3 am

Awake, empty-handed, in the darkness with the sound of rain
rattling inside the cheap metal gutters like muffled drum-fire.

The warm, soft smell of your hair pressed close still rich

in the sharp empty chill of the rented room.

 

The sough of the distant highway your night-breathing

rising and falling as though you're traveling faraway.

 

(Years ago I was working on the road, doing the most grinding dirt-nanny work and staying in a cheap motel in Medford, which is kind of the lower GI-tract of Oregon. I awoke in deep night from a dream of home and wife and, just for a moment, thought she was there with me.

She was not.

That was a very long night.)

Not A Day Goes By

I woke late this morning.

Well, late for me, used to the cold and dark of 4:00 or 5:00am on days when a drill rig or contractor was waiting, but I'd had another night of broken bad sleep. Between the knees and the Little Cat (who continued her tradition of rising loud and proud several times a night) I was still tired and disoriented as I made the coffee and checked my phone to see what had happened overnight.

I found that I no longer shared the Earth with Stephen Sondheim.

It's strange-funny how life and time transmute us and the world around us.

The Girl is a high school sophomore, and if she can be categorized as part of a high school clique - and I assume there still are cliques; jocks, nerds, stoners, normies - she's a "dramat", part of the thespian society which is delightfully strong in her otherwise-fairly-sketchy-urban high school.

She's not a dramat-dramat, not an aspiring actor with all the baggage associated with that. She's a  "techie", running her sound booth or light board for the shows. In fact, she has a fairly side-eyed view of actors, whom she blames for insisting on missing their cues or marks and messing up the tech. After the fall musical she came home cussing the actors so vituperatively that we ad to watch the Mel Brooks The Producers for the moment that Zero Mostel tells Kenneth Mars; "Here! Take the pistol! Go to the theater! Kill the actors!"

Because of her enthusiasm I've been pulled back into a world I left forty years ago; musical theater.

When you stop to think about it, the American musical is a very weird thing. How do you explain a particular subset of live drama where at random moments the actors break into song? Is there anything even remotely similar in real life?

But if they're good, musicals can be powerful in ways that no straight play can be.

Stephen Sondheim created those sorts of musicals.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties I was, like The Girl, a sort of peripheral member of the college Green Room and the people who hung around it. I had a bit part in Romeo and Juliet, not for my acting chops but because I fenced and the director wanted some realism for the opening fight scenes.

 
It was though the Green Roomers that I found musical theater, and the towering figure at that time was Sondheim.

Keep in mind that in the Seventies and early Eighties a Broadway ticket was an expense, not an investment. You could get a pass to a matinee for twenty bucks, and if you hit the TKTS booth in Times Square even an evening performance for maybe twice that - a bit of a stretch for  a college student but not insane, not the eighty or hundred dollars (or more..!) you'll pay now.

So I learned musical theater at the feet of Sondheim.

Oh, sure, I went to see the other sorts of stuff showing in the late Seventies; Nine, Side by Side, Barnum, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (and is there ever a property that has worn less well..?) and, in 1979, Sweeney Todd.

Sweeney was a thunderbolt, a revelation, that you could tell a story - a grim, dark, convoluted, intensely gripping story, through song alone. Dialogue was minimal, just bridges between the numbers, and the songs themselves were jewelboxes; rich, melodic and harmonic while at the same time jarring and atonal and as dark and twisted as the tale itself.

I was enthralled, in my cheap matinee seat in Row GG.

So, a convert to the Church of Sondheim, I waited impatiently for his next work of genius. That came two years later, and I couldn't wait for Opening Night. I scored preview tickets for Merrily We Roll Along.

 
I knew that the original was a Kaufman and Hart property from the Thirties, something about a dramat who makes it big by selling his soul, but that was all I knew other than it would be Sondheim and Hal Prince, those colossi who bestrode the Broadway world while we petty men crept between their legs to marvel at what they wrought.

So, dressed in my "business casual" that was as dressy as I could afford to fit in with the Broadway crowd, I waited eagerly in the dark for the curtain to rise.

