My Neighborhood — A Postscript

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Before 1906 a row of sumptuous Victorians lined the three blocks of Eddy Street from Van Ness to Laguna, making this one of the luxury neighborhoods in San Francisco's Western Addition.

Modern apartment buildings gradually replaced them, leaving only three historic buildings standing, each of which is a designated San Francisco Landmark.

Landmark 11: Rothschild House, 964 Eddy Street

Landmark 11: Family Service Agency, 1010 Gough Street at Eddy, designed by Bernard Maybeck, 1928.

Landmark 35: Stadtmuller House, 819 Eddy, built 1880.

Noehill In San Francisco has a useful listing of local landmarks.

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My neighborhood — The McKittrick Hotel — 3/3

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The Portman Mansion, 1007 Gough Street

Vertigo, the finest Hollywood movie ever filmed in San Francisco, must have encouraged many people to move here. This wasn’t true in my case, but after I first saw it in Boston in 1958, the portrayal of San Francisco as a misty, color-saturated, Vista-Visioned enchantment lying somewhere far to the west on the Pacific coast haunted me in its mythic unreality as it still does even to this day.

Other impressions from the movie remain unforgotten—the genially conceived long stroll across Ernie’s Restaurant in the famous green velvet dress, of course, and the leap into the Bay under the Bridge at Fort Point, the tète-à-tète among misty redwoods in Muir Woods, the fall from the (totally non-existent) bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista in Hollister.

Equally impressive for me and my male buddies in those days was Kim Novak’s appearance at the Empire Hotel at 940 Sutter. Her Playtex Maidenform bra seemed to stretch her green knit sweater to the point of structural unsustainability.

Another great moment occurs when Madeleine enters the McKittrick Hotel to regenerate her delusional possession by Carlotta Valdes. Certainly nowhere in Boston could you encounter an architecture that looked anything like like this.

The "McKittrick Hotel" was in fact the twenty-room Portman mansion dating from the 1880’s at Gough and Eddy Streets. It was torn down in 1959 to make room for an athletic practice field belonging to Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School.

Jimmy Stewart pulls up in his 1956 DeSoto FireFlite.

St Paulus Church is behind him, and my apartment under the arrow.

And he goes looking for Madeleine.

An opportunity for a quick bath is ignored.

The derelict mansion was pulled down in 1959.

Time is elastic, you have to become an older person to really understand that. As much time has elapsed between the filming of the Hitchock movie and the present as between then and when the mansion at 1007 Gough Street was still in its prime. Who knows, perhaps Carlotta Valdes really existed. Every city has its own ghosts, and God knows this town is loaded with them.

A few times each week I sit waiting at the bus stop at Gough and Eddy for the 31-Balboa to come lumbering up the hill. Sometimes, when the neighborhood is wrapped in fog, the McKittrick Hotel rises up spectrally across the street in front of me beyond the schoolyard, and I see Jimmy Stewart stalking Madeleine up the steps. It occurs to me that I too have trailed after one beautiful woman or another, only to see her disappear before my eyes.




The black-and-white photos of the Portman Mansion are taken from the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

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My neighborhood — Jefferson Square Park — 2/3

San Francisco is blessed with a number of fine parks bejewelling the city like so many sparkling florets of emerald green, even though their public reputation diminishes in comparison with the massively gorgeous Golden Gate Park, arguably the best urban park anywhere.

Who among us has not basked under the Spring sun in the green pastures of Dolores Park, enjoyed the folksy sociability of Washington Park in North Beach, or felt awed before the majesty of the Bridge and the Golden Gate while walking along the Bay at Crissy Field. These are pleasures found nowhere else in this country, and they don’t cost you a penny.

My own neighborhood features a recreational area called Jefferson Square Park, only a minute from my door. Regrettably, compared with the other parks available for public enjoyment in this city, this one is a total loser, and it’s a mystery to me why it exists to begin with. Building a park on the side of a steep hill seems counter-intuitive, but with application it can be reasonably accomplished, as exemplified by the not-distant and altogether amenable Lafayette Park .

But Jefferson Square Park fails completely. It is striated with three lateral black asphalt walkways, punctuated by crumbling stone stair cases that elevate one about ten feet. The ground is damp, and due to lack of discipline, the grass has gone clumpy. It is generally cold and windy. Nobody uses the park except dog-owners on the one end of it and societal desperates requiring a place to sleep in the afternoons on the other.

