Author Archives: parmanifesto

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

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When the earth was still flat
And the clouds made of fire
And mountains stretched up to the sky
Sometimes higher
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs
They had two sets of arms
They had two sets of legs
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them
As they talked, while they read
And they never knew nothing of love
It was before the origin of love

– this was what Hedwig sang, raising a manhand to her wig. “How’s my hair? Is there trouble in the west wing?” She asked, then pointed to her burly curls. “These are actually my lungs. My Aquanet lungs. They kick in on the high notes. Let’s be serious.”

After being closed down – by an affectionless mother, the Berlin wall, an unsuccessful sex change, a failed marriage and a rock star who stole her songs – Hedwig is opening up. For one night only. Ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not: Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Hedwig has traveled from Germany to America, from off-broadway to film. It’s a musical. It’s a soliloquy. It’s a stand up comedy routine. It’s an erector set of sexuality. It’s a wrecking ball of rock’n’roll. In the author/director/star’s note, John Cameron Mitchell says, “The script is, at best, a record of a single evening of a single production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We deliberately developed it over a number of years in non-theatre venues – rock clubs, drag bars, birthday parties – in order to keep it free-flowing, improvisational, alive.”

Mitchell probably does not remember meeting me – or actually maybe he does – because I shook his hand like I was going to rip it off and attach it to a key chain as my talisman and I said,

“Thank you for giving us a third option: Man, Woman and Hedwig.” It was a line I had rehearsed. It was dead on arrival. I was already eulogizing the experience.

“She’s quite a woman,” he smiled with a tired grace. A smile nonetheless. And then we, the shadowcast, stood in front of his movie, based on his musical, and made it about us. Mirroring the actions, lip-synching the words, feeling the emotions. We didn’t have a mission so we took Hedwig’s: “I must find my other half.”

Once I accepted that my other half was not John Cameron Mitchell, I hosted a search party – in bars, clubs, social networking sites – until I had searched everywhere but home. I came back to my Wicked Little Town of East Troy, Wisconsin and tried to die. And yet back, back, to the Origin Of Love I was drawn, to a God whom, like a celebrity, I knew of, but did not know –

Well, I am completely dilated tonight. And I digress.

So. Once I was home, I had to leave. I found a second home, 45 miles away: Milwaukee.

And it only took 6 years for Hedwig to catch up with me, via Smithereen Productions, a local theatre company.

Their elected Hedwig ambassador was Jordan Gwiazdowski, a young actor with a nose as formidable as his talent. His performance was a tower of strength and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He drew me close and then drew blood – I wanted to give blood – plasma – a heart.

Once I accepted that Jordan Gwiazdowski was not my other half (he was moving after the show closed), I wanted to restart the search party in the usual kinds of places, all of which were within walking distance of the theatre. But I was with a good friend who would not leave me alone until it was too late to do anything but go home.

Days later, I was at my church’s children’s after school program. Kevin, one of the Pastors, who is one of my roommates, until November, when he will become one flesh with Brianna, read from my favorite version of the Bible, the Storybook Bible. “God wrote ‘I love you’ – He wrote it in the sky, and on the earth, and under the sea. He wrote His message everywhere! Because God created everything in His world to reflect Him like a mirror…”

That night I got Hedwig from the library, where she was waiting between Heaven’s Gate and The Heiress. Halfway through the film, trapped by a too-close-up, Hedwig looked into the camera. Kevin walked in and looked at her, then at me. I looked from her to him. I searched his eyes and thought about saying something, but I stopped when I heard Hedwig singing –

Know in you soul
Like your blood knows the way
From you heart to your brain
Know that you’re whole

Make Way for Tomorrow

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Leo McCarey had a strong hand and a clear eye, like a jeweler. He lifted life to the Light, turning it, looking for the flaws, the glimmer – and then he held it out. Tonight I took in every facet of his best film, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937).

Made and set in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, after Social Security was passed but before payments were issued,* the film follows four children playing a sad game of hot potato with parents Lucy (Beulah Bondi) and Barkley (Victor Moore) whose home has been repossessed by the bank. In a reversal of convention, the parents separate for the sake of the children – Lucy lives with one of them in the city, Barkley with another in the country, thousands of miles apart.

