Scorpio 5° (October 29)

 

Wood being delivered today and I will also get industrial vacuum so to rid the basement of cobwebs. Sounds fun doesn’t it? Oh, I’ll also have to put the hoses away. That’s a project in itself. I will forget however to get the storm door put on. I do now have the lease for next year. We have been spending our evenings singing which I think is pretty wonderful. I really don’t know any other couples that go to the piano after mealtime and sing out, Louise (which is Stella’s “Salon Name”). I saw Gypsy again recently and it was really quite great. I love who animated Rosalind Russell is in any case. She is the perfect film star cuz she can deliver rapid-fire changes in emotion and temperament in a very quick span of time which is wonderful for film. In the end it might have made her seem canned to critics. But I couldn’t disagree more. She’s in my top ten favorite actresses because she knew how to work the clutch. This business is half method and half Lucille Ball. I say that with conviction. When I was studing at HB studios with Ed Morehouse, before I moved on to Uta (and then back to Ed ere long)….I was doing the proper thing; I was using my actions and objectives and letting things move in on me and opening to sense memory and all of that but I said to Ed is it also ok to add some, how do you say, performance to all this. And he said, and I paraphrase: Yes, you do all of that. But you also do Lucille Ball. And I knew what he meant. He meant that you had to animate yourself and the scene and all of it for the stage. That there had to be a soupcon of schmaltz, not that Lucy was ever schmaltz. The brilliance of Lucy was that she was an actress and approached even the most camp and crackpot situations as if they were really happening. She was underappreciated as an artist who could do that on the big screen in dramas or classy comedies. She should have had the chance to do kind of movies Rosalind Russell did or Katharine Hepburn did. I remember someone asked Katharine Hepburn about Lucille and she said Lucille is a clown. That I thought was rude. Yes Lucy had the clowning skills—her mentor was Buster Keaton who tought here a thing or two about or thing or two–but Lucy was as good an actress as Hepburn but just didn’t hit that way with audiences. Kate Hepburn we effing lousy until she got to ’39 or ’40. Lucy was always good because she was open and tried. Kate’s personality onscreen wasn’t much different the way it was off. Stage Door is a perfectly prophetic film. Lucy and Ginger Rodgers are cousins. I always liked that fact.

I am super into going back into my cahiers and starting to create a world of developing aesthetic. I am in no rush to do anything anymore. Thursday will be one seventy one. Saturday will be one sixty nine. Monday could be one sixty seven. I begin writing the show. In the meantime I stumbled upon this yesterday:

Since as long as I can remember we have always called synchronicity: sign posts. A string of which one wants to characterize the majority of ones circumstance if possible. Sign posts are instant communion with the infinite/eternity. They say you’re on the right track, keep going. We’re always try to help clients open up to them. The night before last Penny Arcade participated in an art show and addressed the audience, touching on the subject of synchronicity. And how ones life should be all about it. The way she deliverd it was hysterical. I can only paraphrase: something like: If you’re not experiencing synchronicity with some regularity by the time you’re fifty you’re pretty much fucked. I could feel Stella mentally raising the roof and silently offering amen, as I was. So yesterday I found a journal from 1992 and thereabouts. I hadn’t opened it since. I had decided in the morning I was “going to do nothing all day” which, I find, can be a recipe for a) doing more than usual; while b) letting things happen to you. So I sat and went through this journal for a few hours and of course there were phrases I still write in journals. You know those. When you’re like, holy merde, I was saying that to myself all the way back then?…The physical journal itself came to me in a magical way. It was an empty book, blank white paper, hard red cover; the only thing in it was a title of sorts cursively written on the overleaf, in pencil—to be revealed at a later date!—and the price of 50¢ in the same pencilled hand. I wrote in it during a difficult chapter in all our lives. So many of the loving lights in our lives were being snuffed out by AIDS. The pain was palpable. And its all over the journal. As is synchronicity which suffused my Sunday, yesterday. In real time the journal chronicled the years I worked with Tony Randall’s National Actors Theater. My first year I was an intern and something of a costume-changing live prop in the Feydeau farce, A Little Hotel on the Side, at the Belasco. The second year I understudied three parts, and went on for a run in one of them, in The Seagull, directed by Marshall Mason, at the Lyceum. Marshall was also directing Larry Kramer’s The Destiny of Me, downtown, starring John Cameron Mitchell. Marshall took us all to see it and that’s how I first met JCM. The journal is this double helix of absolute elation at being on Broadway as a young actor in New York and of utter sadness, fear, dread, horror and surpassing anger. Finding and reading this journal brought me right back. As did, of course, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart last night on HBO. Then an actor I hadn’t seen since she too appeared in A Little Hotel on the Side: Daniele Ferland, who was already a great actress as a teen when I first met her, appeared in the cast. More Proustian waves. And, in a particularly poignant moment in The Normal Heart, the mention of Wellfleet from whence I watched. Then Mad Men was waiting on demand. Robert Morse. That same Seagull year at NAT we performed a benefit for the company and I got to share the stage with that genius. I watch Mad Men religiously. But last night, as it began, I thought I’ve loved Robert Morse since I was a baby. (I remember thinking it was aweird-glorious synchronity meeting him at the time—but, as it was, I had been working on a Tony Randall impersonation at Gotham City improv when I first met him, so I wouldn’t say I was getting the feeling I was conjuring people to me, but I wasn’t going to discount the possibility either). So last night watching Mad Men I thought, I’m going to take to social networking today singing Robert Morse’s praises. And then a prescient flash. I have an inkling: this is going to Robert Morse’s episode. And so it was. And in such I way—I won’t spoil it—that makes the hair on the back of my beyond still stand on end. Yesterday was potent and affirming and fun.

 

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree of the Sabian Symbol may be higher than the one listed here  as the symbols cluminate in the next degree. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 days.

 

 Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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