Dancing Became Poetry

It’s called the “Feis," a Gaelic word pronounced “fesh.” It’s a dance contest held annually in different cities in the United States. It’s the “Super Bowl” for young Irish step-dancers. When I competed in the Feis back in the Fifties, there were dancers there from the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and other countries. They took planes, trains and buses to get there to compete, usually in a stadium or some other large venue. 

The best Irish fiddlers provided the music. The judges were old men, retired dancers themselves, serious as clerics, sitting in trios at scoring tables in front of the platforms where the contestants competed. 

The audience sat in the stands or on folding chairs out on the field near the dance platforms. They chatted when there was no music but were silent during the competition. All you could hear then was the beat of the feet and the fiddlers playing their hearts out.

The Feis began with the various solo dancing contests--reels, jigs, and hornpipes. Toward the end of the day, teams of dancers, male and female couples, competed in the three-hand reel, six-hand reel and the eight-hand jig. This was a serious competition. Dancers practiced all year, hoping to take home trophies and medals.

In 1956 I was 18 and had been dancing competitively for at least 10 years. I started taking lessons early in grammar school to please my father who had emigrated to Chicago from Ireland. In his part of Ireland, step-dancing was at least a sport if not a religion. 

In the United States it was mostly girls who took Irish dancing. But my sister, try as she might, was unable to do it. 

I happened to be in the basement the afternoon my father, once a fine dancer himself, tried to teach her the first step of the reel. To show her up, as brothers are sometimes wont to do, I danced the first step perfectly, just by watching my father do it, and from that moment on, I had to take Irish dancing lessons. 

I can still hear him—after he saw me do the step my sister could not do--hollering up the basement stairs to my mother.

“Molly, he’s got it!” 

I was in fourth grade then and danced competitively until the age of 21. Over the years I had come to love the music, the intricate footwork and the competition. And it didn’t hurt that the footwork helped in playing basketball.

From my father’s point of view, the goal of Irish dancing was two-fold—perfection, in that the feet were not to miss a beat, and victory, in that not a contest was to be lost. 

Life being what it is, he was often disappointed. 

The interesting thing is that the music of Irish reels, jigs, hornpipes instantly appealed to me. I felt it in my whole body right from the start even if I didn’t like all the practice time involved, time I would rather have spent playing ball. 

The teacher, a man also from Ireland, not far from my father’s hometown, was a former boxer as was my father. Needless to say, they were of like mind. So we children had to train for a dancing contest as if for a championship fight or close to it. A lesson might take half an hour followed by two hours of practice. And there was no air-conditioning back then except in movie theaters.

It just so happened that in my class we had four boys, all the same age, myself included. We grew up together, dancing every year in contests when not playing ball or doing other things boys normally do. 

In Irish dancing, boys were a rarity. No other dancing school had four boys so they could not field a “real” eight-hand jig, as it was called, with four boys and four girls. Most schools had eight girls in their eight-hand jig. But without boys, an all-girls team in 1956 probably lost points on optics alone if nothing else.

We had four boy/girl couples and we had been dancing as a team for years by the time the contest at Fordham University rolled around in 1956. 

We figured we’d take the train to New York from Chicago and whip every team we competed against, no matter what state or country they were from. After all, we had beaten all the other teams from other Irish dancing schools in Chicago and some other mid-western cities.

That year the Feis was held in the August heat in Fordham's stadium and our eight-hand jig beat everybody, as we thought, except for an “old team” (four couples in their 30s) from Ireland we knew nothing about.  

We had seen them the night before in an Irish pub where fiddlers played nonstop the best of Irish music and everyone was dancing and hollering the way the Irish do when properly lubricated. 

The four “old” men on the Irish eight-hand jig team had been drinking a bit, shall we say, and dancing with girls from other teams, including ours. And they were still dancing, finally with their own partners, long after our team had gone to our hotel rooms to get some sleep for the competition the next day.

But after watching that Irish team dance for fun in the pub that night, I realized that when the right feet were involved, dancing could be poetry. 

Although the “old” Irish team had been drinking all night, they had sobered up by noon the next day when the competition began. We were dancing to win and they were still dancing for fun. We didn’t miss a beat and they didn’t either but they had literally an extra hop in their step, a leap if you will, that we had never seen. 

What’s more, they smiled when they danced and demonstrated an unaffected grace. 

