Unfinished Business

It's the last day of the year and I have a little unfinished business, blog wise. When actress Eileen Brennan passed away in July, I was totally slacking off and not posting much after a feverish spring. So now a proper farewell to one of my favorite entertainers.

The cascade of red curls she favored in the 70s and 80s was enough to make me smile; the piercing blue eyes and smoke-stained voice that masked the lyric soprano of her early musical career were enough to induce both fits of laughter and heartfelt tears, depending on the role.

If you're not familiar with her work, you can IMDB or Google her, as many treats await you. Mostly supporting work in films like The Sting, Paper Moon, a couple of Neil Simon comedies, and of course Private Benjamin. You can even find some rare gems on YouTube, like an early television appearance singing the Habenera song from Bizet's Carmen.

For me, I would express her greatness as simultaneously salt of the earth and ethereal. She was both a real broad and a genuine lady. Well, maybe a tad more broad.

I have always tended to be a tiny bit obsessive (though I prefer "enthusiastic") about performers who touch me, but I come by my enthusiasm honestly. Like many things, I inherited it from my mother.

One night in October of 1982, when I was a senior in high school, Eileen Brennan was struck by a car on a darkened street in Venice, California and nearly died. The next day I learned about the accident while doing homework and watching CNN on the small television in our kitchen with my mother. We had both enjoyed Eileen's work tremendously, laughing ourselves silly at everything from her Gal-Friday turn in Murder By Death, to her failed sitcom 13 Queens Boulevard.

It makes me laugh now, but my mother turned away from the TV and looked at me with as much solemnity as I had ever seen her muster. 

"Now Jimmy, I want you to be prepared...because...it doesn't look like she's going to make it."

I love that she took it so seriously, this injury to a beloved member of our imagined extended family. And I love that she knew that I would take it just as seriously. 

And thankfully Eileen Brennan did make it, living through difficult recoveries from both her injuries and a serious addiction to the painkillers used to treat them. She made it, and went on to entertain the world, and me in particular, for another three decades.

The Bride

  

A little late for Halloween but...

About three weeks before Halloween I dreamt I was rummaging through the attic of an old summer stock theatre. Amongst the props and costumes I find something unusual: a framed movie poster for The Bride of Frankenstein. However, instead of Elsa Lanchester with her iconic lightning streaked coife, the bride is played by that scarlet haired spitfire Nancy Walker.. 

This dream actually prompted me to see the film for the first time. I don't think the bride is in the film for more than 10 or 15 minutes, but she does make quite an impression.

Both Sides Now

                                           

November 7, 2013

I dreamed about Joni Mitchell for the second time in my life last night. I like her well enough but I am not particularly a fan. I mean, she's not someone whose birthday I would celebrate. So imagine my shock when I Googled her today and found out that today, November 7 is actually her birthday.

As for the dream itself, I was at a house party in London...a flat party, really. I could see roof tops from the window that reminded me somehow of graham crackers. 

Joni was sitting on the floor in front of a couch surrounded by party goers, including much of my extended family. I sat down in front of her and leafed through a book of her art work while she signed CDs for people. We spoke for a while and she was a very attentive listener, though I don't remember what we spoke about.

I got up to leave and say goodbye, but then turned back to Joni to say, "Oh wait, I thought of one more thing I wanted to tell you." 

It was then that I realized I had barged in on someone else's turn, that in fact there was a female reporter sitting on the couch waiting to interview Joni. 

Joni said I could stick around and talk to her after her interview, but I was so embarrassed at my faux pas, that I quickly headed for the door.

Buddha Fall Down, Go Boom

So far poor Buddha here is the only real casualty of my recent move. That is if you don't include my bank account. But it's worth it to have a place I only have to share with Buster. True, Buster doesn't cook as well as my last roommate, but he's also not as judgmental. Well, maybe he is, but at least he's not as vocal about it. 

Big shout out to the Countess Vitzthum for hanging out with Buster during the move. 

Gentlemen Prefer Gingers

Saturday June 1 marks Marilyn Monroe's 87th birthday. She's certainly a cultural icon and an interesting performer, but this post isn't really about her. It's about what she reminds me of, which is the summer I spent with my Great Aunt Margaret just outside of London. It wasn't really a summer, just two weeks in July and two weeks in August many years ago, but it made a lasting impression.

Aunt Margaret was my grandmother's youngest sister, though they did not really grow up together, as my grandmother was thirteen years older and left their village in Western Ireland for America when Margaret was just five or six. Eventually Margaret left as well, settling in London where she found work as a nurse during World War II. 

I first met her when she and another sister who had settled in London, my Great Aunt Anne, visited America for the Bicentennial. They were rosy cheeked, buxom middle aged women, and I found them fascinating, so much like my Nanny, but somehow different, foreign...always laughing, smiling, winking, drinking gin. Not that Nanny wasn't fun, but I think their natural charm combined with their novelty made them pretty irresistible. 

