From Tits to the Wind – The Park West Chronicles
 
I often didn’t know what Jolene was doing at her desk, even though it was only two feet from mine. Same with David, his desk a more proper five feet away. It was clear what I was doing – reconciling last night’s receipts. Seven bank bags stared at me from my desk’s uncluttered surface, where I had plopped them after retrieving them from the basement safe hidden in the back of the liquor room. I was good at counting bills, and good at numbers in general. Fast, too.

I opened the first bag, pleased to see that Ray had, as always, properly aligned all his bills facing in the right direction, saving me time and aggravation in my counting. I knew Vince’s bag would be helter-skelter as always, but at least his bag routinely reconciled correctly. Not so with Ray’s. A cocktail napkin peeked out of Ray’s bag, and I knew what would be on it – an “IOU” from Dale saying that he’d taken $500 or $1000. IOU my ass. It was Dale’s club and when he needed cash for drugs or his monthly Bentley payment or anything else, it was his to take. My job was to hide his self-theft from the books. Everyone knew what was going on, including the bartenders and waitresses with whom he shared cocaine.

I needed coffee. Why hadn’t anybody made any? I grabbed the pot and headed to the hall bathroom to rinse it out and fill it. When I got back that’s when I noticed the coffee basket was empty. Shit. Jolene and David were studiously not paying attention. They’d already been here for hours, Jolene anyway. Why hadn’t they stocked the coffee?

I exited the office, navigated the narrow hall and entered the main room through the door to the lighting booth, then headed down the balcony stairs and cut around to the lobby. I strolled down the bathroom hallway, past the Neidermaier Display glitzy wall hangings, to the auxiliary dressing room/catering room, and said hi to Octavio, my newest busboy, whom I could hardly keep my eyes off of and who was filling a tub with ice. I unlocked the basement door, flipped on the light and descended. Then I unlocked the liquor room, nestled under the stairs, where we had to keep the coffee next to the cases of Dom Perignon ever since I discovered that we were losing cases of caffeine every month from the cabinets in the catering area.
In those days, I had a saying: leave the cash on the counter, but lock up the t-shirts. Tour t-shirts were desirable, rare and valuable, and had to be carefully guarded. Same with coffee it turned out.

Back in the office, a fresh pot finally brewing, I settled in to count the cash. David, it seems, had departed, probably for a run along the lakefront. He was in training for another Ironman. David was twenty years older than I - bald, tall, thin, sinewy, eagle-eyed. He was a gazelle on the Lincoln Park track. I counted the money and filed the payroll and Jolene paid the bills, but David was the real money man - handling the books, filing the taxes, telling Jolene when to pay what, and occasionally squeezing turnips from stones.

Someday, I thought, I might have to try this running thing myself.  Not today.

From the bulge in the bags it was clear last night had been a good night, with the bar clearing ten or twelve k, maybe more. It had been a Phil Johnson night. Phil was a black entrepreneur/ impresario, who rented the club a couple nights a month to throw his ‘private’ disco parties. He had a mailing list of several thousand VIPs, who waited anxiously to discover one of his colorful postcard invitations in their mailboxes.

Our waitresses hated Phil Johnson nights because blacks didn’t tip, but if they wanted to work on the money nights – the jazz nights, the blues nights, the rock & roll nights – they had to work the black nights too. We made one small concession to the waitresses. On the good tipping nights, the cocktail waitresses only made $5 a shift, but they were happy to get it since their tips usually surpassed $100, and sometimes hit $200, and in 1979 that was ridiculously good money. On Phil Johnson nights, we upped their pay to $15/shift.

Phil always drew a good crowd -  a thousand or so well-heeled, attractive dancers, womanizers and players, their white-walled and chromed cars lined up at the start of the party to be driven off by a fleet of valets. Phil was a gentleman, reliable and courteous, who always paid his $1500 rental fee up front and never failed to exceed the $2500 bar minimum or tip the DJ and lighting maestro. He was good to the doormen and security staff, too.  On slow months, when our booked talent failed to provide sufficient funds to meet the payroll or pay the bills, Phil’s parties filled the gap.

Ray’s bag was off again. His register receipt showed he should have stuffed the bag with seven hundred and change, plus Dale’s IOU for a thousand and his drawer bank of a hundred. He was precisely forty-three dollars short. It was time to cut him loose. I’d warned him.

“Hello,” she said.

Glenne Headley was standing in my office. Two feet in front of my desk. Looking at me.
This was before people knew who Glenne Headley was, but I knew who she was. The year before, she and some pals formed a little outfit called Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and they produced avant garde plays in the basement of a northside Chicago church. This year they had moved to a storefront on Halsted Street, where, with makeshift lighting and sets and a scant two score seats, they put on the most riveting theatre I’d ever seen.

“Hello,” I said back to her, dumbly.
“I need a job,” she said.

