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Clarification of Thought

2011-02-01T22:21:00Z

I’m thinking of a year, probably 1968 . My internal calendar is basing this on what I remember as a certain interplay between the emerging counter-culture and the dustier mid-twentieth century types; echoes of Franklin and Eleanor were still noticeable in the bearing of the older folks.

These images are associated with a day trip that we made as a family, across the state line of our predictable suburban Connecticut homeland and into New York’s mildly exotic Hudson River Valley. More explicitly exotic was our specific destination of Tivoli. Not the town in Dutchess County exactly, but a scenic farm on the banks of the Hudson that took its name from the nearest village. A Catholic Worker community had settled on the farm to raise chickens, grow vegetables and, more significantly, follow the Social Gospel example of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day by harboring refugees from the Bowery.

It was stunning, at age seven, to cross the threshold into the farm’s communal dining hall and be forced to take cover as a mentally disturbed and apparently un-medicated woman decided to even some score by weaponizing a nearby cylindrical flatware caddy. Since I wasn’t conditioned to react to paranoid delusion, I initially took her threat to be an elaborate attempt at the kind of broad humor I sometimes saw on the Red Skelton show. But when she released her cocked arm to let all those countless forks fly, the effect was like that of an improvised, home scale daisy cutter with the potential for permanent disfigurement to anyone who was slow on the duck and cover. She was a Bowery refugee who was invited to Tivoli by the Catholic Worker community, not so much with an unreal expectation that she’d contribute productively to the farm chores, but more, simply, to heal the wounds of her likely schizophrenia and alcoholism.

Later, I wandered onto the porch of a house situated on the southern end of the grounds and fell into a conversation with a man who functioned at a nominally higher level than some of the others residents. This distinction came with benefits, one of which was the informal title of farm caretaker. And of that came the subsequent benefit of being the exclusive occupant of the house which I came close to unwittingly entering. There were other privileges exercised by this caretaker, like showing off his cigarette rolling skills, inviting others to marvel at his pot belly as if it was the prize watermelon at a country fair and making what, in hindsight, I’ve come to recognize as categorically lewd overtures to seven year-olds.

In spite of being shaken by my exposure to these tragicomic Bowery refugees, I was experiencing a corresponding tranquility. At that tender age, I didn’t yet have the capacity to meditate thoughtfully on the damaged humans staying at Tivoli that summer. Still, as horrifying as they were to my young eyes, there was a consolation. Looking just beyond the expansive, sloping lawn, I was mesmerized by my first ever sighting of the elegant and majestic Hudson River. It was a view that captivated me like nothing else in my childhood and marked the beginning of my applying meaning to things of beauty. At age seven, I was a work in progress at best, but I must’ve become nominally aware during our visit to Tivoli of Peter Maurin, the spiritual father of the Catholic Worker movement who, even in 1967, had been long deceased. He didn’t live long enough to see Tivoli, yet that farm was in so many ways the embodiment of the inspiration he provided to Catholic Worker community that ran the place. Among Peter’s many contributions was the Friday evening tradition of holding a roundtable for the purposes of discussion and reflection which he called ‘Clarification of Thought’. I couldn’t, and didn’t even try, to get my head around the concept at the time. I only remember references to the term, ‘clarification of thought’ and the enjoyment I felt over the pacifying quality of those words. Roaming around on Tivoli’s lawn that day under a peerless blue sky, I began to quietly cobble together a formulation that I’d only be able to articulate years later as an adult; the Hudson River looked like ‘clarification of thought’ sounded.

Forty some odd years later, and I’m back in the Hudson Valley, not for a day trip this time, but finally, after a life-long love affair with the area, to live. Having spent the past two decades in San Francisco, my wife and I wanted to once again be close to our aging relatives, our beloved New York City, and of course, have access for the first time in decades to edible bagels. I’ve come to learn that picking up the pieces of your life and relocating from one side of the continent to the other comes with an industrial dose of stress. And my body offered a resounding Amen in the form of a heart attack, suffered in late winter of this year, just months before the planned move. Upon first arriving here at the height of last July’s triple digit temperatures, I took an evening to myself, away, for the first time in weeks, from my wife, my son, and his best friend who had joined us for the cross-country trip. I was also away, for the first time in weeks, from my dog, my Toyota, the freeway fast food with its familiar take-out aftertaste, the sight of the billboards throughout the mid-west which ironically alternate their sex shop ads with right-to-life messages, the anxious thoughts about my newfound joblessness and the cigarette jones I’d had since the heart attack forced me to quit. In this rare and tranquil moment, I wandered down to the Cold Spring waterfront just in time for sunset and there it was, reflected on the water like the orange and purple hues of the late day sun: ‘clarification of thought’.

In an apparent oversight of the town leaders, I haven’t yet been officially welcomed to Cold Spring by the detonation of an improvised daisy cutter or the offering of a lewd overture. Unfortunate, but hey, I’ll always have my emotional scars. Still, this town does offer a powerfully strong sense of place. I felt it immediately. Maybe there’s something about the sound of a train or the sight of a waterfront streetlamp in the shape of a shepherd’s crook which brings that on. Or maybe it’s that I sense a part of my own spirit here. Some piece of me that was left to the river at age seven and is still travelling to the ebb and flow of the estuarial tides. A return to the river. It’s nice to be home.

Why Do I Feel I'm Being (Heart) Attacked?

