Casting About #3
As it turned out, it was time for Warren and me to re-evaluate our relationship, too. On a vacation to Key West a month later (an extravagance for me which, of course, Warren paid for) we realized we were both interested in exploring other relationships. We were tempted by the easily available men there on that vacation island awash in alcohol. But also admitted how often our commitment to each other had nearly capsized in the roiling sea of men in New York dance clubs.
Did we want to explore an open relationship, as was being talked about in the brand new gay press?
Warren complained he had not lived enough, seen enough, explored his fabulous body enough. He didn't think he had enough relationship experience to settle down for good. I admitted similar feelings, although with less urgency. In our hotel room and on the flight back home, we talked through this challenge, just as we had faced each of the other decisions in our relationship.
We started with digging through our philosophical stances. We found we shared the conviction that sex was a viable a way of getting to know someone, as legitimate and useful as dancing or conversing. We liked getting to know a man's body first. Neither of us held onto the view that there needed to be an emotional connection first, and certainly not a commitment to spend a life together. The life together might evolve organically out of shared experience, but was not a prerequisite to sexual exploration or fun. Even without personal experience, we shared the opinions circulating in the gay cultural current that sex between two consenting adults could be a healthy form of recreation as much as it could express deep love. We gay men didn't need to be held to expectations of monogamy that had been invented in a straight society.
Honesty trumped convention and expectation. We had no desire to have clandestine encounters. When we got back to the City, I simply moved my stuff into the second bedroom in our apartment and we began living as roommates and close friends. Way beyond the timeframe specified in our hand-written agreement, Warren continued to pay our rent for another year and a half. We both went out several nights a week and brought our newest "playmates" back to the apartment. Our individual beds and what we did in them was separated only by a thin wall. Somehow we both accepted hearing each other’s sexual symphonies, though I'll admit to feeling a bit jealous sometimes as I listened to the passions pounding through the wall and into my bed frame. I also remember meeting Warren some mornings in our kitchen, after our bedfellows were gone. Over strong coffee and bagels (we still had a thing for fresh bagels), we'd discuss the pros and cons of each of them.
From talking with many other gay men over the years, I have discovered that our arrangement was not that uncommon--lovers who made a conscious shift to become committed friends and supportive roommates. We stopped short of referring to each other as "sisters" as others did. Neither of us was comfortable with or interested in stereotypically female behaviors, or the over-the-top flouncing of those who aped female impersonators.
By the next fall, Warren had met and started seriously dating Steve--sandy hair cut short, square jaw, gym chiseled body. When they decided to move in together--the lawyer and the doctor with plenty of income to spare--they found an elegantly funky place in the West Village where they could be closer to the dance clubs, and Warren could be closer to his Wall Street office.
No longer in each other's daily lives, our relationship having run its course, Warren and I quickly lost touch. I missed our wide-ranging, open conversations. I missed our daily sharing in the honest way we had cultivated. I occasionally wondered what was happening in his world, but the new realities of my starving-artist life became all-consuming. I would not hear until 30 years later that he died of AIDS in 1985, having moved back to Minnesota to be taken care of by his mother. Balancing the needs of my own survival with the passion to create and produce my choreography, while keeping my body fine tuned for the weekly rehearsing and performing filled every waking moment.
I did not really want to leave the Upper West Side, but I needed to find a cheaper place to live. I started my search in the hip Lower East Side. On my first apartment-hunting trip there, with the limited options my budget allowed, I looked at only a couple of cramped and ugly places, both on dicey blocks. One of them had only two tiny rooms, one of which served as both kitchen and bathroom. The other, much more run down than the first, had cobwebs hanging from exposed rafters and drafts of cold air gusting up through the floorboards. The long walk from the nearest subway on that cold, wet November day was sufficient to quell any enthusiasm I had left. Heading the other direction up to the top neck of Manhattan the next afternoon took over an hour each way from Beverly's Soho dance studio. That option seemed equally daunting.
