Kindergarten, Indianapolis 1967.

My mother saved a small stack of my art from kindergarten, and I have it now. I’ve always been curious why she kept things from kindergarten but didn’t continue. She didn’t like for things to accumulate. Dad was like that, too. (Not so with photos. Photographs were precious; you handled them carefully.)

Anyway, here’s a taste of kindergarten in Indianapolis.

I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s a little too redrum for my comfort.

I don’t know whether this is a self-portrait or I was just signing the picture.

A page from “My Weekly Reader.” Do they still publish My Weekly Reader? I used to love it.

"and I thought you were worth it"

This odd letter never sent was tucked into my high school diary. I think I’ve written before about Tamara who was my girlfriend for a month or two my freshman year of high school and who broke up with me in a letter, which I have also saved. My first encounter with Tamara was when she beat me in the spelling bee in 8th grade.

I say girlfriend but I don’t think we used that word at 14. We were “going together,” which is also a strange expression for it. I don’t remember doing anything together or going anywhere except maybe football games?

My fixation on money in this letter is the weirdest thing about it. I can’t have had much, and I don’t remember spending money on girls. I didn’t have an allowance as a kid, but I started my first real job, working in the kitchen and as a waiter at the DePauw University student union building, when I was 14, so I guess I had a little spending money. In this letter I seem kind of bitter about it. I remember shopping in town for a Christmas gift for Tamara and buying a small houseplant. I kind of remember not being able to give it to her personally because she was away for the holidays and then the next thing was the Dear John letter.

Ken Oliver of Oliver’s Bakery in Kenosha Wisconsin was my Grandma Lenore’s friend (possibly a longtime boyfriend, she never said). Oliver’s Bakery is still a popular local institution, I think still run by Ken’s family.

Thanksgiving.

After my parents got married they lived in an apartment in Waukegan Illinois. Verna and LeRoy Bidgood, also newlyweds, were their downstairs neighbors. They were a few years older than Mom and Dad. LeRoy shared Dad’s interest in aviation and they both built and flew model airplanes. The four of them became close friends. 

When I was 3 and my brother was 4, my dad got a job in Indianapolis and we moved. The Bidgoods ended up in Dayton, Ohio, about 3 hours’ drive away.

Through most of my childhood, we spent Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods, alternating years. I don’t remember having a preference for one house or the other, just that my brother Michael and I looked forward to seeing them every year. They had no children and they doted on us. Maybe doted is the wrong word. They seemed to enjoy our company as much as we enjoyed theirs. They included us in conversations, talked to us like people, not like children. Verna was dry and funny. She had a smoker’s laugh (and a smoker’s cough -- she and LeRoy both smoked Kent cigarettes one after another all day long). She was a great cook, as good as Mom. She made something called a French apple pie that had a sort of eggy filling and a streusel top. I didn’t like it as much as my mother’s more traditional apple pie, but I thought it was very sophisticated. They had a dachshund named Duchess who would snap at your fingers if you weren’t careful, so you were.

Their house, like ours, was full of books and I loved, like I still do, to scan the titles and pull out and read a bit of anything that piqued my interest. One year I found one called something like “Why I Don’t Believe in God,” and it was way over my head but I devoured it anyway. I never had “believed in God,” but it hadn’t occurred to me till then that not believing was its own belief system. On their living room wall they had two framed reproductions of Margaret Keane paintings of sad little girls that I loved to just gaze at.

Around the time my sister Kay was born (she’s 6 1/2 years younger than I), the Bidgoods adopted a baby girl and then a few years later a boy. Their son had what they used to call a learning disability. I remember the year when he was 1 1/2 or 2 and just starting to form words I picked him up and carried him around the house pointing to things and asking him what they were called, like “lamp” or “chair” or whatever, and if he didn’t know I would teach him. Thanksgiving was always such a long, slow day, with Mom and Verna in the kitchen and Dad and LeRoy usually out in the garage or the driveway. Michael was probably out there with them; he took more of an interest in airplanes and cars than I ever did. Behind their house was a woods with a creek and a huge uprooted rotting tree and we’d spend quite a bit of time out there poking and digging at it.

Soon after the Bidgoods adopted their second child, Verna got pregnant and had another girl. By this time I guess my sister was a toddler. The yearly gathering had turned quickly from a party of four to ten, six of them kids, and then my brother and I were teenagers and I guess less interested in a long day with the adults, who were older now, and I don’t remember exactly when but the Thanksgiving tradition fizzled.

