Charity’s Column: Learning to drive

I’ve had a driver’s license since I was 16, and I still remember the incredible feeling of freedom that came with it.

No longer dependent on other people to take me where I wanted to go, I was able to run my own errands, join clubs and get a part in the school play.

So, I was shocked to learn recently that between 1983 and 2022, the number of 16-year-olds with driver’s licenses declined from about half to a quarter, according to the Department of Transportation. Do they never leave the house? How do they get to school, to rehearsals, to the cast party?

I first realized there was such a thing as a driving lesson when my father taught my mother. She grew up in New York City and was well into her 30s before she decided that if she wanted to work in a place without subways, she would have to learn.

My father put two trash cans in the driveway, about 10 feet apart and hung a sign on one that read “Ferrari” and “Lamborghini” on the other. His effort to teach her to parallel park in between the two trash cans ended in raised voices and choice epithets from both sides. 

Most of my family would argue that I never really learned to drive, despite having a license. A few years after my mother’s bad experience, I was behind the wheel of our ‘67 Oldsmobile with a three-speed manual transmission (a.k.a.,” three on the tree”), grinding the clutch down to sandpaper as Dad turned white, cursed, and tears ran down my face.

Dad turned me over to Mr. Dewey, the Driver’s Ed. instructor at my high school, who asked me one day to increase my speed slightly (I was doing 20 in a 45-mph zone) and, petrified lest I lose control, I drove the car straight on a gentle curve and into a cow pasture.

Fortunately, Mr. Dewey had a brake on his side, so no cows were injured but my fellow student, who was sitting in the back seat waiting for his turn to drive, dove under the seat and cowered there until Mr. Dewey coaxed him out.

Marianne Carey, who played Gert and Elaine in “A Deck of Ferry Tales” last week, spent summers at her family’s home in Westmoreland and remembers she and her many siblings getting around the dad-as-driving instructor issue by positioning a family car at the top of a hill on a private road adjacent to the house, and “driving” with brakes, steering wheel and gravity until they learned how to handle the car. “We all learned to drive there,” she recalled.

Bruce Leggett-Flynn’s first driving experience was life-threatening, as befits the man who played the line-cutting undertaker in “A Deck of Ferry Tales.” Born and raised in the U.K., he had never learned to drive on the right or the left side of the road.

“My dad had no patience,” he said. I moved to America and met Cindy and she said, ‘Do you know how to drive?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ The next thing I knew I was on a 10-lane highway, San Diego’s Interstate 8, driving past the Charger’s stadium, thinking I was doing great when a moped passed me, and I realized I was only going about 40 miles per hour. When we got where we were going, Cindy asked if I had a license, and I admitted, ‘No, not at all.’”

Joanne Sherman (coauthor of the musical) needed both parents to teach her to drive at 16. “My dad sat in the passenger seat with a cigarette in his right hand and his left hand across the back of the seat. When I did something stupid, I’d get a dope slap on the back of my head. When my mom would ride with me, she’d sit right smack against me — this was pre-seatbelts — so that both of us were in the driver’s seat, like conjoined twins, and she could apply the brakes. In the end I went for the dope slaps because no 16-year-old wants her mom sitting on her lap like that.”

Tim Purtell’s father (Tim was Fouchard, the French director in “Ferry Tales”) took him out for a driving lesson in a Cadillac convertible on quiet one-way streets in the Heights. “Suddenly, we were in front of the Pharmacy on a two-way road with pedestrians, and I nearly hit one,” Tim said. “He started screaming, ‘What are you doing?’ And that was our last driving lesson.”

Marie Bishko’s father (she played Fouchard’s assistant Melvin/Melba) taught almost everyone in their small town of Tuxedo, N.Y. to drive, but his own daughter was one of his worst students. “I am a bad driver to this day. We were driving down the road when I saw a massive bag of trash right in the middle of the road. I crashed right into the middle of it. I just barreled into it.  My dad said, ‘What if there was a person in there?’ And I said, ‘I would have hit him!’  To this day, I can’t back out of my driveway without hitting the curb.”

Times have changed since parents were the go-to for driving instruction. Today Shelter Island’s would-be drivers get instruction from the school’s Drivers Ed instructor, Christopher Conrardy. Another option is virtual driving lessons with a live instructor on a video call.

Luca Martinez (who played Bill in the school musical, “Momma Mia”) said it was a hassle at times because of after school sports, and the need to log a lot of driving hours, but you can’t quibble with the results of his virtual lessons.

He passed the driving exam and became one of an increasingly select group — people under 20 with the ability to drive. Without them, there’d be less freedom for teenagers … and community theater would be in big trouble.