The park does have a few old-growth eucalyptus trees, and the view south from its northern periphery provides a welcome chance to stretch one’s eyes. But it’s clearly not a place where people choose to hang out or recreate themselves, and its single advantage is that the space isn’t covered with residential buildings and parking lots like everywhere else in the vicinity.

And yet for one brief period, probably the only time in the Park’s history, incompetent city planning produced an unexpected advantage when refugees from the Fire erected a tent city here in 1906.

Underneath my bed I keep a small one-person tent and a rolled up sleeping bag and air mattress. I am not expecting my own building to collapse when the Big One comes, but it could burn down. So I have at the ready a stash of canned food, three gallon-bottles of Crystal Mountain water, and a small aluminum briefcase containing my external, back-up hard drive, along with some emergency weed. You will find me among the first to have established residence in Jefferson Square Park.


Photos: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.


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My neighborhood — 1/3

I’ve lived in the 900 block of Eddy Street for some years now, and have really quite enjoyed being here. Despite the fact that it lacks the defining characteristics of a more authentic San Francisco neighborhood—it’s one of those streets you walk down to get somewhere else: two blocks east to Van Ness, two blocks west to the Fillmore, two blocks north to St Mary’s Cathedral—its central location also enables me to walk to the Main Library, BART and Muni Metro in a quarter hour or less.

It’s also situated on the 31-Balboa bus line, one of the more felicitous routes in the city. The vehicles hustle along efficiently and noiselessly every twenty minutes or so along mostly empty streets. In fifteen minutes you can get to Powell and Market going east, and in thirty you’re at Ocean Beach to the west, perfect for a stroll on hot days. And there’s almost always a place to sit.

My apartment is quiet, comfy and suffers only from being overloaded with books and plants, which would however doubtless characterize whatever living space I chose to inhabit. And it has the inestimable advantage of  facing south with an unobstructed view to the sun, enhancing and nurturing my window garden, the light crisply sutured or softened at various times of the day through the judicious deployment of wooden Venetian blinds purchased at IKEA.

But if the neighborhood is nondescript today, it was not always so. I live one door down from what was once one of the city’s most remarkable architectural assets. The Saint Paulus German Lutheran Church profiled itself so prominently against the skyline of the city that you could see it from miles away, from Noe Valley, Bernal Hill or Twin Peaks. It seemed visible from almost anywhere, and you could orient yourself spatially by observing it on the horizon. That steeple you're looking at sodomized the sky at a height of about eight stories.

Built in 1893, the church disappeared overnight in a terrible fire in 1995.

The razed property remained deserted for years, surrounded by a tall chicken-wire fence, home on occasion to a small number of the city’s homeless, whose encampments got periodically annihilated by the police. Its dismal appearance even qualified it in my feverish imagination as an official entrance to hell, described elsewhere on this blog.

All this changed last year when the plot suddenly exploded into prominence as a community garden, now verdant with  flowers and vegetables, complete with proprietary beehives ensuring rapid fertilization, and described in considerable detail at the sponsoring organization’s website.

What the Free Farm has meant for local residents is inestimable, not exactly in terms of forging us into a viable community, but serving rather as a constant source of intense curiosity. Walking past to and from the bus stop, or marching down the hill to the Safeway, one can’t help pausing for a few minutes to observe what-all is going on in the new community garden.

Thanks flickr user dluck for the fire picture.

disclaimer

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Forget Dionysus

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Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit, U.C. Press 2010, is a sort of San Francisco field guide for thinking people, the basic message being that life here is AWFULLY DIVERSE. To prove it there is a map of "queer public spaces"—we used to call them gay bars—coexisting, just to be clever, on the same page with a chart of local butterfly habitats. Three pages of euphoric prose by Aaron Shurin follow, coyly celebrating the “soul” that gays continue to bestow upon the city.

Well, whatever. What I thought uncompromisingly stupid was the relegation of  resident “whites” solely to Pacific Heights, indicated on the map entitled “Tribes of  San Francisco.”  But I won’t bother to be bothered by the absence of any mention of hippies, which happens, in the words of a UC alumni magazine reviewer, because the author “eschews the prepackaged narrative of Love and Haight.”

Regardless of its ensuing commodification / reification, the hippie experience affected the lives of tens of thousands, and helped enable all kinds of social change. What followed in the Reagan period was a sort of damnatio memoriae of the hippies. It still continues, and I suspect the present volume is more evidence of the same.

