Ah

I have seen the ruins of Rome.
I've been in the igloos of Nome.
I have gone to Moscow. it's very gay--
Well, anyway
On the first of May!

Treasures I uncovered today in my storage unit:

• Gershwin “Preludes”: A Festival of Sharps, Accidentals and Hand-Breaking Intervals
• Hy-Vee Hy Value Card from the dawn of the Dark Ages when barcodes and loyalty programs were first invented and scannable plastic key fobs were REVOLUTIONARY UTILITARIAN ACCESSORIES
• 2€ coin from my last whirlwind tour of London, Paris and Barcelona—the European economy and the very status of the UK in the EU have been in precipitous flux since I so carelessly brought it home a decade-plus ago and removed it from European circulation
• Hand-made What Would Fred Do keychain given to me as an opening-night gift by a long-ago Ginger in a long-ago Follies where we’d together looked for Astaire-piration as we choreographed our featured white-tie-and-marabou-trim number
• Adventureland pay stub from my living-the-dream summer of 1986 where I sang and danced up to 13 shows a day, 6 days a week for two-digit wages that even then were probably criminal
• Debussy’s “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum”: A Festival of Flats, Accidentals and Knuckle-Breaking Tempos
• Blockbuster card that’s laminated in plastic so thick it’ll outlast, global warming, thermonuclear annihilation, cockroaches and the trump family’s concurrent prison terms

Still here

Happy 48th anniversary to Follies, the glorious, epic, mold-breaking 1971 musical by Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Hal Prince and Michael Bennett that ended up being too lavish and probably too jarringly mold-breaking for its own good. The most expensive Broadway production to date when it opened, it drew effusive critical praise but didn't get the musical-theater-pantheon foothold it deserved and closed after 500 performances without recouping any of its investments.

I was unfortunately three when it opened and I couldn't get tickets, but my heart and endless fascination and I were eventually—inevitably—pulled into its magical, inspiring, gorgeous, heartbreaking world when I saw the 1987 London revival, which gave Eartha Kitt a much-needed comeback when she replaced the broken-ankled Delores Gray (just like what happened to her in 42nd Street!) to belt the iconic "I'm Still Here"—which, as coincidences never cease, was the song in the 1971 production that brought Yvonne De Carlo back from the brink of terminal embarrassment after playing Lily Munster on TV.

Thankfully—inevitably—Follies has since then finally achieved the musical-theater-pantheon stature it deserves, and I've been fortunate enough to have seen more productions of it than I can count in New York, D.C., Chicago and beyond. I'm obviously overflowing with fanboy knowledge and trivia and opinions and lyrics (oh boy, am I overflowing with lyrics) about the show, but if I even want to come close to sharing everything about its brilliance that's waiting to burst out of me, I'll have to schedule a six-week subscription-series symposium at a local college to get it all Jakesplained to you.

Fun fact: It opened at the Winter Garden Theater in NYC, which—again with the coincidences—is the theater where I just so happen to have seen my first-ever Broadway show (Cats, the fact of which I am hard-stop-sun-comes-up-coffee-cup not willing to discuss).

My Fair Lady > Elf > Full Monty > 9 to 5 > Follies

Yesterday marked the end of an eight-month marathon of rehearsals and performances for five overlapping shows. It’s been fun and exciting and challenging and exhausting, but now I’m more than ready to put my dance bag in the back of my closet and delete all the screen grabs of still-need-to-memorize lyrics from my phone and contemplate the joys of maybe actually watching a television show. Or seeing a movie. Or having more than 30 minutes to work out after work. Or maybe finally Swiffering my long-neglected bedroom floor.

Speaking of unmentionable bedroom filth, what the hell do you suppose was the creative spark behind this disconcerting advertisement ... or how the agency convinced Joan Crawford that fanning her skirt around would make a compelling sales pitch for Lysol?

Subtext, Joan. Subtext.

Another performing adventure has ended at my beloved Paramount Theatre, and once again I stopped before I packed up and left to take a picture of this awesome door

It’s literally where a hole was cut high into the side of the gilded, lavishly baroque auditorium (specifically an alcove above the audience-left mezzanine) to link it to the austere new addition with all of its modern dressing rooms and bathrooms and showers and elevators and laundry facilities and its comfortably appointed green room with refrigerators and a wide third-floor window offering a southern view of downtown Cedar Rapids. I love how you can stand where I took this picture right next to a sleek stainless steel elevator surrounded by the clean walls and neutral carpet tiles of the modern addition and peer through this door and see the brilliant reds and golds of the rococo carpeting that hint at the breathtaking, venerable grandeur waiting just around the corner.

I grew up in awe of—and in love with—the Paramount Theatre, and I’m so thrilled and honored and humbled not only to get to perform on its century-old stage and enjoy the distinct privilege of looking out into the vast sea of lustrous golds and merlot velvets of its auditorium on a happily regular basis, but also to see first-hand the backstage additions and upgrades and enrichments to the expanded facility that will take it—as I see through the metaphor of this door—beautifully into its next century.