In the fall of 1986 Margaret (who was the first person to ever call me "ginger-headed") visited again, this time by herself. Anne was unwell and would soon pass on. Margaret arrived just as my grandmother suffered a mild heart attack, and she helped nurse her back to health during her stay.

One evening I paid them a visit at Nanny's apartment, and along with a few elderly aunts from my grandfather's side of the family, we spent the night playing cards. I peppered Aunt Margaret with questions about London, particularly the theatre scene. "Come visit. Anytime you like," she told me.

Well, that was all the encouragement I needed. I started saving every penny I could for my trip, and nine short months later, there I was being met by Aunt Margaret at Gatwick's international gate.

London was everything I'd hoped it would be--great museums, theatre (Diana Rigg in Follies on my birthday was a highlight) Hyde Park, Madame Tussaud's, day trips to Dover, Brighton, and more. It was all great, but it's the time I spent with Aunt Margaret that has meant so much to me over the years.

I was pretty skinny that summer, and like any wonderful old relative she never stopped trying to feed me. Tea, scones, digestive biscuits, lots of grilled fish, enormous breakfasts, and my most favorite--rhubarb tart with rhubarbs picked from her own garden, covered with a homemade custard. Every time I complimented a dish she'd smile and say the same thing in her lilting brogue, "Oh, it's ever so easy to make!"

One day I came home from a local record shop with the out of print London cast recording of Gypsy with Angela Lansburry. Aunt Margaret got it into her head that Gypsy Rose Lee was buried in a churchyard cemetery on the outskirts of London and convinced her son Kevin to drive us around for hours on a Saturday looking for it. For the record, she's buried in Inglewood, California, but we didn't know that then and so we soldiered on, taking in several old churches along the way. 

Aunt Margaret was part of her neighborhood watch. Once a month or so she'd have to stay up all night to keep lookout on her block. While I was visiting her turn came so I told her I would stay up with her. It happened to fall on the 25th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death, and the BBC was showing her movies all night long. While we should have been protecting Gilbert Road we were watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bus Stop, and How to Marry a Millionaire. Every once in a while during a commercial break one of us would get up, pull back the lace curtain and give a perfunctory peak out the window. 

Being somewhat removed from our immediate family, as well as a healthcare professional, I guess it was easier for Margaret to speak freely, and so she was the first relative to ever ask me about my mother, to acknowledge, and to help me acknowledge, that there was something wrong, that her life was a daily struggle for stability. It was a brief conversation, but it was a huge gesture.

One morning as the end of my trip was nearing, Aunt Margaret reached into her jewelry box and pulled out a simple gold pin with a dark green square stone. She squeezed it into my hand saying, "bring this home for your mom."   I still have and treasure it.

I don't feel like this post is quite doing her justice, but I absolutely adored my Aunt Margaret, and I'm all at once sentimental and euphoric whenever I see Gentlemen Prefer Blondes...or eat a rhubarb tart. I hear they're ever so easy to make.

Gypsy, Tramp, and Thief

                                               

Whoa! If this doesn't make you feel old, I don't know what will. The ever youthful Cher is 67 years old today. Of course it's easier to be ever youthful if you replace your parts every now and then.

The first 45 I ever bought was Cher's Dark Lady, that classic tale of an adulterous fortune teller and the wife who would have her revenge. Heady stuff for an 8 year old.

Beep Beep, Toot Toot: Remembering a Bad Girl

                         

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to write today, but I wanted to acknowledge the one year anniversary of the passing of the Queen of Disco, Miss Donna Summer.

There are two people whom I passed up chances to see in concert thinking I'd get another opportunity that never came: Nina Simone and Donna Summer. 

I don't have a particular connection with her, but I do enjoy her music immensely  and once I dreamt I saw her at a wedding. She left her sweater on the back of her chair while she went to the lady's room. Without hesitation, I stole the sweater just so I could pretend I had found it and return it to her.

This post is dedicated to my friend John S. who loves Donna as much as I love Barbra...and to the closet Donna Summer fan in my life...you know who you are!!

Because W're All Cool Kids

                               

Fuck you Abercrombie.

THE DOCTOR IS OUT

I woke up at about 3 AM this morning, as I often do, and decided to go on line to read the Irish Sports Page, also known as the New York Times obituary section. I guess it's not for nothing that they have that moniker as this son of County Mayo (well, grandson of County Mayo) always goes to the obituaries first.

This morning I read about the late Dr. Joyce Brothers, and a couple of things struck me. First, I never realized she was such an academic with degrees from Cornell and Columbia, and that she actually did help people, including several suicidal callers to her early radio and TV programs. By the time I was aware of her, I thought of her as kind of a punchline ("hey, Dr. Joyce Brothers, flick that sweat ball off your nose...what are you trying to do, make me sick!!"), or doling out quips on The Hollywood Squares, or What's My Line?