I think Verna and LeRoy were probably always Republicans but back then Republicans and Democrats could be friends. By the 1980s they’d become much more stridently right-wing which Mom and Dad found hard to take, and the smoke-filled house was too much for my dad’s asthma. Their long friendship suffered. They continued to exchange Christmas cards. Verna would write a newsy letter every year in her nearly illegible handwriting. When they retired, they moved to northern Wisconsin, closer to where they came from. Chan and I send them a card every year and most years they send us one too. Verna’s handwriting still takes some effort. They must be in their 90s now, and I haven’t seen them, I don’t think, since my sister’s wedding to her first husband, around 1990. I don’t know anything about their children, who would all be in their 50s now.

I was thinking about the Bidgoods because this year Chan and I are flying to Indiana to have Thanksgiving with my sister’s family. Since Mom died, for enough years to get used to it, Thanksgiving at Kay’s has been a big gathering: Kay and her husband, Chan and I, Kay’s 3 sons and the two older boys’ partners, Michael and his wife Sandy, Dad, and my friend since childhood, Martha. But my oldest nephew lives in San Antonio now and can’t manage such a long trip for the weekend, my second nephew, the one who lives in the East Village now, is working at Starbucks and can’t get the time off (even if he wanted to go home which he says he doesn’t). Michael and Sandy are caring for Sandy’s 99-year-old father whose wife just died, so they can’t make it. Martha will be with her dad this year. Dad lives in Muncie, about 45 minutes from Kay’s, and won’t go very far from home any more. So this year it’ll just be Chan and I, Kay and her husband and their youngest, who is 19.

Obviously I was cooking, not “playing with matches.”

I don’t think I’m feeling particularly sad about the smaller Thanksgiving this year. The cooking will be a little less hectic and for decades I didn’t spend Thanksgiving with my family at all. I usually cooked at home in whatever ratty apartment I was living in, invited friends — for several years in my 20s my boyfriend at the time, Brian, and I invited 20 or more people and cooked the whole meal in what passed for a kitchen but was really just a stove and sink shoved into a closet in our Ft. Greene apartment. I miss those dinners intensely. I miss the holidays in New York, which were always lovely and melancholy, but the winter holidays are sad no matter where you spend them.

Thanksgiving is always just as much about who is not at the table as who is.

Mom.

I Thought I Was Over It, But I Guess I'm Still Mad This Morning.

Last night Chan and I had tickets for a show in midtown and my new glasses are ready for me to pick up on E. 56th St., so my plan was to leave the apartment in time to pick up my glasses, meet Chan for dinner at the little burger joint (I think it’s actually called Burger Joint) hidden in the lobby of a fancy rich people hotel on 56th St., and then walk down to the theater for a 7:30 curtain. Perfect.

But when I walking out the door at 4:30 it suddenly occurred to me that the optometrist was not going to be open after 5:00, duh. I should have been thankful that I’d realized this before I got all the way uptown but I was just annoyed that I was going to have to make a special trip which is the exact thing I thought I’d so ingeniously avoided.

We still met at the burger place, which I’m not going to link to because it’s almost a secret, nearly invisible, and such a great place, just really good burgers and really good fries, and beer. Before the pandemic it was always mobbed (but so good it was worth battling the crowd), but last night it was just bustling in a normal, reasonable way. I hope it’s doing enough business to stay afloat. When our burgers arrived, the server brought 3 orders of fries by mistake. We’d only ordered two and had even thought about ordering one to share because it’s a lot of fries.

There were two young guys sitting next to us and we asked them if they wanted the extra one, but they didn’t, they’d just ordered their own. As we ate, we couldn’t help hearing their conversation, it’s New York, they were like 3 feet away. They’re co-workers, one had recently discovered that the other was “a Christian,” so apparently they’d decided to start up a friendship. Okay. People are Christians, whatever. I think they worked in some kind of financial field, maybe lawyers. The taller, whiter, more dominant of the two hates it when he misses his morning time with the Lord because how can he bring his commitment to serve the Lord to his projects at work if he doesn’t begin the day affirming that commitment? Every sentence out of his mouth had 3 or 4 “the Lord”s in it. He started talking about his Bible study group that someone had invited him to, and he thought it was a men’s group (“I don’t need another men’s group, I’m looking for my wife!”), but he decided to go anyway. At the beginning of the first meeting there were just 4 men but then women (or “girls” as they call all female humans no matter their age) started arriving. Then 30 minutes into the meeting, a woman arrived late, he liked the look of her, and then, when he noticed that she was carrying a bag of Chick Fil-A, he knew she was “his girl.” I guess now they’re engaged or whatever they call it in Gideon.