Speaking as an unrepentant hippie, I refuse to be upset. It always occurred to me that the Haight in 1967 resembled not an infinite city, but more accurately an invisible one. It descends from the skies every hundred years or so like Brigadoon, enabling the more percipient members of society to worship Dionysus with all means at our exposal before it goes away again. It’s like the movie “King of Hearts” (1966), when the doors to a French nuthouse are accidentally unlocked during WWI, and the inmates run out to play in the deserted streets of the town and enact their various phantasies.

It’s a question of grace, not merit, and the best way to ensure that Dionysus returns with his cult to our city is to forget about him completely.



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Would you like to be free of those heavy, logy days due to constipation?

Click picture to embiggen

Mutt and Jeff was created by Bud Fisher and first published in November 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle. Published six days a week, it is generally regarded as the world's first comic strip. It quickly became a nationwide success and remained in syndication until 1982.

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Nancy Ewart's paintings

Visting Open Studios in San Francisco is one of the periodic pleasures of life in San Francisco: you can get to see more contemporary artworks in the course of a weekend in October or May than you can see anywhere else in town, plus which those of us on a fixed weekend can avoid the usual museum entry fees.

After visiting a small coven of artists at 689 Bryant this month, to my great surprise I came home with a painting, actually a collage which you can't see from the photo, entitled Black Sun, White Line:

The artist is Nancy Ewart, who writes an art column for the S.F. Examiner and who also writes her own art blog called ChezNamasteNancy. If you want to know what's going on around town for art shows, museum exhibitions and gallery events, these are the sites to visit.

Nancy is also a very talented painter, and shows regularly at Open Studios. Concerning her erratic career as an artist, (and whose isn't), she writes:

I came here in the 60's to study art (at the SFAI) but I always knew that I couldn't do it full time. I've always painted, done calligraphy, make small books and written. For a while, I even wrote an astrology column and read tarot cards,  but I had to make my living in other ways. For years, I worked for small presses/small newspapers, all the alternate media that SF used to have.

When that dried up, I went to work for UCSF. I got a history degree along the way and did a couple of years work toward an MBA but had to stop, due to the cutbacks in funding for higher education and the demands of my job.I retired a few years ago after 30 years in the salt mines and every day since then has been an exciting adventure. When I retired, I thought I would finish off that long-delayed second (third?) degree but the twists and unexpected turns of this stage of life have meant that I've changed my plans  - often and without regret. I paint more and have started a career in arts journalism, covering all the arts and museums in the Bay Area and sometimes beyond that my energy, interests and time will allow.

Concerning my new acquisition pictured above, she emailed me as follows:

The piece that you have was inspired by the NASA website which I look at every day. I love the images of the cosmos which are both graphically beautiful and scientifically fascinating. It's amazing to think about the wonders of the universe and I can't wrap my mind around the billions of galaxies that are out there. When I make art based on cosmic images, I prefer to use strong graphic shapes and bold colors; otherwise, it can be an amorphous mess. I also like to use layers of mixed media; "Black Sun, White Line" was painted on hand made paper, textured with several types of gel medium including my favorite one which contains pumice stone. Paint and oil pastel rubbed into that surface creates the most amazing textures and while it's not anywhere near the awesome wonder of the universe, it gave me great joy to make.

Nancy's paintings show in my mind perception an almost unique way of thinking about color, as you can judge for yourself  in this picture entitled Number 8:

Nancy is currently working on a series of paintings which she as she says are "based on images of the Elgin Marbles - sculpture from Ancient Greece which is the foundation stone of our culture." You can see them yourself right here.

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Proposal for an Annual Fog-Burying Ceremony

Gustaf Sobin writes of the discovery of numerous stone tablets bearing the inscription “Buried lightning” (Fulgur conditum) on the plateaus above rural Provence. They were placed on the location where a lightning bolt had struck: the lightning was then ritually buried along with whatever charred pieces of wood or rooftops or horsecarts were lying around.

Citing Lucian and Plutarch, Sobin says that a wall was erected around the place where the lightning fell, then an animal was sacrificed and a priest would consecrate the enclosed ground. Considered sacred, the lightning bolt was memorialized and ritually "housed" as the signature of Iupiter Fulgator, and any further destructive powers were assumed to be rendered harmless thereby.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to conduct an annual fog-burying ceremony here in San Francisco. I suggest we convene at the top of the Buena Vista Park annually in August (a good time of year for it, when folks have given up hope of ever seeing the sun shine again) and conduct a ritual interment, somewhat along the lines of placing a quantity of San Francisco fog in a lead casket along with a tube of suncream oil to counteract its noxious effects, and then burying the casket several feet underground.

