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tiny love story/New York Times Sunday Oct 22, 2023
October 24, 2023
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Liaisons with Angela
October 27, 2022
Attend this tale. I regret that I never ran into her at a cocktail party, nor was I privileged to have shared the stage or screen with her. Except for a brief moment, my story is the story of millions. I was an audience member, a fan who was the happy beneficiary of the talent…
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A million years ago
October 16, 2022
On this day a million years ago the two men in this photo packed up their dreams in a UHaul and moved to New York (helped by our lovely, talented classmate Stephen Hope). It was a leap of faith for us Ohio boys to pack up and move to a place where we could live…
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Urban Savant
January 25, 2022
Greg Tate, the prolific critic and culture chronicler, died Tuesday December 7. He happened to be a neighbor of mine. For close to 30 years we lived next door to each other in the Sugar Hill section of New York’s Washington Heights. We shared what neighbors share: a street/mecca where greats like Ellington and Strayhorn,…
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The Master
January 25, 2022
Wisdom: when words convey a truth that’s irrefutable. The right ones echo, to the point where you realize you’ve memorized it because it’s something you never want to forget. Ever. Stephen Sondheim’s words and music have had that effect on me even before I knew his name. In “Something’s Comin’” from West Side Story, I recognized…
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Borrowed thought
May 24, 2021
Ovid in Tearsby Jack Gilbert Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.They asked him what he meant by garden.He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”he said, “there are places walled off where colorand decorum are magnified into a civilization.Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How likea woman, they asked. He remembered their wivesand…
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Twilight in the early 90s
April 1, 2021
The snakes. They were the surprising aspect of the Hugh Steers show on view this week at Alexander Gray (closing this Saturday April 3). I hadn’t seen them before. Later, when I read that this was actually late work I was no longer surprised; at the time Steers made them, the snakes all but shout…
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Crazy Rhythms in a Night of Love
November 29, 2020
Last night I enhaled the glorious mise en scene of Steve McQueen’s Lover’s Rock, one of the five short films that comprise his Small Axe series (Amazon Prime). All that polyester! Sweaty dancers and swigs of beer redolent of high school parties in the basements of classmate’s houses! It’s the power of film, and its…
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Becoming an Actor Taught Me How to Write
December 28, 2019
When I was a 10 year-old boy soprano, a choirmaster proclaimed, “Music is a picture painted on a background of silence.” It was an abstraction that stuck, as first lessons of craft tend to do. Others I’ve heard: Show, don’t tellA cliché is a cliché because it’s trueAlways hold something backAvoid passivity in your attackThe music…
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Dread aught
December 1, 2019
A few nights ago at dinner out with new friends, our getting-to-know-each-other small talk circled around to coming out to our families. Our stories all had variants, but one thing seemed universal: how the presence of AIDS smoked the edges of each instance. Mine came at the end of a most challenging year, one spent…
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