“Life Is But a Stage …”

1987

My liberation as a “wage slave” also included getting rid of my Dodge van at retirement and switching to bicycling, public transit, and walking as my main modes of transportation, except for occasional car rentals in a pinch. The lack of the significant financial outlay of maintaining a motor vehicle, enabled me to travel more and spend several retirement summers in Finland without breaking the bank. One of the reasons I kept the van as long as I did was that I had taken an active interest in doing triathlons during my latter fifties. These weren’t the kind that would require herculean Ironman training discipline, but the easier non-competitive ones sponsored by Fleet Feet running shoe stores, a small chain in Northern California headquartered in Sacramento. (Usually, these events encompassed a half-mile swim, a 20K bicycle leg, and 5K run, which I’d often race walk.) The van would allow for bicycle storage space in transit to triathlon meets. My occasional partner at triathlons was a younger Chinese-American friend Marilyn Chin of Oakland, a century bicycle rider and weight trainer who thought nothing of doing 100 miles on a weekend day, by riding to Sacramento and taking the train back. She even had a couple of double-centuries to her credit, powered by her incredibly strong leg muscles. So if Marilyn wanted to join me in a triathlon, she’d just park her bike alongside mine in the van and we’d go!

THE STAGE BECKONS

But my life’s focus now saw acting as its primary goal. “So never call theatre in an open fire!” I completed three evening acting classes at ACT, plus another later by one of its leading older actors, Ray Reinhardt, a man near my own age. It was called Scene Study and Auditioning. And then I rode off by bicycle to SF City College to take all their acting classes, from John Wilk, who was also connected with ACT, Susan Collins, and Brenda Berlin and David Parr in Acting on Film. John cast me in my first City College play since “Joys and Sorrows,” William Congreve’s Restoration Era comedy, “Love for Love,” in the part of Foresight, a bit of an old fool being cuckolded by his attractive young wife, a court hanger-on who satiated her sexual hungers in the arms of a virile, swashbuckling pirate-type warrior, to which game her silly husband was clueless. Next, I played Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams’ (1911–1983) strangest play, the surreal “Camino Real,” directed by Susan Collins. This overlapped with the popular musical “Gypsy” about the colorful life of burlesque queen, the late Gypsy Rose Lee (1911–1970 — b. Rose Louise Hovick) and written by her, Our show was directed by Don Cate, the head of SFCC Theatre Department. I was double cast as Kringelein, an unscrupulous, seedy hotel owner whose clientele was mostly show biz performers, and as Bourgeron-Cochon, a lecherous wealthy old French stage door johnny who came on stage to slobber over the sexy stripper Gypsy. I really had only one line as the horny tycoon, but I was told by some in the audience that my lascivious leer was the most convincing they’d ever seen. “Gypsy” was really the story of Mama Rose, Gypsy’s aggressive mother, who was trying to promote the career of her cute younger daughter Baby June (later actress June Havoc) and initially ignoring the star potential of her “ugly duckling” Louise. We’d still be rehearsing “Gypsy” while Camino Real was in full production. It was a tough time for me as during both shows I was wearing a urine bag on my left leg to drain a leaking prostate gland. I really should have quit both productions and had immediate surgery, but these shows meant a great deal to me so I postponed the knife work until the curtain rang down on both. I enjoyed my doubleheader immensely, and only then was I off to Kaiser.

1988

 SAN FRANCISCO SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK

My work in the SFCC productions gave me the confidence to hit the general audition circuit. San Francisco’s Summer Shakespeare Festival in Golden Gate Park in 1988 was featuring the delightful light-hearted “As You Like It”, directed by the talented young British import Richard Seyd. So why not flip my hat into the audition ring? And success was my lot! It was an Actors Equity production but did cast a few non-union performers in the large cast. So I was rewarded with two roles, as Adam, the elderly man servant of, the male lead, Orlando, and as Sir Oliver Martext a crazy evangelical forest preacher. I made a $100 down payment toward an Equity initiation fee and began rehearsals. During the four-week rehearsal period I was paid $140 a week as a non-Equity actor which doubled during the six week performance schedule. My Equity friends earned $240 per during rehearsals and double that for their performance schedule. I was now a professional!

The whole cast bid me welcome as an equal partner. Sigrid Wurschmidt, a California native and Richard Seyd’s wife who played Rosalind, the female lead, with her warm and engaging personality was especially kind to me in my first engagement as a pro. Particularly when Kaiser hospital informed me I had the beginnings of prostate cancer! I didn’t want to quit the play, and began radiation treatments at Mary Saroni Cancer Clinic every weekday morning for the required number of weeks and would attend rehearsals during the afternoon in the Golden Gate Park, riding my bicycle as I felt fine. I immediately told Richard and Sigrid about it, and they were both warmly supportive of me and glad I didn’t want to quit the play. Sigrid showed particular care as she was in remission for breast cancer at age 37 and knew what the feeling I was. She said all sorts of emotions would course through me during this time and both she and Richard told me to call them either day or I night if I felt the need to talk. I’ve felt ever grateful for this marvellous couple for their care and concern. Sadly, Sigrid’s cancer metastasize a couple of years later and we lost one of the most beautiful human beings and finest actors I’ve ever known.

