PLAYING AROUND

(Gee, how can I write this post today, without mentioning people with names who'd absolutely hate being mentioned at this point in their lives?)

It's true, in our younger days, we were a very pretty, good-looking, lovey-dovey couple and ... well ...

Playing around as you probably know, became a pre-Jet-Set, post Jet-Set fad of sorts. It's current now, if you're into what's current NOW.

We kept getting offers for foursomes, threesomes, change-your-partner "fun and games." But we were sort of naive, and didn't get it (or behaved as if we didn't get it) when the offers were made, from agents, producers, other name actors, male and female.

In our younger days, there were whispers, rumors, details about various friends, various producer pals playing around, experimenting. Some on drugs? Others into AC DC sex, (that was the term for bi-sexuality). And other weird-sounding things.

There were new drugs, potions, usually clear, sweetened, alcohol-containing liquids with flavoring, and sometimes active medicinal ingredients. HGH, human growth hormone was "IN." With one American turning 50 every 7.6 seconds, HRT, hormone replacement therapy, was a booming business, along with plastic surgery. And yams -- it was the favorite fad food -- everyone gobbled yams.

And it wasn't just producers and directors. I remember our visiting a very major name agent and her very major name "friend" -- being offered drinks, and odd conversation about ...

I'm not sure what it was about. While chatting about marvelous starring roles in some shows that were being created but didn't yet exist, and name-dropping BIG names of performers we knew who'd spent the weekend in the Hamptons with them ... well, maybe it was the martinis, but I had a feeling we, not just JC, both of us were being offered something, but as I said, neither of us were sure what.

Promising to call, we bumped our way out.

We didn't call, but a very dear actor-actress couple called, and after a fancy dinner at Elaine's, when we told them about the name agent and her name friend, they came home with us to see my renovations which had been written up in a magazine.

I'd bought a pool table with a red felt top. Playing pool in our red pool room, sipping cognac, there was interesting conversation ... more than interesting. It was a fascinating exchange of dangling sentences, metaphors, about games, her favorite, his favorite -- no specifics, but private parts, were alluded to ... I think.

While the four of us were exchanging the pool sticks, cues, taking turns shooting the cue ball, the black ball, quoting Shakespeare and Henry Miller, our friends were lyrically, poetically taking us around the world, Without referring to the Kama Sutra, we learned what they loved to do, and how they DID IT.

With a lot of body English, aiming, bangering the balls (the guys said, "don't banger the balls" when if we hit them too hard), and sipping cognac, playing the game ... well, there was a definite but smoky vague suggestion that changing partners was the game to be played.

How did the evening end?

(I couldn't imagine playing any games with him, and while she was definitely imagining the game with JC, he wasn't shocked, or responsive -- JC was tipsy, on the verge of being seriously bombed.)

It was very late. After another round of drinks, and our dog Teechi using his papers in the pantry, they remembered that their two terriers needed a walk. So it wasn't hard to ease into good nights and show biz loving hugs, and they left with our instructions about which corner of our street was best for flagging down a taxi.

Sometime later, we had a dinner with him after his divorce, and met his new wife. (His ex-wife got a role in a television show and faded away when the show faded away.) His new wife doesn't like me. I'm not sure why, but we don't see them very often, so it doesn't really matter.

Older and wiser from our two experiences, though we love the gossip and rumors about some of our current famous friends, we definitely don't get into situations were playing around is an option.

And that's that -- we don't play around.

MEDITATION

What is the most powerful, moving, moment I EVER saw, and hold tight to my heart, and brain?

JC in "Shenandoah," singing "Meditation.

Where does it come from, the beam that comes from him? The gestures he did ...

Actually they were my staging based on knowing him, his hands, his grace, and our communication -- if I say "do this," he tries it and does it -- if he says "do this, Em" I think NO (I don't like to be told what to do), but I try, and usually end up doing it.)

Anyway, it wasn't his gestures, it was him, his stance, his singing and playing of the role. Critics praised him, and he won a Tony for playing Charlie Anderson in "Shenandoah."

So why am I, his wife, heaping these compliments, praises onto him? Because we were tidying our offices, arranging the CD's in alphabetical order on a new shelf. Because playing the "Meditation," the whole song, or just the ending of it brings me joy!

In "Shenandoah," playing the part of the southern farmer with a large family, a wife, and land that he loved, JC was magnificent. The man he actually is, became Charlie Anderson, and Charlie Anderson was John Cullum.

At this moment, he's across the hall ... that voice, that amazing man who doesn't think of himself as a singer ... I'm enthralled like a brand new fan when he sings ... There he is, puttering, dusting things in his office twenty feet away from me -- plumber, electrician, food shopper, handyman who just a while ago repaired the barre in my studio -- gee, how did I manage to land this guy?

Instead of playing "Shenandoah" again, here's a bit of him in his first starring role on Broadway, Lerner and Lowe's hit musical, singing the title song "On a Clear Day."

TURN OFF THE LIGHT, DEAR

Save water -- DO NOT leave the faucet running while brushing your teeth! (See my post, "Doodler Hints").

Clearing the table after dinner, oif course, go ahead and rinse dishes before loading them into the dish washer. But DO NOT walk away and get more dishes with the water running!

These are small ways of saving water in a household where one of the occupants loves to learn his lines, practice his songs while taking a long long shower.

So, what about turning off lights?

Both my guys were always light-leave-on-ers, even before the days of energy saving bulbs. Both invariably groaned when Mom/Wife would invariably remind them to turn off the light please. And in the way irritants progress, when Mom/Wife could later be seen turning off a light in a closet, the light over the chair, or the light on the desk that no one was using -- of course they would quietly groan.