I was so tense listening to this that I could barely speak, or I should say I could barely say anything that wasn’t sarcastic, passive-aggressive, and nearly audible to them.

Between dinner and the theater we passed a big Chick Fil-A store on 6th Avenue. They seem to be everywhere you look now. It’s like an occupation. For the most part I’ve made my peace with how New York has changed since I moved here. Things change, not often for the better, there’s not a whole lot I can do about it, and I still love this city. But at times the infiltration of suburban values punches me in the gut. One of the things the two Christian bros in the burger joint talked about was how hard it is to be a Christian in a secular city, how hard it is to meet people with “your values.” And as we walked, Chan and I wondered what that must be like, and I said I thought there were probably more of them here now than say 30 years ago, because I never had to listen to that kind of horseshit while I ate dinner back then and now there’s a fucking bigot chicken stand on every other corner in midtown. Chan guessed there were probably less of those people here now, I disagreed, and we argued, a stupid argument that was likely my fault because oh my god was I in a mood.

I try to be generous and open-minded, but I don’t welcome those people here. Or I should say, let them come but leave your “values” at home. I left the Midwest to get away from that. I don’t want to listen to their asinine conversation. The only thing I want to do around them is watch my back.

(The Chick Fil-A remark was revealing though. Because I avoid people like that and so don’t often get to observe them in the wild, I don’t get to hear what they talk about to each other. I’ve often wondered if they consider Chick Fil-A as a sort of tribal marker in the way that we do. If I encounter someone who avoids Chick Fil-A, I know I can trust that person not to be an anti-gay bigot. They’re my people. When “Christians” encounter someone who DOES patronize Chick Fil-A, they know that person supports anti-gay bigotry. Their people. But what I’m wondering is: they could get their shitty little chicken sandwich two blocks away, so why were they fouling our hip little burger place? That’s the thing about those people. They are not happy with their own stuff, they want OUR stuff, too.)

Death of Camp?

My sister and oldest nephew were here for a long weekend, and Sunday my husband and I took them to see Newfest’s screening of The Cockettes to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its premiere. (If you haven’t seen this film, you really really should. I know it’s on Amazon but you can find it on other streaming services too.) My second eldest nephew lives in the city now, and he was with us as well.

I didn’t get a chance to talk much with my older nephew, who is somewhat conservative but thoughtful and openminded, about the film, but he told me that for the first 30 minutes or so he felt like he didn’t know where he was or what was happening. I think the idea of people who look and act like that kind of blew a hole in his idea of what the world is like. My younger nephew who lives here now commented that my generation — I don’t consider myself really to be of the Cockettes’ generation, but kids under 25 lately don’t seem to make any distinctions between anyone born in the 20th century — my generation’s conception of non-binary identity is about combining the two extremes, whereas for his generation it’s about being somewhere in between. I told him to keep in mind that the Cockettes were performers and a very small sample, that we had no shortage of the type of nonbinary queer people he was claiming as something new, but in our day they called themselves butch lesbians or “Mary,” or some such.

Anyway, that’s not what I sat down to write about. After the film, the festival held a Q&A with the filmmakers, Bill Weber and David Weissman, who is a friend. I don’t remember what the question was, or what David was discussing at the time, but in the course of his answer he said something about camp and that it’s “not really a part of queer culture anymore.” Just a casual observation in the middle of a sentence about something else, but I felt for a moment like I couldn’t breathe, that, like my nephew, I was suddenly in a world I didn’t understand. David is just a few years older than I but he has close relationships with queer people who are older and who are much younger (check out his Conversations with Gay Elders). His observations regarding history and these generational differences are consistently wise and measured, and compassionate.

For me, there’s no separating camp from being gay. That a sensibility, an aesthetic of anarchic humor and playfulness, hyperbole, theatricality, irony, extravagance, all of it, could set me apart in a positive way, a superior way, could be a powerful statement of protest, of refusal, saved me and I don’t mean that rhetorically. Maybe that change in the culture is just one way in which I often feel at sea in the newer younger “gay community,” but it’s also possibly true that it is the whole of what makes me feel left out, or I should say makes me want to be left out.


Strange Loop, Ordinary Dilemma

A Strange Loop — which won the best musical Tony, the Pulitzer Prize, and the love of critics and its peers, but couldn’t fill the seats — is closing. Go see it if you can.

