Frances Katula Cheslik.

I’m pretty sure my great grandmother Frances Cheslik was born in New York. Her parents, Anton and Josephine Katula, emigrated from Poland in April 1881. Frances was born in New York in September, 1882, so the family lived in New York for at least a year and a half. Another daughter was born in 1887 in Minnesota, so they had migrated there by then. I don’t know why they stayed here so long before moving to Minnesota, which I think was their destination all along.

The Katulas took a ship from Hamburg via Liverpool to New York in 1881. Passenger list showing Anton and Josephine and their 3 eldest children (Frances’s older siblings). I can’t make out the spelling of those names, but the younger two appear to be twins.

1920 Census, the entry for Edward Cheslik lists his mother’s birthplace as New York.

I haven’t been able to find a birth certificate for Frances to verify any of this, though there is a record of her christening in Minnesota—at age 20, which is odd, but maybe she was marrying someone in a different church?—which lists her birthplace as New York. Census records sometimes show her birthplace as New York, other times Minnesota.

I’m not really doing genealogy here, or not in much detail, I don’t have the patience or time for it, but I’m writing about my grandfather, Edward Cheslik, and my effort to reconstruct his life, to whatever extent I can, has led me into the story of his ancestors, my ancestors, in Minnesota. And the connection to New York, especially to this neighborhood, my home, gives the story an extra charge and makes me want to know more. Where exactly did they live; what did they do here?

Grandma Lenore with her mother-in-law, Frances Cheslik

My grandparents, Ed and Lenore, Frances Cheslik, and my dad, Scott Cheslik

Frances died in 1961, about 3 months after I was born, which is around the time Ed (her son) disappeared for the last time. It’s not likely she ever saw me.

Show Boat, Again.

I saw Show/Boat: A River this week (Target Margin/NYU Skirball). I was, and I still am, very torn about the ethics of criticizing non-commercial, experimental work. In some ways it exists in the same New York theater eco-system and is dependent on positive attention and ticket sales, etc. But I also think the standards are different in important ways. Not lower, in fact I would argue higher. But still different. It can be very hard to accept work like this on its own terms (for one example, not expecting this show to be a “revival” of the musical Show Boat), but, though it’s hard, I think that’s what’s called for. Still, on the other hand, this kind of work shares some of the aims of commercial theater—to entertain and edify audiences, to sell tickets—so the terms are not completely different or at odds.

In the end, having such strong feelings and opinions about musical theater, I don’t know how I can not remark on this production.

The reason Show Boat endures, besides the gorgeous songs and moving story, is because it is the story of black and white people in America, which is to say the story of America. This is true on the surface level of its story and its characters and events, and it is deeply embedded in the music. It is provocative work; it was when it was written, and it is now. Any faithful production of the show gives the audience a raft of ideas for discussion and debate. And it gives artists who approach it a rich mine of stuff to think about, question, research, be moved by, argue over. It’s been revised many times in the last 100 years for film and theater, there is no “definitive” interpretation or production or even version of Show Boat, but the wrenching story and thrilling songs still enlighten and move. It literally, to me, feels like a show that is set in the late 1800s through the 1920s, at the height of Jim Crow racial terror in the South, but is about us, now.

Show/Boat: A River strips the show of its story and of most of the beauty and majesty of the music, and it adds a layer of theatrical commentary (most of it inscrutable). Where Show Boat, the musical, speaks simply and powerfully about race, Show/Boat: A River makes mud of all of that. Even if this were its intention, and I don’t think it is, it would fail as an interpretation of the musical because (besides being objectively terrible if judged by basic standards of the art form) it obfuscates the ideas inherent in the original work. But it also fails as a critique of the musical because the audience is never given any idea what the original work is.

These are thoughtful, serious artists making experimental theater, and the last thing I would want to do is disparage or discourage this kind of work. I invested most of my career in making experimental work. It is essential, and most of the people who do it are mistunderstood and under-appreciated by the wider world of theater. But I don’t think this piece was successful. It failed to say anything clear or trenchant about race (in the show or in America), and in the process obscured everything clear and trenchant that the show itself says about race in America, if you let it.

Happy Horatio Alger's Birthday.

I’m not sure exactly where to place Horatio Alger in my esteem. Not a hero or martyr, not exactly, or neatly, anyway. I’ve been a little obsessed with him ever since I read The Lost Life of Horatio Alger (Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales) about 20 years ago, a book which sets out to find the real story of Alger’s life separate from the myths that have grown around him and his books, and ends up being about the impossibility of such a task.

I won’t try to sketch out a biography here (besides the Scharnhorst book, which is great, there’s a very good Wikipedia page), but three facts keep drawing me back to his story: 1, his status as a hero of conservative politics, regarded as the originator of the so-called rags-to-riches American Dream myth (which is mostly based on a mischaracterization of Alger’s books), 2, his early and brief career as a Unitarian minister during which he was accused of molesting teenage boys, driven out of town by his congregation, after which the national Unitarian organization persuaded the church to cover up the scandal, and Alger moved to New York and began writing novels for boys, and 3, after he died, Alger’s sister, following a directive he left in his will, destroyed all his personal and professional papers, including all his correspondence. (This last fact is an extremely common occurrence after the death of queer people, making for one of the bigger challenges for historians of gay life and gay lives.)

In the first conception of the musical, Jack—which I put on the back burner at the beginning of the pandemic but will return to when I finish the book I’m writing now—I was weaving Alger’s story together with the story of my own teenage years. After changing my mind back and forth a dozen or so times, I finally took Alger out. It was cumbersome and too clever.