I got along well with my fellow actors and we coalesced to put on a fine production. Shakespeare in the Park attracts tens of thousands enthusiastic spectators every summer season to enjoy the immortal works of The Bard. In the old location just inside the east end of Golden Gate the only seating was on the grass fanning out from the stage area. (In later years the performance area was moved further west into the park and a tiered wooden grandstand was built to make for more comfortable audience seating.) The whole show was a grand, joyous experience in my lifetime. Many friends from other of my life interests came to see the play: from the racewalking and running scenes, fellow acting students, my anarchist, socialist, and labor union communities. There was no admission fees to see these plays, but as soon as they ended, we actors fanned out across the lawns with receptacles in hand to courteously solicit voluntary donations and pledges. As is traditional in theatre, after our final show of the season, we actors stayed to tear down the beautiful sets that served as a backdrop for the play. What a glorious experience to build on for the coming years in the performance arts!

BUSH SWAMPS DUKAKIS IN PRESIDENTIAL RACE

After Ronald Reagan, his Vice President George W. A. Bush continued the relentless rightward trend of American Presidential Politics to dump his liberal Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 elections, winning 40 out of 50 states in the electoral college. Bush’s running mate was Indiana’s young Senator Dan Quayle, son of a wealthy Indiana newspaper publisher family, who seemed considerably challenged intellectually in the minds of many of us. Dukakis’s Vice Presidential cohort was veteran Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen was a caustic critic of Quayle’s idiotic commentary. Bush waged a hard relentless campaign against the hapless Dukakis who was almost defenseless in his responses. Bush kept hammering away at the governor’s American Civil Liberties Union membership, which had added to his stature in liberal Massachusetts while much of the hinterlands saw the ACLU as another Communist conspiracy. This line of attack by Bush infuriated me as I’d been an ACLU member since the mid-fifties and saw this organization in the front lines against the inroads of fascism in America to preserve our Constitutional freedoms. But the campaign got worse. Dukakis tried to prove his support of a strong military for the defense of the United States by providing a campaign photo opp by sitting in a tank with his head encased in an army helmet and when he stuck his head out of a tank turret to be seen by the news cameras, he looked like a plucked bird with a skinny neck with an oversized helmet enveloping most his head and looking like a 97-pound weakling. That photo provided the GOP with enormous campaign fodder to show what a weakling Dukakis was for our national defense.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

The other monster debacle arose from the Massachusetts prisoner furlough law that had preceded Dukakis’s election as governor. Willie Horton, a black man and convicted murderer, was granted furlough and he promptly went to Maryland and was arrested for rape and assault. Dukakis still defended the law as a useful tool in the prisoner rehabilitation process. A Democratic news reporter, no less, asked the governor who he knew as an opponent of the death penalty, which ban was and is law in Massachusetts today, if somebody was to rape his wife would he still be against capital punishment? Dukakis just lectured him statically at length of the ineffectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent. That pretty much settled Dukakis’s hash in the election. The reporter has later said he was sorry he ever asked that question. For the record, I’ve always been a strong opponent of the death penalty, not much different from the secular essayist the late Albert Camus or today’s Pope Francis. There was no left Third Party candidate running that I could vote for in 1988, so my protest vote went to the hapless Dukakis in my rage against Bush’s attacks against the ACLU, the first and last time I’ve voted for a Democrat since McGovern.

1989

DISINTEGRATION AND COLLAPSE OF SOVIET EMPIRE

The year 1989 was decisive in the disintegration of the Soviet Empire and end of the Cold War. The economies of Eastern Europe which I call State Capitalist rather than socialist or communist, were on the point of collapse ruled by the fossilized bureaucracies of their Communist Party governments, which included the Soviet Union itself. Their demise might have been prolonged and bloody except for USSR being under the undisputed rule of reform Communist Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, in power since 1985. He ruled out war as an option to try to preserve a bankrupt autocratic system. The most democratic leader the USSR had ever seen said this in 1988 to a Communist Party conference: “The imposition of a social system, a way of life, or policies from the outside by any means, let alone military force, are dangerous trappings from the past.” He ruled out coercion as a basic political principle. (Stalin and even Lenin would have flipped over in their graves over such heretical political concepts.) As a result, a whole way of authoritarian life unravelled almost overnight. Gorbachev withdrew Red Army troops from the war in Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall fell, the Polish Communist government under pressure of the Solidarity insurgent labor movement agreed to free parliamentary elections and was wiped out of existence which ended Leninist bureaucratic rule in that country. The Baltic states rebelled and won independence in 1991. One by one all Eastern European satellite states disintegrated. By December 31, 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and Gorbachev himself disappeared from State power, replaced by a corrupt, alcoholic Boris Yeltsin, whose thieving relatives stole the country blind while he sat around staying bombed. It’s good to see the old oppressive neo-Stalinist monoliths gone, but these countries are no bourgeois paradises with the neo-liberal capitalism that prevails in them now. I see no signs of a resurgent liberation labor movements arising at the moment in any of them for true freedom and equality for the many instead of enrichment and power of the few.

