On the day of the 95th Academy Awards, I’d like to say . . . Of all the offensive, harmful, harsh, foolish, and false speech spoken by Donald Trump before, during and after he held the office of President of the United States, certain of his remarks concerning theatre and performing artists are unassailably ignorant. For Trump to pass judgment on actors and acting is a form of trespassing, like an invasive species. He has no critic credentials. He’s not trained as an actor. Although he made a cameo appearance in 15 minor movies, he never played someone-not-himself in any of them. In terms of theatre, he’s not acted in a professional production. He does have a co-producer theatre credit, having invested $70,000 in a domestic comedy (Paris is Out!) on Broadway in 1970 that closed after 96 regular performances due to a poor script. But artistic experience – he has none. His acting resume is limited to television, most notably playing “himself” as an intentionally callous boardroom host of a reality TV show titled “The Apprentice.” Otherwise, consistently since 2015, he’s assumed the role of a campaigner running for office whose platform has largely been to promote aspects of his made-up identity, such as I am a genius. In short, Trump critiquing legitimate actors and acting is a guy out of his league.

In January of 2017, during her acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes, Meryl Streep rebuked Trump (not uttering his name) for his campaign-trail mockery of a different-abled reporter. She noted that he attacked a person “he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back.” Trump reacted by pronouncing Meryl Streep “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood.” That is an idiotic statement. Not that receiving an award necessarily equals excellence, but the awards in Meryl Streep’s trove indicate mastery. In terms of the Academy alone, her film work earned 21 nominations to date, more than any other actor in history, including a record 17 nominations for best actress, resulting in three wins.

Meryl Streep’s scholastic credentials are equally unimpeachable. She attended the Yale School of Drama, graduating with an MFA in 1975. Then in 1983, the same year I received a doctoral degree in Theatre History & Production from the City University of New York Graduate Center, my school awarded Ms. Streep an honorary doctorate in Theatre, making Meryl and me classmates. She later received four other honorary doctorates: from the premier ivies — Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; and from Indiana University at Bloomington for “cinematic talent” and advocacy for women.  

Meryl Streep is known for the singular sincerity and delightfulness of her public speaking, as in a commencement address at Barnard College in 2010 where she established equality for women as central to benefitting the lives of allhuman beings: “Today is about looking forward, into a world where … issues of gender inequality live at the very crux of the global problems everyone suffers (from): from poverty to the age crisis, the rise in violent fundamentalist juntas, (and) human trafficking.” She ended the Barnard address with a dharmic theme, intimating the raw truth that everyone, indeed everything, is without solidity, beholden to impermanence: “This is your time, and it feels normal to you. But really, there is no ‘normal.’ There’s only change, and resistance to it, and then more change.”                                   

I remember in 1982 being in the company of my teacher Stella Adler (arguably the master among master acting teachers of the 20^th century) when she mentioned Meryl Streep’s performance in Sophie’s Choice. Even though Stella was born into the art of theatre and mightily capable of analyzing professional acting, she wasn’t in the habit of expressing like or dislike for an actor’s work. The fact that she commented on Streep as Sophie signaled Stella’s interest in Meryl as a uniquely talented actress worthy of regard. What Stella was suggesting is that Meryl missed something in the scene when she (as the character Sophie) was forced by a Nazi officer to choose which one of her children lives and which one dies — that she didn’t slow the scene down enough to catch the fullness of the horror of Sophie’s impossible choice. I mention this anecdote to document Stella’s appreciation for Meryl as a young actress well on her way; and to illustrate that Stella Adler, who was entirely equipped to evaluate actors’ work, generally did not pass judgment; while Trump, entirely unequipped, does pass judgment. 

***

Even before attempting to discredit Meryl Streep, Trump applied his dumb phrase “highly overrated” to the revolutionary-era musical Hamilton, which is itself a revolution of hip-hop, rap, and rhythm-and-blues. Created by writer/composer/actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and received a record-breaking 16 Tony Award nominations, winning 11, including Best Musical. Trump said he “heard” it was “highly overrated.” He didn’t speak from having seen Hamilton. He spoke from hearsay, and not citing his source, he spoke blitheringly. 

