By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

One day, a Barbra Streisand poster hanging in a McKinley High drama class came to life and winked at him. That was the day that changed Benjamin Lum's life.

Lum, McKinley class of '71, went on to an acting career that included appearances in more than 20 Hollywood films and roles in television shows such as "Married ... With Children," "Seinfeld" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation." But when he wrote the piece that would become his memoir, he hardly mentioned any of that. Instead, he wrote about growing up in Honolulu, McKinley High School, and his family's house on Rycroft Street.

Sophomore Matthew Chong plays "young Benji," who recalls being terrorized by a teacher the kids called "Fish Face." Nakamoto had to change some of the names in the play to protect certain people. "Some people will still know who they are," Nakamoto laughs.

The story recalls a Rycroft Street of a different era, a Honolulu where people didn't have to lock their doors and homemade mango seed was preferable to anything you could buy in a store.

After he left Hawai'i to pursue his acting, Lum didn't get to come home very often except for family funerals. These sad visits home are depicted in the play as he says goodbye to his father, the brother who died in a mysterious fire, and in 1994, to his 74-year-old mother who was murdered in the family's Rycroft Street home by a drug addict looking for crystal meth.

The last time Benjamin Lum came home was for his own funeral. He died Jan. 1, 2002, after a brief but intense bout with illness. He had completed his play and sent it to his high school drama friends, but said he still wanted to do a little rewriting. In his last few months, Lum talked to William Hao about performing the one-man play in a touring show, but said he wanted to do the L.A. and Honolulu shows himself.

"That would have really been a tour de force," Nakamoto says, "Having Benji play all the characters."

But he ran out of time.

This weekend, his words will come home to the very stage where he fell in love with acting and under the direction of the teacher who changed his life.

The evening is rounded out by a one-act play Nakamoto wrote specifically for his drama students before retiring. It's called "Strong Inside," and was written 20 years ago while Nakamoto was on a summer fellowship at Northwestern University.