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”

10.23.22

by notesfromachair

The Fake True Story

I was watching the first two episodes of season 11 of American Horror Story the other night because:

a. I needed an escape

b. It takes place in gay NYC in 1981, and

c. I figured, how much worse could they make the impending doom of that time than it already was?

Plus, one thing I can always count on this show and Ryan Murphy for is a few cheap thrills.

And let’s face it, these days nothing is cheap and little, if anything, feels thrilling.

Well hell if I can’t say American Horror Story: NYC and Ryan didn’t deliver every cheap, thrilling, tawdry, salacious and ridiculously familiar tidbit with a twist that I could imagine, and then some.

But the problem is, it also made me think.

In an age of alternative facts is it okay to simply mix real events and fictionalized nonsense to the point where even I, an overly analytical gay guy who lived through those times, can barely tell the difference between fact and fiction?

Or, say it isn’t so, is that actually the point???

AHS: NYC is the latest in a whole series of sensationalized TV and movie fact-tion that to varying degrees feasts on real people, real events and even numerous real names and images.

They then swallow them whole and spit them out into a based on a true story but not really dramatization of events and eras that definitely existed but, well, in not exactly the way we’re telling it.

Netflix’s recent humorless (note: and in my mind heartless) feature Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novelistic approach to the barely fictionalized life of Marilyn Monroe (note: real name used) instantly comes to mind. As does the retelling of one view of Princess Diana’s life in last year’s Spencer, not to mention the singular tragedy porn take of director Pablo Larrain’s telling of the brief post-assassination period of Jacqueline Kennedy’s life in 2016’s Jackie.

This approach is not limited to the real lives of women, though those stories often prove irresistible fodder since we in the public have loved to fetishize females as somewhat tragic figures who never seem to get either the credit or the love that they deserve.

Full confession: I’m as guilty as any on this score. Me, a guy from the boroughs, spent my teens, twenties and some years beyond feeling so badly for the very young, very from the boroughs and very inexperienced at love Fanny Brice/ Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.

I mean, she marries the handsome, worldly gambler Nick Arnstein because she so purely and desperately loves him and, despite their differences, knows she can make it work as she does everything else on stage. Until she is forced to finally realize the hard way that mere love is not enough to make a relationship work.

It’s compelling to watch versions of the naïve, odd-looking, inexperienced kid from the cheap seats and the handsome, high-living lothario with a heart of gold who falls in love with her that we’ve all heard and read about, right? Except, well, it’s all kind of made up.

It was only with this new 2022 Broadway iteration of Funny Girl that even I, Mr. Show Biz, found out the real Fanny Brice was married and divorced from her first husband prior to ever meeting Nick-y Arnstein, her second one. Not only that, but she already knew he was an unapologetic racketeer into all kinds of illegal stuff long before she married him and even well after.

But, I mean, how romantic is that story? (Note: I, for one, find it wildly compelling but that is yet another story).

There has been a tradition of plundering through people’s lives in hopes of making some creative and commercial sense of their existences. You clean up a little here, romanticize a little there, condense the timelines when convenient and change the names to protect against any one who can sue you.

Except Diana: The Musical… I have no idea what that is

No one really cares that Fanny wasn’t a virgin and that she brazenly married a racketeer if it’ll ruin a better story and make them not appear…sweeter. Just like audiences don’t really want to know that in Gypsy the real life stage mother from hell, the iconic Rose, also had female lovers, one of whom she shot and killed after she dared to make a pass at her daughter Gypsy.

It’s one thing to tidy up specific people’s lives but it’s quite another to pick and choose from many, many lives you are appropriating, not to mention in what ways you are doing it. But well, is it?

The Law and Order franchises have made ripped from the headlines roman a clef a true television art since 1990 and lives on to this day. (Note: Do not say ONE BAD WORD ABOUT MARISKA!). And there is hardly a decade of history in the last 250 years that has not been pilfered for reinvented real-life tales, tall or otherwise.

