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.