It got me to thinking about my own psychologist, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Dr. Brothers, with her short blonde hair, prominent front teeth and droopy eyelids. Lowenstein, as I liked to refer to her when discussing my sessions (mostly with my sister) rented a series of small rooms on Manhattan's Upper West Side, each furnished with one chair, one well worn love seat, a couple of lamps, and an endless supply of Kleenex. Lowenstein was not her real name of course, but rather the name of the shrink played by Barbra Streisand in The Prince of Tides. It was just more fun to say Lowenstein, and besides, it was close enough to my doctor's actual name--they both ended in Stein.

I started seeing Dr. Lowenstein within about two weeks of seeing A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway (see my earlier post "Jessica Lange Scares The Shit Out Of Me".) at the start of a long hot summer. I saw her off and on for almost ten years, but I never had a regular slot. She just always gave me her cancellations or if she knew someone with a regular slot was going to be out of town she'd pencil me in. Ten years and no slot of  my own. Good thing I'm not the sensitive type.

For much of the time I went to see her, Dr. Lowenstein struck me as being completely bored during our sessions. As a former performer (and a writer), I couldn't help but worry that my stories weren't holding her interest. I did finally ask her about it once.

"It's not your job to entertain me," she said. "It doesn't matter if you repeat yourself and I hear the same story over and over again."

Ouch. Honestly, why didn't she just say, "I'm not bored." That would have been a lot more reassuring. But when she told me that she hated Ethel Merman and that she thought that Anne Meara looked and smelled like a bag lady when she ran into her in the fitting room at Loehmann's, well I knew then that our days together were numbered.

I looked her up today just for fun. Well, fun is a stretch, but out of curiosity I Googled her. Twice today I mistook pictures of Dr. Joyce Brothers for Dr. Lowenstein, that's how similar they are in appearance.  I found this review of her services at one of those rate-your-doctor website: "Sour face. Sour advice. She is not helpful. Felt worse after seeing her, like I just walked into a rain cloud."

I don't want to minimize how she helped me to deal with anxiety, or how apparently revisiting the same themes in session after session allowed my heart to catch up with my head when it came to unresolved feelings of sadness and guilt surrounding my mother (yes, yes, I know I'm still visiting those themes here!) but when it was time to go, I was the one saying, "I'm sorry, our time is up, we'll have to stop now."

From time to time I've thought about starting up with another shrink, and I even tried it once for a few weeks several  years ago. But it was like being half way through watching Gone With The Wind, only to have someone come in late and keep asking, "Wait, who is Ashley? What's that girl doing on the horse? Which one's Butterfly McQueen? Is she related to Steve?" It just took too much energy and time to go over territory that had already been covered...and scorched.

Happy Mother's Day

I have not celebrated Mother's Day for a very long time. It used to just make me sad, so I tried to ignore it as much as I could. And besides, I don't really need a holiday to remember my mom, as if she weren't ever more than a few minutes from crossing my mind. 

But this year I am feeling differently, and today I am happy to think of her with a smile. That's why the illustrations are awash in purple, my favorite color, and one that always makes me feel joyous. 

My mom was quick whited, and could be biting and infuriating, but also very kind. She delighted in my clumsiness, often comparing me to Baby Huey. I know that sounds a little mean, but she always said it with a smile, with love. I imagine growing up one of seven children helped form her take-no-prisoners sense of humor.

One year for Christmas I asked for a Linda Ronstadt album. Nothing else. I unwrapped everything under the tree that was tagged "To: Jimmy From: Santa." (My mother signed all of our gifts from Santa, even when my siblings and I were well into our teens and twenties.) I tore open socks, underwear, Avon aftershave (my mother was an Avon Lady--one who somehow never left the house to make a delivery, and why should she when she could get me or my Dad or my sister to deliver the little white bags for her) and a Shirley MacLaine book I had bought myself at the mall on Christmas Eve, and then gave to my Dad to wrap and put under the tree to ease my guilt about shopping for myself so close to Christmas.

The one gift I had asked for and was excited to receive was not under the tree. I was disappointed but tried not to act bitter. After all of the wrapping paper was collected and thrown away and we were all just sitting around the tree listening to Christmas music, my mother turned to me and said, "Well, did Santa bring you everything  you wanted?" 

I tried to be grateful. I mean, I wasn't a little kid, I was eighteen. I couldn't very well throw a tantrum.

"Yeah, I guess so," I replied.

"Why don't you go into my room and look on the bed. I think maybe he left one more thing for you."

I knew right away it was the Linda Ronstadt album.  I smiled. She had gotten me. Again. 

Anyway,  that was my mom. Funny and infuriating. 

(note: the drawings are based on pictures of my mom and dad from about 10 years or so before I was born, so it's not really how I remember them, but I do love my mom's crazy hat and my dad's casual smirk.)