And the children they raised begin to lower them.

The children don’t decide to do this, but they’re still young, there’s still a race to be run, and hurdles must be removed, or lowered enough to step over. Lucy is treated like contraband, smuggled away before company arrives; a granddaughter stows her at the movies and sneaks off for a spree. Barkley is quarantined to the couch during a bad cold, then hustled across icy floors into the nicest bed just before the doctor arrives.

And yet, you can’t get angry at the children. McCarey was an equal opportunity empathizer, perhaps because before he was a film director, he was a lawyer.* He claimed he was so bad they chased him out of the courtroom and he ran until he reached Hollywood; that’s a funny bit, which, after seeing his films, nobody would believe. Every character’s actions are defended, even as the actor’s faces plead guilty.

And actors loved McCarey. Often scenes were improvised and then written. Sometimes, before filming, he would play the piano and sing, leading everyone to the right feeling.

This sensitivity is revealed in every film, in every performance, from the stars down to the extras. Especially in the best scene in Make Way for Tomorrow. It’s a bridge party at one of the children’s apartment where Lucy is staying, and Barkley calls.

“Hello?” Lucy shouts. “Is that you, Bark?” A society woman turns to the source of this disturbance, disgusted, as if a parrot has just repeated a dirty limerick. “This is Lucy, Bark. How are you?” She shouts louder. “I say how are you?” She shouts even louder. At this point the partygoers are exasperated and exacerbating their own exasperation.

But gradually, almost imperceptibly, within the span of Lucy’s devastating two minute monologue, they have forgotten how to play bridge and are trying to remember how to be human. In front of our eyes, the performances bloom, like flowers in time lapse photography: slow and sudden and frozen and pulsating.

And all the time, the intergenerational tension is tightening. I cannot tell you who was stronger, because at the end, I wasn’t certain. I was thinking about my grandpa, the one who died years ago, after serving his time at an assisted living center. The dementia was so advanced that only a half hour after his wife’s funeral, we had to again tell him, through a mirage of tears, that she was gone.

———–

*Thanks to Peter Bogdanovich, Gary Giddins and the Criterion Collection for the biographical and production details.

Angela Again

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Just then a moth flew into the living room, fussing about something. It fluttered in and out of our conversation, in a jagged line that peaked and plummeted like a lie detector.

This date was planned in advance. Angela texts a couples of days before she wants to meet. I text and suggest a day weeks after that. She texts to ask what day we decided before she writes it on her calendar. She texts the day before we meet. She texts the day of.

Angela’s favorite TV show is Monk. It’s about a detective with OCD, which is not what she has. She has a learning disability, which I always remind everyone, to remind myself. At her apartment, she leaves post-it notes all over so she won’t forget anything. At family gatherings, she keeps asking whose cup is whose.

When we’re together, I have to talk light – check my verbal baggage of metaphors, references, AP vocabulary – gaze as they slide and slip through rubber flaps, console myself that later they’ll come out on the carousel, going ’round and ’round, and I’ll pick them up again.

The moth landed as Angela watched. “When I’m running, I’m not in the run,” she said. “When I’m swimming, I’m not in the swim.” And she was not in the story.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Thinking,” she said. “The same thoughts. Over and over. The same thoughts.”

Through Angela’s eyes I saw the thoughts, long, thick, dark covers, thrown over the world, everything draped with them, shaped by them, covered and collecting dust.

“About whom?” I asked.

She gave the names of her boyfriends. Just two of them. There have only been two. They were fine and nice and good and other adjectives that don’t modify anything. The first one was named Jones. He was 25 years older than her. We did not call him Mr. Jones.

I mean, they were better than the boyfriends in Lifetime movies, who begin as sweet and charming, but become jealous and controlling. Actually, I don’t think that transition would bother Angela, or us. We would all give him control, as long as he wasn’t too crazy and didn’t make her cry. Someone to watch over her.

