing in front of her, my Uncle Charlie, who’d be dressed up as the Glasgow icon, the butt of a million Glaswegian jokes, Glasgow’s genial Everyman: ‘Wee Jimmy’.17

‘Ach, it’s Wee Jimmy,’ she’d call back to the living room, ‘and you’d better come and talk tae him because I don’t want him in my hoose. He smells like he’s been drinking straight since the bells.’

This was the cue for everyone to rush to the door. Of course, the real reason Wee Jimmy couldn’t cross the threshold was that if my Uncle Charlie moved, us kids would see the bottom half of his legs sticking out from behind his oversized jacket – and, yes, in case you’re curious, he actually had shoes strapped to his knees, too, as an added convincer. I loved Wee Jimmy!

After we’d all crowd round the door, he’d take a small tin filled with cigarette butts out of his jacket pocket, and offer one to each of us kids (who were just a bit creeped out by the sight of this strange wee man, but also completely enthralled by the little bit of danger and mischievousness he might represent). Wee Jimmy would then banter with one or two of the grown-ups, flirt with Emily, regale us with a few war stories and – always my favourite – tell a couple of naughty jokes.18

The visit would end with a round of ‘Skinny Malinky’, or some other Glasgow ditty, after which Uncle Alex would pass a pound note to one of the kids to give to Wee Jimmy. He’d take it, then he’d tip his ‘bunnet’ and wish us all a ‘Happy New Year’.19

Let me pause here, and offer a brief defence on the intellectual prowess of my cousins, my siblings and me, for not spotting Wee Jimmy’s true identity much earlier in our childhoods. We were not stupid children, and we have all, as it happens, grown up to do fine, important things with our lives. What we were, readers, were children raised in a family that loved to play jokes, dress up, perform skits, and generally have a good laugh with and at each other, and who among us would want to spoil one of our better family performances?

And, I have to say, I truly believe that this ability to suspend your disbelief and give your imagination free rein is a critical life skill. Look at it this way: we might not be in such a global economic mess if more people in the financial world had been imagining what might go wrong if we kept buying and selling those dicey mortgages …20

This is one of the reasons why I’m committed to supporting arts and music programmes in our schools – because if children are not lucky enough to have the kind of home life where their imaginations are nurtured, then our schools must fill the gaps. In the Barrowman family, the ability to suspend our disbelief was finely tuned, even as we grew old enough to know reality better. I’m especially happy to say that the tradition’s been nurtured in the next generation of my immediate family, too.

Here’s a case in point: in 2002, when I was performing in the Stephen Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, I invited my whole family to fly out and see Company, featuring yours truly as Bobby, the part of a musical lifetime. During the run, I was living in a