Epiphany. No, I don't want corn flakes.

1/6

 Mario has returned from Italy. He and Jeremy G and I head across the street to the Bean for coffee and conversation. As always, Mario spans centuries and concepts and continents in single sentences, each paragraph a flight of creative exploration, exposition, excitement and possibility.  The Open Choir is going public again, the Seed Group ready to expand.(https://www.facebook.com/events/752775058163293/?pnref=story) All leading  to another public conversation about performance and the sacred, this time, at my initiation, to include community, building it, Being it. What’s going on here is the continuing process of new spiritual communities in formation, this time informed by the work of Jerzy Grotowski, work inherited by Mario and Thomas Richards.  I keep pushing Mario to move beyond connecting  with and impacting existing diverse spiritual communities into the possibility of building new ones, a place Jeremy G has already gone to. Jeremy G has just returned from the Georgia Sea Islands where he has experienced a Gulla New Year’s Eve watch service followed by a Shout and feast. My invitation list for the next conversation is ever growing.

New York Hair has just brought by another fresh arrangement of flowers, their weekly offering.

Ralph introduces me to a young violinist. Bob, meet the  new ETHEL, Corin. Corin, meet Pastor Bob…

The mumbling man  Eldridge, is in looking for money again. he offers me a box of Kellog's Corn Flakes.

No,put that away. I don't want corn flakes. 

Iain'tagonnaalie.Iaonlycomeaseeyouawhenaianeedhelp. He begins to lift his pant leg to show me his badly swollen leg.

No,please don't do that. You don't need to do that.

Justaneedatrainticketathehospitalandaback.

I reach in my wallet. Pants pocket. $8. I give it to him.

He takes it. Looks back at me annoyed and imploring. 

It's all I have. that's enough for round trip train. ...yes, and bus too...He nods. 

Ralph and Corin play the next hour before a curious audience. There’s Karen, our Hawaiian pianist. And at the piano, a young African-American woman who’s been sitting there, all day, not playing. And of course, at the back, Geoffrey, silently mouthing his prayers, respectful of the music. And of course, Eldridge, still here.

As I prepare to leave, Geoffrey walks out, See you tomorrow. I guess so.

The young woman walks in. I ask her name. Marie. She seems young. Childlike. 

Excuse me sir, are you open tomorrow?

Yes, of course, every day.

May I come again?

Yes, of course. Do you have place to go?

Yes, I do. I have place at the shelter. But it’s noisy. I can’t think. People bother you. May I come back?

Of course you can.

Outside, Martin’s daughter Gabriella is there. My father is so happy, she says.

Me too, I say.

The long awaited long term residency with Noche Flamenca is about to be signed.

On my way to meet Pat O with the Joyce Society in the East Village for a reading of James Joyce' The Dead. An epiphany story. 

Je suis Charlie.

Easter 31: Music. Piano. Conversations

5/21

Nan comes in for her weekly review of bills to pay and just to visit.

A musician walks in looking for the ETHEL rehearsal and the sound of their music quickly reveals their location. They’ve been working on some intense and seriously heavy music this week.

When ETHEL has finished for the day, Karen’s very personal songs and music takes their place in the sanctuary. She gets coffee for the both of us.

A man named Angelo has recently found a job and needs metrocard to get back to Queens. I’ve got just enough to make that happen.

A man from the neighborhood comes in and asks if he can play the piano awhile and I’m happy to oblige.

I take time and talk with my son Micah and Nina in Berlin. Still amazing to see them right there in front of me. We're talking about the devastation in  the Balkans, virtually ignored in the western press. Whole villages destroyed. fear of the potential public health disaster waiting to happen on the heat with rotting carcasses, mosquitos, toxic mud. Nina points out that for the first time since the wars in the wake of the break up of Yugoslavia, there's a sense of cross-border, cross-ethnic pan-balkan solidarity. tennis star Djokovich donates his entire Italian Open winnings. And posts on his website, Long live all the formerYugoslav republics. Serbian soccer hooligans jump on buses to go help their Croatian brothers and sisters. I'll be talking to Beppe about this. I will be helping Milica with her benefit a week from now. 