But I am determined to return to Alger’s story. I still feel compelled to make a case for sympathy for all the millions of queer people who had to daily negotiate crushing repression at every turn and figured out lives for themselves that may have brought them happiness or fulfillment or love but likely didn’t, workarounds that most people now would judge harshly by standards that queer people even today have only very tenuous access to and could not possibly have adhered to, that they were specifically excluded from, 150 years ago. Or 25 years ago. Or 10. The challenge of making that argument using the biography of a conservative hero and lover of teenage boys is for some perverse reason impossible to resist. (And my favorite song I wrote for the show is the one from Horatio’s sister Augusta’s POV.)

Alger was born in 1932, and Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Bootblacks was published in 1868. It was a big hit, and he followed it with at least a hundred more books for boys with roughly the same plot: a scrappy, smart boy (or, in at least one book, a girl) living on his own, has a chance encounter with an older, successful man who takes an interest in him, becomes the boy’s patron and introduces him to the world of business, where he flourishes and rises to some version of middle-class success. Even before the success of these books, Alger was devoted to the welfare of homeless boys (huge problem in mid-19th century New York), gave many of them room and board and other support, adopted at least one boy, and supported the work of various charitable organizations devoted to the welfare of boys that sprang up at that time, like the YMCA, the Children's Aid Society, and the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He spent the rest of his life writing for, socializing and living with, and helping boys in need, and there was never another complaint or even a hint of inappropriate behavior.

Shedding.

I’m consolidating the Life in a Box archive to ship to Minneapolis to join the Y’all archive at the Tretter Collection. It’s mostly digital media—video, audio, images, etc.—but there’s quite a bit of paper, too: notes, transcriptions of interviews, release forms, contracts, publicity materials, financial stuff. I’m sitting here reliving the joy and optimism of the whole thing but especially the last few months when we were getting closer and closer to finishing and feeling more and more certain that it was going to be very good. I couldn’t wait for people to see it, for it to get out to a wide audience it seemed certain to reach. I couldn’t imagine that it would not.

One of the big lessons of the period of my life and career depicted in Life in a Box was that that feeling of inevitability does not make it real, that no feeling of inevitability makes it real. I thought I had successfully and fully learned that. And yet, as I worked on the film over those two years I let the feeling creep in again, came to trust it, and by the end, even though, and just as, I had drained the resources and patience of our investor dry, I started making the same kind of irrational decisions Jay and I had made over and over for ten years waiting for Y’all to hit big. I used credit cards to pay for the final edit, color correction, sound mix and edit, marketing; I accepted funds and in-kind donations from friends; promised deferred payment to collaborators who’d already put more time and work into the project than I had any right to expect of them. I never considered any other way except to plow through to the end knowing that when we signed our deal with HBO everybody would get paid and then some.

And we finished it, and it was really really good. We all knew it. Festival audiences loved it. We got lots of excellent, perceptive, and generous reviews, the attorney representing the film had meeting after meeting with distributors, cable networks, and we tried so hard to sell the film, kept trying for years. But it didn’t happen.

Life in a Box was the last time I had that sense of inevitability. It was the last time I allowed myself to have it. Not only is the disappointment painful and unnecessary, but all the emotional and psychic energy put into it is a distraction from the work.

Who knows why it didn’t happen, but I have theories:

* The film premiered in the San Francisco Int’l Film Festival in 2005. There were two scheduled screenings. The first one was lightly attended, but it started some buzz and the line for the second showing was long and excited. Just before the scheduled time, someone from the festival came out and said that the power had gone out in the theater and the screening was cancelled. Who knows who was there to see it and didn’t?

* We entered the film in the San Francisco Int’l Film Festival, and also Frameline, the long running San Francisco lesbian and gay festival. The SFIFF contacted me first, offering us a premiere. I was thrilled but we all thought the more high-profile premiere for a gay film would be Frameline. We tried to get an answer from them but they wouldn’t commit, so, not wanting to end up with neither, we said yes to SFIFF. Soon after, Frameline said yes, but they gave us terrible time slots in a theater across town, ignored me—the organizer of the festival looked at me and then turned his back to me at the welcome meet and greet events. Maybe he was miffed that SFIFF got the premiere? I don’t know, but it was weird. Then, and I don’t know if this was connected, but both Newfest and Outfest (the New York and Los Angeles LGBT festivals) rejected the film. (But it screened in maybe 10 or 12 other queer festivals all over the U.S. and Europe and every single one treated the filmmakers with kindness and enthusiasm.)

* The old saw that always worked against the act itself. The perception that gay audiences don’t like folky old-time country music and people who like folky old-time country music don’t lke gay people. It’s a myth we literally shattered in our career and in the film over and over, but

* I suspect most people who screen films for distributors, or festivals, or cable channels, or media don’t watch more than the first 5 or 10 minutes of anything. Life in a Box doesn’t tell you everything at the very beginning (personally I hate films that do, but I understand why filmmakers do that, and novelists, and artists who make any kind of art with duration).

* The song contains a big chunk of the Johnny Cash song I Walk the Line. I anguished over the decision to use that footage, but I knew it was perfect for the story, so I trusted that it would work out. Cash’s catalog was (maybe still is?) administered by the family, so it wasn’t hard to get someone on the phone to ask. The person I spoke with was extremely skeptical. I sent him stuff about the film, the edited scene that contained the song (it’s just us in the camper practicing and arguing), talked to him three or four times. I literally begged. I felt at the time like he was pretty horrid, though it’s likely I was oversensitive in a hard business. I actually cried on the last phone call, and I think that’s what got the guy to grant me a limited festival license. I’m not sure the presence of the song was what gave distributors pause, but it’s possible.

More than likely the reason is more pedestrian, and also unknowable. Some combination of all those possible reasons and also dumb luck. Anyway. It’s a massive disappointment in my life, but I’m extremely proud of the work. And I’m happy it touched a few thousand people before it disappeared, which is pretty much the same way I feel about Y’all. Maybe some young person 50 or 100 years from now will dig it up in the University of Minnesota library and give it another life.