Then I heard through the grapevine that the edgy Fort Green area of Brooklyn was the new, up-and-coming gay neighborhood. Its attraction came from location alone, sitting as it did just across the Brooklyn Bridge and two short blocks from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I investigated.
The agent who showed me what he had described as a "newly renovated building" on Fort Green Avenue, told me he'd rented places to four or five other single gay men on this block alone. Just as we were walking in, in a surprising stroke of coincidence, a very young, very tall redhead with a soft South Carolina drawl, came out of the building next door. "Well, hello there, sweetie". With a wink and a backward glance, he sauntered down the street toward the subway, confirming the agent's assertions.
The street was guarded at the entrance off Flatbush Avenue by a pair of iron-barred bodegas with competing trios of guys selling drugs in front of each. Not so promising. But I convinced myself I could steel myself, narrow my gaze, and slide between them unnoticed on my way in and out. More importantly in my mind at the time was the short twenty-minute commute to Beverly's Soho loft. And I had quickly calculated that a one bedroom apartment in the building I'd just seen was within my limited budget as long as I got a roommate soon.
I chose, perhaps unwisely, the apartment on the first floor. It was only half a flight of stairs from the street, in what had once been a rather grand brownstone. The high-ceilinged "parlor floor" promised wonderful light from the two large front windows, but turned out to also be a wonderful home for a growing family of mice, and an invading hoard of cockroaches. To top it off, it was within easy reach of prying hands. It was through one of those elegant windows that someone slipped in on my moving day. While I arranged my clothes in the bedroom in back, they simply walked out the front door with my bicycle. I shook it off, knowing there was no use in even reporting it, and attached my own locks to the windows the next day.
The building's recent renovations had offered me new locks on the hall doors, new kitchen appliances and cabinets, and fresh coats of paint on the walls, but no other upgrades other than marketing. The roach population had waited inside the walls till there was a new source of food on the counter, in the cabinets, on the floors, and even in the new refrigerator.
The other buildings on the block not yet "renovated" were occupied by extended families recently immigrated from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or somewhere in the Soviet Bloc. This multi-lingual, multi-ethnic assortment spilled out on the street no matter the weather, bringing the neighborhood to life. It was the families with their small children and over-protective mothers that saved my particular block from the gang warfare still killing the reputation of the surrounding neighborhoods. Well, protective mothers and the brand new incursion of gay-artist-pioneers with their fierce, get-outta-my-face attitudes. I wanted to be one of those intrepid pioneers. But my courageous intentions were undercut by my mid-western manners and long practice in being "nice." The best I could do was smile and hurry on past to the subway, hoping that would keep me safe.
***
Before I found a roommate, my college friend, Loren, came to visit. Even though five years had passed since I'd seen him, we'd stayed in postcard communication. Our earlier ménage-a-trois with my college girlfriend still hovered in my imagination. Those two nights five years before--hesitant and wildly exciting nights he had initiated--had opened a new vein in my erotic landscape that had by now widened into a free flowing lifestyle. My attraction to Loren had not abated in the ensuing years. When he'd asked if I wanted him to come help on my new dance/theater production, a fantasy of engaging in more erotic experimentation blossomed in my brain. But when he arrived with his wife Jo, and their eight-month-old baby, those fantasies fizzled. Our connection this time centered on the production of "The Song Weavers."
I'd written to him about this new dance theater piece--in some ways a rehash of my Senior Independent Project, "Areoi." He'd been in that evening length physical theater piece in college and was still starry-eyed about the whole experience. My recent steeping in movement and sound improvisations with Beverly Brown was re-inspiring me. I was again driven by a vision of surrounding the audience with an intentionally primitive and direct sound and movement collage. I wanted the audience to feel the experience, not just see it. Just as I'd done in college, I wanted the performers to be within reach of the audience.