2010-03-03T22:38:00Z

There was an unexpected self-consciousness during my exchange with the twenty-something year-old paramedic: What's your name?
Peter Smith
What's your birthday?
August 23rd, 1960
That would make you...49, then.
This Q and A session served the dual purpose of eliciting crucial statistical information about me, his latest patient, while simultaneously confirming my level of orientation. 'That would make you...49, then'. It was spoken with a tone of novelty, as if this young man rarely had the need to decipher figures that high up on the numeric register. For the several months leading up to this exchange, I'd been enjoying a rather peaceful co-existence with '49'. Yes, sure, 49 year olds are pigeon-holed by insurance companies and auto-makers as part of the over the hill 'cautious' demographic. But these are just arbitrary Madison Avenue profile markers. Actually, I've enjoyed a small sense of exemption and pleasure with '49'. I'm still shy of 50, after all. And it was just months ago that I attended a concert with 'Wolfmother.' OK, so it was an acoutstic concert with a number of artists on the bill, my preferred of which was Neil Young. But still...'Wolfmother'!!! The only thing that's 'old' about any of this is the played notion that 49 is over the hill.
Why then, did 49 suddenly feel so old upon hearing this young man breathe sound into it? I mean technically, I was still only a possible myocardial infarction. It was only later, after the paramedic wagon descended the snowy mountain and crossed a state line that my heart attack status would be confirmed. And even then, there would be a good, I dunno, twenty minutes more before the cardiology team would perform a cardiac catheterization and insert a stent into that artery of mine which had occluded to 100 percent. Paramedic boy had none of this information. What at first sounded like a tone of novelty began sounding ultimately like fatalism: 'That would make you...49, then'.
As the above passage would indicate, I suffered a heart attack on February 27, while on a ski weekend in Tahoe. As I'm sure it's easy to imagine, I've had endless thoughts about this life-changing event. There's much  gratitude to be expressed, but I'll probably pick other forums in which to do it. The profuse thanks to family, friends and ultimately, the medical staff attending to me will come in the appropriate time and place.
Meanwhile, 'Heywhateverhappenedto' remains dedicated to glancing back in the rear view mirror to take experiences of the past into newfound consideration. In the context of a heart attack's aftermath, I'm inspired to devote the balance of this post to a cherished - and now former- old habit: smoking.
In the currently cigarette-hostile world we inhabit, the easy thing to do here would be to echo the prevailing societal sentiment, voice my contrition, and swear off any future engagement in the Satanic ritual which co-opted my soul for years. As the comedic interpreter of a former U. S. President would've put it, 'Not gonna do it'. Since an unapologetic love of smoking is so seldom expressed these days, it occurs to me that our current antiseptic culture would be well served if I gave voice to the thoughts shared privately among smokers. Those sentiments are best exemplified by:

My personal favorite L&M moments:

Walking into the Dan Lynch Blues Bar on Manhattan's east side on a Friday nite in the spring of 1980. The image emerging from the cloud of blue smoke was that of a lanky blues singer, his size overwhelmed the pinched space between the raised stage and the drop ceiling. To the rhythm of a 12-bar blues progression, the room filled with lyrics of wounded love, lonely taverns, and cigarettes by the bedside. Leaning against a column at the back of the room, I lit up and let the drag off my own cigarette carry the music into the reflective chambers of my interior.

2AM on a Saturday in 2005, completing the final  draft on chapter seven of my book.  After struggling for weeks to achieve just the right evocation, the words came, and kept  coming, like I'd tapped into the richest literary vein known to the writerly world. For the 60-plus minutes of this creative strobe, a cigarette stayed fused  between the digits of my left hand, the orange ember growing more luminescent with the frequent drags I took.

1AM on a weekend nite in the spring of 1983, behind the wheel of a late-generation Checker Cab, cruising south on 2nd Ave in Manhattan and glimpsing the lights of the 59th Street Bridge. My fare was an aloof and beautiful woman who struck a pose consistent with the lyrics of 'Drive' by The Cars, which was playing on my  transistor radio. I lit my cigarette, swallowed the beautiful burn, and let the song lyrics tell the story of our otherwise silent 10 minutes together.

I could throw in, for good measure, any number of cigarettes smoked with friends under a canopy of stars during summer evenings in the '70's, invariably while 'Stairway to Heaven' played on WPLR.

Equal appreciation would go to any cigarette smoked to the musical accompaniment of 'Cigarette' by The Smithereens, 'Black Coffee in Bed' by Squeeze, or 'America' by Simon and Garfunkel.

And this will sound like an old skit from the original cast of Saturday Night Live (que Laraine Newman and Dan Akroyd), but the after-sex cigarette really is a helluva nice moment.

Second Hand Satisfaction

Not all of my favorite cigarettes were smoked by me. My Godmother, Mary, was a quintessential product of the hi-ball generation. At cocktail parties, I'd be captivated by the way she manipulated her exhaling smoke into silky billows. Since she multi-tasked in such circumstances, engaging the men in her orbit with flirtation, she'd alternate the billows of smoke with symmetrical space-aged streams trailing from her nose, affording her the chance to occasionally purse her sultry lips. For added effect, she'd maintain a dangling ash to the point where the laws of gravity were called into question. Her performances in these salon-type situations carried an aromatic dimension as well. Medium grade perfume of a certain era, in combination with the martini on her breath and the chestnut-like smell of the cigarette smoke would transport me into an intoxicating grown-up galaxy.

