How many deaths should we expect to face, in a given year? Of people we know, I mean. Not our nearest and dearest, but our friends-of-friends, our co-workers' wives or fathers, children we've met, or the old friends we rarely talk to these days? Of that great outer circle, how many should we expect, each year, to hear have died?
I'm also not talking about well-foreshadowed, long-time-coming deaths. Not death as a merciful end to long illness, or even as the fitting culmination to a long and good life. I mean here, very specifically, death accidental and sudden. Unexpected. Unforeseen, and unforeseeable.
I received a phone message from a close friend with whom I usually communicate only by email. So I knew he had bad news. I wondered, as I waited to call him back, whether his relationship had ended. But it turned out to be much weirder, and more horrible (not that an ending relationship isn't horrible, especially when two people, like my friend and his partner, have had so much happiness, and weathered so much turmoil, over their years together. But when a relationship ends, there's still the possibility of healing, as long as both partners live. Healing for them, separately, at least, and sometimes even for their life together.) The real news he gave me was that someone we'd both known for half our lifetimes, someone who had for some years been my very close friend, but whom I'd lost touch with in the last decade, had died in an accident. Unexpected. Horrible. Particularly horrible, in her case, because she'd been run down by a train as she sat and tried to start her car, caught on the tracks.
I spoke to her sister, when she called me some time later. And I managed a letter to her husband, months after, embarrassed by how long I'd put it off. But for weeks after her death, months, all I could do was think of her, of her name-- Janet-- run through our memories together, jobs and travels and relationships and children, a whole panoply of life changes. All those scenes were tainted by the sharp acid of her life's end, marred as old cherished photos with a heavy red DEAD stamp across them.
I've known two people killed by trains, now-- isn't that bizarre? Getting hit by a train always seems so weirdly unlikely, not to say stupid. Trains are so big, and noticeable. They don't come at you all that quickly. There's time to run, surely. But not as much time as you'd think, I guess, because every year people do die, my two friends aren't the only ones. The second one was also the most recent death, a co-worker from Barnes & Noble in Chicago: Lance. He was a good guy. He was killed crossing a street-level track of the El on his bicycle, I imagine on his way home from work. He'd taken over my job, when I left there. The last death by El train in Chicago was, the papers told us, only in November, and I seem to remember regular reports of death or injury in the New York subways, so maybe subway trains are more dangerous then other ones, or faster, or more unpredictable.
In Lance's story, there is some justification for what happened-- bystanders said one train had just passed, and so perhaps he thought the way was clear when he went around the closed crossing gates, and never saw the second train bearing down on him from the other direction. But as for Janet? That's a confusing tale: a minor rear-ender, a late realization that a train was coming, a car that would not start, or for which she could not find the key (reports are muddled.) Onlookers said she actually got out of the car to run away, but then, bizarrely, got back into it and was hit. Inexplicable, on the surface, but when I read that, it made some sense to me-- it made the whole, truly shocking incident make sense, at least theoretically. Janet had superhuman powers of concentration. When I danced with her, or, later, assisted her in choreographing a couple shows, she could disappear into her thoughts for seconds or minutes, however long it took her to resolve the problem she'd identified, or work out the step that was nagging at her. She was a brilliant dancer, and an intelligent, intellectual woman. Her baby's crying could break her focus, but little else reached her in those moments. I imagine that as she stepped out of her father's borrowed car on the train tracks, abandoning it to destruction, some sudden revelation came to her: "I know where the spare key is-- I can still save the car!" Or perhaps she suddenly realized a problem: "Wait-- I left my cell phone on the seat. I won't be able to call and tell anyone what's happened." And so she stepped back, focusing on solving the problem, and it was too late, and she died.
It's a stupid story, the one I've constructed to explain Jan's death. But it's a story, and that's the only point, the only source of comfort.
There have been other deaths, non-train-related, before and between Jan's and Lance's. Two men in their sixties, with histories of bad health-- less difficult to believe, though still unexpected, out of the blue. Two others were children, suddenly still and breathless in their beds, or even in their mother's arms. One was a dancer I worked with once, years ago, and shared some friends with, so that our paths crossed periodically as time wore on. He was discovered-- his body was-- naked, left out in the desert in Southern Nevada somewhere. I've never heard if anybody knows how he died, or how long his body lay there before someone found it, or whether there was any investigation. Knowing his proclivities for self-destructiveness, I assume this was a murder-- a drug deal gone bad? A hideously wrong choice in a pick-up bar late at night? But I know no facts, and the friend who told me didn't know him well enough to ask questions when he heard of it.
Janet, Lance. Mitch, Michael, Anika, Max, Sheridan. I wish there were some overarching moral here, some meaning, lesson, insight. But the inherent point to these deaths is that they are pointless, unredeemed by romance or pretty reason or proud-chested nobility. These are meaningless deaths, devastating to their families and friends and, as one in their ever-widening circles of influence, me. And while Death has always been a particular source of terror for me, a kind of horrifying fascination, I date this new role it's playing to one particular incident, and what I remember as a particularly gruesome and unsatisfying death, which I witnessed.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when I emerged from the West Fourth Street subway station in Greenwich Village, stuck and struggling to get downtown to work; and when I found myself facing the hordes of silent people strewn up and down 6th Avenue, staring hopelessly south (famous from pictures in Time and Newsweek, you've all seen them, haven't you?); and when I turned to look over my shoulder to discover that great, terrible, unreal, unmatched pair of gashes, spewing smoke and flame, in the Twin Towers; and when I dodged around the statue figures and ran to 7th Avenue to see if the 1 line was running, and then turned to go down 7th instead, to Tribeca, to work, thinking all the while, "What the hell can I do?", dialing and dialing my cell phone, trying to get through to anybody; I experienced a series of perceptions, like progressive clicks through a telephoto camera, in increasing magnification.
Click: Look at all the paper flying out of the towers. They look like birds flying around a cathedral.
Click: Those can't be papers. I'm much too far away to see papers so clearly, and they're much too high. I'm seeing whole pieces of furniture, probably chunks of wallboard torn to pieces, chairs and tables and whole desks sucked out to flutter like a flock of pigeons.
And when I heard someone on the sidewalk say, as I ran past-- a male voice, but I never looked to identify him, have no idea who it was-- "There goes another one",
Click: That speck has arms and legs windmilling wildly. That is a human being flying, falling there, fluttering with the falling chairs and tables, screaming probably, falling, falling.
And I looked down at the street in front of me, and didn't look up again.
Who was that person? I knew one victim of the 9/11 disaster, but I doubt it was her. Her name was Pam, and she was a client at the studio I managed then; an executive with Aon, and a lovely, pleasant, and always professional woman (which many of our clients in those days weren't, so she stood out.) Whenever I've read about different survivors' experiences in the towers, I've wondered about Pam, what happened to her, how she died.
But who was that person I saw falling? There were many that morning-- the voice on the street said "there goes another one", and we've all seen the footage of victims clinging to the building, letting go, leaping. Was the person I saw falling, or jumping? Was what I saw deliberate? Hopeless? Hopeful? Did they hope to survive, somehow, or were they only choosing to escape the smoke and the horror of being burnt alive? Were there others with them inside, before they went out the window? Did they all discuss it? Debate the options, and then line up to jump?
Did they think they might survive?
What is that person's story? What was his or her name?
My single clear, coherent thought on the morning of Tuesday, 9/11/2001, as I watched the North tower disappear into a gut of flames and smoke, the South tower still standing there, to collapse less than an hour later, was, "We'll never feel safe again." I meant my generation, which had been just young enough to miss the draft for Viet Nam, who had been spared immediate, present violence and the death of our friends, brothers, and neighbors in war. I was raised with the profound conviction that life was safe here, good here, that although humans could do awful things to one another, that was in other places; it wouldn't happen to us so long as we exercised reasonable caution, locked our doors at night, and avoided drugs and bad parts of town after dark. As we walked uptown on Tuesday, 9/11, me and the other refugees from the studio, and a friend who'd been caught downtown at jury duty, we scanned the skies for other errant airplanes. We stayed as close as possible to the river, where no skyscrapers could fall on us. We joked about these things we were doing, but we did them. And we talked of news footage we'd seen, that our walk seemed to palely reflect: refugees from destroyed villages in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Holy Land, trudging vacant-eyed away from utter destruction and into... what? Leaving their ruined homes and the bodies of their neighbors and loved ones, not knowing what they were walking into. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
In our case, it never has. There has been no new attack, no war within our borders. But the thing that has stuck with me even as I've left New York, moved twice to different cities and become comfortable again living and moving among tall buildings, is my loss of faith that the world will make sense. That life will. That death does.
The thing about 9/11 that was most difficult for me to come to grips with was that it was intended, those nearly-three thousand deaths were meant to happen, people planned it. But still, the manner of those deaths, the specific chain of circumstances that ended all those lives, that part was not planned. Osama bin laden, the man who inspired in me a newfound belief in violent execution-- I prayed that he would be captured and brought to this country so that we could publicly stone him to death as the opening of the Salt Lake City Olympics, and that's not a joke, and I think I would have flown there to take part-- did not designate how many deaths by smoke inhalation, how many by crushing, how many by... whatever other means. Those means, those stories, were accidental.
