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Finding harmony in dissonance

Michael Wickersheim struggles to suppress his Tourette Syndrome. But he joyfully gives in to his desire to enrich lives with music.

TAMPA - One day last spring, before one of the last school concerts of the year, band director Michael Wickersheim stood before a wriggling group of musicians at Durant High School.

"Everyone close your eyes and shut your mouths," he called out.

His outstretched left hand shook as he pleaded with them to pour all their teenage energy through their instruments.

"We need a lot more air!" Wickersheim called. "The right note would help."

Then his head suddely jerked. The students didn't seem to notice.

He flipped them off. They kept their eyes on the page.

He yelled, "slut, motherf--r, n---," and they kept playing.

It was just another day with Mr. Wickersheim.

Wickersheim, who has made a career eliciting beautiful sounds from others, can never be sure what kind of sound he'll make himself.

Not long ago he stopped at a doughnut shop and paused over a display of soft brown cinnamon rolls, white glazed doughnuts and jelly filled puffs.

"Slut-lesbian-n--r," he suddenly called out, the words loud and distinctive enough to echo in the empty Krispy Kreme.

The stunned attendant, a young black woman, looked down at the doughnuts.

"Sorry, dear," Wickersheim, 35, offered softly.

"Is there anything I can get you?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said. "A cure for Tourette's." It would be hard enough to deal with severe Tourette Syndrome, with its tics, spasms and involuntary verbal outbursts, in everyday life. Now imagine coping with it as a teacher in a public high school, a rule-bound environment in which it is considered unseemly, to say the least, for a band director to give his students the finger.

When Wickersheim got his first teaching job, in the mid '90s, he had no idea whether the students (or their parents, or his colleagues) would accept him. But in almost a decade of teaching - at a middle school in Volusia County, at Pasco High and at Durant - his charges came to know him as more than the guy with tics.

At Pasco High, where he taught the longest, they remember and miss the director they called "Wick," the man who rebuilt the music program.

They remember the humor - sometimes corny, but always on their level - of a man who was a mentor to many and a good friend to some. Who taped his fingers together before concerts to avoid flipping off the crowd. Who pushed students to levels they had never imagined.

He was the joshing director who threw his credit cards at students and told them to buy as much air as they wanted - then warned, "You'd better give those back to me."

And he was the director they defended when other students ridiculed him.

"You hear that kids are so cruel," Wickersheim said. "But I've had more problems with adults in my life than I ever had with my peers or youth."

Growing up in Polk County, Wickersheim was a carefree child, creative and funny, the kind who could spend hours in his room entertaining himself with Matchbox cars, his mother, Susan Wright-Mosely, says. Early on, he developed passions for politics and music. He was encouraged in the latter by his grandmother, who often played Boston Pops recordings tailored to children.

"I would watch (Pops conductor) Arthur Fiedler (on television). I cried when that man died," Wickersheim remembered.

A defining moment came in elementary school, where he played violin and piano. One day, the children got a visit from a marching band.

"Ten-Hut!" hollered the drum major. A rumbling shook the room as the band marched in. The drum major high-stepped into view, his posture washboard straight, his movements rigid and regal.

Mesmerized, Wickersheim remembers thinking: "I'm going to be a drum major." In eighth and ninth grades, he got the job with his junior high school band.

By then, his friends started to notice his mysterious beeping.

The doctor knew right away. Wickersheim, 15, had Tourette Syndrome, a neurobiological disorder. (See box.) The condition is genetic, but Wickersheim and his relatives could point to no one in their family who had it.

As he entered Lakeland High School, Wickersheim was put on a host of medications, which controlled the tics but left him a "walking zombie," he said.

Somehow he found the energy to join the band and run, unsuccessfully, for class president. He slept most of his free time because of the medicine.

During his senior year, he ran a history class for a day and "got bit by the teaching bug." He was also inspired by his demanding high school band instructor, who could zero in on one flat flute in a roomful of squawking instruments.

At Troy State University in Alabama, he flirted with journalism and public relations before settling on a music education major. He joined the marching band.

But as time went on, his medicine could not hold back the tics. His hands and arms jerked. The beeping outbursts got worse.

Wickersheim decided to transfer to a school closer to home. He switched to Florida Southern College in Lakeland. He also started seeing a new doctor, who put him on different medications.