Favorite smoke from the stage and screen:

Any cigarette seen on the lips of:
Jackie Gleason
Bette Davis
Keith Richards
Mickey Rourke

Silly Smokes: Two of the drop-dead funniest cigarette scenes in movies or television are:
Oscar Levant in the cafe scene of 'An American in Paris'
Michael Richards in the season 5 episode of Seinfeld called 'The Sniffing Accountant'.

For most of my life, cigarettes have been my gateway drug of choice to the more addictive intoxicant known as passion. Given the risk that our currently dry and insipid culture places upon our society, I consider my promotion of passion, through cigarettes or any other means, the fulfillment of a civic duty. I've stopped smoking, at least for the moment and maybe for good, even though the ample risk factors I had leading up to this heart attack suggest that cigarettes weren't culpable in and of themselves. Trust me, I only decided to address this one risk factor because it was the only one I had control over. I wish I had the same control over my unfortunate gene pool, my epic level of stress, or my baldness (Yes, believe it or not, there is a correlation between male pattern baldness and an increased risk of heart attack. How did I earn such a bounty of blessings?). So, I'll quit...smoking cigarettes. But for as long as I yearn to taste the passionate side of life, I'll never really...quit cigarettes.

August

2009-10-07T01:35:00Z

   It says something that I'm posting my homage to summer in mid October. There's a geographical explanation; after spending the first 32 years of my life on the eastern seaboard, I came to depend on the change of seasons to calibrate my internal calendar. Then came my move west 17+ years ago, when, upon arriving in the Bay Area, I became adrift in a nebulous cycle of fog, rain, fire and flood. Looking out my window onto the San Bruno Hills this October 16th, it looks like late August. By my reckoning, it's time for wistful thoughts about the waning days of summer.
June and July are fine. But it's August, in particular, that's driven me to post this latest entry. Maybe it's because my birthday lands on August 23. Maybe it's because my son, by a coincidence of procreation, was born on the 20th of the same month....Nah, both of these anniversaries are worthy of mention, but it's August 15th, 16th and 17th that have captured my imagination for the last 40 years and vaulted August to a level of dreamy romanticism of which no birthday, even that of an only son, could inspire.
I was a few days shy of my own 9th birthday in August of 1969 when radio and television reports began trickling in about a convergence, on Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York, of hippies and musicians, the head count of which was heading toward biblical proportions, according to the early reports. We all know what happened during those three days at Woodstock, some by virtue of actual attendance, but others, like myself, from the documentary film by Michael Wadleigh, which was released the following year. The moments that the film immortalized were the touchstones that prompted me to immediately begin dividing the world into two distinct categories; a) the people, songs and cultural snapshots that gave off a 'neo-Woodstock' vibe- and b) ...everything else.
True to my life-long love of all things Woodstock, I did take an evening a few weeks ago to see the Ang Lee film 'Taking Woodstock' and was impressed with the film's ability to tell the story of the festival from a point of view of someone who experienced it largely from the margins. But the summer movie that had an equal, if not greater, neo-Woodstock vibe, was 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'. The star of that movie was Shia LaBeouf. That's relevant because Shia, if his bio has been reported accurately, is a hippie child, born of hippie parents who raised their son in convention-free circumstances. So, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Shia LaBeouf - hippie parents. Thus, you have something with a conclusively 'neo-Woodstock' vibe. I bring up this rather remote, contemporary example to illustrate that, even forty years later, my mind still makes this kind of distinction.
But the examples from years gone by were more frequent, most of which were revealed in the immediate wake of Woodstock. The most celebrated of these is arguably Joni Mitchell's hallucinogenic hymn, 'Woodstock' , penned, as many know, by Joni in a hotel room in NYC while watching the live television coverage of it all and lamenting her own absence from the festival. Joni Mitchell: envying her boyfriend Graham Nashs' appearance on the Woodstock stage, writes a song that becomes just as emblematic of the event as any of the songs that were actually performed there. She virtually founded the school of the neo-Woodstock vibe.
   In August of 1969, Paul McCartney was nowhere near Bethel, New York. But he was on a farm, in West Sussex, England, putting the final touches on his self-titled 'McCartney', an album so crudely produced, stripped down and evocative of a five-day stubble that it played like a trippy poetic addendum to the concert that was staged at Yasgur's farm. McCartney: rustic farm - barefoot - bearded - broken guitar strings. Again, neo-Woodstock vibe.
In 1972, my rather square older cousin graduated from college. It was a milestone marked with a party given in his honor by his parents. True to form, my cousin didn't have a hair out of place that evening. But the same can't be said for one of his classmates who was there for the celebration. I remember the graduates posing for a Kodak moment in front of the fireplace. Absorbing the social posturing of these older guys, I was mesmerized to discover that peeking out from under the mortar board and gown worn by my cousin's fellow graduate, there was discernible evidence of subversion: shoulder length hair, facial growth of the lamb-chop sideburn variety, ripped and frayed jeans and a pin-striped button down shirt that was not only untucked, but certifiably rumpled. These elements revealed themselves only after my double-take, similar to the way I had to look twice at the superficially preppy Steven Stills on stage at Woodstock, before realizing his indisputable counter-culture credentials. The sneaky obscurity of that anti-establishment essence lent a risky underground quality to both Steven Stills and the graduate. 1972 college grad: externally upright but with an underlying subversiveness - not to mention the unmistakable glassy quality in his eyes that could've only been brought on by the purest stash of Columbian Gold. Again - neo Woodstock vibe.
(Generational note; 'square' was a term used to describe someone who got regular haircuts, tucked in their shirt and avoided recreational drugs.)
  But nothing compares to the mother of all of my neo-Woodstock moments, which happened later the same year. August, in fact. That's when my middle-aged, non-conformist, dashiki- wearing, peace sign-flashing parents took my brother and I on a day trip to a farm in rural, upstate New York (with just that minimal evocation, I bet you can hear Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner piercing the morning quietude). We were visiting the farm, not just for the French picnic we enjoyed under a tree, but to have a conversation with a quintessential 'back to the land' hippie named Paul, about the prospect of shedding our suburban existence and joining him as one of the founding families of the commune he hoped would develop on the farm. As we ate our Concord grapes and tore at our communal baguette like French proletariats plotting an uprising, we sat at Paul's knee - a knee, by-the-way which was outfitted with a devastatingly hip pair of black leather pants of the Jim Morrison variety - as he shared his vision of a self-contained utopia. In Paul's version of life on the farm, children would attend school right there on the grounds, play basketball in the re-converted barn which now housed a gymnasium, and become generally indoctrinated with a progressive syllabus of peace, love and understanding. Paul wasn't a musician per se, but as he held court under that tree with his shoulder length hair, leather pants and flower power wife by his side, you could practically hear the reverb from the steel strings of a Fender Guitar. Driving away at the end of the day with the farm diminishing on the horizon behind us, I lived briefly in the fantasy that I would in fact finally gain citizenship to Woodstock Nation. Notwithstanding the moment of fanciful speculation on the part of my parents, it wasn't to be. Despite the dashikis and flashing peace signs, our suburban life, with its boil-in-bag dinners and primary and second mortgages, beckoned.
As the leaves begin to fall from the branches and August, like that farm of my youth, diminishes in your rear-view mirror, take the opportunity to seek the potentially neo-Woodstock moments in your own life. The change of seasons itself will likely offer an opportunity. As you curse the cold, letting an f-bomb fly here and there, remember to really let it fly. 'Fuck', in and of itself, is not Woodstock worthy. But, if you harness the frustration of others with a call-and-response shout out, you're recapturing a bit of what Country Joe McDonald had in mind. Give me an 'F'.....Give me a 'U'....
Don't limit your quest for a neo-Woodstock moment to your waking hours. As you climb under your temperature-fortified bedding for the night, think of August, and the wheat colored hills of Sullivan County, N.Y. If you're disposed to having a neo-Woodstock moment, your REM cycle might evoke dreams of seeing '...a child of God who was walking along the road......'
Peace!