The New Year.

I’m not big on resolutions but I do want to buckle down this January. The six months between my residency at Yaddo, where I accomplished so much, and the end of the year, were so full of things besides writing. I keep thinking I’m close to the end of this book and then I’m not.

I admit that my biggest obstacle here is a lack of personal discipline. It’s a lifelong challenge, one that I’m more or less friends with at this late age. But the more acute problem lately is that I’ve been struggling mightily with my vision.

I’ve had strabismus since I was a little kid, maybe it’s congenital?, a weak eye muscle. (They used to call this “lazy eye.”) I don’t remember it bothering me until I was a teenager and started getting bad headaches and seeing double and my optometrist prescribed lenses with a prism, which corrected the problem. Sometime in my twenties, though, it started to get worse. I didn’t have health insurance, and I couldn’t really afford much for my eyes beyond cheap glasses, so I lived with the headaches for years.

The first time I had health insurance as an adult was in 1990 when, after temping as a legal proofreader for a couple years, I took a full-time position at Mayer Brown & Platt. My insurance was an HMO called HIP. I don’t think it exists anymore. At that point, I was seeing double and feeling nauseous pretty much all the time, worse at night. My doctor referred me to an eye muscle surgeon at Beth Israel. As I remember, it all went pretty smoothly and the surgery completely corrected the double vision. The nausea and headaches disappeared overnight.

About 20 years later I started seeing double again, especially in the later part of the day if I was tired or had had a drink or if I was watching TV. With some effort I could bring the images together. Most people don’t consider how much of their vision is handled by their brain. Your eyes capture a certain amount of data but your brain synthesizes and completes the picture so you see one coherent image (or series of images). Giving my eye muscles and my brain both a serious workout, I could manage to see pretty well for a while, but eventually, with each eye delivering increasingly different images, it becomes too difficult for your eyes and brain to pull them together.

I had lost my insurance when I left the law firm job and New York for Nashville and then life on the road, so I was uninsured through my 40s. But in 2011, Chan and I registered as domestic partners in New York, and I got insurance through his firm. My ophthalmologist connected me with another eye muscle surgeon (incidentally, my primary care doctor, my ophthalmologist, and my eye muscle surgeon were all named Dr. Cohen).

This time the process felt more protracted, maybe because I was older, maybe I’d forgotten the first one, but the preparation, all the tests and measurements, seemed much more strenuous and intense, and recovery from the surgery took longer. The surgeon this time attached the muscle with an adjustable suture that, several days after the operation, had to be tugged back and forth to get my eye aligned. What’s weird though is that none of that process was based on an objective “right” or “wrong” position because the whole time the doctor was moving my eye around, my brain was compensating for the misalignment. Beyond the nausea it causes, it’s just kind of a nightmare to have your eye pulled all over the place.

Anyway, it worked again. The surgery, in short, involves cutting a small piece out of the muscle at the side of one eye and then sewing the two ends together to shorten the muscle, which pulls the eye in the direction of the shorter muscle. So, though you can see better within most of the field of vision in front of you that you use for most purposes, your eye no longer has full mobility, making it difficult or impossible to focus on those quadrants of your field of vision that one eye can’t get to because the short muscle prevents it from moving far enough. (For me, that quadrant is the left, especially below left. I’m constantly misjudging distances there, running into counters or dropping things, or setting them down too hard.)

Here we are now, only 14 years later this time, and the problem is back. I get nauseous headaches and just plain exhausted after reading (or writing) for more than a few minutes at a time. TV, or anything that takes sustained focus, is also fatiguing. (For some reason, big screen movies are not quite as difficult; maybe it’s because I can move my head around to see different parts of the screen?)

I’m not sure if I can have the surgery again. There’s only so much flesh they can cut out of that muscle. But medicine tends to advance, so maybe there’s something new now? A pig muscle?

I’m dreading finding out what my options are, if I have any. When I was 29, and even when I was 49, things like surgery didn’t phase me, but now it’s of a piece with my encroaching (and, to be honest, unexpected) anxiety about aging and decrepitude. It’s not just a problem that needs to be addressed, it’s my body falling apart and turning into worm food. (My back and hips and knees. I always said and believed that living in the city, walking everywhere, I was getting enough exercise, keeping fit, staying youthful. But I didn’t consider the wear and tear on my knees and hips from walking on pavement every day.)

And then. I’ve decided to scrap most of the work I’ve done on the autobiographical musical I was writing. I want to go back to the songs and write a solo show with monologue and songs, which was how the thing was conceived to begin with. I’d like to record the songs first and make an album, keeping in mind that the main lesson of making an album is that more than likely nobody wants an album of my songs. But at least now it’s all streaming and no physical object to manufacture, so I won’t have to take boxes of 500 unwrapped CDs and toss them in a dumpster five years later.

My New York Theater 2024.

Theater has gotten so much more expensive that I think we saw less this year than in previous years. Still, we saw a lot. These were my favorites:

Musicals:

Titanic (Encores! staged reading at City Center). I didn’t know this show at all, and I was enthralled. The production was huge, huge cast, huge orchestra, lots of huge choral ensemble singing. It’s an odd show, the main character is kind of the ship, and it’s unabashedly a history lesson kind of play, but the music is so stirring, so gorgeous. I fell in love.

And then Titanique, same ship, very different show. It’s a parody of sorts of the James Cameron film, but also a parody of Celine Dion and a hundred other things.  It’s crazy funny, a wild ride.

Death Becomes Her. Go see this. In a year of very funny theater, this is one of the funniest and best and most entertaining. The songs are so packed with jokes sometimes I could hardly catch my breath. Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard should both get that Tony.