Following the success of Hamilton, Mr. Miranda co-purchased (and so co-preserved) the landmark Drama Book Shop, relocating it to fresh quarters with solid-wood bookcases, classy armchairs, and a coffee bar. The Drama Book Shop, where I bought books during my student years, was a refuge for Lin-Manuel Miranda during his formative years, as it can be for all arts-minded people any year. There is the example of my student Tim, a white-haired man in his sixties who I met among the incarcerated population at New York’s Woodbourne Correctional Facility, where in 2018 I taught an “acting monologs” class for RTA (Rehabilitation through the Arts). Tim had been on the “inside” for many, no doubt too many, years. He told me that when he was released back home to New York City, the first place he’d go was the Drama Book Shop to buy a copy of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology. That was the play containing the monologs we were working on. Tim loved Spoon River — the array of characters and the poetry of their memories.

When Aretha Franklin died in August of 2018 Trump named her a “great woman with a wonderful gift,” who he “knew well,” and who, he said, “worked for me on numerous occasions.” Hearing that, I thought, “You sound like you think she was your hired help.” Aretha Franklin, the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, rest assured, didn’t work for Trump or anyone else who wrote her a paycheck. She worked, or rather, played, for the music and the musicians, and the rest of us were welcome to come along and listen.

The “Respect” worlds inhabited by Aretha Franklin, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Meryl Streep — feminist, diverse, compassionate, artistic – are utterly alien to Trump. He’s style-focused, attracted to the splashy surface of the world of entertainment. George Clooney called him a carnival barker. Frank Rich, the former chief theatre critic of the New York Times, critiqued Trump’s 2016 campaign performance thusly: “Compared to Nuremberg rallies, second rate, third tier. He’s more the lounge act than the main attraction.”

Mr. Trump presumed he could pronounce upon Meryl Streep, Hamilton, and Aretha Franklin. He similarly aspired to insult Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg, Bette Midler, and Oprah Winfrey – award winners all. In contrast, his “Apprentice” show, across its Trumpian history, was nominated for eight Emmys, two times for the program itself. It lost all eight times. That’s when Trump first started using the word “rigged” to discredit a contest in which he was a loser. I’m unsure what is Trump’s expertise, given his bankruptcies and lawsuits. Music theatre actor Josh Gad decided, “He isn’t fit to babysit let alone lead.” Well, then, what is Trump’s special arena? What is the identity for which he’ll be remembered? Robert DeNiro gave an answer. In the years 2018-19 at various times and places, Mr. DeNiro spoke the following about Trump — cut and pasted here, to make a monolog:

We have a wannabe gangster in the White House. Even gangsters have morals, and they have ethics. They have a code. This guy doesn’t even know what that means. He is a person who has no sense of right and wrong. He’s a dirty player. The president is supposed to set an example of trying to do the right thing. Not be a nasty little bitch. Because that’s what he is: a petulant little punk. There’s not one moment when Trump said: ‘I’m sorry. I realize I’ve done something that I shouldn’t have done.’ He has not one speck of redeemability in him. I see him and his family: they’re on the take. It’s like a gangster family.

Robert DeNiro located Donald Trump in the gangster arena with the identity of a hoodlum. 

In reaction to being called a gangster, Trump tweeted, “Robert DeNiro, a very low IQ individual.” On the contrary, Robert DeNiro, like Marlon Brando before him, is a sharp and studious actor, known for in-depth script analysis, who trained with Stella Adler and altered the course of American film acting. The man who played Vito Corleone and Jimmy the Gent can recognize a hoodlum when he sees one. Robert DeNiro branded Donald Trump irredeemable. That is possibly so. And yet I hold an aspiration: now that he’s on his way out, may Donald Trump examine his karma. May he deconstruct his ignorance. As he becomes nothing but history on the world stage, may he say something redeemable.

