The Trocks are Coming, the Trocks are Coming!

MONDAY, MARCH 4--Last night I got to do something I love to do: sit in the dark, surrounded (mostly) by strangers, watching a movie. It is especially lovely to do this -- what feels like such a commonplace luxury -- in a small venue and community like Portland's SPACE Gallery.

Having handed out show info, greeted patrons, and introduced not only the film but the film's raison d'etre -- the Trocks are coming! the Trocks are coming to Maine via Portland Ovations! March 28 - 29 -- I'm sitting in the second row alongside a colleague who happens, similarly to the movie's subjects, to be a dancer who is also an excellent comedian.

We've both cried four times at least during Rebels on Pointe, a documentary of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo -- the first documentary, in fact, of this notoriously fun and skilled male drag ballet company founded over 40 years ago, rising out of Stonewall and Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater Company. Any evening on which you are moved to tears multiple times by art is a great night.

I can't remember now all the scenes that moved us to tears; there were many. Maybe one time it was the young, beautiful dancer from Cuba (Carlos Hopuy) describing how he and his family (and, basically, everyone) were starving during the 1990's; and how much he wants his mother, also a dancer, to be able to get out of Cuba to come see him dance. Maybe it is the sweet faced dancer-turning-educator as he heads into his 40's, going home regularly to northern Italy between tours to visit his dad, who has Parkinson's disease. Maybe it is when the first young Trocks couple gets married -- something neither Trocks' Artistic Director and retired dancer Tory Dobrin nor I thought we would ever see in our lifetimes. Most likely for me, it is when Dobrin talks about losing half the company to AIDS during the epidemic period of the 1980's-90's -- including his own partner. I remember too well when gay men were dying all around us, every day.

And that's one of the amazing things about the Trocks: their history spans a remarkable 40 years of gay history as an integral part of their own. The up's and down's of the dancers, the support of their families, the company's growth and evolution, their rock star status in Japan: it's all within the context of queer history and male dancers in drag satirizing one of our most elite performing arts forms -- ballet.

The comedy and satire the Trocks bring to ballet ironically "normalizes" what has become, for too many, an inaccessible form. They bring ballet down to earth both with their incredible skill on pointe and their commentary on the form itself -- and of course, their humor. Broad understanding is best fed by laughter.

SPACE Gallery's screening of Rebels on Pointe was a generous collaboration with Ovations in the run up to the Trocks' arrival, and was sponsored by Maine AARP. Portland Ovations presents Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo at Merrill Auditorium on Friday, March 29. As part of our Ovations Offstage (O2) community programming around the performance you can also take advantage of the following activities and events:

Wednesday, March 27: 

• 12 p.m., University of New England: Aging with Grace and Movement -- Health Challenges Faced by the LGBTQ Community, a collaboration with UNE and SAGE. FREE.
• 7:30 p.m., Austin Street Brewery: Drag Queen Bingo with Cherry Lemonade

Thursday, March 28:

• 5 p.m. FREE Intergenerational, LGBTQIA Movement Workshop with the Trocks

Friday, March 29:

• 7 p.m. FREE pre-performance lecture, "Dancing Queens, How the Trocks Satirize Classical Ballet," with former Trock dancer and Maine resident Roberto Forleo, Merrill Auditorium
• 8 p.m. PERFORMANCE

Remembering the Freddies, My Queens

Freddie (Endrich, Jr.) was my mother's most beloved first cousin. She adored him. He called her Maisie, and bought her daybooks every year, in which she faithfully recorded the weather, as well as whether or not my father or brother were at home.

When I was growing up, during the 1960's and 1970's, Freddie was the most gentle soul I knew. He sported a thin mustache above his ever-amused lips, and a beret. In 1959, our statewide paper called him a "beatnik" and reported on how he wished to conform with no one. Unlike the rest of the men in his German family, he spoke in a soft tenor. And he was educated: not only had he been to college (his father, a plumber, had a sixth grade education like most of our family from that generation) but he had been around the world, serving in Korea, teaching at the American University in Beirut for many years. He brought me home a copy of Aesop's Fables from that sojourn, a book I held, and will always hold, dear. The tortoise and the hare?! The lion and the mouse?!

We will, we will, rock you. - Freddie Mercury and Queen 

Freddie loved my long, 1974, 13-year-old platinum hair. Somehow I had genetically mimicked the Swede who had adopted me, while with its length rebelling against parental authority all in a single act. Freddie took it as a sign of my Bohemian/artistic temperament. I was his, and he was mine.

I just gotta get out of this prison cell, one day I'm gonna be free: find me somebody to love.

Freddie had a former tenement house in the Lower East Side, south of Houston, which was a slum when I moved there in the mid-1980's. It's difficult now for people to envision NYC as it was then; so much dirt, so much crime, so much violence. The building in which Freddie lived with Basil and their twin dobermans and monkeys-in-the-shower recently sold for millions of dollars. It makes me laugh until I cry -- and I know it would him, too, if he were still around.

