Monthly Archives: August 2012

I Must Be High

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It’s a Monday and it’s been a weird weekend. There was the play Bill was stage managing on Saturday evening during which I nodded off about a half dozen times. Then there was an associate of Bill’s that wanted me to write a review which I did and it turned out to be quite nasty, so nasty that I assigned yet another pen name to it. I wasn’t even done with the review when Bill read it and loved it and sent it off to his friend. The next day was even weirder than anyone had anticipated and it was bad.

It turned out one of Bill’s cousins in Puerto Rico was murdered. No information besides that bad news. Bill was planning on going to the funeral which meant flying down to Puerto Rico for the day, but with the timing and the hurricane weather he couldn’t do it. Plus, he is singing the national anthem and Zeus Bless America on Saturday before the Staten Island Yankees game on Saturday night. I reassured Bill that his family in Puerto Rico are sure to understand, but Bill is understandably upset with what happened. And for Bill that is simply not enough.

He came home after an audition yesterday afternoon followed by some wandering around Central Park. I sat by the river and smoked a cigar and read the Carole King memoir. Bill came home midway through the True Blood season finale and I paused it, eventually stopping it all together so Bill can get things off his chest and perhaps cry on my shoulder. I was glad I could be there for him. He came down to earth just in time to watch the season finale of the newsroom which we both enjoyed very much. After the news Bill went to bed and I of course stayed up.

Bill took off from work today to visit his family in Manhattan and I did some grocery shopping before a major rain storm. Thanks to some rare good thinking on my part, I brought an umbrella and was home just a few minutes before the skies opened up and it started coming down in sheets. No busking for me today but I wasn’t too keen on staying inside, so once it stopped and the sky was blue again, I headed out to read some more Carole King by the river, on the way running into a lovely couple, Karyn and Christine.

I sat and read and enjoyed a cigar. I got to the part where Carole King was an abused wife. Really bad, punched in the face by her boyfriend (not Gerry Goffin). It was a bit harrowing told in Carole’s voice, how she never could understand why women stay in abusive relationships and then all of a sudden she was an abused wife. The guy eventually died of a cocaine overdose, found in a shooting gallery in Los Angeles. I met Carole King once and thought she was very nice and humble and proud of her daughter Louise who I had seen perform a few nights earlier.

Now it’s later, the sun is going down in a grey sky. Learning some new songs on the guitar, this time I am trying to figure out Jeepster by T. Rex. Easy enough but the chord changes are tricky.

How do I get to Carnegie Hall?














I Must Belong Somewhere

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I just got home from seeing the play Bill has been stage managing for the past two weeks. It was the last night and so I went. And it was a mishmash of things dealing quite loosely with Dada and Surrealism. Very loosely. It had been a long day for me and I have to admit I nodded off a few times, like seven times throughout the play. I was tainted by Bill’s stress from a few weeks ago so my eye was a bit jaundiced. I went in prejudiced and was somewhat justified by that fact when I left the theater.

And the play takes place in the 1920’s which makes it the third thing I had seen in the past week that takes place in the twenties. The Artist, Singing in the Rain and now this, Who Murdered Love. A Jazz Age trifecta. The first two, The Artist and Singing in the Rain are definitely top shelf, the play was somewhere on a lower shelf.

Despite nodding out a few times (I was in the back row, no one near me so no one knew) I am pretty tired now. I hardly ever go to the Village these days and when I do it certainly is not during the weekend. Here it is, a Saturday and the streets were crowded with people. Now it’s a bit later, Bill and I watched Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell which woke me up somewhat. But what worked better was the pizza we just devoured from Grimaldi’s.

Now we are watching The Fantastic Mr. Fox on DVD. I had seen it before but Bill hadn’t so that is what is on. I asked if he wanted to watch a movie and he said sure. So I asked if he wanted comedy or action and he picked comedy. The alternative is The Road Warrior which is one of my favorite all time movies. Great action, great story, probably the last great movie or the only great movie Mel Gibson ever made. The first time I saw it was in Paramus with a friend, Al Lewis. Al had some powders at the time and suggested we put that powder up our noses. Having never done that before I agreed.

The combination of those powders and the nail biting action had me at the edge of my seat and probably contributed to my insane driving that night. The powders are long gone with no regrets and the movie still holds a special place in my cinema pantheon. I remember seeing New Order at the Paradise Garage in the 1980’s a few years later and in a large lounge within the garage they were showing Road Warrior, silent but still with all the action intact.

New Order playing to a packed house, singing ‘How does it feel, to sing in front of assholes like you’ in one room and the next room Max versus Humungous in a silent battle. Oh someone in the audience yelled to New Order, ‘We love you anyway’. No, it wasn’t me. I just remember being the only person on the dance floor listening to Larry Levan play just for me, Our Lips are Sealed by the Fun Boy Three, after everyone else had left the Paradise Garage.




01 come together