I’m getting ready to meet Esther R and Katie R to talk about a future performance together at Open Mic. I step outside and there is Rudy. Now bearded. Gives him a look of wisdom. Today, as he often does, he talks about communication. How these days he experiences it as disjointed and alienating. No one has normal  phone conversations anymore. It’s all texting and e-mail. I remember the peak days of what the community knew as  Rudy’s gym , sometimes to our Session's consternation, before we closed. The generation of Upper Westside kids who experienced his zenmaster-like gymnastics instruction, especially on the trampoline. His annual gymnastics concerts with members of Big Apple Circus and Cirque de Soleil, who worked out regularly after hours in our gym,  with their acrobatics, anti-balance work, aerial arts and even fire. Our separation over the landmarks struggle. And our mutual connection to Jack. The writing group and after. With his bald head and beard, he’s beginning to resemble Jack. If I had more time, I’d invite him in. I’m glad his work continues at another church in what we used to call Hell’s Kitchen. He’ll always be a part of the spirit of this place.

And finally as I’m leaving, RL is arriving. He’s got a message for me to deliver to Katie.

The 20th day of Easter: Worker bees

5/9

Ending the night with Stay Awhile, as usual. John, Pat (behind RL), RL, Nick and Steve 

So good to have ETHEL back in the building. The quiet intensity of their music is both energizing and sustaining at the same time. At the end of their rehearsal, Ralph stops in, asks a big favor. Would like some of Angelo Romano’s angelitos. I ask why. After 15 years, Ralph has quit his job with the Lion King. Wants to focus mainly on ETHEL. And his own work See if that can be enough. Wants to give a small gift to those who gathered around to support him in that decision.

It’s a New York story. I once knew someone who had done over 1500 orchestra performances of Les Miz. He said, You get on the train at 5 heading to Time Square and the theatre. At 11:30, you’re on your way back home with no memory of where you’ve been or what you’ve done…Though it is steady work and pays the bills, there is a sense that you came to New York with a dream and have wound up in a musical assembly line. The soul dying a slow death.

Dennis from the Interfaith Assembly in with more papers to sign.

A full cadre of Revolutionary Communists has taken over the sanctuary. Like a buzzing hive of busy worker bees armed with vacuums, brooms, dust pans, mops, dust rags they are going over every inch making sure that everything is spic and span. Their innumerable questions are somewhere between annoying and endearing. But bottom line evidence of a desire to make sure that every i is dotted every t crossed, every base covered and detail accounted for. Dedication. Discipline. Should the revolution ever come, they’ll be ready.

John took us by surprise

Working to get information lined up for Noche to make their  proposal.

Finally time for another Open Mic. Once again, an open door and surprises. A young singer-songwriter, John, from Austin. Now teaching kids in Harlem. When he starts to sing, our ears suddenly are captured. RL pegs him as being somewhere between John Gorka and John Prine. Which from RL is a real compliment. Mandola and Pat do some fine work together. They’re thinking about putting the Original Buskers back together and inviting

Mandola apparently making a point

young Nick the banjo player to join them. Nick starts with a classical medley and ends with an original. Steve, another walk-in from the neighborhood, sits down at our road house honky tonk piano. The one Andrea brought to our house from her home and now to here. The one our kids learned on. He’s fully at ease and does a cabaret set that could easily play a midtown late night bar scene. As for mine, I detect a sense of bitterness in what I’ve got planned. Even though I’ve played it over six times back in my office, I start Dylan’s It Ain’t me Babe and hit a snag. Decide to let that one cook more and finish with Tonight will be fine instead. My voice feels better than my heart, which is why we do this. This time I gather the names. We need to keep building community. It’s fun to play to a full house, sending a voice out to engage with the audience and bringing it back again. Pat even puts in an evangelical word about people coming to

Cabaret artist Steve

hear me on Sunday mornings.

Ralph and his Lion King colleagues. The RCP crew. The open mic gang. Worker bees all.

A discovery. A correction. Urban forest redux.

1/9

Priska continues to work on her studio.

ETHEL is done with recording, out of the gym and back in the balcony. I’ve got their music all day long.