And my heart melted. Glenne Headley, as talented an artist as I would ever see, was standing in my office asking for a job. This was so wrong.

“Okay,” I said.

She needed money. The whole company, including her husband John Malkovich, needed money, and they all were out looking for jobs to pay the rent and keep food on the table while they toiled to get their theatre company going.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said.

“I’m sure,” I responded. “My name is Coleman.”

“Mine’s Glenne. Glenne Headley,” she said, and gave me the slightest smile with that signature tilt of her head.

“I know,” I said. “I’m your biggest fan.

She relaxed a little then. “So, can I have one?”

“Waitressing?” I asked.

“Yes. I guess. That’s where I’d make the most money, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go downstairs, and we’ll get the paperwork taken care of and I’ll show you around.

Glenne Headley was a terrible waitress. She scowled every minute of her employ. She hated the slinky white silk waitress uniform she was forced to wear, and she hated the high heels and she hated slinging drinks.

A week after she started, she was back again, in front of my desk, this time with a glow in her eyes and a big grin on her face.

“I quit,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“We got a grant. I don’t need the money anymore. I quit.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s really great.”

I never spoke with her again, except occasionally in my dreams.
 …

My doctor (whom I greatly respect) recently advised that as I approach the age of 70, I should give myself permission to slow down.

I'm sure that's sage advice. Still, it's advice I'm not particularly fond of. I'm not interested in slowing down. As the grim reaper comes somewhat closer into focus, that's precisely when I want to speed up. I don't want to waste a fucking minute.

​Recently, my vision has been a bit blurry. Damn. It had to be cataracts. Or something. Glaucoma, maybe. Anyway, I went to my optometrist, and he informed me that yes, my vision has changed since my last visit. My old glasses are TOO STRONG. My vision has gotten better.

​Take that, grim reaper.

1968. Oklahoma.
A Warm September Night.

It was a stupid thing to do, but … if I was going to spend the next five years or so in prison, which seemed likely, I needed one last visit to a gay bar before I got locked up.

I’d been so careful to hide my preference from men – from myself, from my friends, from my family, and most of all from my draft board and now from the judge. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I was queer. It was all new to me. Or rather, yes, I was sure, I guess. Of course I knew.

Or maybe I didn’t.  

It was a foolish risk. Someone might surely recognize me from the news, from all the damned print and TV coverage. Word might get out. The bar could be raided. If a reporter got ahold of this, everything I’d been working for would be ruined. I’d just be a faggot, which all by itself would be more than enough to lock me up without the rest of it. It was one thing to refuse induction. It was something altogether worse to be queer.

I had heard somehow, the way people hear these things, that there was a gay bar in Oklahoma City. It would have been easier to believe that there had been a real Dorothy who really was taken by a real tornado from Kansas to Oz where monkeys flew and scarecrows talked. A gay bar would never (could never) be allowed in Oklahoma. Not by the people who mattered. The very thought of such a thing was ridiculous.
Nevertheless, it was there. Smack dab in the middle of bustling May Avenue. I’d driven by it more than once. A low, squat ugly building with no sign giving any inkling what it was there for. A blight, really. On fashionable May Avenue.

I looked good, I thought. Which means I would probably get lucky. Or not. Probably not. Maybe. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get lucky. Maybe I wasn’t sure what getting lucky meant. But still, I might get lucky.
Traffic slogged along the flower-bedecked four-lane boulevard. On Friday night, May Avenue was for couples on dates. (Boys and girls, of course. What other kind of couples could there be?) May Avenue was for cruising up and down, grabbing a malted in the Big Boy down the street, or retreating to some quiet dark corner of Will Rogers Park, or continuing down the road all the way to 63rd and the new 70mm Cinerama Cinema where Yellow Submarine played to an audience that didn’t get it.

I parked where I could, a couple of blocks away, which allowed me to get a good view of the handful of people headed to the same ugly building as I. I slowed my pace and gave them plenty of room. I still had time to change my mind.

A fist.

A fist, or something hard.

A fist I think. On the back of my head. Hard enough to make me stumble and almost but not quite fall. Before I could come to terms with what was happening, I was hit again. In the back. Twice. And then again. Something punched my stomach. an anvil perhaps.

I was on the ground. They kicked my sides, my head, my legs. They stood on me. They jumped up and down. There were one, two, three, four … five, maybe?. I’m not sure. Through the fog of my pain and my fast-swelling eyes I still took notice of their tattered blue jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, their plaid shirts and ragged t-shirts and soiled straw cowboy hats. Their wide leather belts with big bronze buckles. Their singular Oklahoma twang.

They were as young as me, only twenty. Maybe older, but if so, not by much. No, I think they were younger.

