The instructor is, after all, John Gardner Jr, son of a dairy farmer, the Batavia boy made good. And that's close enough to home. One is to be an acrobat and do noble things, and the other is to be a clown, like me. Only the clowns, he says, get to be fancy and wild. I just lie about them.
Nobody can correct a word of it.
And they all like him for saving it, because he doesn't pretend to be an acrobat. Gardner is working on the screenplay with French director Jules Dassin, and says filming should begin in Batavia in the fall. There have been other novels, anthologies, and essays for the Southern Illinois University teacher, who got his doctoral degree at 25. He's already appeared on two television talk shows and a radio show, winning the interviewers over. And it seemed he was winning over the workshop participants during yesterday morning's class session too.