In contrast, our team of boys and girls looked as serious as novices from a seminary and convent. We were kids trying hard and they were adult dancers having a wonderful time. They took the trophy and gold medals back to Ireland and we took our silver medals back to Chicago. 

We had been trounced and we knew it. And there was nothing we could have done, before or after the contest, to beat that Irish team. 

I can still see one of the men I had first seen in the pub the night before. He was as bald as the balls on the pool table and wore an Irish kilt. But that man could dance. He didn’t miss a beat, drunk or sober. His feet on the floor sounded like iambic pentameter with a little thunder added here and there for emphasis, especially at the end.  

Reels, jigs and hornpipes are still in my blood although it has been decades since I danced, for fun or competitively. When I hear the music now, I sometimes am moved almost to tears. It's the only music that ever really got to me. 

That was a long time ago but every once in a while I wish I were young enough to get up on that platform at Fordham University and dance again, compete again, and then I remember that bald Irishman in his kilt and I know that once again I’d be taking home a silver medal.

Dancing for fun beats dancing to win. I learned that in 1956 watching a team from Ireland leap and not miss a beat as the fiddlers played their hearts out. The three judges knew the winners as soon as they saw that Irish team. They knew, in the heat of that August day, they had seen dancing suddenly become poetry. 

Donal Mahoney

A Note to Young Writers

Over the years I have been accused of many things in real life and in the virtual world as well and often deservedly so. Recently, however, I sent a few poems to an editor unknown because samples on his site suggested to me that these particular poems, rejected by other editors as not fit for their sites, might find a home there. One never knows and can only try.

These poems were scabrous enough, I thought, to have a chance at this site but they lacked profanity, sex and violence. I am neither in favor of nor opposed to profanity, sex or violence but I don’t knowingly traffic in any of those when it comes to writing. 

Sex is too easy to write about, I feel, and profanity seems an easy way out when the right word can’t be found. Violence I don’t think I have ever dealt with although I have dealt with the prelude to violence as well as its aftermath. I guess it’s all a matter of taste. 

Nevertheless, I decided to send these poems to this particular site because I thought they might fit there. No cost to send an email overseas. It’s not like when I started out decades ago and you would have to weigh envelopes and affix overseas postage not to have the postmaster return the envelopes damned as bearing insufficient postage. 

Editors vary as greatly as writers in taste and patience and I speak as a former print editor bearing the scars of many years of experience. I remember writing acceptances and rejections and receiving pleasant and irate responses. But the response I received in the rejection of this batch of poems accused me of something I had never been accused of before. 

The editor told me in no uncertain terms my poems were too “nuanced” for his site and left it at that. 

If you write for many years and send a lot of stuff out, you should eventually become less elated by acceptances and less dejected by rejections. But when I received this particular rejection, I thought what if a young writer starting out received a rejection that said his or her poems were too nuanced. 

Rightly or wrongly I've always thought nuance was a good thing in writing poetry, fiction or an essay. 

At the same time I think there is a place for tough poems that can be nuanced if that is the right word to use. Such poems may cause some editors dyspepsia and I have no problem when they send them flying back. At the same time I would never consciously inject profanity, blatant sex or hard-core violence into a poem. I have never felt poetry was the place for that kind of thing. Perhaps that comes from reading too much T.S. Eliot as a young man and not enough Charles Bukowski. 

As someone who grew up admiring Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso and most of the writers in The Beatnik Generation, you would think I would find some merit in the writings of Bukowski but try as I might—and I have tried off and on over the years--I have not found anything that made me want to read more of him. Yet there are writers today who think of Bukowski the way Buddhists think of the Dalai Lama and Catholics think of Pope Francis. 

There are more than a few sites that are almost dedicated to Bukowski but editors at many of those sites don’t seem to demand imitation of him in the poems they publish while some seem to like that kind of thing. And I think an inordinate admiration of Bukowski at this particular site is why my efforts were judged “too nuanced.” But as my wife often reminds me I could be wrong once again.

In any event, I hope young writers learn early on to accept rejections for what they are. Either accurate because something is wrong with the poem or simply because the poem is not suitable for that site. 

Or maybe the editor has too big a backlog or simply doesn’t like your content or your style. 

Or maybe he or she doesn’t like you. Not everyone does, you know. I don’t think any writer should strive to be everybody’s friend. 

