acting school

Remembering Moondog and Some Others on a Sunday morning in Istanbul

/ zdunno03 / 15 Comments

I was remembering Moondog this morning, this blind musician/poet who dressed as a viking and wandered the city streets reciting poetry, playing music, and scaring the wits out of drunk teenagers like me who just happened to bump into him when rounding a corner in the West 50s. The first time I was with Henry Munoz and Alvin Miller and we had spent several hours after acting class in the Blarney Stone eating those greasy cornbeef sandwiches and drinking draft beer spiked with rye whiskey that Julian Richards always smuggled in under his coat. Anyway, Alvin was going off to catch the D train to Carnesie, if I remember correctly, and Henry was walking with me to 34th Street where he would get the E or F train back to Jackson Heights and I would catch the LIRR home and boom. Right smack into this viking. I mean, man, that’ll sober you up pretty quickly. Of course, later I found out he was a sort of West Side celebrity and even appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson playing some of his compositions. And since so much of my time was spent in the West 50s because that’s where the acting schools I attended were located, I ran into Moondog on more than a few occasions and, like all New Yorkers, quickly accepted all strange and unusual things as normal.

But this is about more than Moondog, naturally. It’s about the faces I woke up this morning staring at me from the various corners of my rooms. I mean, I literally trip over these people and playing You Were On My Mind by the We Five on repeat mode on my compact stereo system in the den doesn’t help matters. I will, no doubt, before I finish with this piece switch to Go Now by The Moody Blues and then some early Kinks like You Really Got Me because I really am going somewhere in my head.

Now my senior year of high school changed the trajectory of my life and I wrote about this previously in a piece called, quite appropriately, My Senior Year of High School, but I’m going to revisit that year and a few prior to it and maybe one or two afterwards because they all explain how a working class kid like me ended up not just here in Turkey but at the end of what could only be referred to as an eventful life, one I probably wouldn’t have lived if it hadn’t been for those rock & roll shows at the Brooklyn Fox that Murray The K put together and where I saw Stevie Wonder for the first time do Fingertips Parts 1 & 2 , Ronnie & the Ronettes swing their long hair as they sang Be My Baby, the Shangri-Las doing Leader of the Pack, and countless other acts that graced that stage for a song or two. ‘Cause it was my clowning afterwards that led Jimmy Hanley to suggest I become an actor which led to that year commuting into the city at night to not just attend classes but to become friends with people like Henry and Alvin and fall under the influence of Lee Stanleigh, fall hopelessly in love with Karen Deene and get drunk too often with Big Ed and Julian. Life is pretty funny, isn’t it?

So here I am on a Sunday morning in Istanbul postponing packing my carry-ons for my week’s vacation starting tomorrow in Izmir thinking about these ghosts from my past and listening to the We Five singing “I got wounds to bind”.

So here’s the dog story ’cause no early morning or late night stroll among these ghosts is complete without my dog nudging my elbow and climbing into my lap. We had just adopted him from the ASPCA on 91st Street and drove over in my Volkswagon to visit my brother George and his girlfriend, eventually to become his first wife, Lily, in their apartment on East 5th Street. Frodo, the dog named after yes, the trilogy George and I read together, is maybe 8 weeks old and not in total control of his bladder so George is laying down parts of the Sunday NY Times on the kitchen floor while Frodo is looking for a place to do his business. And, of course, he backs up next to George and lets go on George’s brand new desert boots which, of course, made us all laugh, including George, and endeared us all to what would become, before this damned cat came into my life, the number one animal in my life. Now this cat, Noir, has not displaced Frodo in my heart but he has somehow managed to settle in next to him. Anyway, I was thinking about Frodo this morning, too, and almost tripped over him in the hall going for my second cup of coffee of the day.

But back to the mid sixties, not the early seveties, and there’s Steve Cohen asking me who Wiley is. You see, I kept mentioning Wiley in conversation and he couldn’t quite figure out who this woman was, and I had to explain it was Jane, Wiley being her last name, which, after we were married I insisted she keep. Maybe because I liked the sound of it on my tongue but actually because of Steve’s mother Grace who said over breakfast at his parents’ house that she went from being her father’s daughter to her husband’s wife without ever having an identity of her own. And that so impressed me that I swore I would never let any woman I loved ever lose her identity in mine. Now I have a lot of memories where Jane is concerned and some have worked their way into some of the poems but this is not about her because if any woman hovers over my shoulder this morning it’s Karen Deene. She tousles my hair as I sit studying my lines for my scenes with Ed in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and she will be the vision of Maggie the Cat in my mind even though I’ll play it with another actress named, quite coincidentally, Jane and who would French kiss me when we did the Rainmaker together and run her hand across my crotch in rehearsal and I often wonder why I didn’t follow up on those leads, her being a good ten years older than me but quite willing to initiate me into the joys of her bed which, I might add, the owner of the school enjoyed himself, so age was not something she seemed to care much about. But I was hung up on Karen and when I am hung up on a woman, whomever she might be, no one else can distract me, especially if it’s reciprocated. So Karen was, in my eyes, Maggie and I played it for her. I remember holding hands with her, having her lean into me on the street, in the seat next to me in class because she always managed to sit next to me, the whiff I would get of her perfume, the way her long hair almost touched her waist, her laugh, that smile that lit up a room when I gave her the Worry Stone I bought for her in The Village so she could rub away all the things that were troubling her.

