88.1

I woke up this morning to the the voice of Umberto Crenca on my clock-radio, tuned to the only station it can get, which is the very closest to me, 88.1 FM. He was speaking about the latest Foo Fest and they cut to a dance, tom-tom troupe pounding away. My dog sits there staring at the radio in disbelief at the sounds he's hearing. He doesn't know whether to bark at it or run away.

After the tom-tom bit, they shift to a folk group called Sugar Honey Ice Tea. As they play in the background, I hear Crenca explaining how they met and what they do. He kept repeating the band's name till I start to wonder about something.

 Sugar Honey Ice Tea 

“Shit?...the first letters spell the word, Shit.” I thought to myself. “Nah, it's a mistake...is it?”

*****

When it comes to art, the big four I'm hooked on is music, literature, movies and stage. The first three I had easy access to but not the fourth until much later in life.

I've been to some plays while in grammar school run by the just then formed Looking Glass Theater. It's hard to sit there as a seven year old and always “get” just what they were trying to do for us. At least I felt so. It wasn't until years later, when my brother was working in the development office at Trinity Theater did I see professionally crafted plays. My brother's job in the development office was to beg the rich and corporations for money.

He would get scads of free tickets for various plays and would just hand them out to people he thought would enjoy them. Then one night, he asked me if I wanted to go see something called Painting Churches, a play about a family dealing with their father's worsening Alzheimer's.

So I'm sitting there, watching this. What struck me, was that the stage was stripped down and only the essential props and clothing was used. One scene set was in a living room and I was about eight feet from the actors. They were engaged in a screaming argument about “What to do about Dad?”

It was so well done that I felt very uneasy about staying there. A family argument had broken out about very personal issues and I felt as if I should leave. This was none of my business and I wanted to get out of there.

I was struck by that reaction later. That's how drawn in you can get with live actors.

As luck would have it, I managed to see about twenty plays for nothing as the years went by.  Actually it was double luck! I saw something I wanted and didn't have to pay the usual $50 to get in.

Here's an inside joke my brother told me about Trinity.

Every Christmas Season Trinity will put on Dicken's A Christmas Carol. The major reason they do this is because it's their largest yearly generator of ticket sales and, of course, the public wants it.

The main lobby at Trinity then was decked out, in Victorian style, with a Christmas tree, garland, lights and an addition of a cheesy cardboard cutout of a life sized Santa. Why that was put in a Victorian setting my brother never found out.

Late in the afternoon a few of the actors were milling about the lobby, talking and making a few jokes before the 8PM Grand Opening of the play. My brother then tells me one of the actors, who was a Screaming Queen, yells out, “I'm gonna give Santa a BLOW JOB!”

The guy then drops to his knees in front of the cardboard Santa and bobs his head like he was auditioning for the most lurid porn film ever made. The other actors start guffawing and then realize they have to get him to stop because people walking on the sidewalk, past the main doors, were snapping their heads around to see this.

My brother then says the theater's director, Oscar Eustis, who was passing by on the upstairs balcony, sees this and shouts down, “Oh for God's Sake! Would you stop that! Everyone's looking!!!”