Storytime

Storytelling is an art I’ve yet to truly master, which seems odd because I teach it.

But in a way, it’s not.

No one is a master at every story they tell.

That’s both the beauty and the hell of it. Just when you think you know exactly what you’re doing, something great pops into your brain that you can’t make work despite all of your knowledge and experience.

My thing is written stories, which have their own sets of challenges depending on whether they are meant to be performed on a screen or stage, or simply read to oneself silently.

There are tricks of the trade, depending on the medium, but at the end of the day the facts are never exactly true. The best you can do is capture the spirit of the truth, as you experience it through your characters.

Every writer is a magician, a liar AND a truthteller, all at once. But make no mistake, as sincere as we are, we are still pulling the wool over your eyes. Concocting a set of circumstances and actions and getting you to believe them in our world.

Well, at least a world of our own making.

Of course, we humans are ALL storytellers, even if we don’t write them down.

Donald Trump tells many stories but so do his 34 felony convictions this week. What does that tell us? That despite how many people you’ve gotten to buy the bullsh-t you’re selling, or telling, there comes a point where one of your stories (Note: Or at least 34 of them) won’t work and you’ll get busted.

You may think what you’ve concocted out of whole cloth is great but as Ernest Lehman, the renowned screenwriter of North By Northwest, among many others, once stated:

…Then suddenly the audience tells you what you never knew.

Trump makes up facts daily, spinning them into a sorcerer-ized version of his own reality, and for some insane reason(s) members of his party have taken a loyalty oath.

To the abusive alcoholic Dad who will buy them something to make up for the beatings –- emotional, physical and all sorts of other kinds. Or for the promises he makes to them, some of which he will keep for a price and most of which he won’t remember, deny having made or simply welch on because he can.

There are countless reasons why an audience not only stays with you for some of your lesser works, but pays for them over and over again and swallows them whole.

I, for one, have never figured out how a film as godawful lousy as Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (written by Randall Wallace) earned half a billion dollars at the box office worldwide. Or the international blockbuster earnings of pretty much any Michael Bay film.

Nor can I ever fathom how it is that the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy of books (written by E.L. James) sold 165 million copies, Stephanie Meyers’ seven-book Twilight series nearly topped it at 160 million copies and that each have far, far outsold, by A LOT, everything in total the late, great Pulitzer Prize-winning writer William Styron EVER wrote.

Much in the same way I will never truly understand the appeal of a thoroughly unconvincing hack storyteller the likes of Mistuh Trump, as his current arch enemy truthteller and former fixer, Michael Cohen (Note: A guy from the boroughs, just like me and Donald) liked to call him.

Nothing about any of the above movies or books, or even movie versions of the above books, had the vaguest ring of even escapist truth to me. As for Mistuh Trump, you had to either grow up or live in New York City in the seventies or eighties to know what a truly buffoonish clown he was, and always has been able to get away with, thanks to inherited wealth, ties to criminal enablers and a mawkish racism and sexism that a lot of rich white people shared but would never verbalize in the “entertaining” way he chose to in all of those privileged and/or back-room circles.

So many stories so many New Yorkers like myself heard about at the time but when we voiced our disgust (Note: Those of us who did were a solid minority, but clearly a minority) we were dismissed as soft, too sensitive or unable to take a joke. Didn’t we know this was the real world and if we wanted to get ahead we’d just have to go along with it like everyone else?

No. We didn’t think that. And literally, we didn’t.

Instead, we did our thing in the way we thought right. We tried to fight but you can’t battle the Trumps of the world and their enablers 24/7 and have a life. As the years go on you learn balance, and the power of your own voice and your own stories. They might be less lethal but they were far less evil, and had far less of a vindictive, nasty ugliness directed towards others. What they also had was our ring of truth.

Perhaps someday, many of us thought, our story, or stories, would become just as popular has his were. Or even surpass them.

And with a 12-member jury of Manhattanites on Thursday, that day finally came. The one where the audience that mattered publicly turned their backs on one particularly bile-ridden string of lies he told and his defenders had enabled and/or supported. Instead, they bought into the stories of a porn star, a reformed felon who was a character in some of his uglier stories, and those from a team of lawyers, magically woven from the remnants of real facts he had chosen to either omit, or his cohorts unknowingly (Note: Or perhaps even knowingly) left behind in a paper trail of notes, eyewitness accounts, and phone record transcripts in the cloud (Note: Whatever and wherever that is) that can never be erased.

