Model teacher
In cowboy hat or heels, Alfred Hughes wears his heart on his sleeve
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By day, Alfred Hughes Jr. works with preschoolers at Brattleboro's Winston Prouty Center. At night, he entertains people of all ages as a master of ceremonies at fashion shows and social events. Photo by Jon Olender |
Toolbox
By KEVIN O’CONNOR
Staff Writer - Published: June 4, 2006
Brattleboro’s alphabet set, sitting curbside at the town’s annual Strolling of the Heifers parade, jumped and squealed as almost 100 clomping cows gave way to one colorful character.
Arthur the Aardvark?
Barney the purple dinosaur?
Clifford the Big Red Dog?
Try local child-care provider Alfred Hughes Jr., a black man — make that “dark chocolate,” he says of his skin tone — in an anything-but-vanilla gown and heels.
Weekdays, Hughes works with preschoolers at the nearby Winston Prouty Center, named for the late Republican U.S. senator from Vermont’s conservative Northeast Kingdom. Nights and weekends, he trades sneakers for sequins to entertain people of all ages in this liberal southern corner of the state.
Opening his portfolio, Hughes points to a Vermont Magazine story on Brattleboro that mentions his regular star turns volunteering at downtown fashion shows: “The mc is the amazing Alfred Hughes, who wears a dress so well it hurts.”
The local newspaper, eyeing him as master of ceremonies at a benefit event, labeled him “Brattleboro’s unofficial cruise director.”
“Unofficial?!” he replies.
Better to quote the French Canadian travel writer who, stopping by a popular pub, observed, “Alfred is very easily noticeable because he has a strong sense of the spectacle with his Tom Waits voice, his Mick Jagger mimics, and his Grace Jones personality.”
One minute the Boston Globe is reporting how Hughes models consignment-shop cocktail frocks, the next he’s posing in his birthday suit alongside dozens of pasty, pudgy civic leaders for the Rotary Club’s “Men of Brattleboro” calendar.
But for all of Hughes’ media cameos, no one has ever told his story. About his religious roots. His dancing days. How he wants to extend his preschool philosophies to all mankind. What makes him vote Republican and root for the New York Yankees. Why a child of the Caribbean would anchor himself in a wave of landlocked mountains.
“People said, ‘Vermont is the whitest state.’ So I said, ‘Then I want to go there, ’cause it needs some color.’”
Spiritual start
Hughes isn’t afraid to expose the reality about growing up in the seeming splendor of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His mother and father weren’t married. His family lived in affordable housing. He was born in …
“I like to keep my age a mystery,” says the man whose gold facial glitter competes with a few silver hairs. “It’s the one secret I don’t want to reveal.”
And so you don’t ask the date of a sepia-toned snapshot he holds of an elementary schoolboy with hands pressed together in prayer.
“I’m a very good Catholic boy,” Hughes says.
He laughs. He’s not kidding. He loves his faith, given to him by his father. He received it at the marble- and mural-adorned Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Thomas.
“It’s close to the waterfront and where Jacqueline Kennedy supposedly came to church. I wasn’t there that day — darn! But you get first communion and confirmation, then the Holy Spirit is with you and you’re ready to take up and fight like St. Michael and all the angels.”
As a schoolboy, he didn’t understand why his mother, an Episcopalian, didn’t understand his faith. Before his first communion, she forced him to swallow down breakfast.
“I said, ‘The nun says you’re not supposed to have anything to eat or drink before.’ Everything the nun said not to do, my mom said to do. But one of the things the nun said was honor thy mother and father.”
Hughes found that difficult when crowded out by 13 older brothers and sisters.
“I was the baby, but I wasn’t spoiled. I wasn’t a child who was loved and cuddled. I often said if I became an adult, I would look out for the children.”
‘Got the groove’
Hughes was dancing at summer camp when a local choreographer surprised him with a scholarship to the St. Thomas School of Dance.
Hughes began studying professionally at age 12. He pulls out newspaper pictures of a boy smiling. The man holding them frowns. He recalls how his parents didn’t want to sign the photo releases.
“My parents didn’t support my dancing career. They did everything to get it squashed.”
At age 15, he was considered a shoo-in for the Ballet Theatre of the Virgin Islands.
“The day of the audition, my mother sent me to visit her friend in the country. She slapped me and said, ‘You get on that bus.’”
Once an adult but still a teenager, Hughes boarded a plane to study at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. He then received a scholarship to New York City’s Harkness House for Ballet Arts. Soon the island boy accustomed to coconut palms stood amid the skyscrapers of the Big Apple.
“On my own. With nothing. I was scared the first few moments. Just the first few.”
He never had stepped into a subway. That’s why he wasn’t afraid to.
“Wah troc eh dat?” he asked people who mistook his molasses-thick accent for a foreign language.
He soon learned what track that was. In return, he offered some guidance to all the trend-followers around him in Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.
