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But he did pass on one lesson he learned from Lee: "No matter how small your role is, you've got to work your ass off to make the audience love you."

At age 12 he went on a year-long national tour of dinner theaters with the long-defunct Country Dinner Playhouse as the child lead in A Thousand Clowns. He remembers sitting around in dressing rooms after curtain and watching the adult actors laugh, drink wine, and pass joints over his head. (Even in the heat of the 1970s, some boundaries did prevail - he said he was never invited to partake of either the pot or the vino). Because of a "booking snafu," he found himself with his own hotel room while they played Louisville, Ky., making himself sandwiches for lunch and watching TV all day long until he was escorted by his presumptive guardians to the theater. The grownup actors in A Thousand Clowns gently teased him for his very Texas-sounding name of "Bobby Joe," and during the Colorado run they dubbed him "B.J.," the professional moniker he's used ever since.

"They gave me the name 'B.J.' right before I turned 13," he said. "During the play, my character also turned 13. [The other actors] gave me a cake backstage. It felt like a growing-up experience. To this day, if someone has a birthday during a show, we bring out a cake."

Upon his return, Cleveland enrolled in Boswell High School. His drama teacher there made a point of initially casting the very experienced young actor in smaller roles to avoid the appearance of favoritism. But he applied Auntie Ruta's lesson even in those roles, to good effect.

In a Boswell staging of The Sound of Music, for instance, he played the butler. "I had already created a backstory [for that small role]," he said. "I figured that since the Von Trapp family was being chased by Nazis, there was a good chance there'd be a Nazi mole in the household. That was the butler. I played him with a scar on his face and a Boris Karloff accent."

By the time Cleveland graduated from Boswell in 1981, he was working at Granbury Opera House and Casa Mañana as an actor and a youth theater instructor.

A major opportunity for national exposure came less than two years later, when producers from United Artists started casting a low-budget drama to be filmed at the recently opened Las Colinas film studios in Irving. The accountant for the film, the son of a woman Cleveland had performed with in Auntie Mame, nudged Cleveland to audition. Director Robert Altman eventually cast him in the film version of David Rabe's scorching Vietnam-era drama Streamers. Although Cleveland's character never speaks, he's featured as the primary witness to the destructive back-and-forth among Matthew Modine, David Alan Grier, Mitchell Lichtenstein (son of pop art icon Roy Lichtenstein), and Michael Wright. His reaction shots, sprinkled throughout the movie, came about in an incidental, Altman-esque way.

"I had to lie on a bunk in my boxers all day [on set] with the sound of a rain machine over my head," he said. "I fell asleep. Altman heard me snoring, quietly moved the camera over to my bunk, and then woke me up screaming, 'This is my movie!' Then he filmed me doing little bits of business on the bunk - waking up, looking around, hiding under the covers - that you see all through the movie." When the movie was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1983, the principal cast won an unprecedented ensemble award for Best Actor. Cleveland's name wasn't on the trophy, but his role had an impact.

By 1984, he was pursuing a theater degree at the University of Texas at Arlington and had joined the staff of Theatre Arlington as an administrative assistant and box office manager. The "assistant" position included everything from training volunteers to cleaning the toilets, but Cleveland was also tapped to act and direct as well as to develop youth outreach programs. Soon after, his former Casa Mañana buddy Lisa Whelchel invited him out to Los Angeles to audition for bit parts in her hit NBC comedy The Facts of Life. He earned a small recurring role in the 1984-'85 season as a hapless fraternity pledge.

When asked why his brief TV and feature film work didn't encourage him to ditch Fort Worth for the show-biz shark tank, Cleveland reiterated a constant theme in his life: Tarrant County theater has always felt like a family to him, and the thought of leaving so many people who'd praised his work for so long was scary. In a weird way, it seemed ungrateful, too. The risk of taking the leap into the cold, hypercompetitive world of movies and television didn't feel worth the potential reward, especially since he enjoyed so much professional security in his hometown.

"At the time, New York was a bigger temptation than L.A.," he said. "But I just never got serious about the [film and television] industry. I was up to my chin in theater. Even as a child, I had an agent, but I was never sent out on many TV auditions." When he became a young adult, the idea of auditioning for strangers to get work didn't appeal much to him, since "I never lacked for stage work here because I kept getting jobs from people I'd worked with before. I guess the best answer is, 'Shoulda, coulda, woulda ...' . "

If the pursuit of national stardom wasn't much on his mind, he only had to wait another two years for local and regional fame to come trotting after him. In 1986, when he was 23 and working as an artistic associate at Theatre Arlington, Cleveland got a call from a producer over at KXTX-TV Channel 39, then a local station owned by the ultra-conservative Christian Broadcasting Network, whose flagship show was the syndicated 700 Club with Pat Robertson. The producer had seen him in a show at Theatre Arlington. Would he be interested in auditioning for the role of an afternoon kids' show host with a floppy-eared dog puppet sidekick? Yes, he would.

The Cartoon Clubhouse Starring BJ and Lester ran from 1986 to 1990. It was later refashioned as BJ and the Super Ones when it switched to the Disney-owned KTVT Channel 11, where it ran from 1990 to '94. On his one day off each week from Theatre Arlington, Cleveland shot five half-hour segments with Lester, the puppet voiced and operated by producer Jack Glaze. They introduced cartoons, chatted with local guests on vaguely educational topics, and broadcast from locations around North Texas and, later, from Disney World. B.J. and Lester made regular mall and school appearances, served as grand marshals for area parades, and introduced Ice Capades shows at Dallas' now-razed Reunion Arena.

Both TV shows were less memorable for their content than for the manic enthusiasm of Cleveland, whose persona was the epitome of the phrase "man-child" - it was nearly impossible to guess his age. In reality, the shows ran from when Cleveland was 23 until he was 31 - a period when many young men do a little hell-raising and a lot of socializing. But the standards of behavior expected from a kids' show host could be harsh. He recalled one stranger who stopped by his table at a TGI Friday's to ask him if he should really be having that margarita while there were children in the restaurant.