The Broken Gears Project Theatre grew out of the Poor Mans Productions group that produced last year’s TWELVE ANGRY MEN, which also featured Terry.

Broken Gears describes AMERICAN BUFFALO as an “engrossing, tragic take on the American Dream” as three characters each pursue their own warped definition of success until corruption and ultimately violence erupt.

The production runs for three weekends — June 3-5, 10-12, and 17-19 — at ISP Studios in Irving, Texas. Shows start at 8pm.

Like I said last week, I hate brats. Kids who think they can have anything they want whenever they want it AND the parents who taught them that this is the way the world works.

I’ve seen this first hand when I’ve had to kick young people out of my classes for using the their cell phones after having repeatedly been warned, or for not coming back from breaks on time, or for being constantly disruptive. Ninety percent of the parents call the office or come by the class, and want to know why their child was kicked out of class, and when told, they get up in arms. “Why can’t they use their phone?” “So what if they’re late!” “My child would never lie!”

Ah…that’s my favorite. “My child would never lie to me.” I’ve heard that one many times over the years. I heard it when I kicked a young lady out of class for using her cell phone after having been warned repeatedly. Her father came up to the class, walked into my classroom, and said loudly, “I heard you kicked my daughter out of class.”

“I did,” I came back. “I told her to stay off of her phone and she wouldn’t or couldn’t and I let her go.”

The man looked taken aback. “She said that you never mentioned it.”

Before I could say anything, the class broke into uproarious laughter, which I must say, confused the man a tad.

Finally, a gentleman wiped the tear from his eye and said “She was the third person he kicked out!”

That happened again several years ago. I happened to be in the office when a father called and I heard my boss talking to him. The gentleman told my boss that his daughter had been in my class several weeks before and hadn’t received her certificate. I heard my boss ask for her name. I heard a pause, and then my boss came back with the name Sutton. Anyone who has ever taken my class will tell you that I have a pretty vivid photographic memory. I can have forty students, have them each tell me their name, and then repeat their names back to them. I can also look at their driver’s licenses, memorize their birthdays, and repeat them back to them, so obviously I have a pretty vivid memory.

While I’m sure there are many girls with the name Sutton in this country, I had never had one in my class…or at least in the last couple of weeks, I hadn’t. My boss asked her father if she had the paperwork that all students leave with at the end of class. They’re copies of the forms that the instructors turn in and are used in making the students certificates. The man said that his daughter lost hers. Okay…strike one.

Since she lost her copy, the obvious next to step was to look through our forms, which are the originals. Lo and behold, Sutton’s was missing. Strike two.

Then my boss asked if she could describe anything that went on in the class. She had told her father that the class was long, dull, boring, and would have rather gouged her eyes out with corncob skewers than to ever have to sit through another one. Okay…ball one. You had to give her that one.

After this, we checked the signup sheet where we have each student’s name, their daytime phone number, and their driver’s license number. There were twenty names on the list and no Sutton. Strike three.

And if none of those work, we go to the final proof. The itemized sales receipt from the restaurant for the food that the class eats which is part of their payment. The company pays for it, so it’s all on one ticket. We looked at the list and the first thing that we noticed was the number of customers, which was twenty-one, which includes the class and myself. Sutton would make twenty-two. Finally, we count the amount of meals served. We finished with… guess what… twenty-one. Strike three. I hear my boss say to the man that he maybe…uh…perhaps…eh…his daughter never went to class and she’s lying to him.

“My daughter would lie!” the man said indignantly.

“Well, she wasn’t in that particular class then,” he came back.

“She said she was at Spaghetti Warehouse on Saturday morning, on this particular day, etc. etc.,” the man retorted.

“Hang on,” says my boss. “Let me go talk to Susanna.”

The boss puts the man on hold and walks into the office where Susanna resides. (For privacy’s sake, we’ll call her Susanna, but her real name is Susana. One ‘n’. Oops!) The boss asks Susana to look up the girl’s name in the computer. Susana complies, types in the girl’s name, and comes up with a blank, a nil, nothing, bupkis.

“She’s nowhere to be found at all,” the boss says, returning to the phone.

“But my daughter wouldn’t lie! Not to me!” Ah…the desperation of the deluded individual. But the man wasn’t done. He thought he had us.

“Well then…what about her friend?”

“What friend?” asks the boss.

“The guy friend that met her there?”

“What’s his name?” asked the boss, this time rolling his eyes and ready to hang himself with his own shoelace.