This is all a lot to consider (or not) while watching the beginning of AIDS, the murderous virus of homophobia, the leather cruising, the excessive drug use and the pilfering of fact and fiction as the subculture of gaydom before it was mainstreamed and/or talked about as portrayed in AHS: NYC.

It’s 1981 and we’re given a bit from the much criticized movie Cruising (1980) when a closeted gay detective played by Looking’s Russell Stovey examines what remains of the body of a handsome, fictionalized, leather-clad airline pilot murdered by the docks.

But the detective is living with an angry, middle-aged out gay journalist, played by renowned out gay director-actor Joe Mantello, a composite of many but sort of a roman a clef of a real-life but much younger out gay journalist at the time, Michaelangelo Signorelli, who became famous for outing famous closeted gays in the late eighties for not doing more to lead the fight against AIDS.

So far, so good and a smart mix of fact and fiction – kind of.

But then it gets kind of murky when we’re introduced to several requisite gay killers, one of whom is stalking our sweet, young, looking-for-love but not necessarily for sex, hero Adam, causing his best friend to go missing and Adam to become desperate.

A series of clues lead him to a bathhouse where he stumbles upon a famous photographer of provocatively naked, rough-looking gay males, but someone who also likes to capture images of flowers. He should really be called Robert Mapplethorpe but isn’t because this isn’t a Fanny Brice-type biopic.

However, it sort of is because the Mapplethorpe type has a rich boyfriend/manager/art patron named Sam, portrayed by Zachary Quinto, as a sleazy, sadist who is a little older and who is clearly based on Mapplethorpe’s real life lover/patron, Sam Wagstaff.

By all accounts, the real Sam was a kind man who loved Mapplethorpe, bought him a building to finance and create his art, and believed in his work when almost no one else did. Nevertheless, his AHS version likes drugging young men, locking them in cages against their will and doing god knows what to them before they meet some looming awful demise. At least by the end of episode two.

There’s also a lot more.

The obviously well-educated ex-military gay psychopath who, with some help, drugs and kidnaps men at gay bars, and then tortures and/or kills them by injecting needles under their fingernails. He and the crimes in the opening are sort of but not exactly based on New York’s notorious real life Last Call Killer as well as some of the murders portrayed in Cruising.

Not to mention the chanteuse at the gay bathhouse played by Patti Lupone, who so far has no dialogue but sings two songs great. The problem is one of them is the haunting Oscar-nominated tune I Am Calling You, from the 1987 film, Bagdad Cafe, and she’s singing it in 1981 to a group of gay men, many of whom are likely to be dead by the time the real version of this song was first written and recorded six years later.

On the other hand, does this matter when you get to see Patti in a Cleopatra/Cher/Victor/Victoria type headpiece, doing an homage to the world’s most well-known, real life gay bathhouse singer, the young Bette Midler of the early 1970s?

Not to anyone else but me, it seems.

AHS:NYC and the like may not be historically accurate but they don’t have to be. They are real enough, real-ish, which is fine as long as they are believable enough to be moneymaking and/or entertaining.

To use the present vernacular, they provide us infinitely more digestible alternative facts than our actual history.

And then some.

The lovely Kellyanne Conway first coined the oxymoron alternative facts in early 2017 on NBC’s Meet the Press in an effort to defend, or at least massage, the Trump administration’s lies about the number of people at his inauguration.

Days before, at his very first appearance as White House press secretary, Sean “Spicey” Spicer bellowed to a group of disbelieving reporters that President Trump had the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – PERIOD…!

That easily provable lie and blatantly improvable alternative fact quickly became an embarrassing international meme and butt of many a Saturday Night Live gag.

Numerous comparative aerial photos, as well as final Washington, D.C. Metro figures for that day became irrefutable truths that Trump didn’t have anywhere near the attendance they claimed. In fact, the first inauguration of Barack Obama more than doubled the real Trump numbers, which Spicer had already exaggerated by about 20-25%.

It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, more of an embarrassing mess that would ultimately be cleaned up in the history books by real facts, not alternative ones.

And look where we are now.

George Michael & Lynn Mabry – “I’m Calling You”

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: gypsy

Storytime

The Fake True Story