After some prayers of deliverance and a short sermon by an especially appointed Fog Bishop, the rites might be concluded with a sacred bonfire, during the course of which the congregation would be urged to get naked and dance around with broomsticks up their asses and indulge in whatever other festive activities might be considered appropriate or not, as the case may be.

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Photo from Gustaf Sobin, Luminous Debris. 
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Plotinus bites the dust

Reacting to the West Portal Tunnel Calamity, one of our Entrances to Hell in San Francisco posts, Lew Ellingham sent in the following comment recently:

Plotinus, my familiar, drew my attention to the stench. It seemed more than the usual petroleum-tinged motes of Upper Market Street as we walked westward from the Harvey Milk station at 17th St., Castro and Market, with its new little park at the door of the Glass Coffin Bar. Plotinus is small, so we tarried, and I am old, so we tarried more, but eventually the slanting hole of the Collingword entrance to the Twin Peaks Tunnel hove to view. This once was also the Eureka Street Station, long ago abandoned, though the platforms remain in the tunnel itself. Perhaps the closing of this entrance introduced the karma that has blighted the setting for decades; one wonders. Train drivers who race their speeding trains in the wee hours, thinking to save time or rush home from a final shift: a few have derailed. Other trains have killed workers on the tracks, derailed for no apparent reason, passengers have disappeared -- whither? The stench grew stronger; sorry vines and old weeds festooned along the collapsing walls of the tunnel entrance, the old metal gate weary from whatever, once a bright gray and now the color of a mothballed warship, pealing.
I bent to pick Plotinus up, to carry; he was struggling, slowing down. Only the size of a small dog, I often have to do this, though in some situations he is way ahead of me, jumping and turning quickly, racing about within his small compass. But as I touched him, he flew from my hand, which in any case had not closed over him, and hurtled toward the old metal gate of the Collingwood entrance. A huge sound accompanied. Deafening. A movement of air, a sucking. And indeed, the detritus of the street drew and massed with Plotinus as all flew toward the rattling doors, the whole portal trembling, as if a jet plane were about the emerge or collide. My bladder yielded to the horror. These distractions dulled my understanding of the event as a whole, the images more like sequenced still photography than motion pictures, but I did see Plotinus together with a large tree branch hit the grating above the metal doors and bounce heavenward in a large arc toward Collingwood Street. On the street’s surface both landed, but the entrance itself was but a swirl of tumbling, flying junk and noise, dimming only as the orifice itself began to disappear behind the impacting debris.
I had fallen, unaware of it until I tried to rush to Plotinus and found myself crawling. So horrible! Was he dead? His huge starring eyes were open, but then he seldom blinks them; he rested on one side. In a moment I had grabbed him, tucked him beneath my open jacket, hidden him from the maelstrom. Can I hide myself? So awful, so awful. I couldn’t see clearly. Tears, yes, but the atmosphere was cluttered, the light rapidly failing. Was time passing quickly, like the strong wind? I could hardly clear my nose from phlegm, and was gasping. Was this over? Was it just the beginning?

Not the Twat of Tangiers

Nice show last night at the Thrillpeddlers revival of Hot Greeks, which hasn't been performed in these precincts since 1972. My favorite number was "I Am Not the Twat of Tangiers," tenderly rendered by Russell Blackwood, who looked like a crazed Kabuki actor suffering transfixion by Pallas Athena's Medusa.
Miss Sheldra's performance of "No, No, Nanook" convincingly informed the audience that there might be more going on at the North Pole than one might have logically supposed.
In "Divorcee's Lament," Michael Phillis did a remarkable job of imitating original Cockette Goldie Glitter's patented facial expression, which required continual fluttering of the eyelids alternating with a look of glazed, bovine stupefaction suspended in a fabricated state of intense horrification.

