A Freewheelin' Time (30 page)

We named the apartment Melody Lounge to counterbalance the glum state of mind in which we found ourselves. We read from the wisdom of the Indian seer and philosopher Krishnamurti and deliberated over the I Ching as we played medieval music and drank wine from deep-red-colored glasses. We played the Beatles at top volume and made sure we had as much fun as Harley and Ofelia, who were especially adept at bouncing off the walls and running relay races at all hours of the day and night. We credit each other for saving one another’s life at a shaky time.

Through someone I knew, I found waitress jobs for both Janet and me at a place called the Donut Wagon on Thirteenth Street and Third Avenue. At the end of the day we brought home the unsold corn muffins for our breakfast the following morning. I felt as vulnerable as the puffy baked goods easily breaking into a yellow pile of soft crumbs on my plate.

A
fter one of the producers of Quinton’s play kept encouraging me to take acting seriously, I finally followed her suggestion and in November 1965 signed on for an acting workshop somewhere in the West Seventies.

The first exercise was about trust. We worked in pairs and took turns. One partner would sit behind the other and at a signal from the teacher the front sitter would drop back, trusting that the partner sitting behind would catch his or her head before it hit the floor. In the middle of this interesting exercise, all the lights in the room went out. The half-light of evening lit the room from the windows facing the street, but it took a few minutes for our eyes to adjust. All heads were safely cradled in a partner’s hands.

We waited a few beats, still holding heads. We waited some more, but the room stayed dark. From the windows we could see that there were no streetlights and that the traffic lights were out. Cars were honking and swerving and moving with caution across the intersections. Though nobody knew what was going on, we speculated that a huge fuse had blown somewhere where it counted. We were nonplussed and a little freaked out.

The pay phone on the street didn’t work, either. Since I was wary about the long hike downtown, I decided to walk a few blocks over to the Ehrenbergs’ apartment on West End Avenue. Inexplicably, their telephone worked, and from the shortwave radio we learned that the blackout extended as far as Canada. There was no electricity anywhere and no information from authorities about when it would be restored. I stayed with the Ehrenbergs until I found a ride downtown with someone on a motorcycle.

The moon was full and cast an eerie light over a blacked-out cityscape. We rode through streets where volunteers with flashlights assisted traffic cops at intersections and directed the cautious drivers into an orderly flow. Candles flickered in windows high above, and stores sold candles and batteries on the sidewalks in front of their unwelcoming dark interiors. It was controlled chaos. New Yorkers accustomed to living under those conditions every day come together as a community when the chaos is no longer controllable.

When I got back home safely to Melody Lounge, Janet was in a state. She had filled the bathtub with water and was waiting for the invasion—of what, or who, she couldn’t say for sure, but she was very worried all the same. In truth, our nerves were on edge because the guy who probably had started the fire in my apartment had begun stalking us and had left a cracked mirror in front of the building’s entrance the day before.

Barely a month had passed since the trauma of the fire; I was still struggling to recover—and now a total blackout. Janet had a point—everything seemed eerie and mutable. But I did not want to be worried. I looked at the cats sleeping peacefully. They showed no sign that they sensed impending danger. Fuck it. I poured us some wine.

Slum Goddess

A few weeks later
a reporter from the
East Village Other,
a new local biweekly claiming to be hipper than the
Village Voice,
asked me to be part of a feature the paper was starting up called “Slum Goddess,” inspired by a song by the Fugs, “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side.” The feature would be the counterculture’s answer to the Miss America aesthetic of overly made-up and girdled women with beehive hairdos. I thought it was a fine idea and said yes. I was to be the Slum Goddess for December 1965.

The reporter asked me three questions: what I did, why I lived on the Lower East Side, and what I wanted from a man. Walter Bredel was the photographer and we walked around the East Village one afternoon while he took pictures. I wrote that I lived in the East Village because I liked the view—I was being sarcastic, since the neighborhood was really grungy. But when the paper came out, the quote was transformed to I liked the “new”:

If a man can learn to develop all his inherent and latent powers there is nothing that he will not be able to apprehend. For the knowledge is in man the same way it is in God. Only a heavy veil of darkness hides it from view and prevents his seeing these things and understanding them.

Arthur Rimbaud said that, and that’s all I have to say. Because if you look at it close enough it answers the three questions: How come the Lower East Side? Men in general? What I do?

I live on the Lower East Side because I like the new. I want my man to have a toothpick in his ear and a purple boot on his right foot. I do artist and earn money when I do.

The feature gradually became very popular and got coverage in the mainstream press. An article in an April 1966 issue of the
Herald Tribune
titled “Miss America, Move Over” reported: “They are all fully dressed. They all have undone hair, most of it long, and little make-up. And when they say ‘beautiful,’ they don’t mean anything to do with cosmetics or external fixing up. It’s living or soul they are talking about.”

F
eeling a little more stable around the time of my twenty-second birthday, in November 1965, I began looking for an apartment; and it didn’t take too long to find one with an affordable rent. I moved into another fifth-floor walk-up, this time on West Tenth Street between Bleecker and West Fourth streets. By the time I was an
East Village Other
Slum Goddess in print, I no longer qualified in real life, since I had moved back into
Village Voice
territory.

The West Village felt healthier than the grungy tenements of the Lower East Side and the East Village. My interim stay with Janet at Melody Lounge had made a difference. The apartment on West Tenth was a nice sunny studio with a separate kitchen. Using gels from one of the theaters where I was working, I made “stained glass” windows. I bought black window shades and cut out shapes and inserted the gels. I made a chandelier of sorts out of large tin cans that I punched holes in, attaching a tin funnel to the top, and with a light bulb inside, the pattern was reflected on the walls. People were generous with furniture and dishes and stamina, helping me haul heavy things up the five flights of stairs. Once Harley and Ofelia had tested the bounce of the walls, they adjusted to their new home. It had taken time, but once more I was back on my feet.