And just as I'd done in college, I enlisted the support of my college collaborator, Geoff Wright, now in a graduate music composition program at Peobody Institute, to create an electronic score. The piece needed a strong sonic background to support the voices of the performers as they crossed the "fourth wall," the invisible barrier that usually separates audience and performers. And this time, I wanted the cast members to actually touch the audience. No separation. Immediacy. I even had plans for us to wear citrus scents so an element of smell would permeate the space and linger in the audience's memory.
Loren and I loved discussing these boundary-breaking ideas. We shared a passion for pushing edges. On what must've been his holiday break, he'd driven from Michigan to help with the costumes. With his wife and new baby along for the ride, it must have been more than a little awkward for them, cramped in that small and not-yet-furnished apartment. Loren and I managed to avoid talking about our prior sexual experimentation, but the air was full of unexpressed possibilities, especially late in the evening after Jo went to bed with the baby. I've kept a picture of him sitting on the bare living room floor with a piece of green cloth in one hand, a pair of scissors in the other, loose hair hanging softly over his brow, and a wry grin teasing its way through his scruffy beard. Sexy as hell, but now off limits.
The chair that Loren occupied during our late-night wandering conversations was a true find that happened on one of our wandering walks during one of New York's "sidewalk sales," a term New Yorkers affectionately use for the periodic bulk collection days. While Jo had fed the baby and napped on their first afternoon in Brooklyn, Loren and I had gone "shopping." We'd strolled through surrounding blocks, streets studded with nicer homes, examining and discarding promising pieces of junk. Eventually we spotted a promising chair, someone else's well-loved cast-off. We examined its undersides thoroughly. Assuring ourselves it harbored no mice, lice, roaches or pet poop, we dragged it back to my building and up into the living room for an honored second life.
I had only two other pieces of furniture that first month. One was a fold-up Formica covered table, with matching folding wooden chairs. It looked gruesome in the overhead fluorescent light, and was pitifully unable to fill the center of the big, open kitchen. The other was the full-sized mattress that filled most of the floor of the tiny bedroom in the back of the apartment. I'd made Loren, Jo and the baby as comfortable as possible there, while I slept on an improvised bed in the living room, the room soon to be occupied by the roommate I had yet to find. I absolutely had to find a roommate before the next month's rent was due, having spent everything I had on the down payment.
That's all I brought with me--parting gifts from my much classier Upper West Side existence. As far as setting up house was concerned, I was starting from scratch. Again. I didn't want to worry my parents with the sketchiness of this new development. I chose instead to paint an optimistic picture, and wrote them about "making a new life in an up-and-coming neighborhood in a new apartment with lots of promise."
***
To block out my survival fears, I'd doubled down in rehearsals with a small collection of misfit performers. I'd pilfered a couple of dancers from dance classes. I'd borrowed a couple from Beverly's company. I'd asked around and accepted anyone who showed up. I could not pay anything, so I couldn't be too choosy. But I wanted dancers who could sing, who were gutsy performers, who would not be weirded out by primitive sound and movement material molded out of sounding circles and movement improvisations. I loved exploring, discovering, trying out endless possibilities, structuring a sonic flow in one way and a structured pattern for the movement in another. Even more, I was in love with these new-for-me processes for generating raw material. And the tribe I assembled to venture into this uncharted territory loved it too. They got a kick out of making stuff up, and then, when they found their spontaneous creative work showing up in the patterns I later structured, they puffed up with the pride of ownership.
"Song Weavers" was both the title of the piece and the name we called our little collective. Since I was already at Beverly's studio several days a week for her company rehearsals, she and I had worked out a deal that allowed me to use studio space in exchange for taking on management duties for her company.
By the time Loren visited, "Song Weavers" was far enough along to be running sections of the piece. Before he had to leave, I made the group do a run of the whole thing so he'd get to see it come together. He loved it, and the company got excited by the coherent performance they felt emerging out of such chaotic beginnings. But I couldn't enjoy it.
