Thursday, February 26, 2015

H.B. 2881

The West Virginia House has introduced a bill to disallow anti-discrimination ordinances by cities and counties if the category is not covered in state law. It was introduced by Lynne Arvon, a delegate from Beckley, a dying city in the southern part of West Virginia. She blogged that the bill was not about allowing discrimination, but making sure businesses found the same equal opportunity regulations throughout the state. She did not suggest the state a adopt a non-discrimination ordinance covering LGBT people. Here is my response to her (Slightly edited, only for punctuation and clarity):

"No one believes that this bill is not intended to bring about discrimination against LGBT people. No one thinks you actually believe your own words, given the history of hatred of LGBT people from the Republican Party generally. Did you consult with members of the LGBT community before bringing this up? I'm guessing not. Rumor is that the mayor of Beckley asked you to do it because he was afraid his city might pass it. I know there are gay people in the southern part of West Virginia; you should think about representing them as well as the people you think you represent.This whole Republican legislature has made West Virginia a laughing stock, and you are a big part of that."

Barry Lee Wendell, Morgantown

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Highways

My friend Brian Jacobs posted on Facebook last week that he was attending the twenty-fifth anniversary party for Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. That brought back  memories, and I pointed out in a comment that I had studied performance art there with Tim Miller, and performed as one of five in a piece called "Queer Hearts" in 1994. Mehmet Sander, a choreographer who frequently worked at Highways, and for a time was in the classes with me, greeted me on Facebook and we became Facebook friends.

In the early 1990s, I was living in a tiny Hollywood hovel. I wrecked my car in December 1989 when I rear-ended a car that had stopped to make a left turn. I was late for a scene rehearsal from my acting class and was trying to go over my lines while driving. It was a youthful indiscretion. I was forty. I was uninsured, not getting much work as a substitute teacher, and couldn't replace the car.

I read in the Los Angeles Times some time in 1990 about Tim Miller, a performance artist who lost his National Endowment For The Arts grant because Jesse Helms and a few others thought his work was obscene. The article said that California had stepped in with a grant to Miller, which would allow him to teach performance art at Highways. Tim had one class for gay men on Thursday nights and one Saturday mornings open to anyone. I signed up for both. I took the bus from Hollywood to Santa Monica, walking the last few blocks. If I wasn't the oldest in the group, I was second oldest. Brian and Mehmet were in the group as well as my friend Michael Richter. Gabe Gelbart, who appears earlier in this blog, was there, and maybe twenty or so other young men. The Saturday class had men and women, gay and straight. It had a different feel to it, more about the art than about a gay community. I loved both of these classes.

From these classes, I learned to tell stories about my life, learned to be brief (which I have forgotten on this blog), and became part of a group, working and sharing with others. At the end of the Saturday class, I wrote a piece about Israeli dancing, and how it saved my life. I taped a song from Israeli dance, changing the choreography somewhat, recorded my voice over the music, and danced while the tape played the music and my story. We were to get Tim's critique the week after, which would have been March 23, 1991. I missed that, because my father died March 17, and I went to Baltimore for the funeral and shiva.

Two of the youngest and most handsome men in the group died of AIDS during the months we were meeting. When the play "Rent" came out, I was anxious to see it, because I thought it would remind me of Highways. I hated "Rent." The death of someone from AIDS is a plot point in the play. Everyone just goes on afterwards as if it never happened. Real life hasn't been like that. I still remember one of the men telling us in a performance about his status; I visited the other one in the hospital. Nothing was the same after we lost them.

I tried to see most of the shows at Highways. For a long time, I volunteered as an usher so I could see the shows free. I remember Michael Kearns' drag "Camille" which moved me to tears despite the doomed heroine being 6'3" and having a hairy chest and a mustache. The young man who played opposite Michael in that piece performed a solo piece a different time, where he told about being a prostitute to pay his way through college. Hardly anyone came, but he gave a full-out performance that I still remember more than twenty years later.