There's always this dilemma: whether to please an elite group more sophisticated in their taste, knowledgeable about the medium, and more educated in general or to please the hoi polloi. My mood has taken wild swings both ways my whole career. I don’t know. I think temperamentally, deep down, I’m an elitist. I love the obscure stuff, the weird, in-group, experimental. But sometimes you ‘re not in control of it. You do something strange and the people love it anyway.

Of course pleasing the critics and the audience is ideal. On Broadway, it seems like it's rare work that accomplishes that anymore. Many of the great mid-century musicals and plays were blockbuster popular and also masterpieces, but now it seems like you’re either Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber with very little in between. My hunch is that this bifurcation has a lot to do with the fact that theater writers used to “come up in the business” but now they’re plucked by non-profit institutions from MFA programs at elite universities, but it’s possible I have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about. An argument as to whether and how and why is something I’d be more interested in reading than writing.

My painting teacher long ago used to say "your parents will never understand your work," and that maxim has guided me ever since as I negotiate the line between the two.

Coming Out.

Ten years ago, I said in a Facebook post on National Coming Out Day that my mother and I had different memories of my coming out, and that prompted some email correspondence that I’d long since forgotten till this morning when the post came up in my “Memories.” The two versions are described in my recent essay in Statorec, so I won’t go into mine, but I’m glad I dug up Mom’s email because it includes some small details I’d forgotten (like the fact that my sister was reading my diary in high school — wtf?!).

One thing I love about gmail is how it preserves everything. I’ve lost so much that was on old hard drives and email accounts; correspondence that, if it were paper, I would surely have saved: earthlink and aol, yahoo, Eudora … gone forever.

The bit about Mom and Dad leaving books around for me to notice — that memory is so vivid to me, but Mom didn’t recall it at all and it doesn’t seem like a thing you’d forget, so I question it now. How did that get in my head? My very close high school friend Laura Deer, for my 17th (or maybe 18th?) birthday, gave me a Holly Near album and the book based on the documentary “Word Is Out,” a hint so obvious it’s not even really a hint, but still I was afraid to come out to her, or to anyone I’d grown up with, until I’d been away to college and come back feeling more confident, safer.

Mom and I used to correspond regularly, by U.S. Mail for decades, and then by email nearly every day. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from the loss of that.

Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer <…>
Oct 13, 2012, 1:49 PM
to sharon

So what is your memory of me coming out? I think you said you
remembered it being when I was in college? I don't remember it ever
coming up until I came home with Eduardo. But I also don't remember
ever having any kind of direct conversation about it, just that at
some point it was understood. But I remember finding a book in your
magazine rack that made me think you were dropping a hint to me to
come out, something like "How to Talk to Your Gay Kid." But I
mentioned that when we talked recently and you said you don't remember
anything like that?

Strange how memory works!

Steven

sharon cheslik <…>
Oct 13, 2012, 2:02 PM
to me

Steven,

I knew sometime while you were still in high school, but waited for you to approach the issue. I think you mentioned leaving books around your room dealing with homosexuality that you hoped we would notice, and maybe that was when I knew, but can't remember that for sure. However, I suspected years earlier, but was confused because you dated girls. (Dumb me!)

Kay woke up in the middle of the night while you were in high school, crying, and told me she read in your diary that you were gay. I assured her it was all OK, but don't recall confronting you with the issue.

Maybe because I thought she shouldn't have been reading your diary! I think that happened in the summer when the two of you spent so much time together during a Putnam Co. play.

The first time I remember a real discussion was when you came home the first time from Miami of Ohio, with one ear pierced, which at the time was the mark of being gay. Dad and I had lunch with you at Moore's bar downtown in Greencastle and we talked about it, and Dad warned you to be careful where you went in Greencastle so you wouldn't be beat up.

I do remember telling Mike when he was home on leave from the Navy and he was stunned. He said "NO." Not because he couldn't accept it, but because he was absolutely so surprised.

That's how I remember it.

Love, Mom

"I feel very complete right now."

I was a sophomore studying theater at Miami University, dissatisfied — I don’t think I really had any reason to be, I’ve just always been a dissatisfied person — and I just wanted to go and be somewhere else. I’d gone to college with dreams of being an actor, and I felt like I was failing at it, not getting roles, not getting positive feedback in class, and not feeling like I was at all in command of it.