This Perfectly Marvelous Girl

I've been seeing Broadway plays and musicals since I was sixteen years old. Picking favorite performances and plays is tough, but there are a few that always stand out in my memory. Diana Rigg in Medea, Tyne Daly in Gypsy, a staged reading of The Normal Heart with Eric Bogosian and Stockard Channing. And many, many more. But for sheer excitement, nothing compares in my memory with seeing the sparks fly between Natasha Richardson and Liam Nesson in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie.

The limited run was completely sold out and I did not have a ticket. Then the producers announced a "midnight matinee" benefit performance for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids, spearheaded by Richardson, who's own father had died of the disease a year or so earlier. At a hundred bucks a seat, it was pricey but it was the only way to see the hottest show in town, and it was for a good cause.

I have a pretty good memory, but I do not have anything even close to total recall when it comes to this night. Just images, like Natasha's long, beautiful hair, and her raincoat, which got quite a workout as Liam Neeson spat a fair amount in her direction during his more animated moments. But the intensity I remember, the sitting on the edge of my seat wide awake and absolutely riveted at nearly 3 AM as the play drew to a close and the cast emerged for their bows wearing those famous red ribbons, that I remember. (I also remember it was about 15 degrees outside, and so it seemed like a good idea to stop at the old Howard Johnson's on 46th St and drink half a pitcher of sangria with my friend, but I'm getting off track.)

About five years later I got to see Natasha Richardson on stage one more time in her Tony winning role as Sally Bowels in the 1998 revival of Cabaret. She did not have what I'd call a pretty singing voice, and I did not have a particularly good seat, but she blew we away just the same. Intense, naughty, sexy, mischievous, lost. Like her mother Vanessa, she seemed to have range that knew few limits, and like her Aunt Lynn (always my favorite Redgrave) a sort of pluck and gameness to try anything.

I never met Natasha Richardson, and I did not have a Clayburgh-ian type breakdown when she died, but I did find it very shocking and sad, as many people did. It was the sort of thing that's just not supposed to happen--a mother with young children bumps her head during a ski lesson, gets up and shakes it off, and hours later is brain dead. Senseless.

Seven months later I went with my friend Kevin to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to see Vanessa Redgrave perform Joan Didion's opus on grief and loss The Year of Magical Thinking. Under the best of circumstances it would have been a difficult piece to watch, but seeing a performer whose own grief was so public, so recent, so raw made me uncomfortable. I felt more ghoulish voyeur than audience member. 

The highlight of the evening for me came before we ever set foot inside the Cathedral. We were climbing the stairs leading from the street through the yard toward the building. Walking on the dimly lit path, we careened into two adolescent boys who had stopped short on a landing to say hello to someone. Under my breath (God, I hope it really was under my breath) I muttered, "nice place to stop!" before I realized it was Natasha's two young sons greeting my favorite Redgrave, their great aunt Lynn. I fought my natural inclination to linger and ease drop and maybe meet my favorite Redgrave. As much as I wanted to be a star fucker (as my friend Michael colorfully puts it), allowing them this semiprivate moment was the right thing to do.

Aw hell, I've gotten off track again. Natasha Richardson would have been 50 years old today, May 11, 2013. I was lucky to spend one of the most exciting nights of my life watching her heat up the stage with the love of her life well into the wee hours of a frigid morning. 

She Can Cook, Too

 Nancy Walker as Rosie, the Bounty Lady in a sketch I made many years ago.

 I had to crop her hand out of the picture because honestly it made her look part lobster.

Philadelphia's own Anna Myrtle Swoyer was born on May 10, in 1922. Better known by her stage name, Nancy Walker, she introduced Bernstein songs in Brodway's On The Town, appeared on film with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Girl Crazy, and became widely known for her TV work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, McMillan and Wife, and a string of commercials for Bounty paper towels. Late in her career she hilarioulsy played a deaf mute maid in Murder by Death and directed the Village People in the cult classic Can't Stop The Music...well, nobody gets out of show business with only roses on their resume.

When I was in 10th great I wrote the libretto and lyrics for an unproduced musical I called It's All Relative. It centered around two New York City sisters and their well meaning but overbearing mother. I worked on it for months, feeling great excitement and pride about this original idea I'd developed. It was only after I'd finished the first and only draft and reread it that I realized what I'd done...I had unwittingly written a musical based on Rhoda.

Well, I suppose there are worse ideas. As far as I can remember, not much happened. One sister overate and went to group therapy (perhaps it was a blend of Bob Newhart and Rhoda?) while the other sister pursued a career in the arts and searched for a husband, all while being tortured by their spitfire mother.

Anyway, the vastly talented Nancy Walker, all 4 foot 11 inches of her, was a very bright spot in my childhood (and not just because of her flaming red hair) and I am happy to salute her on what would have been her 91st birthday.

If you've never heard her sing, here's a treat courtesy of Youtube.

My heart on my sleeve

Well, the 10 day period I'm calling Birthday Week comes to a close with the hardest one to draw and the hardest one to write. The late Jill Clayburgh, born April 30, 1944. I've written a little bit about her before on Facebook, and some friends know of my very strong feelings so forgive me if I am repetitive, but I'm a trying to get it all out on the page.

