For the rest of you, please carry on……

Let’s start off with The Beatles.

You say it’s my Birthday.

It’s my Birthday too, yeah!

Hell! Why not?

Because…. it actually just was… my birthday.

Friday, August 21.

And theirs is my favorite birthday song.

Riotous. Joyous. Unconventionally glorious!

Yet today, because life is what it is,

I’ll be alone (except for two energetic Labradors), housesitting in Redhill, UK. About an hour south of London in the Surrey Hills.

Not a problem being alone, but,

I remember when I used to have… parties. Lots and lots of birthday parties.

Maybe you were at one?

In Chicago in the 70s. In New York in the 80s, at my loft on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South. In LA over 40 years: at Rhonda’s in Silver Lake, or upstairs at Barragan’s, LA best Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, for a birthday “roast”. Or with LM singing for our simultaneous birthdays, my 60th, at the Grand Star Jazz Club in Chinatown, or maybe for my dressed-in-all-white “When I’m 64” birthday bash, high in Elysian Heights in the old Hollywood Hills at “Lucretia Gardens”?

But perhaps I’ve outgrown them? The birthday parties, not The Beatles. Or perhaps it was just all downhill after my 64th? Hey, the party was on the wide, wood-slatted back deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Hollywood sign, on a very steep hill, with seven garden-terraced levels down below, up from which the naked Mud People crawled (covered in wet MUD, of course), toward all hundred of us. Not to mention the stilt walkers or fire eaters on the concrete patio right below.

That’s me, pre-“Trules”, maybe 5 years old, in Levittown, Long Island, the first suburb in America.

You can see that I was already hooked on cowboys. The Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Lash LaRue, Maverick, Gabby Hayes, and Paladin from “Have Gun - Will Travel”.

Look at those bright eyes and innocence. Definitely, pre-“Trules”.

I was a shy kid. Sensitive with a thin skin. I like to say I had “social” polio. Even after the Salk vaccine. I was bad at competition, and I didn’t have a date until after I graduated college.

So where did this brazen, self-serving, seemingly self-confident “Trules” come from?

Wellll…

At first, it was only a name. One of my USC theater students, Noa B, just called me “Trules” one day. Out of the blue, in solo performance class. Maybe mid-90s. Before that, all my students called me “Eric”, sort of an accommodation to the non-hierarchical 1960s counterculture. No one ever called me “Prof” or “Professor Trules”.

But from that day forward, I was always “Trules”.

As I say, at first it was only a name.

Ok, maybe it had some aura or energy about it, making me “legendary” to my students, and to future generations of students.

Hey, did you take Trules’ class?

Yeah… it was awesome.

Nah, not yet. But next semester.

I sort of dug it.

But it didn’t carry much weight beyond campus.

Here’s another persona of mine. Clown candidate for Mayor of NYC in 1977, Gino Cumeezi. Finished “5th out of 4 candidates”.

Gino was outrageous, irreverent, and bigger than life. He was dancerly, hyperkinetic, and physical; he took extraordinary risks improvising in public, went to jail, to court, and he challenged all the limiting rules, laws, and mores of conventional society.

Some thought Gino was my “alter ego”.

But me? I didn’t quite see it that way.

I thought Gino was “a character” I was playing. A conscious choice I made to allow myself more freedom, to allow me to “act out” in public, to have fun, create theatrical chaos, to stretch personal and social boundaries. To allow me to become an “outlaw”.

Once I put on the costume, makeup, black bowler, butterfly tie, and size 34 fur-lined Klondike boots, I simply was Gino Cumeezi. I never talked. I never broke character. Not even when three of New York’s “Finest” (the cops) put me behind bars at the 59th Street/Columbus Circle police station.

But Gino Cumeezi is still a far cry from “Trules”.

I don’t mean that “Trules” is even more outrageous than Gino was. He’s not.

But “Trules” is perhaps, more of an actual “alter-ego”.

He’s the external role I play and write about for public consumption. Mostly here on Substack.

A figment of my fantasy, need, and imagination. One hang-gliding side of my personality.

Happy Birthday, “Trules”?

When at “home”, left to my own natural instincts and habits, I’m not “Trules”. Far from it.

Trules is gregarious and opinionated.

Me? I’m private and thoughtful.

“Trules” loves attention. A good show. A good controversy. In that way, he, too, is an outlaw. Albeit a devised and theatrical one.

No doubt that’s the reason I always liked Robin Hood and Jesse James. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Muhammad Ali, all cultural rebels and independent thinkers who operate(d) outside the mainstream.

And sure… yes, you do need a bit of an ego - to be an outlaw, a rock star, the “greatest” heavyweight champion of the world.

I think, perhaps, both “Gino” and “Trules” have been the ways, the “vehicles”, I found - to compensate for my shyness, sensitivity, and privateness. Just like womanizing was the way I compensated in the 70s for my inadequacy with girls in my repressed youth. Although I’d say, and I hope you’ll agree, that one mode of compensation was more “successful” than the other.

But I think “Trules” allows me to escape/transcend the more ordinary Eric Trules, the man with so many doubts, fears, and regrets.

The shy guy, the sensitive soul, the private loner.

To believe in this livin’ is a hard way to go.

It’s hard to reveal one’s vulnerability, one’s hurts and losses, but I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do in my writing and in my solo shows, for more than 40 years. Occasionally successfully, and hopefully, with more than a bit of humor.

While “Trules”? He’s the guy who has been superficially trying to cover it all back up. Acting the huckster, the he-man, the wiseguy-invincible one.

Life is short.

I’ve heard that my whole life.

No, it isn’t, I’d say to myself. It’s lonnnnng. 80 years? That’s a long fucking time.

But now, in the last year of my 8th decade here in this lifetime (incarnation)?

I think… if there is such a thing as a “miracle”, then it’s - life itself.

Simply being alive. With all its rollercoaster, unpredictable ups and downs. Loves and losses. Stumbles and recoveries.

And I think… maybe too… life has a responsibility.

That there’s an “obligation” to living.

To be the best we can be. To be true to ourselves. To make our own unique contribution to the world.

To humanity. To mankind.

As the poets and sages tell us,

“Life is sacred. Love must always be honored. Our existence is brief. Human beings are fragile. One day the memories we carry will vanish. We are made from dust and magic, and to dust and magic we will one day, all too soon, return. - adapted from Chris Hedges

So happy birthday to me.

To all sides and reflections of me, my egos, alter egos, and to all my personalities, roles, and characters.

If you want to send me a present, just drop a birthday Comment here in the post. Or surprise me and become a paid subscriber.

Not at all necessary, but just know that - it is pretty amazing to be able to share this birthday here in Redhill - with 1300 of my favorite online readers and subscribers.

Thanks for being who you are.

xo

Trules

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Sorry, mea culpa - I haven’t posted here in a while, having switched my regular newsletter (that’s what Substack calls these posts) - to my “Santa Fe Substack”. There, I publish every two weeks (except when I publish here), and between the two “stacks”, I haven’t missed a two-week newsletter deadline since I originally Substacked on the first day of Spring, almost three years ago, March 21, 2022.

Thank you for being my Readers and Subscribers.

By the time you’re reading this post, I’ll have been in Portugal for just over a week. Not wanting to miss a deadline, after just bragging about never having missed one, I’ve written this the day before I leave to Lisbon from Santa Fe (actually Albuquerque, the nearest “grown-up” airport in New Mexico). Here’s an amusing, pre-trip post on Santa Fe Substack about how not to prepare for a trip.

But THIS POST is not about my trip to Portugal, as I haven’t been there yet, but it is about the day I “beat” Michael Jordan. Yes, the world-famous one. The basketball ball player.

Ok, I didn’t beat him in a basketball game. Nor did my team beat his team.

But, even better,

for one day in my life, I was Michael Jordan.

True.

Ok, now you’re probably being too rational. How can a man (Trules), from an originally Ukranian, then New York-Jewish middle-class family, think he actually was a poor North Carolinian black man, whose family most probably derived from Africa and American slavery? And furthermore, one who actually was the best basketball player the history of the game?

You probably think I’m going to tell you about a hallucinogenic drug trip from back in the day, right? LSD? Psilocybin mushrooms?

Wellll… I could do that, but… that wouldn’t be about the day I was Michael Jordan.

Because that day occurred in the summer of 1960. Technically, about two and a half years before MJ, the basketball God in question, was born on February 17, 1963, in Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, but who then moved, at five years old, to Wilmington, North Carolina, where was raised, play hoops, and ultimately became a state legend.

See, I did “beat him”. At least chronologically.

But again, not the point, dear readers.

I was 13 years old in 1960, on summer break from 7th grade at W. Tresper Clarke High School in Westbury, New York. I was soon to enter the 8th grade. I had never spent a night outside my own house.

Now… it’s hard to admit… that I just might have been a… “mama’s boy”, or even a “daddy’s boy”, raised, as I was, on privileged suburban Long Island. Of course, I don’t remember when I was an infant, but apparently, I suffered from something now called “separation anxiety”.

Believe me, I know that’s for young pups and neurotic grown-ass dogs, not for a two-year-old infant, yours Trulesly, who apparently… when left by Mama Trules in a shopping cart at the local A&P, while she went around the corner to the frozen food aisle… it seems that… little Baby Trules… climbed out of said cart, and in abandoned-infant desperation, not seeing his ever-present, doting mother, apparently, proceeded to bang his/my hard head on the linoleum-covered concrete floor…. until a gaggle of incensed female suburban grocery store shoppers… picked the howling infant/me up and started screaming for his/my absent Mother.

Oh, what a day! When… Trules… first earned - his infamous and stubborn moniker - “The Hardest Head in Hollywood”.

Ok, it’s the summer of 1960. Ma and Pa Trules, my parents, have decided that it’s a “good idea” to send their eldest, first-born, one and only son, Eric/me (about 50 years before I started going by my last name only) - to summer camp.

It’ll be good for you. You’ll become more independent. You may even like it.

Thanks for that last, Mom and Dad, “I may even like it.”

You see, it was the thing to do in suburban New York back in the 50s and 60s - to send your kids to “sleep-away” camp.

This may, or may not, take place after you’d been to “day camp”, where the parents put you on a yellow school, but now yellow camp, bus and got rid of you for the hot days of summer. Me? I never went to “day camp”.

But nowwww…I’m being shipped off to “sleep-away camp”.

I protest.

I don’t want to go. Why do I have to go?

Not definitively,

I’m not going!

I was still the always-parent-pleasing “good boy” in those days.

And so off I go.

Things do not go well.

After the very first day, I’m…homesick.

Who are all these kids from Philadelphia and Perth Amboy, New Jersey whom I don’t know? I don’t like any of them.

I’m in “Tunk 7”, where the oldest “boys” in camp are. Brassy “Stanley”, “Big Lon”, cool “Duvvy”, and about six others who all sleep on my side of the tunk, Oh, and nerdy “Henry” too. All these guys have been to “Camp Lindenmere” before, high in the Pocono Mountains in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Many have been here for continuous summers ever since elementary school. They all know each other.

Our counselor is “Herbie”, like my uncle’s name, but this dude is as skinny as Ichabod Crane, and he always seems to have a dark, unshaven beard from which his white teeth sparkle.

Herbie, can I call my mother and father?

Not yet. You just got here. Give it a few days.

And after a week,

Herbie, can I call my Mom and Dad? It’s been more than a week. You said I could.

Oh, c’mon, Tunk 7 guys don’t call their parents from summer camp. Just have a good time. Forget about them.

But… I couldn’t. I missed them. I missed my room with its hand-painted cowboy mural, my neighborhood junior high friends, my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I wanted out.

After three or four weeks, mid-way through the camp season (I can’t remember if I was away for six or eight weeks), things are no better. Herbie has sent me to talk to the Head Counselor, Fred, who has, no doubt, “seen it all”.

Apparently… he’d been in touch with my parents after a few worrisome Herbie reports, and they were coming up to see me on “Visiting Day”, along with the rest of the campers’ parents.

I tell myself,

Thank God, I’m going home! (I don’t believe in God.)

“Free, at last!”

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I’ll never forget that Visiting Day Sunday afternoon, walking around the entire camp grounds with Fred and my parents.

C’mon Eric, you don’t want to miss Color War, do you? That’s the best part of the summer.

That’s Fat Fred, naturally trying to encourage/force me to stay for the second half.

I just want to go home.

But Eric, son, you might have a wonderful time if you stay.

OMG! My mother is selling me out!

“Might!!! Again!

You said I could come home!

We said, “We can talk about it.” That’s my father, equally the duplicitous traitor.

Bottom line - I stay.

Cut to: “Camp Lindenmere, Part 2. Color War.”

I’m still unhappily holed up in Tunk 7, but the die has been cast. There’s no way I can get back to Westbury and the 8th grade until after this ordeal is over.

“Color War”? You know what that is?

It’s a competition, especially at sleepaway camps, between the entire camper population. Half the campers are “blue”, the other half are “white”. Blue competes against white, and vice versa, in every imaginable sport the camp can make up: swimming, softball, track, cheerleading, probably dining room behavior and teeth brushing, and definitely… basketball.

I used to be a pretty good athlete. Still am for my age. But back in the day, I played every sport we kids could find: football, baseball, hockey, tennis, ping pong, and yeah, of course, B-ball.

But I was also a terrible competitor. Whenever the pressure was high, I folded. Never could make the high school varsity teams because I was too scared to try out, or when I did, I sucked and played my worst. Since then, I’ve decided to - no longer compete. In tennis, post-college, I just smacked the ball, back and forth - without keeping score. I was a such a choker-sore loser, that I learned it was better for me not to compete, if I still wanted to enjoy the game.

But now, here’s Color War, 1960, Camp Lindenmere. Blue against White. White against Blue!

One basketball game only - for the most Color War points in the entire competition.

I’m on the White Team, and there’s… Billy Dubin… on The Blue.

Billy fucking Dubin, from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, the Michael Jordan of Camp Lindenmere.

Dubin, at a pimply 13, going on 18, at just over 6 feet, can run like a gazelle, slam tennis balls down your throat, and like his grand-nephew, Steph Curry, Dubin can shoot the lights out on a basketball court. “Best Shot in the Poconos”! (I’m not exactly sure about his future relationship to Mr. Curry.)

Me and the Whites don’t have a chance against Dubin. He can beat us all by himself.

The game begins.

Miraculously, it’s up and down through three quarters. I’m having the game of my life. Playing both point and shooting guard. (What’s the difference?) Everything I throw up - is going in.

Herbie, our coach, says,

Just keep shooting, Eric. Get the ball and shoot!

He can’t be talking to me, can he? I’ve never led a basketball team to a victory in my life. I’m usually “just a sub”.

But now, it’s the end of the 4th quarter. Dubin has just dunked the ball over the rest of us White midgets. Blue is up by one point. (It’s before the age of three-pointers).

Herbie shouts to me from the sideline,

Take the ball out and SHOOT!

It’s a full-court game. I take the ball out, pass to chunky Lon Lonker, who immediately passes it back to me.

I dribble, poorly, to half-court.

Herbie shouts to me in a bone-chilling panic,

SHOOOOOOT!

I heave the round-orange Wilson into the sky.

Time stops.

The ball launches into a cloud dance,

into a high desperate arc.

I don’t know where I am.

On another planet?

The ball starts to come down.

In slowwwww mo-tion.

It looks on target.

No, it’s a little off…..

SWISH!

BUZZER! (Maybe a cow bell!)

GAME OVER!

My teammates run at me like a multi-legged, White-shirt tornado.

They lift me on their shoulders.

Carry me off the court.

Dubin comes over and gives me a reluctant high five.

I scream,

We won! We won!

See! That’s ME! With the Camp Lindenmere 1960 Color War Championship Trophy!

Think what you want. But this is the Day that I AM Michael Jordan.

Look! The proof is right here in the photos.

Look, I’m even wearing a WHITE hat.

It’s a miracle. And… with one SWISH, the whole summer camp experience changes for me overnight. I’m not a wussy Mama’s or Daddy’s Boy; I’m a frigging Camp Lindenmere Color War hero!

And that’s the day I remember best. Out of all the days of my childhood.

A few years later, I’m not a child anymore. I’m an angry young member of the counterculture. Everything my parents want for me, I hate and reject. I don’t go to my own college graduation, and I take off from New York - for good.

But that ONE DAY, when I WAS Michael Jordan?

The day the ball went in and we won the game…

That’s the day when - I was still young, and America… was still great!

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Thanks so much!!!

-Trules

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I spoke about the first, Kasia, in the first of these three “Farewell” posts, the one about William McKinney, when the three of us lived together in a little pink-petunia front yard, one-bedroom on Wolfram Street on the near Northside of Chicago, when I was twenty-two years old, had first moved to The Windy City, and first discovered myself a modern dancer. Kasia was my first “live-in girlfriend” and it didn’t take me long at all to discover that - I was a terrible boyfriend indeed. I had been sooooo socially-misfit and sexually-repressed my entire adolescence and four years of college - that I was entirely unable - to be either loyal or loving to a single woman, no matter how loyal, loving, and devoted to me she was. Especially… just as the 70s counterculture was exploding with sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, and… countless available women, hungrily exploring their own sexual appetites and the casting away of their own sexual inhibitions.

I was a much better cad than boyfriend, as I shamefully admit, and when I happily escaped to Paris for a dance troupe vacation in the summer of 1972, I was even happier to discover - that Kasia had replaced me on Halsted Street when I returned - with a much more devoted and loving boyfriend, who she ended up marrying and having children with - for the next 50 years.

End of living with girlfriend #1.

For the next twelve years, I lived… unattached. Except… with yet another lovely dancer from The Dance Troupe, Jackie. But actually, we never lived “together”. She had her own place on Orchard Street, and I… lived “around”. I house sat. I lived in “The Bozo Room”, on the top floor of MoMing, the dance-theater building, an old church rectory, where we all danced together: me, Kasia, Susan (from Part 2 of these Farewell posts), Jackie (yeah, it was an incestuous time), and the rest of “the collective”. I was just a damn un-c-c-c-ommitted cad. In-c-c-c-apable of love. Young, in my 20s, never going to settle down, get married, own a home, become a father… Mark my words!

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I left Chicago, unattached, in 1977… moved back to my native New Yawk. Moved into the seedy, one-time glamorous, residential Hotel Woodward at 55th and Broadway. $55/week, into a room as big as a shoe box. Enough space for 9 humans to change their clothes to become clowns on any given Saturday afternoon, but not big enough for a girlfriend!

Then… I moved into a big loft on 23rd Street and Park Ave South. Big enough for ten clowns and a girlfriend, or two, but hey… toooo many damn clowns. Because that’s where I ran NYC’s Resident Clown Troupe from. I couldn’t find a girlfriend who could stomach allll those clowns. Except for 2 costumers. Clowns and costumers - a good match. At least they fit together - for a heartbeat!

Then in 1982, I moved to LA, but just before I did, Barbara Clay, yet another dancer from the old Dance Troupe, Shirley Mordine’s Dance Troupe in residence at Columbia College, early 1970s, the one before MoMing, … Barbara Clay… reappeared in my life… at the loft on 23rd Street.

Beautiful Barbara Clay, from Port Huron, Michigan. An auborn, sometimes blond-haired, multi-talented Midwestern “artiste”, who came to “us” via the Goodman School of Theatre, still in her early 20s. So “nice”. “Midwestern”, as they say. “Wholesome.” “Honest.” “Pure”.” Not as tenacious as Long Island Donna and Susan, the New York dancers in the Troupe. Maybe in that way, “not Shirley’s type”, like the other Midwestern beauty in our company for a short while, Janet Gerson. Shirley rarely gave out praise, and seldom to these self-effacing Midwestern girls, although they could really dance.

But Barbara was modest and lovely, and she had a great, tear-jerking sense of humor. One winter break, she took me home to snow-covered Port Huron, and to the midnight service of the Catholic church’s Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. This New York Jewboy had never seen anything so genuinely beautiful and “Gentile” (non-Jewish) in his entire life. The white snow, the chimes of the bells, the Catholic liturgy; I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Then, suddenly, Barbara left The Dance Troupe and surprisingly, like William, followed a “cultish” spiritual path, the one of the “14-year-old (at the time) perfect spiritual master”, Guru Maharaj Ji, leader of the Divine Light Mission. While I co-founded MoMing in Chicago, then moved back to New York and founded the Cumeezi Bozo Ensemble, NYC’s Resident Clown Troupe, Barbara lived in an “ashram” in Boston for ten years, where she was completely devoted to her spiritual practice. “Practicing knowledge” daily, meditating, being chaste, and doing community service.

Then, seemingly out of the spiritual, divine-clown blue, we “reconnect” in the clown loft - on 23rd and Park, just before I leave New York for LA in November 1982. “Mr. Unattached” and “Ms. Spiritually Devoted”. We “reconnect” - make love, remember the “good ol’ Chicago dance days, the Port Huron Christmas Mass, the love affair we never had… and right then and there, amidst all the packed-up clown paraphernalia, Barbara decides to leave her spiritual practice behind and - meet me out - in sunny California.

Which she does in the Spring of 1983. Me, a struggling 36-year-old wannabe Hollywood actor, starting anew after two careers as a professional modern dancer and clown prince of New Yawk, and her, a fresh-out-of-the-spiritual-womb “newbie”, having to rediscover everything about the “real world” again, including simple things like driving a car, getting a job, and most difficult of all, living with me, a confirmed and thorny artist-bachelor.

At least this time, twelve years after my first failure with Kasia, I’m a little more mature. In fact, I’m surprisingly loyal and faithful, even amidst the flashy allure of Hollywood’s cheap and available glamor. Barbara is about the “nicest” woman I’ve ever been with. She has no pretense and is entirely open and loving. I do my best to meet her halfway and to return the emotions. I “receive knowledge” from her spiritual master, try to develop a spiritual practice, audition for tv and film roles like crazy, discover that I’m actually not a very good actor (other than playing myself), get hired to teach theater at USC, and do my best to build a new life with Barbara in Santa Monica.

She calls me “The Butz” and I call her “The Wutz”. Cute, right? In a New York, Yiddish kinda way. She encourages me to trade in my first LA car, a tin-can cheapo mustard-colored Toyota Corolla that I buy for $1200 and I sell four months later for $1500, and I buy myself, instead, a sporty cranberry MG convertible sportscar… whose license plate is naturally… THE BUTZ. There’s nothing she won’t do, tolerate, try, enjoy, or endure for me.

But for how long can a 37-year-old, shape-shifting, protean snake of man - stay loyal and satisfied? After all, a snake is the symbol of eternity and continual renewal of life. A snake represents transformation, change, and shedding its skin, even phoenix-like, rising from the ashes, it represents rebirth and healing. And as a human being and partner, I’m loathe to admit, I used to be a “snake of man”. I didn’t cheat on Barbara, but nor could I stay with her. Or rather, she knew that I couldn’t stay, and… she left me. She moved out. Around the corner. Where we were still the best of friends, but no longer lovers. And from where I felt… this was to be the story of the rest of my relationship life. All my relationships.

Then within the year, Barbara is diagnosed with a rare blood disease, an untreatable case of fatal leukemia. She will only have a matter of years left to live. I feel absolutely terrible. Like I have dragged her out of the ashram, thrown her “back into reality”, only to be diagnosed with a life-ending blood disease, without the support of her Boston spiritual community - to die out here in Santa Monica - alone. Of course, she doesn’t say any of this to me. She’s heroic. And as kind and strong as ever.

In fact, a few years later, in 1988, she is still alive and doing as well as possible, when I, having just returned from a triumphant run of a solo show at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, discover a swollen lymph node in my neck.

As steadfast as ever, she twists my arm to see her wonderful hematologist-oncologist, Dr. Daniel Lieber.

Why don’t you just make an appointment with him? He’s right up the street on Wilshire. You can literally walk to his office. It can’t hurt, can it?

I go see Dr. Dan. He’s as kind and gentle as Barbara is. Two weeks later, after having a biopsy of the lymph node in my neck at St. John Hospital on Santa Monica Boulevard, Dr. Dan calls me on Saturday morning, April 7th, my sister Alison’s birthday,

I’m sorry, Eric, the biopsy was positive. You have Hodgkin’s Disease, cancer of the lymphatic system, stage 3A. Why don’t you come into my office first thing Monday morning?

The treatment and story of my cancer ordeal is for another time and post. Let me just say that it’s a time when some of my friends stand close while others disappear altogether. All for reasons of their own.

But Barbara? She walks me to Dr. Dan’s office for every one of the chemotherapy treatments. And she walks me home afterward. She stands by me when I puke my guts out on my knees in the toilet bowl in my little one-bedroom on Berkeley Street, and she watches as my friend Charlie Davis shaves off what’s left of my hair that hasn’t fallen off already in heaps by itself.

While I’m too “worried” about my parents to let them get close to me during these brutal but transformative months of healing, I let Barbara Clay see me at my worst - and my best.

By 1990, I’m officially “in remission”. Perhaps, having shed my old skin, phoenix-like, I’ve been given a second chance. I rise from the ashes, reborn.

By 2024, I’ve been “cured” - now for almost 35 years!

Sadly, Barbara has no such luck. Other than finding a loving boyfriend for the last years of her life, she dies from leukemia in the mid-1990s.

She doesn’t complain. She finds her own peace - up until the very end.

As I wrote in Part 1 on William’s Farwell, Donna, Susan, and William, all members of Shirley’s Dance Troupe, along with Barbara, in the early 70s, all fly to LA for Barbara’s memorial. We all assemble in the hot tub downstairs on the back patio of “Lucretia Gardens”, the beautiful 3-bedroom house I rent in the old Hollywood Hills that I will one day be evicted from after living there for 30 years. But today, at least, the house and the Hills are gracious enough to host us for our own four-person “Barbara Clay Memorial”. Donna and Susan are the oldest of Chicago friends from the late ‘60s, and the first members of Shirley’s Troupe, and William and I are also the oldest of Chicago friends, his being my first “Chicago roommate” when he was 19 years old, then having followed me to the Big Apple and Europe, as a member of my clown troupe, almost twenty years later.

Now one of our fellow warriors, our fellow dancers from the original Troupe, has fallen, way before her time. It hangs heavy on all our hearts, and we spill tears of comradery, artistry, and love, for our dear Barbara. The hot tub overflows with sorrow.

