Ain't That a Shame

A great artist has died. 

Fats Domino.  He was eighty-nine.  He was born and raised in New Orleans where, it so happens, I now live. There is a collective sadness coming over this city.

I have to take you back to 1955 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. That's when, as a ten-year-old kid, I first heard "Ain't That a Shame" sung by Fats Domino on the radio. No--wait. I bought the 45 rpm record! I can see it now. I played it and played it. I'd never heard anyone with such a honeyed voice. He made sadness sound sweet. He sang so pretty!
                    

Then Pat Boone came out with a cover of the song. Do you know who Pat Boone is? He's the whitest white guy who ever lived. He took that song and turned it into Wonder Bread. Nobody had to tell me, a white kid living in the segregated south, that Fats was truth and Pat Boone was a lie. Every cell in my body told me.

Remember when this was. Mid-1950s. The guard was about to change from singers like Patti Page and Perry Como to Elvis, Jerry Lee, Fats, Chuck and Little Richard. Before. And after. My parents didn't let me listen to "colored music." (Yes, they said that.) Ha ha ha. All the kids did, on WRAP radio in Norfolk, the only black music station then. That's where we heard LaVerne Baker, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown and other exciting black singers.

Fats! Fats had a sweet, low down sound. He cradled you. He caressed you. He loved you. After "Ain't That a Shame," he put out "My Blue Heaven" (whatever that phrase meant), "Blueberry Hill," "Blue Monday" (I missed the blue theme he had going), "I'm Walkin'" (which Ricky Nelson messed up) and, of course, "Walkin' to New Orleans." And I can't forget "I Hear You Knockin'". All between 1955 and 1961.  I couldn't wait for a new Fats Domino single to come out.
                                                                           

The one, the only, Fats Domino

I veered away from Fats musically in the 1960s. The Beetles arrived. Dylan. Stones. Hendrix. And so on. In 2005, though, Hurricane Katrina exploded him into my mind again. The storm took his neighborhood down. For a while, they couldn't find him, thought he might have drowned. But he'd been rescued, he was alive, he was ok. And there he was, in 2012, making a cameo appearance on the HBO series Treme. He looked frail. But he sang a bit of "Blueberry Hill," played some, too. And he sounded so pretty.

So sad to see you go, Fats.
                                                                                 

The oblique morality of Tennessee Williams

Last Friday, I saw three one act plays by Tennessee Williams. They were performed at an old mansion in the French Quarter here in New Orleans as part of the Tennessee Williams Festival. Each play, set in a hotel, was performed in a different room of the house. The rooms were small, and so there were times when the actors—never more than four and usually two—were moving about right next to you. It was an enlightening evening.

The plays are Green Eyes, The Traveling Companion and Mr. Paradise. It's not easy to find out much about them. They were published in 2005 and 2008 respectively by the estimable house, New Directions, in volumes of TW's one-acts.  It appears these plays were written much earlier, but, as I say, it's not easy, even on the Internet, to determine that.
                                                                        

In any case, Williams' themes abound in these short plays. As does the characteristic florid, pained way his characters speak, using words that often deflect the truth but that, in the end, do not deny it. You can see that most readily in Mr. Paradise, where the landlady of a rooming house in the French Quarter demands the rent from two washed-up residents. The first is an alcoholic woman who goes on about a rich man she knows who owns a rubber plantation in Brazil. The second is a seedy-looking, dirty-robe-wearing, gut-hanging older man named Anthony Paradise who, we later learn, is—or was— a poet. When the landlady starts attacking the woman, who is obviously lying about the rubber plantation and probably about everything else, Mr. Paradise rises to defend her. In a long speech, he says to the relentless landlady, suppose it's true that there is no rubber plantation, and suppose I don't have any novel I'm working on as I claim I am—suppose all of it's a lie—why must you crush this fabrication? What difference does it make what kind of subterfuge we choose to hide ourselves behind?

One of the things I admire most about Tennessee Williams and for what I'm most grateful, is his understanding of the obliqueness of morality. Yes, there is black and white sometimes. The greatest sin is deliberate cruelty, he said, and at times, there is a plain line between yes and no. But there is also the kind of lie that has nothing to do with cruelty and which only serves to help that person through the day, the hour, the minute. It's a scenario that protects him or her from the glare of that harsh uncovered light bulb and which preserves that most delicate thing—dignity—that should never be stripped from us.                                                                     

In A Streetcar Named Desire, when Mitch calls out Blanche for all the lies she told him about her past, she says, "Never inside! I never lied in my heart!"

Tennessee, let me have the courage to protect those who never lie in their heart.

Rain

It's raining here in New Orleans. The sound is steady and beautiful. I have both French doors in my apartment open to it.  I can feel the freshness of the rain waft into the room where I'm working and I can smell the freshness as well. The way you can breathe rain even indoors. When rain falls, I always feel a kind of absolution. It means I can start anew. It's a kind of recurring baptism. 

Yes, there are rains that are not pleasant. I think of cold windy rainy March days in New York City. Or when you're driving at night and the rain is so brutal you can't see even beyond your windshield and your heart is about to exit your body.

All in all, though, everything about rain is mysterious and poetical. It's not a coincidence that Ernest Hemingway begins his memoir about Paris, A Moveable Feast, in rainy weather. This is is a cold, sad-producing rain, but nevertheless an inspiring rain. He walks from his apartment to the Place St-Michel to a good cafe. He takes off his damp coat, sits down, and begins to write. He's writing a story that we will all read one day, and, as the writer, he knows this, because he is writing this as a man of sixty or so, looking back.  So we are conscious of this and feel, in a way, intimate with the writer.

Hemingway writes,

"A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin....."