Here’s a piece that’s come of age. I wrote it 21 years ago on 1/1/2000. My relationship with artist Larry Anastasi had come apart earlier in the year, meaning I was without a sweetheart for much of 2000.

ONE/ONE/OHOH

(Or the end of the 20^th century)

I knew I was going to be alone on New Year’s Eve. I’d thought of having a party -– instead of on New Year’s Day like in other years -– a New Year’s Eve party. But then Rose said she already had a party to go to and Francis said he was going to follow some mummers around with a video camera watching them get drunk all night. I thought, “Maybe I’ll go with Francis and do that.” I was glad Jeanette was having a party and of course Janus always has a party, so I could go to those. Still, I knew I was going to be alone on New Year’s Eve. I called Elaine who said New Year’s Eve is her and Bob’s anniversary, and then Barry called and said he was going to be with Paula at the fireworks at Swarthmore College and nobody was going to go to the fireworks in Philadelphia because of terrorism which is where I wanted to go but not alone. My son said he wouldn’t go with me to the fireworks, so I looked in the Philadelphia Weekly and saw a Philadelphia Orchestra concert of American music at the Academy of Music with tickets from twenty-five dollars to one thousand dollars and I figured I’d go for the twenty-five. I talked to Harold who said he would be staying in Bethlehem on New Year’s Eve, and then Francis said he wasn’t going to video-tape mummers getting drunk but had an invitation through his brother to the five-hundred dollar a person party on Boat House Row where I could call his cell phone at eleven p.m., and he’d meet me at the door, but I knew I was going to be alone on New Year’s Eve. 

I told Jane how all my friends since just this year aren’t alone anymore. There’s Rose and Jeanette and Beth and Laurie and Julie (who’s going to be in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve), all having boyfriends, and Masako has a fiancée. Of course, Elaine’s always had Bob and Kim’s had John and Lili is with Robert through infinity, just like Fran with Jim, and Jane has married Joe. Even Bruce found a boyfriend this year and Dan has been with Roger forever though Harold seems content with his cat and Francis is fine to hang out with his brother. Jane said perhaps I’d meet somebody on New Year’s Eve, and I thought, “Maybe I’ll just go to Philadelphia.” I called Jeanette and she’d cancelled her party so that left Janus’s party, and Elaine was a little worried about me having something to do, what with my son having gotten fixed up for a bash at the Jersey shore. 

On the day of the 31^st when I talked to Masako, she said she and her fiancé Bert were going to the Academy and then I remembered, “Oh, the concert!” I looked in the City Paper and the only tickets available were twenty-five dollars or one hundred dollars, so I thought I’d take one of the one-hundreds, but the remaining one-hundreds were behind poles, so I bought a twenty-five. Elaine was glad I had something to do on New Year’s Eve, but I knew I was going to be alone. 

I stopped by Janus’ party to say hello and then drove into the city to find a parking space at 21^st and Walnut and arrived on Broad Street in time for the light show. A 6-feet, 6-inches tall man standing next to me said his friends were blocked in at the Dorchester because there was a black-out. He was a musician who’s played the Academy and I shook his hand goodbye saying, “Happy New Year,” and then wished I’d asked him to come with me to the concert. The mayor gave a speech before the curtain and a prodigious woman named Barbara Cook who I’d seen on Broadway in the 1970s when she was a significantly smaller woman sang Gershwin and the Academy gave everybody a piccolo bottle of champagne and a little flashlight in case of further blackouts. 