Eldridge is back again. He shrugs his shoulders. I shake my head. And he speaks relatively plainly. OK, OK won’t ask for money. Just want a cigarette. Got to get out of here. This bull shit, here. Got to run here, got to run there. I gotta go to North Carolina or something. What you think about that? This here, bullshit. And he gets up and lumbers off.

Jeremy G is checking out final details for the residency of the Workcenter Project with Mario Biagini that is beginning tonight.

I think I hear my name being called through the closed doors. But I keep working. Later I’ll find that Sean’s electric cart battery is gone but his acoustic wheel chair is back. Left behind. Like a sinner on Rapture day.

Noche is hard at work preparing for their short Connecticut visit.  I ask Soli how her knee is doing and she’s determined to keep on going. I offer to try a healing and we both laugh.

When I return from the Village and my church and society meeting, Mario’s choir is wrapping up, filling the sanctuary with the sound of southern Appalachian style music. He’s working on taking the Gospel of Thomas and other gnostic texts and translating them into gospel music style. I think of the arc of the day from ETHEL to Noche to now the sounds of  Mario’s Workcenter choir. And I smile.

Mario brings in  two of his choir members, Lloyd from Alabama and Gabrielle from Brazil.  They cold be cousins of Bread & Puppet. He met RL earlier. Mario smiles and says He’s like a character from a Coen Brothers film. I think RL would like that.

RL walks in. I’m ready to walk out. But he says, Don’t you want to hear about my adventure? And of course I do. He leads me to a pew. There seems to be a well wrapped body. Boots sticking out the bottom. This is what I found, he said.  It’s like a clothes dummy, built or constructed by someone escaping from home—or prison—wanting you to believe that they are still there. Did Rachel do this? If so, why? Where is she?

RL came in  the dark. Saw the body. Tried grabbing the foot and shaking. When there was no response, he got concerned and called me. If it was dead, I knew you’d be upset, he said.   But if not, I’m not afraid to take on anyone who’s wide awake. But people you wake up, that’s another story. I waited 20 minutes for the police.

What did they say?, I ask.

Let’s just say they were kind.

We will replay this more elsewhere.

             * * * *

CORRECTION: The original singer of Early on One Christmas morn was Frankie Half-Pint Jaxon, not Freddie Half-Pint Jackson. Only 5’2.  Toured with Bessie Smith.  Recorded with the Harlem Hamfats and the Black Hillbillies.  (Today in he subway system we have the Ebony Hillbillies.) Did design for Ethel Waters. New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, New York and Boardwalk Empire era Atlantic City. Gospel, burlesque, vaudeville. And a pioneer of female impersonation. And finally worked at the Pentagon. (What??!) Here’s to you, Frankie, wherever you are.

               * * * *

                       

This is the bookend of the urban forest whose front end was the arrival of the  Christmas trees from Quebec right before Thanksgiving to make their way into our homes and be dressed and decorated, surrounded by presents and gathered families and friends and parties. Now discarded and piled in the streets. Their dried and crushed needles filling the sidewalks with the fragrance of fir, spruce and pine.  To be gathered. Mulched. And added to the ongoing ecosystem of Central Park. The cycle continues. I breathe in as I walk down the street. Watch my breath in the night air.

Rose petals in the hallway

1/8

Eldrige comes in and starts pulling  up his pant leg. No, no, I don’t need to see that. Don’t need to see that. He’s got  another medical story for me. …will never ask me again….I understood that much.

Nancy’s in. We’ve got to pull papers, letters together for the other broker. Make our case. And go to see the apartment one more time. 

Ralph invites me upstairs. ETHEL is recording with Hannis Brown (http://www.hannisbrown.com/bio.html) one of the hot new genre boundary crossing musicians. I can’t believe the gym. It looks like Abbey Road or something. Mics on every ETHEL member. Space mics. And an engineer. And every one with head sets. And to add to it, with the bitter cold outside, the string quartet is playing with fingerless gloves on. Coffee and donut holes on the side.  Ralph is loving the acoustic. And I see my first graphic score. Something very raw, organic about the music. As is usual for ETHEL.

Priska wanders in from the room next door which she has dived right into cleaning and preparing it. She didn’t know about the recording. She looks up with a look of amazement at the music. Part of the collateral benefits of being in this house.