My two best friends, Scott and Dan, were similarly restless. Dan was auditioning at NYU, and Scott was auditioning at Syracuse, both to study acting. I couldn’t decide (never could, not when I was 8, not this week) whether to be a visual artist or a theater artist, so I sent my portfolio to Parsons and auditioned at Syracuse, and I thought I’d just see where I got accepted and let fate decide. I knew deep in my soul that I would end up in New York, but I think at this point I was still intimidated by the notion of moving here. I was accepted at both schools and chose New York, and the rest .…

I made this journal entry right after my Syracuse audition. i did a monologue from Shadow Box, a play that was very buzzy at the time but I don’t ever hear about it anymore. (I noticed when I was watching The Last Movie Stars that there’s a film of it with Joanne Woodward, so I’ll have to watch that.) It’s pre-AIDS (just barely), about a terminally ill gay man, his lover, and his ex-wife. Anyway, I thought I’d nailed it. Manning and Rosenberg and Bennison were my teachers at Miami. I don’t recall any of them doing anything deserving of such scorn.

I had decided midway through my second year at Miami that I wanted to direct, not act, and I chose Parsons because I thought studying painting and sculpture would be great director’s training. (Or that’s what I was telling myself.) It would have been, except that within a week or two I was completely seduced by the idea of being a painter.

Archaeology.

Yesterday was frustrating. I spent most of the day digging through an old hard drive, finding compelling stuff, having all the emotions these old journals and letters and what not bring up, without the reward of finding anything useful for the work at hand.

Today I’ll spend what’s left of the day trying to make some headway on a short essay I’m writing for a journal. It won’t exactly get me away from writing about tender personal subject matter — I don’t seem to be able to write anything anymore that isn’t tender and personal — but it will at least be a chance to work at a more circumscribed task for a bit, which is, if not easy, at least a relief.

Here’s a thing I found. Category: interesting but not immediately useful except as an oddity to share on my blog. It’s an excerpt from a letter to a close friend. For a chunk of 2003-4, I was renting a room in a sprawling Victorian house in Nashville while I made my film. I don’t think I saw it this way at the time, but reading it now, and all this stuff I describe in the letter is vividly accurate, I realize just how, well I’m not going to use the slur but it rhymes with “slight rash,” my life was then. It''s one of the periods of time I enjoyed most in my life, and I did know and feel that at the time, and the memories are sweet.

There’s no indication as to whether or not I sent the letter. (In case you’re curious, “my car” was a Fiat I got for I think $250 because it had been sitting in some guy’s yard for like 100 years. There was a hole in the floor on the driver’s side that you could put both feet through, if you wanted to, and there was moss growing on the seats. Eventually (as in, about a week after I bought it) it stalled on the road one too many times, and I pulled over onto the shoulder, got out and walked away.)

Knavin.

Rifling through the contents of an old hard drive I have kept but had forgotten about, or forgotten what was on it. Turns out to be backups of my old Mac G3 tower, the one I made Life in a Box on, the one I dragged from Jersey City to Nashville to West Hollywood to San Francisco, put in storage while I lived in Utah, and then brought to New York.

This image haunts me. The photo was taken (by Roger, that’s why he’s not in it) at the top of a hill overlooking Visalia, California in 2002. We’re packing up after a picnic, getting ready for the walk home.

We played a show at a Unitarian church in Visalia California in the spring of 2002. A young couple in the audience, Mike and Kerry, heard we hadn’t yet found a place to park our camper, they lived on a small farm, told us we could pull up next to the chicken coop and stay as long as we wanted. It was not at all unusual for us to receive this kind of hospitality when we lived on the road. I still remind myself of these encounters when I start to wonder if people are naturally good.

A few days into our stay, we all took the dogs — theirs was as I remember a chocolate lab, and ours (Roger’s) was a yellow lab named Knavin — for a long walk. We all, Mike and Kerry, their wonderful kids whose names I can’t remember now, Jay and me and Roger, walked along a short stretch of country road, jumped a fence, walked up a hill covered with long, gold grass, and picnicked at the top.

One the way down, nearly to the road, the dogs charged ahead. When we got to the fence, we saw that they’d crossed the road and were playing on the other side. Concerned about their safety, we called to them to come back and join us, but just as Knavin responded and started to cross back, a pickup truck came around the bend and slammed into him.

Knavin was badly injured. He did recover and live a long life, but none of us really survived that day intact.

(I told this story in the rough cut of Life in a Box. It didn’t make the final cut. I hated to lose it, but it was the best decision for the film. The Knavin story starts at 1:14:08.)

"Alexander Hamilton repents for his sins and accepts Jesus Christ as his lord and savior"

The Times story about this crazy production of Hamilton in McAllen, Texas is the most detailed, but their headline is misleading (shocker!) — sure, the production added “Christian themes,” but that’s mild language for the kind of vandalism they describe. The OnStage Blog story’s headline (“Texas Church Illegally Performs 'Hamilton' with Anti-LGBTQ Messaging”) gets closer.