My friend Kevin was in a Christian order of some kind and lived behind a 1920s mansion on Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles with his Brothers. I remember it was 1994 because Kevin lost the back wall of his room to the Northridge earthquake and had to move. Kevin recruited me to be in a piece about gay love, to be performed at Highways. I was the token older and ethnic person of the five in the group. Three were Mormons, and Kevin was ghostly pale with light orange hair. We each wrote three pieces about gay love, two short and one a bit longer, with a song. We added a few other songs. My long piece was about the mismatch between me and my first boyfriend, who had been the teen organist at his family's Baptist church in Pensacola before he went to music school in New Orleans, where we both lived. The others suggested we sing a Baptist hymn in harmony as part of the piece, and we did. I had suggested that we sing "Too Many Fish In The Sea," originally by The Marvelettes, between pieces, and Kevin went for that, over the objections of the younger members, who had never heard the song. I had never heard of The Smiths, but I learned one of their songs.

Our show ran close to three hours. We were on only two nights, Friday and Saturday. Two-thirds of the Saturday audience was people I had sent flyers to, members of my temple, Beth Chayim Chadashim, where most of the members were gay and lesbian. After our performances, someone asked when I was planning to do another piece, and I said the first thing that popped into my mind. "Never."

We've gone different ways in the last twenty years. Brian Jacobs was a young teacher when
i met him. He worked under an insane principal at a little alternative school near Arlington and Venice. I subbed there sometimes. He has moved on to AP classes, I think in history. He's taken kids on "The March of the Living" where they visit both Auschwitz and Israel, and he has won many awards for his teaching. Michael Richter, despite an Ivy League education, was working as a clerk at The Jewish Federation. He went back to UCLA for a degree in dance and is a choreographer. C. Jay Cox, one of my costars in "Queer Hearts," wrote the screenplay for "Sweet Home Alabama, " starring Reese Witherspoon, and directed "Latter Days," a film about gay Mormons.

Brian, Tim, and Michael all had issues more recently with immigration. All of them had boyfriends who could not maintain legal status in the United States. Michael moved to La Paz, Mexico to be with his mate, Iram. I think he is flourishing there. Brian and Tim were able to marry their boyfriends legally in California, and with the fall of The Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, obtained citizenship for their loved ones. Mehmet told me last week that he had moved back to Istanbul, his hometown, with his American-born boyfriend. His dance troupe performs frequently in England, and I saw pictures on his Facebook page with a large, loving family.

I learned a lot about art and life from my time at Highways, and while I've lost track of many of the people there, I keep in touch with a few. I decided to learn to sing better, and sang for High Holidays for seven years, and most Friday nights for three. At Highways I learned writing and performance, but also compassion, friendship and fearlessness. I got back to my spiritual roots. Those days inform who I am today.


Thursday, February 12, 2015

The Teen Learning Program

Part of me misses teaching, part says "Good riddance." Same with working as a cantor. I did it, I was good after a few years of not being good. I proved a point; it's over.

Tree of Life Congregation where Joe, my spouse, is the rabbi, has a teen learning program twice monthly. The idea is to keep the post-bar and bat mitzvah kids engaged with the temple until they leave for college. Margalit, Joe's assistant, asks people to volunteer time and expertise. She asked me to teach Jewish music to the kids. I agreed to do it, but in my typical passive-aggressive way decided to not teach anything I did as a cantor.

I thought I would start with West Side Story, originally produced on Broadway by Harold Prince, with Leonard Bernstein doing the music, Arthur Laurents writing the book, Jerome Robbins on choreography and Stephen Sondheim writing lyrics. Larry Kert was the original Tony. All of them were Jewish, and, except for Harold Prince, all of them were gay or bisexual. My spiritual ancestors.

Kids might see West Side Story in school, but they are not given a context. They don't know that the music and dancing were revolutionary compared to My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music, which are from the same era. They don't know that just about everyone who played a part in bringing it to the stage was Jewish, and how they related to immigrant outcasts clashing with the dominant culture, also a theme for gay outcasts, especially in the 1950s.

I showed two excerpts from the 1961 movie, "The Dance In The Gym" because it is so exciting and includes Robbins' choreography, slightly altered from the stage version, and "I Feel Pretty" because that song has the most obvious Sondheim lyrics. Bernstein wrote some of the lyrics also.