As fast as it began, it stopped. They leaped and skipped and giggled back to the rusting red pickup truck at the curb, their arms around each other’s shoulders like lovers, grabbing at each other’s asses like straight men who grab each other’s asses.  They hopped up to the truck bed, hooting and hollering, clapping each other on their slim, muscular backs. They grabbed more asses; hugged more shoulders; and fell - out of breath – laughing, into the truck.

They left me on the cracked cement walk.

Bloody, broken alone.

Hurt. Defeated. Ashamed.

Stupid, embarrassed, confused.

Angry.

I melted into the sidewalk and tried to disappear.
​
Queer.

We got us a queer, they yelled. The truck vanished.
​
We got us a queer!

Daniel Berrigan, S.J., died yesterday.
​
This photo of Dan in his Cornell office was taken around the time that we met. I was working in the office directly across the hall, and witnessed the traffic of interesting visitors that paraded in and out of his small office, until finally one day, I ventured in myself.

In 1970, Dan testified as my “character witness” at my Rochester Trial for destroying draft files. His testimony was widely reported, but it was this coverage by the Harvard Crimson that I think captured it best:

"THE HIGH moment of the first week, however, was undoubtedly the appearance of Father Berrigan, who is serving a three-and-one-half-year sentence for destroying draft files. Brought from Danbury "Correctional Institute" to testify as a character witness for Joe Gilchrist, who was a student at Cornell during Berrigan's chaplaincy there, the priest was on the stand for three hours.

Over the frequent vehement objections of Walford, who was openly outraged that Berrigan should even be there to testify, "Father Dan" forcefully and movingly related to the court the content of frequent conversations he had with Joe during the two years they were together in Ithaca. He told of the experience of seeking shelter underground as protection from a B-52 bombing raid on Hanoi while he was there in 1967 on a mission of mercy to bring back to America three POW's. He spoke of the children he saw in North Vietnam who had been burned with napalm, and of the total destruction of the countryside and food supply of that small nation. He told of his growing concern that Americans were unaware of the things being done in their name by the Johnson and Nixon administrations inVietnam. He told how he came to believe that speaking out against the war and injustice here at home were not sufficient, that one had to risk suffering and persecution, jail and maybe even death if he were serious about wanting an end to the killing. This gentle man, who has been such a clear and consistent voice against the institutionalized killing which America has promulgated both in Southeast Asia and in the ghettos and on the campuses at home, struck to the heart of what had moved the eight young people to do more than simply speak against injustice. His presentation was soft and he faltered at times.

Sounding very tired and drawn, constantly asking for water as he spoke, several times he apologized to those in the courtroom for "not being very sharp today." Each time he tried to explain that he'd been kept in solitary for three days, the judge would silence him and order the remarks stricken from the record. Finally, Dan burst out to tell the packed room that he would neither eat nor drink until he was back in Danbury, as a way of protesting the brutal treatment given to prisoners who are in transit from one jail to another. He had been taken from Danbury on Tuesday, and was not told where he was going or for what he was being taken away. He spent three days and nights either traveling or in solitary confinement, never permitted to mix with other prisoners in the jails where he was kept. It was not until the night before he testified that he was permitted to know where he was being taken.

At one point in his testimony, after a thirty-minute battle between the prosecution and the defendants as to the propriety of entering scripture as testimony, Joan Nicholson introduced into evidence Matthew 5:1-12, from Christ's Sermon on the Mount. This was after the government had objected to entering the Holy Bible as evidence, claiming it to be irrelevant. Judge Burke sustained the objection. The beatitudes were not ruled objectionable, however, and Father Berrigan slowly read through the ancient teachings of Christ. In the crowded courtroom, the old words took on new meaning to those who understood how much the government detests the kind of testimony that men of the church like Berrigan can offer about the effects of national policy. Near the end of the passage he read:

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.

Rejoice and be exceedingly glad; for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

The world will miss you, Daniel Berrigan. ​​

Here are my recent out of pocket costs for prescription drugs:
 
January – $400
February - $600
March - $800
April - $1600
 
To be clear, I have insurance (Medicare Parts A & B, with a supplemental prescription drug policy, costing an additional $300/month). Without insurance, these drugs would cost even more.
 
Every month this year the price of these drugs has skyrocketed. If my husband was still working and if I was still covered under his company’s group plan, I would be paying about $200/month for these drugs. Private insurers can and do negotiate prices with drug companies.
 
The government on the other hand is prohibited by Congress from negotiating with drug companies. If you are over 65 and on Medicare, you are out of luck. Why? Because the drug companies give congressmen millions and millions of dollars to keep them in office. They are paid to vote to protect the profits of the drug companies.
 
The US is the only industrialized nation in the world that prohibits negotiation on drug prices for government sponsored health insurance.
 
I can’t wait to see what they’ll charge me in May. The fact is they can charge anything they want.