My favorite new musical this year was Dead Outlaw, by David Yazbek and Itamar Moses, who wrote The Band’s Visit. Very presentational, a band plays songs that tell the story, which at times bursts out into more conventional book scenes. Odd, full of surprises, great tunes.

And my favorite plays:

Oh Mary! is the funniest play I’ve ever seen, very gay, very camp, sort of but not really in the style of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Genius.

The new Jez Butterworth play, The Hills Of California, a big old-school family reunion drama, gripping, beautifully written and acted. It’s not a musical but there’s lots of music in it. (Incidentally, it’s nearly the same story as Gypsy, but in England.)

Our Class, by Polish playwright Tadeusz Sł0bodzianek, directed by Ukrainian Jewish director Igor Golyak, experimental in style, a story of five classmates and a pogrom in a Polish village in 1941. Devastating and legitimately shocking. Great theater.

Also among my favorites this year were This Is My Favorite Song (Francesa D’Uva) and Magnificent Bird (Gabriel Kahane), both at Playwrights Horizons, both solo shows with songs, both emanating from events occurring during the pandemic, and both wonderful.

And I guess I have to say something about Gypsy. This production was the first time I’ve seen this musical on stage—but I’ve seen lots of video of previous Broadway revivals as well as clips of Ethel Merman singing the songs. I resist weighing in on the great debate about Audra McDonald’s voice, mostly because she’s so good and is delivering a powerfully moving performance, and who am I to say what’s right or wrong? My opinion regarding “to belt or not to belt” is that, aside from the fact that the songs were written for ur-Broadway belter Ethel Merman, they are meant to evoke the vaudeville tunes from the era in which the show is set. Those performers shouted those tunes. The setting is not the only dramaturgical reason for the style of singing. That gale-force voice is the embodiment of Rose’s personality, the charisma, the authority that makes her not only intensely compelling to everyone around her, but also terrifying.  Aside from the technical question, though, I couldn’t stop thinking that this Rose was soft, compared to, Merman, or, say, Tyne Daly, or Lupone. I saw a short interview clip with McDonald’s husband, Will Swenson, where he was saying that everything Rose does is motivated by her love for her children, which is sweet because they are parents themselves, but I think wrong and crucially so for the story, which doesn’t, to my mind, turn on whether or not Rose loves her children. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t, but I don’t think Rose shows even a hint of vulnerability until the final song, Rose’s Turn, which reveals her motivation (and it isn’t love), where the armor cracks and you see her pain, but not for long and she barrels right through it. A loving Rose throws the story out of balance. That’s my opinion, anyway. Please go see it for yourself. It’s a great production of a great musical, very moving and immensely entertaining. It looks and sounds amazing. The cast is across the board stellar, especially all those kids. I criticize because this stuff is really important to me. But, ultimately, I loved it.

And finally: probably the less I say about this new revival of Cabaret the better. It’s a crime against art and humanity. This is the first production of the stage musical I’ve seen, and I regret that. I wish I didn’t have it in my head. I hated it a lot.

Here's the whole list (as near as I can reconstruct) of plays and musicals my husband and I saw this year: 

Jonah (Roundabout)
Prayer for the French Republic (MTC)
Oh Mary!
Doubt (Roundabout)
Job
Dead Outlaw
Tommy
Mother Play (2nd Stage)
Home (Roundabout)
Cabaret
Our Class (CSC)
In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot (Playwrights Horizons)
The Counter (Roundabout)
Titanic (City Center, Encores)
Titanique
Death Becomes Her
The Hills Of California
Yellowface (Roundabout)
Walden (2nd Stage)
This Is My Favorite Song (Playwrights Horizons)
Magnificent Bird (Playwrights Horizons)
Gypsy 

<<shudder>>

The anxiety of the last few years is ratcheting up like crazy now. These days leading up to Election Day feel almost unbearable. Though I’ve been very aware of how the anxiety has affected me—changes in my temperament, sleep, work habits, concentration, the effect of stress on my body, etc.—I think I’ve been fairly good at calming my mind from time to time, at finding a bit of equanimity, at least intermittently. Pushing through.

But something happened this week that has me truly shaken. Someone I know, not a close friend, but someone I’ve worked with pretty closely, went full-bore glassy-eyed MAGA cult. Like true believer “I’ve seen the light and let me tell you the good news!”

For the most part, my take on MAGA, even with all the insanity since 2016, has been that they’re a version of the same fearful, small-minded faction of Republicans and religious fanatics we’ve been fighting off my whole life; they’re feeling their power, and they’ve gotten a lot louder, but they’re nothing new. But this person’s conversion seems to signal something novel and uniquely sinister. This is not someone who lives in the exurbs of Ohio and is afraid of drag queens, this person is someone squarely in MY world. I’m having trouble letting it go and moving on.

Things I Think About While Reading the Paper on Saturday Morning.

This brings up so many thoughts.

When Y’all moved to Nashville in 1998, we got a lot of attention and got to work and play with some astoundingly great musicians, but there was no festival hosted by John Waters. I think Y’all may have gotten lost if there was, we would’ve been maybe too on the nose. But it’s hard to compare Y’all to an artist like Orville Peck, who is also drawing heavily from traditional country but is, in the end, a singer singing songs. Y’all’s music was, in its sort of homemade way, legit, but we were always more, and less, than a queer country act. Still, we would’ve killed at this festival.

It’s a pretty regular occurrence, the feeling an article like this arouses.

It’s the feeling I get when LIZZIE is (regularly) compared to—and often positioned (ahistorically) as influenced by—shows that it prefigured: Rent, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Spring Awakening, Six … and on and on, it’s a very long list, and of course now musicals set in a historical era with a rock score are commonplace. I’m proud to be on that list with some great musicals. I’m also proud of LIZZIE’s roots in downtown experimental theater, and thrilled that our show has bubbled up into the mainstream. That’s what experimental art does, and is kind of for, if you’re lucky. (I also acknowledge how LIZZIE has changed over the many years, how it exists now in a kind of dialogue with those later shows, and has been influenced by them.)