The editor who does all the work on any site has the right to have the site reflect what he wants his efforts to accomplish. 

So whenever you get a rejection, look the poem over, make changes or not, and send it out elsewhere. If the poem has merit, it will likely find a home somewhere. But try to pick potential homes carefully—almost as carefully as you might pick a spouse. 

Donal Mahoney

Chicken Breast or Rump Roast

Freddie and Fern were an old couple, a very old couple if truth be told, but on the matter of age, the truth seldom surfaced. Their kids were grown and gone and had families of their own. All of them lived in different cities and two of them had even asked their parents to sell the house and buy a smaller place near where they lived. But Freddie and Fern, despite all their aches and pains, were an independent couple and they liked their privacy. Seeing their grandchildren was nice but living close enough to have to babysit them, that was quite another matter.

Most evenings Fern would sit in her rocker and work crossword puzzles and Freddie would sit back in his recliner and watch whatever sport was in season. They were very different people but in 50 years of marriage they had always gotten along well. Each was solicitous of the other’s needs. Always had been. But as age encroaches, certain needs change and others remain the same, life being what it is.

Fern, for example, had arthritis pretty bad. Her back was always acting up on her. From day to day, it was just a matter of how bad it was. 

Freddie had arthritis in both legs but he could still get around pretty good for a man with his ailments, too good sometimes as far as Fern was concerned, especially when Freddie would get that look in his eye. Sure enough, he would ask her if the next time she had to go to the bathroom, she’d bring him back a Coke from the fridge. And, of course, she always did.

But Fern always knew it wasn’t just the Coke Freddie wanted. The old goat wanted to watch her walk down the hallway. He told her many times she had more bounce to the ounce now than when she was young. 

Hardly, Fern thought. Still, it was nice to hear him say that. But if Freddie looked as though he was going to be pestering her that night, Fern always wanted to go to KFC for dinner first. And if she asked Freddie to go there, he would always oblige, hoping everything would go well later that evening.

On this particular evening, though, when Fern brought Freddie his Coke, he seized the moment and asked her if she wanted to go to KFC. Fern hesitated because her back was bothering her something terrible. She didn’t think when they got home she would be able to give Freddie the dessert he was looking for. But she did like her KFC chicken, two plump chicken breasts with all the trimmings, so she agreed to go. She could just see the pond of gravy in the well of her mashed potatoes. And butter slathered all over her green beans. 

At the restaurant, Fern ordered her two pieces of breast meat, as usual, along with mashed potatoes, gravy and green beans. Plus a side of cole slaw because she had promised the doctor on her last visit that she would eat more fiber. 

Freddie, who preferred any cut of beef to chicken, asked for his usual order of gizzards and fries. A chewy gizzard was really the only part of the chicken he could tolerate. With ketchup on his fries, he was a reasonably contented diner. 

When they had finished eating, Fern knew that her back was so bad she wouldn’t be able to meet Freddie’s needs when they got home. She told him nicely in a code they shared that her back was killing her and that she was afraid there would be no breast meat for Freddie that evening.

Freddie hesitated for a moment and then asked Fern if she thought she would be able to roll over and sleep on her tummy. Fern said probably so because when her back was this bad, that’s what she usually had to do. Couldn’t sleep any other way.

Freddie smiled, sipped the last of his Coke, and said that was good to know. A little rump roast would make a fine late night snack.

Donal Mahoney

Two Old Poets, One in a Rush

Tom was having trouble with outgoing emails. Some would come back with a message from the “mail administrator” about a server problem, a message Tom didn't understand. He had no other problems with his computer that day. And he couldn’t tell from the message which server was at fault—his or the server on the receiving end.

So he decided to send an email to Bill, an old friend whose technological savvy was probably less than his. He wanted to see if Bill would receive the message and send a reply, confirming that someone, anyone, was getting his emails. 

It’s best to admit upfront that both Tom and Bill are less than technologically astute. Perhaps that’s because they're closer to eternity than most. Computers came late into their lives. Both are now in the home stretch, so to speak. 

According to Tom, Bill is so old he wrote his first poem with cuneiform when that was all the rage. And Bill tells their friends--those still above ground--that Tom wrote his first poem with a quill. All this may or may not be true with both men given to hyperbole in lighter moments, few as those moments now may be. 

Tom's memory isn’t what it once was, either. Nevertheless, he had high hopes of getting in touch with his old friend when he sent his email to Bill but he received no response for days. Finally Bill's answer arrived.