I found one other work from each of the four participants. I showed "The Wedding Dance" from the 1971 movie of Fiddler on the Roof because it was Jerome Robbins' work. Fiddler is where Robbins really got back to his Jewish roots. I played the last part of Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms." The New York Philharmonic, where Bernstein became conductor shortly after the premiere of West Side Story, told Bernstein not to write for Broadway again. In 1964, he wrote a setting of psalms for a choral concert in Chichester, England. He picked the psalms and told them they had to sing them in Hebrew. I performed this piece in the choir at Temple Israel of Hollywood around 1999. I still cry when I hear this performed. It ends with Hinei Matov Umanayim Shevet Achim Gam Yachad,
a text the kids all know.

Arthur Laurents wrote the screenplay for The Way We Were, really about standing up for principles, and about the Hollywood blacklist in 1950. Of course it became a vehicle for Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Laurents was both characters, Streisand's radical Jew and Redford's sell-out writer. Then there was that song by Marvin Hamlisch.

Lastly, I showed a film excerpt from a 1980 stage production of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, directed by Harold Prince. We saw Angela Lansbury describe "The Worst Pies in London."

The kids enjoyed it, all three of them, and the few parents, one of whom said the song "The Way We Were" still made her cry. She couldn't believe the movie came out forty-two years ago.

The kids didn't ask about anyone's sexuality, and I didn't tell. I gave them a list of all the Jewish people we had talked about and dared them to look them up. They won't. I only got some interest when I explained that Sweeney Todd slit people's throats in his barber shop and Mrs. Lovett baked their chopped-up bodies into pies. I recommended the 2007 Johnny Depp- Helena Bonham Carter movie directed by Tim Burton. They might look that up.

The classes were supposed to be two weeks apart, but because I was sick the week of the first class, we delayed it a week (costing me two students) and I had to teach again the next week.

Feeling guilty about avoiding prayer music, I decide to teach about Debbie Friedman. We sing many of her tunes at Tree of Life, particularly her healing prayer, Mi Shebeirach, which we do every Friday.

Debbie used to come to BCC, the temple I belonged to in Los Angeles. I met her there once and we chatted briefly. What impressed me about her was that she next showed up a few months later, ran up to me and hugged me and said "Hi, Barry!" I barely remembered having met her.

I showed a video of her teaching "Not By Might" from the Chanuka haftorah, then part of an interview with her where she explains her history, and finally a tribute movie, shown after Debbie's death, at the Union for Reform Judaism's biennial.

Debbie's contributions included changing the texts to include feminine verb forms, writing songs in Hebrew and English, often both in the same song, and writing songs that people could sing with the soloist. She said she was surprised that not everyone liked what she did. I explained that to the kids. Temples with a tenor soloist, an organ and organist, a choir and choir director, felt threatened by a lone soloist with a guitar. Although she didn't say it, having a woman lead services was new and not always acceptable. I get her music. I see why it is popular. I was that tenor soloist. I didn't want the congregation to sing along. I was happy to have my voice soar above a choir or organ (more often a piano). I found her music hard to sing and too "touchy-feely." Still, I don't think Reform Judaism would have survived without her and people (mostly women) who play guitar and lead congregations in song.

Early in class, one of the boys said he heard Debbie had died, and I confirmed that. At the end, a girl asked if she left a husband. I told all of them the truth, that Debbie was a lesbian, that she was open, but never discussed it publicly, and that she had a girlfriend. I don't know if they were ever married. The kids were cool with that explanation.

So that was it. I had three boys and a girl the second week, and one other boy on Skype who lives in the hinterlands about sixty miles away.

I enjoyed doing this, although it took lots of time, and I obsessed about every detail nearly to the point of insanity. Mid-twentieth century American culture, and in particular the Jewish and Queer influences on it, is my real academic interest, and Debbie Friedman is probably the person who most influenced how Jews in the Reform movement pray today. She was a friend, a deeply spiritual person, and a major talent. It is important that the kids know who she was.