One final thing that might feel unrelated but isn’t.

As victorious as it felt after the verdicts of that jury, I still needed an escape from the aftermath repetition of his stories, which were pretty much everywhere you turned.

So I searched and searched and eventually wound up at one of the tried and true places I normally go to begin with —

Well, just for a palette cleanser.

And who I chose was a singer and actress who just happens to be the most Tony Award-winning theatre actor in the history of Broadway – Audra McDonald.

Well, actually PBS chose it for me with their Great Performances presentation of her 2023 concert, Audra McDonald Live At The London Palladium.

Boy, did that do the trick. Audra (Note: We all feel like we can call her that) is a born storyteller, known for her superhuman operatic voice which she can twist any which way – opera, Broadway, the blues, jazz, special material, you name it, as well as for her ability to climb any number of death defying acting feats via characters that on the surface seem far beyond the essence of the funny, down-to-earth and very contemporary self-admitted, “poor Black girl from Fresno” she really is.

In 2014, she became Billie Holiday (Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill) and won the most recent of her six Tony Awards. In 1994, I was in the audience at Lincoln Center when she became the first woman of color to star in a major production of the period musical Carousel alongside three other very white leads in this very traditional and extremely, very white play. With that performance, Ms. McDonald’s (Note: Okay, Audra’s) undeniable talents broke open the door for color-blind casting and, as tricky as the visual was at first glance, in just a few moments onstage she sold you on her life story of that story, and won her first Tony award for it.

I bear witness to her early abilities as a different type of storyteller because it was announced this week that she will soon be playing the pinnacle of All musical theatre roles – Rose, mother of the most famous stripper in the world (Note: Prior to Stormy Daniels), Gypsy Rose Lee – in yet another revival of what many consider the greatest Broadway musical in the canon of Broadway musicals, Gypsy.

Respect to Audra but also doubts by more than a few because Rose is a ball busting, big-belting, overbearing, borderline abusive, egomaniac parent. She will do ANYTHING to get whatever she wants in the name of love for her children but, as she even realizes by the end of the show, it’s really for her.

There will be no such realization from our former president, the one who deflects his felony convictions, as well as three other indictments and pending trials for major crimes across the country, by proclaiming in the lobby of his gold gilted eighties skyscraper to his disgruntled supporters — I Am Your Grievance!

No matter how many court sentences he gets and no matter how many more years, or even decades, he lives on his daily junk food diet, he won’t realize it because after a lifetime of privileged delusion he is incapable of change. It’s not in his DNA. Unlike America. Which despite our checkered history has managed to at the very least slowly evolve to an inevitable change that will continue to be told by a myriad of the best storytellers in the world till the end of time.

Whether that is change for the better – or we follow down the path of destruction blazed by so many once mighty world powers that came before us – led by a guy with a wispy-haired fake blonde comb over in multi-colored pancake makeup, remains to be seen.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to the next six months of him trying to own the public square and us, even though it will be worth it to see him become the massive loser I am certain he will become so publicly yet again next November.

But November does hold one surefire treat – Audra’s Gypsy begins previews at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre on Nov. 21^st and opens Dec. 19^th.

this is the only red and blue I want to talk about

I have every faith she’s thought long and hard about how she will authentically become a selfish, steamrolling, very flawed person who, despite her shortcomings, will finally admit she’s made a lot mistakes, certainly more than 34 of them.

And, in the end, we will love her for it.

Unlike some people, who keep telling the same old tired story in the same old tired way, expecting the same old tired result.

Audra McDonald – “Cornet Man”

05.26.24

by notesfromachair

It’s the Movies for Me

Sometimes I’m astounded at the impact movies have made on my life and the inordinate amount of time I’ve spent watching them.

This is particularly surprising to me because as I kid I watched a lot more TV than films and in my early teen years certainly spent more time obsessing about singer-songwriters and their relentless existential introspections. (Note: I came of age in the early seventies when this was all the rage).

Just me and Joni hanging in Topanga Canyon

Ditto Broadway musicals.

I am not going to once again write about my Dad telling me he would get us tickets to see anything I chose for my 11^th birthday as my first experience at the theatre (Note: A rarity since my family went practically nowhere as a group and my Dad and I had even less than that in common).

Or that somehow I chose Mame. Ahem.