That, Wickersheim says, was when he found out how bad Tourette's could be.

At Florida Southern, Wickersheim would "baptize" door frames outside classrooms by banging his head on them before going inside. He slammed his head on his desk.

He licked people's arms.

"Sorry, sorry," he would tell them.

He learned to make jokes about his behavior. He'd calmly explain and apologize. But he couldn't apologize to everyone.

Fellow travelers in airports would mock him. Security guards tried to kick him out of restaurants.

Normally gregarious, he grew to hate life and hate leaving the house. He thrashed and slammed his knees into walls and his car. His weight ballooned to 250 pounds. Panic attacks left him helpless and housebound.

For the next three years, he dropped in and out of college. He scored a political internship with a congressman from Florida but had a bad experience when a staff member got on his case for banging his body against the wall.

"There were times I'd get to the top, and it would seem like another punch," he said.

Finally he returned to Troy State to finish his degree in music education. Quickly, rumors swirled that the directors wanted him out of the program.

Wickersheim calls that his turning point, when he stopped letting people run over him.

Wickersheim got his bachelor's degree in 1996. The usual internship referrals from Troy State music directors didn't materialize for him.

With help from other contacts, he got a job directing at Taylor Middle School in rural Volusia County. He showed up that fall with his new white baton in hand.

He remembers starting by asking students to play a B-flat scale. Nothing. They just looked at him.

Wickersheim bristled, thinking: "You don't know what I've gone through in my life. You can't hurt me."

Then one girl piped up, "Oh, the scale."

The students knew just one of the 12 scales, and they didn't know what it was called.

What had he gotten himself into?

"If I go to the office now and quit," he remembers thinking, "I can still make it to the welfare office by 5."

But he stayed. Wickersheim spent his own money on caps and ties for the band. At the first football game, he pushed them through an "awful" rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. Afterward, the principal was breathless.

"That was wonderful!" he told Wickersheim. "We could hum along. It didn't fall apart every measure."

During another game, Wickersheim walked over to meet with the principal. The opposing band members, 140 of them, imitated his tics. Wickersheim didn't see them. But his scrappy 27-member band did. Outnumbered almost five to one, Wickersheim's band challenged them to a fight. Adults had to separate the students.

Wickersheim insists he would not have been happy about the students fighting for him. But when he tells the story, a wicked little smile crosses his lips.

The next year, Wickersheim applied for the position of band director at Pasco High School in Dade City and got it.

"My name is Michael Wickersheim," he remembers telling the students at the beginning of the year. "I have Tourette Syndrome. It's a neurobiological disorder. It's not contagious. It's not deadly. It's something I've had to deal with for years. You certainly have my permission to laugh. If you have any questions, please ask."

Things seemed to be going well, but less than a month into the school year, Wickersheim got some unwelcome attention. Radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge had found out about Wickersheim from an article in the Tampa Tribune. Bubba made fun of him on his morning show, depicting Wickersheim swearing, licking a tuba and inappropriately touching a majorette in the shower.

Wickersheim, who had also been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, got a tape of the show and listened to it again and again.

Before the radio gag, Wickersheim did not display what's called coprolalia, the uncontrollable use of obscene language and ethnic slurs. The symptom, which affects 15 percent of Tourette's sufferers, stems from an uncontrollable urge to voice the forbidden, even when it's the opposite of one's beliefs, the Tourette Syndrome Association states.

Wickersheim thinks the tape made his tics worse. After Wickersheim listened to it, he went back to school "swearing like a sailor," he said. A few faculty members complained, but the students and their parents seemed to understand. And the administration stood by him.

Some students didn't like Wickersheim but usually not because of the tics. It was because he was so demanding.

"If you didn't show up, you didn't play," said Jason Stafford, once Pasco's band colonel, its highest ranking member. He's now an engineering student at the University of South Florida.

Stafford, 20, of Blanton, says the stubborn director always pushed him to be better.

"I've seen him cry before because of something we played," he said. "He takes what music can be and turns it into an emotion the audience can relate to."

Wickersheim instilled discipline through the awarding of Air Force ranks, which many marching bands use to divide responsibilities. Students also got tasks such as ordering music, issuing uniforms and keeping lower-ranked members in line.

On the road, band members had to leave a restaurant cleaner than they found it.