I'd been beset by the production details, along with my move to Brooklyn, and was too exhausted. I hadn't learned to delegate. I felt bad about asking people to do the million tedious tasks of mounting a show. So I did everything. I designed and sewed costumes for the eight-person cast, showering Loren with gratitude for his help. I designed a postcard announcement of the performances. I got a thousand printed with money I borrowed from my parents. I borrowed mailing lists from friends, dancers, and from Beverly's 3x5 cards. With the performers after rehearsal one day, I addressed and stamped all the postcards. I organized the mailing according to the rules for non-profit bulk rate mailings established by the post office. I took piles of the postcards around town to dance studios. All of this was overwhelming.
I'd borrowed money from my parents to hire a nearby Soho loft for the February performances, one that came with a few theatrical lights and a sound system that turned out to be inadequate for the cutting edge electronic score Geoff designed. I think this score was to serve also as part of Geoff's Ph.D. in Music Composition as well as his submission to various composer-in-residence programs. In any case, the score was beautiful, and by Christmas we were rehearsing with it, fitting our vocal work into its haunting sonic environment.
By performance week in February, we had reservations for each of the three nights to fill all forty spaces we had allotted for the audience in our performing venue. Each night, forty people left the loft intrigued, excited, or more often, befuddled. At least they weren't bored, and no one left in the middle.
The Song Weavers group was disappointed by the mixed response of the audiences. But because of the way our working together had bonded us, when I tallied up the little money left over after production expenses were paid, we all went out and celebrated--pizza and beer all around accompanied by laughing and singing. And undeterred by the lack of reviews or accolades, most of that intrepid and playful crew agreed to return to the studio. A month later we began exploring new material drawn up out of our bodies and voices for an as-yet-undefined new piece--sounding circles unleashing rich vocal textures, movement games unlocking playful community energy and hidden sensual longings, structured theatrical exercises linking our present day repetitions with the rituals of an echoing past.
This part of my artist's life I loved--the creative part. My enthusiasm motivated the creativity of my dancers. The chance to be such an integral part of the creative process inspired their loyalty in return. And I became more relaxed without the demands of an immanent production and the stress of marketing. I could practice being the choreographer I intended to be--at least for a while. Naive confidence in my skill and talent kept my spirits floating on clouds for several months till living expenses ate up all my earnings from my out of town gigs with the Baroque Dance Company.
So I tried picking up some extra cash working for a gay-owned catering company. It was fun and relatively lucrative for only one night's work--$50 base pay, the same as I earned for a night of performing following four months of unpaid rehearsal. Along with twenty or more unemployed actor/dancer/waiters, all playing the part in our thrift store tuxes, we flirted our way to sizable tips from the benefactors. Then flirted our way into bed with each other. Out of one of those one night stands that began after a long night on our feet on the marble floors of the lobby of Lincoln Center's State Theater, I managed to get a lovely walk in the park the morning after, and a wonderful, flattering photo of me framed by apple blossoms. After a sweet, open kiss in a halo of dappled light, he caught such a sweet, open expression it became the headshot that would serve me for a decade of publicity needs.
Later that spring, motivated by a latent vanity and a desperate need for money I made a completely uncharacteristic move. I joined a stampede of Broadway gypsies who descended on a casting call in a mid-town high-rise. We were about three hundred hopefuls looking to pick up some good paying work for the summer. And the possibility of getting a union card as a result of the gig added to the draw.
I was there for the same reason as the others, although I had not been investing in the dream many of them had. I had been struggling to make ends meet in the modern dance world long enough, had exhausted all my resources with the Song Weavers, and thought I might as well make economic use of my combined acting, singing and dancing skills. I had never been tempted by commercial theater before--seemed too much about the entertainment value and too little about the art for my taste. But I was willing to lower my artistic bar for a while to get paid real money for a change if it would enable me to get back to producing my own experimental work in the fall. So a limited eight week run in a summer dinner theater production of "Sweet Charity" up in White Plains seemed like a good possibility. I didn't know much about the Broadway theater scene, but figured that I might have a chance.