Y’all, too, grew out of the 80s/90s downtown New York theater scene that spawned LIZZIE. Y’all got a lot of love when Jay and I moved to Nashville in the late 90s because Nashville is tradition-minded when it comes to music and Jay and I were doing something, at heart, very traditional. Our act was a kind of cheeky reclamation of a tradition we loved, and very much a tribute.

The bands and home recording I was a part of in the 1980s were maybe arguably a little more situated in their time. It was one part emulating artists we liked and one part “what’ll it sound like if we do this?” making stuff up as we went along, but you can see how the type of experiments we were doing evolved into bands and movements that got a lot more attention than we ever did.  

I’m not claiming I was some genius always ahead of my time. I just never wanted to do what other people were doing, I wanted to do what I wanted to do, I didn’t care if I didn’t know how, and in fact I saw that as a bulwark against inauthenticity. And trying to define or locate a “cutting edge” is a slippery undertaking. Just because you’re working outside the mainstream doesn’t mean you’re not following in others’ footsteps, they’re just different footsteps, combined in different, possibly new ways. LIZZIE stands on the shoulders of the Wooster Group and Lita Ford. The Woods stood on the shoulders of Jackie DeShannon and Eno and Steeleye Span and the Raincoats. With Y’all it was Minnie Pearl and Ellen DeGeneres and the Louvin Brothers and John Denver. But standing on shoulders is probably the wrong metaphor here. It sounds too, I don’t know, heroic. The process is more like picking up threads or dipping into a stream.

These are just musings on a Saturday morning. I reserve the right to retract or contradict any or all of it!

Who?

Facebook memories had me thinking this morning about my various name changes and nicknames over the years (Jack Cheslik, S.J. Cheslik, Steven Cheslik, SteChe, Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, etc.), there have been a LOT, but I’d completely forgotten about one of them.

In 1994, when HERE revived LIZZIE (née Lizzie Borden: An American Musical) and we lengthened it with a handful of new songs, I was deep in the thick of Y’all. I was touring a lot then, so I wasn't in the LIZZIE rehearsal room much, if at all. I wrote the songs wherever I was, recorded them on cassette, bare-bones, just me and a guitar with a fuzz pedal and I think maybe a little Casio keyboard, and I sent them to Tim and the band. There was no written music or M.D., everything was much more DIY indie then than now.

By 1994, Jay and I were starting to tour with Y’all a lot and build a non-New York fan base, most of whom seemed to believe our fictional stage identities were real, or they wanted them to be real. (The psychology of the Y'all fandom is still a mystery to me.) So we decided, a la Pee Wee Herman, that we would let them believe it and never admit otherwise. All our press materials had the fake bios, and, even with the most surreal elements of Y'all, we never let a crack show. (I used to get very confused about how old I was because Y’all Steven was much younger.)

So, when LIZZIE returned, I didn’t want to blow the whole thing up by having it credited to Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, so I made up a pseudonym, and the 1994 version of LIZZIE -- which contained the new songs, House of Borden, Sweet Little Sister, Will You Stay?, Why Are All These Heads Off?, Mercury Rising, and Watchmen for the Morning -- was credited to Stephen Streuber. That seems insane to me now, but at the time I thought it was absolutely necessary.

Thirty years ago we weren’t very good about documenting and archiving, and I’ve never been able to find anything online showing that name, but I know it happened!

Covid, Day 4.

Day 4 of Covid. I don’t know why it comes up so much more now than ever before, maybe because I have friends who have kids?, but this notion of concern for the well-being of people in the world when I am no longer in it is, to be honest, a concern I don’t find as urgent or important or even real as most people seem to. Like, why?

I don’t generally share these thoughts because I think people think they’re monstrous, but I just don’t get as worked up as I guess I should about things like population rate decline and climate change. I practice thrift and the “three R’s” but that’s because I believe we all share the world and its resources and it’s immoral to waste stuff. But all the railing at oil companies—the oil companies have sins to account for, absolutely, but producing oil is not the worst of them. Our world requires massive amounts of energy to function, and you can’t just radically change that overnight without causing more harm than climate change is causing. The population anxiety is genuinely puzzling to me: why, if people are so worried about the planet are they not thrilled to see the population decline? At any rate, it doesn’t feel like a good use of my limited sanity to be in a constant panic about climate change. Implementing global measures big enough to reverse it—a project that requires the buy-in of some 8 billion people—doesn’t seem realistic.

Maybe it’s partly my on and off Buddhist training (“Abandon any hope of fruition” or, as a dear friend of mine, who, like me, tends to worry, says, “Is it happening now?”) but that’s not all. I think I’m just temperamentally disinclined to take the far future all that seriously. (When I was much younger, late teens and twenties, I seriously believed I would die young. It wasn’t like a fear, it was just something I knew. Obviously, that didn’t happen.) 

But the last few days, feeling very sick and very angry to be sick, I have been thinking about it. The status quo now, apparently, is that we have to get regular Covid vaccines in order to hold the virus at bay just enough so that we don’t die, but, fairly regularly, we get very sick. I’ve had every vaccine available as soon as it was available, and I’ve had Covid twice. Two years ago, my case was much worse than this one (I could barely move for a couple days), but this one is pretty fucking bad.

Don’t construe this to mean I’m a vaccine denier or anything like that. I will get vaccinated because I don’t want to die yet, and I certainly don’t want to die with a tube down my throat. But it’s depressing to imagine this situation projecting into the future. I only have 20-25 years left if I’m lucky so I can put up with it, but kids now who have many decades of their lives in which this pattern of alternating vaccines and illness is just what you have to do? And how many more similar viruses will take the same shape? Maybe it’s just the sore throat talking (seriously, there is no sore throat more painful than a Covid sore throat) but that’s just bleak. So I guess Covid has unearthed something in me I didn’t believe was there.