Of course, Donna and I have no idea whatsoever, that two more of our fellow dancer-warriors, Susan and William, sitting right here in the tub next to us today, will also be gone within the very next decade. (See my previous 2 “Farewell” Substack posts).

“One never knows, do one?” - Fats Waller, blues singer and piano man supreme

and

Life… a funny thang, a quote from another big-bodied black man, Sonny Liston, ex-heavyweight boxing champ

Donna and I survive. She stops dancing professionally and moves to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1974. It takes me almost 50 years to catch up with her, but here I am, living ten minutes away from her - in Santa Fe. Looking at the Dance Troupe’s odds of survival, I’d say we’re both lucky to be here.

Along the way, I somehow ask a young girl from Sumatra, a girl 31 years younger than myself who speaks no English, for directions - in front of an ATM in the streets of Kuta Beach, Bali. She tells me to follow her, and I do.

A little over a year later, August 3, 2001, she arrives in Los Angeles, a young Indonesian immigrant with a belief in “The American Dream”.

That was 23 years ago, earlier this month - Surya’s American anniversary.

We’ve lived together for 23 years. I haven’t moved out. Nor has she. Hallelujah! We got married. I haven’t had any affairs. Blessed St. Yawyeh! We bought a home together, the first of my life. I’ve become a father by adopting her nephew, Exsel, when he was 8 years old in 2015, when he also arrived in LA from Sumatra without a word of English. We all moved from LA to Santa Fe in 2022.

And not only do I hope and believe that my deceased parents would be happy for, and proud of me, and know that still-living Kasia already is both (she’s told me so many times on Facebook), but I’d also like to believe that -

Barbara Clay would be too.

xoxo

Your former Bachelor-in Arms/Now Firmly Married Man (Mark my Words!),

Trules

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PS. MARK THE DATE: August 25th, 2024, Sunday, 4 pm. I’ll be having my 77th Birthday Bash at Paradiso Santa Fe, 903 Early Street - reading a Collection of “Santa Fe Stories”. With special guest, “Library Girl”, Susan Hayden, from LA. Plus saxophonist supreme, Alex Murzyn and keyboardist extraordinaire, Bob Fox. BYOB! If you’re in town, or anywhere nearby, reserve your place, by sending me a message here.

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As I said, “such is life.”

Another beautiful soul who I danced with from 1970-77 in Chicago was Susan Kimmelman.

Valedictorian of Valley Stream High School on the South Shore of Long Island, Class of 1966, graduating just one year after me (I was definitely not valedictorian of W. Tresper Clarke High in 1965 in Westbury, Long Island), Susan was groomed and expected to become a “lawyah”, in the same way that I was groomed and expected to become a “doctah”. I mean, that’s what good girls and good boys of The Tribe did and became in those days, the buttoned-down post-WW2 Eisenhower years. We became doctahs and lawyahs and Indian Chiefs, the next generation on the upwardly mobile food chain: from blue-collar working-class Ashkenazy New York Jewish immigrant plumber-painter-cabinet maker - to first-generation white-collar businessman in the schmata (textile) business taking the daily Long Island Railroad into Manhattan for work - to “collarless” college-educated “professional” doctah-lawyah-university theatuh professuh!

But Susan and me - “the professionals-to-be” - we end up taking “the road less traveled”.

So while I spend my first post-college graduation year, 1969-70, trying to figure out “who the hell I am” - by modeling nude for figure drawing classes at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, driving a taxi following speeding ambulances up and down the ever-congested avenues of Manhattan, and selling blond Lebanese hashish imported from London shipped Stateside in immaculately-packed holiday chocolate tins, my “future dancing twin”, Susan, is still enrolled in her final year at the University of Chicago, living somewhere between a state of recovery from a long bout with the ever-popular-on-college-campus disease, mononucleosis, and her all-too-frequent state of full-time depression. Her only salvation, naturally - modern dance… which her fellow University of Chicago “student-at-large”, and also coincidentally Long Island friend, Donna Sugarman, from Roslyn, New York, calls to her rescue, enrolling the ailing Ms. Kimmelman in modern dance classes on Chicago’s Northside… with the talented new dance director of Hull House and founder of the Dance Center of Columbia College, Shirley Mordine.

Yes, this is very same Shirley Mordine who gives me, just a few months after she gives Susan’s hers, my one and only chance - to miraculously transform myself, in the summer of 1970, from an uptight, overly educated, doctah-to-be - into a clumsy-at-first, but then passionate and hard-working, professional performing artist and modern dancer! Just about the most unexpected and unpredictable of all probabilities for a 22-year-young Trules.

To discover myself… a “modern dancer”… is absolutely unbelievable to me. It’s like going to sleep one day as an inhibited, self-conscious adolescent and waking up another day… someone else - entirely. Say like, going to sleep on the planet Earth, and waking up on - the planet Mars. Or perhaps, like going to sleep one day as Rip Van Winkle and waking up - twenty years later - and not recognizing anything about myself, or the world about me.

In high school, to my friends and parents, I might have been thought of as “the boy most unlikely to become a modern dancer.” Even more surprising to them, and myself, would be,

What the hell IS a ‘modern dancer’?

Certainly, we would have had no idea. As a goody-goody, repressed high schooler, I never took a dance step, sang a note, or thought of trying out for a school play - of ever doing anything at all - creative. Art? Self-expression? Definitely - not for me.

Sure, my parents took me to Broadway shows “in the City.” I saw the original My Fair Lady, Bye Bye Birdie, Oklahoma. I went to museums—The Met, The Modern, The Guggenheim. We were “culture vultures.” But that was just something we did. Me? Myself? Nyet. Be footloose or fancy-free? Never! I was too scared of what people would think and say. I was monumentally afraid of looking stupid and acting foolish. Of having a hair ever be out of place.

So… when the strictures of self-consciousness finally start to break, first with marijuana in college - it’s just a matter of time, until this volcano of inexpression - both physically and emotionally - finds an outlet through which it can erupt. First slowly, in college yoga classes, then afterward, in avant-garde theater workshops in New York, then finally through modern dance with Shirley, I finally find a way to - circumvent my repressive, judgmental brain, and to set myself free!

And that’s exactly what it is. Freeing! Liberating! Physically. Emotionally. Sexually. My volcanic damns break loose, and my inhibitions explode. I discover a new self – below my neck. I discover - my body. I discover - freedom and improvisation. I don’t open a book for the next seven years.

Shirley gives me this gift. By inviting me to take her summer workshop. And by inviting me to join her Dance Troupe. Sure, she must have been desperate to take such a chance on me; but she had just lost her one and only male dancer. And I’m sure, male modern dancers were very hard to find in 1970. But synchronicity - Shirley losing Mitch - and my passing through Chicago at exactly that time - are the exact moments that make for a life story. And also the moment, in retrospect, for which, I will be forever grateful

I think Susan’s story was exactly the same. Dancing set her free. Gave her life a purpose. And after just a few months of taking classes with Shirley in her college senior year in 1970, Susan too, was invited to join Shirley’s fledging new dance company, just months before I was to be - with Donna and Mitch, in residence at Columbia College. Immediately upon graduation, she gratefully left her LSAT and law books behind at the University of Chicago, moved to Chicago’s Northside, and never looked back. She too, became a professional modern dancer, soon teaching classes in Columbia College’s Dance Department, and spending the next seven years of her life as my professional dance colleague and my intimate friend.

That’s Max the Clown. The saddest clown you ever saw.

Imagine Max - with two things:

1- A broken yellow and green plastic birdcage. One of the plastic bars has somehow been cruelly shattered. Max has lost her bird. It has flown away. She holds the broken cage eternally aloft, dangling it pathetically from her outstretched left arm.

2- A giant unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary, that Max endlessly lugs around (when not carrying the broken birdcage), hugging the immense albatross to her chest…. constantly asking members of the public to find the precise word that she, or they’re… looking for. Or more precisely - the word that she/Max - has lost. Because that’s the thing - the metaphor - that defines Max - she has been permanently and sadly broken; she has clearly lost something - a word, an idea, a friend, her heart. Pooooooor Max.

Max and I did a dance duet together once. A real, choreographed duet. It was back in 1976, or so. Right before I left Chicago in the Spring of 1977, after my having lived there for seven years.

But wait, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

First, Susan and I… dance together. In Shirley’s company for four years. We take company dance classes together. Every day. We rehearse together. Every day. We sweat together, work creatively hard together, create original dance-theater pieces together, perform in public together, eat countless meals together, lick labels on mailing lists together, spend our 20s together, grow up together.

You know how “they say”: only a few experiences can bond people together like no other: formative childhood itself, sports team campaigns, the cruelty of war. Well… being in a dance company - is like that.

Dance… art… clowning… become my/our… entire life/lives.

We have this unique and beautiful… friendship.

Ahhhh.. how to describe it?

We never see - eye-to-eye.

In fact… quite the opposite.

If I say, “black”, Susan undoubtedly says “white”.

And of course, au contraire, if she ever says “White”, naturally I, with my full heart and soul, just have to say “Black!”

And this isn’t only with the single words, of course, but with entire ideas, full-on philosophies… just about anything.

It becomes so funny and well-known between us, that arbitrarily, one of us will call the other, any time, day or night, when we’re on one of our few vacations away from dance (and well before the existence of cell phones!)

Black!

And without fail, the other will, automatically, mono-syllabically, reply

White!

And that’s all that’s needed. Along with a good, deep, life-affirming laugh - from the bottom of our two, bound-forever, dancing-clowning-morbid-Ashkenazy souls.

In 1974, we 5 dancers, along with prominent dance critic, Sally Banes, and Tem Horwitz, Susan’s husband, leave Shirley Mordine’s Dance Troupe at Columbia College and found a dance “collective” called MoMing (“Nameless” in Chinese). It is a big move, heard all around the cultural world of Chicago.

But oooops, I forgot to tell you, those of you who are following Susan’s story here, that yes, she got married in the early ‘70s. To businessman, entrepreneur, and future Chicago land developer, Tem Horwitz. From Butler, Pennsylvania… who once told me personally, in all seriousness,

I don’t think there’s anyone smarter than me in the entire world.

Right, TEM. Not simply TIM Horwitz. Nope. Tem! One of a kind… who was business managing Shirley’s Dance Troupe at Columbia College when he was fired just before we all left the Troupe and formed MoMing in 1974. Hence the bad taste, blood, and karma between Tem, Shirley, and her former protégées.

Nevertheless, MoMing, becomes immediately successful artistically in the Chicago landscape, bringing NYC “post-modernist” dancers like Laura Dean, Kenneth King, Steve Paxton, and other Judson Church-ers to “The 2nd City” for the first time. We “founding five” also do our own original dance-theater work, but this - at a great personal cost - making us more and more competitive between ourselves - over each and every year of our existence - as the brilliant Mr. Horwitz keeps us afloat with non-profit arts grants, fundraising benefits, and dance classes for the public, all of which I become a prominent source.

But back to Max’s and my duet. Or should I say Max and “Gino’s” (my clown name) duet. A sort of farewell to my seven lucky years in Chicago and a simultaneous adieu to my/Gino’s one and only clown “partner” in life, the sad and inimitable, Max.

We create it from scratch. Rehearse it for months. Sort of a cross between a Keystone Kops slapstick comedy two-reeler and a live, on-stage, exactly-choreographed, modern dance duet for two, late-to-learn, almost-cursed-to-become, doctahs and lawyuhs. It is physically challenging, full of pratfalls, lifts, slides, and… a special, on-stage water pyro-technique.

Unfortunately, it is the latter that gets the best of us in our very last performance… when…

I/Gino am lifting sad stoic Max in a beautiful spray of water from MoMing’s upper level, church rectory balcony, when…

OOOOPS……………

Gino’s Size 34 Klondike fur-lined Boots sliiiiide on the wet wooden stage and….

BAM!!!!

Gino… I… drop Max/Susan right on HER FACE… onto the hard wooden floor.

The audience groans aloud.

We don’t stop.

There’s blood everywhere.

We don’t stop.

Max instinctively grunts…

Go on!

She puts her hand over her bleeding mouth and…

Somehow…

We finish the piece.

After which…

Susan is taken directly to the hospital in an ambulance and has her mouth stitched up.

After which…

… her face never looks the same.

There is a scar that forever remembers that night.

On her upper lip.

That Susan has to live with for the rest of her life.

And I have to see for the rest of my life.

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I leave Chicago and MoMing in 1977. I move to New York and life carries on. Susan stays in Chicago but also leaves MoMing. She stays married to Tem, but he is not particularly faithful to her. They do have three wonderful children together, Noah, Micah Rose, and Jonah, and motherhood replaces dance as the love of Susan’s life.

I don’t see her again, although we do keep up our “Black” and White” phone conversations over the years. She goes back to law school and actually does practice law, along with becoming a social activist and dog advocate, writing books, and continuing her lifelong practice of tai chi. She develops a heart problem, although she chooses not to have “the procedure” that will protect her from future heart failure.

Then, in 2000, tragedy strikes when… headstrong teenage Noah… shockingly hangs himself… on Mother’s Day.

Susan never recovers.

A little over a year later, she dies in her sleep in her Michigan summer home, on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2001. She is 53 years old.

The cause is believed to be a heart attack.

All her close friends say: “broken heart”.

For the dumbest of reasons, I don’t go to my dear friend’s memorial.

Why?

Ohhhh…. it’s the first day of the new semester at USC, the university where I teach theater and movement in LA. I have four new classes. The first day - very important. Can’t miss Important!

I don’t go to Susan/Max’s memorial in Chicago.

And I regret it - to this day, 23 years later.

How short-sighted could I have been? How could I have chosen the first day of four temporal college classes of students I had never yet met - over honoring the life of one of my closest and dearest friends? My dance buddy? My clown partner? My soulmate in art?

If ever there was a fool who made a stupid decision in his life, that was me that August, 2001.

Sorry, Max. Sorry, Susan.

Please forgive me.

Love in Clown Heaven forever!

R.I.P.

xoxo

Gino

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PS. MARK THE DATE: August 25th, 2024, Sunday, 4 pm. I’ll be having my 77th Birthday Bash at Paradiso, 903 Early Street, Santa Fe - reading a Collection of “Santa Fe Stories”. With special guest, “Library Girl”, Susan Hayden, from LA. Plus saxophonist supreme, Alex Murzyn and keyboardist extraordinaire, Bob Fox. BYOB! If you’re in town, or anywhere nearby, reserve your place, by sending me a message here.

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Such is life.

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I remember…

…my maternal grandfather, Murray Rosenberg. This is the only photo I have of him.

Almost completely faded, unlike my memory of him. He was… a gregarious, bald-headed, and strong-hearted immigrant, fresh off the Ashkenazy-Ukranian boat from Kiev, arriving in Middle Village, Queens, New York, “The Land of Opportunity” at the turn of the 20th century. With his American-born wife, Sally Berman, they had 3 kids, rocking Roz, my mother, buttoned-down Phil, and black sheep, Harvey. They ran a working-class grocery store on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and drove out to Westbury, Long Island almost every Sunday afternoon with cardboard boxes full of canned soups from the grocery store’s highest shelves, fresh vegetables from the ice-cooled bins, and pounds upon pounds of frozen steak, lamb, and hamburger - that would heartily feed the Trules family for the next week - or two. “Poppy” gave me my first bottle of Knickerbocker Beer at the Hempstead Bowling Alley when I was nine years old, and

Damn, if I don’t still remember that innocent beer’s golden-smooth taste.

Murray died at the beginning of my freshman year in college… at the University of Freezing Cold Buffalo New York. That’s why I remember him here. I was living “by myself”… for the first time… in an alienating college dorm of 19-year-old strangers… 500 miles away from my family. It was my first experience, and my first memory of… death. All alone. My “Poppy”, suddenly dead at age 67. I had nobody to share my feelings with.

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PART 1, William McKinney aka Mac Randall

Just a few years later, far away in another city called Chicago, but in quite another lifetime,

I’m reinventing myself as “an artist”, in the body and career of “a modern dancer”.

I’m now living by myself in a cozy little one-bedroom house with pink petunias in the front yard, on a street called Wolfram, just half a block from where the Steppenwolf Theatre Company will find a home for itself years later on Halsted Street on the near Northside of Chicago.

I’m a young man about town, a member of Shirley Mordine’s “Dance Troupe”, well-known and well-reviewed in the Chicago Tribune by New York-bound critic, Linda Winer. I’m also a gadfly in my early 20s, footloose and fancy-free, on Lincoln Avenue, the hub of Chicago’s up-and-coming 1970s theater scene that features Stuart Gordon’s “Organic Theatre”, early home to David Mamet’s new plays, and seedbed to future Hollywood and Broadway stars Joe Montegna, Dennis Franz, William H. Macy, Andre De Shields, and a host of others. We all hang out at The Oxford Pub, eating fried chicken together until well after midnight, doing theater and dance shows, and learning Second City improv skills from dark comedic guru, Del Close.

Right in the middle of us all, there is William. Six foot-three, sculpted from hard onyx stone like a black Achilles, straight from the Southwest side of Chicago’s “African American ghetto”, he’s probably no more than 19 years old, an artistic runaway from his overbearing father and straight-laced mother, who has tumbled into Chicago’s near-Northside, unleashed and unwashed, not unlike myself, who arrived exactly the same way into the Windy City in 1970.

If Chicago has a NYC-Greenwich Village equivalent arts and music scene in 1970, Lincoln Avenue is it. The tall, long-bearded, and magnanimous Reverend Jim Shiflett has founded “The Body Politic” as a community arts center, and by the time he hands its artistic reins over to Stuart Gordon in the early 70s, and music clubs like Ratso’s and Orphans are hosting Southside Chicago blues legends like Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Junior Wells, and Buddy Guy, the Northside is spilling over with production and creativity.

It just seems like everywhere I go, there’s - William. With kinky, uncombable hair, and a smile and enthusiasm as wide as the State of Texas, here, in my new sweet home Chicago, is my fast future friend of a lifetime.

Just one without a home. You see, William lives night to night… on Chicago’s rakish Northside, finding himself wherever his wits land him… which more and more frequently… becomes… 854 Wolfram Street - on the couch, with me, single, or “engaged for the evening”, behind a flimsy closed door, on the waterbed in the bedroom.

He soon moves in with me… full-time… my first “unofficial” roommate, and within a year, he sees my first-ever “live-in girlfriend” join us. A cozy trio we are, me, William and Kasia, a pretty, round-faced, German-bred, Art Institute of Chicago-trained and talented painter, who within the year, is somehow miraculously, a member, along with William, of Shirley Mordine’s professional Dance Troupe! In residence at Columbia College Chicago, which also miraculously, pays me to be a member of their dance faculty… but which… doesn’t prevent the three of us from getting evicted from the wonderful $75/month Wolfram Street residence, by the bug-eyed landlady, Mrs. Fisher, who definitely doesn’t approve of her little petunia-ed, one bed-room house being occupied by a Jewfro-donning modern dancer living in sin with his unmarried girlfriend and his very visible black Adonis roommate!

Ahhhh, those were the days………… where within a week, Kaisa and I move into a 3-bedroom apartment right around the corner on Halsted for - $125/month, and William finds his own bedroom in another friend’s apartment right down the street on Halsted - for free.

But back to - that “flimsy closed door” behind which William slept - on the Wolfram Street couch - before our eviction.

Perchance… there’s the rub.

Because I believe that… the story and direction which William’s life takes - is entirely based on - the “closed door” (closet) from which he never comes out.

Sure, those were the times, the 1970s, during the rise and height of the alternative “counterculture”, especially in the arts scene, when many, many people “came out”. But - in this case, William’s - he never did. He never could. I just think he couldn’t ever admit to his stern religious parents, and therefore even more importantly, to himself, that - he was gay. It was just too hard, and too shameful for him, no matter how strongly he was attracted to men. No matter that he had very occasional, secretive affairs with men “behind closed doors”.

He did fall deeply in love with his male roommate on Halsted just after he moved out from Wolfram Street, even though Bob, a long-haired Japanese American man, was “straight”, and was in a full-time, committed relationship with Marilyn, their other housemate. Honestly, I never got the full details of their menage a trois arrangement, only that William never fully recovered from it, nor did he ever have a serious or committed relationship afterward for the rest of his life.

Instead… he ate. Mightily…

…until eventually, his one-time, perfectly sculpted, six-pack dancing frame expands and… expands again… to over 400 pounds.

But not before… he moves away from Chicago - to New York. In 1974, just when we five dancers are leaving Shirley Mordine’s company at Columbia and forming MoMing, a new “dance and theater collective”, William decides that his future isn’t going to be next to mine anymore, but rather, on his own. He finds a one-bedroom apartment on 17th Street in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, and he becomes “an actor”. He even changes his name - to “Mac Randall” - because there is another “William McKinney” in the actor’s union.

I don’t see him much for the next three years - until I, too, eventually leave “The Second City” and move back to my native New York in 1977, where I live in The Hotel Woodward on 55th and Broadway, during which time William and I both study acting with Lee Strasberg, and I found “The Cumeezi Bozo Ensemble”, NYC’s Resident Clown Troupe, of which, of course, “Mac” becomes a member.

That’s “George”… as you can see from his nameplate…. “on the phone” at Grand Central Station in New Yawk at one of our many public Cumeezi escapades around town. Of course, the “Cumeezis” don’t tawk; we’re silent, white-faced “clowns” in the Chaplin busker tradition, and George is about the most outgoing, rambunctious of the bunch. Unfortunately, headstrong and independent Mac basically refuses the very physically-specific training that I impose on the rest of my company, but “George” just carries on and clowns naturally - on his own - as the well-seasoned and compulsive performer he is, and… when it comes time to choose a select group of Cumeezis to go on a Holland-French-Swiss tour in 1979, of course, there’s George/Mac - at the top of my list.

One of the things that I love most about my friendship with William/Mac is his closeness with my parents, Roz and Joe. They absolutely adore him and he loves them equally in return. It’s a mutual admiration society that begins first with their visits to Chicago and blossoms further when they move from Long Island to Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the late 1970s. He always remembers their birthdays with a sweet card, and he even sends them cards for Mother’s and Father’s Day. In a way, my parents become his proxy parents. It’s an easy substitution; for as hard, judgmental and unaccepting as his own parents have always been of him and his lifestyle, my parents are, contrarily, just that loving and embracing.

I stay in The Big Apple until 1982… when the demands of running a non-profit clown company and booking enough commercial gigs to support a gaggle of ten - just wear me down and take the fun out of clowning for me.

While I move to LA, Mac moves to Yelm, Washington, country miles south of Seattle and east of Olympia, to a rural center for the study of the teachings of “Ramtha”, a “spiritual being” who purportedly “channels” i.e. speaks through the mediumship of — the school’s leader, JZ Knight. At the time, Ramtha’s school is drawing more than 3,000 students from more than 20 countries around the world, and Mac Randall is one of them.

This is also the time that my dear friend, who I believe is sublimating his stifled sexual appetites into “spiritual studies” and food consumption, is starting to pile on the pounds, by the hundreds.

Then there are the rumors within the counterculture: former students accusing Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment of practicing brain-washing and mind-control, as well as using intimidation and fear techniques to keep students in the school, calling Knight a "spiritual predator" using methods such as “spiritual prophecy” which threaten that unless students remain faithful to Ramtha, they will become prey of "lizard people", and that “the ancient figure of Jehovah will return to earth accompanied by these lizard people in a spaceship”, which I hear directly about from a totally-committed, William/Mac.

Eventually, over the years, my parents stop receiving greeting cards from William-Mac, and I, too, hear less and less frequently from my old friend, until one of our fellow Chicago “Dance Troupe” former members, Barbara Clay (about whom I will write soon), dies in the late 1990s. I pay for a ticket for William (I always choose to call him by his given name) to fly down to Los Angeles for the memorial, and I pick him up at LAX.

And there he is, waiting for me curbside… all 450 pounds of him… my former perfectly-sculpted, Greek God-dancing-clowning friend in arms.

He gets into the passenger seat of my white Toyota Celica convertible. The car tips massively over to the right. I’m shocked and embarrassed. I don’t know if we can drive on the freeway without tipping over and having an accident.

Of course, we make it - home to “Lucretia Gardens” in Echo Park - where four of us surviving Chicago dancers all climb into the hot tub on the lower concrete deck and spend many hours reminiscing about our dear friend, Barbara, who had moved from Boston to LA to live with me when I first moved from New York to LA/Santa Monica in 1983. William’s 400+ pounds spill many gallons of water over the top of the tub, but it seems “appropriate”, like the hot tub itself is crying buckets of tears for the loss of wonderful, loving Barbara.

After that, I lose touch with William. I keep his former Christmas card on my frig, but his phone numbers stop working, and he has no email address, no social media, or any other way of contacting him.

Until another day… several years later, I get a phone call from his sister, Clara, who’s still living in Chicago.

Is this Eric Trules, my brother William McKinney’s friend? This is Clara, his sister.

It is. But I haven’t heard from your brother in years. Is he ok? Still alive, I hope?

He’s still alive and he wants to talk to you. He’s had a stroke. He asked me if I could get him your phone number. He doesn’t have a cell phone.

Oh no! My phone number is still the same. He should have it.

Well, I’ll give it to him and let him explain, ok?

Ok, thanks for calling, Clara. I miss him. Say hello to your mother and father for me.

A few days later, my old friend calls… with a caveat.

Is this Eric Trules? I have a collect call from Mr. Mac Randall in Yelm, Washington. Will you accept the charges?

Yes, of course.

Pause.

Sorry to call collect, Gino. I don’t have any money.

So what else is new, Mac?

Ha ha. I think I’ve gotten stupider.

What do you mean?

Well… I had some kind of accident and I’m sitting around this place in a wheelchair all day long doing nothing.

William is talking very slowly, like it’s hard for him to form words.

Well, why don’t you just get up and dance - or break out like Chief Bromden (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)?

Good idea.

Do you want me to come up and visit you?

That would be wonderful.

What’s your address?

I don’t know. I’m so tired, Gino.

I’ll get it from Clara,

Ok, thank you. See you soon, Gino.

Ok, see you soon, George….

We hang up.

I feel like crying. My beautiful friend has had a debilitating stroke. He’s sitting in a wheelchair. He weighs over 400 pounds. He hardly knows who, or where, he is. I better go see him - before it’s too late.