Bill wrote, “I got your email today when I checked my more than 100 messages awaiting my immediate response. I read two Larkin poems after breakfast."

That was the sum total of Bill's email. Tom's old friend didn’t have anything else to say. It had been 60 years since the two men last worked together putting out a print magazine, but Tom could tell from his message--the first one he had received from Bill in a couple of years--that despite his pacemaker and a couple of stents, he was doing okay. 

Bill wasn’t at all pleased when that cardiologist put foreign objects in his chest to keep him alive but he got used to the idea. And from his response, Tom could tell that life was still good for Bill. He was reading poetry and probably still writing it. Maybe a short story now and then as well. He was not a man to waste words. He always got right to the point if there was one. 

It was obvious to Tom as well that Bill was still not in a rush about anything. Backed up with 100 or so unanswered emails, Bill was instead attending to more important stuff—reading Philip Larkin’s poetry, for example, after breakfast. Retirement has its rewards and Bill was savoring every one of them. 

But then, Bill had never been in a rush, Tom remembered, except when the two of them were on deadline putting out a monthly magazine. They both were in a rush then because they were the whole staff. They had no other help. 

Bill moved pretty fast in those days. More importantly, perhaps, he had skills. He could write, as could Tom, and he knew grammar and had a sense of layout. The two of them served as their own art director. Budget constraints made this possible. 

Over the years Tom had learned a lot about layout from Bill, something that helped a great deal in other editorial jobs later in life.

In his personal life, however, Bill did very little and did it very slowly, reading good fiction and poetry and doing his best to write well himself. His writings had been published in good places over the years so he had succeeded to some degree but not to his own satisfaction. 

After giving Bill's response considerable thought, Tom wrote back to his old friend and said,

“Great to hear from you again and happy to see the world has not changed your lifestyle. I can almost hear your groan after you read that word “lifestyle” in the previous sentence. But I’ll bet lifestyle is in the Oxford English Dictionary, assuming someone is still publishing it. 

“The OED is probably not in print anymore but it’s likely online. Your old edition probably wouldn’t have lifestyle in it but the book itself might be worth quite a bit of money at a rare bookstore. I know you would rather part with your left arm than your OED. 

“Bill, I promise not to bother you again until after Memorial Day and then only to let you know I’m still alive. I promise to put the subject line in all caps so you will know it’s from me. I don’t want my email to die in cyberspace among all the others you’ve left unopened. 

"God forbid anything should happen to you in the meantime but if it does ask your sister to let me know.

"I gave my wife a stamped letter to mail to you should anything happen to me. If she dies first, I’ll guess you’ll never find out.

“Until then keep reading Philip Larkin and maybe throw in a little Wallace Stevens now and then as a chaser.”

Tom sent the email to Bill but never received a response, and he may not until he writes to him again after Memorial Day to confirm that one or both of them is still alive. By then Bill might have as many as 300 unopened emails and Tom’s may be added to that list. 

At his age, Bill is not in a rush. And Tom admits he’s slowing down a bit himself. He still writes every day to stay awake and sends stuff out to publishers. Some of it gets published, some of it not. Tom knows he and Bill won’t be around that much longer. But he hopes he has enough time left to send another email to Bill after Memorial Day—and that Bill is there to get it whether he opens it or not.  

Donal Mahoney

Interruptus

The story takes place at night.  No, wait.  It’s the daylight, with shadows cast here and there.  Or it’s night if you like, a night-time of the mind.  Our character is a nameless face.  You simply have to imagine a face on this stick figure, and there it is.

I am our character.  Unless you want to be.

My face is a shifting sight.  This could be the earth or the moon.  The future of the past.  Because I am the word that is dropped in the wrong place, sometimes misheard.  Philosophers call it The Other.  What must it be the have the powers of a god, the completely Other?  To watch as the universe passes by?

I know that feeling from being passed on the street, in the hallway, a conventional gesture, a common exchange.  This is what always passes between us.

I’ll never know because my name is Stanley (no, it’s not) and I want to be park ranger (museum curator).  In me you see yourself because that’s how this works.  Or you think of someone you know named Stanley, but it’s still about you.  You see yourself in Stanley and compare yourself.  We wake up, groom in front of the mirror, and never leave it behind.  Not completely.