Tomato, Stage Left

2009-05-31T20:22:00Z

   Hey all you Facebookers and Twitterers, my 140-day hiatus has given me the jitters about posting again. To countervail that, I'm ceding the first few here to other voices. It all gets explained in the end, though:

"You played a tomato for 30 seconds and they went a half a day over schedule because you wouldn't sit down."
   "Yes - it was illogical."
   "You're a tomato!! A tomato doesn't have logic! A tomato can't move!!
   "That's what I said. So if he can't move, how's he gonna sit down, George?!! I was a stand up tomato, George, a juicy, sexy beefsteak tomato. Nobody does vegetables like me. I did an evening of vegetables Off-Broadway. I did the best tomato, the best cucumber - I did an endive salad that knocked the critics on their ass!!"

   The above dialogue is recognizable to anyone who was alive in 1982 as the deliciously funny confrontation between out-of-work actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) and his agent George Fields (Sidney Pollack) in the movie, 'Tootsie'.
I like to revisit that scene periodically for the rare thrill of watching an actor take a stand against the inane. There's a pleasure-by-proxy in this for me, after having, on a number of occasions throughout my performing life, been asked to 'play my tomato while sitting'.
   If I forage here for the worst examples in my own experience, I'm inclined to think about the time, during a brief stint in radio, in which I was asked to appear at a live remote broadcast from the retail outlet of a new sponsor...dressed in a pair of Everlast boxing trunks with corresponding gloves, and effecting the persona of Rocky Balboa. Taken alone, it doesn't sound like the worst form of spectacle - until you consider that, standing there bare-chested and swimming in a pair of over sized boxing trunks, I, all 132 pounds of me, looked like a wet noodle, and not of the wide and hearty 'fettuccine' variety, but more of the sinuous 'vermicelli' kind. The incongruity was amplified by my hairline, which, even at this point in my young adulthood, had become mostly theoretical. This was painfully underscored by comments of the young women I would meet in bars, who responded to my overtures with comments like "Oh, my God, are you sure you're only 25?!"  Even the most pickled patrons of those bars wouldn't have confused me with Sylvester Stallone. Or even Frank Stallone, for that matter.
   I was trying to imitate Rocky Balboa. I ended up looking more like the subject of a Dorthea Lange photo essay. If this sounds like it should be all in a day's work for those in the unprincipled world of broadcasting, then you've met the low bar of expectations the radio industry usually applies to selecting their program managers. Congratulations. And I'll see you in Hell!
   But, as capable of malevolence as my program director sometimes was, the inspiration for this bit of 'humility theater' was an idea born not in his head, but in my own. It began when one of the account reps at the radio station landed a sweet advertising contract with a new health and beauty retailer: a one-month flight of ads would be run on our airwaves during the morning and afternoon drivetimes, culminating with a live remote at the local retail location after a one month build-up. The store was called "Jabs" , which conjured an association with upper cuts and TKO's. As to why a health and beauty retailer would market itself with a name that evokes images of black eyes and split lips is still a question that has branding experts shaking their heads.
   In the flurry of 'creativity' in the production booth, recording ads for our new sponsor, I let it slip that I did a fair impression of Rocky Balboa. Eyes lit up, microphones were rearranged, and before I knew it, I was reading the ad copy ("Jabs means deep discounts and huge savings") in the slurred, mono-syllabic cadence of the Italian Stallion. The program director liked it, the new sponsor loved it, and like that, I was the hot new property among the 50,000 watt AM radio talent pool. Life was pretty sweet there for a while. I'd pull up to the station at a mid-morning time of my choosing, park my '72 Toyota Corolla with the recent valve job and a new set of re-treads, and stroll into the station under the adoring eyes of the receptionist. To fill out the rest of my day, I'd simply make my way to my cubicle where I'd take calls and field offers.
   Of course, most of the above is just me having a Walter Mitty moment. But truth be told, I was sort of enjoying a limited amount of positive attention as 'The Voice of Rocky'. I just wished that I'd said something when the program director conveyed the sponsor's wish to have me be at the live remote not only sounding like Rocky but dressed as him as well. You see, despite all the heady attention, I was clear-headed enough about it to realize something that everyone else was missing: This was radio - 'theater of the mind', where you could create an entire universe of unreality and never be challenged - until you try to manifest it physically. Now, this might've worked on some level if there was a way to underscore the intended visual gag. Y'know, like someone else from the on-air staff playing the role of a no nonsense emcee, saying something like.."Hey, hold on here. You're not Rocky Balboa! Why, you're nothing more than a bald person with a Depression-era waistline. Ladies and Gentlemen, we've been had!" But there was no one quite Letterman-esque enough to play straight man to my Chris Elliott. The expectation was that I would just show up, cast a spell over everyone with my uncanny impression, and induce mass hypnosis. 'Didn't work. This became clear, not through any outward comment, but rather by the way the shoppers circumvented me with alternating glances of pity and that universally recognized  look which seems to say, 'Take another step closer and I'm callin' security'. I take no great significance in the fact that the fast decline - and finally, the shuttering - of 'Jabs' seemed to be in direct correlation with my appearance there. But, you decide.