It’s my 15th Cedar Rapids Follies!

We just had an increments-of-five-years-anniversary-celebrating cast meeting before our final show and I got a nice card and a packet of granulated silica gel. It was in with a star-shaped metal box engraved with my name. Which is nice too.

Now the house lights have dimmed, the audience has hushed, the curtain speech is underway and our final first downbeat is in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

I am where I wanna be

I’m sorry, but I just belted endless choruses of this brilliant, layered, driving anthem surrounded by a 14-piece orchestra and a 10-voice pit chorus with 50 soloists and singers alternately crooning and belting on the stage above us—many of whose lives are affirmed profoundly by these lyrics—and I’m at once happy and weepy and so so proud to be a part of this amazing show with all of these amazing people.

My Paramount Theatre office view for the next week as a Cedar Rapids Follies pit singer:

I’m surrounded by rockstar singers and instrumentalists and singing on-book so I DON’T HAVE TO MEMORIZE ANYTHING. I’m not complaining at all.

I actually found an angle of the Paramount Theatre that I haven’t selfied!

Follies is finally moving into its gorgeous performance home and I’ve already celebrated by doing my little happy dance for being here.

I never knew that crooning the theme to Love Boat with a full orchestra was at the top of my bucket list, but I just found out it was and I JUST CROSSED IT OFF

I’m at the Fpitzprobe so I was just a placeholder singer, but the experience was surprisingly awesome—and as awesomely cheesy as a grown-up '70s kid could ever want.

Our soloist is in for a supreme treat when he croons it onstage. All we'll be missing is a cameo by Adrienne Barbeau.

Follies pit singer sitzprobe!

Or you could say Fpitzprobe. But no, you should really never say Fpitzprobe.

God, I hope you get these

Bendy people try to stand out so they can dance like clones.

The way you do your hair is a metaphor for the idea that it doesn't matter what you look like.

A group of women with 50 years of age differences who've never worked together and who've probably never even met somehow simultaneously remember the choreography and staging to a generations-old song. Oh, and something about a coffee cup.

All the neighbors' cats disappeared so ...

Dude can't commit.

Mom makes too many sandwiches and moves out.

Dude dots Dot, dies.

Cats with stupid names pretty much do nothing.

Pray for a tech malfunction if you want to see some dicks at the end.

Six boobs and a garage-door opener.

Tons and tons of plotlines about French people--half of whom are poor and uneducated--who for some reason all sing in perfect English.

Dancing guys in tight jeans take a stab at cultural harmony.

Slinky Fosse choreography makes the plot irrelevant.

Drag queens overcome adversity and teach everyone a valuable lesson about discrimination and tolerance.

Then, 40 years later, the exact same plot happens again.

Throwback Tuesday: Close Shave Edition

I'm in The Full Monty now ... then 9 to 5 ... then my 15th year in Cedar Rapids' annual Follies song-and-dance extravaganza. I've spread myself a bit too thin this spring as far as rehearsal availability goes though, so I'll be a pit singer in this year's Follies--where I won't have to wear costumes, worry about my hair or even shave. But Facebook just reminded me there was a time when I not only had to worry about shaving for the show BUT I HAD TO DO IT ONSTAGE. I can't quite remember why, though.

Leg Day in cheap, ill-fitting track pants is more miserable than Melania on Smocking Hamburder Night

I’d like to think my pants are all bunchy in all my uncomfortabunchy zones because of my mighty man quads and cantilevered cantaloupe calves, but it’s really because I was a big Clearance Clarence who was reeled in by the racing stripes. These stupid pants are tailored for cartoon ostrich legs, and they’re literally compromising my manly squats.

But they have pockets!

In other news, my Graffiti Wonder Woman shirt hasn’t sparked a single conversation about which is the definitive cast recording of Sondheim’s Follies. (It’s a tossup for me between the OBC and the Papermill Playhouse. Any other opinion is invalid.)

OK ... I'll jump on the bandwagon:

THEATRE EXPERIENCES SURVEY

1. Played a murderer - yes
2. Played an animal - no
3. Played a character opposite your gender - in a couple of drag cabaret shows
4. Worked with an Oscar/Tony/Emmy winner - not that I’m aware of
5. Undressed on stage - oh yes … and I’m about to again
6. Had a stage kiss - yes
7. Played a ghost - no
8. Been a stage manager – no
9. Been on tech crew – in high school, and I will again in a few months
10. Worn fake eyeglasses – yes
11. Worn contact lenses – in one eye that was supposed to be blind
12. Been in a staged fight - yes
13. Missed a cue - just a few lines over the years
14. Walked off stage during a scene to fix your costume - no
15. Scolded someone for touching your prop? – gently
16. Been in a musical – DUH
17. Been in a Shakespeare production – just in a few isolated scenes
18. Forgotten a line on stage - yes
19. Forgotten a prop on stage – no
20. Had a wardrobe malfunction on stage - a hat with a wig glued inside it once fell off my head
21. Been nude on stage - starting January 25 at Theatre Cedar Rapids!
22. Eaten real food on stage - no
23. Choked on real food during a show on stage - also no
25. Been injured during a show - nothing serious
26. Torn up the set by accident onstage during a show - no
27. Broken a prop onstage during a show - indirectly
28. Had a nosebleed onstage - no
29. Played a character of a different race – no
30. Been paid for a performance - yes
31. Played a musical instrument for a performance - yes
32. Sung in a show – DUH
33. Farted on stage during a show - gross, no
34. Made noise backstage during a show – only on purpose
35. Cut your hair onstage during a show - no
36. Simulated sex onstage - no
37. Ad-libbed until another actor made his/her entrance - yes
38. Played a child – only when I was an actual child
39. Been punched in the face accidentally onstage - no
40. Played a lawyer – no
41. Killed another character on stage - only offstage, if that counts
42. Died on stage – almost, if that counts
43. Played a drunk on stage – yes
44. Choreographed a show – not a formal musical, but I’ve co-choreographed Follies and choreographed more show choirs than I can remember
45. Directed a show – no
46. Designed a set - only in my head
47. Helped build a set - yes
48. Ushered/house managed a show – no
50. Helped make costumes for a show - emphasis on helped
51. Experienced effects of a theater ghost - I don’t believe in ghosts
52. Done a lighting design - no
53. Done sound design - no
54. Used dialects – extremely, extremely poorly
55. Gotten a bad review – not that I can remember
56. Done children's theater – yes
57. Worked with animals - no
58. Improvised to cover a technical issue – just broken props
59. Performed in outdoor theater - no
60. Fired a prop gun onstage - I’ve held many prop guns on stage, but I don’t remember having to fire any

Ugh. I do NOT have time to be felled by a damn cold.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been debilitatingly sick, and I’d forgotten how pathetic and helpless it makes me.

BUT! I used the time afforded by my canceled plans tonight to finally finish my second reading of Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical "Follies"—which I’d started on an airplane in April, and I have the dated boarding pass/bookmark to prove it.

And my second reading of the book unquestionably confirms what we’ve all long suspected: I’m still deliriously gay.

Thirty years ago today ...

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different ... something so random and so unexpected that the shock of the words literally didn't make sense to me: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the 1988 autumn semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and what ended up being a definitive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away. Dimly seeing what we could of it and haltingly learning more and more about it over the next hours was at once horrifying and comforting, filling us with both hopefulness and helplessness.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the murdered Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last thirty years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about catastrophic tragedies like the 9/11 attacks and the Stoneman Douglas massacre and the devastating 2018 wildfires ... though I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Thirty years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Thirty years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Thirty years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour news cycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are robbing you of a precious and very limited possession, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak both do and don't make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should work to find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Thirty years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for eight presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and eight houses and eight jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, even though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves ... and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you experience when you finally see images of the bloodied, abused corpse of Moammar Gadhafi—who denied to his last hopefully excruciating, terrified breath every credible report that he'd ordered the Pan Am bombing—feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Tony-winning actor? International journalist? Have-it-all mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m the only one in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and befriended her kids on Facebook and marched in pink hats with her in Washington and lost countless hours texting ridiculous memes back and forth with her.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Thirty years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken—and strengthened—my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

Love, Love, Love

I've been reading Everything was Possible--a fascinating insider account of the creation of Steven Sondheim/Michael Bennett/Hal Prince/Jonathan Tunick's magnum opus Follies--over the last month. And at this very moment I'm listening to the cast album with new eyes (or I guess ears) as I hear the performances of the singers and actors--not to mention the voluptuous orchestrations--I've been learning so much about. It's like I'm loving my mind.

I lost almost the entire day today sleeping off what seems to be a low-grade-but-nonetheless-still-exhausting cold

but I thankfully woke up in time to make it to my niece’s birthday dinner tonight. Then I think I finally got my dad’s birthday Alexa set up, even though I accidentally called it Siri twice and ended up having conversations with two disembodied robot women at once—JUST LIKE MY LOVE LIFE—but even though I couldn’t get Alexa to find 91.7 fm classical radio, it IS somehow playing classical music from somewhere that’s probably costing $7.99 a minute right now, and I’m going to try to knock out one more chapter of this fabulously gay book that I started reading in August because why read a book quickly when you can stretch it out over multiple sessions of Congress?

SPOILER ALERTS:

The Lusitania sinks. There’s a war. Everyone eventually dies. I give the VERY AWESOME book to someone else to enjoy. Sondheim writes a breathtaking show that gives me the gay shudders. I start reading the book about it for the second time. I regret bringing a massive gallon of already-watery-already-flat Diet Coke on my plane home.