Back in the saddle again ...

Dirt Cowboy Coffee House in Hanover, NH sipping a little Fair Trade Guatamalan organic coffee and realizing it’s January 9th and I haven’t blogged for a coon’s age. I’ve been back and forth to Manhattan, I can list a whole array of excuses, but still, still, still … so today is a combination catch-up, miscellany, and Happy New Year!

AND THEN THERE WAS A BLUE BUD LIGHT CAN

It’s beautiful here. I’ve been in New York for about a week, and I love New York, I delight in being there for so many reasons, but nothing puts a smile on my face like Vermont. Whether it’s the dark clear night we had last night with Orion and the Pleiades and Cassiopeia shimmering through, so clearly, so sharp; or the sweeping white rise of the hill behind our house with the fir and spruce along the wall line crest stretching up for the first buttery rays of the sun this morning; or the fresh feathery snow that makes everything seem new, I’m just a sucker for this place. And it’s frigidly cold, it’s hovering around 5 degrees, and I don’t care, I’m slap happy, I have to get out in it this morning! I had intended a 4 mile walk, rambling around for at least an hour, but we had a bit of a time crunch (weird imagining a “time crunch” in Vermont) and the 4 mile, hour or so trek shrank to 20 minutes and one mile tops. So I quick whipped through some chores - filled the cast iron firewood holder with wood and carried some boiling water and collard greens up to Schmul, Ginger and Mary Ann, who are all getting along famously, thank you very much – and ventured out into Dr. Zhivago-land. Pristine countryside. Appreciation unbounded. Oh earth, oh sky, oh nature!

And then there was a blue Bud light can.

Right there in the snow, just above “Dead Man’s Curve,” tossed out of a truck, I imagined, a logging truck, but who knows really. There have been other cans, most every walk I pick up a few. And it always stops me short. I can’t think how any one could even think of doing it. Here, of all places. Vermont and litter just don’t go together in my mind. You look out at this stunning beauty and … well, maybe they think the Bud light can is beautiful. It’s a nice shade of blue. It sort of breaks up the white nicely. Maybe that’s it, it was an aesthetic decision. They thought “maybe that one gay guy that goes for walks and reads and writes as he walks, yeah, the “weirdo”, maybe he’d appreciate a touch of blue against the white. Maybe he likes beer. No, wait, gays don’t really like beer, do they? Just expensive wines and cosmopolitans. Well, we’ll just stick with the blue, then. Go ahead, toss it out the window, Todd, go ahead.”

It does make me think of an anti-littering law that comedian Rick Reynolds came up with a few years back, namely that whatever someone littered should be shoved up their butt. That would include cigarette butts, Big Gulp cups, and most certainly a blue Bud light can. It could work. I think we should give it a try. Have Bernie Sanders champion the cause in Congress.

GHOSTS

My life is surrounded by ghosts these days. Not trying to be morbid, not really depressed, it’s just a fact. The play I’m writing is peopled with ghosts, the book I’m reading, “Free for All” Kenneth Turan’s excellent “greatest theatre story ever told” about Joe Papp and the Public Theatre, is teeming with all kinds of ghosts; even our woods in Vermont are filled with intact stone walls marking ghosts of once cleared farm fields taken over by forest; and New York City, frigid New York City, where I lived for a full decade and returned for 3 to 4 month stints to do plays while I was living in Los Angeles, New York City has ghosts on every block. I’m sure many people throughout New York’s history have had the same feelings. EB White wrote about it in his 1948 essay “Here is New York” rhapsodizing about what had happened in the city’s history only blocks away in every direction, even the spot where he was sitting and writing his piece.

For me, the ghosts come in all forms. There are the ghost of buildings, theatres no longer in existence – the Morosco, Circle in the Square downtown, the Promenade, the Regency revival movie house. And with the Morosco and Regency there are the ghosts of the protests to prevent their demise, protests peopled by Joe Papp and other ghosts. Up near where I’m subletting an apartment for the next 4 months on the West Side is the ghost of a grand old bowling alley I used to frequent in the ‘80’s. It resided around 75th and Amsterdam and now is the home to some glass and steel structure, a gym I think. Oh, the good times we had in that ramshackle bowling alley, parties, league nights, echoes of laughter and shouts, the cold taste of beer. There were only about 8 or 10 lanes as I recall and you had to alter your game a bit to compensate for the lane’s decided list. That was part of the fun. And the ghosts of the characters that worked at that place: the stern, bespectacled man behind the shoe counter, spraying Lysol into every shoe before and after you used them; the bartendress with the brashly colored red hair. Gone, gone, gone.