This is interesting for so many reasons. I think most church people have the attitude that they're special and above the law. (For that matter, I think most Americans, or at least a very large portion of them, believe that churches are special and above the law.) But this kind of behavior isn't just churches. We've never come across an unlicensed production of LIZZIE, but we've been self-licensing the show for several years now, over a hundred productions, and you'd be surprised -- or maybe you wouldn't -- at how often people think they can change things to suit their own agendas, despite having signed a contract that clearly says they can't. The ways in which this Hamilton production was altered (among many other changes, they added a scene in which Hamilton "accepts Jesus Christ as his lord and savior") makes me think of our experience with the Communist Party censors in China who wanted us to change the ending of LIZZIE to have her convicted and sent to jail. Also, I'm kind of enjoying the irony of a fundamentalist Christian church taking what is already a fairly reactionary show and editing it to make it explicitly illiberal.

Chili Crisp.

Lately more often than usual, I'm being told or it is being implied that all I do is complain, which, on one hand is concerning because I'm like Mary Richards I want everyone to like me, but on the other hand fuck everybody I only complain when there's something to complain about. So, here's one:

Chili crisp. Seriously people. Do you not see our way of life circling the drain? Here’s what I want before I die: I want people to stop telling me that a thing which is just somebody putting a thing in a thing that people have been putting it in for 10,000 years is something brand new and worth a lot of money. Just stop.

Breakthroughs.

Apparently there’s a leak in the plumbing under our bathroom. It’s not affecting us but is, understandably, a problem for the people in the apartment below. Plumbers are here breaking a hole through the tile and the floor under our toilet this morning. I don’t know what the machine is that they’re using to do it, but it’s loud, and it’s going to take about three hours the guy tells me. High-rise problems.

All week I’ve been endeavoring to revise my unintentionally 4-hour long musical To make it shorter, but also better. I say “endeavoring to” because sometimes I’m actually revising, as in moving text around on a page, but more often I’m just sitting here thinking and frowning. I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that rewriting is like playing Jenga, but it’s really only like the part of Jenga where everything is falling in a pile on the table and you’re saying “fuck me.”

I started out thinking I could just go through everything and shorten it. I’m good at that. It’s not easy but it’s a specific kind of technical task that I know how to do. But pretty quickly I realized that wasn’t going to do it. I needed a plan, a method for wrangling all the disparate elements of my story. A theatrical idea that would, 1, make the piece more theatrical, 2, make it obvious to me what should stay and what should go, 3, clarify my point of view, and 4, make the piece more present, more urgent.

I’m not sure what words to use to describe how this process feels: sometimes it’s like a grinding anxiety, sometimes something approaching a panic attack, it’s a lot of telling myself to just breathe, and then there are moments when I feel like I am the smartest person and the greatest artist in the world. I was annoyed thinking I would lose a morning’s work because of the noise and the plumbers, but somehow that background distraction, and the fact that I need to pee and have to hold it for another two hours, has worked to dislodge the gunk in my brain and revealed an obvious solution. Hooray!

Now I just have to actually do it.

On Outing Ed Koch.

One of the most interesting, surprising (though I guess it shouldn’t be) things about the response to this article about Ed Koch’s “secret gay life” is that a large number of queer people will still argue against “outing” a public figure who had the power to help us but whose investment in secrecy about his own life led him to respond weakly or not at all to our suffering.

I’ve said already that on a personal level, it’s heartbreaking. I feel a deep sympathy for any queer person whose life has been corrupted and hollowed out by shame and fear of living an honest life. And of course on a public level, Koch’s avoidance of the AIDS crisis happening all around him was monstrous. Unambiguously evil. It looms over any good he may have done in one of the most powerful elected offices in the U.S.

Stories like this confirm my belief that the numbers of so-called LGBTQ people are vastly underestimated because they are based on self-disclosure in a society where the risks of coming out are massive, where people fear the loss of status, power, family, friends, their homes, livelihood, freedom, personal safety, their lives. People are always throwing around numbers, 3%, 10%, whatever, as if poll numbers reflect actual numbers of queer people. I have to laugh at the conservative freakout about recent polls showing more young people are identifying as queer. It’s contagious! Societal pressures, stigma, discrimination, are loosening (don’t get too used to it, though), so of course the numbers are ticking up.

To me, the Kinsey numbers from the 1940s have always felt pretty close to reality; over 1/3 of American males have some degree of gender nonconforming feelings or desire or experience. But we’ll never know.