But I can’t find Clara’s phone number. It’s not saved in my cell phone. It’s not in a Chicago phone book. It’s not anywhere on the web. I can’t trace the collect call from Yelm. I call the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, track down one person who remembers “Mac”, but he tells me that,

Mac left years ago, and I have no idea where he is anymore.

What am I supposed to do? Fly to Seattle? Drive to Yelm and go from institution to institution?

I don’t… do either.

I don’t do… anything.

And I never see my friend again.

That’s been… more than a decade ago.

And I never hear from Clara again.

But I assume…

…that William passed away… sadly and anonymously… in a Yelm institution… without a loved one in sight.

I’m sorry, my friend, that I never made the trip to Yelm.

I should have.

I regret

that I never did.

But believe me when I say,

You live on… in my heart… just like every other loved one that I’ve ever lost.

Murray… Roz and Joe, Max… and all the rest.

Yet……………………….

There was

and still is….

…only one “George”.

Only one Mac Randall.

Only one William McKinney.

And he will live on with me…

Forever.

Adios, amigo.

Trules

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Thanks so much!!!

Trules

PS. MARK THE DATE: August 25th, 2024, Sunday, 4 pm. I’ll be having my 77th Birthday Bash at Paradiso, 903 Early Street, Santa Fe - reading a Collection of “Santa Fe Stories”. With special guest, “Library Girl”, Susan Hayden, from LA. Plus saxophonist supreme, Alex Murzyn and keyboardist extraordinaire, Bob Fox. BYOB! If you’re in town, or anywhere nearby, reserve your place, by sending me a message here.

Travel the world with “e-travels with e. trules” blog

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Eric Trules’ Twitter (X) handle: @etrules

my father used to be a carpenter

a master craftsman

a cabinet maker extraordinaire

he'd turn these perfect round cherry wood salad bowls on his lathe

dovetail smooth fitting mahogany joints on his meticulous router

pull his whining De Walt table saw over huge planes of wood that would magically become

with his love and care and endlessly detailed patience

kitchen tables with white inlaid formica tops

custom-built wall units complete with knotty pine bookshelves for the World Book Encyclopedia

and antique scrolled top desks with french wire-netted doors that were sanded smooth as a baby's cheek and stained the tawny color of sandalwood

his woodworking shop was downstairs in the basement

the only place my mother would allow it

sort of off-limits to the rest of us mere mortals

existing in a chaos all its own

full of the smell of sawdust

and the sounds of powerful metal machines groaning together like dinosaurs in this archaic man-made sanctuary

amongst piles of wood scraps, nails, blueprints, and half-completed projects

each of the dinosaurs had a personality all its own

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there was the drill press

the stately straight-backed worker who stood head and heels above the others

who with as little effort as possible bore through the lumber in the precise places where my father wished

whose only danger was in removing the spinning bit after the incision

for if you weren't careful in holding the wood down, it would fly around in a circular rage and knock your knuckles off

there was the simple jig saw

who even a small fry like me could enlist

to cut the simple shapes of stars, squares, and keys

that i stained and finished and then tried to peddle door to door in the neighborhood

whose jagged blade rode furiously up and down, up and down

like teeth

only to belie the feeling that it was cutting through the wood like butter

then there was the bigger band saw

a glorified version of the jig that wasn't quite as housebroken and could really get nasty sometimes

like the time my mother was attempting to lose her mechanical blind spot

but instead band-sawed off the end of her index finger

and came running upstairs with it in her fist

and vowed never to come down to the shop ever again

a vow that was easier said than kept

there were lots of other mechanical monsters

whose names i can't remember

but whose images i see just as clearly in my mind today as i did 35 years ago

when they were all sacred to me

each in their own spot along the narrow green pastel walls

but whose mastery always eluded me

no matter how much i'd practice

or wish i had my father's dexterity or inventiveness

you see i always identified with my mother

in this division of the sexes

she was the articulate one

the one who used words

as tools

as creators

instead of machines

the one who encouraged my liberal education

my interest in books, and Broadway shows, and how things

fit together

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what did i learn from my father?

if not his scientific bent and his ability to fix anything anywhere anytime

i think i learned his curiosity and imagination and

his ability to see

his sixth sense that could

look at an object

smell it

hear it

then tell you

exactly what was

wrong with it

he was like a magnet in this regard

he was drawn to thing's imperfection

its critical flaw

like a leech to blood

like a finger to a sore

it was his genius and his achilles heel

for the more he cared about something

the more he loved it

the better he saw

the more precisely he heard

the more exactly he noticed

what was

wrong with it

the scuff on the shoe

the furrow in the brow

the crackle in the recording

the pimple on the nose

the thinness of the legs

the well from which this gift sprung was never revealed

perhaps it fed upon its own dark and troubled source

but it always reflected outward

never inward

and what it saw

it saw

flawed

and then tried to fix

sometimes my father would really surprise me

when out of the blue and for no apparent reason

he'd ask helter-skelter

"what's wrong?"

and i'd suddenly be frozen by his scalpel

caught by his glance

and just have to stop

i'd say to  myself

"i don't know

is there something wrong?"

but when nothing presented itself

i'd just say "nothing"

"nothing's wrong, dad"

but then he'd tell me

"what about this

how about that

you don't look right

you look unhappy

there must be something wrong"

and pretty soon

i learned

i anticipated

i figured out

what was wrong

with me

i got to be one of the bowls

one of the records

one of the masterpieces he owned

or was creating

or needed to have

i got to see

in no uncertain terms

what was imperfect

about me

what i couldn't win

how i couldn't compete

how nothing ever was

how i never was

good enough

so that now

i've incorporated his voice

made it my own

"the critic"

for whom nothing's ever good enough

who cripples me before i walk

who chokes on the words "i love you"

and folds at the point of conflict

oh dad, poor dad

you've locked me in the closet and made me so sad

it's not your fault

but how do i get out?

how do i let you go?

maybe i'll take a course in woodworking

and learn the skills i left behind

how to wield the hammer

carve with the chisel

build the walls i never was able to construct

between you and me

between me and them

between she and i

maybe woodworking 101

will teach me how to work with flaws

how to sand over rough edges

accept imperfections

say i love you without a guarantee

commit to her in sickness and in health

to death do us part

i still love the smell of sawdust

and the line of a graceful bowl

i look down at my hands and see the fingers of a carpenter

his hands

the swollen cuticles

scarred and bloody not from the work itself

but from the endless picking

digging

picking

at

and on

himself

i forgive you, dad

you loved me as tenderly as you could

they're my fingers now

i have to build my own life

take my own wife

raise my own family

take my own risks

fall on my own knees

maybe i'll just try a little differently with my boy

let him find his own tools

say his own words

develop his own skills

fight his own battles

i'll love him

like you did me

and plant the seeds

for him to grow

i'll be a gardener

and make the soil rich

and the water pure

and the light good

my tools will be the watering can

and trowel

instead of chisel and saw

trules

tools

trowel

power

to grow into his own

sturdy

self-reliant

healthy

little tree

for some woodsman to cut down and give to a carpenter

and the cycle will start again

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Thanks so much!!!

Trules

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I am re-posting it today as a tribute to my great friend and tennis partner/coach of just about the same 3 decades, who just recently passed away from a stroke, after living on the hard-scrabble streets of South Central LA, as a trickster, rabble-rouser, and keen-witted survivor.

SKY’S THE LIMIT

the first day of the rest of my life.

i’m “semi-retired” as of today. taught my last USC class of the semester… yesterday, and will be teaching no more fall semesters. just 3 more springs. half time at half pay.

“phased retirement”, amigos! that’s what they call it. time to collect social security, take the leap, and see how to create that “third act”.

i’ve been talking about for so long….

so… played tennis today. with earl, the pearl.

as every tuesday and friday. in LA’s south central “hood”. slauson and van ness. my favorite thing to do in the world. hit the yellow fuzzy tennis ball every which way… with 55-year-old, lanky and ebullient earl, the mayor of the van ness courts. originally from arkansas, the youngest of his many southern siblings, nobody knows exactly where earl lives… maybe with his mysterious girlfriend… or maybe…in the park itself… alongside of tommy gunn, local cart pusher number one, and houston, enforcer of the once, gang-infested park.

but who cares… where? all i know is that earl drinks beer out of his water cup while he plays and has been doing it for the entire 10 years i’ve been playing with him.

finally graying around the temples, earl is my “coach” and tennis partner extraordinaire. i happily pay him 20 bucks an hour to teach me the backhand i never had, a wicked drop shot, and a heart-breaking topspin lob, to go along with the driving forehand i’ve always had, as far back as i can remember. now they call me the “roger federer of van ness”. not 66-year-old “honky”, who’s been coming twice a week for 10 years, often with da wife’s leftovers from her catering gigs, making me one popular sonofabitch at the slauson and van ness courts.

but hey, not only am i popular, but i’m “great”. at least in my own mind. i hit the shit out of the ball, and have earl shouting at the driveby… cars… every time i hit another winner past him.

we don’t keep score. we’re too smart for that. we play every point to the death, and i say, “good shot” every time he hits one past me. but i finally figured out how to overcome my lifelong fear of failure, which would make me just good enough to… lose… in every conceivable tennis combination. if i played a great player, i’d play great. that is, almost as great as my opponent, until… i’d inevitably lose the last point in the last set… every time… making me one of the most miserable tennis players on the planet. or contrarily… if i’d play a really lousy opponent, i’d play just… lousi-er enough… to lose… the last point in the last set… making me remain… the most miserable tennis player on the planet.

but now… with earl… with keeping no score, we play just for the joy… just for the art… of hitting the ball. just perfectly… just past… one another… making me just about… the happiest tennis player on the planet. so much so… that no matter how much work, how much stress… how sick i feel… you’ll always find me out there every tuesday and friday… down at slauson and van ness… with the great and effusive, earl, the pearl.

so… i’m driving home from the courts today. i’m soaked with sweat. it’s 96 degrees out on the 2nd day of may, and i stop for gas… at the arco… on normandy and 54th. $4.23/gallon. outrageous, but still cheaper than downtown LA, echo park, and certainly the toney west side. of course, the damn ATM machine doesn’t work. i have to go inside the AM/PM to give the dark-skinned proprietor my ATM card.

“fill ‘er up,” i say. “number 5.”

the dude takes my card and gives me a funny look.

“go ahead, my man,” he smiles.

he doesn’t look like a local. like i said, his skin is dark, but with his familiar sounding accent, i’m guessing he’s from north africa… some place like… egypt. i’ve been there and yep, i think he’s from cairo. could be, right?

hey, i’ve read nobel prize winner for literature, naguib mafouz, author of “the cairo trilogy”.

i fill ‘er up and go back for my card and receipt.

i’m wearing some kind of worn out, badly-faded white t-shirt that says “PAC 10” on it. my main proprietor man smiles at me and tries to read the “P-A-C” aloud.

“what’s that?” he asks.

“uh… pacific athletic conference”, i say.

“college football, baby! i love it!”

“yeah, USC”, i say. “i teach there.”

“what do you teach?” my gas man asks enthusiastically.

“theater,” i say, a bit surprised by his curiosity.

“really?” he says, duly impressed. “what do you teach in the theatuh?”

i’m even a little more taken aback, but i’m not going to tell the dude i teach, “solo performance”. he’s not gonna know what that means. so i say,

“i teach people how to tell their own stories and perform them onstage.”

“wow!” he beams. “you’re an artist.”

“uh… yeah,” i say, “but i just started my ‘semi-retirement’ today. i’m not gonna work again ’til next january. and then only half time.”

“that’s great!” the am-pm gas man says. “you got your whole future in front of you. and it’s gonna be bright. i can just tell. you gonna write every day. sky’s the limit for you!”

“yeah,” i beam back.

c’mon, how does this guy know anything about me? how does he know that i’m gonna write every day?

well, in truth, he doesn’t! or shouldn’t. but hell, right now, to be honest, it doesn’t matter one little bit.

because sometimes, maybe you just be walkin’ around with your future so absolutely readable all over your beautiful face, that even the am-pm gas man can see it. or maybe… this gas man… is some kind of shaman, or psychic, or fortune teller. and he can just see right through my sweat-pouring skin… that today is the 1st day of the rest of my life.

anyway, i hope the am-pm gas man… be right……………………

“sky’s the limit, babies……………”

“sky’s the limit………………………………”

R.I.P. Earl Thurrell

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Thanks so much!!!

Trules

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Eric Trules’ Twitter (X)  handle: @etrules

No, wait, I’m on the homestretch.

No, wait. Which stretch is it? Backstretch or homestretch?

Well, you can’t exactly say I’m a racehorse. Not really. Because I DO take my time, now don’t I? A lot of words. “Too-many-words-Trules” - that’s what some of you call me - behind my back. I’ve heard you!

Ok so, I admit, I do like my words.

But which is it here? Backstretch or homestretch? There must be a difference….

Well, it turns out that “backstretch” is the opposite of “homestretch”. You see, the “backstretch” is parallel to the “homestretch” on the racetrack - across from the grandstand - where the horses pace themselves, while the “homestretch” is the part between the last turn and the finish line, the climax and most exciting part of a horse race, and where, at the end, the winner is crowned.

Got it? Natch!

Well then, I’m in “the homestretch”, the last part of my tale, from 2010 to… the present. The Obama-Trump-Biden years. The “Trules becomes a father” years. The “who knows what the hell is gonna happen next?” years - as of November, 2024!

After which, I can finally get back to my charming little tales about… Santa Fe.

2010 -2024 (63 - 76 years old)

The decade of the 2010s began in the chaotic wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and ended with the impeachment of a U.S. president. The continued explosion of social media fueled mass protest movements like “Occupy Wall Street”, “Black Lives Matter”, and “Me Too”, bringing millions of people together around the globe in pursuit of common objectives. Britain saw a new generation of royals emerge, countries around the world passed new laws legalizing same-sex marriage, President Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives, and a beloved baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, ended a 108-year-long dry spell by winning a World Series.

Me? I started the decade with all things in order, the 3 pillars of my life still sturdily in place: the oldest of the three, my USC theater professor job heading into its 24th pedagogical year, the second oldest pillar, my home of 17 years (even though I never owned it) was still holding my hillside palace in place, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Hollywood Sign from the hills of Echo Park, and the third pillar, my unlikely marriage to Surya, an Indonesian woman 31 years my junior, was as secure as ever, going on its 7th year, 9th if you counted the year she actually joined me in 2001.

Of course, if I looked more closely, perhaps I could have seen some cracks in the pillars, some fissures in the masonry: things like another battle or two with my bullying Dean at USC, or an unannounced and hostile rent raise at “Lucretia Gardens”, or maybe even an angry and solo trip back to Sumatra by my wife to visit her family while she was depressed about her unemployment during “the recession”. But hey, who wants to look at cracks and fissures?

Anyway, it’s 2010, and all’s right in “the world according to Trules”, so why not accept another Fulbright Grant to go to Bucharest, Romania for a month to do what I do - teach improvisation and solo performance, on my country’s dime, and to represent American values that I actually practice and believe in: freedom, self-expression, creativity, individuality, art, and following the beat of you own drummer.

I’ve never been to Eastern Europe before, except briefly to Berlin and East Germany, and although I’ve been to Communist Vietnam, China, and Cuba, I figure Eastern Europe will be an education all unto itself.

It is…. In fact, Bucharest reminds me of the late 1960s on the West Coast of California in America. Or at least, it’s trying to be. Ever since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the execution of brutal Romanian dictator and Communist Party General Secretary, Nicolae Ceaușescu, also in 1989, the youth of Bucharest have been going through the “alternative culture” changes that their Western European brethren went through in 1968. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. It’s surprising to me. And refreshing. It brings me back to my 20s, the same age as my UNATC students, the national theater university in Bucharest, who have never had a “professor” like me - so open-minded, so free-thinking, expressive, and iconoclastic.

At first, they’re a bit cautious and shocked.

Who is this Trules dude who’s yelling at us to sign up for his class? Telling us we’re going “discover ourselves”? He’s going to “set us free”? “Find our own voices”? What the fxxk?

Well, slowly, they start showing up in Studio D, up three flights of stairs, almost in the attic of this stodgy old government building, from where… over the next several weeks… strange “cries and whispers” are heard from strenuous, physically-demanding improv classes, and from personal and emotionally-demanding storytelling and monologue writing classes, that these Romanian students have never tried before. Because, from their stodgy old Romanian, formerly-Communist professors, they’ve never been told progressive ideas like “students may actually have something of value to bring to the stage”, only that “the only form of theater to be done are the classics!”

Wells, yours Trulesly turns things on their head for a few beautiful weeks, at the end of which…. about fifteen brave Romanian students rent a downtown Bucharest coffeeshop, pack it to its gills, and present a show called

“Wanna Know a Secret?", A Night of Solo Performance

…after which… they receive a standing ovation for their courage and artistry, after which… we’re all so thrilled and excited that… we go spilling out of the coffee house onto the cobblestone streets of Bucharest to the famous mid-city protest fountain where they all serenade me on guitar and with their voices - with Romanian folk and protest songs… until 3 a.m., when I finally beg off to make my flight to Istanbul, Turkey the next morning - to meet Surya, for a two-week tour of the onion-domed Orthodox Anatolian Peninsula.

The world? Beginning in December 2010 in Tunisia and continuing into spring, 2011, the “Arab Spring” is a wave of populist uprisings against authoritarian governments in the Middle East (Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Bahrain) that, although not entirely successful, results in regime changes in many of these countries. That same year, around 1,000 people march through the streets of New York City’s Financial District in September 2011 under an “Occupy Wall Street” banner. The protesters condemn income inequality and the influence of money in politics and call for an overhaul of what they see as a failing financial system. In 2013, three black female activists start using the social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who has shot and killed an unarmed black teen, Trayvon Martin, the previous year. Drawing inspiration from the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and Occupy Wall Street, the Black Lives Matter movement gains more attention in 2014 and 2015, when rioting follows the deaths of several more black men who are, once again, killed by police.

In 2011, Surya generously agrees to take her LA “homegirl”, Denise, who has never been out of America, to Bali, the island where she and I met. Of course, Surya goes early to visit her family in Sumatra, and I end up flying to Bali with Denise.

But when we arrive, Surya’s youngest sister (of four), Anna, meets us at the Bali airport - only to tell us that,

Surya is in hospital - with dengue fever!

Horrible news! An Asian mosquito-borne disease, also known as “bone-crusher’s disease” because of the tremendous pain it inflicts upon its victims, for which there is no prevention, and which frequently results in death to children and elders, dengue keeps Surya on her back on IVs in the hospital for a week, but - she’s tough - and thankfully, with excellent treatment, she pulls through.

We continue, traveling up the East Coast of Bali, ending up in the small rural fishing village of Padangbai, full of tall green tropical coconut and banana trees, where… huzzah… I come down with a serious attack of gout… which if you don’t know, is a very painful disease that attacks the joints of the fingers and toes from an inherited excess of uric acid in the blood. (Thanks for that, Dad.)

I’m laid up in the corner room of a beachfront bed and breakfast in Padangbai. I can’t walk. Surya has already spent a week on her back and feels obligated to take Denise around the beautiful Balinese island. She does, leaving me… cornered… not only in the room, but by the brother-in-law of the hotel owner’s wife… who is a typical local Balinese… piranha.

The truth is, I’ve made this trip to Bali, in my own mind at least, to buy a retirement home. I haven’t really discussed the details with Surya, which of course I should have, but to me, come on,

I can afford to buy a house here on an island Paradise for cash, maybe $50,000, and retire here, without a mortgage, leave America, a land I’ve criticized for decades, become an “expatriate”, a thing I’ve romanticized for decades, build an adjacent little bungalow for my friends to come visit me from all over the world, maybe build a little swimming pool… Hey, I may be lame with gout, but Padangbai is looking pretty damn good to me!

The piranha, “Made” (MaDAY), puts me on the back of his motorbike and drives me all around town. He shows me every piece of property for sale. All the “big hotels that are going to be built.”

Riiiiight!

One thing leads to another, and there are two, side-by-side bungalows… off the main road… right in the middle of a verdant coconut and banana tree field.

Welll… there are two foundations of bungalows, both of which are framed and almost roofed, but which obviously, have not been completed.

Wellll… it “so happens” that,

The family’s son’s has cancer and they need the money for him. So they are desperate to sell - at a very good price, Pak Trules.

Riiiiighhhhht! I’m supposed to believe this Balinese line of “boulay (Indonesian gringo) bullshit!

But wait a minute! It also turns out that the B&B owner, where I’m “cornered” is also the “chief” of the whole village of Padangbai. He’s about 60, my age, but naturally, he’s Asian, Indonesian, with a wisp of a long white chin beard. He looks like a big “Mr. Miyagi”, from “Karate Kid”. His name is “Pak Putu”.

And for some reason, Pak Putu is unduly impressed with me. He thinks I’m a “good businessman”. That I will “bring him luck”.

He wants to become my 50% partner to buy the 2-bungalow unfinished villa!

And so… to make a long story short…. we do! Buy the villa. Me and the village chief, Pak Putu! 50-50!

And in six months, Made, Pak Putu, and his wife, Dani, finish building the 2-bungalow “villa”. They thatch the roof with bamboo, pave a driveway, put in glass windows, gorgeously furnish the interior, hang mosquito nets, build a tropical garden paradise, even build…a swimming pool.

I’m a first-time homeowner, in Padangbai, Indonesia, age 64!

As you can see from the photo, we rent it out when we’re not there, which is 99% of the time, because I’m still teaching. I bought it to retire, and… that’s still a few years off in the unknown future. In the meantime, there’s Airbnb and Trip Advisor and Booking.com and this and that, all being a royal pain in the ass… long distance international rental… with a piranha as manager.

But then… THINGS CHANGE AGAIN.

In 2014, my former Indonesian USC student, Roland, invites me to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, to teach a theater workshop. He’s an aspiring filmmaker who has gone to USC film school and is pretty well-established in his home country, so he can set everything up pretty well at a major hotel, with accommodations, with even the flight and stay for Surya included. Great! We’re able to combine a visit to our villa in Padangbai, with Surya’s visit to her family in Sumatra, with my teaching gig in Jakarta.

But one day shortly before we leave LA, Surya comes into the bedroom where I’m reading Gabriel García Márquez and she says,

Can you come into the living room? I’d like to talk to you about something.

A little formal. Makes me nervous. Nevertheless, I get up, follow her, and sit down on “The Purple Couch.”

I don’t want you to get upset.

How can I get upset when I haven’t even heard the idea?

From past conversations, this sounds like it’s going to cost me A LOT of money.

Do you remember meeting my nephew, Exsel, in Bali?

I do. He came to visit with Anna over New Years in 2012? And he jumped into the pool about a thousand times with those plastic floaties on his arms?”

Right… Well, Anna thinks he’s really smart and curious, but sometimes he gets bullied by his brothers.

He has one older brother and one younger brother, right?

I’m proud of myself for remembering.

Well, Anna thinks it would be really great if we invite him to visit us in LA.

Ok…. for how long?

Well, that’s up to you.

What do you mean?

Well, Anna spoke to our brother, Nanda, and Exsel’s mother, and everybody thinks it would be a good idea for us to adopt Exsel.

Adopt him? For good?

Only if you agree.

Wow! This is about more than money! This is about….

What do you think?

That’s what Surya asks me. What do I think? About becoming an adoptive father. At age 67!

Out of the blue. On The Purple Couch.

What do you think?, I ask her incredulously.

____________

ASIDE: Without giving it a whole long story of its own, let me just say, that Surya and I tried an unsuccessful IVF procedure earlier in 2014. But because I underwent chemo-therapy for my cancer (Hodgkin’s Disease) in 1989, I, unfortunately, was unable to fertilize Surya’s eggs - to form the necessary “zygote” - to be re-implanted into her uterus – to magically… “make a baby”.

_____________

Surya now says,

I think that it’d be an incredible opportunity for Exsel to have a different life in America. And for you to become a father.

I look at her expectant face. I don’t know what to say.

But only if you want to.

I’m stunned. I’m thinking about the “opportunity” Surya is offering us. Both me and Exsel.

First, Exsel. An eight-year-old boy from third-world Indonesia. Giving him an education here in LA. A chance at getting a good-paying job. Infinitely more options than he’d ever have in Medan. Where he’s from the fierce, matriarchal Batak tribe. Where just five generations before him, his family were animate-worshipping cannibals. Where Surya’s Mom raised six children by herself, ever since her husband died in a motorbike accident when Surya was fourteen. Where the typical teenage Batak boy goes to school, hangs out on the streets, smokes cigarettes, stares at his smartphone, and looks forward to - nothing. Where Surya’s youngest brother sold drugs and died of a drug overdose in his mid-twenties.

Where in America… Exsel could look forward to - giving back - to his birth family… in the future. It’s what Surya has already done since first coming to LA. It was part of her original reason, part of her immigrant dream, for moving to America. Now, without Exsel even knowing it, it’s why Surya, Anna, and his own birth parents… have all agreed… to allow him to also come to LA. Allowed the idea… for him to be adopted. Even before having me on board.

And for me? It’s sort of obvious, isn’t it? I’ve never been a father. The opportunity would have seemed to have passed me by. A self-confessed artist-hippie. A guy who never believed in marriage or family. In settling down. In parenthood? A guy who lived only for himself. Well, here’s “the train of opportunity” again…. stopping at my station. Just like the blind chance I got to dance in 1970. To become a clown. To teach theater at USC. To make a documentary film about my Uncle Harvey. To go to Bali in in 2000 where I met my wife by accident by asking two random strangers for directions on the streets of Kuta Beach. It just seems like my life has never been about the choices or decisions that I’ve made or decided for myself. Quite the opposite. It seems that my life has been about the random or fateful or synchronous opportunities that have simply appeared or come my way. Ones… that I’ve said yes to.

And NOW here’s another one.

You don’t have to decide right away, Surya says. We could just bring Exsel here and see how you like him.

And how he likes me. (beat) Ok…. let me do a little research about how to get him a visa.

You mean you’ll do it?

I’m not saying I’ll adopt him. But I’ll try bringing him here. And we’ll see how we like each other. We may never get another chance like this again.

And there it is. Anna’s idea.

Surya? And me?

We just say “Yes”… to “The Train of Opportunity”………………………..