I don’t remember the young lad’s name, but we’ll just call him John Doe. “Did you have a John Doe in your class, Terry?” he yells from his office.

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” I told him.

“Well, this man says that Sutton and this boy were both in your class and neither of them have received their certificates.” The man seemed to have a “so there” attitude to his voice. So we went through it all again, and there was no John Doe on the enrollment list, no John Doe paperwork of any kind, and no extra meal on the receipt. The father seemed to think that was extremely odd.

I don’t remember exactly how my boss said it, but he said something to the effect that perhaps they had both showed up too late to get into the class (on Saturday’s, I lock the outside door) or perhaps they just took their parents’ forty dollars and went to the mall, but I do remember that the last thing the man said to my boss was “my daughter wouldn’t lie.”

When he’s not rehearsing or performing, Terry Yates
teaches classes for us in Dallas, Richardson, and Plano.

Over the years, he’s gained a large following of people who seem
to get tickets just so they can take his class again and again and again.

I hate brats. They come in all shapes and sizes and I hate them with the passion of a thousand white-hot suns. We live in a world now where parents would rather be friends with their kids than actual parents, and when their kids do something wrong, they blame everyone but themselves for anything that their children do. It’s always someone else’s fault.

One of my most vivid brat stories took place several years ago when I had a young lad of sixteen in my class. Of course, not all teenage drivers are bratty and dangerous, but this one was.

He’d been driving about six of his friends around when he got pulled over for speeding. As he pulled off of the road, he ran a stop sign. Upon request from the officer, the lad told him that he had left his wallet at home. Then the officer asked him for the car insurance, which he couldn’t produce. Finally, the officer got his name, went back to the patrol car, and looked him up. He found out that the boy has only had his driver’s license for a few weeks. In the state of Texas, teenaged drivers are only allowed one person with them in the car, and he’d had six.

I’m guessing that the officer saw the attitude of the lad and wrote him tickets for speeding, running a stop sign, too many people in the car, no driver’s license, no insurance, possessing firecrackers, and he even wrote him a ticket for a concealed weapon because the kid had a rather pointed letter opener on the seat. (I’m not sure I agree with that one.) So, there he is: sixteen-year-old in my class, who got seven tickets at once.

Now, had this happened to me at sixteen, I would still be grounded.

But no, this young lad still had his nice car and was showing the other kids how great a stereo system he had. The kid was also a bit disruptive, constantly talking during the videos, coming back from the breaks, and THEN having to use the restroom, and pretty much just getting on my nerves, but he didn’t seem like a bad kid, so I tolerated him…that time.

About two months later, he resurfaced with another four tickets, and another month after that, another two tickets. Sorry, folks, but by this time, I have absolutely no respect for this kid’s parents whom I’ve never even met.

The second class that he was in, he was equally as disruptive as the first. I had to clamp down on him harder this time. I finally told him to shut up or to leave. He quieted down a bit for the rest of the class. When he came through the door the last time, I just had to ask him, “What do your parents say about you getting all of these tickets?”

“Nothing,” was his only response. I thought I would vomit.

Now, I must admit, that by the third time he was there, I was ready with both barrels to let him have it if he so much as said a word. He started off great, but then his natural bratty personality came out, but there was only about an hour left, so I just told him to be quiet and not speak again.

As the class filed past me at the end of the day, I took his arm, pulled him aside, and said, “Look, this isn’t working out, so have Mommy and Daddy send you somewhere else the next time you get a ticket, okay?”

With this, he stormed out of the room. I gathered my things and left. As I was walking to my car, I was chatting with one of the other students who had parked his car next to mine, when I heard someone yell loudly. I turned to see the boy sitting in his car next to the parking lot exit, revving his engine. He yelled again, and this time I heard it. He basically let me know that my parents weren’t married and that I had a thing for my mother…who was a female member of another species.

“What did you say, Boy?” I asked, walking towards his car.

With this, the kid sped out of the parking lot and onto the service road, squealing his tires as he did so. There is a hedge that sits about fifty feet from the parking lot. As he passed the hedge, I saw these two lights go on. One red and one blue. It was a Plano police officer who had been sitting behind the hedge.

The other student and I began to crack up with laughter. We walked over to the two cars. The kid was already outside of the car and trying to explain to the officer that he’d just left defensive driving class like he thought that might help.

“Oh yeah?” we heard the officer ask. “Yeah,” the kid replied back. “I can prove it.”

