“So?”
“So you tell them if they put on the glasses they can see the dance in three-D.”
“Right,” Paul said, “then we chuck spears at them.”
Not like the last time when I smelled, I swear it, the lightly scorched odor of composition-rubber gym shoe in the van’s closed air and browsed the curious sampler of upscale magazines, Interview and Elle and M, that the company favors, and dipped at will into proffered community snacks, introduced for the first time to the delicious sodium nitrites and scrumptious carcinogens of beef jerky, on whose long, tough leather I chewed with pleasure for half an hour, for if I am crippled up and need assistance to get into a van, I have the jaws of a grown man. Nature gives with the right hand, takes with the left.
Now we don’t stop for gas, so forget beef jerky. Forget dinner, too. Not like last time. (Place in Kansas? No fast-food joint or truck stop or theme restaurant but the genuine article, the kind of place you see on the network news when Tom Brokaw breaks bread with vox pop—a farmer, a banker, the John Deere man. And there are plaques for Rotary, Jaycees. And Angie—the company’s high school apprentice—asked what the Optimist Club was, and Liz told her it was a support group for people who are too happy.)
Hi-diddle-de-dee, the actor’s life for me!
Only it isn’t the boards I want to trod, it’s the Road. Having been born with this J. B. Priestley sense of good companionship, some troupe notion of traveled kinship, a true believer—my pop was a traveling salesman—in lobby encounters, this vet of the shifting, shared geography, this heart’s perpetual reunionist, you see, this sucker for chums, this long-standing-enough guy on that pavement in Paris who eventually runs into everyone he’s ever known—this, this auld acquaintance. Because it ain’t really friendship I’m talking about, it’s Miller time! And even today I imagine all sports announcers, men covering not only different teams but different games even, know each other, and are always bumping into one another in the best hotels in the different towns—though it’s always Cincinnati—and going off together to the good restaurants to catch up, to do the divvied shop talk of their lives, speaking in a jargon so closed it’s almost ethnic of the great patsies and fall guys—did you see Broadway Danny Rose? like that—doing the anecdotal schmooze and war stories, all high life’s tallest tales.
Still, not like last time. Because we really do go back. Well, a couple and a half years anyway.
Ross Winter was born in Australia. He studied at the University of New South Wales and, though he took modern-dance classes while he was a student, he ultimately went for an architect. Emigrating in 1959, he was with a film company in Portugal for a year, moved to London and set up in the design and architecture trade. He choreographed dances for the London and Edinburgh festivals, married, started a family, came to America and moved to St. Louis, and in the early seventies went to work for the Wetterau Corporation, a wholesale-food-distribution company, where he was head of the design department. While at Wetterau he founded, in 1976, the Mid America Dance Company, a sidebar to his life. Then, in 1984, the company closed down Winter’s department, and it was suddenly a compulsory hi-diddle-de-dee on him. Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas—this is the venue of their modern dance.
Winter looks, in profile, rather like some King George on currency and, like other educated Australians, talks a sort of soft-edged English Prim, the vaguely indeterminate accent of someone raised in a mother tongue but an alien in the land where he speaks it. It’s an agreeable, even amiable, sound, but you can’t imagine anyone ever shouting in it and so it seems, well, vulnerable, the patient calm of a forced, stoic courtesy. (Aw geez, come off it. What are we talking about here? Some great Greek patsy fall guy? A few not-like-last-times and we’re into the tragics? As Georgie Jessel said about his chauffeur forced to stand outside the limo and wait for him in the rain, “Nobody told him to go into his profession.”) At fifty-two, Winter is slightly egg-shaped. “The irony about dancing,” he says, “is that as a dancer gets better his body only gets worse.” In any event he hung up the taps years ago, though he still performs in “The Madcracker,” his parody of The Nutcracker and the company’s most popular dance.
MADCO doesn’t do badly. That is, it’s a wash. The company takes in and disburses about $150,000 a year. Between $35,000 and $40,000, or about 28 percent of its income, comes from grants; touring brings in another 34 percent; fixed-fee performances in St. Louis, 8 percent; box-office sales, 14 percent; educational performances in schools, 11 percent; fund-raising, 3 percent; with a miscellaneous 2 percent coming in from classes and such. Salaries for the dancers range from $115 to $210 per week. Liz, who’s been with MADCO eight years, gets $210 (for a thirty- to thirty-five-week season), but the mean salary for the dancers is $150. Ross allows himself $330 a week. David Kruger, the tech man and company manager, books the tours and works on commission.