“Why do I want somebody else’s name on my backside? I want Alfred. From then on, I was always looking for a way to keep my visibility. I’d wear a fantastic red shirt with green pants; a bright orange shirt and lime pants. This is way before the fashion. These days when I see people dress up like that, I know they took my style. But I still got the groove.”
‘Been with the best’
Hughes honed his signature style at dance classes.
“I’m able to say I’ve been with the best. I’ve studied with some great teachers. Teachers who gave you the love, the strength, the art, the goodness of true dancing.”
He takes the floor to demonstrate. First come a few steps from George Faison, Tony award-winning choreographer of the all-black Broadway musical “The Wiz.”
“He liked my spunk, the fact that everybody wore black jazz shoes and I wore white.”
Hughes next shares a move from Thelma Hill, founder of the New York Negro Ballet Company.
“Steroids couldn’t even come close to what my body looked like after Thelma Hill. She whipped you in shape.”
Now a turn from Jack Cole, who choreographed Marilyn Monroe in the movie musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
“He called me ‘Crazy Alfred.’ That was a compliment.”
And a final flourish from Margaret Craske, assistant to ballet master Enrico Cecchetti and one of the world’s great teachers of his pioneering classical technique.
“She called me Joe, and I got insulted and said ‘My name is Alfred.’ I couldn’t keep up, but who cares? I was in Margaret Craske’s class.”
Eventually, Hughes says, Craske was asking him to slow down.
“When I auditioned to study with Alvin Ailey, Mr. Ailey himself handpicked me from the lineup.”
On the professional circuit, Hughes reports more tryouts than callbacks. But he hasn’t let that trip him up.
“When people say, ‘You’re too short, you’re too tall, you’re too this, you’re too that,’ I say, ‘Show me the dance.’”
‘I saw a flash’
Hughes tells his story with the hands of a magician, the voice of a maestro, the face of a mime.
“Picture this — a used bike with a little wicker basket and a bell!”
He tosses out exclamation points like a partygoer throwing confetti.
“I used to ride around to the public schools and teach dancing in some of the tough neighborhoods — Brooklyn, the Bronx, the Lower East Side. New York City taught me some of the best things as far as culture, as far as food, as far as how much tenacity I have to go up and talk to whomever.”
Consider Edward Koch, mayor from 1978 to 1989.
“He asked me how he was doing and I thought he was doing a good job — why not answer him? They’re people, just people.”
Hughes recalls talking to everyone about everything: Ballet, baseball — how ’bout them Yankees? But all semblance of performance stops when he explains how he was mugged one evening in Central Park.
“A vicious mugging. Three black males. It all happened so fast. One guy was holding me by the neck. One guy was pummeling my face, my eyes, my teeth. One guy was just slashing my clothes, my pockets, my backpack. They took my money, my beautiful silver aquamarine ring. The one guy who was holding me said, ‘I’m going to put you to sleep.’ I put up a struggle, but that one boy, he said if I didn’t stop ...”
Hughes speaks without hand gestures. Without vocal inflections. Without facial expressions. Without punctuation marks.
“My feet were off the ground. He seemed to cut off my oxygen. It was night, it was dark, but I saw a flash like daylight. That’s when I stopped fighting. I just let go.”
A new world
Then he came to.
“I couldn’t move. My feeling is they thought I was dead. I didn’t do anything to warrant this kind of behavior. But I pulled myself together, went to the police and reported the crime.”
Miraculously, Hughes didn’t suffer any slashes or broken bones, although his bruised and bloodied face wasn’t easy to look at. A month later, he was back on his bicycle, only to be toppled by a hit-and-run driver.
Miraculously, he only injured his left ankle. A few months later, up again, a rent hike tossed him out of his Lower East Side apartment.
“I was working, I had money coming in, but not enough. Not everybody who is on the streets has done something bad or is on drugs. Economically, they can’t string it together.”
Central Park is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Hughes slept during the day, stayed awake all night. He washed in restaurant restrooms. He prayed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“It has the most brilliant gift shop — all these Catholic things.”
One day, two joggers, Kayla Black and Michael Bryan-Brown, stopped to talk. Soon they invited him to their nearby apartment. Then they invited him to Thanksgiving dinner at their second home in Whitingham. Two years later, in 1994, Hughes moved to Vermont.
“I could hear birds. I could see that people actually do drive normal. I got all my zest back. I got all my zeal back.”
He got a job at Brattleboro’s Morningside Shelter for homeless people. He had no social-service experience. He had something better: He had walked a mile in their shoes.
Hughes worked nights at the shelter, then found a day job at the Brattleboro Retreat’s Mulberry Bush Early Learning Center, his entry into the preschool scene. On weekends, he discovered Saturday afternoon Mass at St. Michael’s Catholic Church (“so I can go out Saturday night and not get up Sunday,” he confesses). For fun, he went to Twice Upon A Time, a downtown consignment shop, for a Friday-night fashion show.