So what did I do Friday night? I didn't exactly nag, but in a semi-nagging, wifely tired-tone, I reminded JC that he'd left the lights on in his closet, and bathroom.

This after he'd been rehearsing, then performing "Scottsboro Boys" at the Vineyard Theatre, then rushing off to perform in his show at the Music Box Theatre.

The staged reading was Friday afternoon ... (A hellish day -- One Glove Michael would have hated the hullabaloo over how he died, but loved the evocations of him, praises, touching elegies and tributes by celebrities.)

The Scottsboro boys were the focus of a powerful race prejudice case in 1931. (I used it in Somebody, Book 1, p. 296.) Nine young blacks were found guilty and sentenced to death for raping two girls, retried, convicted again, and only years later found innocent and released from jail. Composer John Kander (who wrote the song "New York, New York" and created "Cabaret" with Fred Ebb) has turned the story into a minstrel show, and JC was playing the interlocutor for the reading.

But the moment they started the reading, some of JC's music pages got stuck on the glue he used to patch in some changes. Joel Grey was part of the invited audience, which included producers, backers, and JC's manager. Paranoia momentarily flared. Joel and JC are friends, but if the musical gets done, one never knows what will happen with the casting.

And Em at bed time mentions those lights ...

JC, who grins and bears it usually, said, "One of these days I'm going to remind you about your inconsistencies."

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day ..." And parting at night, saying goodnight when you're pooped and somewhat frayed ought to be sweeter ...

The subject was dropped. "I wanted to say "You hurt my feelings" -- thought about saying it, was ready to say it, but he was asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.

Marital trouble? A spat?

This morning he made me my coffee. I buttered his bagel for him.

ORANGE MOSAIC TABLE

JC and I were fighting. It was serious. We couldn't get rid of the problem. After we'd talked about it for a week, nothing was solved.

He'd been doing "Hamlet" while I was finishing a tour of England with my dance company. The girl who played Ophelia kept phoning him. I wanted him to tell her "'Don't call me anymore." He knew she was seriously depressive, suicidal, and didn't want to hurt her.

We sat at a coffee table we'd inherited from B. (My friend B had just gotten married, and was building a new life with an architect who designed rectangular furniture, modules that contained your bed, desk, closet, shelves -- you name it, it was in the module.) So, we were sitting across from one another on B's Danish chairs, foam rubber covered with a pleasant brownish-orange tweed.

Before JC had gone out of town for "Hamlet," before I'd gone to England, we'd bought orange mosaics, sheets of one-inch squares -- a ten pound box, enough to re-do the bathroom floor.

"JC, you said --- "
"No, Em, that's what you said, and I said ---".

Back and forth, we argued and fitted mosaics in a circle in the center of the coffee table. What do you discuss, if there's a needy neurotic girl interfering with the balance of husband and wife? Husband's audition for a new project, as you lay an orange square next to the previous one in the ever-enlarging circle? Wife's new choreography idea, as you position another orange square, passing a box-cutter back and forth, chopping off corners that have to be excised, so the mosaics can lay in a circular shape?

With interruptions for normal things, in between circles of mosaics, we exhausted his Hamlet, Ophelia, auditions, and Em's choreography ideas --iff'ed, maybe'ed, and planned a trip to L.A. where there might be new opportunities for us both, and created a beautiful coffee table with an orange mosaic top.

It sat in the center of our living room while other trips, choreographies, plays came and went, and successes earned us money for renovations, and everything orange and brown and worn in that living room, became spring green and fresh white wicker.

QUERIES & ANSWERS

DK ASKS:
"Should I break up with him? My parents don't approve. Mom says I'm limiting myself. Dad thinks he's a dropout because he's not planning to go to college. I really love him. I think about him all the time."

(DK said she's seventeen.)

"I'm going to be working part time helping a florist this summer, before I go to college in the fall. He's 20, a trainer, two nights a week, and all day Sundays. He loves to play tournament squash, loves to cook."


EM SAYS:
DK, the answer is in the question. You wouldn't be asking if you didn't already know the answer.

You said, "I think about him all the time." Think about YOU, and your plans, DK. If what your parents think is echoing louder than your thoughts about what's next for you, then he is limiting you.

THE GO SPIRIT

Waking this morning, to a faint noise, a vibration from our tenants on the floor below who are packing and moving, I thought about JC.

I crept downstairs last night, to sleep on the futon in my studio theater. It used to be "DanceHouse," my school where I taught; before that, it was rented by a guy who played the drums whom I desperately wanted to evict -- the noise was intolerable. We own the building -- a five-story brownstone in the heart of Manhattan; we occupy the two top floors.

Anyhow, upstairs, JC who is recovering from a coughing cold, was snoring.

JC's In-The-World clothes are on the rack in the hallway downstairs, upstairs on the brass coat rack, on coat hooks in the laundry room, in his three closets. (Yes, three, I just have one big one.)

Grrr.. No...it's wonderful--JC the actor marches out everyday, to shop, to audition, to do a benefit, to talk with Phil our building's super about the latest landlord problem. Then JC is off to the theater 6 days a week to perform. He doesn't say no. Never says no. He reschedules, jumps through hoops to be available for out-of-town relatives, old friends, as well as meetings with agents, producers, directors ... that spirit, what a spirit, the go in him.

I love his looks (a handsome husband is nice to have) but JC's go spirit inspires me, a go person in a different way... to go go go ... go further, faster, more delightedly... just GO.