I don’t know how I lost those people, how they slipped away and now only return in those hours between 12:00:01 am to midnight, which, as you can see, pretty much covers all waking sleeping hours of my life. My college friends are still with me for the most part, but these people from my high school years are gone, only Maureen somehow managing to reappear many years later in LA but that is, as they say, another story.

Where’s Joey Parker, for instance? Or Kevin Mahoney? The last time I saw Joey he stopped his car in front of Temple Emmanuel to say hello to me as I crossed the street and he knew I was in college, something far from any dreams of his, and he said, on parting, “Make it, man. Just make it.” And to this day I wonder just what he thought making it could be. Would he think I made it now? Here, in self-imposed exile, far from the people who care for me because the wounds, those still open wounds, are a long time healing. And you, Joey, sitting in your car, blowing air bubbles with your tongue, the muffler needing to be replaced, your right hand resting on the Hurst shifter, ready to roar off down whatever streets you roam looking for peace in your soul, where are you now? You the most loyal of friends, who took 43 stitches in the face standing up for a friend of mine. You, Joey? And Kevin, looking up surprised in the auto parts store when I came in with my brother Johnny who was trying to repair that damned van I bought to go camping all over the West in. That baby-faced smile, that little laugh you always had when the world surprised you, still with the hair curling at your collar, the sweatshirt and jacket not able to conceal the brawn of your body, the tension in your neck. Where are you, Kevin, old friend?

I don’t know. I bump into these people in my hall, in the elevator at school, while walking the ancient streets of Balat, sitting on a bench looking out at the Sea of Marmara, thousands of miles away but they still find me. Still vivid and young, still staring life in the face. Some other blogger wrote you can’t live in the past or the future but only in the present, as if those other times were a waste of energy and took us away from the moment we should be cherishing. But the past is always there, coloring the present, affecting the future. We can’t avoid it, nor should we. It is what has made us who we are and if we are not displeased with what we became, then the past is something we should not only acknowledge but embrace. And my past, these ghosts that follow me halfway around the world, are not intrusions. They are part of me just as the books I have read, the films, the plays I’ve seen, the music I’ve listened to, the art and photography that have moved me, the eyes of the people I have known, the sound of voices, laughter, tears, my father’s lost dreams, my grandmother’s espresso, my grandfather’s love of cherries, my mother’s collection of odd shaped bottles, and Joey’s scars, Karen’s long hair, Ed’s drunken ramblings about the Old West, Lee’s passion, Henry’s guilt, the musical lithe of Julian’s speech, all are embedded in my heart, my mind.

And so here, on a Sunday morning in a city 2500 years old, I, too, try to come to peace with my past. Wounds. Troubles. You on my mind. Yeah, don’t we all have these?