And in that, the nameless, arms-windmilling human being I saw falling or leaping from the Twin Towers on 9/11-- I can't even remember which tower it was now-- stands out as the leader of a parade of accidental death victims I have known since. Pam, Mitch, Michael, Anika, Janet, Max, Sheridan, Lance, and others less closely connected to me. There is no real story, only individual, uncompleted endings.
And where's the comfort in that?
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Reviews: NYC
I lived for 9 1/3 years in New York City. And in that almost-decade I learned, unequivocally, the exact meaning of the phrase “love-hate relationship”.
I refused to admit the “love” part for a long time, so that’s where we’ll start now. The great thing about New York, the thing which, simply, no other city on earth can ever hope to match, is the great accessibility it offers. Where else can you find yourself sharing a cabaret table with some hero from your childhood, or live with a bunch of the greatest paintings in the world practically in your backyard? No place, plain and simple.
When I first moved to Manhattan, I lived in a basement studio in a crumbling brownstone on West 89th St. Horrible apartment (especially considering I’d just left a brand new 2000 square foot, two story, three bedroom, three bathroom house that I loved—and owned! But never mind that….) But it had a great location, on the Upper West Side, half a block from Central Park and just ten minutes’ walk from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surely one of the great destinations in all the world. The Met is everything a museum should be: huge, confusing, chock-full of interesting surprises, and constantly changing. It has a spectacular Egyptian wing, and a recreated Frank Lloyd Wright room. It has ancient furniture and arms and armor, and more artwork than anyone could ever comprehend. I’d learned to be fascinated by the place from afar as a child, by reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a novel which I heartily endorse for anyone, of any age. And, moving to Manhattan, of course I spent long afternoons at the Museum, and found it to be one of the very few places I’ve ever come to know, after years of imagining, which not only fulfilled my dreams, but surpassed them.
And so, after reading all the plaques on mummies and Greek statuary and Babylonian temples and Medieval monstrances, I eventually wandered into the Impressionist rooms and started staring at van Goghs and Monets. And I defy anyone, anywhere, to spend any time at all staring at original van Goghs and Monets and not be changed, utterly. There’s the obvious passion, and the entirely unique ways of seeing ordinary things, and all the mysteries of creation and light and color and utter insanity. And there’s history and story and love and destruction and beauty. And craftsmanship—you tell me how Monet got so much dimension out of a flat piece of canvas. But the most amazing thing to me about those paintings was that they were there, just across the park, within easy walking distance of my shoddy apartment, practically mine.
And then those heroes. I worked at Starbucks for a couple of those years, at various locations on the Upper West Side, which might just as easily be named Actor Ground Zero. Don’t ask me why. But in my first store, all the Baldwin brothers stopped by at one time or another (Alec: powerful and scary, Billy: sex on a stick, Steven: weird but endlessly charming), and Nathan Lane used to hang out, and a bunch of TV stars on their summer hiatus. And in my second store, just two blocks over on Broadway, both Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper stopped in (although not together, which would have been a better story but just too surreal), and Mandy Patinkin hummed Sondheim under his breath while I made his latte (I swear), and Audra MacDonald bought Chai Lattes and Linda Hamilton from Terminator 2 turned out to be much prettier in person, not least because she laughed at all my jokes, and Joel Schumacher brought a whole bevy of cute boys in, and Ally Sheedy lived upstairs and stopped by at least once or twice a day (she drinks soy milk, and looks harried but always very sweet). I became friends with Patricia Kalember, an actress I’d adored on Thirtysomething and Sisters. And Caroline Rhea, who was hot off Sabrina then, lived around the corner and stopped by for steamed milk and to gossip.
And then one night I went to see a friend in a show at the Duplex, and realized halfway through that the person jostling my chair was Steven Schwartz, composer of Wicked, Pippin, and, among others, Godspell, which marked a high point in my teenage musical career. Now, I’m not a huge fan of most of Schwartz’ work, but good lord—Godspell was huge for me. And there we were, practically sitting on each other’s laps, crowded into about two square feet together watching the same show at the Duplex’ dingy little cabaret room. There’s just no place like New York for accessibility.
But (and here’s where we start getting to the hate part of the equation) would you like to know why there’s such fabulous accessibility in NYC? It’s partly because the damn place is so small—you can walk the entire island of Manhattan without too much trouble, and the lower half, where all the parts you’ve heard about are, is barely big enough for a bus ride—but it’s also because the nature of the city reduces everybody, no matter how fabulous, to the lowest common denominator.
It’s ugly, and mean, and it’s small. Small, people. Tiny. Miniscule. Lots of crowded, tiny spaces all stacked up on top of each other and jockeying for position. Picture the most annoying, high-pressure saleswoman you know. Now picture her closet—so full the door won’t close, and with more shoe boxes than you can count stacked up, stuffed in, and bursting forth from it. Probably overflowing—if you look closely you’ll see more thousand dollar cardboard boxes stacked outside the closet door, and underneath the window, and around all the furniture. That’s New York City, folks. Overcrowded, overly pretentious, overflowing to swamp everything else around it.
New is not known for its architecture, and it’s not revered for its amazing city planning. Central Park does get some kudos—and I have a few gripes about that which I’ll get to later. But for the most part, New York City is famous not for the city itself, but just because of all the stuff that happens to be there. This may seem like splitting hairs, but consider: whereas Chicago is revered for making the most of its waterfront, and for rising up repeatedly in the face of destruction and adversity; and whereas New Orleans is celebrated for its slow, sexy, uniquely bayou pace and indulgence, which infuses the food and the music and the very streets; and whereas even Los Angeles is known for its maddening, spread-all-to-hell-and-gone geography, the only thing intrinsic to New York that people talk about is its “energy”, which I think is really just a euphemism for the dislike most of its social/racial groups seem to feel for each other. People in New York really don’t like each other much, and their antipathy is heightened by the fact that the they’re forced into such close proximity day in and day out. There’s a myth that Manhattan is full of creative energy and productive energy, that the confluence of movers and shakers there fills the streets with such a fertile, abundant atmosphere that anyone with the slightest modicum of ambition can dip into it and thus manifest their own dearest desires. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What fills the streets of NYC, kids, is competition. Ambition brings people there, because the place is the center of so many industries. But ambition doesn’t get you far when everyone you meet on the street has it, too, in equal or greater measure to yours. You have to fight them all, and the ones who win do so not because their vision is purest or most heartfelt, but because they have the greatest talent for ruthlessness. This is an entirely different gift from whatever vision of creativity brought them to the city in the first place. Sometimes it can coexist with those dreams, but sometimes it occludes them. New York City is full of once-creative or visionary people who have become merely good at business. It is, in other words, the world capitol of mediocrity, where everything must surrender to the demands of competition.
But on the other hand, even mediocrity can look pretty damn impressive if there’s enough of it. New York City can’t claim the best of much of anything these days—Broadway is certainly not where the most interesting theater is being produced, and in this age of instant communications designers, artists, writers, innovators in any medium can much more easily exist elsewhere and still get noticed. But NYC is still the most, the world’s center, the place where people and things congregate, where new things will at least be discussed and imported for scrutiny, even if they don’t originate there.
It’s the New York conundrum, to my way of thinking. An ugly place, not nearly as inviting as it should be; a thoroughly annoying city with a populace one wants to slap hard; and yet a place with one particular wonder, which is that everything is there, and everyone can be found, and whatever dreams or heroes you’ve ever cherished, in New York City they have an address and a corner coffeeshop where you can find, meet, and chat with them. Whether this inspires you and enables you to manifest those dreams in your own life exactly as you’ve always wanted, or convinces you that no dreams are real and all human accomplishment is ultimately sad, sordid, and small depends, I suppose, entirely on your personality. For me, both lessons applied.
Oh well.
Next week: Summer Movies!
I refused to admit the “love” part for a long time, so that’s where we’ll start now. The great thing about New York, the thing which, simply, no other city on earth can ever hope to match, is the great accessibility it offers. Where else can you find yourself sharing a cabaret table with some hero from your childhood, or live with a bunch of the greatest paintings in the world practically in your backyard? No place, plain and simple.
When I first moved to Manhattan, I lived in a basement studio in a crumbling brownstone on West 89th St. Horrible apartment (especially considering I’d just left a brand new 2000 square foot, two story, three bedroom, three bathroom house that I loved—and owned! But never mind that….) But it had a great location, on the Upper West Side, half a block from Central Park and just ten minutes’ walk from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surely one of the great destinations in all the world. The Met is everything a museum should be: huge, confusing, chock-full of interesting surprises, and constantly changing. It has a spectacular Egyptian wing, and a recreated Frank Lloyd Wright room. It has ancient furniture and arms and armor, and more artwork than anyone could ever comprehend. I’d learned to be fascinated by the place from afar as a child, by reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a novel which I heartily endorse for anyone, of any age. And, moving to Manhattan, of course I spent long afternoons at the Museum, and found it to be one of the very few places I’ve ever come to know, after years of imagining, which not only fulfilled my dreams, but surpassed them.