We are the champions, my friends. And we'll keep on fighting, 'til the end...

Freddie died of AIDS on February 12, 1988. He was 58 years old. He'd been gay for as long as any of us had known him, bringing his partner, Basil, to Christmas at my aunt's in New Jersey where he knew he'd be tolerated by a Catholic family focused on love. I couldn't find an obituary for him, and I am trying to locate his sculptures and papers in light of the recent death of his younger brother.

Freddie Mercury -- like my Freddie, a queer man who lived on the cusp of a transitioning society -- died of AIDS three years later, in 1991. There was no telling, in those days, who would die when.  Some of those diagnosed died within weeks or months. Others are still here, amazingly and against the odds, to tell the tales. This year's Oscar-nominated film for Best Picture, Bohemian Rhapsody, tells Mercury's tale remarkably well, and re-plants the band's splendid glam-rock ear worms in our heads where, with luck, they live on as reminders to us all. The holocaust is not over, with more than a million people around the world dying of AIDS every year. And there is something about Bohemian Rhapsody, as a song, that always felt eerily prescient to me..."sends shivers down my spine/body's aching all the time...gonna leave you all behind..."

But life still goes on, I can't get used to living without you by my side. I don't want to live alone...I've got to break free.

I moved into the queer world of NYC in 1985, my partner Kathryn and I staying with Freddie and Basil on Eldridge Street and also at their cottage in Cherry Grove. We had stepped into a holocaust. Our pretty, smart, creative and beloved boys were dying every hour of every day of every week. Our lives were filled with visits to St. Vincent's and memorial services. But when my Freddie died, his illness was kept under wraps. I did not even get to visit him in the hospital. Suddenly, he was gone -- like so many others.

We cannot count the dead they are so many -- but we can remember them. I remember Freddie, his soft voice, his intellect, his laughter, his desire for pleasure and for joy, his sculptures made of neon light. Freddie wanted us all to be free. And we can continue our fight for a future in which the Freddie's do not die in their quest for pleasure and freedom.

These are our birthrights as humans, challenging to achieve though they are; and it is not god who punishes us in our quests for them. Long live our struggles for pleasure, and for freedom. Long live Freddie Endrich, and Freddie Mercury. I am so grateful to you both.

#ActUp. #FightBack. #Silence=Death.

Whitey on the Moon

Close to 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong was the first man to land on the moon.

This landing — only the first of six that occurred between 1968 and 1973 — is an all but forgotten scene from American history. It’s importance to us lies more in its context than it what it achieved.

The “one small step for man…one giant leap for mankind” and President Kennedy’s desire to prove that Americans could do things precisely because they are difficult fell prey to a meaningless yet deadly war in Vietnam; a string of political assassinations of progressive leaders; race riots; domestic bombings and the National Guard shooting of students at Kent State; President Nixon’s impeachment and resignation — and most recently to reality TV.

The “space race” was just that: an hubristic enterprise by white American men, spending billions of dollars of public money to beat their Russian counterparts to the moon while America burned.

African-American musician Gil Scot-Heron captured the sentiment at the time with his poem and song, “Whitey on the Moon:” “I can’t pay no doctor bills / but Whitey’s on the moon… / No hot water, no toilets, no lights / but Whitey’s on the moon…"

Armstrong’s landing might have imbued us with a reverence for our planet and its solar system. Instead, it became just another victory march for white Americans, plowing forward, as Armstrong’s wife Janet says (her fear-based anger well portrayed by Clare Foy in “First Man,” the recent Damien Chazelle film epic of Armstrong’s flight, now playing at Opera House Arts), like “boys with balsa wood toys.” The program persisted through loss after loss of astronauts killed as test pilots and, most famously, three burned in their capsule before the takeoff of Apollo 1 in 1967. After which, we were rewarded with many shots of other astronauts planting the flag -- along with a bit of scientific research.

There just wasn't much to find on the moon itself. As Armstrong put it before he even went, what we might get was, at best, most likely to be a clearer picture of ourselves in context from outer space — one we perhaps should have had already. Armstrong himself came back from his first flight beyond the atmosphere in amazement at how thin it was.

That was 50 years ago. Little did he know that oversized U.S. fossil fuel consumption would make our atmosphere even thinner and more fragile in the years to come.

Despite the awe and positive impact sparked by the Apollo voyages' famous “blue marble” image of the earth from outer space, we’ve continued to exploit the planet more than steward it. We've continued to be distracted by political mayhem, and remained unable to invest in solving the problems of the most needy right here in our own country. In all of this, we follow in the all-too-large footsteps of that first “whitey on the moon."

Dahlov Ipcar's Joyful Visions at Bates Museum of Art

Sheep of Insight, oil by Dahlov Ipcar
in the exhibit "Blue Moons & Menageries"
Bates Art Museum through October 6

One of the great pleasures of working in the arts -- well, really, of being human -- is making time to see a lot of it. Performance, concerts, films, exhibits: we each have the chance to exult in the human imagination and creativity.