As my friend walks away, hood up, into the rain-soaked evening, or the sun-blaring day, I make a few suggestions about what we might do next week.  My voice is never loud enough and so I decide one day it will be.  Sometime in the future when I can decide what exactly I want to be like.

JD DeHart

An Affective Disorder, the Doctor Said

No, Freddie can’t say he mourned when his father died and his father’s third wife found Freddie's number and gave him a call to give him the news. His father had been responsible, worked hard, saved his money, put Freddie and his brothers through college but when his mother died and all the boys had grown up and left home, his father disappeared. No forwarding address. After awhile Freddie didn’t think that much about him. So he was surprised when this widow he didn’t know called and told him his father had been hit by a truck that ran up on a sidewalk and flattened him. Declared dead at the hospital. 

Freddie didn’t mourn his mother either when she had died although he had spent two years taking her to the best doctors hoping one of them would save her from cancer, not realizing that back in those years there was nothing doctors could do for a cancer so severe and caught so late, certainly not the big-time surgeon who said that he could. He was number one at a teaching hospital and wanted to fatten his mother up so he could operate on her again so all the residents and interns could watch and learn from him as he attempted to do the impossible. 

His mother was terminal, the first doctor had said following the first of three operations two years earlier, but that doctor was an immigrant at a small hospital. There were bigger, better hospitals in Chicago and Freddie took her to the best in the city. Finally his mother, in her last days and when she weighed about 80 pounds, said, “No more operations.” She died two weeks later in the middle of the night right after Freddie had called the hospital to ask about her and heard the usual mantra, “Your mother’s vital signs are stable.” They never said she was dying.

But after the funeral Freddie sat for three hours and sipped Cokes in his apartment and watched a movie of his entire life run through his mind. Like Freddie's father his mother did everything a mother could do but she wasn’t any better affectively than his father had been although Freddie would bet no mother ever made better salami sandwiches. He ate three or four at a time and took them and everything else she did for him for granted. That’s what a mother was supposed to do. He was too smart to know better.

Freddie had been a kid reared in a neighborhood of immigrants. The other kids, by and large, had parents who drank too much, fathers who didn’t work, mothers who played canasta all day and let their kids make their own sandwiches if they could find something in the refrigerator. 

One kid had come to love sandwiches made with dill pickle slices and ketchup because that’s what he used to find in the fridge. There was always salami and liver sausage in Freddie’s fridge. In comparison, Freddie had it made but he was always too smart to know better. 

Besides Freddie, three other boys in his neighborhood went to college at a time in life when if kids went to college their parents had to have the money to send them because there were no loans and only geniuses got scholarships. The only jobs kids could get then were paper routes on bicycles and paper routes didn’t earn tuition. 

There were no fast-food restaurants where a kid could at least earn minimum wage. In fact, there was no minimum wage. 

Freddie’s first job as a dishwasher in a greasy spoon paid forty cents an hour and as many hamburgers as he wanted for lunch. He always ate at least three with a milkshake. The owner’s wife didn’t like that but Freddie didn’t get fired. He was 14 at the time. It was the summer between 8th grade and high school. Who knows what they would have had to pay an adult to wash dishes. Probably a dollar or more an hour. Big money for unskilled labor at that time. Businesses paid what they needed to get the job done and often that wasn’t very much.

All the material things in life a kid could reasonably expect Freddie’s parents made certain he had on time. But otherwise they were inadequate as parents although neither they nor Freddie knew it at the time. As Freddie told the doctor much later in life, he never recalled being hugged or kissed by either one of them although perhaps as an infant one or both of them might have done that, his mother especially, he thought, because she would smile once in awhile. But hugging, kissing or smiling was not really his father’s style. 

It wasn’t until much later in life, as a husband and father himself, that Freddie came to realize that when it came to love—real love--he was missing some component other people seemed to have. Not just romantic love because sex always got in the way of that. But other kinds of love—what parents felt for children, what brothers and sisters felt for each other, what grandparents seemed to feel for everyone. Freddie didn’t feel anything like that, never had and thought it was odd when he witnessed demonstrations of love in other families. Worse, he didn’t know something was missing in him until very late in life. But it was too late then. What had happened had happened and in some respects Freddie realized he was lucky to have been sent to an institution rather than a prison. 