I will only comment to future 11 year olds that my father likely knew me better than I thought. Or, at least was trying.

Yet somehow this all shifted as I became an adult. Sure, I remember having my life changed when I saw Mary Poppins as a kid on the big screen or how I looked forward to the then only once-a-year showing of The Wizard of Oz on TV (Note: Yeah, that was also a thing).

Or the time young teenage me found Lana Turner’s Madame X on NYC’s Million Dollar Movie (Note: Channel 9 or Channel 11, I can only recall they showed it all day and night) and I obsessively watched it four times in a row.

Ahem.

Times 12.

And let’s hear it for the sensitive, overly-theatrical lads.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

There was some moment where movies began speaking to me most personally. A time when the immersive experience of sitting alone in your thoughts at a movie theatre, yet surrounded by people who for me, most of the time, might not as well have been there but luckily were there, supplanted everything.

Part of it might have been the waiting in line (Note: I can still remember three plus hours in freezing cold Manhattan waiting for tickets to The Exorcist and bonding with a ton of waaay cooler people than myself also desperate to be scared “to death.”).

But more likely it was that films had a way of making everything bigger and more important than anything else in the world because they were literally HUGE.

So I learned pretty quickly that movies could address your fears, your hurts and your yearning for happiness, albeit in a somewhat ironic, funny yet loving way and SUPERSIZE your personal concerns in a way that you KNEW they deserved to be.

Films were way better than real life. They BECAME real life. Or real life experiences, at any rate. I often found that for those who didn’t understand me fully, I could simply recommend a film that dealt with my “issues” and refer it to them to watch if they wanted to know in a very real sense what truly concerned me.

It wasn’t the be all or end all. But at least it was a starting point.

I’d forgotten about this because in the last few decades movies, as a whole, have changed a lot. Oh, of course there are still great films, meaningful films, and every year there are more than a handful that speak to me personally.

But it wasn’t until my friend Ray Morton reached out to me via Facebook in a challenge where you have to publicly post ONE MOVIE IMAGE per day for 10 straight days with NO COMMENT (Note: The latter being the toughest part for moi), that I began to once again recognize the impact of the films I chose.

Maybe impact is not the correct word because it wasn’t so much that I was shaped by them. It was that I felt they represented me or that somehow they saw me or read my mind at a particular place in time. I didn’t plan ANY of my picks, I just posted what came to me that day. But as I peruse the list on this final day of the assignment I’m astounded by the personal resonance of the list.

It’s not that these are the best movies I’ve ever seen (Note: Though they are pretty great), that I couldn’t name ten more that were ever better, or more sophisticated, or more dramatic, or funnier, or more….more, more, more.

I could. And you could.

But I stand by my list because in a purely knee jerk, visceral sense they are there for a reason. They are, or were, ME.

The Way We Were finally made me realize it is not enough to love someone, or for them to love you, for a relationship to survive. (Note: And it only took me eight viewings over 20 years to get that).

Strangers On A Train showed me that I was not as crazy I thought and that if I thought my family was really crazy, well, think again.

Blue Velvet taught me you can write serious movies and be as sick and funny and twisted as you like as long as you’re committed to your world and your characters.

Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the newly humorless and bereft me laugh for the first time in a long time amid all the death and condemnation and destruction at the height of the AIDS crisis.

The Godfather provided the gold standard of storytelling for an aspiring storyteller and made me confident that my obsession with dysfunctional family dynamics had nothing to do with being Jewish and gay.

Brokeback Mountain allowed me to cry (A LOT) and appreciate what I had and was likely in peril of taking for granted.

BlacKkKlansman made me angrier than I’ve been since the eighties about how f-cked up the U.S is; showed the absolute default privilege you get (Note: I got) for being white; and reinforced my constant desire to waterboard (Note: But not kill, that would be too nice) every person supporting the orange sh-t stain.

Rosemary’s Baby brings back just how much I still love the visuals of the sixties and why, deep down, I was right to be suspicious of almost everybody.

Harold and Maude told me your teachers and lovers always appear when you least expect it and in the strangest of ways.

and

La La Land is an endless, dizzying, constantly morphing dream of too many things to count, many of which you are likely not to achieve in the way you thought, certainly not in Hollywood. But that there are far worse things than being a dreamer. And nothing better.

Cass Elliot – “Dream A Little Dream of Me”