Not long after I moved to West Tenth Street, I got a call from the stage designer Peter Harvey, who was doing the scenery and costumes for a show at the New Theater on East Fifty-fourth Street. The theater had more seating than the Off-and Off-Off-Broadway theaters downtown so the regulations required a mix of union and nonunion workers. Based on
Mad
magazine, the play was a musical revue called
The Mad Show,
with a book by Larry Siegel and Stan Hart and music by Mary Rodgers. I was happy to join the crew—no more interim waitressing jobs.

Leonard Bernstein walked into the theater one afternoon while a few of us were painting a piece of scenery and the cast was rehearsing. He stayed for a bit watching, listening, and talking with everyone. His love for every phase of putting together a theatrical production was evident in his camaraderie.

At some point I was offered the job of running the sound for the theatrical run. Live musicians accompanied all the musical numbers, but there were skits that required prerecorded voice-overs and sound effects. The last few years of working in downtown theaters doing everything for a production—including technical work—paid off because I knew how to run a soundboard. Admittedly, this was back in the precomputer era, and the
Mad Show
soundboard consisted of two reel-to-reel tape recorders with a tape-splicing gizmo, a control panel with a few buttons and switches, and a headset with a microphone. I could handle that.

A small crew, we were stashed away in an above-the-balcony long, narrow perch about a few inches from the ceiling. Up there with me was the lighting technician from the union and the people who worked the lights and the follow spots—as in, spotlights that follow the actors around on stage. Joy, not quite five feet tall and a singer in real life, worked one follow spot and Bill, in real life an artist and who towered over Joy, worked another. The three of us were nonunion. Joy lived in the Village and we traveled together on the subway until New Year’s Day 1966—the day John Lindsay was inaugurated as mayor of New York—when a subway strike brought the city to a standstill. Joy and I hitched and walked the nearly three-mile trip twice a day until the strike ended two weeks later. We slogged through a lot of wintry weather, but once again New Yorkers came together to help one another. We got rides easily, rarely having to pay for taxis.

The
Mad Show
cast was terrific: Linda Lavin, JoAnne Worley, MacIntyre Dixon, Dick Libertini, Paul Sand, and for a short stint David Steinberg. A few of the actors had passed through the improvisational theater group Second City, either in Chicago, where it originated, or in New York.

Joe Raposo, who went on to compose music and lyrics for
Sesame Street,
among many other credits, was the musical director, and Danny Epstein played percussion. When I left the show after several months Joe gave me a book of poetry, and Bill, the artist, did a poster-sized cartoon of me at the soundboard with a machine gun and a sign saying
PLEASE DON’T ANNOY THE ITALIAN
, inscribed by all the
Mad Show
participants.

The technical rehearsals were complicated. The follow lights had to be quick and fast to illuminate the actors, and tiny Joy was a whiz at shifting the focus of the heavy spot from one end of the stage to the other. I had many complicated setups and there was always a danger of the tape breaking, with all the fast-forwards and rewinds at each performance. I became very adept at making a quick repair splice.

Everything worked smoothly at the dress rehearsal—which of course meant that opening night was marked for some mishap or other. Cast and crew were ready for it. The lighting technician checked all wiring, and I checked and double-checked that I had correctly cued up the prerecorded tape. The stage manager gave me the cues from backstage, but I also had the visual of stage and actor, albeit far below, to add to my accuracy in timing.

The first few sound snippets worked fine until a skit where the recorded narration was crucial to the story: when I hit the button, nothing happened. It had jammed. I hit it again and heard a whirring sound blast from the speakers. I tried to keep panic at bay and fast-forwarded the tape as I saw Paul Sand look up from the distant stage in the general direction of my perch with what appeared to be a beseeching expression, but given the distance I couldn’t be sure. The next sound from the speakers was similar to singing chipmunks. I heard the stage manager choke out a Shut It Off into my earphones as the very professional Sand improvised appropriate narration. For the rest of the night, the play button worked perfectly, and the only explanation anyone could come up with was that the machine had had an attack of opening-night nerves.

The Mad Show
got really good reviews and was set for a long run. As time went by, there were some cast changes as actors moved on, but the backstage crew remained mostly the same throughout the months I stayed with the show. Mishaps came and went, but I never again had any button malfunctions.

My private life interfered one time only. My Siamese cat Ofelia had a habit of jumping from the outside window ledge in the main room of my apartment to the outside ledge of the kitchen window. The studio apartment wasn’t an L shape, but there was enough of an angle to the building to make the jump possible. I thought she was terribly clever and didn’t worry once I’d seen her do it a few times.

But one day she missed and plummeted to the cement courtyard five stories below. When I realized what had happened I flew down the stairs, believing she had ended up like her namesake. Instead I found her alive, crouched low on all fours, her head bobbing like those toys with the heads attached by a string that nod slowly and continuously. I was due at the theater for a matinee of
The Mad Show
in less than an hour. I telephoned the stage manager in a state, frantically explaining what had happened and promising I would be there as soon as I could. Not to worry, he kindly sympathized. Take care of your cat. I wrapped Ofelia in a towel and took a taxi to the ASPCA, far uptown, where I called the theater again to say my cat seemed OK. The curtain was literally going up when I slid into my spot behind the soundboard.

The ASPCA kept Ofelia overnight and said it was most unusual that she survived unscathed. She wasn’t quite the same, though. Every now and then she would stop in her tracks, crouch low, and bob her head for a few minutes before she could continue on her way. She never attempted the jump again. Fortunately my other cat, Harley, named after the motorcycle because she purred most of the time, would never even think of doing fancy jumps like that in the first place.