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