I began to laugh as the kid ducked back into his car looking for his paperwork, because I had seen it on the table when I had left the restaurant, along with the notes that he took and the pen that he used.

“I swear I was in defensive driving!” he exclaimed. “There…that man was my teacher!” he cried, pointing at me and the other student.

“I don’t teach defensive driving,” I answered back. “I’m just going into the convenience store.”

“What’s defensive driving?” the other student asked loudly.

We both walked into the convenience store and looked out the window as the officer wrote the kid what looked to be several tickets. When they’d both gone, the other student and I went back to the scene of the crime. We stepped off the distance that the kid had gone from the restaurant parking lot to where he got pulled over. It was about ninety-two feet.

It wasn’t as much fun knowing that nothing would become of it. He would just go home and tell his parents that he wasn’t doing anything and that the officer just had it out for him, and they would believe him. It was kind of nice knowing that I wouldn’t be seeing him again, though.

Some other teacher could have him for a while.

When he’s not rehearsing or performing, Terry Yates
teaches classes for us in Dallas, Richardson, and Plano.

Over the years, he’s gained a large following of people who seem
to get tickets just so they can take his class again and again and again.

I was catching my breath, when the door of the car opened and out popped a lady whom I’d guess would be in her mid thirties. I was about to walk inside the restaurant when I heard the sound of books falling. I turned around to see that she had dropped some books that she was obviously going to carry inside.

Now being a chivalrous lad, or as I like to think, just a decent human being, I ran around the car and bent down to retrieve her books. As I stood up, I noticed that she was removing something else from the car: a cane. It was one of those three-pronged canes that usually the elderly or stroke victims use instead of walkers. A three-pronged cane covers a wider area than a regular cane, allowing the user to put more weight on it and with three prongs instead of one, the user won’t be as likely to slip.

“Here, let me carry these books for you,” I told her.

“Thank you,” she replied. I expected a bit more appreciation in her thank you, but I always try to put myself in their situation. She was several years younger than I was and was already confined to using a cane. I’m not exactly sure how I would’ve reacted at that age if something debilitating like whatever was afflicting her had happened to me. I’d probably be a bit of an old fusspot, too, so I let it go.

I held the door open for the lady. Another so-so thank you. When we got inside, she asked me where the defensive driving class was.

“You’re in luck,” I told her. “I’m the defensive driving instructor.”

“Well, I’ll follow you then,” she said back, exceedingly under-whelmed that she was talking to an A-1 bona-fidee defensive driving instructor. I could’ve just as easily said that I was the guy who put the cheese on the nachos.
Now, usually when I get people whose dispositions or attitudes are a bit morose, I either tend to talk to them in their own voice, sort of like Jack Webb from Dragnet (for you older people), or I’ll go completely over the top and annoy them with this “Isn’t the world great!” happy sunshine, very annoying voice.

“Follow me,” I told her, having decided to use the happy sunshine voice.

I lead the way through the restaurant to the hallway that leads to the restrooms and to our room.

“Right this way,” I said, my hand extended, doing my best French maitre d’ impersonation, which was a tad embarrassing, because when I turned around, she was nowhere to be seen and I was left looking like an idiot in front of everyone sitting at the bar. I’m pretty sure that I was the first person that they’d seen that day doing a French maitre d’ impersonation to no one.

I retraced my steps and found that the woman had turned down a corridor.

“Hello,” I said. “Back this way.”

The lady made her way back to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll follow you then,” she told me.

As we began to walk, I noticed that she seemed to be studying the floor for some reason. And then it dawned on me. The woman wasn’t studying the floor, she was watching where she was walking: She was making sure that she wasn’t going to trip. I had a strange sensation as I lead her into the room and sat her down at one of the tables. There was a question I needed to ask her, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to ask it, so I decided to just rip the band-aid off.

“Eh…are you…eh…blind?” I asked her.

“Yes, I am,” was her only response.

“Well then…uh…um…what are you doing in a defensive driving class?”

“Oh,” she started, “I can see well enough to drive. I just can’t see up close at all.”

“I see…” I stammered back, not completely comprehending how one did that.

Usually, the first few minutes of my class are taken up with explaining the rules, and showing them the restrooms, and filling them in on breaks, and generally explaining what the student gets out of taking the class. After all of this, I go around the room and meet all of the students. I ask them their names, followed by their reason for being in the class.

Most people are in the class because of tickets, although some take it to lower insurance, while still others take it for their job, but as I said most people are in the class because they got a ticket.