But at times, he was one of them. Once, he and some male band members helped coach a male student on how to ask out a girl.

The initial giggling over the tics subsided. Wickersheim's jovial nature and willingness to rib himself helped them relax, students said.

When he'd bang his head off his stand or the blackboard, he'd yell, "My head hurts," and they'd laugh together.

If Wickersheim grabbed Stafford - another tic - he would joke, "Jason, keep your hands off me!"

Students and parents alike learned he might touch them in sensitive places if they weren't prepared. Administrators at Pasco High received several calls a year from concerned parents, mostly complaining about Wickersheim's swearing tics, said principal Pat Reedy. The cases were handled with "education," he said, or parent conferences, where Wickersheim would meet with them to explain the Tourette's.

In a few cases over the years when those explanations weren't good enough, parents pulled their children out of the band, he said.

But other parents developed different coping techniques.

"We just know not to get within hitting distance," said band mom Kathi Terpin, who was grabbed once or twice.

More important, she said, was watching her son, 18-year-old Andrew, turn from a shy kid into a confident young man in Wickersheim's band.

"I can't tell you the difference he has made in my son," she said.

Consumed with the music, Wickersheim didn't have tics when he conducted. Critical parents would ask in a mumble why he couldn't stop permanently, Terpin said. After all, when he spoke in front of a crowd, he would work to hold the tics back.

"I've seen him sweat bullets trying to keep it in," Terpin said. "I'd see him between numbers. He'd go backstage and throw his arms around and get some of it out."

Wickersheim's pinnacle at Pasco High came in the spring of 2001, during the concert band's performance in front of judges for Music Performance Assessment. The assessment is a critical moment for every high school band because it determines which bands make it to the annual state festival.

In the middle of Kentucky 1800 by Clare Grundman, Wickersheim knocked over his music stand, sending it crashing into a row of flute stands. All the music hit the floor.

Students said Wickersheim had ticked.

He insists he hadn't. His enthusiasm was at fault.

"I kind of got a little bit carried away," he said. "When I went for beat three, somehow my hand got underneath my stand. My score remained on the floor the rest of the song."

The students' eyes stayed on him. Some students didn't even notice. Everyone kept playing.

In the end, the band won a superior score - the highest - for the first time anyone can remember, advancing to the state festival.

The next year, the band did it again.

For a concert for Pasco High in the spring of 2003, Wickersheim dressed up like John Philip Sousa, complete with salt-and-pepper dyed hair and a red jacket with tails.

The last day of school, he had something to tell them.

"When he announced he was leaving," Andrew Terpin said, "there were tears in everyone's eyes."

When students return to Durant on Thursday, Wickersheim will be gone.

He worked part time last year trying to figure out what to do next. Now, after eight years in public schools, the man who once feared leaving his house will stand before university students and try again to elicit beautiful music.

He starts this fall at Northern Arizona University as a graduate conducting student, leading undergrads in a few bands.

He is prepared for the occasional strange look, ready to offer his explanations and apologies.

But somehow, things have become easier, he says. More people know about Tourette's today. And his success in the classroom has helped build his confidence. He's a different person, he says, compared with the one who showed up that first day at Taylor Middle.

The biggest lessons he hoped to teach were the ones he lived.

"If I left them with the belief they can achieve more than they realize they can . . . and not accept subpar standards in anything they do . . ."

His voice trails off.

"Shoot for the stars, and if you land on the moon, at least you tried. I told you, I have these corny phrases."

- Saundra Amrhein can be reached at 813 226-3383 or amrhein@sptimes.com Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

Tourette Syndrome, first described by Gilles de la Tourette, is a neurobiological disorder characterized by repeated tics, involuntary, sudden movements, and/or vocal outbursts.

Motor tics may include eye blinking, head jerking, shoulder shrugging and facial grimacing. Vocal tics include throat clearing, sniffing and tongue clicking.

No cause has been established, but evidence points to abnormal metabolism of at least one brain chemical, called dopamine.

Tourette Syndrome often goes undiagnosed. Estimates put the number of people with it in the United States at 200,000. All races and ethnic groups are affected.

There is no cure, but medications are available to control symptoms.

For more information, call the Tourette Syndrome Association at 718 224-2999 or visit its Web site at www.tsa-usa.org

Source: Tourette Syndrome Association