Long before I ever heard of her, Jill Clayburgh was making a name for herself in Broadway musicals like Pippin and The Rothschilds, and guest spots on TV shows like N.Y.P.D. (with her then boyfriend, the unknown Al Pacino),  Maude, and The Rockford Files. Like a lot of people, I first remember seeing her with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in Silver Streak.

It's hard to know just exactly why certain performers grab your heart and others don't. I like Meryl Streep well enough, and Glenn Close, for instance. But they don't particularly touch me or make me root for them on screen. Maybe it has something to do with timing. Jill Clayburgh's career really heated up in the late 1970s, before I was going to the movies by myself but just as my family got cable television. Her string of performances as independent women (even reluctantly independent women, like her visceral work in An Unmarried Woman) seemed to play on an endless loop from about 1979 to 1984.

My mother and I (yes, I know, my mother again; it is not lost on me that these memories are as tied to her as much as to Clayburgh or anyone else I write or dream about) particularly loved her in Starting Over, a comedy about finding love after divorce with Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen. Bergen's off key singing is a hoot, but we always laughed the loudest when, taking a turn  in a charity dunk tank, Jill's character,  kindergarten teacher Marilyn, is dunked repeatedly by Reynolds and finally loses her cool, screaming in front of her shocked students, "CUT IT THE FUCK OUT!!!"

There's also a fine example of her natural approach, when during a scene shot at night in clearly frigid weather, a long, glistening string of snot runs from her nose, and instead of stopping she's so "in the moment" she simply wipes it away as any real person would do.

The next several years brought her roles as the first female supreme court justice in a stagy but fun First Monday In October with Walter Matthau, a lovelorn mathematician in It's My Turn with Michael Douglas, and a harrowing portrait of a Valium addict in I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can, all of which I watched repeatedly.

After that her career slowed down considerably as she chose to devote her time to raising her kids. She was also waging a battle with chronic leukemia, which she managed to keep private for over two decades, until after she passed away in 2010.

In 2005 she returned to the Broadway stage for the first time since 1985. In little more than a year, as if making up for lost time, she managed to appear in four different plays in New York. I saw two of them and was lucky enough to meet her twice. I told her I'd waited my whole adult life to see her on stage. "Oh God, I hope it was worth the wait," she laughed. She also told me a funny story about how the company releasing the new DVD of An Unmarried Woman didn't think she was buxom enough in the original movie poster and pasted her head on another woman's body. I had my picture taken with her and proudly displayed it on my desk.

Here's where the story gets a little embarrassing for me, but fuck it. If I can't be truthful then there's no point in writing anything at all. 

In the fall of 2006, a few months after I met Jill, she appeared in the film version of Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors. She played Agnes, the dog food eating, agoraphobic wife of an eccentric therapist, who becomes a mother figure to the film's teenage lead. I was dating a new boyfriend at the time, and even after reading Burrough's memoir, I was wholly unprepared for what happened when we went to see the film.

About three quarters of the way through the film Agnes breaks out of her stupor and makes the young man, clearly in need of some mothering, a plate of Hamburger Helper. I burst into tears. And not pretty, quiet tears. I was pretty much sobbing, heaving for each breath. I was on a date with a new beau and I was sobbing uncontrollably in a movie theatre.

Truthfully, lots of movies make me cry. Pretty much anything with a sick or dying mother, or anything with a mother/son relationship can wring tears out of me the way Field of Dreams can for most straight men. But this was different, like the difference between a run of the mill toothache and a tooth with an exposed nerve. 

I did manage to pull myself together, but then in the last scene of the movie Agnes once again finds the strength to put aside her own neurotic mishegas and be of real service to the boy. The credits roll. I am unable to move. I can not stop crying. The theatre clears out and the staff sweeps around us. My beau (I'll call him Jonathan 'cause that was his name and he's not the one whose identity needs protecting in this story) is very understanding. After about ten minutes I catch my breath and am able to get to my feet.

We walk out into the brisk Autumn air as dusk is falling in Chelsea. We head south from the theatre on 23rd Street, alternating between discussing the movie and silence. By 21st Street I am consumed by a new flood of tears and mortified beyond belief.

My childhood was not nearly as eccentric as the one portrayed in Running With Scissors, but there are parallels, and Jill Clayburgh's beautifully etched performance stirs memories and shakes me deeply. I have not watched the movie since, as much as I'd like to; I'm a little afraid of anything that has that much power over my emotions. 

On the first Saturday of November 2010, I awoke to the news that Jill Clayburgh had died the day before at her home in Connecticut. It was stunning news, considering how well she'd hidden her illness over the years. I did the only thing I felt I could do, which was to sob for ten solid minutes. 