And so, after reading all the plaques on mummies and Greek statuary and Babylonian temples and Medieval monstrances, I eventually wandered into the Impressionist rooms and started staring at van Goghs and Monets. And I defy anyone, anywhere, to spend any time at all staring at original van Goghs and Monets and not be changed, utterly. There’s the obvious passion, and the entirely unique ways of seeing ordinary things, and all the mysteries of creation and light and color and utter insanity. And there’s history and story and love and destruction and beauty. And craftsmanship—you tell me how Monet got so much dimension out of a flat piece of canvas. But the most amazing thing to me about those paintings was that they were there, just across the park, within easy walking distance of my shoddy apartment, practically mine.
And then those heroes. I worked at Starbucks for a couple of those years, at various locations on the Upper West Side, which might just as easily be named Actor Ground Zero. Don’t ask me why. But in my first store, all the Baldwin brothers stopped by at one time or another (Alec: powerful and scary, Billy: sex on a stick, Steven: weird but endlessly charming), and Nathan Lane used to hang out, and a bunch of TV stars on their summer hiatus. And in my second store, just two blocks over on Broadway, both Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper stopped in (although not together, which would have been a better story but just too surreal), and Mandy Patinkin hummed Sondheim under his breath while I made his latte (I swear), and Audra MacDonald bought Chai Lattes and Linda Hamilton from Terminator 2 turned out to be much prettier in person, not least because she laughed at all my jokes, and Joel Schumacher brought a whole bevy of cute boys in, and Ally Sheedy lived upstairs and stopped by at least once or twice a day (she drinks soy milk, and looks harried but always very sweet). I became friends with Patricia Kalember, an actress I’d adored on Thirtysomething and Sisters. And Caroline Rhea, who was hot off Sabrina then, lived around the corner and stopped by for steamed milk and to gossip.
And then one night I went to see a friend in a show at the Duplex, and realized halfway through that the person jostling my chair was Steven Schwartz, composer of Wicked, Pippin, and, among others, Godspell, which marked a high point in my teenage musical career. Now, I’m not a huge fan of most of Schwartz’ work, but good lord—Godspell was huge for me. And there we were, practically sitting on each other’s laps, crowded into about two square feet together watching the same show at the Duplex’ dingy little cabaret room. There’s just no place like New York for accessibility.
But (and here’s where we start getting to the hate part of the equation) would you like to know why there’s such fabulous accessibility in NYC? It’s partly because the damn place is so small—you can walk the entire island of Manhattan without too much trouble, and the lower half, where all the parts you’ve heard about are, is barely big enough for a bus ride—but it’s also because the nature of the city reduces everybody, no matter how fabulous, to the lowest common denominator.
It’s ugly, and mean, and it’s small. Small, people. Tiny. Miniscule. Lots of crowded, tiny spaces all stacked up on top of each other and jockeying for position. Picture the most annoying, high-pressure saleswoman you know. Now picture her closet—so full the door won’t close, and with more shoe boxes than you can count stacked up, stuffed in, and bursting forth from it. Probably overflowing—if you look closely you’ll see more thousand dollar cardboard boxes stacked outside the closet door, and underneath the window, and around all the furniture. That’s New York City, folks. Overcrowded, overly pretentious, overflowing to swamp everything else around it.
New is not known for its architecture, and it’s not revered for its amazing city planning. Central Park does get some kudos—and I have a few gripes about that which I’ll get to later. But for the most part, New York City is famous not for the city itself, but just because of all the stuff that happens to be there. This may seem like splitting hairs, but consider: whereas Chicago is revered for making the most of its waterfront, and for rising up repeatedly in the face of destruction and adversity; and whereas New Orleans is celebrated for its slow, sexy, uniquely bayou pace and indulgence, which infuses the food and the music and the very streets; and whereas even Los Angeles is known for its maddening, spread-all-to-hell-and-gone geography, the only thing intrinsic to New York that people talk about is its “energy”, which I think is really just a euphemism for the dislike most of its social/racial groups seem to feel for each other. People in New York really don’t like each other much, and their antipathy is heightened by the fact that the they’re forced into such close proximity day in and day out. There’s a myth that Manhattan is full of creative energy and productive energy, that the confluence of movers and shakers there fills the streets with such a fertile, abundant atmosphere that anyone with the slightest modicum of ambition can dip into it and thus manifest their own dearest desires. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What fills the streets of NYC, kids, is competition. Ambition brings people there, because the place is the center of so many industries. But ambition doesn’t get you far when everyone you meet on the street has it, too, in equal or greater measure to yours. You have to fight them all, and the ones who win do so not because their vision is purest or most heartfelt, but because they have the greatest talent for ruthlessness. This is an entirely different gift from whatever vision of creativity brought them to the city in the first place. Sometimes it can coexist with those dreams, but sometimes it occludes them. New York City is full of once-creative or visionary people who have become merely good at business. It is, in other words, the world capitol of mediocrity, where everything must surrender to the demands of competition.
But on the other hand, even mediocrity can look pretty damn impressive if there’s enough of it. New York City can’t claim the best of much of anything these days—Broadway is certainly not where the most interesting theater is being produced, and in this age of instant communications designers, artists, writers, innovators in any medium can much more easily exist elsewhere and still get noticed. But NYC is still the most, the world’s center, the place where people and things congregate, where new things will at least be discussed and imported for scrutiny, even if they don’t originate there.
It’s the New York conundrum, to my way of thinking. An ugly place, not nearly as inviting as it should be; a thoroughly annoying city with a populace one wants to slap hard; and yet a place with one particular wonder, which is that everything is there, and everyone can be found, and whatever dreams or heroes you’ve ever cherished, in New York City they have an address and a corner coffeeshop where you can find, meet, and chat with them. Whether this inspires you and enables you to manifest those dreams in your own life exactly as you’ve always wanted, or convinces you that no dreams are real and all human accomplishment is ultimately sad, sordid, and small depends, I suppose, entirely on your personality. For me, both lessons applied.
Oh well.
Next week: Summer Movies!
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
You Can Too Go Home Again
Let me tell you about dancing.
No, that’s a terrible start. Let me tell you what I miss about being a dancer.
That’s worse. And come to think of it, it’s not what I want to write about.
Start over: I was backstage a couple weeks ago, hanging out with Phil at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, where TheatreWorks was presenting Merrily We Roll Along. (Just for the record, some rag just printed a comment that the definition of a theater queen is anyone who claims he has a fix for the book of Merrily. No comment—and those of you who received any of my emails discussing what I thought about this show when it opened can just keep your mouths shut, too.) We were at the theater because Phil had to make the curtain speech—you know, the sort of flight attendant welcome to the theater thing: exits are there and there, turn off your cell phones, please, please, please buy our tickets for next year, enjoy the show. While he did that, I was hanging out backstage, saying hi to some of the actors.
One of the really nice things about TheatreWorks is that Phil is more intimately involved with the actual productions than managing directors at other theaters sometimes are. And the TheatreWorks crowd seems to believe that I have some actual role in the company, too, so people talk to me instead of looking at me sideways like I’m in the way. So this night, I was trying to stay out of the way, and chitchatting with whoever came by, and I inevitably began to think about my own stage career, and the things I miss from it.
Everybody with me now? Good. We’re talking about things I miss, what makes me feel all sad and nostalgic when I’m visiting theaters. I wish I could write about my actual career and how wonderful it was— if you want a good picture of what dancing and production shows were like in the good ol’ days, go read Larry McMurtry’s novel The Desert Rose. It’s a terrific story and the best representation of dancing in Vegas I’ve come across, on both practical and emotional levels. I’ve never been able to convey that, much as I’ve tried and wish I could.
But I can tell you what I loved about working and spending much of my life in theaters. Not “theatre”, a word proclaimed in stentorian tones while holding a skull and staring meaningfully off at the sunset. Theaters. I love theaters. I love being in them. I love every part of them, especially during the day or after the show, when the public is not invited. When the audience is there, theaters can be anything. In Las Vegas, I danced in numbers that were set in Africa, Japan, outer space, the circus, and Bible history, to name just a few. Those theaters became time machines, TVs, gargantuan pagan temples, transports to entirely unknown worlds.
But outside of show hours, they’re just themselves. They’re great big, empty boxes with terribly dusty drapes hanging along the edges, and big clunky weights and hundreds of feet of cables rattling down the side walls. And that’s the time I really love them. I can’t tell you all the reasons why. But coming into a theatre before a show starts is like loading the car before a trip that you’re really excited about—it’s full of anticipation, and wonder at what might happen, who you might see; it’s full of possibilities. Add to that the nervousness of pre-performance, the running checklist that’s always active in a dancer’s head about how much sleep he’s had, how his body’s feeling, if he’s eaten the right amount and at the right time to hit his peak of energy at the right time, whether he’s going to dance anything new that night, etc., etc., and you get a pretty exciting, energized scene. And the theater itself, well, it’s great, and big, and unworried; it’s hosted other shows before this one and will host many more after; dozens or hundreds of other dancers have passed through its doors, run onto its stage, rehearsed and performed and triumphed and failed in it. It has history, which you’re now a part of. It allows you in, it shares itself with you, when you’re working in it. Theaters, when you’re a dancer (or, no doubt, an actor, or a singer, or whatever) are your Mecca, your cathedrals, and your home, in a very real sense. As a stage performer, you may never put down roots in the sense of buying a house or much furniture. But every time you step into a new backstage, are welcomed into a new surrogate family and begin learning its idiosyncrasies, its rules and expectations, its mythology and history, you’re sort of home again.