Now… it’s May 5, 2015. Cinco de Mayo. I’m waiting at LAX, Los Angeles’ bustling Tom Bradley International Terminal. I’m alone. Nervous as hell. My knees are knocking and I’m sweating. A lot.

I’ve spent the last year, hassling with immigration lawyers (useless), international adoption agencies (the same), and the USCIS (seemingly the bane of my existence), trying to get Exsel a “tourist visa”. There is absolutely no other way to get him to LA - legally!

Surya and I had to go directly to the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, representing ourselves as Exsel’s aunt and uncle (instead of being the required birth parents), and we begged the agent, Natan Berger (no kidding, a member of “my Tribe”), to look at my gigantic file of support papers that I gathered, “proving” that we had every possible person’s, and agency’s, “permission” for Exsel to “come visit his aunt and uncle in LA” for one month…. at which point…. Mr. Berger asked me directly,

And you have no plans to adopt the boy, do you, Mr. Trules?

At which point I laughed heartily and said,

No way, Mr. Berger, you can clearly see that I’m far too old for that.

Stamp. Stamp. Stamp. Visa approved.

One of the happiest days of Surya’s life!

Now, half a year later, I have a sign with me at the International Arrivals Terminal. It says:

“WELCOME EXSEL!”

And there it is, up on the overhead directory: China Air Flight 3807 from Taiwan. It’s just arrived, from halfway around the world. From Medan, Sumatra - two hours to Jakarta. Next - change planes… six hours to Taipei on the island of Taiwan. Then - wait five hours as the plane re-fuels before…. another twelve hours… across the Pacific, landing in…. LA. Altogether, about twenty-seven hours. Quite an ordeal for any international passenger. I can only imagine what it’s like for 8-year-old Exsel, on the first airplane flight in his life!

I’m looking down the long international deboarding runway. It’s steeply graded uphill to downhill, like the passengers come out of a long dark, third-world tunnel.

I don’t see them. It seems like every passenger and their brother… and their mother… and their father… and their son and daughter… and their infant child… has de-planed… and come out of the tunnel.

Where’re Surya and Exsel? Have they missed the plane altogether?

But hey… look… finally!

There they are!

My wife. And this little boy… holding her hand. Dragging two rolling suitcases. The one Exsel has looks bigger than he is. He has on a thin, sky-blue t-shirt and too-big khaki shorts. His legs are sooo skinny. He looks like he hasn’t eaten his whole life. He’s sooo tiny. Forty-three inches tall, when we measure him. Four feet, seven inches. He won’t be tall enough to go on the rides at Magic Mountain for years to come. He looks cold and hungry… like one of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. And he looks….overwhelmed.

They walk down the ascending arrival ramp. Towards America….

I wave my sign wildly,

WELCOME EXSEL!

Surya sees me. She points to me so Exsel sees me too.

I know he’s thinking:

Who is this “bule”?” (Indonesian for gringo) I can read his little face.

I hope maybe he remembers me.

He is soooooo cute.

But finally…

Exsel has arrived in America…..

….and my life is about to change forever.

I think I’ll stop here.

You already know that Donald Trump won the 2016 US election over Hillary Clinton although he didn’t win the popular vote. And you know that he lost the 2020 US election to Joe Biden, although he claims that he didn’t and instead, he provoked a violent “insurrection” on January 6, 2021 at the U.S Capitol Building because of those beliefs (or claims). And you can’t help but know that he’s now ruling and running the so-called “Republican” Party, or at least the MAGA part of it, and in all likelihood, he will be running again for President of the United States in just a few months, and that the results of this upcoming election will in all likelihood determine the direction of our once-great country. And that it will likely be a historical election and quite likely… every vote will count, so…

Get out there and vote!

And you already know that there are brutal, costly, and history-making wars in Ukraine and Gaza whose outcomes may affect the fate of the whole damn planet, and that… it’s a bleak world to live in, but.. we have to keep our heads and spirits up, and do… what we can.

And as for Trules, that would be me, you already know that I’ve spent the rest of the 2010s decade and the next 3+ years of the 2020s — raising my boy, Exsel, and moving my family to Santa Fe, and escaping the LA desert after 40 years… all of which you have, or can… read about on my 2 Substacks.

So…

finally….

I have hereby completed…

My Review of the Decades!!!!!

I hope you made it through!!!

Or will go back and check on any of the posts you missed.

Until next time…

See you back in…

Santa Fe!

Yours decadely,

Trules

—-

If you enjoyed this post, or any previous ones, please LIKE IT (by clicking the Heart), and LEAVE A COMMENT. It continues to help build an enthusiastic and interactive readership.

Also, if you have any friends who you think might enjoy Trules Rules, PLEASE SHARE IT WITH THEM.

Thanks so much!!!

—

Visit “Santa Fe Substack” HERE

Visit my personal blog “Trules Rules” HERE

Travel the world with my “e-travels with e. trules” blog

Listen to my travel PODCAST HERE

Or go to my HOMEPAGE

My Twitter (X)  handle: @etrules

“Y2K! Y2K!!”

Remember that? The commonly-used scare phrase and meme that was ubiquitously used to refer to a widespread computer programming shortcut that was expected to cause extensive havoc as the year changed from 1999 to 2000? But which instead, turned out to be, and which we all should have known, was only another short-lived hoax duped and bedeviled upon the gullible nature of mankind across our entire beautiful and lonely planet as we crashed magnificently into the next millennium.

Me? I was in Kauai, the most beautiful of the Hawaiian Islands, with my two best friends from LA, Todj and Michael. We’d been flown there, all expenses paid, by Todj’s “patron”, Catherine (Emmy) Davis, and as the New Year rang in, the three of us sat there, under the sheltering Hawaiian sky, full of sparkling stars and shooting new millennium meteors, waiting for the Y2k virus to wreak havoc upon us. The clock struck midnight… and nothing… occurred. Our iPhones didn’t blink. Our laptops didn’t burp. Everything remained… exactly… the same - except the calendar changed an entire FOUR numerals, as we, and the rest of the human race, limped, staggered, crawled, or leaped, depending on how you saw it — into our next one thousand years.

2000-2010 (53 - 63 years old)

Without a doubt, the biggest and most transformative thing that happened to me at the beginning of this new decade/century/millennium was - my wife-to-be, Surya’s, arrival in LA on August 3, 2001. That’s when the life of this curmudgeonly, dyed-in-the-wool, artist, educator, committedly uncommitted bachelor… changed… forever.

Let me explain.

In the summer of 2000, I decided to take off for the “Asian void” for the very first time. I flew 30 hours from LA to Bangkok, the sexy, exotic capital of Thailand, where they said,

You can get anything you want anytime you want it.

I was girlfriendless, childless, and without prospects. I had recently crossed the half-century mark. I was lonely. Girlfriends came and went. Recently, more went than came. I was still living in Echo Park, still paying rent, still under the illusion that I would be living at Lucretia Gardens “forever”. I was still teaching at USC, a popular professor; but who knew how much longer that would go on? I had survived cancer, disappointments in love, life, and loss… hell, that was life! But that was the thing, I was just carrying on.

The summer before, my Mom had died. Suddenly, from a stroke. I was there. I had just returned from a trip to Israel. As I said in my last post, the Moravs, my Israeli diplomat Servas hosts had twisted my arm to visit them in Jerusalem, and as per usual, after a trip abroad, I’d gone up north to Walnut Creek, outside San Francisco, for a week to visit and hang out with my parents.

However, on this visit, in the summer of 1999, my Mom wasn’t feeling well; she had an earache and headache. But since I was still packing my rain or shine, all-purpose, “ready for anything travel pharmacy”, I stubbornly convinced her to take some of my homeopathic drops to help her pain. She was resistant at first and I had to, sort of, twist her arm, but finally, she took the drops under her tongue and went to sleep.

She never woke up again. We found her unconscious in the morning and had her ambulanced to the hospital. She’d had a massive stroke and brain hemorrhage. She never regained consciousness. After three days on life support, the doctors told us that she’d never recover. So, we decided, as a family, to let her go. We took her off the breathing machine, and we watched her… expire.

I never forgave myself for my mother’s death, even though I know logically that there was absolutely no medical connection between my giving her the homeopathic remedies and her having the stroke immediately afterward. But that’s the way it happened.

I also know that my mother always blamed herself for my ending up “alone”, for never getting married, for not having a life partner, for not becoming a father. That somehow… her selfishness, her “not being a good enough mother”, that… something she did… was responsible for my being alone… something that caused her much grief and pain. And every time I’d introduce her to a new girlfriend, she would be so friendly, so enthusiastic, so welcoming, and then so disappointed… when the relationship ended, or “didn’t work out”. She finally said,

I don’t want to meet any more girlfriends, Eric.

And then she died

Off to the Asian void. Summer, 2000.

Bangkok, Thailand. Buddhas, sex shops, “anything you want, any time you want it”. From there, I take a dangerously, still-warring, bloody Khmer Rouge military road through rural Thailand across the Cambodian border to see the magnificent 11th-century Khmer temples of Angkor Wat in Seim Riep, onto Phnom Penh, the stylish third-world capital of Cambodia. Next, a speed boat down to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in South Vietnam, then north, up along the Vietnamese coast, shipping home traditional, carved wooden water puppets and kilos upon kilos of custom-made tuxedos, overcoats, dress suits, and designer shirts from the charming little tailor town of Hoi An. Then, all the way up to North Vietnam’s jam-packed, secret-alley, French-cuisined Communist Hanoi.

Next? Why not take the slow boat up the mighty Mekong for three dreamy days on a fanciful, once-in-a-lifetime sloop from northeast Thailand to Luang Prabang and Vientiane in southern Laos, then make my way down the long fertile strip of Malaysia, synchronicitously organizing my first Fulbright grant there for 2002? Then? How about jumping off the tip of Malaysia to visit the still “wild men of Borneo”, finally, keeping a promise to myself and my short-lived Colombian-Parisian documentarian soulmate, Ms. Villar, to meet “my destiny” in magical Bali, “Island of the Gods”?

I know, that’s a lot of ground to cover, and as they say, “the devil is in the details”. But rather than give you all the beautiful and gory details here, I refer those of you who may be interested to my travel website, “e-travels with e. trules”, where I have many, many posts on the tales above. And for those of you who might want to listen to some of these colorful adventures (and misadventures), please go to my Podcast of the same name.

The “real world in the first part of the 21st century?”

The story of the early 2000s is told using the words of technology, globalism, and the concept of a “one-world digital economy”, but obviously, the biggest single event occurred on September 11, 2001, when Osama Bin Laden masterminded and coordinated the Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda’s series of four terrorist attacks against the United States, during which both Twin Towers at the World Trade Center were destroyed. And just like after the United States’ twin atomic bomb attacks on Japan in August,1945, the world has never been the same since.

Many of you may have heard before - how I met my wife-to-be - then calling herself “Wati” - by accident and incident - in front of an ATM in Kuta Beach, Bali in June, 2000.

Kuta, being the last place on the island I wanted to be, and the most touristic, I was simply lost, waiting to fly back home. I was asking two random strangers, the first two I saw, for directions. One of the two, the pretty young Batak girl who had left the island of Sumatra to work and “expand her horizons”, didn’t speak much English, but having caught the bule’s (Indonesian for gringo), my attention, she smiled and generously attempted to point me in the right direction. I smiled back but apparently, still looked confused.

The young girl said,

I so you. (“I’ll show you.”)

And off we went.

And…

...she’s been “so-ing” me ever since……

It was a crazy and ridiculous roll of the dice for the both of us. We’d met for one night only, that night in Kuta Beach, before I had to fly back to Bangkok and LA the next morning. She spoke almost no English. She didn’t know who Bob Dylan, Richard Nixon, or Martin Luther King were. I was 31 years older than she was. We had almost nothing in common. Yet after I went back to visit her over Christmas, 2000, and we mimed and fought our way into each other’s hearts and consciousnesses, we decided to take the leap. I would help her get a passport and visa and she would come to visit me in LA. Nothing more or less.

As I said, she arrived barely a month before 9/11, on a tourist visa. If it had indeed been a month later, after 9/11, there’s no doubt in my mind, that she, being from the most populous Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, “Wati” would have never been allowed entrance into America, my life would have never been the same, and that I certainly would never be writing this post. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t by now, a bitter lonely old man. And for that, I must say, sardonically,

Thank you, Mr. Bin Laden! Good timing.

Not to say that Wati’s arrival in America wasn’t challenging and her learning curve steep. They were. Tremendously so. I remember, all too well: her staring up at the tall Los Angeles skyscrapers, completely overwhelmed, looking at all the LA women with their glossy red lipstick and high high heels, even walking into “her” new big house in Echo Park and meeting her new “giant anjing” (dog)! She felt soooo out of place, especially with all my kind, solicitous LA friends, all being gray-haired, all thirty years older than her, and all speaking to her in a language she didn’t understand at all. She had no job, she didn’t drive a car, and we lived on a steep, steep hill. Did I say the learning curve was steep? Did she feel isolated? I’d say so.

“Wati” enrolls in Evans Community Adult School”, the largest English learning school in America, conveniently located right down the street on Sunset Boulevard between Echo Park and downtown LA. Taking classes 4-6 hours a day, she meets fellow immigrants from Senegal, Brazil, Thailand; doctors, lawyers, educated professionals, blue-collar workers, wannabe Americans who study hard, want to learn English, get jobs, become citizens, and send money back home to families, just like generations of immigrants before them, just like my grandparents who entered NYC via Ellis Island, just as immigrant have since the birth of our nation. All living and believing in the “American Dream”. Seeing THIS, makes even this hard-core, skeptical intellectual NY liberal, government-damning Trules - start believing in America again. Start seeing the American Dream alive and well, in action, in the living and breathing present of his wife-to-be, and in all her hard-working immigrant friends.

Soon, Wati has her first job tending bar at a Thai joint near Hollywood Boulevard. She’s recommended, of course, by a pal from Evans, and she serves, so to speak, “under the table”, while it takes me six years to do all the legal immigration work to get her a green card, which eventually will make her a US “permanent resident”. We wait on long lines together in downtown LA on Spring Street at 5 a.m. that wrap around the Federal Building. We attend hard-core interviews with USCIS staffers who ask us “which side of the bed do you sleep on?”, and “where do you keep our toothbrushes?”, just business as usual for an overwhelmed department that’s often being scammed by phony marriages and more than its share of grifters trying to become U.S. permanent residents and citizens.

Along the way, “Wati” becomes “Surya” (her full Indonesian name being “Suryawati” = “girl of the sun”), and bartending leads to restaurant serving at some of the best restaurants in LA, and to catering with Wolfgang Puck, and to serving “Meryl, Beyonce, and Brad” at the Oscars, and to going to x-ray technology school, and to buying her first car (a little red Geo Metro), and to sending her younger sister back in Sumatra to nursing school and onto a self-supporting career in nursing, and most impressively of all, to converting this lone wolf stubborn old man into a - somewhat flexible and amenable, loveable and loving, partner and husband. Impressive indeed. Wouldn’t you agree?

And yeah… we get married.

On Valentine’s Day, 2003. At LA City Hall. With our friend, Todj as our Best Man, our only guest, and as our Greek-fisherman-capped chauffeur. (smiley face)

The World:

2003 — Using a never-verified “weapons of mass destruction” premise as an alibi, President George W. Bush sends American combat troops to invade Iraq, commencing the first stage of the Iraq War.

2004 — Facebook is formed by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard.

2005 — Terrorists hit London, leaving 52 dead and 700 injured.

2007 — The global financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, hits, and Steve Jobs and Apple launch the first iPhone.

2008 — Barack Obama wins the 2008 election, becoming the first African American President in US history, and for perhaps a brief moment in time, Americans, and others all around the planet, believe in his campaign promise of “hope”.

On a slightly delayed honeymoon, Wati and I go to South America right after my academic year ends in May, 2003. We’re lucky to get her a “re-entry permit” from the Department of Homeland Security (USCIS) while her immigration paperwork is in progress over the next six years.

The only problem in going to Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador is that “Mr. Experienced Traveler” (that would be me) forgets that balmy summer in LA, Europe, even China, above the Equator, is actually freezing cold below the Equator in the dead of winter, especially at 12,000 feet above sea level in Cuzco, Peru at ancient Machu Picchu and at 14,000 feet above sea level at storied Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Not to mention the soroche (altitude sickness) we both get, or the tragi-comic, but near-fatal, clash of a new marriage finding itself twisting its way through the Ecuadorian Andes to El Nariz del Diablo (“Nose of the Devil”). We survive three months roughing it in The Andes - barely!

Then, after a year off from travel in 2004 when Greek-capped Todj twists my arm to create a pilot film and video program at Washington Prep High School in South Central LA, I go to Granada, Spain in southern Andalusia in the summer of 2005 to present an “academic paper” on USC’s dime, dancing flamenco with gypsies at night and unwisely crossing over the Morocco border by foot to the mythical North African town of Chefchoauen. The next year, 2006, I also go solo (while Surya stays home in LA to keep her multiple jobs) to Southern India (Mumbai, Kochi, and Kerala), - on an invitation to meet my mysterious German friend Stefan, but he never shows up!

The next summer, 2007, just a year away from a hip replacement, while Beijing prepares for its heralded 2008 Olympics, I somehow miraculously get invited by Willie Tsao, director of the Bejing LDTX Dance Company, the Joffrey of China, to teach a company workshop, and Surya joins me to see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi’an. The high-speed trains are fast and the cities overflow with people. They say if you eat a different kind of local Chinese food for every day for your entire life, you’ll still have tried only a fraction of the varieties of food cooked in China!

In 2009, with a brand new titanium right hip, we visit Cuba, via Jamaica, mon, still a few years before Americans are allowed easy entry to Fidel’s Communist fortress, but the truth is we prefer the happy-go-lucky vibe of the poor Jamaican people to the uptight money-crunched attitude of the desperate Cubans, who actually cancel our bed and breakfast reservation the day of our arrival when another guest offers them more money. The exhaust-fuming antique American cars, the doctors having to drive taxis to survive, the daily loaf of bread Fidel leaves at every compadre’s doorstep… sad.

I know, once again, a lot of miles covered by one Batak (Surya’s Sumatran tribe) and one Ashkenasy (I leave that for you to figure out). If you want to read more, please visit my travel website, “e-travels with e. trules”, where I have many posts on the tales above. And for those of you who might want to listen to some of these stories, please go to my Podcast of the same name.

As for “Why travel?”, as my podcast asks? Why leave the comfort and familiarity of home?

For a change of scenery? A change of pace? For rest and relaxation? Or maybe to push your boundaries? Some new food? For the exotic and different? To discover another land? A different culture’s art, history, ideas?

Or for something else?

What about this?

Travel is an amazing elixir. Enticing, adventurous… mind-altering… even addicting.

Travel expands your consciousness, stretches your horizons; disrupts your habitual patterns and behavior.

Travel broadens your perspective, refreshes your worldview, and hopefully even, cures your myopia.

What do you think?

I think these posts are getting toooooooooooooooooo long.

I’ll stop here and continue in two weeks.

This Decade Project is taking “a while”…..

Hasta la vista, Babies,

Trules

___

If you enjoyed this post, or any previous ones, please LIKE IT (by clicking the Heart), and LEAVE A COMMENT. It continues to help build an enthusiastic and interactive readership.

Also, if you have any friends who you think might enjoy Trules Rules, PLEASE SHARE IT WITH THEM.

Thanks so much!!!

—

Visit “Santa Fe Substack” HERE

Visit my personal blog “Trules Rules” HERE

Travel the world with my “e-travels with e. trules” blog

Listen to my travel PODCAST HERE

Or go to my HOMEPAGE

My Twitter (X)  handle: @etrules

I’m home alone, about to ring in the New Year - 2024! Enjoying, dare I say, my 3-week, enforced bachelorhood, in my 8th decade on planet Earth, while my Indonesian Batak family are back in Sumatra, visiting their birth family for Christmas, no time at alllll - for their Santa Fe Santa Trules.

So why, just hit the highlights of the year — but rather, why not - since I have the time — take a tour — through the decades — mine and America’s — to see what stands out - in my mind - and perhaps — by association, memory, and metaphor - in yours?

Because… believe it or not… I do write these self-centered, narcissistic newsletters/blog posts, not only for my - self — but also — for YOU… thinking that, like any good storyteller, autobiographical, or otherwise, that in the specific details and truths of the personal, “microcosmagical”, perhaps also lie, the boilerplate and truths to the universal and “macrocosmagical” of YOUR LIVES, if you catch my drift….

So ok, here goes…………………….

1940s (0-3 years old)

Ahhhh… I remember the ‘40s well! Born 8/21/1947, it was a hot August day at 4:40 p.m., in Queens Hospital, New Yawk, New York. My parents, GI Joe Trules and his post-WW2 bride, Rocking Roz Rosenberg, were living in the very first suburb in America, “Levittown”, Long Island, eponymously developed by sightseer, Arthur Levitt, exactly 36.2 miles, as the crow flies, from Times Square, midtown Manhattan.

The United States of America, having “defeated the enemy” on two fronts, both the European and Pacific, was now, for the first time in world history, the mightiest nation and empire on earth. Having dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to “end the war”, sure, there was a new Cold War with Russia on the immediate horizon, which the new United Nations could do little about, but American preeminence was on the rise, and bursting Baby Trules and his entire Baby Boom generation would soon both arrogantly and self-centeredly taste this “thrill of victory”, along with its nauseating upchuck of hubris, in the next many decades to come.

1950s (3-13 years old)

It was the button-downed, conservative, “duck and cover” 1950s of Ike Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during WW2, and 34th President of the United States. It was also the one and only “age of innocence” for lil’ ol’ “Errie Trules”, class president of every one of his elementary school classes, usually captains of all the softball teams, teachers’ pets, etc. etc. Just like Eisenhower was a “five-star general”, I was a “five-star student and son”, before, by the end of the decade, I first started to notice “the darkness on the edge of town”.

America was celebrating its WW2 victory with a new stability for its middle class, giving its soldiers back home from the war good jobs, houses, education, loans, and upward mobility. My family was on the ladder up, buying an even better suburban house in Westbury, Long Island, for $18,000 in 1952, and like the rest of the neighbors, having brand new elementary and high schools built for their sons and daughters. Mickey Mantle and the NY Yankees ruled my universe, and the new omnipotent tv, the internet of its day, was filling up our hungry minds with cowboys, Indians, made-for-television drama, live comedy with Milton Berle, Sid Caeser, Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton, along with spoon feeding us insidious PG commercials to brainwash us to buy Coca Cola, Alka Seltzer, Frosted Flakes, Marlboros, Chevrolets, Fords, and yes, even Barbies.

I think 5th grade was the highlight of my young mid-50s life. I was 11 years old, in Miss Ann Lockledge’s class at Salisbury Elementary School, just a three-minute stroll, or quick sprint, straight up Valentines Road, where we lived in our 3-bedroom brick ranch house. Miss Lockledge was a first-time teacher who looked a lot like Howdy Doody, the wildly-popular, freckled-faced, wooden tv puppet with human sidekicks, “Buffalo Bob” and Clarabell, the Clown, who I watched every day after school. Miss Lockledge had curly red hair and glasses, and she was a sucker, I’m afraid to say, all too easy to take advantage of, for us wise-ass suburban Jewish kids.

One day Richard Franks got out of hand and threw a black hightop Converse sneaker to the front of the room. It hit Miss Lockledge in the face, broke her glasses, and she started to cry. The room went dead silent. In a heartbeat, the Principal, Mr. O’Farrell came in and took me and Richard Franks to his office. Why me? Oh, did I say, I was the ringleader?

My favorite thing though, was to stand in front of my house, on Valentines Road, every day after school, to wave to Miss Lockledge, as she drove home from Salisbury, in her 1956 green and white Chevy Bel Air convertible. She’d wave back. Just like Howdy Doody. So cooool.

1960s (13-23 years old)

It was all over by the time I was thirteen. With my dreaded and hated Bar Mitzvah! The one I never wanted. Because I didn’t have any girls to invite to the big reception after the service at Temple Sholom where I “became a man”. And because of the stupidity of Hebrew school, never teaching us what one frigging word meant in English!

Are you sure you don’t want a Bar Mitzvah, son? You may come to regret it?

I’m positive! I’m just doing it for the both of you!

Yet another case of me being the good, good boy, of pleasing my parents. No voice of my own. Something I would be sure to correct for the next many many decades!

By the end of 6th grade, also thirteen, I was separated out of the general student population, and “put in with the smart kids”, something that I would definitely regret for the rest of my young life.

I don’t care about how smart I am, Mom. I’m gonna lose all my friends. They’ll never talk to me anymore.

Are you sure? It’ll be very good for you. So many opportunities….

Yeah, I’m positive. I don’t want to have to take all my classes with Nicky Bloomberg with the Coke-bottle glasses. Please don’t make me! (Even then, I guess I had something against Coca Cola!)

But in the end, I was a “good boy”, needing to please my parents; I did just what they desired.

And when I graduated high school in 1965, even then, I bitterly went to the cheap, State University (at Buffalo), when all I was groomed for, and encouraged to do, was to apply, and go to, an Ivy League school. Brown, Columbia, Princeton? No, for not me, the parent-pleasing, “good boy”! Forgeddaboutit! Not in the cards.

Instead, I got angry. Very very angry.

And that’s primarily what I remember about the 1960s…. my anger… until… I cut the umbilical cord and ran away from home. Several years later….

But I was in line with the times, wasn’t I?

“The times, which were ‘a changin’.”

After JFK got shot in 1963.

Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Cassius Clay, soon to become Muhammad Ali, all my end-of-childhood “heroes”.

By 1967, I had dropped my pre-med program at college along with my family’s wish for me to become “their son, the doctah”.

Instead, I “turned on, tuned in and dropped out”, as Timothy Leary preached back in the day.

The war in Vietnam dominated the political and cultural consciousness of the mid to late 60s, as did protest, alternative culture, and “sex, drugs, & rock ‘n roll”. I watched the Summer of Love, Flower Power, the promise of peace, civil and women’s rights, and so much more… turn sadly and violently into Malcolm’s, Martin’s, and Bobby’s assassinations in 1968…

…and instead of going to my college graduation in 1969, I crossed Niagara Falls and lost my much-belated virginity in a rooming house in Toronto, Canada.