I am not delusional; I know that meeting someone twice does not constitute a relationship anymore than watching them on screen or on a stage does. I know that Running With Scissor's Agnes was not my mother. I know that Jill Clayburgh was not my mother. I know and accept all of these things to be true. And yet...and yet...and yet...two years after her death I still dream about her and wake up startled and saddened to realize she's gone. 

Only one other person's passing has ever affected me quite so strongly, and that was, of course, my mother's. It is sad  that someone whose work I admire and who was polite and engaging in the brief time I spent with her is no more. But more than that, most of my memories of Jill Clayburgh are so interwoven with happy memories of my mother (of which I don't really have many) that I think her sudden death sort of tore open a wound that I had thought was healed. 

They say that when someone close to you dies it takes a while to really absorb the loss, but that eventually you do, and you begin to carry your grief, to wear it like an article of clothing, and that it gradually becomes bearable, almost comfortable. With varying degrees of success I found this to be the case after the deaths of both of my parents,  but I never imagined I'd go through a similar process for someone I only met twice.

An overbite out of life

If you draw out of love, as I try to do, and are completely and utterly untrained, as I am, and your 6th grade art teacher told you, as mine did, that you couldn't draw a straight line with a ruler, which I couldn't, then you may spend a lot of your drawing time avoiding having to draw teeth. But a likeness of Sandy Dennis without teeth would be like Van Gogh's Sunflowers without, well sunflowers, and since today is her birthday I've decided to stare down my fear of the pearly whites and put colored pencil to paper.

I fell in love with Sandy Dennis the moment I saw her on the late-late showing of The Out of Towners when I was about 12. My mother and I laughed ourselves silly as Sandy and Jack Lemon found themselves spiraling further and further down the rabbit hole of New York City. I still laugh when I think of her saying, "George, my hair hurts." 

Eventually I saw most of her films--Up the Down Staircase, Sweet November, The Four Seaons, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, and especially her Oscar winning role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, and her hilarious turn as a dimwitted Philadelphia nun in the Watergate parody Nasty Habits. 

Is it because of Sandy Dennis that I think overbites are adorable? Is she to blame for me ignoring my dentist's advice to do something about my own protruding top row?

I was lucky to see Sandy in a late career stage performance when she and Kaye Ballard came to the Bucks County Playhouse in the female version of The Odd Couple. It was odd in more ways than one. Sandy played Florence, the fussy one, and though she acted fussy and she could do the post nasal drip noises like an old pro, her clothes were sort of helter-skelter and her hair all akimbo, as if the soul of the fuss budget lived in the body of the slob. 

Reportedly she had younger lovers, dozens of cats, and a great old farm house. She would have been 76 years old today, and I think it's a shame she passed on (went to glory as my sister and I like to say) so young because I have a feeling that she would have made a really terrific old lady.

Note: I know it looks like her gums are bleeding. That's just how it goes sometimes. I refuse to apologize!

I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together...

A big 80th birthday shout out to Carol Burnett. (Birthday week has been exhausting but it's been worth it with nearly 1,000 hits since Monday!)

Back in the days when people used to stay home and watch TV on  Saturday nights, The Carol Burnett Show was an enormous hit, but it didn't come on until 10 o'clock, which is pretty late when you're only six or seven. Actually, it's also pretty late when you're inching up toward fifty, but that's another story.

In order to stay up that late I had to be on my best behavior, and even then a fair amount of begging was involved. I almost never made it to Carol's final ear tug before conking out from exhaustion, but it was always fun to try.  

Lady Be Good (and she really was)

Ella Fitzgerald was born on this day in 1917. I had the great privilege of seeing her perform at Radio City Music Hall in 1992. At nearly 75 years of age and having battled health problems, her voice was well past its  prime, but her spirit was exuberant and infectious and I have always counted myself very lucky to have seen her last New York appearance.

In honor of her birthday I decided to do some quick sketches of her. I was inspired by the story of Pablo Picasso running into Ella at a restaurant and doodling a surrealist portrait of her on a napkin.

When I draw I am basically winging it, and nearly everything I produce takes hours and hours, even when it doesn't look like it. So for this birthday salute I decided to limit each sketch to no more than 10 minutes. I wound up with about 40 or so sketches. What follows is a sampling of my doodles surveying Ella at various ages, weights, and hair styles. Some of them are more successful than others, but I think a few of them capture a tiny bit of her spirit, or at least I hope they do. They are all either ink or pencil on notebook paper, though the exposures have been played with on some of them to adjust the colors.

Happy Birthday Barbra

It's hard for me to believe this now, but when I was 11 years old and bought the 45 for Evergreen (Love theme from A Star is Born), (and yes, that's it's official title, parenthesis and all) I had no idea that Barbra Streisand was a gay icon. I'm not sure I even knew what either of those words meant, gay or icon. I just knew that this woman, who had made me laugh so hard in What's Up, Doc? and had stirred in me a deep sense of recognition as the passionate misfit Katie Morosky in The Way We Were, was now wooing me with her singing voice...and her afrotastic hair, which practically cascaded off of the sepia toned record sleeve.