It did...and that was the high point of the show.

What's peculiar is that Merrily seems to have grown in the telling. It's been revived several times, successfully, and is supposedly considered among the better Sondheim/Furth properties - perhaps not up there with Pacific Overtures or Company but better than The Frogs...

The 1981 production was a resounding disaster. 

Even a theater noob like me could sense it coming, as the muddled story and interchangeable cast struggled through the backwards-chronology towards the first act curtain. The intermission applause had a tentative quality that boded poorly for the second act which turned out to be as poorly received as the first. Along with the rest of the audience I was sort of stunned. This was a Stephen Sndheim show? The book, not the songs, was largely the problem, attempting to lift the story from the cynical opening to the sunshine-y final curtain and largely producing, instead, the sort of grim, forced brightness of a Hallmark commercial pitch.

The original run notoriously closed after 16 performances, the worst a Sondheim show had ever done up to that point.

I read that the failure of Merrily hit Sondheim hard. He considered abandoning Broadway altogether. And, indeed, his Broadway work was greatly reduced; Sunday in the Park with George in 1984, his first collaboration with James Lapine and Into The Woods three years later.

In a life that has featured as many failures as successes - as I imagine many, probably most lives do - it may sound odd that the immediate memory the news of that Sondheim would never again write the music and lyrics for a musical play brought to my mind was that of one of his great failures.

Even in failure, though,the enjoyment of musical theater I'd come to, largely though Sondheim's talents, never left me so that so many years later I could sit and enjoy Wicked and In The Heights with my neo-dramat daughter.

Is there a point to this ramble?

Perhaps only that we touch each others lives in odd and unpredictable ways; that the life now ended touched me, and mine touched my child's, and here we are, waiting in dark for the curtain to rise on another production for another day.

Upon the waters

Four years ago my father, the man I always called "The Master Chief" in this place, died.

My mother, his wife, lingered on another three years until she, too, died in the spring of the year, just a little over a year ago.

I sat beside them both in their final days, as their bodies followed where their...souls? Spirits? Minds? The part of them that made them who they were, the person that they had been, had already gone.

Both passed from that which I called "...the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead." to unlife full of years and - although no more ready for that passage than any of us is, or will ever be - full of lives well-lived.

Today a small group of their family - son and daughter, cousins, niece and nephew - and those relatives' beloveds gathered in a nondescript little rented room in a small town on the east end of Fourth Lake, the largest of the "Fulton Chain of Lakes" in the Adirondak Mountains of New York state.

The remnants of Jack and Carol - father and mother, aunt and uncle - stood as they had in life beside one another, only just as small rectangular boxes set on a table scattered with books of photographs and memories of the lives of the ashes within.

It was the sort of barely-comfortable gathering you'd find anywhere a group of virtual strangers met to spend one last time with dead people.

Hardly anyone knew what to say, and only my sister had the courage to openly weep for the loss of our father and mother. Several of us told stories of Carol McMillan and Jack Lawes as we remembered them, or through memories of our times with them.

My cousin's (and her wife's) happy little Westie helped lighten the mood by being, well, a happy small dog. I had a flight to catch tomorrow morning so I left early, with the others still talking amongst themselves in the rustic room lit with the filtered sun of early afternoon.

I wandered down to the shore of the lake, the clear water bright with wavelets.

This place was particular to my father, who was born and grew up not far away and whose relatives had owned one of the many "summer resorts" along the north shore, although much more modest than the luxurious Gilded Age hotel my sister had booked for our parents' memorial.

I sat and drank a draft to their memory, to the place that my father had loved and had brought his bride to and she had, in turn, come to love.

When I wrote about my father's death four years ago I spoke of how adrift I felt that he was gone:

"As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone."

I won't pretend that I was gracious or cheerful about traveling cross-continent to stand beside the silent ashes of my father and mother. I won't be polite and say it was a pleasure, or that I wanted to make the journey. I was a right bastard, sis, and I made a difficult time more difficult for you. I'm sorry, that's the damnedest part of who I am.

But for all my bitching and moaning in the end I'm glad I came over those mountains and seas and spoke, in vain, to their silent ashes.

