Nothing Personal

For the record.

(I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago.  Then some shit happened and I thought maybe I didn’t need no stinking life, and Tumblr being a part of said stinking life, I took a detour into less verbal pastures.  So, the info here is dated.  Chronologically speaking, we’re talking about three weeks.  In Zorica years that amounts to barely enough time for me to get my head out of my ass and rejoin the world.  A portrait of my sanguine, pre-breakdown thoughts follows.)

In the theater world we have a tradition in which the performers in a dance company or Broadway show will all autograph a copy of the season’s poster.  It’s a symbolic product, all of those distinct, personal flourishes adding up to a keepsake greater than the sum of its parts.  But there’s always a problem with who gets to keep the damn thing.  The whole point is nobody owns it because everybody owns it.  When “everybody” owns something one of two things usually happens: it becomes accessible exclusively to the powerful, or else it gets forgotten entirely and shoved in some random, anonymous basement.

New York’s City Center has found a really beautiful way to circumvent this problem.  Rather than have the performers sign a poster, one of the production artists for every show or company that has toured to City Center since the late 90s has painted the show’s logo on the wall of the stage-left stairwell and then the company performers have all signed their names directly onto the wall.  It turns the theater, a place obsessed with the “here and now” on which live performance depends, into its own chronicle.  That which would be archived becomes the archive itself.  

I can only imagine what it’s like for a performer to pass by all of those signatures while loading into his or her dressing room, preparing to step on one of the most famous stages known to the performing arts.  The signatures in the stairwell definitely captured my imagination and I was only on my way to the bathroom, about to step onstage not as part of art history but as an unofficial guest of the Miami City Ballet, the company that shook the New York ballet scene with its weekend engagement a few weeks ago.  You could call my three-day tenure with the company an “audition,” but that would imply that there was some sort of job at stake.  Fact of the matter is that there are no jobs in ballet right now, especially not at Miami City Ballet where they are cutting millions of dollars out of the budget.  They pretend to audition people because that’s part of their job description and we out-of-work dancers continue to audition because as feeble as it is, it’s our only hope.

I was very lucky to be there, pretend-auditioning for a job that didn’t exist.  MCB auditions dancers by invitation only and it wasn’t an easy invite to get.  Walking through the stage door, warming up and dancing on the stage, wandering the halls pretending to look for the bathroom but really exploring, peeking into the wardrobe room packed with tulle and sequins, I felt like one of the chosen few.  As my father, a 40-year veteran of the performing arts, said just the other day, “Things are so bad that you feel blessed and honored just to be considered for work.”  Gypsy, the Broadway show on which he’d been head carpenter for the last year, closed last month.  He’s since found another gig, and under the heading of “silver linings” he counts trading headlining star Patti LuPone for the new show’s Jeremy Irons.  ”I’m no shrinking violet but Patti, well, she scares the living shit out of me,” he said to me at least once a month while Gypsy was up.

When he heard I was going to be spending a weekend at City Center he reminded me that it was the same theater where his production of Gypsy had first been produced.  He’s always been insistent upon details like that, especially to his children as we began to cut our own teeth on the boards he’d walked for years.  I never went into a theater and saw only the show that was on the stage; thanks to my father the ghosts of shows-past were always hovering at the periphery, providing a wisp of perspective on the “here and now” like the silent signatures do in the City Center stairwell.

In my wanderings up and down that stairwell I eventually got brave enough to venture down the hallway leading to the star dressing rooms.  It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, but there was no painting on the wall to memorialize the production of Gypsy in which Patti LuPone starred and which later employed my father at the St. James Theater on 44th Street.  

But there, quite far down the hall, right outside a superfluous and virtually unused bathroom, is a nondescript metal fuse box, and scrawled aggressively on its cover is Patti LuPone’s larger-and-louder-than-life autograph.

I could only assume that that first production of Gypsy being on a shoestring budget and inevitably strapped for time as well, the stairwell-signature tradition fell by the wayside and Patti took things into her own hands to see that she, at least, would not be left out of the archive.

There was no note indicating in what show she had performed.  No sticker or painting of any logo.  Just the name, “Patti LuPone.” Two big, curly P’s that, with their round possessiveness, implied nothing so much as a warm and friendly, “Fuck you very much but I’ll not be forgotten!”

Nothing that weekend made me quite as happy as that signature, not any of the compliments I got on my dancing, not any of the pirouettes that went well, not even the sense of accomplishment I had when it was all over.

When I saw my dad on Monday I told him about Patti’s hijacking of the fuse box.

“Good old Patti,” he said fondly.  He seemed to already have forgotten that, for forty-five weeks at the St. James Theater on 44th Street, she scared the living shit out of him.