It's a relationship that spans nearly four decades now, longer than just about any other relationship in my life. Barbra's work has been there for me always, as  balm for a broken heart, as jubilant companion in happy times, and as prayer in solemn moments. 

There was a time when it would have embarrassed me to reveal these thoughts publicly. When I finally admitted to myself that I was gay, and realized that gay icons really do exist, and that Barbra was in fact one of them, I was a little mortified. I felt it cheapened my passion for all things Barbra and reduced my feelings to a joke, or even worse a stereotype.

Though it's sometimes hard to remember, I know that I can't expect to be happy while worrying about what other people think of me; worrying whether I am typical, atypical, or even stereotypical  Like every man, I need to stay true to my feelings, my thoughts, my principles. After all, as Katie says to Hubble, "People ARE their principles!" 

Happy Birthday, Barbra Joan!

Judy, Judy, Judy!

Today is Australian actress Judy Davis's birthday. For my money, there is no badder bad ass in movies today, though I suppose Helen Mirren comes pretty close. Her ability to be larger than life yet absolutely real at the exact same time always wins me over, even in terrible movies. Her fearlessness has led her to play a string of bitter wives and lovers, but also biopics of everyone from French writer George Sand to Judy Garland to Nancy Reagan. Almost every movie I see I wind up thinking, "that would have been better with Judy Davis."

Her alabaster skin and that pink/orange hue around her eyes that seems to suggest a terminal case of conjunctivitis may not be every man's idea of beauty, but I find her stunning.

I've dreamt about her twice that I can recall. The first time about two years ago. I was at some sort of religious retreat, feeling very awkward and out of place. Suddenly a young man in a leather jacket, the type that old fashioned square type movies might describe as a bad boy, walks up to me. He asks me if I want to go for a ride. We go out to his car and start making out. He stops mid kiss and says, "let's go to 7-11 and rent Judy Davis movies." I knew it was true love.

The second time I dreamt about her was about six months ago.

My sister and I are watching the evening news. We see a story about a movie that's being made about our family.

In shock but very excited, we rush to the movie set in Times Square. A theatre lobby has been converted temporarily into a casino for a scene. I see a woman who looks a lot like Judy Garland having a drink by a craps table, but she's just an extra. We are told that Judy Davis is playing our mother, which of course I think is fantastic.

Stepping outside into Shubert Alley, we find Miss Judy Davis walking through the crowd topless. I ask someone if this is part of the movie, but I'm told no, this is just how she relaxes in between scenes.

Jessica Lange Scares the Shit Out of Me

I love Jessica Lange but she scares the shit out of me. And it's not just because she recently played the sensual and sadistic Sister Jude on American Horror Story. No, she terrifies me for reasons far beyond the small screen.

Back in 1992 when I was living in Hell's Kitchen, I had two encounters with her. Well, not really encounters, more like we briefly orbited the same atmosphere.

 The first time I was walking along 47th street near 8th Avenue and I spied her on the sidewalk  with Amy Madigan, who at the time was her co-star in A Streetcar Named Desire. They seemed deeply engaged in conversation. Jessica was wearing dark sunglasses, and even though I could not see her eyes, even though  her head barely turned in my direction as we passed, I felt a shiver up and down my spine.   It was like crossing a black cat. She just sort of exuded a vibe that said, "don't fuck with me."

I did not fuck with her.

A few weeks later I went to see the play and sat in the second row. She got crappy reviews for this show, her Broadway debut. Mostly the critics felt her performance was too small to carry to the balcony of a nearly 1,100 seat theatre.

I can't argue with what people saw from the balcony, or even the fifth row, but what I saw from the second row was devastating. It was like a tiny, delicate, raunchy carving; a portrait in miniature of a lost soul.

I couldn't get it out of my mind, the horror of Blanche's betrayal by Stella, her final delusion  and her ultimate disappointment. About a week later I started having anxiety attacks for the first time in my life. The kind where your heart beats out of your chest, you feel like you're on fire, and you can't catch your breath.

God damn you, Jessical Lange! You made it impossible for me to keep my own disappointments and betrayals buried. You forced me to tare away the gauze of my own happy delusions and confront very ugly truths. Jessica Lange, you made me go to  therapy, and I fucking hate you for it.

That last part's not really true--I still love her. But she scares the shit out of me.

*************
Note: Today is Jessica Lange's birthday. It's the start of a 10 period of birthdays for some of my favorite people, including Barbra Streisand, Judy Davis, Blair Brown, Carol Burnett, Sandy Dennis, Ella Fitzgerald, Jill Clayburgh, and my identical twin aunts on my mother's side.

Pull Up Your Pants!

I had just started afternoon kindergarten (what a concept--you don't have to be there til noon and it only lasts three hours.) My older siblings left on the early morning school bus, leaving me to sleep in, watch Popeye cartoons, and occasionally get into trouble. 