“I wonder where they are, what they’re doing, when they’ll call,” she said. “But they’re not my boyfriends anymore. I know, I know that, but I wonder, I wonder,” she looked at the floor without looking at it.

“Why don’t I stop,” She said.

I started thinking about the men seeking men, flashing their portraits, lining the blank corridors of craigslist. How I would step towards and back from each one, asking can I like this? and selecting several, sending the e-mails, selecting one, meeting somewhere, not really liking them but really wanting them to like me. And later, wondering what it was for.

“Whose cup is this?” Angela asked, her hands hovering over them, like a magician.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Leaving the cups untouched, she laid hands on the armrests.

“Do you pray?” I asked.

“Of course I pray,” she retorted, in a rush of Catholic adrenaline.

“I’m not talking about waving your hands around and saying the same words over and over,” I said, looking at her.

She looked at me. Like she’d stolen something and now the owner was asking for it back, but asking nicely. Her eyes filled up.

“I stopped praying when the grandparents died, and Jones – ” she paused. “Now I pray to the grandparents.”

“Why do you pray to them?” I asked.

“Because they’re real,” she said. “I mean, I know God is real, but He isn’t real. To me.”

“You’re real to him,” I said. “He made you. He loves you. He likes you,” I paused. “Try talking to Him like you talk to them. Ask Him to be more real.”

The moth was flitting around a lamp now, and I wondered what compelled it: the light, or the cloth shade.

“But tell me,” Angela said. “Should I stop praying to the grandparents?”

October 23rd, 2012

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Dear Stephen,

I am writing to you because you see things. Things that are there, but I can’t see. You point them out and then I see them, like that picture of the pretty lady my art teacher put on the projector. “Look closely,” she said, and so I stuck my neck out and squinted hard until my eyebrows hurt and the teacher laughed. Then she pointed to a couple of lines, and I saw the pretty lady was also an ugly lady, at the same time. The teacher called it an optical illusion. I think most of the world is like that.

You don’t know who I am, but then I don’t think anybody really does. I’m not saying that to make you feel sorry for me. I have friends. But sometimes it feels like you know me better. Especially yesterday.

Yesterday I saw your movie, the one you wrote based on your book, which I read, but that was awhile ago. All day it rained hard, and soft, and stopped, over and over again, like someone was turning the volume up and down on a radio. I was wearing my oldest pair of jeans, the ones my mom bought for my first day of high school. Now there are holes in them. But the holes are 100% natural. They just happened. I got the biggest hole when it was raining, actually. We were having play practice outside and I ran and slipped and fell and my knee ripped through the jeans and it sounded sort of like tiny thunder. Everyone laughed and that made me feel good, even though it hurt.

Before the movie started some nice man got up and talked about other movies coming soon. One was The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I remembered the time my friend who was in the shadowcast (I know you know what that means) invited me. She told me to dress up. So I saved from my job at the store and bought a dress. I went in the bathroom and locked the door and shaved my legs and arms and my mom kept knocking on the door and saying, “what are you doing in there?” I told her I was showering. Then there was whispering. Then my dad said, “Hey buddy? What you’re doing is totally normal, OK? But you need to speed it up.” So I finished as fast as I could, and there were little rivers of blood all over my legs and arms, so I dried off and wrapped the towel around my waist and put my dad’s bathrobe over it and walked really fast to my room. Then I went to my friend’s house and changed. When I was done, she said, “You look like Princess Di.” I didn’t know I was supposed to dress like one of the characters in the movie.

Anyway, your movie was really good. I felt like it was happening to me. I guess that’s what movies are supposed to do. But it was different than a lot of other movies I’ve seen. It made me want to go back and do things again. And it made me want to go on and do new things. Mostly it made me happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.

I guess this letter doesn’t flow, something my English teacher used to say a lot. It seems like I always start telling one story, and before I finish, start telling another. But the other is better, because I’m telling it now. Isn’t it? What do you think?

Love always,

Ben

Neither Here Nor There

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The town had over 27,000 people, but it looked a lot smaller on TV. Quaint colonial facades. More stop signs than stop lights. It had rained, and the night streets were greasy and dark, like the back of a whale emerging from the depths.