How poetic is that, I ask you? And the shocking thing is, I pretty much believe it, regardless of how sentimental and hackneyed it sounds. Perhaps this whole theater-as-home thing is why I’ve struggled so much with feelings of rootlessness since leaving Vegas and quitting dancing ten years ago. Not only have I only rarely lived in apartments I actually liked since then, I’ve also not had the foundation of a performing family, a shared space, to fill the gap. Heaven knows during the years I was dancing, I lived in lots of places I didn’t like, and never felt particularly injured by that. But now where I go home to is a huge deal, and I get way too worried about the annoying, pedantic little details of life, like how many square feet I rent and how convenient my neighborhood is. It’s a real pain, I’ll tell you. Life was much easier when that sort of stuff didn’t matter.
The old saying is, You can’t go home again. And I understand what that means. When I go back to some of the specific theaters I worked in now, I usually end up feeling maudlin and disappointed, because things have changed, or the theaters are dark, or in some cases they’ve been completely destroyed. But on the other hand, any time I walk into any theater, I get some taste of home. It bothers me that I don’t really have a place there, anymore, that I have to concentrate on staying out of the way, and while the actors at Phil’s theaters are nice and friendly to me, I have to stay in the dressing room hallway rather than going with them into the wings, where it’s dark and friendly, because I’m not one of us anymore. I don’t belong there, I have no purpose. Because I’m no longer a performer, my place is in the audience, if anywhere. But home still exists, and I do get a taste of it sometimes, thanks to my useful partner. And I get to glance into those wings, and get a nod of recognition from the stage manager, and that’s a nice thing. I may not live at home, anymore, but it’s good to know it’s still there.
No, that’s a terrible start. Let me tell you what I miss about being a dancer.
That’s worse. And come to think of it, it’s not what I want to write about.
Start over: I was backstage a couple weeks ago, hanging out with Phil at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, where TheatreWorks was presenting Merrily We Roll Along. (Just for the record, some rag just printed a comment that the definition of a theater queen is anyone who claims he has a fix for the book of Merrily. No comment—and those of you who received any of my emails discussing what I thought about this show when it opened can just keep your mouths shut, too.) We were at the theater because Phil had to make the curtain speech—you know, the sort of flight attendant welcome to the theater thing: exits are there and there, turn off your cell phones, please, please, please buy our tickets for next year, enjoy the show. While he did that, I was hanging out backstage, saying hi to some of the actors.
One of the really nice things about TheatreWorks is that Phil is more intimately involved with the actual productions than managing directors at other theaters sometimes are. And the TheatreWorks crowd seems to believe that I have some actual role in the company, too, so people talk to me instead of looking at me sideways like I’m in the way. So this night, I was trying to stay out of the way, and chitchatting with whoever came by, and I inevitably began to think about my own stage career, and the things I miss from it.
Everybody with me now? Good. We’re talking about things I miss, what makes me feel all sad and nostalgic when I’m visiting theaters. I wish I could write about my actual career and how wonderful it was— if you want a good picture of what dancing and production shows were like in the good ol’ days, go read Larry McMurtry’s novel The Desert Rose. It’s a terrific story and the best representation of dancing in Vegas I’ve come across, on both practical and emotional levels. I’ve never been able to convey that, much as I’ve tried and wish I could.
But I can tell you what I loved about working and spending much of my life in theaters. Not “theatre”, a word proclaimed in stentorian tones while holding a skull and staring meaningfully off at the sunset. Theaters. I love theaters. I love being in them. I love every part of them, especially during the day or after the show, when the public is not invited. When the audience is there, theaters can be anything. In Las Vegas, I danced in numbers that were set in Africa, Japan, outer space, the circus, and Bible history, to name just a few. Those theaters became time machines, TVs, gargantuan pagan temples, transports to entirely unknown worlds.
But outside of show hours, they’re just themselves. They’re great big, empty boxes with terribly dusty drapes hanging along the edges, and big clunky weights and hundreds of feet of cables rattling down the side walls. And that’s the time I really love them. I can’t tell you all the reasons why. But coming into a theatre before a show starts is like loading the car before a trip that you’re really excited about—it’s full of anticipation, and wonder at what might happen, who you might see; it’s full of possibilities. Add to that the nervousness of pre-performance, the running checklist that’s always active in a dancer’s head about how much sleep he’s had, how his body’s feeling, if he’s eaten the right amount and at the right time to hit his peak of energy at the right time, whether he’s going to dance anything new that night, etc., etc., and you get a pretty exciting, energized scene. And the theater itself, well, it’s great, and big, and unworried; it’s hosted other shows before this one and will host many more after; dozens or hundreds of other dancers have passed through its doors, run onto its stage, rehearsed and performed and triumphed and failed in it. It has history, which you’re now a part of. It allows you in, it shares itself with you, when you’re working in it. Theaters, when you’re a dancer (or, no doubt, an actor, or a singer, or whatever) are your Mecca, your cathedrals, and your home, in a very real sense. As a stage performer, you may never put down roots in the sense of buying a house or much furniture. But every time you step into a new backstage, are welcomed into a new surrogate family and begin learning its idiosyncrasies, its rules and expectations, its mythology and history, you’re sort of home again.
How poetic is that, I ask you? And the shocking thing is, I pretty much believe it, regardless of how sentimental and hackneyed it sounds. Perhaps this whole theater-as-home thing is why I’ve struggled so much with feelings of rootlessness since leaving Vegas and quitting dancing ten years ago. Not only have I only rarely lived in apartments I actually liked since then, I’ve also not had the foundation of a performing family, a shared space, to fill the gap. Heaven knows during the years I was dancing, I lived in lots of places I didn’t like, and never felt particularly injured by that. But now where I go home to is a huge deal, and I get way too worried about the annoying, pedantic little details of life, like how many square feet I rent and how convenient my neighborhood is. It’s a real pain, I’ll tell you. Life was much easier when that sort of stuff didn’t matter.
The old saying is, You can’t go home again. And I understand what that means. When I go back to some of the specific theaters I worked in now, I usually end up feeling maudlin and disappointed, because things have changed, or the theaters are dark, or in some cases they’ve been completely destroyed. But on the other hand, any time I walk into any theater, I get some taste of home. It bothers me that I don’t really have a place there, anymore, that I have to concentrate on staying out of the way, and while the actors at Phil’s theaters are nice and friendly to me, I have to stay in the dressing room hallway rather than going with them into the wings, where it’s dark and friendly, because I’m not one of us anymore. I don’t belong there, I have no purpose. Because I’m no longer a performer, my place is in the audience, if anywhere. But home still exists, and I do get a taste of it sometimes, thanks to my useful partner. And I get to glance into those wings, and get a nod of recognition from the stage manager, and that’s a nice thing. I may not live at home, anymore, but it’s good to know it’s still there.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
HoF Number One: Maggie
Okay, as promised or threatened, here is the first of my Hall of Fame posts. There are people I've known whom the world needs to know about, too, or not to forget. The first of these is my ballet teacher from Reno, Margaret Banks, which would no doubt horrify her. Well, that's too damn bad. If there is any sort of afterlife, and they read blogs there, Maggie will just have to deal with the embarrassment. So here goes.
Being a dancer is a lot like being an alcoholic. Sometimes it's exactly like being an alcoholic, to the extent of, well, drinking way too much and waking up face down in apartments you don't recognize, and having to apologize to strangers a lot. But aside from a general fondness for controlled substances, what I mean here is that dancers (and other artists, I’d guess) have to go to class every day or they begin to lose both their edge and their motivation, just as alcoholics attend daily meetings to stay focused and stay sober. There’s more than a surface similarity here, to my mind. I think that in a weird way, we artists are addicted to failure. We’re terribly afraid of failure– along with success, mediocrity, and the big laughing face of God pointing his finger down at us someday and booming out "You thought you could do what? You?!" which pretty much sums up all the other neuroses. In other words, we may be lusting after the muse, but we’re also doing everything we can to keep her away. Sound familiar, anyone? Anyway, going to classes, just like going to meetings for an addict, reaffirms our purpose, supports our choice to actually pursue the unreliable bitch, and reestablishes our place in the artists’ community– all very valuable actions, as any addict worth his salt will tell you. (Just for the record, if anyone knows of a daily meeting for writers, I’d like to sign up. Not only does it really suck to struggle through this alone, trying to get better without any handy teacher around to give corrections, but it’s also hard to remember how important it is without that external calling of a barre and a dozen or so peers in sweaty, torn clothes every afternoon. I want a Writers’ Barre, and I don’t mean the kind that writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were so fond of. Although sometimes that’s nice, too.)
But back to the dancing. Let me tell you about teachers. Ballet teachers are all the same: picture a tiny, elderly creature in a knit sweater and with a slightly mysterious, often impenetrable accent. Her hair is pulled back and probably died some color that would scandalize Mother Nature, and she constantly sports an appraising, not-sour but carefully not-encouraging expression on her face, complete with pursed lips and one slightly raised eyebrow. Her arms are folded, unless they’re extended to their utmost, reaching out like hawk’s wings to demonstrate how the human body can reach and expand, filling the room and touching the opposite walls with its fingertips in spite of the fact that it only stands 4'11" and has shoulders so narrow that you could encircle them with one palm.