I Love What I Do.

One thing we found out is that my new musical is four hours long. Oops. I had in my head that it would be under 2 hours because of the 1 page = 1 minute rule — my current draft is 89 pages — but I guess that doesn’t apply to musicals or to shows where one character tells lots of long, single-spaced stories.

We had to be out of the room by 10, so we didn’t quite finish reading it, but we got very close, and even though I was disappointed not to hear the ending, I count it a huge success. My brain is chattering away at me with all kinds of big and small ideas for the next draft. The main thing of course is to cut half of it. Some of those cuts will be chainsaw blunt, but most of it will be more like laser surgery.

It was a thrill to hear it out loud, to find out that it is mostly “actable.” That the convoluted mix of worlds and times and places I’ve created is — or at least is going to be — legible. And that it’s interesting, even compelling, to people other than me — if I can judge by having kept 8 actors engaged and energized through 3-1/2 hours of a dense, complex, and sometimes kind of heavy play. I’m always saying it, because it needs to be said, that actors are amazing. I spend my life and career in awe of what they do. That moment when a thing on a page becomes a thing in a room thrills me every single time. Theater is literally magic.

Today is my 10th wedding anniversary. Chan and I are going to Mohonk Mountain House (where we got married) for the weekend to celebrate, but today I’m going to do as close to nothing as I can manage. Monday I’ll dive back in. People always say that re-writing is harder than writing, but that’s not how I ever experience it. They’re both hard, just hard in different ways. I can’t wait.

First table reading of JACK, LaMama rehearsal space on Great Jones Street.

Ten Years Later.

It’s still almost two months away, May 5th, but Chan and I have been making plans to spend a weekend upstate at Mohonk Mountain House, where we got married, to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, so it’s on my mind. Ten years.

In my lately never-ending excavation of old stuff, photos, diaries, letters, and, my favorite but the most difficult to organize, scraps of old writing — ideas, images, drafts, beginnings of things I didn’t finish — I ran across what looks like I was working on an announcement that I was getting married. (When I read to the end, I realized it was probably a monologue idea for a solo show I was writing. This was the piece I was writing at McDowell and which turned a few years later into my musical, Jack.)

Anyone who’s known me a minute knows that I was strongly and openly against gay marriage for a long time. No one ever seems to care about what is still to me an important distinction between a couple’s decision to get married for any number of reasons people get married and a campaign to legalize same-sex marriage as a tactic in the gay rights struggle, so I won’t bore you (except to point out that we as a society, 7 years after a Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay marriage, are still arguing over whether my marriage is actually equal to a straight marriage, or if so-called religious convictions override my equality.)

Anyway, here’s where my head was 10 years ago:

Company.

I can’t speak to the changed gender of some of the characters in this new revival of Company. This is the first full production of the show I’ve seen. Other than having watched video of Raul Esparza singing Being Alive a few times on Youtube, I don’t have a strong impression of what the show was like with a male Bobby, etc. Though Esparza is thrilling, Katrina Lenk’s Being Alive is gut-wrenching. Rather than just being a song about an idea, in Lenk’s performance something, lots of things, happen in the song. I was shaking I was so moved. I get the sense that, after the success (or not) of the gender switching, the casting of Katrina Lenk is provoking the most disagreement about this production. I am firmly on team Lenk. She is a peerless actor, in this, and always.

Seeing the Broadway revivals of The Music Man and Company within a week or two of each other was, to say the least, instructive. One thing that bears mentioning is that the audience for both shows seemed, I think mostly due to the pandemic, local, and to the extent there were tourists, they were Broadway tourists, people who are invested, who know this work and are experiencing it in the context of a long love of the show and New York and Broadway, and the excitement of being back in a Broadway house with fresh interpretations of these two seminal masterpieces. It’s heady.

Some thoughts:

It’s not hard to make the case that The Music Man is reactionary, or at least that it can be read that way, and that there is a kind of cynicism embedded in it. But Company is, I think unambiguously, reactionary and cynical, and it’s bitter. The Music Man is not bitter. Is this just indicative of how the times, and we, have changed? Have we seen how ugly people truly are and we’re no longer willing to let ourselves off the hook? Do we not believe anymore that love is the answer? 