I come into it in 1986, about.
Ross wanted to choreograph a dance to prose and asked me to write a story that I could read downstage left while the dancers carry on behind me. When “Notes Toward a Eulogy for Joan Cohen” is performed on Saturday night in Springfield, it will be the fourth time, not counting rehearsals, we will have worked together. It’s a long piece, about forty-five minutes, and although, owing to my location onstage, I’ve never seen all of it, the bits I have seen—in MADCO’s rehearsal studio—have always seemed to me rather sexy. Well, all dance is about screwing, finally, even the barn dance, even the waltz, but we’re talking leotards and leg warmers here, we’re talking spandex and muscle. We’re also talking, in the instance of “Joan Cohen,” about a rabbi who officiates at the funeral of a woman with whom he’s been carrying on an adulterous affair—talking porno movies in a Philadelphia hotel room, talking blow-job discussions. We are a distance from Swan Lake. And did I mention that Springfield is the world headquarters of the Assemblies of God? Not so much the people who gave you Jimmy Swaggart as the folks who took him away.
When we danced the dance in St. Louis those other three times there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for my cane, applause all around the minute they saw it when I limped in from the wings to take my seat behind the table where I do my stuff—all my plucky Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’s and show-my-flags. Well, I’m known in St. Louis, a known cripple. When I stumble on in Springfield Saturday night and they don’t applaud I will think, this is some tough audience! Well, I’m spoiled. (And why, incidentally, do top-hat, white-tie-and-tail types like Tommy Tune and Fred Astaire use canes in their acts?)
If the collective mood isn’t like last time, maybe it’s because these are the final performances of the season; and for Liz, who is married now and who, whither thou/thither me, will be leaving the company and moving to Arizona with James in a week or so, it’s a last tango in Springfield altogether. And because Darla, she of the reddish hair and supple face, has been in severe pain for eight months now and has either torn ligaments in her hip or a ruptured disk in her back, maybe both, which isn’t great for the leg extension and presents difficulty for her turnout, and has given her more downtime than a computer; and even if the company is family, unlike real families it’s forced to function, is burdened always—unlike me with my merely hail-fellow, good-time-Charley, Miller-time intentions, all my visions of those sugarplums in a weightless world—and if that’s the case, what alternative did she have except to ask Ross if he had a minute and then offer her resignation?
Only I don’t know all this yet. I’m still sitting innocent next to the Stephen King–reading Mike, a few rows up from invisible Jeff, apparently sleeping. Passing with Ross the time of the day and, deep in my heart, wondering what the place will be like where we’re going to stay.
Well, not much. It doesn’t have a restaurant, it doesn’t even have a coffee shop, let alone a lobby where one can transact old times with the other announcers. It’s a hot day in the summer of the great drought, and though there’s an air conditioner in my room, it doesn
’t work. Oh, it has the sound of air-conditioning down, but no B.T.U.s. And there are bugs squished against the walls. But hi-diddle-de-dee anyway, because isn’t this how it’s supposed to be? To all intents, ain’t it a kind of vaudeville we’re doing, riding the tour van like a time machine, all symbolic trains, rails and clickety-clack like a montage in movies, name, pop, and elevation wig-wagging above the stations like accepted synecdoche for distance itself? Ain’t it? We’re paying our dues, man. Look, Ma, I’m playing Springfield! Ain’t I? Ain’t we? We’re taking this show on the road! Ross, me, and the mean-average twenty-five-year-olds, those hundred-fifty-buck dancers. Hell, if we had any sense we’d go all the way, split the motel altogether, maybe look for a boardinghouse maybe, some place with just the one telephone next to the landlady’s apartment in the front hallway, or something really fleabag, a hotel with old bus-station chairs and ripped-up green plastic cushions in the lobby. And that’s one muse. The Muse of Myth, of How It Was. There were hobos in the earth in those days, a race of fry cooks, of broke-mouthed old fellows, closed-jaw, and all wide, ear-to-ear, turned-in lip like Popeye the Sailor. And you know what? If you permit me to get ahead of myself, you know what? There still are. I saw them.