When it came time for her to explain why she got a ticket, I naturally expected to hear her say “I was speeding” or “I didn’t give my turn signal” or “I didn’t come to a complete stop at the stop sign”or any number of offenses that I hear in my class…but she didn’t. When I asked how she got her ticket, she fumbled with her cane for a moment, and then said, very matter of fact, “I stopped too far out in the intersection at a red light.”

“How far?” I asked, thinking maybe she pulled a tad too far into the crosswalk.

“About twenty feet.”

When he’s not rehearsing or performing, Terry Yates
teaches classes for us in Dallas, Richardson, and Plano.

Over the years, he’s gained a large following of people who seem
to get tickets just so they can take his class again and again and again.

Judging from some of the questions students ask me in class, I get the impression they think Defensive Driving instructors get some sort of special pass to drive on a secret system of highways where no one cuts you off, all the lights are green, and we all exchange lollipops at intersections.

Well, here’s a little story to show you otherwise…

I was at the bank today (really, a comic at a bank.  It’s a true story.  OK, I was stocking up on free pens for class. Getting that chain off is more work than it looks like.)  As I was walking back to my truck a man approached me and asked, “Sir, is that your vehicle?” pointing to my truck.

I said, “Yes.  Who wants to know?”  I was suspicious; bordering on flat out paranoid.

“Sir, I’m an off-duty police officer and I…”  OK, now I was beyond paranoid.  I was flashing back to my DWI days. But I haven’t had a drink in over seven years.  He continued, “…and I just saw a woman strike your vehicle and drive away.”

Relief!  Then ANGER!

It turned out an off duty police officer witnessed a woman back into my parked truck.  I had parked it, like a good Defensive Driving instructor should, smack dab in the center of the parking spot.  And of course I picked the spot with empty spaces on either side to add to the illusion of safety.  She backed into it, meaning she had to drive PAST my truck and then back into it.  Like she was aiming for it with a Demolition Derby maneuver.  She then pulled back out and drove away.  She kidney punched my truck! The officer actually ran around the building to look for her!  He was able to get a partial license plate number from a temporary plate and a description of the car.

Armed with this information I contacted the police department and exercised some of this Defensive Driving instructor power I’m supposed to have.  After waiting on hold for 45 minutes I finally got through to a duty officer.  I explained my situation to him, and he told me I could drive over to the police station (35 miles) so they could take pictures of the damage.  Just in case they find the vehicle that the temporary tags are currently attached to.  Then there’s the matter of who was driving.  I think he said I was really out of luck.  Needless to say, I declined on the photo shoot.

So now I’m in the same boat as everybody else.  Do I pay the deductable for the repairs and watch my premiums magically go up?  Or find the rubbing compound I bought the last time some idiot hit me?  In that case I was sitting in dead stopped traffic on I-820 at US 377 (Denton Highway).  Somebody actually rear ended me!

So far my truck has been hit twice. The grand total of my speeds at the time of both crashes?  Zero miles per hour!

My thanks to the off-duty officer: you tried to help.

And the next time you think the instructors are getting special treatment, think again.

Glenn Listman teaches classes for
Comedy Guys Defensive Driving in Fort Worth.
If you take his class, try not to notice
the bank logo on the pen he uses.

This latest endeavor is a squeaky-clean motivational comedy show entitled LAWS OF LIFE. This presentation is a unique blend of common sense rules of conduct and behavior mixed cleverly with observational humor and laugh-out-loud storytelling. The humor is geared towards the unfortunate souls who may occasionally break the rules and reap the consequences of inappropriate decision-making.

The beauty of the humor in this show is that it’s funny without ever being vulgar or offensive. With thoughtful and insightful wit at every turn, Todd uses the art of laughter and fun to make any often-boring topic both enjoyable and educational.

A 12-year comedy veteran, Todd Justice released his first CD, AND JUSTICE FOR Y’ALL, was release in January 2004, to rave reviews and national. Later that same year, he was able to bring his own brand of laughter to the US troops across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. You can read Todd’s full bio – including lists of his TV appearances and corporate clients – here.

Todd teaches classes for us in Hurst and Ft. Worth.

presents

Reginald Rose’s

August 14-16, 21-23, 28-30
8pm
Castleview Ballroom,
Sterling Hotel, Dallas

Poor Man Productions, a new theatre company including two of our instructors – David Moore and Terry Yates, opens its first production with Reginald Rose’s theatre classic play of twelve jurors deciding a murder case that raises a lot more issues than just the verdict.