Danielle is back at last!!! Her return from Iowa has become an odyssey. Stranded in Chicago for 3 days and two nights. Due to the polar vortex, which still sounds like something out of DC comics…having emerged from the polar vortex, the man of steel…..but she’s finally back. And I breathe a sigh of relief.

Regarding the still missing Rachel, Jeremy agrees with RL’s general perspective, you can’t save everyone. You need to apply your energy, creativity passion to developing programmatic work related to homeless. You can’t save everyone, especially those who don’t want saving. 

But there’s always the starfish parable…

Yeah,but you’re not even throwing  her back in the ocean. Just kind of throwing random buckets of water on every now and then.  

I get it. And when Danielle and I talk, as annoying, deadly annoying as Rachel is, I don’t want a once grand lady (if only in her own eyes) frozen like a bird in the ice in Central Park.

In the midst of the winter, I see rose petals strewn in our hallway leading to Martin’s studio. I look in, see Marina. It’s a scene from Antigone, she says, we’re rehearsing..scenes for backers….

Upstairs, RL is wondering why there are lights on upstairs. It’s Priska. Drill in hand, hard at work on her studio. She gestures to the walls, every inch covered with Chris’ unintelligible scrawls. Are you in love with the writing? She asks. 

Start with primer…says RL. 

No, I say.

 I can’t read, says Priska. My English is not so good. 

Even those of us with good English can’t read it, says RL. 

I look again. And I ponder the space between Chris’s scrawls and Peter Schuman’s walls at the Queens Museum. It is a continuum.  But there’s a distance greater than from here to Queens. And there is a line. Sometimes it just feels thin. Between madness and genius.

I’m off to check out Stephen and Cara’s new apartment.

Walking down the street, I run  into Rudy. It's been five years since he left and Rudy's gym officially closed. A generation of westside kids trained there. He's reestablished on 57th. Hell's Kitchen. But it's not the same. We're too old to have time to try and figure everything out. Why and what went wrong. It's enough to think of the future. And possibility. It's still cold. 

At Stephen and Cara's. I get a call from RL.  Someone is asleep in the sanctuary. What to do? 

Call 911.

Later, I find a message on the phone. All is ok. But he is flustered and frustrated. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

The eighth day of christmas, new year's day. A new year begins

1/1

The eighth day of Christmas.  New Year’s day. A new year begins. And who are my companions? What happens is symbolic to where we are.

It should be a vacation day. But I am alone and so go to the office to catch up. Why are the lights on? Soon enough Ralph (of ETHEL) emerges. He’s here with a flautist rehearsing for a Friday night gig at the Metropolitan Museum balcony bar. I invite them to move from the chapel to the sanctuary so I can hear them as as I do my work. We spend time sharing appropriately good memories of Christmas Eve.

And of course, soon enough Rachelle appears.

Later in the day, Michel walks in. Used to be a member of  Samir (Leila’s father)’s community chorus. They sang everything from classics to Samir’s original compositions to Christmas carols. He misses that. Hopes that we could do that again. And I would like for that to happen.

Unavoidably, I choose to spend an hour talking with Rachelle. Hear her old stories again. Of her car accident on the bridge and her miraculous angel assisted rescue/salvation. Of her early days as  neighbors of the Nixons and Rockefellers. Her relationship with Donald Trump. How Patty Hearst's grandmother taught her how to dress as a bag lady for self-protection. And now she is one. Of a college roommate descended from Norwegian royalty. Of college day parties and handsome men. And her attention to the homeless. And now she is one. Of her outliving a  terminal diagnoses. And spending her fortune. To help others. 

And how none of those can now help her. Too many lost private numbers. If Tennessee Williams had been a mid century German Jew, she would be a classic Williams character lost in her past, roaming the streets, SUV shopping carts carrying her life. I try to be patient. It could be me. Had one or two critical decisions gone the other way. He used to be a minister, they’d say. 86th and Amsterdam. They say he went to Yale!!! So I try to be more compassionate, understanding.

I walk down to Roosevelt Hospital to visit Cara and back.

RL initiates a conversation into taking seriously the money we’re about to come into. Not a windfall. You worked too hard to call it that. And what it will take to use that money not to survive but to grow. We’re talking  about the same thing here. Time is shorter than you think. A new year is beginning.