He hoped one of these doctors would be able to figure out what was the matter with him but all they had said so far was that he had an affective disorder since childhood. But even if they could help him with that it would make no difference, really. He would never get out of the institution and besides, even if he did, where at his age could he go? His kids didn’t want to see him because they had found their mother. 

At times, usually in the middle of the night, Freddie felt like apologizing to everyone involved. Almost. He had more sessions to go with the doctor. Maybe something would kick in and he’d start writing letters. The doc said he’d give him the stamps if he ever wanted to do that. But Freddie didn’t feel like apologizing yet and he really wouldn’t know where to send the letters even if some day he wanted to write them. What the hell could he possibly say? Sorry wouldn’t help anything as far as he was concerned. Besides, most of the time he wasn’t sorry and he thought he should be by now. 

Donal Mahoney

Shakespeare Under the Stars

A very strange interlude in the life of Sidewalks Theater,

Theater Musings

 by

 Gary Beck 

Sidewalks Theater was in the middle of a cycle of Aristophanes plays and a core group of the company had been together for a while. We had just finished workshop productions and a six week run of The Birds, to appreciative audiences and even fair reviews. Although I was reminded by a noted critic that ‘I wasn’t Zero Mostel’. I didn’t bother telling him that I never thought I was, preferring dignified silence to a disclaimer of a delusional disorder.

We usually spent the summer touring, or doing programs for underserved and neglected audiences. The previous summer, for example, we toured Aristophanes ‘The Women in Assembly’ to 25 public housing developments in all 5 boroughs of New York City, as well as other public service and college performances. Audiences of every type and age level loved the show. A number of actors had left us when we ended the run. Rather then recast, I opted for a change in the regular production schedule. I decided it was time to do a Shakespeare play.

I couldn’t conceive of doing Hamlet without a complete cast of talented and skilled actors, way beyond our budget. However, the core group was talented and capable, so I chose one of the most accessible comedies for those with limited resources, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’.

We couldn’t afford a nice venue, so I arranged to do the show with an erratic, slightly disreputable theater manager. He had various theater spaces in an old courthouse building in Manhattan’s West 50’s. They were all dirty, decrepit and decayed, but we would be using an outdoor courtyard, which we assumed a brief cleaning would suffice to make it presentable.

An educational digression. We had done shows at different Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway theaters when we didn’t have our own theater. In virtually every instance, the space was filthy, unmaintained and required repairs of stage and seating to preserve the safety of the audience and actors. In one noted Off-Broadway house there were big holes in the walls on street level for people to peer through from outside. Their lighting instruments, some of which weighed 20 – 25 pounds, were barely secured by string, the same type string used in a bakery to tie your box of cookies, hanging dangerously over the audience as well as the stage.

In another well known Off-Broadway theater, the seats weren’t attached to the floor, the emergency exits were blocked with piles of lumber. I could go on about how some diminutive theater mentalities seemed to think it was normal and acceptable to operate a dangerous pig-sty. We were always hated for daring to clean, make repairs, and paint before starting rehearsals and tech. I believe a theater should always be clean, comfortable and up to fire code for the pleasure and safety of the audience. They don’t teach these values in college drama departments. I leave it to the reader to try to understand why so many middle-class offspring are so dedicated to creating filthy theater spaces.

The outdoor courtyard, where I had arranged to perform ‘All’s Well’, hadn’t been cleaned in years. The light board had been left uncovered, in the open, through at least one winter and had a 2” layer of pigeon shit. It required major overhaul. There were only 2 lighting instruments, elderly fresnels, that had to be taken apart and cleaned and we had to bring in our own lights and cables. The stage, four rickety, collapsing 4’x8’ platforms, came with a collection of bottles and jars containing urine and feces that belonged to a homeless man living under the platforms in a nest of cardboard. Another man lived under the fire escape stairs that led from the building to the courtyard, except his was he was neat as a pin, with bookshelves and a reading light on an extension cord and cans of bugspray and Lysol. Each evening while we were there, his bed was vacant and the curtain hiding it was closed. The stench under the platforms made chemical warfare envious. It took our tech crew hours and hours of unpleasant labor to clean, then disinfect the area with ammonia, instead of their starting to take down the useless set.

My regular designer had made other commitments, assuming we would tour The Birds, so I was compelled to hire a costume and set designer. We had a limited budget, which invariably allows for limited talent. The exception this time was the set designer, a talented young woman who came up with a multi-level platform that could have come out of a textbook of classical design. Every rose has its you know whats. She brought her boyfriend to assist her, a moderately competent, but obnoxious oaf, oblivious to all the other work going on, including rehearsals.