Friday, breakfast morning of show time, a bunch of us were sitting around Orville & Betty’s Café—SERVING DOWNTOWN SPRINGFIELD FOR OVER EIGHT YEARS—doing the large o.j., French toast, sausage, and coffee, $3.25, when this bo came up. His hair was perfectly black but he was toothless. He was wearing a T-shirt, his exposed arms so covered with tattoos he looked abstract, as closely decorated with geometry as a mosque. He needed a light for his cigarette. Liz, or maybe Jeffrey, lit his cigarette, and he asked if anyone happened to know the time. It was ten-thirty, and Liz filled him in. “Thank you. Is that AM or PM?” “AM,” said Liz, “it’s ten-thirty in the morning.” “You want to buy a floor lamp for two dollars?” There it was, in the corner, this classic floor lamp with this classic lamp shade, this classic wire, this classic plug. (And for my money, in my book, right there’s another muse—the Muse of the Bizarre Confrontation. The muses are singing today, I’m thinking. How it was is how it is, and I should get out more.) Liz didn’t live in Springfield, she’d have no way to get it home. “I can understand that,” he said reasonably. “I’m not from here myself. You can have it for a dollar.” Betty, at the cash register, beside a wall mounted with a half-dozen stuffed heroic silver bass, is watching closely. Liz just plain doesn’t want the damn thing. “Take it off my hands,” pleads the tattooed man. Who is difficult to look at, on whom time, booze, and circumstance have worked their magic and whose colors are running, who like some ancient, benighted schoolboy, cannot seem to stay within his own lines. “Take it off my hands, take it for nothing.” Betty shoos him, but before he goes he asks the time again, and once more needs to know if that’s AM or PM (Later, Ross will mention he’s seen him in the street, that he didn’t have the floor lamp with him so must have gotten his price, better than his price. There were two bucks in his hands, and he was counting them out like some crazed miser, turning them over and over. “A dollar, and a dollar, and a dollar, and another dollar . . . ”)
There are several agendas.
Even if five of the eleven of us showed up for breakfast today, it isn’t often we’re in the same place at the same time. Michael likes to stay in the room when he’s not working, though when he’s with us I’ve noticed he’s a superb mimic, a parrot of the zeitgeist. Of the male dancers, he is the most solidly built, the most powerful, though it’s Paul, I think, who is probably the best athlete. It’s surprising to see him at the motel pool. Dancing must be a sort of ultimate acting. In a bathing suit he’s almost scrawny. He is scrawny, yet when he swims there’s no wasted motion, no energy loss. A few strokes take him the length of the pool. The women are similarly deceptive. Except for Ellen they’re all relatively short, yet on stage they appear tall. In one of the dances Liz moves across the stage, apparently without effort, with Paul on her back. (What’s going on? Are you funny, are you in one of the high-risk categories? No, of course not. Of course not? Michael’s powerfully built, Paul’s the best athlete, Liz plays horsey with him? Of course not? Well, it’s the fashions. The fashions. The way their clothes fit, all right? Are you caught up yet? The way their clothes fit, I tell you. My clothes never fit me like that. You’re fifty-eight years old. Don’t make excuses for me, they never fit. Whiner, you’re in mourning for a wardrobe? Yes, sure, why not? Only not for a wardrobe, just that accident in the genetics that skewed my architecture and made me silly in caps, jeans, in Jockey and boxer shorts either, in all the extraordinary accessories of the rakish, windblown young down to the beaches in boaters and scarves. The only equality is the equality of sexual style, the Me Tarzans, You Janes, all the level playing fields of dalliance. You bet your ass I’m in a high-risk category, the highest. I’m not cute! The grass is always greener, eh? Always. All right, get on with it.)
So there are different agendas. Raeleen is at the theater with Ross, holding up costumes so David and James—who wears clip-on suspenders with a length of Mickey Mouses attached to trousers so baggy (fashion) he could be that Dutch kid who saved Holland—can preset the proper cues on the lighting board. Darla and Ellen are sunning themselves. Michael relates the plot of his Stephen King, and Jeffrey retrieves tossed dimes before they sink to the bottom of the pool. I chaise lounge alongside. Paul is dressing. There’s a technical rehearsal at one.
“Step leap step skip,” Liz drill-sergeants in theory class in Richardson Auditorium the afternoon of the performance at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. “Swing and up, left two three. Over right, two three up,” she calls out, commanding mantras of the dance, square-dance calls.
“Oof.”
“Shit.”
“Find your center, you’re not finding your center.”