This is a ballet teacher. And my ballet teacher, back in Reno, was a little like this, sort of, but she was also a true original, and the kind of character that only Reno seems to breed.
Maggie Banks was petite, and she could somehow, while lecturing you about things like extension and reaching out past your fingertips, breathe in and fill a whole stage that normally required an entire opera company to not seem rattlingly empty. But she was also jolly, and funny, and told great stories about her days in Hollywood and New York and hobnobbing with Gene Kelly and Shirley MacLaine and any other even vaguely musical star you can think of from the 50s and 60s– and just for the record, when I later met several of those people, they were always thrilled to hear about her, and said things like, "Oh my god– Maggie! She was the best, she taught me everything!" which is a pretty damn good recommendation coming from Donald O’Conner. Oh– and also for the record, Maggie was from Canada, so she was blessedly free of the gutteral consonants and twisted, Cyrillic vowels that make so many teachers unintelligible.
Maggie Banks left home at 16 to go to New York and dance solos with American Ballet Theater. I don’t know the year she did this– the late 30s? Early 40s?– but she was known for her extension and her musicality. She could nuance the choreography and turn the simplest step into something groundbreaking. I know this from the reviews and pictures that were framed and hung around her studio, which I read and re-read a million times while waiting for class to start. More about that later.
The other pictures that were hung up were from Hollywood– backstage shots from rehearsals of Can-Can and West Side Story, and 8x10 glossies of legends like Fred Astaire and Ann-Margaret. Now, I had grown up knowing without question that West Side Story was the greatest musical ever made, with the greatest score, and also that Fred Astaire was simply super-human, so brushing past all these pictures, not to mention learning from someone who’d also given Rita Moreno corrections, and hearing stories about how bad Natalie Wood sounded when she sang her songs on set– well, I was touching greatness.
And in spite of all the cynicism I’ve developed since those days, and the disappointments which have led me to reluctantly admit how small and ordinary the world of men is, and how lacking in magic, generally, I’m convinced that, in Maggie’s studio, I was touching greatness. Maggie’s Hollywood was of another era, one in which there truly was a community of stars who hung out at each other’s houses, who worked together at the studios and worked constantly, finishing one musical and starting another like clockwork, but with a glamourous opening every few months to spice things up. This was a world in which Maggie and Debbie Reynolds could wash dishes together at someone’s party because they were tired of hobnobbing and ended up in the kitchen together. It was a place where Maggie could go outside during a break from rehearsal and chat with Bette Davis, who was bitching about Joan Crawford ("We’re all just sitting around waiting for J.C. And I don’t mean Jesus Christ.") It was an era when Maggie could meet Juliet Prowse in her first role and form a lifelong friendship. That one included helping to keep Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley apart at inopportune moments, and breaking the news to Juliet’s husband years later that if he called Juliet’s hotel room in London at 2 in the morning and a man answered, it probably wasn’t because they were holding a late rehearsal.
The magical thing about Maggie, the real source of her enduring greatness, was not just the people she’d known or the bits of history she’d been involved with. I’ve been involved with some history since then, too– I saw apartheid up close and personal, and 9/11, too– and I know that doesn’t make anyone great. But Maggie was down to earth, she was reliable. She was the ultimate professional, who did what she’d said she would, and how she’d promised, and didn’t promise things she couldn’t deliver. She knew herself, knew what she wanted, knew what she could offer and what would and wouldn’t work. I think in Hollywood in any era, those must be exceedingly rare gifts. For a young dancer learning his craft, they were certainly every bit as valuable as learning how to do a plié.
I discovered Maggie when I was 17. My father tracked down her studio for me– I can’t remember where he’d heard about it, and if I had nothing else to thank him for through the years, Maggie would be one great legacy. At that point, Maggie Bank’s Ballet Studio was in a tiny storefront (aren’t they always?) south of downtown Reno. It was dim and cramped, and I didn’t quite understand what to do. You had to enter through the back, if you were dancing, because the studio space itself stretched wall to wall and you weren’t supposed to walk in street shoes over the dance floor. But you would naturally come in the front if you’d never been there. And then the dressing rooms were inadequate (as always) and I think the men’s dressing room doubled as a storage closet. That’s usually the case. If you’re a man in the ballet world, you can count on a certain number of mops in your future.
I took a couple classes. But I actually got serious about Maggie a year or so later, when the studio had moved and I had also gotten really serious about dancing. No more trying this or trying that– I’d found jazz and tap teachers, realized my former ballet muse was a bust. So off I went, again, and this time the studio had moved to the home I remember best, in a business park out by the train tracks in Sparks.
This space was much, much bigger. There was a lobby, and proper dressing rooms (although I seem to remember that the mop still lived in the men’s bathroom). The dance space was huge, or seemed so. And it was packed. Every professional dancer in Reno (with two major production shows and half a dozen cabaret revues going, there were several hundred of those, then) acknowledged Maggie as the teacher of choice. She taught advanced/professional ballet at 4:30 every afternoon (perfectly timed so that working dancers could go straight to their shows when it ended at 6:00, with time for a stop in the cafeteria or at MacDonald’s on the way. There’s that Canadian practicality) and beginning or intermediate class from 6:00 to 7:30. I toiled away in those six o’clock classes and dreamed of the day I’d be allowed into 4:30. I, with a varied host of other beginners, haunted the corridor outside the studio before our class started, and peered in at the pros as they went across the floor, working on jetés or turns or whatever suited Maggie’s fancy that day.
They clapped for each other, sometimes. Or laughed when they fell over. Maggie joined in, or said, "What was that?" Or sometimes stopped the music and said, "Kids, you’ve got to pay attention. It’s–" and she’d go through the motions, stressing what had gone wrong. And then, "Thank you, everybody," and the day was over.
It was much the same for us at six, except we were far more anxious, far less able to laugh and let mistakes roll off. We were avid and serious, as the pros were, too, and we knew Maggie our time spent with Maggie would open all doors and see us on our way into our dance careers. I remember watching at that doorway, wide-eyed at Michael’s perfectly pointed feet, at Leslie’s emotional impact even just doing turns across the floor, at Eva’s extension. Later, I discovered the first male teacher I truly wanted to emulate in Philip Riccobuono, and a couple years after that, when I got hired by the best choreographer I ever worked for, and one of the best in the world, the audition took place in that studio.
Maggie died a couple years ago. She had something that she thought was a persistent flu, and our mutual best friend Angelo urged her to go to the doctor. When she finally did, they found a tumor and wanted to operate immediately. And in surgery, her small intestine was perforated, she developed an infection, and after waking briefly to learn what had happened to her and attest that she didn’t want to be kept alive on machines, she died. It was the end of an era, and another break from that earlier era in show business when professionalism mattered, and when performers were craftspeople first, divas second or third (or not at all).
I’d like to stick an inspiring close on this– that’s what’s expected, after all. She taught us, and set us free, and the world’s a better place and all. And that’s true, but the other truth is that the world is poorer without Maggie, and those of us who were her products are getting older and have moved on in our own lives. We’re not a community, and most of us are not even dancing anymore. Maggie has a legacy, as we all do, and hers is particularly proud, being of hard work and immeasurable talent and love and dedication. And fun, and joy in what you’re doing. That’s all true, it’s irrefutable. But as I get older, I think more and more that I’d trade a few good legacies for the people who left them. I’d rather go to Maggie’s class again, and hear a few more stories.
Being a dancer is a lot like being an alcoholic. Sometimes it's exactly like being an alcoholic, to the extent of, well, drinking way too much and waking up face down in apartments you don't recognize, and having to apologize to strangers a lot. But aside from a general fondness for controlled substances, what I mean here is that dancers (and other artists, I’d guess) have to go to class every day or they begin to lose both their edge and their motivation, just as alcoholics attend daily meetings to stay focused and stay sober. There’s more than a surface similarity here, to my mind. I think that in a weird way, we artists are addicted to failure. We’re terribly afraid of failure– along with success, mediocrity, and the big laughing face of God pointing his finger down at us someday and booming out "You thought you could do what? You?!" which pretty much sums up all the other neuroses. In other words, we may be lusting after the muse, but we’re also doing everything we can to keep her away. Sound familiar, anyone? Anyway, going to classes, just like going to meetings for an addict, reaffirms our purpose, supports our choice to actually pursue the unreliable bitch, and reestablishes our place in the artists’ community– all very valuable actions, as any addict worth his salt will tell you. (Just for the record, if anyone knows of a daily meeting for writers, I’d like to sign up. Not only does it really suck to struggle through this alone, trying to get better without any handy teacher around to give corrections, but it’s also hard to remember how important it is without that external calling of a barre and a dozen or so peers in sweaty, torn clothes every afternoon. I want a Writers’ Barre, and I don’t mean the kind that writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were so fond of. Although sometimes that’s nice, too.)