I was not so lucky with the costume designer. She was typical of the Off-Off Broadway breed with questionable talent and minimal skills. A sad commentary. She was the best I could find for a small fee. She was scrupulously obliging at the beginning of the project, until I requested preliminary sketches and fabric samples. She thought this was unreasonable. A bad sign. Then she smiled gamely and said all will be well. She had five weeks to make 14 costumes, most of them fairly simple. This seemed easily achievable.

I had started casting five weeks before we moved into the space, where we would have two weeks to work before opening night. The core group had already learned their lines and were building their characters, thus setting an example to newcomers. I prefer working with actors who I worked with before, not always feasible Off-Off Broadway.  In the first part of auditions, I had 20 actors assemble in a rehearsal studio and I gave them an overview of my work process. I stressed that I worked with life and death like intensity to create a living fabric onstage, not a museum piece.

One girl was troubled by what she considered my harsh method of approaching a revered classic. She stood up and whimpered about ‘how Shakespeare should be performed with delicacy and sensitivity’. She had realized she had fallen into the hands of theater barbarians. Before I could cut her off and thank her for coming, Autry, a capable, talented actor, who had been with us for a full production cycle of ‘The Birds’, stood up, turned to her and said: “Fuck that shit.” He happened to be very big, very black, and scared her into abrupt flight, thus saving me the chore. I ended up casting six newcomers, five men and a woman. All the men had at least several years minimum of experience and had gone through a demanding audition cycle. They were eager, cooperative, and happy to be doing a Shakespeare play. Considering the generally meager talent Off-Off-Broadway, they were an acceptable lot.

We started rehearsals in an indoor space in the complex (after a thorough sweep and mop). The newcomers fit right in with the core group and were working well. It took two weeks of prodding, but the costumer produced a few sketches, promising more in a few days. Then she finally measured the actors. The first night we were to work in the outdoor space, the manager couldn’t be found. A bad sign. Several of us climbed a 10 foot courtyard wall, then jimmied the door open to let everyone in. The manager showed up later and was outraged that we climbed the wall. By the time we got into the outdoor space, with two weeks to go before opening night, the costumer had stopped returning phone calls. She finally told our production manager, Robert, that she’d bring half the costumes in a few days. She temporarily reassured him, so I concentrated on other problems.

At this time I was the artistic director and executive director of Sidewalks of New York Productions, that included Sidewalks Theater, a video production company and outreach programs in a Bronx public housing development and a boy’s prison facility. There was endless writing of grant proposals and administrative work, not including my own work as a playwright and translator of the next Greek comedy we would produce, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. The only way I could direct ‘All’s Well’, and keep up all my other chores, was to set up a work table in the rehearsal area and work there from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., only getting up to go to the bathroom, or stretch.

The oaf boyfriend assisting the set designer became a constant annoyance. He deliberately walked through the actors while we were rehearsing, made as much noise as possible whenever he was near me, and left tools, scrap wood and other debris in the rehearsal area. He sulked when I asked him to move things, then mumbled resentfully. By the third day he was becoming a menace to safety and I decided to have a talk with him and try to improve his attitude. Before I could do this he laid cable for the lighting instruments, not his job, that wasn’t supposed to be done for several days, including through our rehearsal area. I asked him to gaffer tape the cable so no one would trip on it and he freaked out, screaming: “You sit around all day telling everyone what to do, while we’re all working.” Then he started towards me threateningly. Work stopped. Robert moved behind him, ready to knock him down if he attacked me, but I stared him down. Then I told him he was fired. He grabbed his personal things and left cursing all of us.

The designer, his girl friend, came up to me and said she wouldn’t work without him and was quitting. I described some of the things he had been doing, but she didn’t care and prepared to leave. I then told her pleasantly that if she quit I’d make sure she’d never design a legitimate theater production again, which scared her. She caved, went back to work, hating me, another dramatic episode in a small theater company. But I got rid of the oaf and if I handled her carefully I’d get a good set.