I see the contradictions in my attitude here. Just the fact that I worry a lot betrays a concern for the future, but that kind of fretting about possibly bad outcomes doesn’t project out very far, no more than a few months, usually a day or two. But much more telling: I’ve just placed the Y’all archives, and plan to place my own personal and professional archives eventually, in a research library because I want future scholars to have access to them. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.

P.S. While I’m feeling justified in my crankiness: what is the deal with everyone raving about Japanese egg sandwiches? Who hurt you? Did your mother never make you an egg salad sandwich for lunch and cut the crust off? Just because you call it “Japanese” doesn’t make it new. Jesus, people.

Dad, Beethoven, etc.

My Dad for the most part expresses very little emotion. He can be extremely hard to get a fix on. But I was thinking this morning that his favorite music, the classical pieces he loved and that I grew up hearing in the house, was the most frankly emotional stuff in the canon: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninoff No. 2, Chopin, lots of Beethoven. It’s like my father’s emotional life has always been in plain sight, but invisible to me. More and more as I get older, I see that so many things I thought he was withholding from me—expressions of love being the big one—he was actually broadcasting loud and clear, but I was oblivious. Sometimes I think wisdom is wasted on the old. This bit of insight would have been more useful to me at, say, 12.

End of an Era

Right out of high school in 1979, I went to Miami University for two years and studied theater. I’m a little fuzzy on how it worked — it was a B.A. program but they were in the middle of a big transition to a more intensive, studio-based program, which I think was going to be a B.F.A., for the acting/directing students.

I had great teachers across the board, in acting, movement, voice, directing, design, theater history, and some of the closest friendships of my life. It was a remarkable group of hugely talented kids who’ve had long careers in theater, onstage and off, TV, and education. My sophomore year I was feeling antsy and constrained, so I applied to Parsons School of Design—at that point I had decided I wanted to direct and I thought I should study painting to be a better director, but I also just wanted to move to New York, and part of it was that Parsons had long been a sort of ideal of art school and I wanted to know if I was good enough—and to Syracuse University for acting. I thought I’d let fate decide, but I was accepted at both schools. I chose New York.

I had a great year at Parsons, met my friend Joan, my friend in art and life for 40-some years, I had great teachers, my painting teacher Regina Granne, whose class, her words, her work ethic, what she taught me about art and art-making, still a touchstone for me as an artist. But again, I got antsy and felt constrained, and I left Parsons after a year.

I had a bunch of small scholarships and took out two very small loans when I went to Miami. I think I was in debt for like $2-3,000 dollars, and my parents paid it off for me. (Mom said, because they would be paying for my sister’s wedding and since I wasn’t ever going to have a wedding, they wanted to make it up.) I can’t remember how much my loans at Parsons were, I’m sure more because it’s a pricey school, but pricey then wasn’t like pricey now. I made payments on them religiously all through some very tight years until, at around 30, I declared bankruptcy (long story), and started over. The balance of the loans was cleared, along with a $127 emergency room bill from Beth Israel that had been sold to a collection agency, but mostly credit card debt.

Over the next couple decades I never felt a need to have finished school. I was too busy. But, approaching 50 and finding myself in Austin with my life and career either circling the drain or full with possibility, depending on one’s mood (again, too much explaining for this morning), I decided to finish an undergraduate degree at UT. Why not?

I had to borrow some money, but UT is less expensive than a lot of state schools. I was probably the poorest I’ve ever been in those years, so my financial aid covered everything. I know how to live on nothing, so I even stretched it enough to pay for food and housing. I chose American Studies because I like that stuff, and a lot of my theater and fine arts credits applied toward the degree. Still it took 2 1/2 years, but I loved it. Loved being in school, loved those classrooms air-conditioned like refrigerators, and listening to smart people talk about things I’m interested in, reading great books, writing papers. Among the most stress-free years of my life. UT Austin is a great school.

So those loans in Texas are the loans that I’ve just paid off. I think it made my mom happy that I finally finished college. And I don’t think she remembered the loans she’d paid off years ago when Chan and I asked Mom and Dad if they would pay for our rehearsal dinner when we got married.

1 2 1234!!

Because I was telling in 90 minutes a story that unfolded over years, I had to skip a lot of stuff in Life in a Box, whole episodes that someday maybe someone will excavate in the Y’all archives (which will be available to researchers soon! I’ll let you know). The film goes straight from our decision to break up into a wistful and sad ending sequence. In reality it was about 6 fairly traumatic months of unraveling, with the Edinburgh festival near the end of it.

Every August, coverage of the festival brings it all back. I remember how beautiful Edinburgh was, how much I loved every trip to Scotland with Y’all, and how exciting it was to see so much cool theater day after day. It’s pretty thrilling. I think I’d love to go again, but as a theater-lover, without the pressure. But I wonder if it would bring back too many painful memories for me to enjoy it in the moment, all these years later.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but by August Jay and I and Roger weren’t talking much to each other. It wasn’t angry silence. We spent a lot of time apart, but also together. There was love, but it was also just so very very sad, and we were trying to get through the days in whatever way we could. And then doing our show every day, which was all about our love and our big dreams, knowing that in our real lives we’d given up our dreams, that it was all winding down. (The theater itself was a large high-ceilinged classroom in an old school, completely shrouded in black and dark blue velvet curtains that sucked the sound and light and life itself out of the room—even with house lights it was so dim you had to squint to find your way in and out. You can’t imagine a more cheerless space.)