For, as I've mentioned before in this place; as children and parents we make an unspoken bargain.

As parents we will see our children into the world.

We will help them grow straight and strong, honest and truthful, kind and loving. We will set the path before them, the path into the world and through it, as best we can.

And then we, as children, will see our parents out of the world.

Love and care for them, listen to and treasure them, and, finally, see them laid down in death as peaceful and beloved as we can make them.

As they set us forth upon the waters we fulfill the promise that will see them home safe to harbor. And then be the quay where they came to rest; to bear witness of their voyage and the doings thereof, great and small, fine and coarse, large and little. That, in us, their memory will live as long as we do.

And so we have. So I have. I am no longer adrift, no longer bereft. I am without them, the people who helped make me who I am, but I will never be without them. I am their logbook, their testament, their living memory. I, my sister, those we love and tell of our parents and their lives.

It is ours now to take forward from here; mine, and all of us who knew them and loved them.

So I stand, at rest, by the waters of the deep cold lake where my father and mother have themselves come to rest. Their journey together, and their journey together with me and all their beloveds, is ended, and their great works, the works of their lives, are done.

Now they are ours to carry on.

Fifteen

Well.

It's that day of the year again, isn't it, love?

That day where once, or twice, or a handful of times I stop and really think about you.

Not in the usual sort of passing way that has become your visits to me of late; the random idle wonder at the sight of a dark head in a gaggle of teenage girls, or the fleeting memory of a still small bundle of yellow flannel jammie.

But a dead stop remembering you as you were, and remembering me as you were to me.

Not the tiny day-old baby girl that was all that you would ever be. That was your mom, who carried you all those long and fretful months. But to me; the gangly girl you might have been, or the petulant and angry teenager I hoped you'd avoid becoming, or the compact dark young woman who would one day stand over my grave and remember me.

Instead I got to stand over yours, and now I am almost all there is; your mother and I and a handful of our friends, to remember you.

I'm sorry you never got the chance to grow up into all those dfferent people, darlin'. I miss those people and all the other people you might have been but never could be. I wish that I was going home tonight to find you pissed off and arguing with your sullen little brother and pushing aside your goody-goody little sister and shouting at you to lighten up and lay off your siblings, which says something pretty brutal about how much I miss the you I'll never get to know.

I do enjoy our little visits on this day, troubling as they are at times.

I wish you could stay for a while longer. But tomorrow you'll be gone. Again. As you were, and as you always will be, even though in your quiet and ephemeral way you'll be here as long as I am. That doesn't really count. Not next to the you that isn't here with me.

And, look; it's time to go already. Yes, I'll miss you. No, I'm sorry, you can't stay longer. Yes. I'll think of you again.

I always do.

Goodbye, love.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Over a distance of ground

So no sooner was I inundated by public grief over the suicide of one actor came news of the peaceful death of another:

"A gutsy broad who rode her life and its hardships with self-effacing dignity: “You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing,” she said."

What I remember about Betty Joan Perske - better known as Lauren Bacall - was that when I was a young man, living in the world when young men and young women had very little style and bearing (not that young people have ever had much of either, regardless of their times) she seemed the ideal combination of gutty, sensuous, and confident style and mature, intelligent bearing.

That was pretty much the sum of what she did on screen; in a sense she wasn't a "star" or an "actor" but a character actor whose character was so compelling that she became a star without really having to do more than act the same character in whatever part she was cast.

But, damn, was that character terrific. As that character she was the woman you wanted to fall for, the one you wanted to fall for you, the one who was so desireable, so terrific, that the two of you together would be more than you were as individuals.

And - not an altogether unimportant thing for a young man - Bacall's character introduced me to the idea that men and women could flirt intently and intelligently, that an adult relationship could be much more than just what they showed in "adult" films. Here's a great example, from The Big Sleep:



If that's not one of the sexist goddamn scenes ever filmed I can't think of many others.