I walked toward Penn’s Landing thinking maybe I’d see Elaine and Bob or John and Kim at the fireworks, and a man called Andre who was drinking champagne called Andre walked with me. He said, “You’re beautiful, if you don’t mind my saying.” I said, “I don’t mind, especially tonight, because I knew I was going to be alone on New Year’s Eve.” He paused on a street corner to show me how he can do the splits and near City Hall he stood on his head. He was kind of wasted on grass though he was able to remember he’s twenty-eight years old, a personal trainer, a Scorpio, and his social security number. He wanted to walk me anywhere I wanted to go, but especially he wanted to get me off 13^thStreet because, “The niggers there are bad on shit,” and that they’d steal my handbag for a hit. He said he earned his money, and he would never rape anybody because if you needed a woman he knew where you could get one for five dollars. I shook his hand, which was cold as ice, and he unzipped his jacket and showed me no shirt and a handsome chest. He asked if I had any special person and I said, “Yeah, my son Moosh,” and he asked if I’d be his special person, but he thought that probably I wouldn’t because of the “ethnicity thing,” but that he wasn’t a man if he didn’t ask. I said, “It’s good you ask. You’re a good man.” And I thought how come that musician at the light show didn’t ask if he could go to the concert with me, and there I’d been thinking how I should have asked him. I told Andre it didn’t matter to me if a man was black but if he was a decent person and an artist and he said, “How about an exotic dancer, does that count? I mean a dancer’s an artist, right?” I kissed him on each cheek, saying, “No, you can’t walk me to my car,” and handed him the little flashlight from the Academy, and he said, “Can you give me a couple of ones for some beers?” I knew I’d be alone on New Year’s Eve. But that was back in the 20^th century and now there’s here – here and now – the millennium.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, TWO-OH-TWO-TWO, ONE AND ALL

In the spring of 2019, I was invited to a “Volunteer Recognition” lunch at the prison where I teach an acting class based in meditation; or did teach, before the pandemic. Our hosts for the lunch were men selected to represent all students enrolled in prison classes. They’d prepared the food and decorated tables in the gym where we gathered. Before sitting down to eat together, there was opportunity for mingling. I talked with the 4 men representing the arts organization I work for – they’d all been in my class — and then I entered into conversation with one of them (I’ll give him the name Jason) who told me he’d passed the parole review board and would be released in a couple months. 

Jason is a medium-height, medium-build, physically fit, nice-looking, Latinx man with dark hair. In class, he was willing to share his feelings and could speak without sounding judgmental. He entered into breathing exercises, voice exercises, theatre games, monologs – all of it – with interest. In meditation practice, he came to sit attentively. Above all, as my assigned helper, he was helpful. Every class, before I arrived, he’d set my desk and chair in place, get the room arranged, and lay out markers for use on the white board. When I arrived, he’d give me a greeting with a smile and always wanted to bend my ear for a minute or two about something going on outside the prison — not in a bloviating sort of way, but excitedly — as if to keep in touch with life as he imagined it. Then he’d take attendance. 

Over the course, Jason told me he was life-long close with his mother, she lived with her husband, and she bought a new car they all liked a lot – Jason liking it in his imagination.

A teacher doesn’t discuss with her incarcerated students the crime they committed or their sentence. I don’t ask what got someone into prison or what it’s like living behind bars and barbed wire, though the men may comment on the noise of prison, or the food, or a guard with a chip on his shoulder. But on “Volunteer Recognition” day (knowing I’d not see him again) I asked Jason about the journey he’d been on since being arrested: how he’d gone from convicted criminal to gracious theatre participant. In the 10 minutes given us, here’s what he let me know.

Jason was incarcerated at the age of 17. An unruly young man, he continued to misbehave in prison, resisting rules and getting into trouble. The first glimmer of a turn-around happened fairly early in his imprisonment, in a facility way upstate. A man from the outside (a clergyperson, if I rightly recall) had permission to come in and form a theatre group – doing some actor training and putting on plays. Jason joined the group and, to his surprise, not only liked making theatre – onstage and backstage — but was pretty good at it. That was the beginning of envisioning himself differently. 

He was moved to a facility downstate. There, again, his behavior was disruptive. For stretches, he was put into solitary confinement. During one of the solitaries, his mother came to visit. He was brought to the visiting room, handcuffed, and seated before his mother. She looked at the handcuffs. All his life, she’d called him Jay. She looked at him and she said, “Jason, is this what you want?” He returned to solitary and considered her question. His answer was to stop breaking rules.