Here's the list of people to look up from my first class. Go ahead. Look them up.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

Jerome Robbins (Rabinowitz) (1918-1998)

Stephen Sondheim (1930)

Arthur Laurents (Levine) (1917-2011)

Larry Kert (1930-1991)

Zero (Samuel) Mostel (1915-1977)

Barbra (Barbara)Streisand (1942)

Harold Prince (1928)

Jerry Bock (1928-2010)

Sheldon Harnick (1924)

(Chaim)Topol (1935)

Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovich) (1859-1916)

Sidney Pollack (1934-2008)

Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012)

Alan (1925) and Marilyn (Katz) Bergman (1929)

Also, go to YouTube and see what you can find of Debbie Friedman.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Pics

Here are the pics from the last post, hopefully.  This is the house and the street.


Real Estate, Part III

One thing I wanted to do in 2015 is move. We live in a firetrap townhouse (the insulation on the lower floor says "Flammable: Do not leave uncovered." It is, next to the furnace, hot water heater, and dryer. We are also in a three-story house, where it's a full flight up to get the groceries to the kitchen. Our next oldest neighbor in the other  twelve townhouses is twenty-eight. We don't go to football games, but we are close enough to the stadium to have to plan our movements on football day to avoid the messed-up traffic and noise.

We talked about owning, but there was a voice in our heads that said "Morgantown is not home." If that's true, then we don't have a home. I'm five years out of Los Angeles, Joe is ten years out of San Francisco. We have people in New York, Washington, Memphis, Buffalo and various places in Florida. We are not really planning on moving to those places.

On Sundays, I typically check out the real estate section of the local paper. I learned from my unfinished graduate work in urban studies that the easiest places to move are the middle of a city and the outer edges. Tree of Life, where Joe is the rabbi, is two blocks across  Decker's Creek from downtown Morgantown. There are three historic districts on The National Register (Chancery Hill, South Park and Greenmont) in that part of town. Many of the members of the congregation live in that part of town. Prior to the 1960s, Jews didn't live anywhere else in town. There are new townhouses being built around the edge of the city. The problem with the old houses is that while they are beautiful, they are expensive if remodeled, and unlivable if not.The new houses tend to be ugly and far from just about anything.

I look for more modern houses within five miles of the synagogue. Our townhouse is only 2.8 miles away, but through the University, meaning the traffic on the ancient streets is always backed up, and when classes are in session, one has to drive miles out of the way to avoid students walking to class.

Last Sunday, I saw a listing for a typical Liberty Road-style 1950s split-level house in South Park. An anomaly in that neighborhood. I called the agent for the house Monday and Joe and I went to see it Tuesday. It's only slightly bigger than the house I grew up in in Baltimore, and from the same time period. That house was cramped, but we were four. Two of us should be able to handle it. At sixty years old it can also be part of the historic district it is in, although most of the neighborhood is from the early twentieth century.

Yesterday we were pre-approved for a loan. I have enough cash for a down payment and the monthly payments will not likely be more than we pay in rent. The price seems too high. Of course, a similar house in Los Angeles would be in a rough Valley neighborhood and cost twice as much; in New York, it would be thirty miles out from Manhattan and cost a million dollars.

There may be other, nicer houses for less money, but not in South Park, which is where we really belong. It is the one liberal neighborhood in this otherwise troglodyte conservative part of the world. It's probably the only neighborhood in the 300 miles between Pittsburgh and Charleston where you might see an old "Obama" sticker on a car. This isn't an easy state to live in.

Buying a house might be the kind of "leap of faith" Joe took when he quit his job at Wells Fargo at forty-seven to start a five-year program to become a rabbi. Looking at a fifteen or thirty year loan at our age is daunting. And buying means we plan to stay here in Morgantown.

Still, it would be great to have a mid-century house, a flat yard, a finished basement to put our stuff in, a back deck to entertain in the summer, and neighbors who are already our friends. We might finally be in a home.

We still have work to do before this house is ours. We have inspections, price negotiations, dealing with banks, and then the logistics of moving to deal with. I'm hopeful.

I called this post "Real Estate, Part III" because Parts I and II were about our venture into real estate in Crescent City, California, described in my previous blog, "Barry's Excellent Adventure." It also appears in my book, Barry's Crescent City Blog: A Jewish Gay Man On California's North Coast.

I've spent a half-hour trying to upload pics from my phone and correcting the extra capital letter in the "Labels" section a dozen times. I'm so frustrated with how poorly this format works, I could strangle Sergei Brin (founder of Google) myself.