As college graduation hurried past me and with the end of the decade looming ominously in front, with all my former high school friends going safely to either law or medical school, having just voted for Eldridge Cleaver in my first presidential election, I had the huge movie poster of a dazed, aimless Dustin Hoffman from the film “The Graduate” tacked on my old childhood bedroom door, and it was presciently clear that I had “no direction known” punched as my ticket to ride into my chaotically unknown future.

1970s (23-33 years old)

Then things changed.

On the first day of spring, 1970, I packed up all my road-worthy belongings into a green army duffle bag, and along with the $850 I had buried away from my hated 13-year-od Bar Mitzvah, I traveled up and down America “like it was one big map”. In a right rear fender, camouflaged-painted, 1964 Pontiac Tempest named “Wolfie” - who took me from the Bowery and Delancey in Lower Manhattan, to still bomb-dropping Washington DC, to the hanging Spanish moss of Savannah, Georgia, to Papa Hemmingway’s Florida Keys, to Selma “Bloody Sunday” Alabama, back up to Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, to Louisville, Kentucky (to see the home of “The Greatest”), and to every place in between that I had ever heard of, without ever knowing where I would rest my near-hippie, Jewfro-ed head, from one night to the other. Gas was $.33/gallon in 1970, and it was a “groovy and far out time”, one when I could pull into any random coffee shop in almost any “long-hair part of town” in America, and find myself a free place to stay for the night, or for probably as long I’d like.

This was a wild and wooly ride for a still-naive young Trules. When I first fell in love with travel. When I first found myself a capable, fun-lovin’ and “freewheelin’” creative improviser. Because before college graduation, and the miracle of marijuana “expanding my mind”, I was quite the opposite. I’d never taken a dance step, sang a note, or ignited a creative fire in my life. Rather, like my parents’ generation, and ol’ Ike Eisenhower himself, I was completely “buttoned down” - repressed, inhibited, and follow-the-rules, uncreative. I was also, perhaps unknown to myself, a volcano waiting to erupt and explode… too long the “good boy” who really didn’t know, and who was never encouraged to learn… who the hell I really was. But then pot… which finally allowed me to let go and open my mind, and which gave me the courage to drop my plans for medical school, and now - hitting the road - finally… set me… freeeeee.

And so… after over four, wildly-unpredictable and risk-taking months on the road, without contacting my family, former friends, or anyone I had ever known (there were rumors I was dead or selling drugs in New York’s East Village), I ended up in The Windy City, The City of Big Shoulders, Chicago, Illinois.

And it was there… that my life took a radical turn.

I met Shirley Mordine and The Dance Troupe in residence at Columbia College at 1725 Wells Street in Old Town.

Shirley was my first, and perhaps my only, mentor in life.

Shirley gave me this gift - by inviting me to take her dance-theater workshop on Wells Street in the summer of 1970. And by inviting me to join her professional Dance Troupe. Sure, she must have been desperate to take a chance on me, a twenty-two-year-old volcano waiting to erupt with almost no dance experience. But then again, she had just lost her one and only male dancer, and I’m sure, male modern dancers were very hard to find in 1970, as they still may be in 2023. But accident, incident, and perhaps fate (if you believe in it), and definitely, synchronicity – Shirley losing Mitch and my passing through Chicago at exactly that moment – are the precise moments that make for a life story. And also the moment, in retrospect, for which I’ll be forever grateful.

But to discover myself… a “modern dancer”… was… and still is… absolutely unbelievable to me. It’s like going to sleep one day as a repressed adolescent and waking up… someone else – on another planet. Say like, going to sleep on the planet Earth, and waking up on the planet Mars. Or perhaps like going to sleep as Rip Van Winkle one day and waking up twenty years later and – not recognizing anything about yourself or the world about you.

Suddenly, my 20s, the 1970s, became about “being an artist”. Taking company dance classes every day. Graham and Cunningham modern technique. Ballet barre. Company rehearsals every day. Teaching dance and theater classes for Columbia College Chicago every evening. Getting paid for it! Performing in public. Getting reviewed (positively) in the “Chicago Tribune” and “The Chicago Reader”. Leaving Shirley’s company in 1974 and co-founding “MoMing”, the best-known dance-theater in Chicago in the 70s, one of the City’s “Heavy 75”. Learning to choreograph, direct, produce, apply for and get grants (city, state and federal), growing up and becoming a young adult with a wild and wooly, free-wheelin’ sex life.

I hardly knew what was going on in “the real world”. The Vietnam War came to an end. Nixon got caught with his hands all over Watergate and was forced to resign the Presidency. I watched that! The end of the civil rights movement, the birth of the gay liberation movement. More Cold War, the passing of “Roe v Wade”, Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the UK, the breakup of the Beatles, the emergence of punk and disco, the death of Elvis… what else did I miss?

I had my first live-in girlfriend in 1972. I was a terrible boyfriend. I wasn’t capable of loyalty or love. What were they? I had too much high school and college social awkwardness to make up for. Too much sexual and creative repression to compensate for. I remember the incestuous and polygamous fabric of the time when we all slept with each other, our students, our friends, our friends’ wives, and any attractive and willing waitresses on Lincoln Avenue, usually not at the same time, but usually and eventually, to deleterious effect.

Women were newly empowered in the early 70s, gay people were coming out by the drove, and there was no AIDS menace yet on the horizon. I remember getting more than one woman pregnant, and watching more than one go through the awkwardness and pain of abortion, yet feeling no shame at the time. Years later, losing my fertility to Stage 3 lymphatic cancer and chemotherapy, I often think of the word “karma”.

But those were my 1970s in Chicago. Wild and wooly indeed. My coming of age. A young man in tune with his changing times. A portrait of an artist in search of himself.

I think I’ll pause here before I gallop off through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, and arrive here at the 2020s.

Maybe I’ll post Part 2 in a week, instead of waiting the full 2 weeks.

I hope that maybe I stirred some Decade-Recall of YOUR OWN.

Let me know if I did.

In the meantime, HAVE A GREAT HAPPY AND HEALTHY 2024!!!!

If you enjoyed this post, or any previous ones, please LIKE IT (by clicking the Heart), and LEAVE A COMMENT. It continues to help build an enthusiastic and interactive readership.

Also, if you have any friends who you think might enjoy Santa Fe Substack, PLEASE SHARE IT WITH THEM.

ALSO, a REMINDER, to CHECK OUT “TRULES RULES on SUBSTACK” with over 100 posts and re-posts of “rants, raves, reports, and points of view + top-rated travel podcasts and some common sense”.

Thanks so much!!!

Trules

—-

Visit “Trules Rules” on Substack HERE

Visit my personal blog “Trules Rules” HERE

Travel the world with my “e-travels with e. trules” blog

Listen to my travel PODCAST HERE

Or go to my HOMEPAGE

My Twitter (X)  handle: @etrules

I hope that my previous post jarred some Decade Recall of your own. If yes, but you haven’t yet left a comment, please do!

Today, I’ll march on ahead… through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, all the way up to the present, the 2020s. A little ambitious, but let’s see!

That’ll make 8 decades on the planet for yours Trulesly. Many more years than my generation was ever thinking when we boldly proclaimed,

Never trust anyone over 30!

Well, that ship sailed… many decades ago.

What is it now?

Never trust anyone over 100?

Anyway, it’s time to get back to Chicago, 1977… when I finally split “The Second City” after seven years as “a dancing fool”… and made it back to my native New York… for a unique five-year window.. that I’d like to give its own spotlight, straddling the decades so clearly on its own, between the late 70s and the early 80s, back in the Big Apple, between my stints in Chicago and LA.

1977-1982 (30-35 years old)

I didn’t mention that before I left Chicago I became… sort of a notorious public fool. That’s me/him, above. “Gino Cumeezi”. Not a circus-type clown, but more a self-taught, Chaplinesque, improvising silent one, who created my own movement-based style and technique, and brought it out in public, not for pass-the-hat “busking”, but for “free public laughs”. That’s what I called it, the kind of outrageous, rule-breaking, mores-challenging “clowning” that first I, and then my whole troupe, did - on subways, street corners, baseball stadiums in Chicago, and then on ferries (Staten Island), beaches (Coney Island), and in marquetas (Spanish Harlem), department stores (Bloomingdales), hotels (The Plaza), cruise ships (QE2), discos (Studio 54), and at festivals (Lincoln Center), once I had a 2nd “clown company” in New York.

I developed “Cumeezi” in Chicago but he was indeed my “ticket to ride” when I first moved back to Manhattan in 1977, straight into the formerly elegant, now seedy, residential Hotel Woodward (click to listen to the entertaining podcast episode) at 55th and Broadway, for $55/week, around the corner from the Carnegie Deli with the best corned beef in New Yawk.

It turned out that in the Spring of 1977 (of course I left Chicago on the 1st day of Spring), there were 17 candidates running for Mayor of the Big Apple (NYC), all of whom tried to coerce Gino into their campaigns whenever they’d see him, which would be frequently since I was “clowning” every day for self-discipline. (Once a dancer, always a dancer.) That pissed me/Gino off… so… I/he decided to run for Mayor himself!

Gino was supported by Norman Cousins (editor of the “Saturday Review”), Bob Dylan, Anthony Bourdain, as well as many other outlaws and mavericks, and he finished “5th out of 4 candidates”! (Haha, get it?)

And once he/we (The Cumeezi Bozo Ensemble) were covered by the “NY Post”, the “New York Times”, and featured in “The Talk of the Town” in “The New Yorker”, we were invited to tour Holland, Switzerland, and France in 1979, the only problem being - I came back homeless and had to live in a bathroom-less rooming house on “Toity-Toid & Toid”, until, in 1980, when my Ukrainian Grandpa Meyer died and left me $5000, all of which I put down as ”key money” for a “Cumeezi loft” (home for my clown company) on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South, directly above the IRT #6 subway stop and donut shop, right in the building’s lobby.

Ahhhh, those were the days…..

What was going on outside the world of Cumeezi I hardly knew. In 1979, the U.S. and China established full diplomatic relations, and the U.S. experienced its most serious nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island. A diplomatic standoff between Iran and America also began in 1979, when 52 American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It helped Ronald Reagan beat the embattled Jimmy Carter, and during Reagan’s time in office, the top income tax rate fell from 70 percent to 28 percent and the national debt tripled. Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980, Sandra Day O'Connor became the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and a rally against nuclear weapons drew 750,000 to New York City. Gino wasn’t there.

I studied acting with Lee Strasberg and directing with Nicholas Ray (“Rebel Without a Cause”), did some off-Broadway theater and some soap opera acting, and I made my weekly Woodward rent “re-selling” half-price Broadway show tickets from the TKTS booth on 47th Street & Times Square for full price by standing in front of the theater du jour with a long face saying,

Can anyone use a couple of extra tickets? My girlfriend got sick and I have two great seats I can’t use…

…which of course, my girlfriend didn’t, but the tickets were.

Thereby… allowing me to sell ten pair of the half-price TKTS at full price on any given Sunday afternoon at The Wiz, on a good day, and come home with say, $300 cash, more than enough for my $55/week rent…

…until… the theater managers got wise to my act… and the TKTS booth began to print on the back of every ticket:

Half-price tickets. NOT FOR RE-SALE.

Effectively, putting me out of bidness.

I had to ramp up the clown business - applying for more grants and getting more commercial gigs - but ended up giving away more than half of the company’s income to accountants, managers, lawyers, agents, and Indian Chiefs… all with greedy, beady dollar bills for eyeballs…. all living off the hard work and sweat… of silent Cumeezi clowns.

Not surprisingly, clowning became less and less fun, and I fled the Big Apple and the non-profit arts world for good in November 1982, flying out to LA on just two legs for the first time in over a decade. I had finally decided to give up trying to support a multi-tentacled dance or clown company of ten - to try seeing what the world would be like breathing on my own….

1982-1990 (35-43 years old)

I arrived late one night at LAX at the end of November 1982, took a taxi through the twinkling dark of Los Angeles’ ribboned freeway maze - directly to my friend, Dolores’, oceanfront condo on Bicknell Street in Santa Monica, and woke up at daybreak the next morning to the bright sun, blue sky, and crashing waves of the glorious Pacific.

Welcome to LA!

…where I’d spend the next 40 years.

Residentially, I lucked out. My quirky loner cousin, Laird, lived in a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment at 1311 Berkeley Street, thirty-one blocks from the Ocean, between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, in sort of a boring white bread characterless neighborhood, but… after letting me “crash on his couch” for a month, he decided to “move back East” with his parents, Daisy May and Uncle Herbie… leaving me… the unwritten rent-controlled lucky lessee, paying $278/month for the next frugal ten years. Oh, the rent eventually did go up to $358/month.

Meanwhile, I was subletting my Cumeezi loft in Manhattan to various subtenants for income to live on for my first several years in LA, until one smart, greedy one sued me for “treble damages - meaning I owed them three times the difference between what I was paying my absentee NY landlord and what they, the sublessees, were paying me, meaning… I had to give up the ghost (the “cash cow”).

But I was never at a loss for hustles, and so while I was hustling myself as a wannabe “Hollywood actah”, and an aspiring “movie directah”, I came up with another nefarious scheme to “collect”, and then sell back to Hollywood itself, a list of all the names of the people in “development”, the executives and subordinates who the producers and actual Hollywood “machas” (bigshots) hired to make their way through their piles of submitted scripts, and choose the ones to recommend and pass upward.

For some odd reason, when I got to town, there was no such list. Perhaps the info was too “well-kept”… too secretive… thereby making my new little “publishing biz” more than a little dicey, since I “came by” the names of these development people in rather “offbeat”, some might say, possibly “criminal” ways, and I then proceeded to copy them illegally at Universal Studios late at night, by the thousands, until… one night, the cagey Sheriff of Beverly Hills decided to “meet me” at the Xerox machine, haul me off to jail, and charge me with “commercial burglary”, the same charge my actual, career-criminal, Uncle Harvey Rosenberg, was charged with… before I made a film about the two of us, called “The Poet and The Con” in 1990. (more later)

What could be more interesting than this in “the real world”? A Libyan oil embargo? A ground-breaking ceremony for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial? A 1983 United States embassy bombing in Beirut that killed 63 people? Michael Jackson’s Thriller album going to #1 on the US Billboard charts for 37 weeks, setting a world record for staying at number 1? Time Magazine publishing their first typo when ‘contol’ rather than ‘control’ is printed on the front cover and all issues are recalled by the publisher? Arcade game Mario Bros., produced by Nintendo, being released in Japan, paving the way for future Mario games to become Nintendo’s “greatest” creation worldwide? The assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi? The 1984 Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles? The original Macintosh computer? The hearings in the Iran-Contra affair, the re-opening of the Statue of Liberty, the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the Soviet Nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploding in 1986? What do you think?

In any event, perhaps it was my “reputation” that preceded me which… in 1986… got me hired to profess (teach) at USC’s (University of Southern California, the largest private employer in southern California) School of Theater. Well… not my reputation as a “commercial burglar” (mercifully the charge got dropped by the studio), but rather, my reputation as a theater director around LA’s “Equity Waiver” theater community, where I directed a few plays with high profile “soap stars” that got me some attention.

I started with just one “improv” class, which I agreed to teach - without ever having taught or studied it before. Of course, I had been an improvising dancer, clown, and traveler ever since 1970, but “theater games”, Viola Spolin, Paul Sills, Second City, The Groundlings in LA, home to future Saturday Night Live stars, what/who were they? I certainly didn’t know. But I’m also sure that I wasn’t the first fool who ever said yes to a job offer when he didn’t know the first thing about how to do it.

You might say… I learned “on the job”. It would take me 3-4 days to plan a single 2-hour class… which in my own opinion, never turned out all that well. But I was diligent, dedicated, and hard-working. And hey, I was a former professional modern dancer and clown, who had made up my own teaching techniques in both. How hard could teaching another college class be?

Hard.

The hardest part was making up the 14-week sequence of classes, “the syllabus”, something that made sense for a whole semester. Like writing a screenplay, it’s easy to start, but unless you know where it’s going; in fact, unless, you know the whole structure and how/where the story is going to end, you’ll most likely get lost and founder. Same with a college class. It needs structure. One class needs to follow the other and they all need to add up to a “course” that makes sense and pays off. Well… that took time. Perhaps, a few years.

But… the students liked me. “They really, really liked me.” Even at first. And my one Improv class immediately became two, and soon five… per semester… which… not only theater students took… but also… thousands of other students from all across the University. Film students, science students, an improbable number of Asian students, engineers, philosophers, musicians, pre-doctors and dentists, anyone and everyone who wanted to lose their self-consciousness, discover their own voices, become more creative, learn how to take risks, and be more themselves.

My improv class became notorious, with some famous alums, followed by the first “solo performance” class in academia, then a class on “self-expression and creativity”, and “Discover LA”, and “Bob Dylan & the 60s”, and the “Life & Times of Gordon Davidson”, and they all filled up my days, from September to December, and from January through May. Eventually, professing full-time made me give up my auditions altogether (actually, I wasn’t all that good), and even my ambition to “make it” in Hollywood, while it still afforded me more than enough time to support myself as “an artist” and travel the world once or twice a year. I was indeed, a lucky man. For 31 years.

In 1988, the Soviets finally left Afghanistan after eight frustrating and pointless years, from which our own country learned, seemingly nothing. In 1989, George H. W. Bush was sworn in as the 41st president of the United States. The same year, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissolved under Mikhail Gorbachev, while the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing and the brutal Chinese Communist response happened almost simultaneously.

In 1988, I did my first 1-man show, “Down… But Not Out”, at two theaters in LA. It received an excellent review in The LA Times and I was invited to bring it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland where it was “shortlisted” for best show of the Fringe by London’s “Independent”. The “Edinburgh Scotsman” said:

Trules is an accomplished writer; he has both a feel for contemporary idiom and a poetic imagination that echoes the great American playwrights.

Edinburgh was a highlight of my artistic life, although being recognized outside my own city and country was nothing less than, what can I say, ironic.

I was supposed to go back to Edinburgh the next year, 1989, with my next solo show, but life… had other plans for me.

On April 7, 1989, my sister Alison’s birthday, Dr. Dan Lieber, my gentle hematologist-oncologist called me on the phone with the results of a biopsy from a small protruding node on the right side of my neck.

I’m sorry, Eric, the results are positive. You have stage 3 Hodgkin’s Disease, cancer of the lymphatic system.

I was 41 years old.

They say cancer is the “disease of despair”.

What did I know? I was scared. Dr. Dan told me I needed to receive 6 months of chemotherapy. A dayglo red-blue-green concoction of MOPP/ABV, a protocol involving two, highly toxic, injectable drugs (mustargen and vincristine) while sitting in a dental chair), along with two oral medications (prednisone and procarbazine) taken at home. What fun!

I lost 30 pounds and all my hair, and because I didn’t store my semen early enough before the first round of treatment, I became sterile. I had “cancerous lymph nodes the size of grapefruits all through my abdomen and thorax”.

Many “friends” avoided me like the plague. Some total strangers became “my best friends”. I didn’t want to see my parents in Walnut Creek (San Francisco area) because I didn’t want to feel like “I had to take care of them.”

But I was lucky. The chemo started working quickly. And whereas just a generation before, Mickey Mantle’s (my boyhood NY Yankees baseball hero) entire male family had been wiped out by lymphoma, now MOPP/ABV had a 90% cure rate.

And so… after just 2 months of chemo, my tumors were tremendously reduced in size, and I was driving my little red MG convertible around the toney streets of Santa Monica, warming my shiny bald head in the sun, feeling all the beauty in my life, and how much “I was loved”.

Miraculously, cancer turned out to be “the best thing that ever happened to me”!! It shook me up, turned me inside out, and made me face my own mortality.

One day in the middle of chemo, I went to see the Dali Lama at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. There were hundreds of his “hungry ghost” devotees lined up to receive his ten-second blessing. I stood in line with them for about five minutes, then… I walked out, alone…. preferring to just lie in the green-green grass outside, lying on my back, staring up at the blue-blue sky, feeling self-fulfilled, grateful, and loved by the universe.

Grateful - to still be alive.

I’m afraid I’ve been overly ambitious. Trying to cram too many decades into too few posts. So… rather than get another email from my ever-supportive sister,

Your Substacks are toooooo long. I don’t have time to read them. Can’t you make them shorter?

I suppose I should stop here and hope you’ll return for the 90s!!!

Let me know what you think.

The Bataks are back from Indonesia!

And I’m a bachelor no more….

Trules

—-

If you enjoyed this post, or any previous ones, please LIKE IT (by clicking the Heart), and LEAVE A COMMENT. It continues to help build an enthusiastic and interactive readership.

Also, if you have any friends who you think might enjoy Santa Fe Substack, PLEASE SHARE IT WITH THEM.

ALSO, a REMINDER, to CHECK OUT “TRULES RULES on SUBSTACK” with over 100 posts and re-posts of “rants, raves, reports, and points of view + top-rated travel podcasts and some common sense”.

Thanks so much!!!

—

Visit “Trules Rules” on Substack HERE

Visit my personal blog “Trules Rules” HERE

Travel the world with my “e-travels with e. trules” blog

Listen to my travel PODCAST HERE

Or go to my HOMEPAGE

My Twitter (X)  handle: @etrules

Be sure to scroll down to the end of this post to read my HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY.

According to Wikipedia,

The 1990s is often remembered as a decade of relative peace and prosperity: The Soviet Union crumbled, ending the decades-long Cold War, and the rise of the Internet ushered in a radical new era of communication, business and entertainment.

(Plagiarism, Trules, how dare you!!??)

In any event, I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification, don’t you, Wiki?

1990 - 2000 (43 -53 years old)

At 43 years old, “Professor Trules” (that would be me) returns to his/my job at USC, teaching theater at “the great university”. A good number of my colleagues don’t even recognize me - probably because my “Jewfro” has been replaced with a shiny bald pate, I’ve lost thirty pounds from chemo, and there’s a broad smile on my face. Hell, I’m grateful to be alive. My students, no problem, I have a brand new slewful every semester. They don’t need to recognize “ol Prof Trules”, they just need to meet this funny new, bald skinny guy.

But having survived cancer, I’m now “back on the carousel of life”. What next?

What’s most important to me is “to hold onto” what my Hodgkin’s has shown me, not just let it fade into the dusty bin of memory and personal history. It had been so easy and organic to experience it during the chemotherapy, unavoidable, so much physical trauma and emotional duress on my body and soul. But now that I’m “in remission” how can I still appreciate all the “love” that I experienced and shared? Cancer and my treatment had torn me open, my mind, my heart, my spirit; it had forced me to let go of a lifetime of anger. Amazingly, I had fallen in love, with my acupuncturist, Carrie, in the middle of my treatment, but I already knew that now that I “was better”, the relationship wouldn’t last. The last thing I wanted to do, was to get back on the same treadmill I’d been on before my diagnosis. But how to live with an open heart?

In 1990, my friend, Ed Couppee, an aspiring filmmaker, comes to me and says,

Trules, I want to make my own short documentary film. You’re the most interesting person I know. I want to make a short film about you. What do you say?

I’m surprised, and not. Most things in life have come to me this way. Never of my own volition or initiative, but more out of someone’s, or the universe’s, unexpected invitation.

But I say,

I don’t know, Ed. I flattered but I’m just recovering from cancer. I don’t know if I can handle being the center of a whole film.

Ed looks surprised, knowing my “narcissistic inclinations”.

But I have an idea, Ed. I have this Uncle, Harvey, my mother’s youngest brother. He’s been an outlaw, a convicted criminal. He just got released from prison to a halfway house in downtown LA. I’ve been seeing a lot of him. What do you think about making a film about the two of us? The connection between the artist and the criminal? The poet and the con?

Ed agrees. We start shooting on 16 mm film stock in black and white.

The footage is riveting and we edit together a short 25-minute film - about how Harvey and I identify with one another. About how Harvey, being a neglected, unexpected last-born child, had to “find himself” on the hard-scrabble streets of New York, and then as an “enforcer” for organized crime. How he actually knew Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, kingpins of the Jewish Mafia. Hell, that’s like knowing Jesse James and John Dillinger, public enemies Number One.

And Harvey, he always says about me,

I know there’s a star in the sky with your name on it.

We romanticize each other’s lives.

Everyone in our film crew loves Harvey.

Until… he suddenly disappears…

…is profiled on America’s Most Wanted…

…for the 1982 unsolved murder of Hollywood actor-goodfella, Frank Cristi, who had been found dead outside his LA apartment, apparently the victim of a hired “hit” by the husband of one of Cristi’s ex-lovers. Now, having “been on the trail” for more than a decade, the LA Police Department leads them to my Uncle and his two professional jewelry thief partners, who were, at the time of the murder, desperate and strung out enough on cocaine, to “do the job”.

Harvey becomes a fugitive, living scared, by his wits, in tents, from town to town. I don’t hear from him for months.

This… after finally having turned his life around at almost 60 years old, having served time for all his previous crimes, having found “redemption”, gone back to UCLA to become a drug and alcohol abuse counselor, having shot our film, now… after all this… here is his murderous past coming back to catch up with him - again.

Exhausted and sick, Harvey finally turns himself in Oxnard, California in 1993. He and his two partners are brought to trial in Judge Lance Ito’s LA courtroom just before Judge Ito goes on to adjudicate the infamous OJ Simpson trial. In a mournful and painful testimony, Harvey confesses to being an accessory to the murder (not actually having shot Cristi), but he is found guilty and sentenced back to prison.

However, before he serves his time, he is released to a hospice to die - from lung cancer. In 1994. It’s sad, to say the least. My family, especially, my mother, who has “enabled” Harvey his entire life, forgiving him his every crime, trying but inevitably failing to help him, attends his memorial in LA but they ask me not to film it.

I finish the film, “The Poet and the Con”, by myself, without Ed, in 1998, eight years after we began. It’s been a long and arduous journey. I premier it at a prestigious international documentary film festival in Nyon, Switzerland, and show it at several other festivals around the world. It doesn’t win an Oscar, but gets a full-page spread in the LA Times, and you can find it on Amazon Prime or Chai Flicks. I don’t make any more documentary films; eight years was long enough.