   This past March, I staged a solo performance here in San Francisco (The piece was the first installment of a larger work in progress called 'Striking a Deal With Labor'. But more on that in a later post). After writing and workshoping the piece throughout the winter, I was, for the most part, satisfied with the end result, notwithstanding my hope for some fine tuning in subsequent performances. But the workshop process was wrought with tension and more than a little conflict with my workshop director: he dismissed my best ideas, he wanted me to improvise more (a great tool for development, unless you've already employed another time honored creative device called...writing!) and he encouraged me to fabricate details, even though it was a memoir piece (i.e., taken from actual experience). I felt that he was, in effect, asking me to 'play my tomato while sitting'. With some lingering PTSD from my radio days and other similar moments, I spoke my mind on this occasion. I'd hoped that our differences would be processed through a frothy and witty banter, like the stubbornly principled actor and his pragmatic agent in 'Tootsie'. It could've been that my Michael Dorsey impression wasn't quite up to the standard of my Rocky. Or it couldv'e been that the workshop director never saw 'Tootsie' and didn't pick up on the cues. Whatever the reason, our creative tension never rose to the cute and clever tone of movie dialogue. Instead, our dynamic was more like that between a petulant teenager and exasperated parent.

   Thirty years ago, before my radio days and long before my experience of this past March, I was green and 18 - newly arrived in New York and just getting my feet wet in stand-up comedy. Knocking around Times Square on an early spring afternoon, I was drawn to an industrial building just south of 42nd St. Affixed to the masonry-and-mortar facade was a banner proclaiming the building to be the home of Manhattan Punchline, a theater company that staged plays, sketch comedy and improv. Though MPL was still in its nascent days, I'd read - or heard - that it was at the vanguard of the burgeoning New York comedy scene. Stumbling upon it on a carefree afternoon, just when I happened to have a little time on my hands and still young enough to be fortified with an unchastened self-assurance, I rode the elevator to the 7th floor loft space. I was fantasizing about finding a quiet black box theater in a rarely glimpsed state of pre-show clutter and afternoon un-selfconciousness, the air thick with theater dust made translucent by the 4'o'clock sun flooding through the windows. I was further fantasizing that I'd find someone there, preferably a lone individual, toiling with scene sets and willing to share his mid-day ruminations on theater, audience sensibilities and the modern pilgrimage of comedy. I chose these particulars for my fantasy because these kinds of encounters were lacking at the comedy clubs where I'd started to spend my evenings. Drawing high numbers on open mic nights, I'd cower in the back of the house consumed by a stage fright so immobilizing that I could barely breath, much less speak to anyone (This btw, is where my unchastened self-assurance began to waver). Further panic was induced at these clubs when established comics from the regular roster arrived. On slow nights, it might just be Larry David, Richard Belzer and Paul Rieser hanging around. On a supercharged weekend nite, Rodney Dangerfield might show up for a set. Somewhere on the vast island of Manhattan, there was surely a thoughtful and approachable soul who would complete the conversation I'd started with myself as a child, about 'comedy as high art'. Devined by a karma that I can't explain, I pushed open a door and did in fact find a man toiling with stage sets. After I awkwardly apologized for the intrusion, we fell into one of the most thoughtful and provocative conversations of my young life. I was clumsy, unpolished and not terribly articulate. But I was full of ideas about humor and comedy, of both the timeless and topical variety. He humored me with validating smiles and occasionally offered challenges to one of my points. I didn't know it then but I was probably sharpening my talking points on the germ of a theory that would evolve later in life as my contrast study between the absurdism of Beckett and the satire of Molière. Between the moments when we were seeing eye to eye, there was dissension of opinion, but only of the gentlest kind, indicated by nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a warm smile.
   It was the gentle divergence of opinions, communicated with such reverence - that, along with an invitation to 'come back sometime' - which had me walking on a cushion of air as I left. I've had meaningful dialogue since then with people in the performing arts, but apparently not when it matters most. At the really crucial junctures, I dummy up, don an over sized pair of boxing trunks and risk arrest for public harrassment. Or I sit in a sullen state during a workshop and watch my best ideas get spiked. Yes, I'd like to be Michael Dorsey and stick it to the man when he deserves it. But more than that, I'd like to be carefree and 18 again, wandering the canyons of Manhattan, looking for a forum in which to oxygenate my headful of ideas. Then I'd like to find that forum, just as I did 30 years ago, in the company of a wisened stage veteran who knows how to register intrigue in his eyebrow, while the late day sun furnishes him with a translucent halo of theater dust.