But back to the dancing. Let me tell you about teachers. Ballet teachers are all the same: picture a tiny, elderly creature in a knit sweater and with a slightly mysterious, often impenetrable accent. Her hair is pulled back and probably died some color that would scandalize Mother Nature, and she constantly sports an appraising, not-sour but carefully not-encouraging expression on her face, complete with pursed lips and one slightly raised eyebrow. Her arms are folded, unless they’re extended to their utmost, reaching out like hawk’s wings to demonstrate how the human body can reach and expand, filling the room and touching the opposite walls with its fingertips in spite of the fact that it only stands 4'11" and has shoulders so narrow that you could encircle them with one palm.
This is a ballet teacher. And my ballet teacher, back in Reno, was a little like this, sort of, but she was also a true original, and the kind of character that only Reno seems to breed.
Maggie Banks was petite, and she could somehow, while lecturing you about things like extension and reaching out past your fingertips, breathe in and fill a whole stage that normally required an entire opera company to not seem rattlingly empty. But she was also jolly, and funny, and told great stories about her days in Hollywood and New York and hobnobbing with Gene Kelly and Shirley MacLaine and any other even vaguely musical star you can think of from the 50s and 60s– and just for the record, when I later met several of those people, they were always thrilled to hear about her, and said things like, "Oh my god– Maggie! She was the best, she taught me everything!" which is a pretty damn good recommendation coming from Donald O’Conner. Oh– and also for the record, Maggie was from Canada, so she was blessedly free of the gutteral consonants and twisted, Cyrillic vowels that make so many teachers unintelligible.
Maggie Banks left home at 16 to go to New York and dance solos with American Ballet Theater. I don’t know the year she did this– the late 30s? Early 40s?– but she was known for her extension and her musicality. She could nuance the choreography and turn the simplest step into something groundbreaking. I know this from the reviews and pictures that were framed and hung around her studio, which I read and re-read a million times while waiting for class to start. More about that later.
The other pictures that were hung up were from Hollywood– backstage shots from rehearsals of Can-Can and West Side Story, and 8x10 glossies of legends like Fred Astaire and Ann-Margaret. Now, I had grown up knowing without question that West Side Story was the greatest musical ever made, with the greatest score, and also that Fred Astaire was simply super-human, so brushing past all these pictures, not to mention learning from someone who’d also given Rita Moreno corrections, and hearing stories about how bad Natalie Wood sounded when she sang her songs on set– well, I was touching greatness.
And in spite of all the cynicism I’ve developed since those days, and the disappointments which have led me to reluctantly admit how small and ordinary the world of men is, and how lacking in magic, generally, I’m convinced that, in Maggie’s studio, I was touching greatness. Maggie’s Hollywood was of another era, one in which there truly was a community of stars who hung out at each other’s houses, who worked together at the studios and worked constantly, finishing one musical and starting another like clockwork, but with a glamourous opening every few months to spice things up. This was a world in which Maggie and Debbie Reynolds could wash dishes together at someone’s party because they were tired of hobnobbing and ended up in the kitchen together. It was a place where Maggie could go outside during a break from rehearsal and chat with Bette Davis, who was bitching about Joan Crawford ("We’re all just sitting around waiting for J.C. And I don’t mean Jesus Christ.") It was an era when Maggie could meet Juliet Prowse in her first role and form a lifelong friendship. That one included helping to keep Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley apart at inopportune moments, and breaking the news to Juliet’s husband years later that if he called Juliet’s hotel room in London at 2 in the morning and a man answered, it probably wasn’t because they were holding a late rehearsal.
The magical thing about Maggie, the real source of her enduring greatness, was not just the people she’d known or the bits of history she’d been involved with. I’ve been involved with some history since then, too– I saw apartheid up close and personal, and 9/11, too– and I know that doesn’t make anyone great. But Maggie was down to earth, she was reliable. She was the ultimate professional, who did what she’d said she would, and how she’d promised, and didn’t promise things she couldn’t deliver. She knew herself, knew what she wanted, knew what she could offer and what would and wouldn’t work. I think in Hollywood in any era, those must be exceedingly rare gifts. For a young dancer learning his craft, they were certainly every bit as valuable as learning how to do a plié.
I discovered Maggie when I was 17. My father tracked down her studio for me– I can’t remember where he’d heard about it, and if I had nothing else to thank him for through the years, Maggie would be one great legacy. At that point, Maggie Bank’s Ballet Studio was in a tiny storefront (aren’t they always?) south of downtown Reno. It was dim and cramped, and I didn’t quite understand what to do. You had to enter through the back, if you were dancing, because the studio space itself stretched wall to wall and you weren’t supposed to walk in street shoes over the dance floor. But you would naturally come in the front if you’d never been there. And then the dressing rooms were inadequate (as always) and I think the men’s dressing room doubled as a storage closet. That’s usually the case. If you’re a man in the ballet world, you can count on a certain number of mops in your future.
I took a couple classes. But I actually got serious about Maggie a year or so later, when the studio had moved and I had also gotten really serious about dancing. No more trying this or trying that– I’d found jazz and tap teachers, realized my former ballet muse was a bust. So off I went, again, and this time the studio had moved to the home I remember best, in a business park out by the train tracks in Sparks.
This space was much, much bigger. There was a lobby, and proper dressing rooms (although I seem to remember that the mop still lived in the men’s bathroom). The dance space was huge, or seemed so. And it was packed. Every professional dancer in Reno (with two major production shows and half a dozen cabaret revues going, there were several hundred of those, then) acknowledged Maggie as the teacher of choice. She taught advanced/professional ballet at 4:30 every afternoon (perfectly timed so that working dancers could go straight to their shows when it ended at 6:00, with time for a stop in the cafeteria or at MacDonald’s on the way. There’s that Canadian practicality) and beginning or intermediate class from 6:00 to 7:30. I toiled away in those six o’clock classes and dreamed of the day I’d be allowed into 4:30. I, with a varied host of other beginners, haunted the corridor outside the studio before our class started, and peered in at the pros as they went across the floor, working on jetés or turns or whatever suited Maggie’s fancy that day.
They clapped for each other, sometimes. Or laughed when they fell over. Maggie joined in, or said, "What was that?" Or sometimes stopped the music and said, "Kids, you’ve got to pay attention. It’s–" and she’d go through the motions, stressing what had gone wrong. And then, "Thank you, everybody," and the day was over.
It was much the same for us at six, except we were far more anxious, far less able to laugh and let mistakes roll off. We were avid and serious, as the pros were, too, and we knew Maggie our time spent with Maggie would open all doors and see us on our way into our dance careers. I remember watching at that doorway, wide-eyed at Michael’s perfectly pointed feet, at Leslie’s emotional impact even just doing turns across the floor, at Eva’s extension. Later, I discovered the first male teacher I truly wanted to emulate in Philip Riccobuono, and a couple years after that, when I got hired by the best choreographer I ever worked for, and one of the best in the world, the audition took place in that studio.
Maggie died a couple years ago. She had something that she thought was a persistent flu, and our mutual best friend Angelo urged her to go to the doctor. When she finally did, they found a tumor and wanted to operate immediately. And in surgery, her small intestine was perforated, she developed an infection, and after waking briefly to learn what had happened to her and attest that she didn’t want to be kept alive on machines, she died. It was the end of an era, and another break from that earlier era in show business when professionalism mattered, and when performers were craftspeople first, divas second or third (or not at all).
I’d like to stick an inspiring close on this– that’s what’s expected, after all. She taught us, and set us free, and the world’s a better place and all. And that’s true, but the other truth is that the world is poorer without Maggie, and those of us who were her products are getting older and have moved on in our own lives. We’re not a community, and most of us are not even dancing anymore. Maggie has a legacy, as we all do, and hers is particularly proud, being of hard work and immeasurable talent and love and dedication. And fun, and joy in what you’re doing. That’s all true, it’s irrefutable. But as I get older, I think more and more that I’d trade a few good legacies for the people who left them. I’d rather go to Maggie’s class again, and hear a few more stories.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
I am TOO still writing
Who knew the cyber-world of blogging would prove so fraught with difficulties? It's an adventure, and we all know how those work. Phil's and my move out here was an adventure (and yes, as per various requests, I'm planning to post those moving updates here sometime soon-- I just want to figure out where to put them so they're out of the way for those of you who have already savored every brilliant bon mot). Adventures are tricky things, and usually wet and uncomfortable. This one has proved especially tricky, as the Internet and unfamiliar software are wont to do. I won't bore you with the minutiae, much as I'd like to-- suffice it to say that Blogger was seeing fit to hide my posts, and your comments, in a secret location known only to it, but I have now rooted out what was lost, and it has seen the error of its ways. We are now communicating clearly, or at least I think so. Only time will tell, of course, but if I'm wrong about our new relationship, I have nefarious plans to take my brilliance somewhere else, so Blogger can just watch the hell out and do my bidding if it knows what's good for it.
Onward. I was agonizing over what, precisely, I should plan to post here. I mean, god knows I have enough diatribes and complaints stored up to fill endless posts. But that seems so banal, so expected, so done, you know? The very thought of writing all that whining filled me with ennui, and I can only imagine what it would inspire in you. But then, while cruising around on Highway 101 (a surprisingly fertile place for new thoughts), it occurred to me that I also have a mental storehouse just full of Things the World Needs to Know, and now, with the sometimes-recalcitrant Blogger.com, I finally have a place to put them, thereby forcing my own point of view on the world, where it belongs. I'm planning for a Hall of Fame, ongoing Reviews, and, probably, in spite of the above, a few well-crafted Diatribes-- but I'll at least commit to making those entertaining and readable, and as generally applicable as I can manage. Of course, I am convinced that anything important to me is generally applicable, but I'll try to curb my ego and limit myself to things which you might think are valuable. We'll see how that goes.
