Staging my big break
Summertime. When all good wives go to the country and all bad husbands go to their girlfriends.
For young people a warm weather activity is summer stock — such an education that sometimes you even learn acting. One season I had five major roles and two minor affairs. I didn’t end up the best actress — but I was the happiest.
The first season I just apprenticed. Clearly, I was no four-star super-talented Piper Laurie. I made scenery, polished flats, scrubbed dressing rooms, built furniture. Come Labor Day I was ready for my future — as a professional home wrecker. That year our company was so talented that three apprentices landed jobs: two as cabinet makers and one as an interior decorator.
I was told that to achieve success, one must struggle. However, the connection between cleaning latrines and stardom still escapes me.
Summer stock then was barns, haylofts, an occasional building, often a mudhole. Bats, bugs, worms and fields had more space than the players.
Straw-hat revues booked urban talent at suburban prices in exurban areas. Nothing’s as great as “Hamlet” in Pittsburgh, Tennessee Williams off a hayloft or the aroma of “King Lear” in a cow barn.
Today everybody does barns. Look soon for Fauci to play Julius Caesar in Detroit.
Many pros use Eastgunk as a proving ground. Venues so crowded with old-timers there’s no room for newcomers. By the time young’uns get a shot they’re already old-timers.
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Actresses occasionally smell that a real producer is out front just a proscenium away. She figures this is her chance. Actually it was her figure that was her chance. Little does she know he’s hibernating. He’s locked himself up in the whiskey closet, won’t come out until November.
The season I semi-slayed the audience was the year I was in “Blithe Spirit.” Took years to convince me this wasn’t the only play available. My Broadway career wasn’t lengthy. Came offers from a Florida company. That’s when I learned “Hamlet” wasn’t a coffee shop.
A taxing campaign
Now, back to the real world’s civilization and our pols and our elections and que pasa with the performance of NY’s political actors.
Cue in Bruce Blakeman of whom you may have heard. I somehow never got to know him well, even over the usual day-old tuna-fish sandwich at some century-old political club. I only know I just received a bit of political news.
It was reported to me that he was on radio a day ago, saying: “I didn’t raise them [meaning taxes] even by a penny. Not by a penny.”
OK. But appears he did. First in 1998. Voted to raise Nassau property taxes 3.6%. Voted again to raise a second time in 1999. Was raised 9.4%.
But he was just on radio this week saying, “I didn’t raise them a penny.”
Could that be Liar, Liar, pants on fire? Easy, Bruce.
During this warm weather season and the Iran war, our entire country has basically been put on Alert. Makes us remember those good old days when the only time our USA sent out alerts was when they were talking about Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky and her next husband.
Only in New York, kids, plus all the other states.