He wasn’t amused.
“I didn’t think they were doing it right, and if I don’t think something is right, I’m going to let you know.”
Owner Randi Crouse handed him the microphone. On Aug. 6, 1999, she also gave him a little black dress.
“She just picked it up and said, ‘Wear this.’ I didn’t argue.”
Hughes may have been born to wear a dress, but until that moment, he hadn’t. He slipped it on. He saw another flash. The next day, he spotted his picture on the local front page.
Different colors
Society today wrestles with words like “transgender.” Hughes doesn’t.
“I’m just a man with a dress.”
(Make that a Republican man with a dress: “My mother was a Democrat,” he explains.)
Hughes usually wears pants to the Winston Prouty Center, where he’s worked since 2002. Located in a big, old clapboard house with a tree-shaded yard, it wriggles with preschoolers and an aquarium full of tadpoles.
They have competition. Although Hughes still dances on occasion, “I’m not in tights 24/7 as I was. Now I’m in skirts. The next thing you know I’m down in the sandbox or up the slide. The girls are like, ‘Wow!’”
The boys laugh. Inside, everyone is learning to appreciate different shapes and different colors. Outside, some grownups still need to work on it.
Brattleboro, population 11,944, is a bastion of liberalism. More than 750 people recently filled downtown’s Latchis Theatre the middle of a workday to hear progressive radio commentator Al Franken interview politicos Bernie Sanders, Patrick Leahy and Howard Dean. Before Hughes made a name for himself about town, however, storeowners often eyed him suspiciously. Street loiterers threw curses and, in one instance, a bottle.
But when the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center unveiled its exclusive Andy Warhol show in 2004, it knew who to tap as host of its opening gala.
“I had the whole party in the palm of my hand,” Hughes says. “I was the evening.”
His tone isn’t boastful, just informational.
You could confirm Hughes’ popularity by talking with local parents and grandparents, arts aficionados or the working-class crowd at McNeill’s pub where he “holds court.” Or you could just sit with him downtown, where a woman approached him last week with tears in her eyes and a cigarette in her mouth.
“You don’t know me, but I’ve seen you so many times,” she said. “May I have a hug?”
Hughes gave her one. Learning she was struggling with finances, he handed her a few dollars, too.
“This world needs more love, don’t it?” she replied.
Four years ago, Hughes was chauffeured (he doesn’t drive) in the town’s inaugural Strolling of the Heifers parade. People cheered. Seeing him take to high heels in subsequent strolls, newspapers snapped photos. Then for some reason — one organizer said his Chinese parasol scared the cows — Hughes stopped receiving invitations to march.
He wasn’t planning to appear in this year’s parade, which drew tens of thousands of spectators to Brattleboro on Saturday. Then he imagined everyone waiting for his entrance.
“God is my witness — I was not going to do it, then I went into overdrive. My dress — whoa, Nelly! — is going to hit the tongue like you wouldn’t believe.”
‘All the way’
Hughes had good reason to high-step onto Main Street and crash the parade: “I do it for the little guys.”
He’s back holding that sepia-toned snapshot.
“When I see this picture, I look at that little boy and I see that was the beginning of me being strong. Sometimes people don’t really listen to children. I do find that children need to be listened to more. I want to be the patron saint of children. I feel that’s what I am.”
His philosophy extends to people of all ages.
“I don’t worry about what their successes or bravado seems to be. I always look for the child in someone.”
Worried about fitting in? Don’t — being different makes you special, Hughes shows and tells his preschoolers.
Hughes respects everyone and shares everything. Well, most everything. He shields not only his age, but also his wardrobe cabinet and the personal life it contains.
Got a problem with his facial glitter or fluorescent orange cowboy hat?
“I have to answer for my beliefs, and what I believe is that we don’t know nothing. I don’t know who came up with this whole notion of ‘you can’t do this, you can’t do that.’ We all speculate, but while we speculate, I still want to live. I’m not dealing with the devil, I’m dealing with God. I’m with J.C. all the way.”
He’s not talking about Joan Crawford.
“When I was suffering — that was my Joan Crawford period — I said, ‘I will show them, I will get back.’ And I have. You can find your way if you really hang in. What you give to life, it will give back to you. Where am I going? I want to be an old sage. I want to be with J.C. And I would like to have a movie of the week. A movie of the week! I’ve got it all!”
It spills from his scrapbook. The side trips to California, Paris, Amsterdam. The Rotary Club’s “Men of Brattleboro” calendar that, 17,000 copies later, raised $25,000 for charity.
“A bunch of naked Caucasian men, and then look at the color!” says Hughes, pointing to himself wearing nothing but a strategically placed scarf. “I want to bring color to Vermont! ‘O, mon!’ We got so much to talk about! I tell you, we haven’t tipped the iceberg! You want a three-part series?”
Contact Kevin O’Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.
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