Memories of Janis Joplin

walking in the Park, surrounded

by a small crowd of admiring

longhairs

hung-over one morning

in the Café Garuda on Haight Street,

bitching about something grungy

at the bottom of a mug of spiced tea

in the summer of '68 there was

a Hell's Angels party at the Carousel Ballroom,

with beer barrels, fist fights, and blood,

and above it all sat Janis

with a five-foot hash pipe, while

the band screamed like a saw mill

at two in the morning

the entire S.F. Tac Squad

lined up in front of the building,

standing by as a couple hundred

Angels started their motorcycle engines

creating a thunder reverberating

down Market Street to the

Ferry Building; it was fabulous

at all the rock concerts

she was the the hippie chick incarnate,

a whirl of motion, and suddenly

she became the lovesick Earth Mother

wailing for her demon lover

one night, in those days,

I dreamed that Janis and I

played Telemann sonatas together

on alto recorders

Sweet Home San Francisco

The house is located on Masonic near Geary Boulevard. Be sure to click on the picture.

Dodie Bellamy and the arrival of the "Mission School"

I’ve always thought that an art museum is like a zoo, where artworks instead of animals are held prisoner and displayed for public gawking at some extortionary admission price. Zoo animals behave like they've been lobotomized, but what's missing in the case of artworks is their history—how they tumbled forth from the mind the artist, how they were meant to be one thing and turned out another, and how the artist lived and worked in a community that nourished and sustained him/her. Sanitized of a context and paraded on display in a museum, an artwork loses its subjectivity, referencing an absent agent whose biography and community of friends seem to have gone missing. 

Dodie Bellamy backgrounds the hidden life of museum art beautifully in a recent  SFMoMA blogpiece. Speaking of the “impenetrable cleanliness of the institution,” and the corresponding lack of memory of the “living community that created the objects,” Dodie goes on to lament the impermanence of neighborhood art scenes in general, and her perceived vanishment of an artist community in the Mission in particular.

This aching after forgotten scenes and lost communities unfortunately does not abate with age. Writing recently about Bob Kaufman took me right back to Grant Ave in 1959, the year of my initial discovery of San Francisco. Where hundreds once gathered, nothing remains to remind but a few faded pages of print and a photo or two.

The Summer of Love 1967 on Haight Street proved life-changing. It was followed by the Castro era, which in many ways produced some extremely imaginative social and street-artsy behaviors--it wasn't just politics. There were mini-scenes elsewhere: on 24th Street in the 70’s, in the Lower Haight in the 80’s, on Valencia Street from the 90’s and after, intermittently also on Telegraph Avenue going back to the political 60’s and Café Med days, where poetry arguments often raged among total strangers.

It is a trick of the mind that if you are involved with a scene, it seems considerably more stable than it actually is. I can remember some hippie friends in 1967 talking about buying property in the Haight-Ashbury, thinking that the life of the community would endure for decades, so forceful the outbreak of a major cultural revolution seemed at the time.

The years of yuppification have all but put an end to low-rent neighborhoods and cheap places to eat, the essential requirement for artist scenes and popular culture movements in America since jazz music was born a century ago. As poets retreat from the streets to the "impenetrable cleanliness" of college classrooms, digitization fills local cafes with laptop zombies and young nerdlings chatting online to remote locations. People are now everywhere but here. Or as Gertrude Stein might put it, there’s no here here. It seems to have disappeared in a cloud of electrons. Certainly there’s hardly anyone left to chat with about obscure pieces of blues music over a cup of coffee or herbal tea.

Dodie remarks upon a cat with bladder problems at the Adobe Bookstore. I knew that cat, but I was more impressed by two others resident at the Aardvark on Church Street. The first was a somnolent tabby which sat meditatively on a stack of books on the counter and looked benevolently upon the proceedings but without a whole lot of inner involvement. And there was a black cat, which mostly didn’t like anyone, and would rise occasionally to stalk patrons around the store, rejecting strokes from all but a very few. 

Saturday Gallimaufry

1.  A great resource for San Francisco history with hundreds of photos can be pleasurably rummaged through at FoundSF. Above photograph shows cable car tracks on Market Street running toward the corner of Castro in 1888.

2.  And here at FORA.tv is Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, a  fascinating ninety-minute video presentation formed from home-made movies of old San Francisco.

In Praise of Hitchhiking

I was lamenting last week the demise of hitchhiking and its negative effect on American literature, and it occurred to me there are probably not many left who have thumbed their way from one end of the country to the other.

My own hitchhiking adventures were not all that extensive, but they did produce some memorable experiences. In 1959 I undertook my first transcontinental trip, from Boston to Seattle. The 50's were perhaps the last era of middle-class social cohesion, which meant among other things that folks tended to trust each other, and even look after one another in public situations. As a young person, the trick was to dress neatly and do as much as possible to look like a college student, and success was assured.