If rain accompanies strong sensual moments, then you live a poem, you are fully alive. In college, years ago, I was in love with a beautiful, melancholy girl. Her name was Sarah. She would stay with me in my apartment off campus over the weekend. I remember, even today, one afternoon, together, in bed. I remember it started to rain. I remember the sound of the rain slapping against the leaves on the ground, and the damp smell of it breathing into the window and cooling our bodies. My arm was draped around her bare shoulder. The cascade of her soft hair fell onto my naked arm. I often think about the soft sound of the rain against the windowsill and on the leaves on the ground. Of us in bed together as we talked dreamily to the tat-tat-tat of rain against the leaves.

If we think about the wonders of being alive, so many are simple, straightforward. Rain is one. Replenishing, cleansing, encouraging. Making us poets at least for an hour or so. The beauty of those drops coming from the sky. The mystery of it. There are things in this world that are dark. Rain is not one of them.
                                                                   

Stars taking up collections, con't.

I had a small part in A Streetcar Named Desire in a college production almost forty-five years ago. The impact of that experience was strong, and it was permanent.

I played the part of A Young Collector.

To set the scene:  Blanche has met Mitch and she (and we) see possibilities.  We've already had the poker game scene where Stanley, drunk, goes after Stella and she escapes upstairs.  Then the famous, STELLA! which brings her back to him. Now, Stella and Stanley have gone out, and Blanche is alone in the house, waiting for Mitch to arrive.

Enter me.  Or, rather, enter A Young Collector (who Williams refers to in the body of the script as the Young Man). I walk over to the door, ring the bell, and then....

Blanche:

Come in.
            [The Young Man appears through the portieres.  She regards him with interest.]

            Blanche:

Well, well!  What can I do for you?
            Young Man:

I’m collecting for The Evening Star.
            Blanche:

I didn’t know that stars took up collections.
            Young Man:

It’s the paper.

            Blanche:

I know.  I was joking—feebly!  Will you have—a drink?

            Young Man:

No, ma’am.  No, thank you.  I can’t drink on the job.

            Blanche:

Oh, well, now, let’s see….No, I don’t have a dime! I’m not the lady of the house.  I’m her sister from Mississippi.  I’m one of those poor relations you’ve heard about.

            Young Man:

That’s all right.  I’ll drop by later.  [He starts to go out.  She approaches a little.]

            Blanche:

Hey! [He turns back shyly.  She puts a cigarette in a long holder.]  Could you give me a light? [She crosses toward him. They meet at the door between the two rooms.]

I was listening to Blanche DuBois.  There were no actors.  There was no play.  I was a newsboy in New Orleans.  It was as if I'd walked through that liquid mirror into another world, but a real world, a three dimensional world that I belonged in. Everything about it was authentic.  And what was happening was as it happened in life.  It was real life--mine. I felt awkward and uneasy and thrown off balance by this woman.  She was beautiful and hypnotic.

What would she say next?                     

Stars taking up collections, curtain up

I have acted in one play and one only. That play was A Streetcar Named Desire.

Yes, I know.  I'd be perfect for Stanley.  Many many people have told me this.  Well, actually, none.   The year was 1969.  I was twenty-four.  This was when I was going to graduate school at Wayne State University in Detroit. A lot of my friends were theater majors, actors.  "You should try out for something," they said, noting my hammy tendencies.

So, I did.  I auditioned for the part of Stanley in Streetcar, as actors referred to it.  I got the part of A Young Collector.

I'm not even sure I'd read the play before.  When I did, I saw that the Young Collector (a teenage newsboy collecting for the local paper) was a small part, came in the middle of the play somewhere, and didn't seem to have much significance.  No many lines, maybe twenty-five.  The scene is between the Young Collector and Blanche DuBois.  When he comes to collect for The Evening Star, she pulls him into her world briefly. Then, exit.  

The part of Blanche was played by a suitably flamboyant, self-absorbed actress. I'd watch from the wings as she and Stanley went at it.  Exciting, raw stuff.  The play took shape, we had dress rehearsals, and all of a sudden it was opening night.

I was nervous, of course.  Felt silly in my Young Collector outfit in clothes that weren't mine.  Had all the known fears and some unknown.  I'd forget my lines.  I'd trip and fall.  You name it, I fretted over it.

Then: Time to go on.  I was given my cue, and, deep breath, I stepped out onto the stage.

And then the whole world changed.
                                        
                                                (To be continued)
                                                                       

The Courage of Thomas Lanier

I'm living in New Orleans, not far from where Tennessee Williams once lived.

He lived in several places in the French Quarter, and my current apartment is close to where he sets A Streetcar Named Desire.

I have always looked to him for courage, and now that I am growing old in his favorite city, even more so.

Every so often I pick up the marvelous biography of his early life, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams.  It's a highly under-appreciated book.  I like to to read about those early struggles of his, many of which took place just a few blocks away.

You get the impression in letter after letter, journal entry after journal entry, that, no matter how bleak the situation was for him, it never came close to dissuading him.  He hocked his typewriter, he hocked his only suit, he hocked his bicycle to pay the rent, to pay for food.  He wrote.  He never stopped writing.  He was a courageous writer, a courageous man.

                                                                 

     

                                                    

Brave and funny.  I remember seeing him on a Chicago talk show once with three or four other people.  One of them was a Catholic priest.  Tennessee had recently converted to Catholicism.  The priest, knowing this, said, "I shall pray for you."

Without missing a beat, Tennessee said, "I don't require your prayers."

Years ago, I read something he wrote in a preface to one of his plays: "...time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition."

I can hear it, the ticking. 

Give me courage, Tennessee.