Fade to black. This tomato is now standing for his curtain call.

Post Script:
A special shout-out to founding member of Manhattan Punchline, Mitchell McGuire. He not only jogged my memory for some physical details for this post, but he also deduced that my seredipitous conversation on that afternoon 30 years ago was with MPL's artistic director, Steve Kaplan.
Much thanks, Mitch - and of course, Steve

Recession Cinema

2009-01-28T23:38:00Z

Hey there, all you under-employed and overextended movie fans! Last week, upon the announcement of the Academy Award nominations, it struck me that this past movie season was remarkable in terms of the sheer volume of quality films. Milk, Slumdog... , The Wrestler, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case... , and on and on. Such artistic riches should be celebrated, but I found myself a bit overwhelmed and longing for simpler times when moviegoers of limited means were afforded the leisure of wallowing in the essence of, say, one or two boffo films, which would dominate the marques for months, without being forced off-screen by an accelerated theatrical release schedule timed to the production excess of deep-pocketed studios. Money ain't what it used to be and plopping down $10 and change to see each and every Oscar-worthy film this past season would've had my family and I eating nail soup well into next summer's blockbuster season. During the days of the Great Depression, movie houses were operating at full capacity. Then again, so my mother has said, the price of admission was 10 cents and you sat through a double feature at least, if not a triple. My mother's favorites were the musicals with Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy - light escapist fare that always seemed to end with a scene known in Hollywood parlance as 'the kiss'.

In my adolescence, during the recession prone 70's, we too, formed some humble movie-going habits that befit our own lean times. The film that readily comes to mind is Billy Jack, an independently produced project that, upon release, ended up for an extended theater run, partly because word of mouth had furnished the film with an unexpected set of 'legs' and partly, I'm imagining (in my overly-romanced version of hard times), because there wasn't a lot of product out there to show. As a result of this cultural and economic climate, we'd go to see Billy Jack once with one friend, then with another friend, and then with the youth group from church and probably once more with parents, who might've eventually gotten curious about this unlikely cultural lightning rod. For those of you that are incredulous at my suggestion of adolescents inviting their parents to a movie, remember that Billy Jack was our movie, with our values displayed and our way cool soundtrack theme song. We couldn't wait to rub our parent's nose in a cultural triumph of our own. The story concerns the students and faculty of a 'freedom school', essentially a band of non-conformist hippies, who experience wrath, venom and eventually, rape at the hands of some ugly local yahoos. Of course, just when you think you can't bear to see the hippie kids suffer one more demoralizing episode, Billy Jack himself intervenes with a Hapkido Karate move known as the 'outside crescent kick', which satisfies the audience's desire for vengeance. Truth be told, the hippie kids, no matter how much I rooted for them in concept, were, in their portrayal here, a bit cloying in their earnest self-righteousness. This, in combination with the disconnect of having these idealistic peaceniks redeemed through an act of violence, made for a very flawed film indeed. But, over the course of many viewings, all while contemplating the film's message encryptions, the whole thing started to make some kind of strange cinematic sense.

I have a theory that the plethora of current releases originated with seed money already in the pipeline before the economy tanked. If I'm right, we'll soon see the Hollywood offerings dry up, meaning that we'll have to condition ourselves to the quaint habits suitable for a genuine recession; finding some odd and imperfect little movie that enjoys an extended run on screens that would otherwise be dark. If it's a recession not just of cash but also of culture, we'll become reflective and philosophical, interpreting everything in this magined little flawed film as having deeper meanings and lasting lessons. We'll return to the theater over and again, falling deeply in love with the only option available. So, memo to Hollywood: we're in a recession! Stop being so damn prolific and professional. Times are hard. The least you could do is play poor - allow this recession to realize its full cinematic potential. Lean times call for films with muddled messages that ferment into something close to clarity over the course of its many screenings, then gain added import in the hearts of the down-and-out audience, until the good times start to roll once again.