Jason explained, change is gradual. You take some classes, you embark on an education, you begin to feel better about yourself. He took classes, he got an education, and he joined the arts organization I work for at the downstate facility. He participated in plays and took a leadership role in getting the plays produced. He said, you get older, too, and that changes you, changes the things you’re inclined to do. But working on the plays, building something together with other people – that was for him the wake-up. The theatre and his mother’s question, these turned him in the direction of helpful.

Jason looked young to me, maybe 30, but I really didn’t know. I asked him his age. He said 39. He’d been in prison 22 years, all his young man years. He didn’t mention a girlfriend waiting on the outside. We all sat down to lunch.

Weeks later, I heard the plan for Jason was to go to his mother’s house and from there he’d have to find a job and eventually a place to call home. I thought, he’ll have to figure out how a man may enter society at the age of 40. Whatever Jason took from our time together in a theatre class in prison, may it benefit him in the world.

The Memorial Day weekend front page of The Sunday New York Times will not soon be forgotten. The page is printed entirely with names of persons taken by Coronavirus. Each entry includes the person’s age and hometown, and a line signifying something of who they were. There was Lila A. Fenwick, 87, New York City, first black woman to graduate from Harvard Law School; Timothy Branscomb, 32, Chicago, always busy looking out for others; Marty Derer, 56, New Jersey, loved to referee basketball games; Hailey Herrera, 25, New York City, budding therapist with a gift for empathy. Totaling 1000, the names continue on for two more pages of the newspaper, making 1/10^th of the 100,000 persons lost to Covid19 here in the US. It’s impossible to read any 10 of the names and not weep. 

The page is a work of minimalist art and dramatic. It’s also an invitation to compassion – not as an idea but as a feeling, as an aching — the ache of loss, arising somewhere in the chest, because we’re willing to share other people’s suffering.    

The page brought to mind a production of Waiting for Godot I directed in 2001, where I had the idea to cover the entire back wall of the set, floor to ceiling, with newsprint. With the audience on 3 sides of the stage, everyone could see, though couldn’t read, the writing. During one of his exchanges with Estragon, Vladimir (played by Jared Delaney) went to the back wall and stood facing the vast expanse of newsprint, just looking and listening, during these lines:

Vladimir:   You’re right, we’re inexhaustible.…

Estragon:   It’s so we won’t hear.

Vladimir:   We have our reasons.

Estragon:   All the dead voices.

Vladimir:    They make a noise like wings.

Estragon:    Like leaves.

Vladimir:     Like sand.

Estragon:     Like leaves.

            Silence.

 Vladimir:     They all speak at once.

 Estragon:     Each one to itself.

            Silence.

Vladimir:       Rather they whisper.

Estragon:      They rustle.

Vladimir:       They murmur.

Estragon:       They rustle.

            Silence.

Vladimir:         What do they say?

Estragon:        They talk about their lives.

Vladimir:        To have lived is not enough for them.

Estragon:        It is not sufficient.

            Silence.

Vladimir:        They make a noise like feathers.

Estragon:        Like leaves.

Vladimir:        Like ashes.

Estragon:        Like leaves.

            Long silence.

The Memorial Day 2020 Sunday New York Times manages to speak the lives of the whispering dead, who, until then, had not been heard of publicly and surely not heard from. 

But the virus isn’t at war with us. It doesn’t hate us and we’re not its enemy. The Given Circumstances are, it’s attracted to us and wants to be our guest; it aims to replicate and we’re the chosen place for replication. The Rising Action of this play called Coronavirus is its pandemic spread and the Peak entails huge misfortunate. We don’t yet know the ending.

When I heard the word “hero” being circulated, I thought of a Bertolt Brecht passage that’s stayed with me all my life, and I sent my son a message:

Dear Sonshine,

People say you are a hero. I’m not fond of the word and how it’s used. It was the theatre that taught me why. In Brecht’s play The Life of Galielo, when Galileo recants his scientific discoveries to save his very life, Galileo’s student, so disappointed in his teacher, says to him, “Unhappy is the land that has no heroes.” Galileo replies, “Unhappy is the land in need of heroes.”

