From 1966 to 1971, if you grew up in Indianapolis and watched Channel 8 after school, you saw me. I was the boy who ran into a living room, took one look at a plaid sofa and jumped on it, while a man's voice said, "Go ahead. It's built to take it." That was Ruehlmann's Furniture. In 1968 I also drank a glass of milk for Twin Elms Dairy and wiped my mouth on my sleeve, which my mother said was not how she raised me and the director said was perfect.

My mother took me to an open call at a photographer's studio downtown when I was eight, mostly because I would not sit still. That turned out to be the job.

The summer I was eleven, I played the Artful Dodger in a summer stock Oliver! I had a top hat two sizes too big and a coat with the cuffs rolled four times. On closing night the audience stood up. I remember thinking it would always be like that.

Then I grew. Between thirteen and fourteen I gained five inches and my voice went, and the people who used to call my mother stopped calling. Nobody was unkind about it. There was simply a new boy jumping on the sofa. I watched him one afternoon on our own television. He was very good.

The advertising agency gave my mother a reel of sixteen-millimeter film with my commercials on it. It sat on a closet shelf for fifteen years. In 1985 my father had it put onto a VHS tape at a camera shop, and my mother has it still. I watched it with her last Christmas: a minute and a half of a boy I barely remember, jumping on a sofa that must be long gone. She laughed at the same spot she always laughs at. So did I.

I teach drama now, at a public high school in Cincinnati. Every fall somebody finds out, a parent or a colleague or my own big mouth, and the students don't believe me. I don't blame them. I am forty-one, I wear cardigans, and the only proof is a tape I won't bring in.

What I tell them instead is the one thing I learned from it. Being seen is a gift, and it is a loan. Sooner or later you give it back. You hand the part to the next kid, and you go sit in the audience, and if you are lucky you find out that the seats are good too.

Most days I believe that. Some days, when a freshman walks onstage for the first time and the lights hit him and he forgets to be afraid, I miss it so much I have to look at my clipboard.

My wife, Catherine, teaches third grade and has seen the tape twice, which she says is plenty. Our daughters, Amanda, 14, and Ashley, 11, think the whole thing is hilarious. Last month Ashley asked whether she could jump on our sofa, for old times' sake. Our sofa is not built to take it. I let her anyway.

If you grew up watching Channel 8 in the late sixties and you remember a boy and a plaid sofa, I would love to hear from you. It would be nice to know someone else saw.