The early 1990s? The world at large? The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the biggest event of the new decade, after economic stagnation set the stage for its collapse, including overspending on the military, overdependence on heavy industry, and lack of free-market mechanisms. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of toleration and openness to nationalist and dissident sentiments (glasnost and perestroika) led to Lithuania becoming the first Soviet member state to leave the Union by declaring its independence in March, 1990, with Latvia and Estonia following in September. German reunification took place in October, 1990. Just before, Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and The Gulf War erupted immediately following.

On a more positive note in the early 90s, a computer scientist at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee, having first developed the World Wide Web (www) in 1989, was responsible for more widely birthing “the Internet”, which surprisingly, remained a curiosity until 1994, when the introduction of Netscape and JavaScript made it more far more accessible. Then with Microsoft’s development of Internet Explorer, the explosion of the Internet went into high gear, and as we all know, it has since “changed the world”!

Ethnic cleansing and genocide marked the Yugoslav Wars from 1991-95, the bloodiest war Europe had seen since WWII. Official estimates place the death toll between 130,000 and 140,000, with another 4 million people forced to leave their homes by the fighting. The war saw deliberate acts of genocide, particularly by Serbs and Montenegrins against Bosnians. The Serbs also ethnically cleansed Muslims, driving an estimated 700,000 people out of Kosovo to secure their hold on the region. The Croats also committed ethnic cleansing, similarly expelling Serbs from Croatia with the goal of a purely Croat state.

While another, the Rwandan genocide, took place in 1994, it was also that year that finally saw apartheid come to an end in South Africa, when Nelson Mandela, after spending 27 years in prison, was elected the first black President of his country. In America, the LA “riots” took place in 1992 in response to the Rodney King beating, and in 1995 there was the notorious Oklahoma City bombing, and ex-football player O.J. Simpson went on trial for murder.

Genocide, war, ethnic cleansing… the end of apartheid, the birth of the internet, I must say… they do have a way of putting one’s own life in… humble perspective.

In 1993, after ten years of living in boring, white-bread Santa Monica, I decide it’s time to move… to the “other side of town”… to artist-bohemian, gang-banging, “red”-baiting, revolutionary and rebel Echo Park… where at the time, it’s impossible to tell the difference between the after-game fireworks at nearby Dodger Stadium nestled in corporate Chavez Ravine — and the gunshots fired by the Locos, the Crazys, the Frogtown Rifa, the Head Hunters, or any of the other local Latino gangs - any time after dark - from the hills and ravines of Elysian Park.

Trules, are you out of your mind? Why are you leaving the comfort and safety of beautiful Santa Monica for the danger and terror of the Eastside?

Character, man. Character!

And I guess that’s exactly what it is. Echo Park has “character”, spunk, heart, diversity, aliveness. And I guess that’s who I am circa 1993, an LA “character,” specifically an “Echo Park character” - one with a good job at USC, who can write and present his own 1-man shows, produce and direct his own documentary films, produce city-wide arts festivals, and possibly do anything else I dream up outside the Hollywood system - that is - with a little help from my artist friends, some city, state, and federal grants that I seem to be pretty good at writing, and a lot of good old-fashioned New Yawk chutzpah.

Anyway… me and my best LA friend, Todj Mondayla, after a little “vision questing” retreat at La Fonda, the best “hotel” on the West coast of northern Baja, where Greek proprietor extraordinaire, Dymyti, invites you into his little casita to drink out of his custom-distilled mezcal bottle with the worm still at the bottom of the bottle, Todj and I manage to find (with the help of our deep bass-singing friend Charlie D) the most wonderful house in the old hills of Echo Park, once known as “Edendale”, where Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin himself, invented slapstick comedy and silent films.

Of course, I’m talking about, “Lucretia Gardens”, the house I bamboozled myself into thinking was really mine, on the rim of “Elysian Heights” (the hills above Echo Park), with a 270-degree view of downtown LA, the Pacific Ocean on the West, the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Observatory straight over the back deck, and the misty San Gabriel Mountains to the East. But of course, it’s not mine at all, I just foolhardily rent it for 30 years - as you’ve heard me painfully tell before - although mostly happily for the first 25, and Surya, my one-day Indonesian wife, will join me there in 2001, as will our adopted son, Exsel, in 2015. And on another day, far away in the distant future, in 2022, as you may have also read before, I comically and with utmost incident, drag my family and my own reticent ass, out of my beloved Echo Park and the heights of Elysian -

- to the sacred hills of Santa Fe.

But life.. and time.. don’t stand still. Even in the old, now quickly gentrifying, Hollywood Hills of LA. Things… change. People, their ideas, ambitions, needs… evolve. Even those of stubborn, set-in-their-ways, crusty middle-agers. Like yours Trulesly.

By 1995, I’ve finished producing my last government-funded artistic project, a city-wide solo festival at CBS Studios, along with the third of my three solo shows, It’s the Day after Valentine’s Day. I’m going back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with the show at the end of the summer, but… I’m tired. I’m burned out and exhausted being a self-initiator, a self-producer, a self-promotor.

I want to be a free man again.

I want to see the world.

And so… I do.

Welcome to Servas.

An organization dedicated to world peace, international understanding, and social justice, the idea of Servas grew from a group of people calling themselves "Peacebuilders" in 1949 in Denmark. After the devastation of World War II, American conscientious objector, Bob Luitweiler, and his friends were deeply concerned about the state of the world and came up with the idea of a work-study travel system that made it possible for people from all over the planet to travel more thoughtfully, by visiting the homes of hosts offering voluntary hospitality. For free. At the first international meeting in 1952, the organization was renamed Servas, meaning “we serve” in Esperanto, a language invented in the 19th century to be a kind of “world language”.

By the time I make my first Servas trip in 1995 (all around Scotland before I perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the second time, and afterward, when I continue traveling to the rest of Britain, all of France, and northern Spain), Servas is very well-organized, but still a few years from “cyber ready”. So I have to write letters (you remember those?) to scores of hosts, then wait weeks back for answers, to organize my trip, where I can only stay with each host for 2 nights and 3 days (the Servas protocol). I dare not change my schedule for even a day more of pleasure, improvisation, or inclement weather, otherwise, my whole itinerary will be thrown off. Of course, I’m a pretty disciplined dude (“once a dancer, always a dancer”), so I have no trouble keeping to plan.

Scotland, Britain, France, and Spain, amigos! Generous people who share their cities, homes, and “favorite things” with you - for freeeeee! Now that’s my idea of traveling!

Two years later, 1997, I take my 2nd Servas trip, all through Mexico, 1500 miles from north to south, and then back again to LA, with my LA Pico-Union Chicano mentee, Alejandro. We drive my white Toyota Celica convertible (a true eyesore and target south of the border) east from LA and cross the US-Mexican border at El Paso, Texas, into very “sketchy” Cuidad Juarez, full of crime and trouble to be found. We don’t stop but drive straight through seedy Chihuahua and Saltillo to the mythical old mining town of Real de Catorce, in the sacred peyote hills of the Huichol Indians. “Alex” isn’t quite used to my improvised way of travel where we drive hundreds of miles a day. He’s much more “careful” than I am and likes to wash his dirty socks and underwear each night, but we do find our first Servas host in San Luis Potosi, a beautiful Spanish colonial town where Alex does rise to the occasion and saves my car from being towed away by the policia who settle, instead, for a little mordida (bribe).

We make our way to cobblestoned and Catholic San Miguel de Allende, high-end home of international expats and artistes, where we stay with more Servas hosts, but Alex has reached his Trules travel limit, so I sadly put him on a bus to Guadalajara to spend the rest of the trip with his guitar-making uncle and family. Me? I drive solo, on to historic Dolores Hildago, home of the Mexican Revolution, to quaint colonial Guanajuato, then south to sprawling and monumental Mexico City. Then on to Puebla, where ornate blue and white ceramicas are made, then to indigenous Oaxaca in the south, all the way to the small Mexican Gulf town of Puerto Escondido, where I have no Servas host, but instead stay on the beach in a straw hut with my newly-made beach pimp friend, Quepo. He treats me like royalty, I treat him pretty well too.

The world? Yet another Olympics Games were disrupted with a bombing in Atlanta in 1996. The same year, the Taliban took over Afghanistan by capturing Kabul, and eight climbers died on Mount Everest during a storm, the worst loss of life on the mountain in a single day. In 1997, the 99-year rule of Great Britain over Hong Kong came to an end as it turned the city over to China, also officially ending the multi-century-long history of “the British Empire”. Princess Diana died in a fatal car crash in Paris in 1997, and on August 7, 1998, multiple bombs exploded simultaneously at US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar el Islam, Tanzania, killing a total of 224 people, said to be organized by terrorist Osama bin Laden. On September 4, 1998, Google was founded by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. The same year U.S. President Bill Clinton was impeached over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the “Good Friday Agreement” was reached between Britain and Ireland, which put an end to most of the relentless violence of “The Troubles”. In 1999, the Columbine High School massacre occurred, one of the first major school shootings in the United States. Sorry I don’t have more “good news” to report.

In 1998, as I said above, I premier “The Poet and the Con” in Nyon, Switzerland, fall in love with the Colombian-Parisian festival winner (I didn’t say that part), but somehow manage to take a train alone to Caesar’s and Fellini’s “Eternal City”, Roma. There I’m hosted by the Moravs, Raphael, his wife, Maya, and their two sons, Liran and Eilon, an Israeli diplomatic family, with whom I perhaps overstay my Servas protocol, by them hosting me for six weeks, instead of the prescribed three days and two nights. Hey, they wouldn’t let me go! Of course, I take some diversionary trips from Rome to Florence, Venice, Perugia, the Amalfi Coast, Napoli (Naples), and then I take a ferry to Corleone, Sicily, where I’m made “an offer I can’t refuse” by the last of the Don Corleones. Sorry, I can’t tell you what it was; he swore me to secrecy, at the cost of my life!

The Moravs decide to adopt me into their family and invite me to Jerusalem the next summer when “Raphy” is called home by the Foreign Office. Again. I make a few side trips from there - to Tel Aviv, Haifa, even to the West Bank, all up and down the still-then-safe country of Israel, as well as across both the Jordanian and Egyptian borders, when I memorably go on a 3-day camel safari into the Biblical Sinai Desert with Bedouin guides, where we survive on primitive wood fires and pita bread, just as perhaps Joshua, Moses, and the Wandering Jews did millennium before. Tongue in cheek, I decide it’s the best thing the Israelis and Palestinians can do to find a lasting peace between them. HERE’s the first episode of my travel podcast, describing the camel “Sephari” into the ancient Sinai.

Travel, travel travel. Teach teach teach. Servas Servas Servas.

As the millennium comes to an end, here is one man’s version of the most significant events of the 20th century, somewhat in chronological order, and what can I say, a bit Ameri-centric:

1. The end of “The Gilded Age” in America, political reforms by President Teddy Roosevelt, the curtailment of unbridled individual wealth and corporate monopolies, the rise of labor unions

2. The birth of “modern art” in Paris in the early part of the century

3. The invention of the automobile and its mass production by Henry Ford

4. Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, of the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty forced to abdicate on February 12, 1912. Only six years old at the time, Pu Yi dies in 1967, a gardener for the Chinese Royal Gardens

5. The birth and then boom of Hollywood, soon to make American “movies” the most popular medium on earth

6. The rise of Communism in Russia (later the Soviet Union) and later still, in China

7. World War I, the subsequent establishment of the League of Nations

8. “The Roaring 20s”: Prohibition, Organized Crime, the rise of “American literature” (Hemingway, Fitzgerald etc.)

9. The decline of the British Empire between the 1st and 2nd World Wars, the end of the Ottoman Empire after WWI

10. American women gain the right to vote in 1920

11. The popularity of Babe Ruth and American baseball, leading later to the globalization of American basketball & sports in general

12. Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight in 1927

13. The NY Stock Market Crash of 1929

14. The Great Depression of the 1930s

15. The 4-time election of American President Franklin D. Roosevelt

16. Mahatma Gandhi’s three major campaigns in the Indian Independence Movement, using peaceful “civil disobedience”, result in the independence of India in 1947

17. The rise of Hitler, the German 3rd Reich, & the Nazi Holocaust during WWII

18. World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, and the United States of America becoming a “superpower” after the War

19. The establishment of the United Nations in 1945, the “Last Emperor” of Japan in 1946, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 (I know, 3 different events)

20. “The Cold War” between capitalism and communism, the USA and the USSR

21. Between 1945 and 1960, three dozen new states in Asia and Africa achieve autonomy or outright independence from their European colonial rulers

22. The Korean War in the early 1950s

23. Television replaces radio as the most important source of news and home entertainment

24. The launching of the Russian Sputnik satellites in the 1950s, the “Race to Space”

25. South and Latin America? Read the books of Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan anti-colonial journalist and writer: “The Open Veins of Latin America”, and his beautiful, post-Columbian poetic-historical trilogy, “Memory of Fire”

26. The birth of “Rock ‘n Roll (and the worldwide influence of all American music: blues, jazz, rock, rap)

27. The American Civil Rights Movement culminates in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act

28. “The Louisville Lip” (aka Cassius Marcellus Clay) wins the 1960 Gold Medal in boxing, later changes his name to Muhammad Ali, becoming the most significant athlete of the century

29. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

30. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 (plus Martin, Malcolm, & Bobby in 1968)

31. The “counter-cultural revolution” of the 1960s

32. Landing a man on the moon in 1969

33. The Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s

34. The Watergate scandal and the resignation of American President Richard Nixon, and the subsequent loss of trust between citizens and their political leaders worldwide

35. The growth of “Women’s Lib” and the “LGBT” movements

36. The invention of the World Wide Web (www) in 1989 and the consequent development of the Internet

37. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s

38. The Persian Gulf War in 1991

39. European Union forms November 1993

40. The end of apartheid in South Africa, 1994

41. The Yugoslav Wars from 1991-95

42. What else? What would you add?

Famous one-word names of the century: Einstein, Freud, Babe, Mantle, Mays, Elvis, Elizabeth, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Hindenburg, Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, MacArthur, McCarthy, Truman, Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro, Guevara, Clinton, Gorbachev, Thatcher, Bush, Cheney, Hillary, Diana, Teresa, Evita, Curie, Wright, Lindbergh, Amelia, Houdini, Martin, Malcolm, Bobby, Hoover, Capone, Chaplin, Dylan, Ali, Beatles, Gandhi, Nehru, De Gaulle, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Hirohito, Mandela, Tutu, Farouk, Nasser, Sadat, Nkrumah, Allende, Pinochet, Sadam, Amin, Khadafi, Kim, Khomeini, Suharto, Sukarno, Marcos, Ortega, Selassie, Ben-Gurion, Golda, Begin, Rabin, Peres, Wiesel, Walesa, Debs, Darrow, Brandeis, DuBois, Chavez, Nader, Steinem, Friedan, Keller, Picasso, Dali, Kahlo, O’Keeffe, Warhol, Marilyn, Dietrich, Garbo, Isadora, Valentino, Fairbanks, Pickford, Hepburn, Tracy, Sinatra, Bogart, Brando, Poitier, Pacino, DeNiro, Streep, Kipling, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Beckett, Orwell, Gaudi, Wright, Gehry, Stravinsky, Copland, Gershwin, Bernstein, Cage, Glass, Levitt, Schweitzer, Hawking, Seuss, Miles, Ella, Louie, Duke, Count, Coltrane, Astaire, Balanchine, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Nureyev, Pavlova, Graham, Merce, Baryshnikov, Caruso, Callas, Pavarotti, O’Neill, Tennessee, Miller, Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Pele, Budge, Laver, Borg, McEnroe, Montana, Rice, Unitas, Brown, Payton, Namath, Bradshaw, Butkus, Child, Beard, Edison, Oppenheimer, Tesla, Ford, Mulholland, Disney, Rockefeller, Hefner, Kroc, Sarnoff, Murrow, Paley, Cronkite, Robeson, DiMaggio, Spock, Mead, Dior, Laurent, Chanel, Armani, Bannister, Thorpe, Owens, Phelps, Gretsky, Wilt, Kareem, Magic, Bird, Jordan, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Lucy, Seinfeld, Fonda, Nicholson, Jagger, Marley, Janis, Jimi, Morrison, Madonna, Michael, Tupac, Biggie, Springsteen, Capra, Coppola, Scorsese, Kurasawa, Fellini, Truffaut, Lucas, Spielberg, Schwarzenegger, Gates, Jobs, Oprah.

Who did I leave out?

It was a long century, yes?

Time to sign off as the new Millennium approaches.

Hope you enjoyed the trip.

Best from the Southwest,

Trules

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There was a time - not toooo long ago - probably about 4 winters past - around this same Holiday and Christmas season, when I was still morbidly stuck in the LA desert. I was perhaps 73 years old, had already retired from USC (the over-priced University of Southern California) as a theater professor after 31 years, had gotten married for the first time to an Indonesian woman, also 31 years younger than myself at 55 years old, adopted our 8-year-old Indonesian son at age 68, and was still renting at “Lucretia Gardens” in Echo Park, having been in Los Angeles almost 40 years, over half my life. There must be some magical alchemy in the math, but I must say, it eludes me.

And that was exactly the problem.

I was on my way nowhere. Just holding on “‘til the end”. Hoping I could stay at Lucretia Gardens “forever” where I had scattered my parents’ and dog’s ashes in the gardens below, but I had already read the writing on the walls, loud and clear, from my dying landlady and her inheriting daughter, that,

It was time to go.

And there was the rub.

I had no place to go.

After paying $75/month for my first one-bedroom, petunia-gardened apartment in Chicago when I was a fledgling artist at 22, $125/month for the next one, $55/week for a room at the Hotel Woodward on 55th & Broadway in New Yawk, then $350/month for a beautiful 1100 square foot “clown loft” on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South in my 30s, then $235/month for a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica for 10 years when I first moved to LA in my 40s, then $1100/month for the 3-bedroom Lucretia Gardens hilltop “palace” for 25 years+, I’d say that I had more than used up my “good rental karma”.

Because now in the 2020s? LA rent was exorbitant and far out of reach. To say nothing of the sky-rocketed real estate. And Echo Park in particular? It was one of the most gentrified, hip, and desirable neighborhoods in LA. We had already gotten our eviction notice in the middle of covid and were engaged in a full-out landlord-tenant battle (previously written about). Not that we could afford to buy, or rent, anywhere else in LA. We couldn’t. We were priced out!

It was time to go.

But as I said, I “was stuck”.

So… one sad lonely night, while my wife was out working hard for one Wolfgang Puck or another, and my son was innocently sleeping over at a friend’s house, old “Pak Trules” (that’s what Surya, my wife, and Exsel , my son, call me, “Pak”, with a silent “k”, being an Indonesian word of affection and respect for an elder) drove himself to the toney neighborhood of La Canada-Flintridge. Right near Glenoaks Park, not far from the beautiful Self Realization Fellowship Center.

I often drove into this canyon for both July 4th and New Year’s Eve with both Clay, the Dog, and now his current canine in crime, Cassius, to lose most of the noise and bombast of the fireworks of which they both were and continue to be - terrified.

Tonight, it’s as quiet as a graveyard. All the lovely candy cane houses are laid out in softly-winding, perfectly-designed candy cane lanes… like “they should be” in the perfectly imagined La Canada-Flintridge suburbia. Each modest little house has multi-colored Christmas lights trimming their well-lit windows and their perfectly-manicured outdoor landscaped gardens, and their beautifully-trimmed Christmas trees laugh at me malevolently from their seemingly happy, warm, and oh-so-content living rooms within.

Tough luck, Pak Trules. Too bad you don’t have one of these. A nice little home to call your own.

Yeah, thanks a lot, La Canada. You remind me of my house in Westbury, New York, where I grew up when I was 5 years old. Of the house my GI Joe parents bought after WW2 for $18,000 which is now probably worth more than a million. About your price, right? Or are you preposterously worth double? Do you think I can afford to buy myself a nice little quiet candy cane house like you? Fuck off!

The houses maliciously mock me in unison.

Go take your dawg and crawl back to Echo Park, Trules. You’re never going to own a home of your own. You had your chance, you hippie-non-conformist suckah! You just friggin’ blew it!

Owwww……..

And now it’s almost Christmas, 2023. Somehow, and miraculously, I now live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I flew the coup. I escaped the LA desert and somehow, miraculously, my family and I bought a house here. The first house I ever owned!

Last night, while both my wife, and my son, were working at the Hotel Santa Fe, she as a server, he as a pink-sweatered, Barbie/Ken host, I had some new friends, Nava and Jennifer, come over for some wine, gin and tonics, a roaring fire, and Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain.

It snowed.

Cassius the Dawg, was rambunctious. He wasn’t satisfied with the delicious Thanksgiving leftovers, so… we took him for a walk.

It was colllllld. And snow-fallingly, New Mexican, blizzardly beautiful.

It was a quick walk. Cassius romped in the virgin snow. Nava trembled in his thin “I’m invincible” sweatshirt, Jennifer was “wine-warm”, and I was grateful in my new four-layer, fleece-lined, minus 20-degree, hooded Klondike jacket.

We got back and sat around the fire of crackling pinon logs.

And I sent Nava home with “Mintz’ jacket”, a 40-year-old, trendy army green Eddie Bauer down jacket that my childhood friend, “Mintz”, gave me one winter in Brooklyn, that I had since worn around the globe in frigid places like St. Gallens, Switzerland, Amsterdam, and Moscow, but now Mike Nava would be schussing down the New Mexican slopes in forever more….

I walked my two new friends out the front door of TwinYuccas Lane, and I dusted off two inches of powdery snow from their front and back windshields. Then I walked inside.

Just before I closed the front door, I noticed the house across the street in our cul de sac. It was all lit up in Christmas lights. It looked like a picture postcard, and it looked… very familiar.

It looked like… each of those picture postcard houses near Glenoaks Park in La Canada-Flintridge.

Except I now lived in one myself, across the street.

In one of those modest, perfectly Christmas-lit houses that had laughed mockingly at me - only a few winters ago.

Now I owned one myself. Me and my wife, Surya.

I was shocked. And grateful.

You can see my view of my neighbor’s house - across the expanse of virgin snow - at the top of this post.

Sometimes…. things DO CHANGE…

Thanks for reading Trules Rules!

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It’s good to have you here! I hope you don’t mind my adding you to the mailing list.

Why a 2nd One???

Origin of Trules Rules

Way back when - at the beginning of cyberspace - I started blogging - creating a WordPress blog of the same name, “Trules Rules”. Some, maybe many of you, were on my list. But the times, they have been ‘a changin’, and now Substack has become the contemporary writers’ platform of choice.

So I’ve decided to bring the old WordPress archive here, online, to a new Substack, also called “Trules Rules”, and to add to it, posts not related to my other “Santa Fe Substack”.

You will start receiving updates in your inbox. You can also log in to the website to read the full archives (as well as listen to all the episodes of my travel podcast, “e-travels with e. trules”).

Here’s the LINK.

Here are also a few random sample posts from the more than 100 on “The Stack”:

And hey, if you want me to recommend a post especially for you, please let me know!

Thanks for reading Trules Rules!

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Eric Trules’ Twitter (X)  handle: @etrules

Kharkiv is the 2nd largest city in Ukraine, and it's now being pounded by Russian troops & missiles daily. Ukrainians are fighting desperately for their lives and for the survival of their country.

It's also where my paternal grandfather, Meyer, was born.

I always wanted to, and planned on going there, to see the place my grandfather was from. But I when I finally went to Russia in 2018 to teach theater in Moscow, I didn't have time to go east to Kharkiv.

That’s me, Trules, in “Red Square” in 2019.

And below, you can see in the first of the next two photos- a piece of paper I gave to my grandfather, on his deathbed - in Miami - in 1970. On one side, he signed his name in Russian, and on the other side, he gave me the address of his brother "Mark Truleser" in "Khartov", the home from where he fled in 1917. (I didn't know until this recent war, that he was from the 2nd largest city in Ukraine, "Kharkiv", with a different spelling.)

Like so many immigrants at the early part of the 20th century, Meyer came through Ellis Island, where the immigration officers changed his name and left him with just six letters, "Trules". He met his wife-to-be, Anna, who I never met because she died around the time of my birth, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he worked as a house painter. I still have an ancient trowel that he used to plaster walls back in the day - hanging above my washing machine.

I didn't know my grandfather, Meyer, very well. He was hard of hearing, spoke with a thick "Russian" accent (that’s what we called it “back in my century”, as my son, Exsel, likes to say), and Meyer didn't visit us every weekend in suburban Westbury, Long Island, like my mother's parents, Sally & Murray, who my sister and I called "Nanny & Poppy". They were also from Ukraine, I think from Odessa, and they brought piles of groceries to us every weekend in cardboard boxes from their grocery store in Middle Village, Queens. In contrast, my "Grandpa Meyer" was a hard man.

Even my father and his sister, Daisy May, had a contentious relationship with him, their own father. When he sat down for a meal at the kitchen or dining room table, he had real trouble chewing his food, probably because of bad dentures, and I was disgusted by my own grandfather’s lack of table etiquette.

I remember one day in our grassy back yard in Westbury, Meyer challenged me to a running race, across the manicured yard, maybe 50 yards at best. I didn't want to do it. Meyer was "old" and I must have been about 12 at the time, but he insisted. My father and sister were there, "refereeing", and they started the race with 2 shouts.

I took off like a hornet, leaving old Meyer behind, but after only about 20 yards, he screamed out in pain and fell to the ground. He had torn a calf muscle.

I felt horrible... like it was MY FAULT that my grandfather was injured - lying there on the ground, squirming in pain.

And then, years later, when I was about 23, here he was lying on his death bed in Miami. I knew I wasn't the cause of that, but still, I felt terrible. I didn't yet know much about death at that age, and it was hard to lose him. Honestly, I don't even know what he died of.

But I've kept that sheet of paper all these years... and always vowed to go to "Khartov" -- to find the home of Marc Truleser. Until now, that is... when "Kharkiv" is in the daily news, fighting for its life and survival. Hundreds, or thousands, of citizens in Eastern Ukraine are getting pummelled with rocket and gun fire, ballistic missiles, their onion-domed Orthodox churches, like those in Kyiv, being crumbled into rubble.

Screams in the air, blood on the white snow, and pain on the faces of millions of Ukrainians.