According to the trade magazine ad, they were looking for five men and five women for the chorus. They expected us to show up with a headshot and resume listing "triple threat" experience--equally able to handle the singing, dancing and acting demands of Broadway musicals. All I had on the back of my new headshot was a one page resume that included a B.A. in Theater, a list of modern dance choreographers, and some college musicals. I didn't hold out much hope of getting the gig based on my track record, but I thought the audition experience might be good for me.
We were called into the large studio in groups of thirty. Dance auditions came first, luckily for me, and I found the paces they put us through laughably easy. They asked only a few of us to go next door for the vocal auditions. The rest were sent home.
Like everyone else, I was ready with sixteen bars of a song that would show off my voice. All that was really essential for them, I found out, was that I could project my words and keep a tune. One after another, we brought our sheet music to the accompanist and sang. The musical director made quick decisions on the spot. Most were sent home.
After the vocal auditions, I was still in the running...and surprised. It seemed too easy. The rest of the audition consisted of being paired with various others so the producers could see how we looked together. They also asked us to learn a song, read lines, and learn a piece of the choreography from the show. Nothing creative required. Just reproduce as closely as possible what had been done in the original Broadway production. Look the part. Don't make mistakes. Smile wide. Be sparkling on demand. Before I left the rehearsal studios, they told me I had the gig.
I was stunned. What had I gotten myself into? I looked at the rehearsal schedule they gave me, and was speechless, incredulous. We would have one week of rehearsal in the theater before we opened. One week? One week to learn choreography, songs, staging and the bit parts each of the chorus played throughout the show? One week of rehearsal followed by eight weeks of eight performances a week! I was used to several months of rehearsal for a single four-night run in a small venue.
The rehearsal week at the beginning of the summer was strenuous and nerve wracking for me, but also fun. I was unsure of my ability to pull it off, but I found that at almost thirty years old, I had much better work habits than most of the other chorus members, none of whom was older than twenty-two. I paid close attention, learned well, and fit in quickly. I knew how to match my steps to the other dancers. I had no trouble blending my large baritone voice into the chorus. And I had fun with my bit part...for a while.
As the shortest man in the chorus, and with my boyishly round face, I was cast as the teenager. I grudgingly accepted that I was perceived as ten years younger than I actually was. At the time it seemed a bit insulting that as the oldest member of the team, with the most performing experience, I was playing the youngest role. And to add even more insult, all of us chorus members were forever referred to as "boys and girls," never "men and women." Day after day I had to respond to calls over the backstage speaker system for "boys on stage in five minutes."
The reality of life in the chorus of a commercial musical gradually sunk in. In less than two weeks, spending so much time in the dressing room each day with the rest of the boys who were constantly dabbing at their makeup--immature, image-obsessed, catty and gossipy hours that grated on my nerves--convinced me that this life was not what I wanted, no matter what it paid. As the other chorus boys prattled on about one current Broadway star or another, it became clear to me that, while I could get into the chorus, and perhaps any number of other chorus roles for longer running shows, I would never get out of the chorus. To work up to playing leading men, I would have needed to fit the physical type first, just to be seen by a casting agent. I wasn't tall enough to get in the door. To get a juicy character part, I would need a uniquely unusual face or voice. I was too conventionally good looking and mid-western sounding. And I was too WASPY in an industry that, in the late seventies, was trying to shift to more ethnic diversity in casting.
By the time the eight weeks were up, I had decided I'd had enough of that world. And besides, before I’d even begun that run, I’d found what I really wanted -- well actually, who. If my life were a movie, this would be the moment where a dazzling young man would make his dramatic entrance—the androgynous spawn of Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara in a rush of twirling grace notes gliding down a long spiral staircase.