“Hey –” I interrupted the TV – “they have the same weather we do” – but it didn’t listen, just kept showing and telling. A building resembled one in my hometown, a man reminded me of a former neighbor, until the only difference was our children had not been massacred.

Pictures of and flowers for the victims made a colorful, messy mound, like a melting birthday cake, topped with candles that no one wanted to blow out. The news anchor waved his microphone as a cattle prod and magic wand, asking citizens questions about how they would begin to heal.

“Oh, I have something to show you,” said my Grandma, taking several sitting starts at getting up off the couch, which was crinkly leather and deep red and looked like the lips at the beginning of Rocky Horror Picture Show and with one flick of its tongue could swallow her whole. She teetered out, pulling down her sweater. She teetered in, holding up a child’s baptism gown.

“It’s made from Nancy’s wedding dress.” Grandma’s daughter, Nancy, died of cancer when she was in her thirties; her son, Joel, was murdered in his thirties; now his brother, Dom, will be fathering a daughter in his thirties.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, touching the shroud of dry cleaning plastic.

Two days later it snowed. Fat clusters of flakes, like new Weight Watchers members holding on to one another as they parachuted down. It wrapped everything in white, but it wasn’t a good wrapping job; you could tell exactly what everything was. I think it was supposed to be that way.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Car I Drove

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It was an 8-hour trip home from Kansas City, Missouri – a city split by two states, which I find quite relatable. Also, as I learned on the visit, it’s one of the busiest corridors for sex trafficking in the country. Likely this is due to its Celtic cross of freeways, bringing customers from every direction.

While I drove I listened to Michael York, that yummy English muffin, read the second installment in The Chronicles of Narnia. Audiobooks are another invented industry of the outsourced society, wherein we can’t even read a book, we must have some specialist do it for us. But a moving car has the same effect as eating a gigantic meal – it drags me into the undertow of deep sleep – and no one keeps me upright like Michael.

In the story, the spoiled brat Edmund (the one most like all of us) is manipulated by the White Witch, because she promises more Turkish Delight. Since I’m an Anglophile, not an Anglo-Saxon, I Googled the dessert. It’s a “sensuous pleasure imbued in its melting, gelatinous texture, and, when made in the proper way, delicately perfumed with rose petals, flavored with oils and dusted with sugar…[it has a] power as sweet and seductive as Arabian nights.”* So it’s candy. Cheap and sweet, but you pay for it later.

Just off the freeway, I saw a building without windows, like those anonymous municipal things outside of town that contain some power supply. So did this one, I realized, as I read the sign: Lion’s Den Adult Bookstore. The lion imagery was conflicting, considering the book I was listening to and The Book I believed in.

On my 18th birthday, I drove around with a friend whom I wanted to be more, though I knew little of what that meant. I said, “I’m 18 – I have to do something.” He smiled, “Like what?” I smiled in a different way, “I don’t know.” He thought. “Do you want to buy some cigarettes?” I pretended to think. “No.” I pretended to pause. “Let’s go to that store next to the freeway.”

They’re always next to freeways. And they’re all the same. We walked in and showed our ID’s. We walked around, he looking at the merchandise, me looking at him. We left. I never went in another place like that. I never had to. It was all only a laptop, click and a hump away.

“This was enchanted Turkish delight…” Read Michael York. “…anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.”

As I passed the store, I stared at the cars in the parking lot, waiting for their drivers.

*So says Jenny Colgan, some britchick who writes chicklit.

The Week Before Halloween

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I turn off all the lights until “it’s as dark as Noah’s ark when it’s dark.” That’s the second line of a poem written by a neighbor girl. Today she gave me a private reading of it in exchange for giving her a ride.

I light a candle – for whom, I’m still deciding – when the phone rings. It’s Lee. The candle lights for Lee.

We met in film school, back when I was a culture vulture. Well, not really a vulture, more like Snoopy pretending to be a vulture, using the art of others as braces for my artistic posture.