With admittedly a very small data set, these two shows back to back, The Music Man from 1957 and Company from 1970, could not more starkly demonstrate what’s changed about “the American musical,” a change that’s almost impossible not to lay at the feet of Stephen Sondheim. I can’t imagine there are many writers of musical theater today who don’t revere Sondheim and cite him as a major influence. With the exception of the Disney shows (and that’s a whole nother conversation), how small the American musical has become. The Music Man et al. take place against the backdrop of the sweep of history. Company takes place in the mind of a sort of avatar of urban loneliness trying to sort out her neuroses. We don’t learn a thing about the characters in Company except what’s in their heads. Even the New York we see is an exceedingly narrow slice of the city.

How ugly a portrait of New Yorkers and life in New York Sondheim and George Furth paint. It’s bleak and pinched and I think ultimately profoundly sad. Which is not to say the show is not great art. But it’s dark. Musical theater used to be a populist art form, and now the most accomplished artists in the genre since the 1970s (if you can even say that the golden age musicals are in the same genre as Sondheim), make work that appeals to a rarified audience of jaded urbanites, or, in the case of Disney, children. One notable exception would be Hamilton. I think the most obvious reason for the massive popularity of Hamilton is that it is about big things, it’s about us, it’s about America, and Americans recognize themselves and the pressures of their own lives in it. It is, like the best of the big midcentury musicals, critical of America but ultimately optimistic.

I hope I don’t sound like I disliked the show. I didn’t. It was gripping, hilarious, moving, jam-packed with provocative questions. The cast is first-rate across the board, I loved the scenic design. The musical direction is sharp, the sound design crisp and bright. I loved it. It’s a great night at the theater.

Incidentally, I didn’t realize until last night that the song Side by Side is about being the third wheel and that the title of the show alludes to the expression, “Two’s company three’s a crowd.”

One last thought: Who are these lunch ladies and why is there a song about them in this musical? I had only ever heard this song in cabaret or concert performances, and it is a great great song, rightly revered, but why is it in this show? It’s puzzling, like who is she talking about?

What The Fuck, Now, MacBeth?

LIZZIE fans know there’s bits of Aeschylus and Shakespeare sprinkled throughout the book and lyrics. I think the Shakespeare is probably most concentrated in the song “What the Fuck, Now, Lizzie?” the lyrics of which take lines and images from MacBeth. All that blood, and a collaborative murder in which one partner goes rogue — it’s hard to resist.

Every song in LIZZIE came together differently, but several songs started with Tim bringing an idea to me along with a page or two of associative thoughts and images and, in the case of What the Fuck?, lines from MacBeth. My first draft had all the verses set to the same melody and chord structure, then Alan revised the “Foolish thought to say a sorry sight” verse and the final verse. (I didn’t set out to give you a peek behind the co-writing curtain, but there you have it.)

Watching the new Joel Cohen film The Tragedy of MacBeth last night reminded me that the song originally had a first verse that went:

The thane of fife had a wife where is she now?
Lying on the rug with her face in a puddle.
Now I gotta clean this up and I don’t know how
Blood on my hands and the house in a muddle.

(What’s great about working with collaborators whose judgment you trust is, among many things, there’s someone around to say, “Mm, maybe we can do without that first verse?”)

Storm Large and Carrie Manolakos, from LIZZIE the Studio Album.

We added What the Fuck? kind of late in the process. Emma had disappeared halfway through the first act thinking she and Lizzie had a plan to poison Mrs. Borden. She returns in the second act to find both Mr. and Mrs. hacked to death with an axe. It didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t have a big reaction. Emma has an outsize reaction to pretty much everything. Also, Emma has less stage time than the other three women so we wanted to give her another headbanger to balance it out.

Anyway, watch the new MacBeth film. It’s dark and scary and visually beautiful. If you know LIZZIE well, it’ll be fun to hear the borrowed lines in their original context. The stark expressionist cinematography and production design put me in mind of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I learned about in college and have watched several times because of my fixation on Antonin Artaud, who is in the film. Artaud’s theoretical writing about theater blew my 18-year-old artist mind. I reread him every decade or so. His ideas are still a touchstone for me — I live by that notion in Theater of Cruelty that an artist’s task is to assault the audience, not like beat them up but assault them aesthetically, assault their senses. Attack their sensibilities.

Early on, we were told that the song What the Fuck? was too much, too many fucks, you can’t do that, the audience will not tolerate it, you can’t just scream “what the fuck?!” over and over and over, and I was like, but that’s the point. We took some of the fucks out and it totally deflated the song. It was just so obviously a giant pulled punch at the top of the second act. It made me cringe every time. When we recorded the album, we put the fucks back and there they stay.

Short clip from Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. If you get a chance, watch the whole thing.

The video quality doesn’t do justice to the film but here’s a clip of Artaud.