So on we worked and waited for the light, which was still in question due to the decrepit condition of the lightboard. During the pre-production period, the theater manager, rather then helping us in any way, complained bitterly that we didn’t have the right to build a set, paint the peeling walls, repair the seats, etc. But rehearsal was going well and with a week to go the play was shaping up satisfactorily. Then the next costume crisis. After fervent promises, we still hadn’t gotten any costumes. There was no time to hire another costumer and truth be known I might not have done much better. If lighting designers were 80% competent Off-Off Broadway, set designers 60%, costumers were between 35% and 40%. A sad reality in a mostly self-indulgent environment.

We were faced with the dread alternatives of costuming the actors in black leotards and tights, a dreary expectation at best. Robert, the long suffering production manager, with his eight year old son, Daemon, who had been an assistant stage manager at our theater for years, went to the costumer’s apartment. At first she wouldn’t answer the bell, or their knock. Then Daemon sweet-talked her and she promised to bring the costumes to the theater in two days. Daemon, already a bit cynical about erratic costumers, told me it was the best they could do. On Sunday, two days before dress rehearsal, when she didn’t show up, they went to her house again. She wouldn’t open the door, but told them she’d bring the costumes Tuesday morning. When again she didn’t appear, they went to her house, pounded on the door until she opened it under threat of their bringing the police. She gave them whatever she had. All the principal’s costumes were  half finished, the others all needed major work. It was a mess.

Dress rehearsal Tuesday night was in street clothes and everyone worked well. The show ran about 2 ½ hours, with one 10 minute intermission. When we finished, I praised the actors and the techs and told them our costume problem. All the core group actors volunteered to sew costumes. The newcomers followed suit. Despite the objection of the theater manager, we took over an empty space in the building and sewed away until four in the morning. Everyone seemed to have a fun, social time, however unexpected the demand. The costumes weren’t great, but everyone had a period costume and they were presentable, although some of them were pinned or hot glue gunned together. Another minor theater miracle. Most of the actors had to work on opening day. They weren’t the bartender class actors, who made good money dispensing booze, and really didn’t want to perform, just audition once in a while to retain the illusion of being an actor.

The cast assembled at 6:00 p.m. for the regular pre-rehearsal warm-up. We had set up tarped areas in a backstage space for dressing. The show began a little later then 8:00 p.m., due to last minute costume adjustments. All the new men, who had been macho and articulate throughout rehearsals and dress rehearsal, suddenly tumbled out of the closet and presented the gay follies. Their physical and vocal mannerisms that made a travesty of the work we had done. The rest of us were horrified, but to the credit of the core group, they did their jobs properly and well, despite the grotesqueries going on around them. I tried talking to the suddenly demented dolts at intermission, but they were unresponsive. Autry and some of the core group men wanted to beat them, but I stopped that. The bitterest pill that night was the audience didn’t seem to notice the difference between two different types of performance.

My choice was simple. Close the show, which meant that we would have wasted our time, money and creative effort, or live with the offensive outbreak. I decided to continue, but we divided into two groups, one doing serious Shakespeare, the other doing high camp. We set up a separate dressing area for the newcomers and left them to their own devices. The core group of 6 men, three of whom were gay, performed with passion and integrity, gradually overcoming the silly antics of the others who lost stage credibility and became almost invisible. We actually managed, despite the negative factors, to do a good show.

We did 6 shows a week for 6 weeks, and somehow, in an incredibly rainy summer, the rain always held off until the final curtain. The performances were frequently accompanied by dramatic thunder and lightning courtesy of Mother Nature, which would have been ideal if we were doing Macbeth.  Of course there were always ongoing problems. How else could it be in the not-for-profit theater world? But we overcame them and the show always went on, something I always prided myself about. The worst disruption on opening night was by the idiot theater manager. He had stipulated the show had to end by 11:00 p.m. It was scheduled to end between 10:44 and 10:45, but ran late due to a late start. The dolt shut off the building’s power, which included our theater lighting, at 11:00, with five minutes to go, without bothering to check if the show was still on. Robert flew up five flights of stairs to his office and promised to fracture his skull if he didn’t put on the power. Robert demonstrated Einstein’s Lesser Theory of Relativity in his time shattering flight.

A few days after the production closed, while I was still enjoying the pleasure of not seeing the childish, stupid actors again, I found myself idly wondering if sewing costumes the night before opened some sort of gay portal that transferred onto the stage. Then again, the core group’s gay actors weren’t infected by the sewing virus. So it became one more weird occurrence in the strange life of an ongoing theater company.