Such was the case one day while I was playing in the woods set in the hills above our neighbor's backyards. When I felt nature's call I was faced with the choice of climbing out of whatever imaginary world I'd dreamt up (there's a good bet it involved being chased by tigers, or the scary natives from Gilligan's Island,) going all the way down the hill and across the street to my house to use the potty, or doing what the big kids all did, namely go potty right there in the woods.

I opted for what I'd seen the big kids do. Although, technically I'd only ever see them do number one, and I definitely had number two on my mind. How different could it be? I had a lot to learn. For starters, I was way too prissy to use a leaf in place of a roll of Charmin.

But the real problem, as  I soon discovered, was that I really wasn't in the woods. I had misjudged my position by quite a bit, and was only about halfway up the hill when, in full squat, I saw my father run out of our house, arms flailing and all red in the face.

"Jimmy! What the hell are you doing? Pull up your pants!"

What I learned that day wasn't so much about impropriety or misuse of property, or even squatter's rights. No, what I really learned was a golden rule of theatre actors everywhere who are always trying to steal a peek at the crowd from the wings: If you can see the audience, they can see you.

Kramer vs. Godzilla...or The Reptile Wears Prada

September 20, 2011

I'm having trouble finding my grandmother's apartment. I knock on the door of a red brick building that I think is hers, but I soon realize I am mistaken. The building I want is on the next block over.

Before anyone can answer the door, I feel my body rise up toward the sky and I float one block over to my grandmother's building.

I have arrived in time for a late supper. Many members of my family have gathered; my parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles...and Meryl Streep, who apparently has married into my family. No one seems particularly happy, as a very literal dark cloud hangs in the sky.

A noise from above brings most of us brings most of us to the living room's picture window to investigate. Flashes of pink and orange light indicate that we are under an alien attack.

A kerfuffle draws my attention back to the dining room where Meryl Streep is now locked in hand to hand combat with a reptile like alien, which has somehow managed to slip right into my grandmother's apartment.

Meryl attempts to subdue the creature with a larger hypodermic needle, but it appears to have no effect.

"Augment this," she yells out to one in particular. A linebacker sized man emerges from the corner of the room. He opens his mouth, or more accurately, he unhinges his jaw to reveal row after row of syringes in place of teeth. They look like the glass tubes you'd find in an old television set, but they have sharp needles protruding from their tops.

He pulls a syringe from the spot where his upper left moler should have been and tosses it to Meryl.While fending off the beast with her left hand, she catches the syringe with her right and jabs it into the creature's neck, rending it powerless, or possibly dead.

The Memory is Fading...

My friend Laurie Beechman would have been 60 years old tomorrow. Being an actress, it was not so unusual that she lied about her age, but strangely she only shaved off one year, telling everyone she was born April 4, 1954. I laughed out loud when I realized this and told her, "if you're gonna lie, make it count! Take off 5 years, not one."

She passed away 15 years ago, just a month shy of turning 45, after a long battle with ovarian cancer. And it was an epic battle, with all the ups and downs, triumphs and setbacks of an Eisenhower or McCarthur campaign.

Today I am remembering her talent, her voice, her laughter, her generosity. While she wasn't exactly a household name, she was kind of a big deal in the world of Broadway musicals. She performed in Annie, Pirates of Penzance, Les Miserables (as Fantine), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Tony nomination) and spent about 5 years of her too short life in Cats, playing Grizabella the Glamour Cat, and belting out Memory well over 2,000 times.

When I first moved to New York, I got a part time job as her assistant. Mostly typical stuff like organizing her mailing list, picking up dry cleaning, or counting the house at her nightclub act so that the management wouldn't try to rip her off. One of my better assignments was running lines in her Cats dressing room at the Winter Garden as she prepared for a West Coast production of Funny Girl. I read all of the parts except for Fanny, which was Laurie's role, of course. All the while she'd be applying her makeup, and as I'd have my nose buried in the script, she'd completely transform into the bedraggled prostitute cat.






I still think about her, and occasionally see her in my dreams. While she was still here, she liked to give me advice. Two things she said have always stuck with me. When I lamented the slow progress of a new relationship, she told me, "Jim, you can't go to Ikea on the first date!" The second, and more universal advice came after she brought me with her to a meeting with her press agent. Apparently I'd come across as very shy. Afterwards we walked out onto Seventh Avenue and she stopped me and said, "when you meet someone for the first time, I want  you to look them right in the eye and give them a  firm handshake."

And then she made me look her in the eye and shake her hand. I felt like an idiot, but I did it. If she hadn't made me, maybe the lesson wouldn't have stuck, but now whenever I meet a new person, I think of her. Thankfully, that memory is not fading.

Linus Over Easy

Much as I love him, I've never tried to draw Linus before. Next time I will try not to give him a club foot. And not make his face swollen from anaphylactic shock. And I'll do it after breakfast, not during.

A Tale of Two Bunnies