My Senior Year of High School

/ zdunno03 / 15 Comments

Senior year of high school found me attending acting school in Manhattan. It all came about because I was enacting some story in my head to Jimmy Hanley who looked at me with a half smile on his face and said, “You oughta be an actor.” Now I probably thought the same thing at one time or another like every kid thinks, but never really taking it seriously because the only thing I ever wanted to do since I became enthralled by E.B. White’s Stuart Little was write. I mean, I loved reading, loved the worlds I discovered in books, loved getting lost in other people’s lives which in books I seemed to be able to do so easily, and I thought I’d kind of like to do that, too. Create worlds people could get lost in, create characters people could care about, want to get to know, have coffee with, maybe, and watch logs burn in a fireplace as they traded stories. So writing is the only thing I thought I would ever do, but then this idea of acting, getting lost in characters in real time, seemed like an interesting complement to what I thought would be my life’s calling, so I mulled it over a few nights, then told my mother I was thinking of going to an acting school to see where it could lead. She, naturally, thought it was a great idea, being supportive of us as always, and so I thumbed through a Manhattan phonebook looking for the school I thought I remembered people like Gary Cooper studied at, and quite by accident picked the wrong one, but in the end it didn’t matter.
The New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. On 57th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues. My new second home for a pivotal year in my life. The year I had the two most influencial teachers I would ever know and the year I made friends with people, though I lost contact with as the years slipped by, who would leave their imprint on my heart and mind for the rest of my life.
That year I had my senior English class every morning at 8 and was exposed to Dr. William Jaeger, called Wild Bill affectionately by his students, who opened my eyes to literature in a way no one had previously. We read over 15 novels and plays, poetry, etc., including 2 novels by Camus, J.D. Salinger (whose Catcher in the Rye was banned in the school district so he had us read Seymour: An Introduction & Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, which was his surreptitious strategy of sneaking Salinger into school), Jonathan Swift, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Stephen Crane, Orwell, Conrad, Sophocles, selected Dialogues from Plato, Shakespeare’s King Lear, which he would act out for us, and so much more. Each morning was an adventure in his class because you never knew what he would do. He was a big man, a part-time actor (I saw him in a small role on TV once), and he pranced around the room, his tie loosened at the collar, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his eyes flashing, his arms flailing in the air. We would sit in a big circle and he was in the center, like in a circus, with him challenging us to think every second of those class periods. I loved books before but he made everything jump off the page. And the class was the strangest mixture of students: honor roll scholars, student body officers, hoods, loners, geeks, athletes. We all couldn’t figure out why we were in the same classroom but a few years later I met another alumni of his who told me because he was that rare PhD teaching high school in those days, the principle let him have the top 100 IQs for his classes, regardless of their GPAs. And his stated mission was to save us before we grew up into adults. I don’t know how many he “saved” but he certainly changed my life.
Then there was Lee Stanleigh at night: my acting teacher. He used a distilled version of The Method to tap into our inner emotional lives in order to get us to “feel” the roles he assigned us for scene study. The breakthrough role for me was Starbuck in The Rainmaker, which no one in their right mind at the time would have thought me capable of. But Lee did. And he talked me into the role, as he talked me into roles like Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, with Big Ed playing Big Daddy and throwing me around the room in our version of the mendacity scene. Lee saw Tennesse Williams stamped on me and so had me also take on Tom in The Glass Menagerie and Shannon inThe Night of the Iguana, all tormented souls. And each time before I would get to go on, he’d talk me into the mood of the piece, sometimes for 10 minutes or so, and then let me loose with my emotions on my sleeve.
Between those two, my brain and my heart got a workout but I grew in ways I never imagined possible and found pain beneath my surface begging for a release.
And then there were my classmates, everyone older than me and from every possible corner of the city and social-economic class:
Big Ed, an alcoholic, from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and hung up on old Western gunfighters, telling tales he read from Western magazines right out of Zane Grey, his favorite TV show being Gunsmoke, had once worked as a runner for NJ gangsters bringing cigarettes and whiskey across state lines until his partner shot some of the competition in some bathroom in a bar and Ed got spooked enough to quit. His hands shook uncontrollably, his eyes were shot, I saw him suffer from the DT’s once, shaking on the floor, foaming at the mouth. I’d often sit in bars with him late into the evening listening to his stories and even took a bus out to NJ once to visit him in his lair. He was one third of the trio that spent time with Lee after hours, including me and my first real love: Karen Deene.
Karen’s real name was Karen Gross but she preferred her adopted stage name Deene. A NYC Jewish girl from the lower East Side, she grew up in Peter Cooper Village, one of the first middle-income housing projects built in the city. Her father was a doctor who worked for the city in a clinic somewhere, and Karen graduated from Hunter College as an Education major. She was 2 years older than me but graduated college when I graduated high school because she skipped a year in grade school and I lost a year due to contracting ringworm on my head when I was seven and had to stay out of school for 6 months, causing me to repeat third grade. Karen became the prototype of almost every woman I ever fell for: long, dark hair, deep, dark eyes, a sly sense of humor, book smart, cultured, intuitive, perfect in every way except she was in love with Lee who was married to Carol but was openly gay. The marriage happened because Carol had an hysterical pregnancy and got Lee to marry her, only to find out it was a false alarm. They stayed married for reasons I never understood but did not live together. For Lee, it was an attempt to go straight that didn’t work. It was a source of anguish for Karen which made it a source of anguish for me.