Where Rubber Meets The Road

2009-01-16T01:47:00Z

Hey all you frustrated masters of the muscle car out there - welcome back to the days of affordable gasoline! - Yes, it's true that as of this posting, gas has now become not just affordable, but probably under-valued when adjustments for inflation, etc. are factored in. It's ironic and vexing that the price of gas has come down so dramatically just when we as a nation have begun to reflect that much of our idealized car culture was ripe for a reassessment. Well, we as a nation of taste shaping consumers have managed to 'reflect' in an acutely manifest way, if the latest profit reports from Detroit's big three are any indication. Over the last couple of years, I've been weening myself from car dependence and relying more on pedal power, riding my bike to work at least 50% of the time. In so doing, I've become predictably self-righteous, an unfortunate by-product of progressive thought. While the roads are still clogged with emission-spewing gas guzzlers, It's been clear to me that others have adjusted their habits to the new ethos as well. The Toyota Prius was a rare curiosity just a couple of years ago. Now, here in San Francisco, the Prius is so ubiquitous and noble that it enjoys the kind of reverence you'd expect to see reserved for a beloved local mascot. But now and then, I find myself in deep communion with my inner gear-head. Recently, I thought my 12 yr old son might enjoy watching a movie I first saw at his age and had fond memories of. As the opening sequence of American Graffiti rolled, I was blasted back to a time and place with the ferocity of a twin cam V8...opened all the way! American Graffiti chronicles the activities of several teenagers in a quintessentially California - American town as their lives intersect over the course of a single summer evening. But it's the cars in the film that I was (both then and now), thoroughly romanced by. Then again, every sequence that took place in a car interior had the added intrigue of an utterly captivating soundtrack; early '60's rock-n-roll, courtesy of otherworldly DJ Wolfman Jack, who offered a fictionalized portrayal of himself. Man, do I miss that perfect cultural cocktail of music, muscle cars and elusive sex that, to a considerable degree, defined my youth. That might not be entirely accurate. I came of age in the mid '70's, a decade and a half after the era depicted in the movie. Even though there was still a muscle car around here and there, my family had 'gone Volkswagen'. That left me stuck cruising on a Saturday nite in my mother's VW 412, a car so categorically un-sexy that my only option was to embrace its quirkiness by attaching one of those oversized novelty wind-up keys on the hatchback window. But because I was only removed by a decade from the glory days of gearheads, their cultural mark pervaded my coming of age, even as I cruised embarrassingly with my street-legal wind-up toy. There was a moment somewhere between the waning of muscle car culture and my own teen years that I felt the power and exhilaration of a souped up sedan. I was 8yrs old and visiting some family friends with my parents. There was a young adult gearhead son living in this household who'd blazed some trails in the nearby woods big enough for him to navigate his '57 Chevy through. In 1968, no one thought it was a bad idea for kids and adults alike to pile into a '57 Chevy with an incurable gearhead at the wheel and careen through the woods at, oh, 45-50mph, taking hairpin turns all the way and narrowly escaping head-on collisions with old growth fur trees. So, with my parent's blessing - and their companionship for that matter - we did just that. I felt alive! Hey, Whatever Happened To...feeling alive? A question to contemplate as we listen to 'All Things Considered' from behind the wheels of our non-descript, fuel efficient, safety rated conveyances.
Peel out,
Pete

Back to Work and School

2009-01-05T21:58:00Z

- Hello all you mouse clickers out there!
For many of you, it's back to work after a (hopefully) restorative holiday break And speaking of 'clickers' (see salutation), school is back in session too. But for high-schoolers, the real learning always takes place after 7th period, off-campus. That's when social groups form and allegiances take hold. 40+ years ago, my two older sisters had their loyalties divided between two cliques, reflective, I'm certain, of their sibling rivalry. One sister was happily ensconced with the 'Clickers' while the other was displaying all evident markers of being a 'Hood'. I was just a 5yr old squirt at the time but they would occasionally let me tag along with them to the place where these two groups hung out, the Handy Kitchen. The HK was a luncheonette in downtown Waterbury, CT with threadworn upholstered booths, sassy waitresses and - I'm half remembering and half imagining here - a surly grill man who's hair and complexion were the inspiration for the grease in the term 'greasy spoon'. As the five yr old tag-along, I remember being treated pretty well by both camps. The Hoods were more dangerous in appearance but both groups had their appeal. I remember a mock rivalry breaking out between the Hoods and the more collegiate, straight-laced Clickers as to where I would place my allegiance. Frankly ,I don't have a clue which group I chose but I seem to remember feeling more spiritually akin with the Clickers. Ironic then, that when I reached high school myself some ten years later, I was every bit the Hood, and then some. Welcome back to school all you latter-day Hoods and Clickers,