Early on, we were invited to perform in a sort of late night variety show in a bar, where people would do a bit of their act to try to create buzz and get audiences. The competition for attention at the festival is fierce. As I remember, we sang Fancy Pants, a fast, funny song that our audiences loved, but Jay was so wound up he took it like twice as fast as usual. I couldn’t keep up with him, and for whole stretches of the song, his downbeat was my upbeat. It was the most intense, surreal, terrifying 2 minutes I’ve ever spent on a stage. And it didn’t work. Our show ran all month, I think 5 or 6 shows a week, and we never had more than 6 or 8 people in the audience and that was a good house. Usually it was more like 1 or 2. I’m not exaggerating. It was brutal.

Our plan was to stay together for the rest of the year—we had gigs booked well into the fall—but in Edinburgh we decided to make our New York show in September a farewell show, and to do our last performance on a live radio program in Ithaca which was in September I think, maybe early October, and cancel everything on the calendar after that.

The Mind's Eye is not an actual eye.

In my first week at Parsons, in a class I don’t remember the name or purpose of—in addition to the studio classes (painting, sculpture), there were a couple required classes that were more focused on ideas, on learning how to think about art; in fact my main criticism of art school, and it’s the reason I only lasted a year, is that there’s not nearly as much attention given to learning how to make art as there is to learning how to talk about art, so that your experience is nearly completely determined by the sensibility of whatever teachers you end up with, which obviously can be good or bad*—the teacher was leading a discussion having something to do with idealized forms, which she described, using “apple’ as an example, as what you picture when you close your eyes and someone says, “picture an apple.”

I said something to the effect of, saying that you’re “picturing” something is a figure of speech; you’re not really picturing it, you’re imagining it, you’re contemplating its attributes or qualities, but you’re not looking at a picture I thought I was making a trenchant point about how idealized forms are ideas, not depictions. But the teacher, who I guess just thought I was a smartass, said something like, “Well maybe you need to do some contemplating on what exactly it is you see if it’s not a picture.” That teacher, I can’t say if it was because of that early interaction, but she disliked me the whole semester. She would literally roll her eyes when I raised my hand. For what it’s worth, I thought she was kind of dim.

Anyway, I thought of that teacher when I ran across this article on “aphantasia,” which is described as the state of not having “a mind’s eye.” I’m skeptical. Am I supposed to believe that some people, when they close their eyes and think of an apple, actually see an apple? I know that the mind contributes to seeing, but vision begins with a mechanical process, a lens interacting with light, etc. If people can close their eyes and imagine a thing and see it, as they claim, in full color, as clearly as if it is right in front of them and they’re looking at it with their eyes, completely conjured with the mind, then why do they need to shut their eyes? Why can’t they just think it and see it in front of them, replacing their view of the world actually in front of them with a mentally conjured view that is indistinguishable from it?

I’ve done my share of drugs, so I know it’s possible to see something vivid and whole and absolutely real-looking, but which is not actually “there.” That experience of hallucination sounds like what these scientists are saying most, or many, people have, like all the time.

* I had three main teachers at Parsons. No one has had a bigger influence on my life and career than my painting teacher. I frequently refer back to her teaching in class, and conversation outside of class, when I think about what art is and means, and what the activity of art-making entails and requires. My drawing teacher was entertaining but taught me nothing. My sculpture teacher was a complete zero. I don’t remember, in fact I don’t think I had, a single moment of engagement with him.

Math.

I’m on the train from Saratoga Springs headed home after a month at Yaddo where I was working on my book.

I had set an arbitrary goal for myself — to end the month with a draft. I say arbitrary because I’ve never known how long this book would take to write. I’ve never written a book before, and the scope and structure of it keeps changing as I go. I started it in earnest four years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, but I don’t know how to measure how much time or energy I’ve spent on it because that formulation changes day to day depending on whatever else demands my attention: family, cooking and cleaning, LIZZIE, therapy, the gym when I do that, a million other tiny things that need done when they need done.

I didn’t end the month with a draft per se as much as a picture coming into focus, but I fulfilled the real underlying goal which was to work as hard as I could, to keep my head in it every waking minute (and some of the sleeping ones), and I got more done in the previous month than I did the whole year before it.

I’ve never experienced anything like Yaddo. I won’t even try to describe it. I’m only a hour away and it feels like a dream. People talk about the magic, the spell, of Yaddo. The magic is real, though I think the largest portion of Yaddo’s effect is maybe not magic at all, but just the answer to a material question at the heart of what it means to live an artist’s life: The work has its demands, and they are the same whether I am at Yaddo or at home. And home has its demands, and they are the same whether I am at Yaddo or at home. Both home and work are all-consuming, and I fail at either if I don’t devote my whole self to it. When I am at Yaddo, I can ignore the demands of home and just do the work and I am an artist. When I am at home, if I ignore the demands of home and just do the work, I am a psychopath.

The various indie creative communities, non-profit institutions that produce, present, develop, support artists’ work—visual art, music, theater, etc.—have been focused the last several years on creating models where they can pay artists a living wage. (Historically artists who made work in those institutions worked for little or nothing because they wanted to do the work and would take whatever they could get.) But I always feel at odds with this “artist as employee” conversation. Yes, artists need a living wage but that is the wrong frame. Artists need the material circumstances within which they can work, and that includes a living, but they also need the space their work requires, they need their beds made and towels and sheets laundered, their meals prepared, morning walks and evening conversation, to share their work with other artists working in the same and other media who love and revere the process, and still seemingly endless hours for daydreaming and scribbling, hard thinking, and typing into the late hours, in a community of people who know hard it all is and what silence means. Artists need the circumstances that make art-making possible. This project I’ve been at for the last 4 years, or the last 15 years depending on where I mark the beginning, has required reflecting on a lifetime of correspondence and journals and notes, reminding me that I’ve contemplated and fretted about this tension, this dilemma over and over and over since I was 20 years old, and 40 years later I’m pretty certain that these circumstances are incompatible with life. That — not depression — is the cause of my lifelong sadness and anxiety. Depression is irrational, whereas this insight is as reasonable as a mathematical fact.