It brings the war home to me personally, as I read obsessively about it in the “LA Times” - every day. It seems that there is no end in sight, except more bloodshed, pain, loss, and destruction... until the inevitable... crushing defeat and submission to Mr. Putin.

Of course, I hope that the defiant Ukrainian resistance will prove me wrong.

But in memory of Grandpa Meyer, I kneel,

and shed a tear for him, and his brave, invaded Ukrainian countrymen.

With love, compassion, and geneology,

One of the last Ukrainian “Trulesers”

Trules

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Kenny’s and my family had moved into the new neighborhood near Salisbury Elementary School that was built for all the kids of the GIs that had come home from World War 2 and were now thriving in post-War America. My part of the neighborhood was called Birchwood and was almost entirely Jewish. We moved into the three-bedroom ranch house shown as the model in 1952 and Kenny’s family moved up the street into a court with a dead end a few years later. He was a year older than I was, and I didn’t really get to know him until high school… whose name was W. Tresper Clarke… which they also built for us boomers… because we were growing up in bunches and just demanded more and more room. Kenny and I were the two first classes to go to Clarke, I went in 5^th grade, he went in 6^th.

I’ll tell you how I got to know Kenny in high school. First, he became a wrestler. A really good one. I think he wrestled at 140 pounds. That’s about a middle weight, if you know boxing, for example. Pretty big for high school. I wrestled in 6^th grade when I was forced to in gym class – at 85 pounds – and I won my division by beating Georgie Bauer, but having to fight three, 2 minute periods, at full strength for a hundred per cent of the time, was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. And even at twelve years old, I couldn’t face the possibility of losing, so I quit and never wrestled again. But Kenny Greenblatt, he wrestled in high school… and he won. Clarke had an awesome team. They went on to compete in county and state championships. Bryan Lambe, Richie Specion, Andy Capozzi… these guys were like gods to us ordinary kids. But Kenny Greenblatt… a Jewish kid from our neighborhood… his wrestling… and winning a county championship… this  was absolutely unthinkable. Totally impossible.

Because I’m sure Kenny never knew that these same Italian and Irish wrestlers and their brothers were picking on me with their anti-Semitic bullying in the underground parking garages at Clarke where I locked my Schwinn bicycle every morning.

Hey, Kike, lose your bike?”

It was Barry O’Flaherty and his little brother, Larry, both on the wrestling team. They’d cut my bike chain and were now threatening to beat the hell out of me. I was terrified. I know they wouldn’t be stealing Kenny Greenblatt’s bike.

When I got home, I asked my mother, “What’s a Kike, Mom?”

She was furious. But that’s… another story altogether. (https://www.erictrules.com/blog/there-was-a-horse/)

--------------------

Kenny Greenblatt sold me his fraternity sweater in high school. I’ll bet he doesn’t remember. It was called the Black and White fraternity, and I guess Kenny was so cool by the time he was a junior, he’d already quit. I bought the sweater for ten dollars. I was never cool in high school.

But I’ll bet Kenny does he remember that I “helped him” on a few of his high school tests. That is… I let him copy the answers off me. You see, I was put in all the smart kid classes… and Kenny was known as a “dumb wrestler”. I don’t know how we ended up in the same classes together, his being a year older and my usually being partitioned away with all the smart kids. But it happened. And there was Kenny – sitting exactly behind me - to the right – at a forty-five degree angle - that I’m sure he’d perfectly calculated - copying every word off my test. History, math, I can’t remember which… maybe both… one day for each. But I do remember… that dumb wrestling champ… copying all the answers off me… the bullied Jew.

The next memory I have of Kenny Greenblatt is a funny one. It’s more than a decade later. We’ve both graduated college. Me from the University of Buffalo, where I never wanted to go; Kenny from the University of Miami, where I hear only recently, I think he’s won another state wrestling championship. It’s 1977. I’ve moved back to New York, after unimaginably, becoming a professional modern dancer in Chicago for seven years, even though I might have been voted the boy “least likely to become a modern dancer” at Clarke. Kenny, no doubt now called “Ken” has, post-college graduation (how did he do that?), joined his father in the schmata business.

Oh, along the way, I’ve also become a professional clown. That’s right. White face, baggy pants, Charlie Chaplin black derby, no talking, just a very verbose kazoo. My clown name is “Gino Cumeezi”. I’ve gotten lots of grants for my dancing and clowning in Chicago, but now I’m living in the itinerant Hotel Woodward on 55^th Street and Broadway, paying $55/week for rent, and I’m “clowning” every day out on the streets of New Yawk – for a little fun and self-discipline. Hey, that’s what clowns and artists do.

.. 

Today I’m at 40^th and Broadway. That’s the heart of the schmata business; in fact, my father works right nearby. Well I’m (Gino is) clowning and kazoo-ing away, improvising with all the people in midtown Manhattan that are willing. I call it “Free Public Laughs”. I don’t “busk” or collect any money. That’s why I got grants. Gino just tries to break peoples’ boundaries and make them laugh. He mimics them, grabs their hands (if they’ll let him), challenges them to a boxing match, directs traffic in the middle of the street… you get the idea. Sometimes, one of my (Gino’s) “audience members” is super enthusiastic and will spend a long time with him – even bring him up to their office. One time, Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review and proponent of laughter being a healer of illness, takes me up to his magazine office, where I (Gino) proceeds to stand on his desk, throw his papers all over the office and horrify his staff in peals of laughter.

Well today, a businessman in a suit and tie (not this guy above) is so delighted with Gino at 40^th and Broadway that he brings me upstairs to his 11^th floor office. It reads “Greenblatt and Son”. (At least in my memory.) And in two seconds, I figure out that this childlike, enthusiastic businessman is none other than my wrestling high school buddy, Kenny Greenblatt. Wow! He has no idea who I am. I mean, who Gino is. Immediately, Gino goes into a confrontational wrestling posture. Kenny half falls for it – half going into a competitive wrestling pose. As I say, he’s in a suit and tie. He stops himself.

“Who are you?” he demands.

I point to my name tag. “Gino Cumeezi.”

He tries to pronounce my (Gino’s) name and I have to admit, he does a pretty good job.

Gino goes down onto his hands and knees, like it’s second or third period in a wrestling match - waves for Kenny to take his position on the floor. Kenny’s confused. He hesitates. Gino gets up and wags his elbows like a chicken, making “chicken noises” with his kazoo. “Bawk, bawk, bawk!” “Ken” doesn’t like it.

Gino takes a piece of paper on Ken’s desk and writes down: “W. Tresper Clarke.” “Bryan Lambe.”

“Who are you, man?”, he demands again. He grabs Gino around the arms and pats his pockets for ID. Gino doesn’t have any. Ken’s a big guy now, still with a huge wrestler’s barrel chest. He lets Gino go. Gino challenges him again to wrestle. Ken is really dumbfounded.

He walks over to sit in his office chair. Afterall, it’s his office. Gino comes over and sits on his lap. Ken pushes Gino off. This is absurd. Who is this guy?

Gino writes down “Andy Capozzi?”

“How do you know these guys, man? You have to tell me.”

I don’t. Tell him anything. That is, Gino doesn’t tell him anything.

Gino struts out of the schmata office confidently, and waves, “bye-bye.” And that’s the last time I see Kenny Greenblatt. 1977.

--------------------------------------

Then sometime in the early 1980s, I hear, much to my surprise and disbelief, that a man named Kenneth D. Greenblatt, has won a Tony Award for Producer of a Broadway musical. I look in the newspaper, and sure enough, it’s my buddy, Kenny Greenblatt, from Clarke High, who I last saw in 1977, when I/Gino Cumeezi, last sat in his lap. I say to myself. How can this be? How can that dumb wrestler have just won a Tony Award as a producer?

I never find out. It’s a mystery. I move out to LA in 1982. I become a poet, a podcaster, a college professor, a solo performer. But over the years, and it’s been almost forty now, I hear that Kenneth D. Greenblatt keeps winning Tony Awards as Producer of the Year. I still can’t figure it out. This guy cheated off me in high school.

So, a month ago, I break down. It’s 2021. I find Mr. Greenblatt on Facebook. I mean, who’s not on Facebook, right? And I send him a message: “Hi, there. Do remember that clown who came up to your office on 40^th and Broadway in 1977? Who challenged you to a wrestling match in your father’s office? Who knew Brian Lambe and Andy Capozzi? But who you had no idea who it was?” And I send him the electronic photo above.

And I get a text message back right away: “Sorry, but I don’t remember.”

I’m heartbroken. You can see all the detail I remember. All the joy I got out of duping the dumb wrestler in his father’s schmata office. And the now multiple Tony Award-winning producer doesn’t even remember the great Gino Cumeezi? Come on!

I try again: “Well do you remember Eric Trules? I lived in the neighborhood, went to Clarke with you, and I “helped” you pass a few high school tests.”

Again, I hear right back from him: “Haha. I remember you 100%! Give me a call. Here’s my cell. Let’s catch up.”

“When?” I text.

“How about now? My wife’s asleep.”

I call Kenny Greenblatt somewhere near Boca Raton, Florida. We talk for the next two hours and… catch up.

He doesn’t really remember who I am, just my name. But he’s delighted that he cheated off me. Turns out that he cheated off everybody he could in both high school and college. That’s how he got through school. He’s the first to admit he was a terrible student.

He tells me a lot more. His mother died in high school. It made him angry. Maybe that’s why he was such a good wrestler. But he never experienced any anti-Semitism at Clarke. He’s shocked that I did. There wasn’t any on the wrestling team. There couldn’t have been. He would have beaten the shit out of those very O’Flahertys who stole my bike and called me a Kike.

All through high school and college, although Kenny wasn’t learning a damn thing in school, he was learning his father’s schmata business. That’s what he was good at. Printing on fabrics, dyeing, selling, pricing, warehousing, you name it, Kenny learned it – from the inside out. By the time his father died, also at a young age, and “Ken” inherited the family business, it unfortunately wasn’t worth a nickel – but – by then, Ken was expert, knowledgeable – and driven. He drove the company forward – and was the first to print designs on Lycra swimwear – and he built a world-wide schmata empire – so that by the time he was in his mid-30, he was able to sell his company for seven figures!

Ken had never been “rich” before. All the money had gone back in the busines. But now suddenly, although he’s still consulting for the company he sold, he can do anything he wants. A Broadway company asks him to invest. Sure. A hundred thousand dollars? No big deal. Only one condition. Ken wants to attend rehearsals. You see, growing up, kids like Kenny and me always went to Broadway shows: “Oliver”, “Oklahoma”, “Bye-Bye Birdie”, “My Fair Lady”… my parents took me, Kenny’s grandmother took him. It was exciting to go into “The City”. To see shows “on Broadway”. To read about them in “the Sunday Times”. (Then again, maybe Kenny didn’t actually read about them in the NY Times.) Anyway, it’s a natural fit for the now, semi-retired “Kenneth Greenblatt” to want to get involved in Broadway and to be eager to watch rehearsals.

The only problem is… the unwritten rule: “no investors in the house”, meaning Ken isn’t allowed to watch rehearsals. He says, “No rehearsals, no money.” He walks. Until two weeks later, when the cash-starved production comes back to him and says, “Ok, you can sit in the very back row and not speak to anyone, cast or crew, and if you promise, we’ll take your hundred grand.” “Deal.”

Then… within two days… my gregarious and aggressive, former wrestling buddy… is naturally sitting in the second row next to the director, who is naturally asking his naïve, unexpert opinion about the show. “You’re my audience, Mr. Greenblatt. Tell me what you think.” And Mr. Greenblatt does exactly that. And while he does, he gets to know the cast, the crew, and everyone else in the theater. His rambunctious, businessman-super salesman personality is infectious. From nine to five, he still works in the schmata business, while from 5:30 to midnight he soaks up his new Broadway calling… with a passion.

Four months before the show is supposed to open, the producers from Paramount come up on stage and say, “We’re very sorry - but we don’t believe this show is Broadway material. We’re going to close the show before opening night.”

Everyone is shocked. Including Kenneth Greenblatt, $100,000 investor and former state champion wrestler. He gets out of his seat, runs down the aisle, and jumps on stage.

“This show is not closing! I promise you. This show is going to open, on schedule. You have my word.”

I’m listening on the phone to this far-fetched story from my sort of high school friend whose lap I last sat in as a clown in 1977. He says,

“I don’t know anything about theater, believe me, Eric. But there’s Tommy Tune, the director of the show, sitting in the front row, with his mouth hanging open, and there’s this guy from Paramount, representing Mike Eisner, the future head of Walt Disney Studios, having just brought the whole cast to tears by trying to close the show, and there I am, pumping my fist on stage like I just won the state championship.

“So first thing next Monday morning, I’m on the phone with my new entertainment lawyer and Mike Eisner’s attorney, negotiating the show away from Paramount – to me, Kenneth Greenblatt, ex-schmata entrepreneur, now virgin Broadway producer.

“I immediately sign up for a course in producing at the New School with my wife, Sandi, and while we shoot spitballs at each other though straws, the show opens four months later on Broadway at the 46^th Street Theatre to amazing reviews, and a month later, I win my first Tony Award, two weeks before I get an “A” in the producing course. The show’s called NINE and it beats out DREAM GIRLS in the biggest upset in Tony history.”

“Wow, Kenny, that’s quite a story.”

“And now my son, Seth, is running the whole business, and we’ve been nominated for 125 Tony awards and won 44, and we had 46 shows running all over the world before the pandemic hit, but now we hope everything is opening again, and I have tickets for you to come to Las Vegas for the opening of the new Whitney Houston musical.”

“Okaaaaay. Thanks, man.”

“But you know what makes me happiest?”

“What?

“My family. My wife Sandi of over fifty years. And my three spectacular children, Shon, Seth, and Leni. And my five grandchildren: Gavin, Charlie, Harrison, Ariana, and Willow. Do you know my granddaughter, Ariana Greenblatt?”                                                       

“No, sorry.”

“How old is your son?”

“Fourteen. Why?”

“Ask him if he knows her?”

I call over Exsel, my son. And guess what? He does know her. Wow! She’s a teen phenom.

Then I tell Kenneth D. Greenblatt a little bit about my life… along the road less traveled. About my being a storyteller, a traveler, a solo performer, a college professor, a documentary filmmaker, a podcaster. About getting married for the first time at fifty-four. Becoming a first-time father at sixty-nine. He’s impressed. I tell him I’ll send him some of my stories to read on the web.

“Nah, don’t. I can’t read. Never could. I listen to books. All day long. During my workouts. Send me something I can listen to,”

“I will. My podcast. But wait a minute. You said you could never read. Even in high school and college?”

“Nah. Same with my kids and grandkids. They were diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. Maybe dyslexia. You know what that is?”

“Of course.”

A light bulb goes off.

“You know what that means?

“What?”

“That you were probably the same thing yourself – all through school.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, they just didn’t have vocabulary for problems like ADD and dyslexia when we went to school.”

“So?”

“Well if you ask me, you’ve been living under false pretenses. You’re not stupid. You made a huge success out of your father’s business. You sold it for a fortune. You’ve won 44 Tony Awards.”

“I’m just a good salesman”.

“You just couldn’t fucking read, man!”

“I know. That’s why I cheated. I wasn’t gonna fail.”

Wow! Now that’s a good story, Kenny Greenblatt.

Maybe you’re not such a dumb wrestler after all…………………

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KENNETH D. GREENBLATT, GFour Productions (Founder/Producer) began producing in 1981 with the hit musical NINE, starring Raul Julia, Sergio Franchi, Bert Convy, Karen Akers, Anita Morris, Shelly Burch, Lillian Montevecchi, and Camila Saviola. Directed by Tommy Tune and written by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, NINE won the Tony Award® for Best Musical that season. His next Best Musical Tony Award® came in 1984 when he produced LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, written by Jerry Herman and Harvey Firestein, directed by Arthur Laurents, starring Gene Barry and George Hearn. Ken won another Tony Award for the revival of LA CAGE AUX FOLLES in 2005, this time directed by Jerry Zaks, and starring Robert Goulet. Other Broadway productions include MY ONE AND ONLY, a Gershwin musical written by Peter Stone and starring Tommy Tune, Twiggy, Honi Coles, Bruce McGill, and Denny Dillon, directed by Tommy Tune and Mike Nichols. ZORBA, the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical directed by Michael Cacoyannis, choreographed by Graciela Daniele; starring Anthony Quinn, Lila Kedrova, Debbie Shapiro, and Robert Westenberg. THE RINK also by Kander and Ebb, starring Liza Minnelli, Chita Rivera, and Jason Alexander. BABY, directed by Richard Maltby Jr. with music & Lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire, starring Liz Callaway, Todd Graff, Catherine Cox, and Beth Fowler. GRAND HOTEL starring Jane Krakowski, Michael Jeter, Rex Smith, Cyd Charisse, Directed by Tommy Tune, written by Luther Davis with music and lyrics by Robert Wright, George Forrest, and Maury Yeston. GRIND starring Ben Vareen, and Stubby Kaye, directed by Hal Prince, with music by Larry Grossman. BIG, written by Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire, directed by Susan Stroman and Michael Ocrant. SALLY MARR written and starring Joan Rivers. CATSKILLS ON BROADWAY, directed by Kenneth Greenblatt, starring & conceived by Freddie Roman, also starred Mal Z. Lawrence, Dick Capri, and Louise Duarte. RING OF FIRE, Directed by Richard Maltby Jr., with music by Johnny Cash. 9 to 5, written by Dolly Parton, directed by Joe Mantello, and starring Allison Janney, Stephanie J. Block, Megan Hilty, and Marc Kudisch. Off-broadway shows TRUE WEST, starring John Malkovich, Dennis Quaid, Randy Quaid, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, written by Sam Shepard. WRONG TURN AT LUNGFISH, directed by Garry Marshal, written by Lowell Gantz, and starring George C. Scott, Tony Danza, Jami Gertz, and Kelli Williams. DIAMONDS, directed by Hal Prince and starring Jackee Harry, Scot Holmes, Nestor Serrano, and Chip Zien, with music by Kander and ,Ebb, Alan Menken, David Zipple, Larry Grossman, Ellen Fitzhugh, Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. I LOVE YOU BECAUSE, with book and lyrics by Ryan Cunningham, and music by Josh Salzman. Ken & his son Seth Greenleaf are the very proud owners of MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL, now in its twentieth year of production world- wide. It is the longest-running scripted musical show in Las Vegas history and will continue to entertain nightly at Harrah’s Hotel and Casino, on the 50 yard line of The Las Vegas Strip, re-opening in August. MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL also has the record for the longest running musical in Australian history and is the highest grossing small touring musical in US history. More recent successes since partnering with his son are the Pulitzer prize winning DISGRACED, starring Gretchen Mohl and Josh Radner; winning the 2013 Tony Award® for their 50th anniversary production of Edward Albee’s WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF; Co- financing the five-time Tony Award®, five-time Drama Desk Award®, and seven-time Olivier Award® winner for Best Musical, MATILDA THE MUSICAL; producing the critically acclaimed revival of THE GLASS MENAGERIE starring Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto; the 40 week national tour of the Tony Award® winning PORGY AND BESS; producing LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR AND GRILL starring five-time Tony Award® winner Audra McDonald as the unforgettable Billie Holiday; AMERICAN SON starring Kerry Washington, which has since been made into a Netflix special; co-producing the smash hit comedy from London, THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG; co-producing the internationally acclaimed, Olivier Award-winning THE INHERITANCE, and co-financing TINA THE MUSICAL, THE BOOK OF MORMON, and SIX, all of which will reopen on Broadway this season. Their smash hit tour of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, which they produced on Broadway in 2016, will begin touring again this year, and in the spring they will open AMERICAN BUFFALO on Broadway, written by David Mamet, directed by Tony-winner Neil Pepe, and starring Tony-winner Laurence Fishburne, Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell, and Emmy-winner Darren Criss. Kenneth and Seth anxiously await the Tony Award results as one of their shows is nominated in the Best Musical category (TINA) and Best Play (THE INHERITANCE.) They are also extremely excited about their partnership with BASE Entertainment to produce AN EVENING WITH WHITNEY, the Whitney Houston hologram concert, which will open in Harrah’s Hotel & Casino in October, and begin its world tour soon after. Kenneth and Seth’s shows combined have been nominated over 125 Tony Awards, winning 44, and 130 Drama Desk Awards, winning 57.

Kenneth Greenblatt Chairman of the Board GFour Productions, LLC

GFourProductions.com

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___________________

Here’s a small excerpt. 

___________________

It’s 1970. I’m  22 years old. I’ve just randomly arrived in the Windy City of Chicago, climbed an old wooden staircase up into a rehearsal room on Wells Street in Old Town. A month later, my life will change forever…….

___________________

“Somehow, miraculously, at least to me, I become a modern dancer. Soon a professional one. In the summer of 1970, I'm invited to take a hard-working, new piece-creating, summer workshop for six weeks in Chicago with Shirley Mordine’s Dance Troupe in residence at Columbia College.

____________

To think of myself... to discover myself… a “modern dancer”… is absolutely unbelievable to me. It’s like going to sleep one day as a repressed adolescent and waking up… someone else – on another planet. Say like, going to sleep on the planet Earth, and waking up on the planet Mars. Or perhaps like going to sleep as Rip Van Winkle one day and waking up twenty years later and – not recognizing anything about yourself or the world about you.

_____________

In high school, to my friends and parents, I might have been thought of as “the boy most unlikely to become a modern dancer”. Even more surprising to them, and myself, would be, “what the hell is a ‘modern dancer’”? Certainly, we would have had no idea. I was so self-conscious and repressed as a high schooler that I never took a dance step, never sang a note, never thought of trying out for a school play – of ever doing anything at all – artistic. Art? Creativity? Self-expression? Were definitely not for me.

______________

Sure, my parents took me to Broadway shows “in the City”. I saw the original “My Fair Lady”, “Bye Bye Birdie”, “Oklahoma”. I went to museums – The Met, The Modern, The Guggenheim. We were “culture vultures”. But that was just something we did. Me? Myself? No. Nyet. Be footloose or fancy free? Never! Not for me. I was too afraid of what people would say. I was monumentally afraid of looking stupid and acting foolish.

_____________

So when the strictures of self-consciousness started to break, first with marijuana in college – at least mentally – it was just a matter of time, until this volcano of inexpression – both physically and emotionally – found an outlet through which it could erupt. First slowly, in yoga classes, then after college, in theater workshops in New York with Scott Kelman and at La Mama, then finally through modern dance with Shirley, I finally found a way to – circumvent my repressive, judgmental brain, and set myself free! And it was exactly that. Liberating. Physically. Emotionally. Sexually. The damns broke loose. My volcanic repression exploded. And I discovered a new self – below my neck. I didn’t open a book for the next seven years. I discovered my body. I discovered freedom and improvisation.

__________________

Shirley gave me this gift. By inviting me to take her summer workshop. And by inviting me to join her Dance Troupe. Sure, she must have been desperate to take a chance on me; she had just lost her one and only male dancer. And I’m sure, male modern dancers were very hard to find in 1970. But synchronicity – Shirley losing Mitch and my passing through Chicago at exactly that moment – are the exact moments that make for a life story. And also the moment in retrospect, for which, I will be forever grateful.”

_____________

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No, what I do remember vividly, is that Alley Pond Park was the green-grassed, red picnic-tabled immigrant park of my forefathers, where my helter-skelter Russian Jewish family got together in their monthly summer, “cousins’ club" meetings. The second thing that I remember about the old park and those red picnic tables was that it was directly across the street, Winchester Boulevard, from Creedmoor Hospital, New York City’s 2^nd most famous “nuthouse”, right in impressive line after Bellevue.

I grew up in Westbury, Long Island, directly across the street from Salisbury Park, soon to be re-named “Eisenhower Park”, after the famous World War II general who became America’s two-termed 34^th President, during the buttoned down, conservative 1950s.

I used to chase errant golf balls hit over the chain link park fence by duffer weekend golfers, when I outran the pack of my neighborhood “Birchwood” friends to retrieve one of the hopefully still-pristine, Titleist or Wilson golf balls, to sell back to one of the grateful or irate duffers, for 50 cents or a dollar, depending on the condition of the ball. It was a good business for a kid. I also remember memorizing all the names of the cars of the day, along Salisbury Park Drive, for points towards my Cub Scout Wolf Pack badge: not only the Fords, Chevrolets, and Chryslers, but also old school cars like Hudson, LaSalle, and DeSoto, named after European colonial explorers, who I used to idolize, before history was “de-constructed” and the great “conquistadors” had their reputations tarnished and trashed.

But it was me and my sister, Alison, five years my junior, who felt like great adventurers, when we were packed into the Chevy Impala station wagon, perhaps twice a summer, and set out for Alley Pond Park with Mom and Dad on a Sunday afternoon, arriving an hour later at one of the other-worldly, or should I say, “old-worldly”, cousins’ club meetings. It was here, in Alley Pond Park, that the old world, East European Jews, from Russia, Poland, Lithuania,  or perhaps Ukraine, who had migrated to New York, primarily right after the first World War, to places like Delancey Street in Lower Manhattan, and Bensonhurst, Coney island, Williamsburg, and East Rockaway in Brooklyn, came to meet in the 1950s, as they started to spread out from the densely-populated urban ghettos to the more-affordable suburban homes given to them under the post-war GI Act, even though many of the cousins still lived in Brooklyn and Queens, and were all hustling along varying rungs of the upwardly-mobile economic ladder.

Alley Pond Park was where Jewish-European immigrant families stayed together in the new country during the buttoned-down 50s, after having been crowded together into single tenement rooms in the Roaring Twenties on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. After they first congregated in cold water flats, having shuffled through U.S. immigration gates on Ellis Island, being forced to shorten their last names from “Truleransky” to “Trules”, from “Rosenfrokov” to “Ross”. When “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”… rode past the Statue of Liberty in 1912, in 1917, in 1920, before, and after, America entered “The Great War”.

After which my housepainter paternal grandfather, Meyer, and his East Ukraine-born wife, Anna, brought up my father, “Yussel” (Joseph in English) and his younger sister, May, in an over-crowded, one-room apartment building in the poor Brownsville section of Brooklyn. After which my maternal grandmother, Sally, and grandfather, Murray, ran a corner grocery store in Middle Village, Queens for 40 years and brought out canned vegetables and fresh chicken to their kids and grandkids on Long Island every weekend they could.