1990

THREE PLAYS; EAST EUROPE TRAVEL PLANS

I performed in several more plays in this year. One was based on Ken Kesey’s famed novel “One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest” adapted by Dale Wasserman. This classic hadn’t been seen in San Francisco in over twenty years after a smashingly long and successful run covering several years downtown nonstop. It was performed at the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House by the Potrero Hill Theatre Ensemble, with Don McCunn the director. I played the role of Scanlon, one of the asylum inmates featured in the play. We had an enjoyable high energy production that packed the house night after night as San Franciscans were starved to see it after its long absence from the City’s stages. They loved our show so much that we engaged the theater for an extra week’s run!

Potrero Hill Theatre Ensemble again was the sponsor of Lanford Wilson’s bitter slice of life in a small Bible Belt Midwest town, affected by a murder in “The Rimers of Eldritch,” directed by David Grote. Here I was double cast as the stern judge and the crazy backwoods country preacher, not all that different from Sir Oliver Martext that I portrayed in “As You Like It” in 1988.

Finally, I was Dr. John Buchanan Senior in Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke” performed at Berkeley’s Live Oak Theater under the sponsorship of the Actors’ Ensemble of Berkeley, directed by a young Polish-trained Rafal Klopotowski. In this one my character gets shot to death, but fortunately off-stage so my bloody corpse is never seen by the audience.

PLANS FOR EASTERN EUROPEAN TRAVEL

My curiosity was aroused by the fall of the Eastern European powers and I conceived of a plan to tour them during 1991 to see what lay beyond the former Iron Curtain. I contacted Winship Travel on Upper Market Street, a specialist in Eastern European travel to formulate an itinerary for my journey. Prior to that, I planned to attend the 1991 FinnFest which took place in February in Lake Worth/Lantana, Florida since the torridly hot weather prevalent in South Florida in mid-summer made it impossible to hold it there then. My Florida prelude to my further itinerary was cinched when Dr. Paula Erkkila, a Northern California psychiatrist, approached me about doing a Kalevala play she had written for FinnFest. I had first met Paula the night I played Väinämöinen at the Berkeley Kaleva Hall in February, 1984. She had a great soprano singing voice and would adapt a couple of the Kalevala cantos as songs to be sung at her show. This time she cast me as Lemminkäinen, the swashbuckling lover boy of Kalevala and she would play my mother in the scene where she restores her son to life by the banks of the Tuonela. She would use bundles of twigs, bones, stones from the river bed, verbal chants, songs and magic rituals to restore my life. The only problem was that in real life I was thirteen year’s Paula’s senior to be her son. But stage make-up would work wonders in giving me youth, and a specially deigned contoured mask helped to authenticise her as an aging woman. So FinnFest–Florida gave us a slot on its cultural program. So we found a space for rehearsals in San Francisco, and by the time we left for Florida we had worked out the kinks to come up with a highly presentable production.

Another development that excited me for my travel perspectives was that the 1991 World Masters Track and Field Championships would be held in Turku, Finland that summer. So I wrote to the meet administration that I would like to volunteer to assist at the games as an experienced track official no longer competing myself and serve as a Finnish–English interpreter to all the thousands of foreign athletes who would compete at Turku. I particularly wanted to help out as a volunteer at the race walks which would be held at a track in Raisio, a Turku suburb. My assistance was welcomed and a dormitory room bed offered cost-free at the Turku City Hostel by the banks of the Aura River, walking distance across the tributary from Paavo Nurmi Stadium during my days at the meet.

So I hustled to Winship Travel to make my reservations for what proved to be a 4 ½ month journey, the longest of my life since my Navy tour around South America described earlier in these Memoirs. The agency scheduled all my air line flights, most train travel in Europe, and pre-arranged hotel reservations in the Soviet dominated Baltic States and the soon to fall USSR, plus Intourist guide services in them. The itinerary included the Florida FinnFest, a short trip to Boston and my home town of Westminster, Mass., Kennedy Air Drome in New York, Luxemburg, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Helsinki, Turku, St. Petersburg, Petrozavodsk in Russian Karelia, Moscow, Helsinki and Turku again, family visits around Finland, and a return flight home via Warsaw and New York.

End of Installment 29