I have a lot of hero actors and actresses, but the first one who lighted up my heart and brain to want to perform was none other than the wonderful Dick Van Dyke. I was around eight years old when I saw the movie Mary Poppins. I was a Girl Scout and a bunch of us were taken to see it in the city. All of us kids growing up in Queens called Manhattan “The City.” It was only a subway ride away but it was as exciting as going to another country.
Waiting in line outside the theater in Times Square, across the street from Mary Poppins another movie was advertising it was coming out soon: YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, in giant red flashing letters, practically screamed at us from a big marquee. I just stood there transfixed. What does that mean? You mean we get to live twice? I thought it was only once. But what do they mean by ONLY twice? I don’t get it!
While I was pondering this all of a sudden a loud, exasperated voice from one of our Girl Scout leaders shook me out of my daydreaming. “Gina! Come on! Pay attention!!” The whole group of girls had moved way up. I hadn’t noticed and the leader was frantically waving at me from quite a distance. I ran to catch up. I was always in trouble for daydreaming and I drove my poor mother nuts. Failing marks in grade school (except for reading), with my mom going up to see the teacher year after year to be told again, “Gina is a very nice girl but she doesn’t pay attention.”
Mary Poppins started and I was immediately captured by it. Magic was real! And you could find it in the ordinary day to day things if you only looked for it. I loved everything about the movie but my favorite by far was Dick Van Dyke, aka Bert. I knew right away after seeing him what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was either a chimney sweep or a sidewalk chalk artist. What’s funny, though, is that one of those dreams in a way came true.
We all went back home but Mary Poppins had changed my entire life. I was a very shy, quiet child, almost pathologically shy. Outside, sitting on my back steps, in my mind I began to play everyone’s parts, not only Bert’s. But I was much too shy to actually act out anything. I would sit out there for hours in the cold imagining the entire movie with me in it.
My mother opened the back door after a while and said, “What are you doing?” I thought I would be in trouble for daydreaming again so I said, “Uh, nothing.” She kind of shook her head with a kind of “weird kid” look, and went back inside. I realized I had worried her again and I got in trouble anyway. But oh to be Bert and dance with “all me pals” on the rooftops of London!
What really drove my imagination was when, after Bert makes some chalk drawings on the sidewalk it starts to rain and it washes them away, Bert just cheerfully points to his head and says, “Oh Well! There’s more where that came from!” That absolutely shocked me. That meant you could do anything.
Funny thing, too, except for drawing right on the sidewalk I pretty much paint like Bert. Nothing is planned, no preliminary sketches. It’s chalk to paper driven only by my imagination. Each drawing has its own life, not one is repeated. When I drew as a child I had this game where I had to finish the entire drawing of the person I was drawing or they would have to go around, say, without an arm or an eye. And we would talk to each other. “Please Gina, you must finish or I won’t have an arm!” I would say, “Don’t worry! I will finish!” They were alive to me. They still are.
“And it’s all me own work from me own memory.”
“Well not Royal Academy; still better than a finger in your eye!”
“Chim chimney, chim chimney chim chim cher-oo, I does what I likes and I likes what I do!”
Dick Van Dyke will be 100 years old on December 13, 2025. He said in a recent interview he still feels like he’s 13! When asked his secret he said:
“People say, ‘What did you do right?’ I don’t know. I’m rather lazy. I’ve always thought that anger is one thing that eats up a person’s insides—and hate. And I never really was able to work up a feeling of hate. I think that is one of the chief things that kept me going. There were things I don’t like, people I don’t like and disapprove of, but I never really was able to do a white heat kind of hate. My father was constantly upset by the state of things in his life and it did take him at 74 years old.”
I thought that was one of the most amazing things I ever heard, and something for me, for all of us, to try and follow too. Happy Birthday to the one and only Dick Van Dyke!