Of my three handsome older brothers Jack was the one with the black Irish good looks. When I was in first grade he was in high school, glamorous and distant. Indeed he was a glamorous figure, having consciously reinvented himself when our family of General Motors nomads was sent from small-town Wisconsin to Northern California just as he entered high school. He arrived in Hayward a skinny bespectacled eighth-grader. A couple months later he entered Hayward High School a dark slender heartbreaker and achieved matinee idol status there. Politically astute early on, he compensated for his utter lack of athletic prowess by running for head cheerleader, backed by his best friend, the football team’s quarterback. When he was cheerleader he made it more than a sideline role; he was a star in his white gabardine slacks and sweater, performing well-rehearsed synchronized routines with the gorgeous twin sisters recruited as his assistants. Jack was a performer. As Hamlet in a black velvet doublet, he dazzled audiences in school plays produced by a drama teacher whose productions went beyond the ordinary. Jack loves an audience and had one throughout his career as an English professor, teaching film and literature. His audience today is in the Intensive Care Unit; he is telling jokes a couple hours after emerging from open heart surgery, still  still holding the stage.