Ellen pushes up on her push-up sleeves. Angie, the apprentice, fixes the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt on her shoulders. Everyone wears leg warmers, even the men, who appear oddly old in them, as if their circulation were impaired. Liz, a cappella, continues to snap her fingers, never surrendering the beat while the troupe in its artfully ripped sweatshirts (fashion! fashion!) hunts its lost center. Difficult, I imagine, to find in the near dark they’re working in, all the three-ring din of the crew’s preparations—they’re putting together a jungle-gym forest for the set of “Lemurs,” they’re testing the fog machine, adjusting sound levels for the romantic, boozy music of “Silver” while a stagehand kneels in the dark and blows up props, two dozen silver cushions. “Are you the curtain puller?” Ross asks a student. “When you’re closing you can always be a little faster than when you’re opening,” he says to him. “He’s a quick study,” he tells David as the curtains come smoothly together.
“Two, that’s warm.” David addresses a person or persons unknown in the booth. He speaks, like an air-traffic controller, into a microphone cantilevered across his mouth like a prosthesis, some orthodontics of sound. “Two and a half, that’s even warmer. Two and a quarter. Okay, that’s good.”
Liz crickets away, the dancers swarm.
They are theoried, beliefed, suffused with us/them, farmer/rancher, mountain/shore antipathies and yin/yangs. Well, they have nothing against ballet dancers personally . . .
Ballet dancers are bun heads.
" " " robots.
" " " toy soldiers.
As ruled and rigid as ice skaters doing all the compulsories and mandatories of their frozen art. Ballet a by-the-numbers game, tableau vivant, not classic so much as stiff, dead to the arts as Latin is to language. Modern dance is to ballet what jazz is to golden oldies. (Though how much is terror I can’t say. Much would have to be, no? It stands to reason, doesn’t it? Life up on pointe? Or down in plié? Lowered in painful rice-paddy mother-squat? Because all dance really is about screwing. Even ballet.)
When we get to the motel Ross hands envelopes to each of us. They are pay envelopes. Because I think the
check for my fee will be in it, I am embarrassed to open mine in front of them. I open it in the room. It isn’t my fee. It’s my per diem—a lump-sum $45. This is Thursday, we will be leaving Sunday. It will have to last me. (But I come back with money to spare. I could have lived a week and a half in Springfield.)
When I finally see it, the Landers Theatre gives me the hi-diddle-de-dees altogether. It’s the real thing. A classically legitimate legitimate theater. A theater like the theaters there used to be a broken heart for every light on Broadway for.
Once, years ago, in Rome, dubbing a film into English (I was Sextus, son of Pompey) and asked “What hour is it?” I was supposed to answer, “It is a quarter past the hour of the second watch.” I delivered the line not only without credibility or good evidence that I could even tell time, but without any clear understanding (me, Sextus, a grown coconspirator) that it was the time I was being asked to tell. I worked almost the entire morning before being fired. The point isn’t that I was fired. It’s that once, years ago, in Rome, I dubbed a movie. Wait, I take it back. The point is also that once, in Rome years ago, I was fired. Legitimate legitimate theater.
And the Landers is it. Built in 1909, it has two balconies. Its seats are plush, ornate. Great fierce gilded masks—almost gelded masks, not asexual, but not Comedy, not Tragedy, only dramatic—with bulbs sitting on their tongues line the sides of the theater and the bottom of each balcony, perched like gargoyles on Architecture. The second balcony isn’t used now, but, in its day, a full house would have been about a thousand people.
This is it, all right. By God, it is!
There’s a kid, maybe he’s eighteen, who volunteers his time as a stagehand at the Landers. He says his ambition is to own a place like this someday. Not an actor, mind, but an impresario. I don’t know why this should move me but it does, as I am moved by the theater, I am moved by the dancers, as one is always moved by odd, off-center hope, by people hanging in there and the persistence of the obsolete. (You, crybaby! You’re so moved, why didn’t you buy the bum’s floor lamp? Why didn’t you take it off his hands for two dollars? That’s something else. Something else. Ri-ight. Well it is. Sure. All right, smartguy, I’ve reason to believe it may have been an ill-gotten floor lamp. Oh, an ill-gotten floor lamp! I was too moved, I was too! Sometimes you’re moved, sometimes you’re only embarrassed. This is a postmodern thing, right? I could ask the same of you.) Because there’s something in the blood, I think, eager to hold the other guy’s coat, to present his card, to serve as second. That admires a blacksmith in the late 1980s but wouldn’t necessarily care to be one. (Didn’t you used to be Charles Kuralt?)
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