I think of you as a fine doctor, and exceptional, who lately, more than ever, has been ongoing called to extraordinary work that you’ve performed with discipline and grace. I don’t think of you as a hero.

Love, Mom

I stay home these days except for walks and hikes. Out there, I notice how elements of theatre have taken hold and we are the players. Without a director, we stage ourselves, keeping 6 feet apart. Some of us are ignorant of the breadth of 6 feet, or possibly we choose to play the role of provocateur or libertarian or villain. For my part, when hiking a rail trail in the Hudson Valley, if someone comes overly-near it feels like a fellow-actor messing up the blocking. I find myself going off-trail into the woods or a creek, as if being swept into the wings. But most hikers move over to their edge of the path with a wave or a nod or even a few words of dialog. Scarves and masks are regular features among our repertoire of elements, and sometimes gloves as well, resulting in altered faces and hands. Our faces have changed, and what will we look like when this particular production has completed its run? 

To close this reflection, let us return to Waiting for Godot.

Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? (Estragon says nothing.)

Who would have thought that Vladimir’s exhortation could have become more ironic and more touching than it already was?

I remember Jerry Ringer so handsome in high school. He went to the all-boys Catholic high school and I to the all-girls. We were on stage together in Shakespeare plays – Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cesar — and contemporary American comedies like The Man Who Came to Dinner. The plays were directed by Fr. Clarence Joseph Rivers — a small-built person of prodigious energy, an African American priest, a musician who brought guitar music to the Catholic Mass, and a lover of language. It goes without saying, Fr. Rivers endured racism but not from us kids. He called our theatre group the Queen’s Men, after Shakespeare’s company, and through laughter and patience he taught us to enunciate, navigate, appreciate, and perform Shakespearean verse.

After I graduated high school and left home for college, I lost touch with Fr. Rivers and the Queen’s Men — except for handsome Jerry Ringer. Like the other Queen’s Men, Jerry stayed in Cincinnati but not to attend university or work for Procter & Gamble, but to create the life of an artist. He was the true bohemian among us. Home for spring break my sophomore year, I called Jerry and left a message. He called me back from a phone booth. He said, they discovered a hole in his heart on Valentine’s Day and there’d be surgery. I imagined him in a black trench coat with the collar turned up leaning against the inside door of the phone booth. He said he hadn’t known, but his heart was broken all along. I felt like I could love this boy, and then the next thing I knew, he was dead.

That’s one of the prospects now with the virus of various names: Corona-19, SARS-CoV-2, Novel Coronavirus, COVID. I could be talking on the phone to someone and then –. I’m not imagining a specific person, just someone old, and anyway it’s an unthinkable imagining. Or, it could be the other way — someone talking to me on the phone and then –. When I first heard the name Corona, I thought it had to do with coronary, that one’s heart gives out. But, in fact, it’s the lungs that are affected, though now we know it can travel to the heart, and it doesn’t help in the first place to have a heart full of trouble.

The scope of the virus and the multitude of human beings it’s direly infecting brings to mind the truth of impermanence: Everything changes, nothing lasts, everybody dies. Most of us infrequently contemplate the truth of impermanence. But working in the theatre brings the truth of impermanence home show after show. Early on in my career at Villanova Theatre, there was a technical director, John Parmalee, responsible for getting the sets built according to design plans. John was a capable TD as well as a soft-spoken, gentle person. When a show was over and it was time for the set to come down, as per the event known as “strike,” John would singlehandedly initiate the destruction of the set, just to get things started. He’d wield a hammer, and wham, that’s how the strike began. He once told me strike was his favorite part of the job. I protested, “But you built the set!” He liked the understanding that the theatre and all its scenery isn’t supposed to last.

I didn’t like to attend the strikes of productions I’d directed. It felt shocking to me: hardly an hour from a show closing to the first blow. Like with handsome Jerry Ringer – a promising phone call and then silence. That’s the theatre — it hardly gets going and it’s over. In that sense, the theatre is a generous teacher of dharma or the truth of how things are. Every day is new on stage. No performance can possibly stay quite exactly the same. Nothing lasts beyond the curtain. Every show goes to strike. And all the characters are no more.