I don't want to use this to get maudlin about Betty Joan's - Lauren's - death. I didn't know her or anyone who did. So far as I can tell she had a rich, full life and died full of years and honors, and I can't think of a better way to leave this world, and from what little I know it appears that she covered that distance of ground very well.

Her passing simply reminds me of the affection I will always have for the character she played, now preserved forever in silver salts and black to beguile, I hope, other young men as they venture into the unknown lands beyond their childhoods.

Friday Jukebox II: Northern California Kick Ass Edition

OK, nepotism confession time; the bass player for this group - The Mermen out of San Francisco is my ex-brother-in-law Allen Whitman.But ex-family-connections aside (and losing my friendship with Allen was and is perhaps the thing I still regret the most about my detonation of my first marriage) it is more than just nepotism that makes me post this video here. These guys genuinely rock, and they are a sort of kind of odd fixture in the northern CA surfer scene.

Which is pretty amazing, because as I understand it neither Whitman nor the lead guitarist (Jim Thomas) can surf across a flat pond on a calm day.

Be patient (or forward to about 2:20 when the rocking really begins) because this song, "Casbah", is one of their more kick-ass, except for the very vivid memory I have of one show of their I went to see at some little shithole bar somewhere in the dumpy part of Santa Rosa, CA, back in the Nineties.

A typical Merman song is not quite as tight as this one - there's a lot of noodling about and long soloing. And there's not a lot of FM radio 3:40-style discipline. A Mermen tune goes...well, as long as it needs to. And there's a lot of very astral spaciness there. So there we were, just surfin' along with the Mermen (all of us with our earplugs in - these guys are LOUD) on our ride to...where-ever.

Until suddenly the boys kicked over into a beautiful, incredible, perfectly terrifying instrumental cover of the Rolling Stone's "Paint It Black".
I wish I could find you a YouTube video of that cover. It fucking blistered what was left of the dingy paint off the walls and knocked us out of our chairs. It hammered the freaky dancers who had been ambling around the tiny dance floor to their knees. It made the sun come out into the northern California night; it made the mountains tremble and the seas run red with blood.

It was everything fucking great about rock n' roll.


Damn. I miss those guys.

Straightedge

I'm 54 today.

It's just another day - I was up in the West Hills drilling a soil boring this morning, stopped by the shop around noon (I did treat myself to a sushi stop for lunch...) and then legged it across the street to drop in on of our construction projects for a check. At the moment I'm taking a break from writing up a soils report to post this.

I'll be back later tonight with some more reflections on twoscore-years-and-fourteen, but right at the moment, thinking back over the people I've been and the place I've gone, y'know what I was reminiscing about?

Straight razors.

It started with a brief visit to my friends Maia and Q here, where our heroine and her husband Mike visit an old-school barber shop in their home in Colorado. As part of the treatment the barber gets out the straight razor to shave Mike, and I was instantly transported back to the Division barbershop on Ardennes Street back in the Eighties.Because back in the day I still had hair, and I got a big kick out of getting a flat-top #1 cut that made me look the spit of my old man in his Navy crackerjacks back in 1944. And the best part of the whole gig was the big finish, where the grouchy old Army barber got out the shaving gear.

He would heat up the lather and strop the straight razor, and then it was all hot shave cream from ear to ear and down the back of my neck.

But before I could relax into the smooth heat he was there with the blade.

There was always something electrifying about the kiss of cold steel along the back of my neck. Maybe it was just the zing of cold after heat...or maybe it was knowing that one slip and things would get messy real quick. But I loved the clean feeling it produced, laying my nape and sidewalls down to the skin.

He never did slip, and I always tipped him high and walked out feeling like a real hard boy with my beret pulled down to show off the high whitewalls.

Well, time and genes have combined to give me whitewalls all the way up, these days. And I do my own trimming at home with an electric razor. I never found a barber outside the service who used the old straight blade after I left the active service. One of the barbers trimming my kiddo's hair told me that it's now against most state regulations, what with fears of AIDS and other blood-borne diseases.

Too bad.

Funny, all the things you do and those you enjoy; the cold steel shave up the back of the neck would seem to be an odd thing to miss. And yet, of all things, I do.