Rumors of the demise of gay culture have been greatly exaggerated.

I’ve been noting and saving thoughts and images with a vague idea of how they connect, wanting to write a longer piece, but I have too much to do right now and want to save what writer brain I have left and available for the bigger project. I noticed this morning that it’s the 6th anniversary of the Masterpiece Cake ruling by the Supreme Court, the decision that made it clear to anyone who wasn’t listening that religious fanatics still hold huge cultural sway—so I figured instead of waiting I’d just share all this stuff and let you construct your own argument about what it all means.

So here. The first image is the last paragraph in an essay about Charles Ludlum and also about the state of American theater in the 1980s, in a quietly and cumulatively stunning book of essays from 1986 by Andrew Holleran called Ground Zero. It’s out of print.

The second one is a letter my mother received around that same time from a neighbor in response to her short letter to the editor taped at the bottom.

Next is an article in Playbill about Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola, and camp. My impulse to write something came after seeing Titanique soon after Oh, Mary! and feeling exhilarated and optimistic that gay culture has survived after all. (I kind of wish I’d seen the unsexy, unqueer, anti-camp production of Cabaret on Broadway before the other two, which may have soothed the irritation.)

And finally, the video is one I post pretty often around Pride season. In one of my mom’s letters I read this week, where she’s explaining to some Indiana bigot the importance of coming out, she quotes the lyrics at length. We have enemies afoot; they’re closing in around us. They’ve beaten us before; they’ve many ways to confound us.

And My Brilliant Father.

And because Father's Day is coming up and Dad’s recent move into an independent living community is why we're rifling through Mom's old files, I’ll brag on my father now.

We never did quite know what my father did at work. Something to do with electronics, then later computers. He’d say he worked with machines, and I seem to remember that once he or Mom referred to him as a “design engineer.” What we did know is that if you needed to accomplish a task but couldn’t figure out how to do it, he’d crack the code, he’d make a device or contraption, he’d find a way. That’s how his mind worked, which as you can imagine makes this time of his life when he’s losing his visual and manual and mental acuity extremely frustrating for him. (I am like him in many ways, but not this one.)

He invented this machine. I have no clue what it does, but it must be something important because they patented it.

Happy Pride Month.

I brought a stack of my mother’s personal files home from Indiana last month, including one with clippings and copies of her letters to the editors of various papers over the years. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, on a wide range of local and national topics, from neighborhood land use and development, local ordinances, a rails-to-trails bike trail (her pet project—Mom and Dad were avid bicyclers), endorsements of town council candidates, abortion and birth control, separation of church and state, racial justice to school funding (her only stance with which I disagreed), and lots of letters regarding gay issues. It think every time anybody said anything negative about gay people, my mom wrote a letter. She took it very personally. I knew she did this, she would often send me clippings, but seeing evidence of the extent of it, over so many years, was moving.

The one below, though it’s a personal letter she sent to a columnist, not a letter to the editor, is my favorite—a personal letter allowed her space to share more of her thoughts and feelings. I love her portrait of my brother and me as boys. She was a very clear, concrete thinker. Her sense of justice was never abstract. I always knew how much my mom loved me, how she got me, how she felt especially protective of me, but reading her thoughts here, expressed so open-heartedly to a near stranger, is a special gift now that she’s gone and I’m old.

In the file, there’s also a copy of the columnist’s thoughtful reply, accepting Mom’s invitation. I sure wish I’d been witness to that coffee date.

On My Mother's Side.

Sorting through more old family stuff. This letter doesn't have anything to do with what I'm writing, but I was stopped in my tracks by its liminality, by how it sits so precariously at a moment of great change, in my family and in American history.

These are two pages from a letter my grandmother, Elsie DeMeyer wrote to my mom in 1972, a little over a year after my grandfather, Emil DeMeyer had died. Less than a year later, my mother and Elsie (her mother) had a falling out that was never repaired. Since I was ten years old, I’ve thought of these events and told this story as if it was one quick sequence, and narratively it is, more or less, but this letter sits between the two events, after the death and before everything fell apart.

Not only was my mother’s family about to explode, but the quiet rural community of small family farms where she grew up was about to be gobbled up by a wave of development that started when Six Flags Great America came to town and started buying land to build an amusement park. Not a local phenomenon—though it certainly felt local to the folks in Gurnee, Illinois—but a seismic transformation of the American landscape and the end of a way of life for families, many (most?) of whom were descended from Northern Europeans who’d immigrated in the 19th century.

When I happened on this letter, I assumed it was written by my mother. the handwriting is eerily similar. I have letters in my grandfather Emil’s hand as well, and his cursive also looks almost the same. (Pages 1 and 2 of this letter are missing.)

Relax!

This smells off to me.

I feel like young people now find any r/t sexual overture or suggestion or proposition or invitation suspect, like they’re terrified of intimacy, exposure, vulnerability. It makes me sad to think what they're missing, the experiences they're closing off. Yes letting someone actually touch you in real life is fraught with all kinds of danger. Do it anyway. In my experience, pretty much everything good in life comes out of that intimate physical connection: love, comfort, joy, art.

But then the original Puritanism sprang from fear too, fear of God's wrath. God’s wrath was huge, terrifying, and total. What could be that scary? What are these young people now afraid is going to happen if they let go?

(It bears mentioning that, contrary to the stereotype, those original Puritans were not necessarily afraid of sexual desire and its place in a godly life. The parameters were strictly policed, of course. but they were not shy about it.)