Start with life. She was lively and if I were to give her a Bodhisattva name it would be Playful Generosity. Her this-world name was Sally Curley. She volunteered on every one of the 19 theatre productions I directed at Villanova University over the years, fulfilling every task from patch panel operator to stage manager. During the run of Ice Cream by Caryl Churchill in 1991, as sound board operator, Sally inadvertently let a tape play out to where an unexpected unwanted Frank Sinatra song came blasting through the speakers. Seth Pendleton was on stage in the role of a London East End punk person. Looking toward the sound booth, as if to an upstairs neighbor, he shouted, “Shut the fuck up,” at which point Sally threw herself bodily on the tape deck and Frank Sinatra stopped. 

Every night during the 2-week run of Caryl Churchill’s Fen, Sally reburied potatoes in the dirt floor of the set so the actors could potato-pick anew the next day in performance. The potato-burying made for a messy task and it was the least of how Sally Curley benefited my work across 30 years.

I sometimes slept over at Sally’s house near Villanova during a tech weekend when I was too tired to drive to my place in the city. Her taste was Early American, and there were dolls, some almost life-size, propped on chairs and perched on the sofa. She had literally a roomful of birds that she talked to and one of them, Lucy the cockatiel, talked back. After leaving Villanova and moving from Pennsylvania, I stayed in Sally’s guest room on occasion on return visits. When she developed Parkinson’s and began to divest of material things, she gave me a matching boy and girl doll costumed like characters in a Victorian play.  

• 

As the disease progressed, the medication caused Sally instability of memory and motion. She started falling. On one visit I noticed marks on her arms and bruises on her face. I mentioned the cane she wasn’t using and asked about a walker. She said, “I’d rather fall than use a walker.” I said, “It’s up to you.” Next came hallucinations. Sally knew she was hallucinating, and yet to her the hallucinated people looked and sounded entirely present, like visitors. The last time I stayed at Sally’s house, she said the hallucinations sometimes invited her outside and she’d go. Sally’s children moved her to a care-facility. She’d been found at night, fallen in the street.

I last saw Sally at her apartment in the nursing home. She pointed across the room: “There are a lot of people sitting over there on the bed. I see them. They’re really there.” She knew they weren’t visible to me. She knew they weren’t actually there, and she also knew they were there. How was Sally’s hallucination less real than I standing next to her, or how was I more real than the people on the bed? 

Whatever we see, to a significant extent, our mind is making up. What we think we are seeing, and the way we see, can be a product of, say, our projections or Parkinson’s, or ignorance. Atisha said it well: “Regard all phenomena as dreams.” Although we may like to consider in this moment that objects and people are solid, in the next moment they are already a passing memory. Is anything fixed, is anything unchanging, is anything substantial ever really happening? It seems that for the most part, we are as if hallucinating.

In her middle years, Sally had worked at a day-care center where her special delight was storytelling. That’s what drew her to the theatre – the stories, the comedies, tragedies and tragicomedies played out on stage; and the scary funny accidents happening in rehearsal and performance. Fiction stories and actual stories, both kinds were real to her. That’s why, I think, for Sally hallucination was not a form of suffering. It was a form of story — a manifestation of imagination, just like theatre. 

Me and Sally backstage

Coda: Several months later, I was in St. Petersburg, FL, visiting the Sunken Gardens, home of 21 shrimp-color flamingos and an array of vibrant parrots, macaws and kookaburras. On my way to the exit, I noticed, far from the other birds, a cage with a single cockatiel. She was Mindy, all white, the only cockatiel at Sunken Gardens and the only bird without color. Sally came to mind and her cockatoo Lucy — though of grey plumage with yellow. Barely audibly, in the presence of Mindy, I said, “Hi Lucy. Hi Sally.” Then I walked 5 steps to the end of the pathway and there in the space in front of me was a white-haired woman on a bench. I thought I was in a dream where Sally hadn’t died, or I was hallucinating, or it was Sally framed within the palm-frond foliage of the Sunken Gardens.