Writing is a lonely venture. It entails long hours of solitude and the agony of wrestling with demons and self-doubt.

So the opportunity to give and receive feedback with other writers is (mostly) a welcome one. The important thing is partaking in this blood sport with fellow writers you trust, whose work you admire, who make your work better and who are receptive to your thoughts about their work.   That's a lot of qualifications. Such writers do exist, but it's clear that I am very picky when it comes to whom I enjoy giving and taking criticism.

For the ​​27th Annual UW Writers Institute, I've been tasked with critiquing the work of a number of writers I've never met. Aside from their names and the ten pages of manuscript they each have submitted I know nothing about them. I don't know how long they've been writing, how new or successful they've been, or even if these ten pages are all they have or simply the beginning of a completed seven book series. I don't know if a particular writer is 17 or 70. (The writing itself doesn't always give me a hint of age.)

Nonetheless, that's my job: to do my best in reviewing these ten pages and offering my thoughts.

It's a daunting challenge - akin to commenting on a friend's newborn baby Even the ugliest child deserves a kind comment. It's important to be honest and frank, but it's also important not to damage a fragile and earnest soul who may be the next Jack Kerouac. Besides, I just could be wrong in my assessment. I have never enjoyed reading James Joyce, for instance, so what does that say about me?

Some of the manuscripts I've received are utterly brilliant, so much so that I find it difficult to offer any comment at all other than, "Wow"  Wow isn't a particularly helpful critique and it doesn't fill the two written pages and thirty minutes of conversation that the submitter has paid for. For at least two of the writers currently on my docket, I am having a very difficult time figuring out anything to say other than Wow. They have awed me with their command of the craft.

There are a couple of writers whose work is perhaps less than awe-inspiring, to my reading tastes, that is. And yet, that doesn't mean they don't have a story to tell. I struggled with the craft of writing for years. I still do. It's not easy. Taking the plunge at all is difficult. Finding gentle ways to help guide new or clumsy writers is important. I had my mentors. Writers who saw something in what I was trying to do that wasn't quite there yet. Without their encouragement and their criticism, I never would have attained the (limited) heights I have.

Critiquing other writers makes me a better writer. That's something I learned as a member of various writing groups over the years.

I can only hope I have something to offer these writers, that I will meet next week. ​​​

My favorite actors are those who transform themselves with every role - actors like Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman. Locally, it's actors like Jim Ridge, Colleen Madden, Brian Mani, Edric Johnson, Jamie England, Jordan Peterson. Donovan Armbruster.

This season, I have the sweet challenge or playing educated, upper-class English gentlemen ​in three plays from the first half of the twentieth century (plays by Agatha Christie, George Bernard Shaw, and Noel Coward).

It wouldn't necessarily be wrong to play them all the same​. There's a lot of similarities between these characters (a police detective, a British colonel and a medical doctor). But where would the challenge be in playing them all the same, and how boring for me as an actor (not to mention boring for any audience member who might happen to see me in all three plays). The trick is finding what distinguishes these gentlemen from each other and bringing those distinctions to life, without being gimmicky or imposing a physicality or vocalization that reads false.

Just as I was starting to sort this out in my ​tiny actor's brain, the director for my current role (Sam White) started squeezing me into a box where neither my body nor my voice wanted to go. To say that I was resistant was an understatement. Sam wants what Sam wants, which is his right as a director, but what he wanted wasn't making sense to me and I couldn't figure out how to weave his direction into my performance.

Then finally it hit me. Sam was offering me the key to playing this British colonel in Misalliance very distinctly from the police detective I just played in The Mousetrap. I stopped fighting his direction, and it is starting to feel like I am becoming "someone else" - which is what every actor is required to do.

The show is still a couple of weeks away from opening, and it's up to Sam to decide if I'm satisfying his direction. It will be up to the audience to determine if I meet my goal of becoming someone else - a distinct character, true to the script and appropriately idiosyncratic. And then in a few weeks, I get to start the process all over again when rehearsals for Blithe Spirit start.

It's an actors dream.

There's much that I enjoy about theatre, but foremost is collaboration.

In this most recent project (Are We Delicious at Broom Street Theatre, Madison Dec 3-12)​ eight of the eleven people pictured above write, act, direct and stage manage. The other three keep us motivated and on track.

We each wrote a play. We each act in two (or more) plays. We each direct and stage manage a play. And all of this went from concept to opening night in ... six days.

Thanks to my delicious creative partners. This has been a sweet ride, with one more weekend of performances to go. I never imagined I'd write a piece about two strangers kidnapped in Somalia at Christmas, or that I would play God in one play and a Mafioso in another - all part of a single production.

For those of you who can't make the show, here's my contribution to the work, "Spiny Bone". Too bad you can't see the terrific performances of Dan Steger and Jason Compton, who nailed it.​
​​