This is perhaps particularly important when the news of our day to day lives is as dark as it has been of late. If you, like me, are a citizen of the world's richest nation -- a country which makes up 5% of the world's population and consumes 25% of its energy resources -- you'd expect the default value to be one of generosity.

Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. Rather, our default appears to be fear. Which on the ground is translating into a new "zero tolerance" policy for immigrants and asylum seekers at our southern border. More than 2,000 children have been separated from their families in this ignominious action, an attempt by the President to bully Congress into passing the immigration legislation he wants.

Let's be 1,000% clear: separating children from their families is an act of torture.

In the meantime, I, while speaking out, sending money, and planning to put my body in the streets to protest the regime that is now running our country, was also able to enjoy my first world privileges and take in this exciting new exhibit at the Bates Art Museum today.

"Dahlov Ipcar: Blue Moons & Menageries" is brilliant to behold. In color, yes, but most importantly in the maker's internal vision of life.

Like every Mainer I've ever met, Ipcar's vision is completely her own. Unique. Visionary. Her animals have third eyes. The painted insides of their bodies often represent the worlds around them. Looking at these paintings, I could feel the expansive peace that rushes in and opens out when one looks into one's own mind to see such images.

She seems to have expressed her magical vision of the world effortlessly, in uncountable paintings (some oil, some watercolor); wood block prints; soft sculptures; textile collage; needlepoint; drawings; books...and farming.

Continuing to make art to her final days, Dahlov Ipcar lived in Georgetown, Maine, off of Bath, until she was 99 years old.

THIS is what it means to be an American. Here is empathy and compassion, for the world via animals, extended far beyond the individual self. This is why we create.

Go make some art. And, failing that, get to Lewiston to see this exhilarating, inspiring, joyous exhibit.

Ragtime is Our Time

Racism? Immigration? Musical theater?

Yep. You can catch all three in intimate relationship right now in the musical "Ragtime" at the Ogunquit Playhouse through August 26.

Among the many high performance treats of summer in Maine, the 85-year-old Ogunquit Playhouse, on the National Register of Historic Places, with its legacy of being "America's Foremost Summer Theatre," is surely near the top.

Especially when history nicely synchronizes itself with the theater's production calendar, as it does currently with its production of "Ragtime," based on the 1975 E.L. Doctorow novel of the same name.

It's the story of a talented black musician, humiliated by some working class white men, who seeks his revenge in a bomb-throwing, hostage-taking kind of way.

And, as a parallel narrative, an oppressed Jewish immigrant who makes good in America's nascent film world and marries up.

The face of Lady Liberty graces the
Ogunquit Playhouse's production
of "Ragtime."

The production opens with a gloriously giant mask of the face of Lady Liberty gracing center stage, a talisman for the audience to reflect upon before the actors arrive.

You can't make this stuff up - I mean, wait, you don't have to. It's all in our headlines, right now. Don't forget, this season had to have been planned and cast at least a year ago. The fates of current events are shining on "Ragtime"'s relevance.

A child of the tumultuous 1970's myself, I love that "Ragtime" is oft described as "a unique adaptation of the historical narrative genre with a subversive 1970s slant" -- by which its describers mean that it's author wielded a distinctly politicized, progressive point of view.

The musical's beating heart is a score based in the gorgeous genre of music of the same name, which, with its melding of African-American jazz to pop, came to define the U.S. during the opening of the 20th century. But its story is pure National Book Award winner Doctorow's.

In an effort to educate middle-class white Americans on our history, Doctorow wrote several pastiches, bringing together motley assortments of historical characters to provide us with a snapshot of the political and social history and turmoil that defined the U.S. during the 20th century.

"Ragtime" was his first in this genre, bringing together to the page and later to the stage the anarchist activist Emma Goldman; the pop-culture, Hungarian immigrant sideshow hero Harry Houdini; the "notorious socialite" Evelyn Nesbit, lover of murdered architect Sanford White; financier/robber baron J.P. Morgan; and black, turn-of-the-century politician Booker T. Washington. Its protagonists are the African-American ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker, modeled on a 19th century German novella of a similar name; the Jewish immigrant artist, Tateh and his daughter; and the eponymous "Mother" -- who surprises with her fierceness.

You can't watch this musical -- even without the subliminal reminder of Lady Liberty looking out over the audience during the pre-show and entre'act -- without your heart swelling for America's oppressed groups -- its immigrants, its former slaves -- to be victorious over the wealthy white family from New Rochelle against whom they are based. So for those of you who prefer Republican policies on these matters: come prepared to be transformed.

Yet as with any good and true story, the conflicts are not easily resolved. Will the musical's underdog protagonists -- Coalhouse, Tateh --  triumph in the end? With the use of violence, following the radicalism of Goldman; or of political persuasion, in the mode of Booker T. Washington?

That is for all of you not only to witness at the Playhouse, but to play your own supporting role for in our country right now, as we circle back around on these yet-to-be-resolved issues of the who, what, why, and how of being an American.