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Do I Hear A Waltz? Muzeeka on the I.R.T.

November 28, 2017 by Garrett Leave a Comment

This was in the 80’s when I lived uptown, in the 70’s – West 72nd Street, in fact, the front apartment just above Mrs J’s Sacred Cow. It was early spring. I’d been taking an acting class downtown that went very late. I was on the uptown side of the IRT at 18th Street, well after midnight – and I was alone. Very alone – not a soul on the downtown side, and just me on the uptown platform – actually seated on one of those benches that was made of wood back then, with those wood slats for backing.
I sat there and waited. No train in sight. Nobody, in fact – until about 10 minutes into my late night solstice when two young men appeared. The lead guy wore a knit cap, his sidekick was that kind of bald that looks like a skin-head. They shuffled on, spotted me, then stopped, mumbled some words to each other and then, in a well defined change of pace, headed in my direction, cold eyes zeroing in.
Oh shit. Oh no. Oh dear Christ.
I was young, too, early forties, a husky six-footer but I was an actor who could now and then impersonate a thug – I wasn’t one. Plus, there was two of them, hard-edged and eager and one of me, just wanting to get home and go to bed. I could get angry, fly off the handle, sure, and maybe even let ‘er rip — on stage. In life? I was all smiles, charm, and ‘a good guy’. That evening I was tired, lonely – and right then it’s the kind of fear where your bowels begin to gurgle, your knees begin to shake, and your mouth starts to dry up.
Now they were close, ten feet away, hunched, hands in pockets, both of them ready to rumble. Knives in pockets? Fists at the ready? Oh shit.
This is the one thing I began to learn early during my life in the Big City. When danger is imminent, do not cross to the other side of the street. A guy comes near, don’t back off, don’t walk away – instead, counter-intuitively – walk toward the danger. Ergo, I caught the lead guy’s eyes and said, very slowly, carefully, these words to him:
“ Hey – you know what? If I could’ve been born anybody – my pick of a Kennedy or a Frank Sinatra or Henry Ford – or, um – even the King of Greece? Out of that whole hat of births, I still would’ve picked to be an Etruscan…you know?”
I said this in a kind of slurred New York accent, but cheerily.
The lead guy stopped. His buddy bumped into him. They both watched me. I went on:
“Really. Nobody knows where the Etruscans came from…the archaeologists guess maybe they were one of the first tribes of Rome about a million years ago – you know?”
The lead guy nodded, “ Yeah?”
“…When Romulus and Remus were posing for that statue of them – that baby picture – of them suckling life from a wolf, right?”
“Okay”, the lead guy says, “Sure.”
“… Well, Romulus and ol Uncle Remus must’ve hoarded all the wolf milk because the Etruscans vanished without a trace. Like a high curved wave that breaks on the sand and retreats right back into the sea. Vanished. Poof…Splash!”
That’s about as far as I got. They both looked at each other, nodded and then very quickly – it was kind of remarkable – retreated back down the platform, now and then looking back. But. They – vanished. Poof. Um – splash!
I’ve always wanted to thank the playwright John Guare. So now, my life in hand, belatedly, I will. Thank you, Mr. Guare. Have to say it was one of my most riveting and life-threatened performances of that speech — Jack Argue’s – from Mr Guare’s one-act play, MUZEEKA. There was no round of applause, no standing ovation, but the clatter of uptown train pulling in and my quickened breath was more than enough.

 

Corrected By Our Lives

June 27, 2016 by Garrett Leave a Comment

“There are no mistakes, just efforts.”
— Herbert Kohl, “Painting Chinese”.

Reminds me of the painter Robert Motherwell’s saying that all his paintings begin with a series of mistakes, corrected by emotion. And I’d add corrected by instincts or an aesthetic curiosity – what if I placed a thin line next to this blotch? Why? Just because. It feels good. It feels right.

Corrected by our lives, by this rough day that was. By my divorce. By my father’s suicide.

These efforts, not right or wrong but these impulses. I see the little boy, Perry, talking to his mother on the pink phone – it was a hint that rose up and then I just went with it. I incorporated it into the narrative.

Part of my loving order in my wee piece of the universe, and a danger, is that with this is an unspoken dictum that things must be right not wrong. Perfect. Just so.

I see now my years since a failed marriage, a slowed to faltering acting career, a life that might appear superfluous and of little renown or importance, is just this:
Mistakes, so many, that are now not right or wrong but are my life, my lives. Ego wants things right, perfect, achieved and my soul, full of instincts, surprise, and hints, says, Nuh-uh. Fail. Fail better. Get lost. Get little. Get so small that I may leak into the ordinary and join the light and the earth.

Actor friend Michael O’Neill thrives on ‘mistakes’ on stage – because they are so real, for the audience and the actor – and allow us entrance into the unknown, the unexpected, surprises and sometimes depth.

Perfection, being right, order from chaos, very tricky stuff: an ideal that brings a tightening, a hardening, an unyielding demand.

The mistake – like surprise – lets God in.

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