First up is the Hall of Fame. It's occurred to me that memory is an important thing, and cyberland provides perhaps the best universal memory ever. Who knows what happens when we die? Do we go on to something better, evolve instantly into something completely different, or just fade to black once and for all? Every possibility I can think of has its own very big pros and cons, and the bottom line is, we don't know and we can't plan. But what we can do is collect the past, and pass it on while we're here so that it's not lost.
The most important part of our past is its denizens. In the Hall of Fame I'll be telling you about a few of mine. I'll work my way up to the scary ones-- those people who have changed me against my will and in ways I wouldn't have signed up for if I'd had a chance-- but we'll start with the easy stuff. First up is my beloved ballet teacher, Maggie Banks, and for those of you who are groaning and rolling your eyes, just shut up and read it when I get it done, because she was a great lady and had a world-class story of her own. She conquered ABT and Hollywood, and kept Frank Sinatra from killing Elvis Presley, so there. Details to follow.
Stay tuned. The glitches are worked out, and more wordy brilliance is on its way. Blogger has succumbed! I am triumphant! Rejoice and sing hallelujahs!
Onward-- tallyho!
Onward. I was agonizing over what, precisely, I should plan to post here. I mean, god knows I have enough diatribes and complaints stored up to fill endless posts. But that seems so banal, so expected, so done, you know? The very thought of writing all that whining filled me with ennui, and I can only imagine what it would inspire in you. But then, while cruising around on Highway 101 (a surprisingly fertile place for new thoughts), it occurred to me that I also have a mental storehouse just full of Things the World Needs to Know, and now, with the sometimes-recalcitrant Blogger.com, I finally have a place to put them, thereby forcing my own point of view on the world, where it belongs. I'm planning for a Hall of Fame, ongoing Reviews, and, probably, in spite of the above, a few well-crafted Diatribes-- but I'll at least commit to making those entertaining and readable, and as generally applicable as I can manage. Of course, I am convinced that anything important to me is generally applicable, but I'll try to curb my ego and limit myself to things which you might think are valuable. We'll see how that goes.
First up is the Hall of Fame. It's occurred to me that memory is an important thing, and cyberland provides perhaps the best universal memory ever. Who knows what happens when we die? Do we go on to something better, evolve instantly into something completely different, or just fade to black once and for all? Every possibility I can think of has its own very big pros and cons, and the bottom line is, we don't know and we can't plan. But what we can do is collect the past, and pass it on while we're here so that it's not lost.
The most important part of our past is its denizens. In the Hall of Fame I'll be telling you about a few of mine. I'll work my way up to the scary ones-- those people who have changed me against my will and in ways I wouldn't have signed up for if I'd had a chance-- but we'll start with the easy stuff. First up is my beloved ballet teacher, Maggie Banks, and for those of you who are groaning and rolling your eyes, just shut up and read it when I get it done, because she was a great lady and had a world-class story of her own. She conquered ABT and Hollywood, and kept Frank Sinatra from killing Elvis Presley, so there. Details to follow.
Stay tuned. The glitches are worked out, and more wordy brilliance is on its way. Blogger has succumbed! I am triumphant! Rejoice and sing hallelujahs!
Onward-- tallyho!
Saturday, March 17, 2007
The Job Slog
My, what long time it's been since I posted. I didn't intend that, life just got away from me-- as it does. More specifically, I started working temporarily at Phil's office to bring some cash in, and help solve a little not-enough-hands-on-deck-in-the-middle-of-a-hurricane crisis there. The work has been just fine, thank you-- equal parts data entry and customer service, which translates into entering people's subscription orders into the computer, and then sometimes calling them up to ask just what the hell they actually want, since what they've written makes no sense at all. Given that the average age of a theatergoer in this country is somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and three, this makes for some long, unpredictable conversations, and I've learned more about various people's daughters in Fort Worth, and the history of Menlo Park, than I ever thought there was to know. But that's what I'm being paid for, and I must say that the patrons of TheatreWorks are a good deal nicer and easier to deal with than the nasty coffee addicts of Manhattan, and in any case they're on the other end of a phone line, which makes the whole job pretty damn easy.
But I digress-- which may be the point of a blog, but I'm trying to be focused. Today's official subject, now that we've got the preliminary update section out of the way, if my job search. I'm told by others (not immediately involved in it) that it's going just fine, but the whole thing seems to me to be roughly akin to an endless slog uphill in knee-deep semi-frozen molasses. In other words, it's slow.
And here's the thing that makes this job slog particularly frustrating: as I learned in Chicago, the business community seems to have a very hard time, these days, thinking outside its own boxes. It's very hard to get considered for anything unless you've already done that exact job before, preferably in at least three world-renowned companies for at least five years apiece. Now, my resume, as anyone who knows me might guess, is pretty damn eclectic. Even since I quit dancing, I've managed coffeehouses and an off-Broadway revue, toured with a one-man show, run Real Pilates, worked freelance doing graphic design, web design, and marketing consulting... it's all related, and every part of it has evolved naturally from the previous credits, but what it adds up to is an extremely broad range of skills and expertise, not a neat, focused, single job description. That sort of broadness seems to leave recruiters and upper level managers scratching their heads and then looking up at me with furrowed brows, saying, "But you haven't done this job before," to which I always want to shout, "Oh course I haven't done it before, you dingus! Why would I want to do it now if it was just some retread of something I'd already conquered?" Honestly, I like to learn and be challenged-- am I the only worker out there who feels like that today?
I wonder if this all points to a more disturbing issue, though. Business, in this day and age, seems to be a very peculiar creature. What I mean is, the actual daily practice of business is essentially practical. You're either selling people things, or staying behind the scenes and planning to sell them things (which is more or less what people like marketers and advertising execs do), or perhaps staying really far behind the scenes and advising other people how to sell things better (consultants). But in any case, what you're talking about is a practical activity, and the pragmatic issues which affect it. But given that most of business today is run by MBAs, who have a sort of pseudo-academic patina eggwashed over their nuts-and-bolts outlook, the whole business universe seems to have become extremely muddy, weirdly ritualized, and, let's just say it, insane.
I remember my father, a career academic, decrying the rise of business schools in the early 70s (if I'm recalling aright.) The story seems to have gone like this: because the business world began to pine for some increased respectability in the 60s and 70s, or else because various universities wanted some easy access to the cash held by the business world outside their gates, or because of some combination of the two desires, business colleges began to appear. They are utterly professional in scope and focus. Think about it-- understanding the history of literature is vitally important to an English teacher, critic, or writer, but knowing the precursors of modern business practice is just a waste of brain space for Donald Trump (who has precious little to spare). However, in order to fit into the university system, these business colleges and programs had to create a kind of spurious, quasi-academic superstructure on which to hang their more practical instruction. In other words, selling people things suddenly became (supposedly) theoretical, governed by immutable laws of psychology and sociology (fairly spurious and unreliable disciplines, themselves). The intent was to release a bunch of super-educated business professionals into the world to kick up efficiency, explode sales, and create forms of exploitation barely dreamed of by earlier generations. Let's not question the morality or horror inherent in those goals this time around-- let's just look at what's really happened.
Well, what I seem to be finding is that the whole thing has devolved, not surprisingly, into a sort of particularly banal mysticism and cliquishness. In Chicago I found myself faced first with a string of people who couldn't see that my skills did, in fact, add up to their job descriptions, regardless of how I'd acquired them; and later with bosses who spouted ideas about shopper psychology and environment creation without showing any signs of understanding the reality behind those theories, let alone the steps necessary to translate them into a real world setting. Now I'm facing Problem A again, and have thankfully-- after obnoxiously forcing my way into one temp agency office-- been offered some tips on how to restructure and restate my resume so as to convince understanding-impaired readers that I can actually do what I can do.
I do not mean to be nastier than necessary here, and I also don't mean to encourage any horribly negative perceptions (either in myself or in anyone else) about these people with whom I hope to be interviewing. But I question the environment that encourages this sort of narrowness of perception and total lack of imagination. There was a day, I believe, when a strong general education was considered the best possible preparation for a professional career. The idea was that, if one had well developed universal skills (the ability to write and communicate clearly, a basic understanding of logic and reasoning, a level of comfort with current technology) one could attain the specialized expertise of any particular workplace or industry. But today I seem to be finding almost the opposite-- a reverence for specialized knowledge in the form of jargon and entrenched ritual, and no acknowledgement whatsoever of universality, let alone its obvious value. If some potential employer had said to me, at any point in this process, anything like, "look, you just don't have some of the skills we're looking for-- you can't do A or B or C, and your experience with D is fundamentally unlike what we do," that would make sense. Then I would have the choice of finding some training to get my AB&C skills in shape, or else looking elsewhere. But the only thing anyone has ever said to me is, "You haven't done precisely this before," which seems like another way of saying that I'm not a member of the right club, rather than that I can't do the job. This is disturbing, and not encouraging for the future, either mine or ours as a culture.