And now, a generation later, it was here in Alley Pond Park, where stories of having barely-survived the Holocaust - were still kept alive – still fresh in Jewish memory, still fresh in the cousins’ psyches - some still seared into the numbers tatoo-ed onto their frail Semitic wrists. In this way, at least for me, the cousins’ club was both a way to keep alive a shameful family history, and simultaneously, a way to watch the dream of a new life take root in a new land and come to fruition.

I didn’t know any of the economics, history, or sociology at the time; I only came to recognize sad-looking Uncle Miltie, with his blue and yellow checkered Bermuda shorts and his horn-rimmed tortoise-shell glasses, who was always “down on his luck”, and old Aunt Sadie, with her thick, rolled-stocking ankles and her heavy black shoes, ever sporting a hard-to-look-at black bristle on her lower chin and who talked with a thick, inpenetrable Yiddish accent. In fact, most of the cousins seemed to talk this strange half-German, old-world language to each other, including my parents, who usually only used Yiddish at home when they didn’t want me and my sister to understand some private code between them.

“Kinder un gelt is a shaine velt.” (“Children and money make a nice world.”)

Somehow, I seemed to forget this old world Yiddish expression for my first fifty years, never marrying until I was 56, not becoming a father until I was 68, and still, never owning a hous

Yet as I said, I still vividly remember the green, green grass and the redwood picnic tables in Alley Pond Park, which surprisingly, remind me of the modern-day concrete and artificial wood picnic tables amidst the green, green grass in Elysian Park, two blocks from my house in the hills of Echo Park, right near Dodger Stadium, where an entirely different generation of immigrant families, speaking Spanish, not Yiddish, gather every weekend admidst the dancing mariachi music, the delicious smell of barbecue, and the happy children swinging baseball bats at hanging birthday pinatas.

It’s a lovely connection, keeping Alley Pond Park alive for me, sixty-five years past my childhood, when I now find myself raising my own, adopted immigrant boy, albeit without any trace of his extended Indonesian family, who didn’t make the heroic “Coming to America” journey, along with Eddie Murphy, my Russian Jewish 1950s cousins, or the 21^st century Latino immigrants from El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala, all meeting Sundays in the green, green grass of Elysian Park, coincidentally the second biggest park in the 21^st century City of Angels.

Which brings me back across the street… to Creedmoor.

Of course, back in the 1950s, it was just the big imposing, burly brick building across the street, beyond the lake, from the cousins’ club meetings. I didn’t know the street was called Winchester Boulevard. Why would I? How would I know that Creedmoor would one day loom large in my life? Far larger than it did in the 50s, when as an still under-10-year old, I only knew that it was the famous “loony bin” or “nut house”, as I said, we called it in those days, long before Ken Kesey’s and Hollywood’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” brought names and words like Randall McMurphy, Nurse Ratched, “lobotomy”, and “sociopath” to widespread public awareness.

Still, mental illness was a scary thing back in the 1950s and 1960s. I remember my Aunt May had to undergo a couple of rounds of “electro-shock therapy”, which is what McMurphy got before he got his terminal lobotomy, and hearing that my aunt had to be taken away for this kind of “shocking” treatment was just - way past the realm of “normal” in my family, particularly before things started to get “far out” and “counter-cultural” a few years later.

Nevertheless, as the son of a nice middle-class, suburban Jewish-American family, it was not surprising that I was more or less expected to become “my son, the doctah”. The same with all my nice middle-class, suburban, Jewish-American friends. Hell, what did we know? It was just the next step along the American immigrant conveyor belt of upwardly-mobile education and achievement. Our grandparents were blue-collar house painters and grocery store clerks, our parents were white-collar businessmen and garment industry deal-makers, and we were going to become professionals: doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs. 

That meant: going to school, getting good grades, taking SAT tests, multiple times, getting into the best colleges we could, graduating, taking the MCATs or LCATs to get into law school (if you couldn’t get into med school) – all of which made us - set for life. No questions asked.

So by the summer of 1967, I was well along into my pre-med program at UB (the University of Buffalo, soon to be renamed “State University of New York at Buffalo", the best of the state universities). I had taken my hateful inorganic chemistry course, dropped calculus and physics twice each, and managed to get a B in organic chemistry, only because I had a brilliant professor who made the dry, mysterious chemistry equations into beautiful poetry. The program was pure drudgery, but I figured out quickly that that was the way they separated the wheat from the chaff, the persevering and dedicated doctors-to-be from the slackers and lazy students who would soon switch majors to social psychology or English literature.

It was between my sophomore and junior years that I was diligently looking for a summer job. I had already naively “decided” on my doctoral specialty – psychiatry – so I was both aggressive and lucky – to get a summer internship at – you guessed it – Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, on Winchester Boulevard in Queens.

The internship was on - the children’s autistic ward. And it wasn’t pretty.

By this time, 1967, Creedmoor Hospital was in great disrepair as a state mental institution. It was over-crowded and under-staffed. To say that the walls were in need of paint was like saying the patients were in need of better care. Both were embarrassing understatements.

Why they hired me was also a mystery. It was not like I had any experience whatsoever on a ward. But that was exactly where I was placed. A privileged, still-wet-behind-the-ears, 20-year old college kid – thrown onto a ward – full of severely disturbed, early adolescent teenagers who were abandoned by their parents and society, forcibly adopted by the State of New York into crumbling and terrifying prison-like facilities, and then treated like medicated animals. I entered the ward each morning with a long-toothed skeleton key dangling from my waist.

“Mr. Troof. Mr. Troof. Basket play. Basket play.”

That was Stanley, a seventeen-year old, wiry black autistic teenager on the ward. It was still years before the term “African American” became politically correctly, but years after “Negro” was pushed to the dust pile of history. Stanley was the oldest “child” on the ward at seventeen; the next year he would be transferred to an adult ward, probably for the rest of his life. I didn’t know how long Stanley had been on the ward, nor did I know how long the younger kids had been there either, but as I said, these severely damaged and withdrawn kids had either been deposited at Creedmoor by their parents directly, a very few of whom still visited their abandoned children on very rare occasion, or more likely, they had been transferred by Social Services, as a last resort, the state having no other place to “store” them.

All of the kids were put on heavy doses of Thorazine (an anti-psychotic drug that “slowed them down”), and they were kept locked up in dayrooms for the entire day. They were fed in lunchrooms where they wouldn’t sit down, but instead ran around the food tables like herds of wild animals, stuffing food into their mouths as fast as they could, thinking they had to compete for the food supply. At the end of the day, they were locked into their “cells” for the night, with even stronger dosages of meds, hours after I had already gone home for the day.

Stanley was the brightest and most cheery of the bunch. There was Larry, an emaciated, near-bald, voiceless thirteen year old, who looked like a child Auschwitz victim who tore up his prison-like uniform into rag-like strips, with which he tied up his arms, so as to not to beat himself as severely as he would have if his arms weren’t tied. Yet no amount of medicine could stop Larry from beating himself. There was Kevin, another black, fourteen-year-old autistic teenager, whose mother still occasionally came to visit him, who, as stocky as Stanley was rail thin, banged his head against the concrete wall, also no matter what dosage of Thorazine he was given. Most of the kids were mute, one of the most prevalent and uncurable signs of childhood autism, and although they had social workers who very occasionally came to work with them one on one, this childhood Creedmoor ward was part of a hopeless, lock-down state institution of great despair and hopelessness.

It made me extremely depressed. In the first few weeks of working there, I’d bring in any toys I could find for the kids to play with and I'd leave them in the dayroom. Within the first fifteen minutes, the toys would be completely destroyed. Even a basketball would be punctured and completely flattened. I had no idea how these poor desperate kids did it.

“Mr. Troof. Mr. Troof. Basket play. Basket play.”

I offer wonder what happen to all these kids. They still haunt me in my dreams.

I’d drive home after work from Creedmoor, from Douglaston to Westbury, where I struck up a hopeful summer relationship with Enid, the girl who I wasn’t brave enough to have a relationship with in high school. I remember parking my big brown Pontiac Bonneville out in front of her house on Gloucester Driver, listening to the Box Tops singing “The Letter”:

“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane                                                                                         Ain't got time to take a fast train”…  

Maybe that’s what I wanted. A ticket out of the loony bin. Out of the doldrums and depression of working with these poor mute, autistic kids… as a helpless, hopeless… orderly.

Enid helped me. She “turned me on” for the first time - to marijuana. I remember listening to the Beatles “A Day in the Life” on “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and thinking I was having a heart attack - just at the height of the towering musical crescendo.

My life changed that summer, after Creedmoor.

I no longer wanted to become a psychiatrist. I was scared off. Depressed off. I changed my major the next fall semester… probably to social psychology… or English literature. I didn’t go to my college graduation. I became an artist, a member of the counter-culture.

------------

I look back to Alley Pond Park. To my Jewish-American ancestors and their cousins’ club. I remember the loony bin across the street, Creedmoor Hospital…

…to the place that made all the difference.

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----------

So I'm driving home past Dodger Stadium, perhaps the biggest Covid vaccination site in our country. And living in Echo Park, as I do, actually in the hills called Elysian Heights, I live only 4 stops signs away from the World Series Champs of 2020.

Seeing a very short line of cars on my way home from grocery shopping with the Fam about 4:30 on January 19, I slow down near the entrance gate at Stadium and Academy Ways, and using my gregarious New York cab driver persona, I shout out to the heroic, yellow vest-wearing CORE workers...

"Hey, got room for another over-65 year old?"

"Do you have an appointment, sir?"

"No."

"Are you an essential health care worker, sir?"

"No."

"Sorry, sir."

Of course, just what I thought. I was just throwing spaghetti against the wall.

"But, I heard that they're taking appointments for over 65-year olds at the Inglewood Forum, starting this afternoon. I suggest you go home and try to make an appointment as soon as you can."

"Thanks a lot. Will do. Do you know the website address?"

"VaccinateLA or something like that, sir. I'm sure you can find it online."

I speed home like a bullet train with my wife and son fighting centrifugal force.

"You guys put away the grocercies, ok? I'm going online..."

They agree. I do, and...

It's better than the CORE worker said. Just 40 minutes ago, LA Public Health went online, at 4 pm, with hundreds, if not thousands, of appointments, for over 65 year olds, for the first time. I aboslutely..... lucked out!

There's even an appointment for me -- at Dodger Stadium - today - in 5 minutes - if I want it. I take one in half an hour. At 5:10 pm. It's 4:40 now.

I get back in the car and with just 10 cars in front of me, I'm in the Stadium with a bar code on my phone, at 5 pm.

I snake my way through the orange cones until I'm bumper to bumper in a line of parked cars, just like you've seen online, or in the newspapers. I wait for about half an hour.

A CORE worker comes up to me: I roll down my window. I'm sure there's going to be some mistake and I'm going to be pulled out of line and sent home. I've been trying to get a Covid shot for weeks. And struck out at every turn.

"What's your first name, sir?"

It's a young man in a mask and a CORE yellow vest. First name?

"Eric."

"Last name?"

"Trules."

"Eric Trules?"

"Yes."

"I took your improv class at USC about 8 years ago, Mr. Trules. It was a great class. Life-changing."

"Thank you very much."

One never knows, do one?

"What's your name?"

He tells me but I can't quite put a face behind the mask to it. I think my brain's memory bank OD-ed about 10 years ago.

"Oh, sure. How you doing?"

"Great. Good luck to you and your family, Mr. Trules. Great class."

He moves on to do his job.

I get my shot. It doesn't hurt at all. Until the next day -- when my arm aches so much I can't pull up, or off, my pants. Or for the next 2 days either. Small price, I figure, to pay for immunity.

I can't wait for the 2nd shot. I hope they call me when they said they will.

The next morning, we can't drive in or out of the neighborhood via Stadium Way. There are hundreds of cars lined up in every direction, approaching the same gate that had only 10 cars last night. The word is OUT.

And will be from now on. Probably for months. Around the clock. As I said, I synchronously lucked out.

Thanks, Moderna! Thanks LA Public Health. Thanks, CORE, Sean Penn, and the Biden administration. Thanks, USC and the job I had for 31 years. Thanks, dumb luck.

Maybe one day in this year (or next), we will actually come out of this surreal and frightening world of corona virus. What will "normal" ever look like again?

-------------------------

Addendum: February 16, 2021

Just got my second Moderna vaccination shot at Dodger Stadium. 9 o’clock appointment, home at 9:47 AM. In bed with a 102 fever the next day; arm pain for 3 more days. Still... grateful as hell. Hopefully, I'm now im-muuuuune. 

Hope we all will be sooooooooooooooon!

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—

Family and Christmas go together, right? Like love and marriage. Like horse and carriage, right? Well, I won’t disagree. But growing up in a mostly non-practicing Jewish family, I didn’t know much about it. Sure, we had Christmas in Salisbury Elementary School and W. Tresper Clarke High School in the 1950s and 60s suburbs of Long Island, New York.

Of course, the other-side-of-the tracks O’Farrells and the D’Agostinos let us upper middle-class Jewish kids know all about their Irish and Italian blue-collar ways, with their anti-Semitic middle school harassment and their Catholic jock-swearing braggadocio. “Fuck you and your kike neighbahs”, they’d curse, mangling yet another one of our Schwin bicycles. “What’s a ‘kike’, ma?” “Never mind that now. Let’s get you some new dress pants in the shopping center.” You get the point.

Still, I don’t think I helped decorate my first Christmas tree until I was in college in Buffalo, New York, when a whole bunch of my Italian fraternity brothers (Alfano, Siragusa, Campagnola) introduced me to the practice. I loved it. It was festive and fun. Wrapping and putting colorful reindeer and Santa Claus-papered presents under the angel-topped Christmas tree, then opening them on Christmas morning; it was a revelation to me. Of course, my non-practicing Jewish parents didn’t like hearing about my new discovery, and they even accused me of becoming anti-Semitic myself at this point in my life, which may, or may not have been, true.

Nevertheless, Christmas was family time, and I liked seeing the Christian families celebrate together. Not that we Jews, practicing or not, didn’t have family and holiday celebrations or rituals. We had Chanukah, the 8 day “festival of lights”, celebrating the triumph of Judah Macabee (definitely no Irishman or Scot) over the Greek suppressors of the “chosen people” in the Biblical Holy Land, about 200 years before the birth of Christ. So glorious and miraculous a victory was Judah Macabee’s that now, over 2200 years later, we modern-day Jews still celebrated the fact, or the myth, that somehow… God chose to recognize the stubborn resistance of this small but mighty tribe of Maccabees… in His name, whereupon… He let just a smidgen of holy oil burn in the Temple for an entire 8 days. A “miracle!” Hence the “menorah”, the eight-branched candelabra of the season, and the Festival of Lights, also spelled Hanukah.

Soon after college, our family, mostly based on me and my younger sister’s newly-learned predilection for Christmas, its tree decoration, and exchange of gifts on December 25th, started celebrating the holiday together. I don’t think we were exactly sacrilegious or anti-Semitic, we just laid back on the 8 days of Hanukah and agreed on the more efficient gift-giving ritual on the single day of Christmas. Then again, I always loved watching Frank Capra’s Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, an annual holiday ritual all its own. Who didn’t? Plus, I admired loyal Christian kids of all ages traveling long ways to return home for Christmas to be with their families. I guess it was just impossible for me to resist the larger society’s recognition of the Christmas “season”, even if it was commercially and shopping mall-driven.

And then… there was always… magical and wonderful… Christmas in New York… Salvation Army Santa Clauses, ringing their fake-bearded charity bells on every corner; artificially-frozen, winter wonderland ice skating in Rockefeller Center; the crisp chill of December in the air that had you exhale visible steam from your mouth, always hoping for a Christmas Eve snowfall to create a White Christmas, just like the one that Bing Crosby sang about every year, even though it only seemed to happen every other decade.

—————————————-

Anyway, here I am at the Rotterdam train station on Christmas Eve, with my Indonesian wife, being picked up and greeted by her favorite Indonesian sister, Wati, and her and my Indonesian-Dutch brother-in-law, Dave. We’ve trained into town with Santa Claus and tomorrow is Christmas, the cheesy and uncomfortable time of year, when once again, we all have to consider “family”. Sadly, with both my parents gone in the last years, I have only a tiny remaining natal family left to me. There’s just my younger sister, Alison, her Chilean husband, Edgardo, and their two daughters, Amanda and Marcela, my nieces.

By contrast, Surya, my wife, has a whole village of Manalus (the name of her family’s Sumatran “Batak” tribe) holding down the Indonesian family fort, on the other side of the globe. The Bataks are a fierce, formerly cannibal-practicing,  and matriarchal tribe, converted to Christianity by the Dutch, who are currently discriminated against by Sumatra's predominantly Muslim clerics. And when it comes to her actual mother, older brother, three sisters and three wild and wooly nephews, Surya is still completely attached and inter-dependent, calling or skyping or “WhatsApping” one or two or three of them… several times a week.

It’s a dreary Christmas Eve in the Nederlands, especially here in Rotterdam, not exactly my favorite city in Holland. It was entirely rebuilt after the Nazis bombed it into oblivion at the end of the Second World War. Everything is boxy and boring; sometimes it still feels “broken”. The Germans may have ultimately lost the war, but they did manage to destroy all the old-world beauty and charm of the greatest harbor in Europe.

But seeing my wife’s smiling enthusiasm and childlike joy in seeing her younger sister, after well over a year, certainly takes the chill out night.

They are instantaneously like two peas returning to the comfortable and familiar family pod. Physically affectionate, chatty, and attached at the hip of common childhood memory.

So different than my thorny guardedness around my own family… even when my parents were alive. I could never quite explain it to them… my feeling of wanting to protect myself… from them… from the very idea of “family”. Perhaps it stemmed from the extreme discomfort of my own childhood. From always feeling like the umbilically-attached, parent-pleasing “good boy”,

whenever I was around them as a wannabe “adult”. From the pains of growing up unknown to myself. From the pressure to conform, to become their middle-class New York Jewish son, “the doctuh”. From the pressure and expectation to make money. To get married. Most of all, to be “happy”. When to the contrary, all I was usually feeling was achingly unhappy, self-consciously repressed, socially shy and cripplingly awkward, constantly portraying the pimply and oily growing pains of adolescence.

The wife and I go back to Wati and Dave’s harbor-hugging condo.

We sit around the small, electrically lit, artificial Christmas tree, and… all is well. Red wine, Swiss chocolate, shared with Dave’s mother, Ibu, (younger than me by three years) and brother, Ray. This has been an unusual trip for me, in that my usual modus operandi on a trip like this is to make all the decisions myself: where to travel, how long to stay, transportation, connections, budgets, guidebooks, sightseeing, etc. etc. But on this trip, we are staying entirely with friends and family. With our Israeli diplomat friend, Michel, in Pareee. With our Servas host friends in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Bruno and Karin. And now with Surya’s family in Rotterdam.

I’ve had to instruct myself to let go of the reins and allow myself to “be taken care of”. Not an easy assignment for me. But one well worth it. Because to simply “relax”… to be invited into friends’ and family’s homes, to their dinner tables, into the homes of their friends and relatives, to see their cities through their eyes, to be fed meal after generous meal, with all the local delicacies and charms of their different and distinct hospitalities, is for me, simply astounding. So new. So different. So passive. So… nice.

We sleep in what used to be the unfinished third-floor attic, which now, with the help of a little LA loan since the last time we visited three years ago, has become a comfortable and cozy guest room. Dave has to turn up the heat for us because apparently, we warm-weathered Angelenos, especially yours truly, have developed thin skins and delinquent immunities to the nasty European winters, no matter how “mild” they're claimed to be by the locals.

Same has been true in Switzerland. Paris too. Everywhere we’ve gone, it’s been an apologetic,

“Would you mind turning up the heat a bit? We’re cold.”

“Really? I’m already sweating.”

That’s been the consistent reply. But that’s something family and friends do for one another. Turn up the heat. Feed you something you especially like to eat. Drive you across the border to a historic holiday Christmas market. Take off work, using their vacation days. So simple yet so foreign to the ol’ family-averse and crusty monologist, yours Trulesly.

The entire week after Christmas unrolls and reveals itself lazily…  as we literally seem to do absolutely … nothing. Other than eat, and walk, and then eat some more. Oh yeah, we exchange Christmas presents… at midnight on the 26th! What else is there “to do”? The Batak sisters just want to talk and talk and talk some more. And they laugh. A lot. And reminisce. A lot. Dave and I? We’re just convenient and friendly appendages. “Husbands? What are those?” Or, more likely, “who needs them?”

We were so jam-packed busy in Switzerland, running like over-programmed Swiss clocks with Bruno and Karin, from busing to sledding to hiking to training to thermo-bathing to Swiss cheesing and chocolateting, that we never had time to rest… other than to come home, eat, change, and go out touring again. Here, in Rotterdam, our rhythm and activity level has dropped to… zero. It’s a shock to the system, yet absolutely… fine.

I’ve prepared myself for it. For the whole “family” thing. For giving over the reins. For letting my wife’s love of her sister and for her family, be the rule of the day. She certainly deserves it. After spending 13 years with me in America, in LA, traipsing around the globe with me, primarily on my work schedule, fulfilling my needs, on my time table, now certainly seems to be her turn, me thinks. Time for me to “let go”, to be a little more flexible and tolerant and generous than usual. Not that I’m not a generous and loving husband. I think I am. We Jews tend to be. But just more consciously so on this trip. On this leg. In Rotterdam. With Wati and Dave and da wife and… da “family”.

Yet there’s the rub. That word “family” again. Isn’t it strange? That I suddenly have this vicarious family here in Rotterdam. While my own, so-called “real” family celebrates the holiday season back in far away northern California. With my one, 22-year-old niece having just returned from a junior semester abroad in Chile, surviving an at gun point “collectivo” taxi robbery. With my other, 20-year-old niece readying herself for the win some-lose some Olympic trials of college applications. With my Chilean refugee brother-in-law coming back from his own annual visit to his natal family in Santiago, Chile.

With my fierce-loving, always younger, sister gathering her well-tended brood around her for the uncomfortable-to-be “out of the nest-off to college” years, without her two precious and precocious daughters. With her eternally-missing, never quite available, crusty older brother, me, half a planet away with his suddenly new surrogate “family”… whose languages (Dutch and Indonesian) he doesn’t even speak. Whose new “family” members, each and all, are almost an entire foot shorter than him, and who, each and all, he barely really knows, except through the grace and desire of his family-loving, Indonesian wife.

And yet again, here I am, indeed. In Rotterdam. “With family”. Sounds something like “with child”. Does that mean I’m pregnant or something? Like I’m now stuck for the rest of my life with this Indo-Dutch surrogate family… of Ibu and Ray, Wati and Dave, Nouri and Chris, Mian and Jon, all new members on my insta-family, some of whom I’ve just met this last week? Sounds also a little like “Insta Gram”, the omnipresent photo craze taking over the planet. Just point and shoot. Click and Post. New pictures. New family. Not quite real, but virtual. Better than “real”. Easier. Less connected. Beyond language. No need to speak. Just be in the presence of. Be included. Next time we’re together, you’ll be there. I’ll be there. We’ll all be there. Together. Family. As long as I’m… as long as you’re… still… married.

Sort of… nice. In a comfortable, non-committal way. No history. No scars. No short fuses, like between me and my sister. Where sometimes, all we have to do is be in each other’s presence for less than say… 3 minutes… before the old bomb goes off… the same patterns… the same parents…the same words… the same hurts, injuries, offenses, grudges, wounds, explosions. “Fuck you!” “No, fuck you!” No, fuck you and your over-controlling, self-indulgent parenting non skills.” “No, fuck you and your boringly narcissistic self-involved, self-hating, stupid, unable to love your own family, un-brotherly ways.”

No, fuck you, no, fuck you, no, fuck you, no, fuck you…” ad… infinitum.

Until…. 10,000 miles away…. in a small, sort of ugly, rebuilt  Dutch city still with the biggest port in Europe…. on a Christmas holiday with hardly anything to do except to be around these small, decent strangers calling themselves, and my calling them, “family”…. perhaps is the opportunity… to feel how… actually shallow and superficial this temporary “family” is… although simultaneously comfortable and “nice”… because I don’t really have to talk about anything substantial with them…. because we don’t even speak the same language, nor do we have any personal history together….  Until here… in Rotterdam… just perhaps… is this opportunity to reach out to my very far away, “real”, or at least actual, natal family… to attempt to heal the wounds… and to become just a little closer to my fiercely loving sister…. who has always wanted to have a relationship with her ever-so-smart, older brother, who for some hurtful reason, tore himself away from his own mother and father and sister, at the peak of his adolescence… for what he claims were… reasons of self-preservation… but whose emotional withdrawal and  self-hatred, whose lack of love and complete inaccessibility, were always so, so… terribly, terribly painful.

Yes, perhaps here in Rotterdam, amidst the workman-like but uninspiring architecture of a city that had to completely re-build itself after the heinous bombing of the Nazis, here… might be a starting point to decide to rebuild my own failed relationship with my own self-negated family… the one I set aside and rejected my entire adult life.

Not in lovely Amsterdam, my favorite Dutch city, with her romantic canals and her intact, un-bombed Euro architecture and her pot dealing, free-wheeling coffee shops, and her ever so accepting, liberal-minded Euro friendly residents.

But here, in damaged, re-built Rotterdam, a city I never gave a real chance to…  a city I spurned and rejected for being second rate, for being not as good as others I considered far preferable. Here… may be an opportunity to call my fiercely-loving sister to apologize to her for my life-long criticism of how she raised her two girls… who actually turned out far better than I ever expected them to. Turned out… not like the spoiled Jewish American Princesses who I was so sure my sister had raised them to be. But turned out more like independent-thinking, self-assured young women who I rarely see, even amongst my college co-eds who I have taught with such arrogance and self- assuredness for the last three decades… at indeed, the so called “University of Spoiled Children”.

Yes, perhaps, here and now… on this very day…. amongst my new, Indo-Dutch, ever-so-comfortable insta-family…. might be the opportunity to start over… to start anew… with a more inclusive, a more accepting, a more self-accepting… idea of … “family”.

Yes.

Hey, Aleee-son. Hola. It’s your brother. Calling from Rotterdam. To wish you and Edgardo and Amanda and Marcela…. a Happy New Year….

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