Henry Munoz was a Puerto Rican from Jackson Heights, Queens, who looked 16 but was almost 30. He worked in the graphics department of Penthouse magazine and was secretly gay. He confessed this to me while we were having ice cream after watching Zorba The Greek one Sunday afternoon in Lynbrook. He was afraid I would reject his friendship but since he never propositioned me, had always treated me with kindness and respect, I saw no reason to stop being friends. He would often come out to the house on Sundays to get away from his abusive father (he still lived at home) and have dinner with my family. My mother loved him, and he always brought her a gift, spent holidays with us sometimes, and we remained friends for several years afterwards. I lost contact with him, though, after grad school in Ohio and often wonder what became of him in the decades to follow with AIDS ravaging his world.
Alvin Miller, an African American from Springfield, Massachusetts who came down to NYC to study acting. He was a year older than me and lived in Canarsie, Brooklyn with his aunt who I later found out wasn’t exactly his aunt which explained why he was sleeping with her. She was very nice to me, and I often went out there to visit him, and he came to the house, too, many times on Sunday and as explained once before, ate 3 plates of spaghetti with meatballs and sausage. He moved out to LA in my freshman year of college and though we wrote for a while, I eventually stopped getting answers to my letters. He used to joke that he would end up like Sam Cooke, shot by some woman under questionable circumstances, and I always wondered if that didn’t happen one day.
Roger, from St. Albans, Queens, who introduced me to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and tried to get me to go out with his sister. They lived together without any parents around and I was never exactly sure what Roger did for a living since he rarely seemed to be working but always had money.
Nelson, who lived in Harlem and co-wrote songs with another guy I can’t remember the name of but can see him clearly in my mind’s eye. He was short, wore thick glasses, had a pencil thin mustache that looked painted on, and always had a hat on, a white shirt and sports jacket, no tie. Nelson was tall, athletic, handsome, with the sweetest smile, and questionable sexual preferences. There was a sailor from Haiti who lived with him sometimes and girls were constantly going in and out of his apartment. His New Year’s Eve party was held the same year that the subway strike happened at 5am on New Year’s Day and because of that, I didn’t get home until 4:30 the next afternoon. I slept, more or less, in the living room of Nelson’s apartment and sometime in the morning another friend from school, Lou something who was so in love with Barbra Streisand that he saw Funny Girl on Broadway four times, and I shared a cab downtown and I had breakfast at Karen’s apartment, meeting her parents and coming as close as I ever came to getting a real kiss. I think if I hadn’t been so shy around women then, I might have convinced her to go out with me, but I wasn’t able to read the signs right and whatever opportunity I might have had passed me by.
John Woods, Julian Richards, and Victor Stein and I used to spend two or three evenings after class at the Barney Stone a few blocks from the school on Eighth Avenue doing boiler makers, eating corned beef and cabbage or a ham and cheese sandwich while talking about acting, theatre, films. John was from Brooklyn, Julian from Jamaica (the island, not the section of Queens), and Victor was from Kew Gardens, Queens. Sometimes Big Ed would join us. Julian would sneak a pint of Canadian Club in under his coat and we’d spike the draft beer that we bought at the bar. I’d always get home late those nights, usually catching the 1:52am train on the Long Island Railroad, and get up the next day for school. And on Saturdays, I’d go into the city and meet those three guys along with Henry Munoz and sometimes Alvin at the Cornell Club where Julian worked. He’d get us an empty room and we’d drink, watch TV, talk shop until the evening, then most of us would go out to catch a movie, then go downtown to The Village to eat some more, find a bar, and stay till closing, talking about the one thing we had in common: acting.
And there were others, the names faded from my memory but not the faces, not the way they walked, danced in our modern dance classes, the way I would leap about in fencing class pretending to be Errol Flynn, the instructor shaking his head and saying, “Discipline, Len. Fencing is about discipline not jumping over chairs and slashing the air.” Of course I understood that, but would still jump over chairs anyway with John Woods playing Basil Rathbone to my Errol Flynn and Karen clapping with the others as the instructor gave up with a sigh. And the time we had to recite lyrics using our own stress and intonation patterns and I used the lyrics from the Bob Haymes/Alan Brandt song That’s All which I learned from the Sinatra and Strings album and though I could only look once Karen’s way, she understood and rested her hand on my head after I sat down in my usual spot next to her.
Later, after I drifted apart from them all when I went away to college, and performed the roles I was most proud of: the drifter in Hello Out There by William Sarayon, Leslie Bright in The Madness of Lady Bright by Lanford Wilson, and Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and my formal education began, I really never learned anything those people during that year didn’t already teach me.
I remember it all. That year. The year that changed the trajectory of my life. And the people who helped put the finishing touches on the person I was and helped point me toward who I am today.