There are also the ghosts of friends, some who have passed away, and others who have simply passed away from my life, who I wish well wherever they may be, grateful for the glow of the time I spent with them. There are ghosts of romantic encounters, rehearsals, performances, parties, dinners, ACT-UP protests, walks, bicycle treks, Circle Line tours, subway rides, apartments, lofts. There are ghosts of me at every age I’ve been while living in or visiting this magnificent city.

Here’s one. New Year’s Eve 1973/74. Aprospos having just brought a New Year in. This is a story of a 19-year old ghost of me. I’d graduated high school that May, had traveled around a bit, done some construction down in Florida for several months, then returned to my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, in December where my friend’s Pam Russell and Steven Willette and I concocted a spur of the moment idea to drive to NYC to celebrate New Years in Times Square. We would drive to Pam’s aunt in Connecticutt, park our car, train into New York, and spend night’s “crashing” on friend’s floors. We’d see some shows, eat at Momma Leone’s, it would all be a grand adventure. Pam and Steven were not only friends, they were an item. I was also attracted to Steven, but up to that trip, any attraction I’d had for men had been kept an idea rather than an acted upon reality. This trip marked a heart pounding adventure into new territory in that department too on the night Steven and I slept beside one another in Pam’s aunt’s attic.

But to stay on story - New Year’s Eve. I’d been to New York before on a high school theatre trip and loved being back there free from chaperones. And the added buzz from the secret experiments that Steven and I were transacting added to the holiday emancipation. We had gone to a performance of Godspell early in the evening. Was Momma Leone’s that night too? Not sure. Whenever we did go there I remember rooms filled with garish faux sculptures of David-like personages, wrapped with twinkling Christmas lights. And the food was fantastic. (Gone, gone. Like “Luchow’s”) We got to Times Square at 11:30 and forced ourselves into the crowd until we couldn’t move any further. Pam was a bit paranoid and claustraphobic, but took it all in good stride. It helped that we were all stoned and that the crowd was in good spirits. I remember when the ball dropped everyone started jumping up and down and you had no control over anything. I was cinched so tightly in beside everyone else in that crowd, that when they as one started hopping up and down, I was lifted off the ground myself. I had no choice. I was being jumped up and down. Steven smiling, me laughing, even Pam seemed to be enjoying herself, everyone bubbled with cheeriness. And as soon as the festivities were over, Times Square cleared. Amazing, impressive, ghost like.

Maybe there are already ghosts of what is to come too. The ghost of who I was waiting beside the ghost of who I will be. That’s comforting, already there, waiting for me to arrive.

AND THE BALL DROPPED IN GROTON

This New Year, Richard and I spent a grand night with friends at Brown’s Market Bistro in Groton, Vermont, and I’ll have to count Brown’s and the New Year’s celebration itself, surrounded by friends coming from as far away as Providence RI, as 2 more reasons that I love living in Vermont. It was a laugh-filled, food-filled, wine-filled, fun-filled night. And the snow that night! We cut through back country roads to and from the restaurant and the trees along the way were perfectly flocked. Our friends just arrived from Rhode Island were transfixed by the sheer beauty of it all and sat in the back seat of our outback ooohing and ahing all the way to dinner. How gratifying to hear beauty appreciated, the moment noted, nature applauded. Hip-hip indeed.

As midnight approached, Chuck, the gracious owner, topped the festivities off by wrapping several heavy cake pans with lights, then connected them to an orange extension cord and tossed this glowing orb over an art-filled wall, where it perched, until the final 10 second countdown when he slowly lowered it to the floor bringing us into 2010. The ball got caught on the frame of an oil painting on the way down, but it was easily dislodged, a minor snafu. We all kissed and hugged one another then, with arms around one another, sang a rousing verse of “Auld Lang Syne” to us, to all our loved ones here and gone, even to the Bud Light beer can tossers, what the hell.

Happy New Year to everyone!!