From the shelf I pick up a forgotten necklace, untangle it, lay it around my neck. I describe it to Lee: “it’s plastic beads and metal hoops and it was probably suffocating in some girl’s cleavage only days ago.”

We bitch about The Perks of Being a Wallflower being called this generation’s Breakfast Club. “Don’t they know it’s set in the ‘90’s?” Lee asks, and I answer probably not, but incidentally, I just finished reading Molly Ringwald’s first novel, When It Happens To You, and when did it happen to us? Somehow we started as that and became this. God is like a thief in the night – no – a nocturnal interior decorator who sneaks in and gradually switches a couch, a lamp, a painting, until you are home away from home.

Not so long ago – not even on a good day, which made me think I was a good person – would I think my life taking place in a church-bought duplex, to love our neighbors in a diverse area. Actually, it’s diverse now that we moved in?

I hear Lee mention his roommate, the roommate he’s mentioned for 2 years, but this time I’m not content with an honorable mention. I ask if he’s more than a roommate.

There is a pause. With my lips, I surround one of the metal necklace hoops, forming an expression like the Coppertone girl.

“Yes.” Lee says. “He’s my partner.”

He apologizes, “I know your beliefs – ” and I smile, “No, you don’t – ”  and soon we’re Victorian houses being opened, furniture undraped, dust floating like thoughts, secrets gasping for breath.

We talk for another 20 minutes, say goodbye for another 15, talk for another 5, and then actually say goodbye.

It’s quiet. The orange streetlight fills the room and it glows like the center of a jack-o-lantern. I smile and wonder what I’ll be this year.

Voicemail

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“So, alright, I just talked to my dad and he’s broke off the engagement with the gold digger after 3 years, thank God, and now he’s dating a woman he met on the internet. The highlights: she’s from Malaysia, so she’s Asian, and, uh, she works for I, I, MIT something blah blah blah something out there, anyways, she’s got a good job so I guess the point is she’s not a gold digger and she’s probably smart and she’s Asian, so I, I guess I’m supposed to, uh, accept that my dad has no type whatsoever, because he’s all over the board. I highly doubt that she has big huge giant tits like, uh, whatever, but she doesn’t like her real name – I can’t even pronounce it – so she asked him to call her something else, and she’s decided she wants to be called Angel, which, sorry, makes me think of strippers more than anything because I know a lot of strippers that go by Angel, so, I thought that was funny and, um, I have no idea how old she is or anything, I just find this amusing. I am kind of glad to be rid of the gold digger but, um, but uh, she already did a lot of damage, so hopefully, hopefully this new girl will allow my dad to recover a little bit financially. So anyway. My life is just hysterical. Like all of the time, really. I know you have a lot to write about, but if you ever run out, if you ever run out, just call me.”

Assassins

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Lights rise on a set that merges reality and illusion with a lucid mystery that can only be seen, and believed, in the theatre. Surely this is some patriotic carnival of souls; a purgatory where discarded popcorn bags and American flags, dismembered baby dolls and discolored painted horses, try to see their sin through a dusting of rusty blood.  A wooden combination factory-merry-go-round-prison looms at the rear of the stage, drunk driving around the actors and scenery. Huge portraits – the 6 American presidents on whom assassinations were attempted – stack into a checkered tower, topped by the signs Hit and Fail, which light and buzz and ding like a slot machine.

It is the pay-what-you-can* performance of Milwaukee Repertory Theatre’s** production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. At 82, Sondheim is still a boy wonder. His old shows open like new shows, because they’re usually better than anything new. Yes, they are musicals, but even though the music is hosting the party, Sondheim refuses to let it dominate the conversation. There are characters, and ideas, and critique, all of whom must be heard, sometimes simultaneously.

“Come on and shoot a president!” Barks the barker in his red and white striped coat, slithering from a booth in the corner. As if entering a musical Twilight Zone,*** the assassins dispense with time, space and other meddling realities, coexisting and co-creating each other’s destinies. From a window facing the grassy knoll, they gather around Lee Harvey Oswald as a cloud of witnesses; prophets of the false god of self, shedding blood so that their culture will endure.