So that's my diatribe for today. I have some better thoughts for how to develop this blog, by the way, and you'll be reading those-- if anyone is still reading at all-- next time. I'm picturing a Hall of Fame and various other fun stuff-- fun for me, at least, and, I'm sure, future generations who will recognize and revere my brilliance. Meanwhile, does anyone know anything about forcing tulips? I have a jar full of wilting stems at this point, and I'm not sure how to store the bulbs or what to do next.
But I digress-- which may be the point of a blog, but I'm trying to be focused. Today's official subject, now that we've got the preliminary update section out of the way, if my job search. I'm told by others (not immediately involved in it) that it's going just fine, but the whole thing seems to me to be roughly akin to an endless slog uphill in knee-deep semi-frozen molasses. In other words, it's slow.
And here's the thing that makes this job slog particularly frustrating: as I learned in Chicago, the business community seems to have a very hard time, these days, thinking outside its own boxes. It's very hard to get considered for anything unless you've already done that exact job before, preferably in at least three world-renowned companies for at least five years apiece. Now, my resume, as anyone who knows me might guess, is pretty damn eclectic. Even since I quit dancing, I've managed coffeehouses and an off-Broadway revue, toured with a one-man show, run Real Pilates, worked freelance doing graphic design, web design, and marketing consulting... it's all related, and every part of it has evolved naturally from the previous credits, but what it adds up to is an extremely broad range of skills and expertise, not a neat, focused, single job description. That sort of broadness seems to leave recruiters and upper level managers scratching their heads and then looking up at me with furrowed brows, saying, "But you haven't done this job before," to which I always want to shout, "Oh course I haven't done it before, you dingus! Why would I want to do it now if it was just some retread of something I'd already conquered?" Honestly, I like to learn and be challenged-- am I the only worker out there who feels like that today?
I wonder if this all points to a more disturbing issue, though. Business, in this day and age, seems to be a very peculiar creature. What I mean is, the actual daily practice of business is essentially practical. You're either selling people things, or staying behind the scenes and planning to sell them things (which is more or less what people like marketers and advertising execs do), or perhaps staying really far behind the scenes and advising other people how to sell things better (consultants). But in any case, what you're talking about is a practical activity, and the pragmatic issues which affect it. But given that most of business today is run by MBAs, who have a sort of pseudo-academic patina eggwashed over their nuts-and-bolts outlook, the whole business universe seems to have become extremely muddy, weirdly ritualized, and, let's just say it, insane.
I remember my father, a career academic, decrying the rise of business schools in the early 70s (if I'm recalling aright.) The story seems to have gone like this: because the business world began to pine for some increased respectability in the 60s and 70s, or else because various universities wanted some easy access to the cash held by the business world outside their gates, or because of some combination of the two desires, business colleges began to appear. They are utterly professional in scope and focus. Think about it-- understanding the history of literature is vitally important to an English teacher, critic, or writer, but knowing the precursors of modern business practice is just a waste of brain space for Donald Trump (who has precious little to spare). However, in order to fit into the university system, these business colleges and programs had to create a kind of spurious, quasi-academic superstructure on which to hang their more practical instruction. In other words, selling people things suddenly became (supposedly) theoretical, governed by immutable laws of psychology and sociology (fairly spurious and unreliable disciplines, themselves). The intent was to release a bunch of super-educated business professionals into the world to kick up efficiency, explode sales, and create forms of exploitation barely dreamed of by earlier generations. Let's not question the morality or horror inherent in those goals this time around-- let's just look at what's really happened.
Well, what I seem to be finding is that the whole thing has devolved, not surprisingly, into a sort of particularly banal mysticism and cliquishness. In Chicago I found myself faced first with a string of people who couldn't see that my skills did, in fact, add up to their job descriptions, regardless of how I'd acquired them; and later with bosses who spouted ideas about shopper psychology and environment creation without showing any signs of understanding the reality behind those theories, let alone the steps necessary to translate them into a real world setting. Now I'm facing Problem A again, and have thankfully-- after obnoxiously forcing my way into one temp agency office-- been offered some tips on how to restructure and restate my resume so as to convince understanding-impaired readers that I can actually do what I can do.
I do not mean to be nastier than necessary here, and I also don't mean to encourage any horribly negative perceptions (either in myself or in anyone else) about these people with whom I hope to be interviewing. But I question the environment that encourages this sort of narrowness of perception and total lack of imagination. There was a day, I believe, when a strong general education was considered the best possible preparation for a professional career. The idea was that, if one had well developed universal skills (the ability to write and communicate clearly, a basic understanding of logic and reasoning, a level of comfort with current technology) one could attain the specialized expertise of any particular workplace or industry. But today I seem to be finding almost the opposite-- a reverence for specialized knowledge in the form of jargon and entrenched ritual, and no acknowledgement whatsoever of universality, let alone its obvious value. If some potential employer had said to me, at any point in this process, anything like, "look, you just don't have some of the skills we're looking for-- you can't do A or B or C, and your experience with D is fundamentally unlike what we do," that would make sense. Then I would have the choice of finding some training to get my AB&C skills in shape, or else looking elsewhere. But the only thing anyone has ever said to me is, "You haven't done precisely this before," which seems like another way of saying that I'm not a member of the right club, rather than that I can't do the job. This is disturbing, and not encouraging for the future, either mine or ours as a culture.
So that's my diatribe for today. I have some better thoughts for how to develop this blog, by the way, and you'll be reading those-- if anyone is still reading at all-- next time. I'm picturing a Hall of Fame and various other fun stuff-- fun for me, at least, and, I'm sure, future generations who will recognize and revere my brilliance. Meanwhile, does anyone know anything about forcing tulips? I have a jar full of wilting stems at this point, and I'm not sure how to store the bulbs or what to do next.
Friday, March 9, 2007
Ta-da, the Penninsula
Well, here we are. I'm in Mountain View, CA, and you're wherever you are, and having survived the official Worst Move Ever and settled in to our tiny little corporate apartment with the cats and Phil and about 1/100 of our personal belongings, I am entering the Brave New World of blogging. Not such a new world, at that, but new to me, and a place I haven't even been all that aware of until recently. The reason I'm doing this is because 1) I am always looking for any opportunity to get my words out there, in any form and by any means; and 2) I am dearly hoping that, having gotten my words out into the world in some sort of semi-public way, they will then get noticed by someone, somewhere (perhaps because one of you lovely people will send them along somewhere interesting and useful) and I'll get published, or at the very least solicited to share more words somewhere else more public, and even more official; and also 3) because I am planning to overthrow and destroy the publishing industry, at some point, and I thought it might be a good idea to start firing up the website I'm planning to use for that; and finally 4) because my friend Doug sent me the link to blogger.com, which makes the whole thing so easy. Doug did this, for the record, in response to my email newsletters detailing the Worst Move Ever, and since I got lots of other positive reaction to those from other friends, as well, just as I have for other, similar postings and emails and weekly paycheck memos, well, I thought what the hell, why not take the plunge.
So there you go, and here we are. Of course, at this point I feel horribly trite and uninteresting. If you're still reading, we'll assume you don't agree with that, and I'll imagine you cooing, "No, no, you're brilliant!" and forge ahead. One imagines that an initial posting of a new blog should perhaps contain chirpy predictions about what's likely to appear there in the future, but I can't think of anything drearier than chirpy predictions, so we'll skip that. Suffice it to say that you'll read what I post, and be happy with it. I'll try to keep the enraged ranting to a minimum, or at least be entertaining about it. You catch more flies with honey, or in this case, a silver tongue, if catching anyone is the intent (and that sounds rather deliciously kinky, doesn't it? Oh good-- we've hit annoyance AND sexual innuendo in the first two paragraphs! Off to an excellent start!)
And so it goes, to quote Linda Ellerbee, who is decidedly worth quoting. I am off to feed the cats, having vacuumed and now succeeded in posting. Whoo-hoo! Life enters a new phase! Blogging Central! Watch out, Random House!
Or something like that. Stay tuned, and tell your friends.
So there you go, and here we are. Of course, at this point I feel horribly trite and uninteresting. If you're still reading, we'll assume you don't agree with that, and I'll imagine you cooing, "No, no, you're brilliant!" and forge ahead. One imagines that an initial posting of a new blog should perhaps contain chirpy predictions about what's likely to appear there in the future, but I can't think of anything drearier than chirpy predictions, so we'll skip that. Suffice it to say that you'll read what I post, and be happy with it. I'll try to keep the enraged ranting to a minimum, or at least be entertaining about it. You catch more flies with honey, or in this case, a silver tongue, if catching anyone is the intent (and that sounds rather deliciously kinky, doesn't it? Oh good-- we've hit annoyance AND sexual innuendo in the first two paragraphs! Off to an excellent start!)
And so it goes, to quote Linda Ellerbee, who is decidedly worth quoting. I am off to feed the cats, having vacuumed and now succeeded in posting. Whoo-hoo! Life enters a new phase! Blogging Central! Watch out, Random House!
Or something like that. Stay tuned, and tell your friends.
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