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Writings – Ennis Smith

Writings

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Featured

Deep Songs, Film, My back pages, New York, Television, Theater

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…

Featured

AIDS, Deep Songs, My back pages, New York, Theater

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…

Criticals, Deep Songs, Writings

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…

AIDS, Deep Songs, Gay, History, My back pages

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…

Art, Criticals, Deep Songs, Gay, Literature, Museums/Galleries

Man on Fire

August 18, 2018

I was finishing a late-aborning BA when a professor introduced me to the works of David Wojnarowicz. No doubt she fathomed that he could be a model for the writing I was attempting—autobiography of a frank, sexual nature that also had very much to do with loss and the times in which I came of…

Art, Deep Songs, Essays, Writings

Still, Standing

December 5, 2015

For an art model, time bends, saunters, crawls, or stealthily expands, but it rarely flies. Twenty minutes can feel like infinity if the pose is difficult—and each is difficult in its own way. Tonight is my first full-figure gig, which means I’m struggling to maintain the position of various body parts as my mind manages…

My back pages, New York, Soujorns, Travel

Vacations like other people

August 25, 2014

The sea air is a drug that addles reason. How else to explain the amnesia that comes over me every summer on the first bike ride back to the Ram’s Head Inn on Shelter Island? I forget that its approach involves two short steep hills—the first brings you up to Little Ram’s Head Island, a…

Art, Short Cuts, Sketches, Writing, Writings

Dig Two Graves

March 14, 2012

The sound of the wind was strong. It was that, and what felt like sudden warmth that made Christina sit up, then shield her eyes from the sharp light. She’d fallen asleep in the field. How long had it been—an hour? Minutes? She yawned. The inhalation rephrased the moment, reminded her why she’d come back…

My back pages, Sketches

The End of the Year

January 28, 2010

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Roger Waters, Wish You Were Here By the time we made it to Washington Square Park, 1993 was already half a…

Deep Songs, My back pages

The Super with the Toy Face

September 30, 2009

Note: an earlier version of this piece was published in the literary journal Ganymede Fall 2008 and on the website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the ancient, antic super of 515 Edgecombe Avenue, an immense, pre-war slab of yellowed bricks and mortar at the corner of 158th Street. His complexion, shaded always…