John Wilkes Booth casts Brutus as a role model, whom Oswald immediately remembers. “[He] assassinated Caesar what, 2,000 years ago?” Booth marvels, “and here’s a high school dropout with a dollar twenty-five an hour job from Dallas, Texas who knows who he was. And they say fame – is fleeting?”

With the assassinations finished, the procession begins. “Everybody’s got the right to be happy…” they chant musically to one another, to the audience, coaxing a collective hypnosis. Guns drawn, they aim at us. Eyes open, we look back at them. “…everybody’s got the right to their dreams.” The stage lights go off. The house lights come on.

Backstage, the actors congratulate one another for getting a standing ovation at the first dress rehearsal. In the back of the house, the director presses next to a light board operator, proving his power. As we walk out of the theater, my friend and I discuss the musical we’re writing, sculpting our visions out of the night air.

—————————————————

*I paid in lint and used chap stick. No, I paid the suggested donation, a phrase which is almost Nietzschean in its manipulation. “We suggest this donation for the common man, because he needs structure. But you’re above all that, aren’t you? You’re super. You can give more than the suggested donation. Come on, Superman.” But I was not a mark for this philosophical con. I paid the suggested donation, no more, no less. Unless that was the con. Dammit, this is worse than David Mamet.

**Prior to the performance, Artistic Director and Briton Mark Clements strolled onstage with an authority unique to Milwaukee, where the British are still believed to be more cultured than Americans. After nodding with approval at the awed applause, he dismissed it with a gesture and we were silent. He then provided this introductory speech:

“Right. So, since I came here, we’re constantly trying to push the limits, uh, push the envelope, and this is the most technically complicated show we’ve ever done in the history of this theatre. We had 3 weeks of rehearsal with the actors, a week of tech, and, uh, this is our first dress rehearsal. Actually, um, we’ve never gotten through the whole show before. So we might have stop at some point. If we do, you’ll know. I mean, we’ll turn on the house lights and you can talk amongst yourselves. But when the house lights go off, I’d ask that you stop talking and we’ll start again. But our people have been putting 80 hour weeks in on this, so. Right. Enjoy. Cheers.”

***The Twilight Zone episode “Back There” is about a man who time-travels to the day Abraham Lincoln was shot and meets John Wilkes Booth. It’s worth seeing for the performance of John Lasell, who distills Booth’s political and theatrical ambition into something mesmerizingly convincing.

Picturing

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Someone honked.

A honk is the malfunctioning stun gun of Captain Obvious. “Hey! Do you know what you’re doing? Stop that!” Yes, I do know what I’m doing, and since we’re on the subject of stopping, STOP ANNOYING ME.

Well, I was standing right next to the freeway off ramp. But I was behind the concrete guard rail. I mean – really.

Then the someone waved. I may have known the someone. Honking is only effective if I know your car. If I don’t know your car, now I do, and thanks for making that introduction possible, but now, oh, we’re all out of time, and you’re out of sight, and I still don’t know who you are.

I was next to the freeway off ramp, behind the concrete guard rail, to get the best shot of the Esperanza Unida mural. The honk was fine, actually; I needed the distraction to concentrate. Photography is like all the arts in that it makes your view of the world more comprehensible and mysterious. Only it does it in the most literal way.

Under the sunlight, the mural shook its colors like maracas, and they flushed red, orange, green, blue – though it seemed silly to give names to these colors.

Under the sunlight, an abstract sculpture of a man started breathing, smiling, turning its head, yearning for the best angle. I circled around and around, clicking and clicking, eager to please him.

Under the sunlight, a woman squinted and cradled her sign:

HOMELESS

HUNGRY

please help

thank you

I walked towards her like a student approaching a master, barely maintaining eye contact, saying, “Would you mind if I took your picture? I have ten dollars, I don’t want you to feel like I’m taking advantage of you.”

“I don’t care,” she said, taking the ten.

Under the sunlight, her skin hardened. Her wrinkles deepened. Her back bent.

“Thank you,” I said, turning to walk away, “and God bless.”

“God bless,” she said.

Three blocks away I realized I’d never asked her name.