- And now for the "Hey, Whatever Happened To...?' part: Is analog photography now a skill that resides solely within the domain of professionals? Somewhere in my travels today I stumbled on some examples of scenic photography of the kind that every amateur shutterbug of a certain era with a 35mm camera and a zoom lens would to try their hand at; blissful orange sunrises, deserted beaches with a golden hue, that kind of thing. You could look at this stuff and practically hear the accompanying Bobby Goldsboro soundtrack. Weird, but seeing those photos today made me nostalgic for a time when we photog-neophytes (whose limited talents have been largely forgiven by digitization) would try our hand at that kind of thing. Well, not this photog-neophyte, since I wasn't even remotely talented, but...people I knew. 30 years ago, I was living the hungry life in New York when I made a plan with a freind to meet late one Saturday night after he'd finished a shift of waiting tables at a Times Square tourist trap. This was just a 'Saturday nite, hang out late kindof a thing', but he met me with the news that he'd made a date with a woman which was to take place at the break of dawn the next morning on the eastern tip of Long Island. Greenport, specifically. The woman had just gotten an expensive Cannon...something, something with a zoom lens (so much for my familiarity with photo-jargon) and Greenport, she said, was ideal for the kinds of 'morning mist and horses behind post-and-beam fences' photo-ops that amateurs of that era relished. The catch: she had a 'friend' who would be accompanying her, so it was up to my friend to recruit me so that things evened out - boy, girl, boy, girl. The whole endeavor required my friend and I to take a 1AM train out of Penn Station to the eastern -most station on Long Island, where we'd be met by the two women. From there, the four of us would be off shutter-bugging the sunrise and the horses and the barns...Well, the double date was way, way up there in the category of 'dates that you hate'. The four of us couldn't have been more incompatible. My friend - a better than average shutter-bug with a decent camera himself - ended up being grievously offended by his date's disregard for the protocol of photography. He was especially turned off by the way she treated her Cannon something, something with the zoom something. Watching her indifferently lying it on a beach where sand swept over it and potentially scratched the lens was enough to make him wonder whether he'd missed her mug shot in Photography Magazine under the heading of 'Wanted: for wanton offenses against the integrity of the craft.' As for my date, I don't even remember two words spoken between us for the 4 or so hours we were together. Her name is something I probably never retained. By about the 3rd hour, my friend and I just abandoned any pretense that we were actually enjoying their company, and marked our surrender of good manners by engaging in private jokes that were intentionally aimed over the heads of the two girls. I think the clincher was when I started doing impressions of some of the farm animals that we were seeing. There was a horse in particular that was engaging in an odd form of barnyard behavior that I'd never seen before: at the post and beam fence, he extended his predictably equestrian horsey front teeth and began to gouge the fence beam with them, as if practicing some barnyard form of dental hygiene. It's when I stood next to him and in a gentle mock, thrust my maxillary into the same beam and began knawing at it in unison with the horse, that the girls announced their intention to take us immediately back to the train station, with no diversions whatsoever, not even for red lights, if memory serves. Somewhere, all these years later, there might be, on the wall of some forgotten hallway, in a forlorn frame, a photo from that day. If it exists, it's safe to assume that it was preserved by someone who's now a wife and mother, as a testament to the artistry of her youth. But if you look closely and see something foriegn in the picture, it might be the magnified effects of a lens carelessly scratched by sand. And since this supposed photo on this forgotten wall somewhere was framed by the eye of a non-professional, look for an unintended subject in the photo, far from the center of the shot, inadvertently caught in frame, mimicking the nearby farm animals. 'Glad to have made a contribution to the worldwide cannon of work referred to only in the past tense these days, as 'amatuer photography'.
Click Out,
Pete

Maiden Post

2008-12-31T22:15:00Z

Hey there all you wanderers of the blogosphere who probably stumbled onto this site purely by accident, welcome to 'Hey, Whatever Happened To...?'. And this being the last day of 2008, I wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year, with improved financial portfolios and a new national leader who is up to the task with which he's faced.

Since this is my maiden post, I'll explain the name; Hey, Whatever Happened To...?' was originally chosen for purely mercenary reasons, not so much for the blog, but for an associated (and yet un-launched) website. Without any brilliant inspiration, I simply imagined a website that would have a nostalgic theme, offering entries on the stars of yesteryear, and posting updates as to where they are now. 'Pretty pedestrian idea, yes, but conceivably one that had revenue potential. Well, gathering content for such a site is a gargantuan task that I'm taking my time on. Meanwhile, with rights to the domain name, I took some advice from various quarters - people in my life who said 'Hey, you're a writer. You have to start a blog!'

So here I am, trying to figure out how the name of this blog can be justified by the content within it. On the face of it, 'Hey, Whatever Happened To...?' sounds like a lament. 'Not my intention. I will puposefully be avoiding a 'stuck in the past..ahh, these kids today!' tone. At it's best, I hope for this blog to serve as a jumping off point for some talk about things that have diminished or are no longer seem in evidence in modern life whatsoever, and and yet are worth recalling. There might be an opportunity in that to look at contemporary life through a more illuminating lens. Beyond that, the name might have absolutely no relevance to the content, as I post random thoughts, ideas in the making, samples of my writing (both the polished pieces and the rough works in progress), reader's posts, and if I carry carry through on one of my New Years resolutions, a video of a yet unstaged one-man show that I hope to have on its feet by year's end.

Well, that will do it for now. I'll try to make the site a bit more attractive over the next few days and weeks. Maybe some pics - although some would argue that pics of myself might have a contrary effect on the site's attractiveness. We'll see...

And on the subject of 'Hey, Whatever Happened To.. on this New Years Eve; Does anyone remember when Guy Lombardo was synonymous with this day? Now it's...well, I guess it's Ryan Seacreast, via Dick Clark. 30 years ago, I was green and 18, and had recently moved to the big city and taken a job at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the place where Guy Lombardo tappped his baton as couples on the dance floor in front of him tripped the light fantastic. Alas, by the time I arrived on the scene, Guy had joined the great mirror ball in the sky and his nephew, Bill Lombardo, had taken over at the helm. So, in case you're part of a previously closeted underground cult, here it is; a blogpost registering a note of nostalgia for that sentimental and elegant rendition of Auld Lang Syne perennially brought to you by the stylings of...Bill Lombardo.

Happy New Year,
Pete

Welcome

2008-12-30T17:17:10Z

Welcome to my blog. Please check back soon for new entries.