Hitchhiking around Germany as a grad student in the 60's succeeded easily as well.When the driver noted that I was an American, I also deceitfully remarked that I was Jewish, which activated latent guilt mechanisms. Thus I got dropped off at the very best exits along the Autobahn for further travel.

Later in San Francisco there was for several years a vibrant community of young people recognizable by long hair and colorful costume, which ensured rapid pickups by drivers similarly adorned. So if you needed to go to Berkeley from the Haight, you could appear anywhere on Oak Street with a sign that read BERK, get a ride within minutes, and arrive at your destination, possibly stoned, some 25 minutes later. You saved considerable time getting to the F-Bus at the Trans-Bay Terminal, and met some fun people as well.

Transcontinental hitchhiking wasn't quite as efficient, but worked out fine if you were patient and on a budget. But there were sometimes problems, often involving unforeseen adverse weather, as articulated in one of my journal-poems* from 1971:

HITCHHIKING ACROSS NEW YORK IN JANUARY

I promised myself this would never happen again—

age 31, ten dollars in my pocket, standing

over an hour at an obscure entrance

to the New York Thruway which God Himself

has forgotten and where nothing passes except

an occasional carload of drunk, laughing skiers.

The sky turns leaden grey. At four

in the afternoon it is dark as night. I'm numb

to the bone. I hop up and down to keep from

freezing. Suddenly the wind shifts and

a blizzard begins. In ten minutes I look like

a snowman. Eventually a Volkswagen stops

and offers a ride to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

This represents a deviation of 200 miles

from my planned itinerary, but how can I refuse?

Reacting incompetently to the din of an AM

radio station, I sit for hours with my teeth

clenched, knees to my chin. I promise

myself this will never happen again

* I had the idea in those years to form my journal entries as poems.

The Stonewall narrative

In my last post (Ang Lee's Acid Trip) I was going on about how about history is often represented by the cliche terms or iconic constructions applied to it, mainly by journalists, themselves uninformed, who need to make events comprehensible to an uninformed public. Then time goes by and the historical event is remembered only by the attributed representations and not by the actual events themselves.

There is no better example than the universal homage paid to the Stonewall Riots, touted as the mainspring and the initiating moment of Gay Liberation in America. In reality the similarly motivated Compton's Cafeteria riot preceded it by three years. And there were Gay Lib political demonstrations and gay protest literature disseminated in San Francisco long before Stonewall. In other words, the Gay Lib movement started in San Francisco and not in New York.

One source gives an over-hasty version of the San Francisco story here, but the full record is available only in the archives of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.

Pearls over Shanghai

For my birthday last weekend I got taken to the current production of Pearls over Shanghai at the Hypnodrome. Fearing initially that attending a Cockettes revival might exhaust my final reserves of bathos [my God, has it come to this?] I found instead that I was quite delighted.

The production was generally the same as 35+ years ago, albeit much more professionally executed. John Waters, who attended the night before we did, said the show was “better rehearsed,” which has to be the first major understatement of the new decade. It was great to see Scrumbly at work as the de facto orchestra: his appearance in the persona of an escaped, aging Nazi piano-playing female named Ilsa, was terrific, and of course he was the composer of all the songs. And his appearance as Gertrude Stein in the encore hour that followed was marvelous, although he did look a bit like the Church Lady. Unfortunately Rumi wasn’t present to reprise her role that night as the original Mother Gin-sling, but we have heard nothing but good reports.

Yet the show was very different than the original version, and if I list some of those differences here, it is not to criticize the present production, which I urge everybody to go to see before it disappears—it’s brilliantly funny entertainment. (If you’d like to see a preview, there are several clips posted on YouTube.)

• The principals in the early 70’s, in addition to the happily surviving Scrumbly and Rumi, included Sylvester, John Rothermel (into whose apartment I moved in the Summer of Love 1967), and Martin Worman (whose poems I published in my small press magazine). It’s hard to see the show without thinking about them, and the AIDS epidemic that took their lives and so many others among the Cockettes.

And I’m not about to publish here how many of them I slept with in those days. I suppose it’s an age problem: there’s no way you can let the Cockettes go, since it was such an enormous experience, but the melancholy that pervades those memories is inescapable, since, young and innocent as we were, there was no way of knowing how it would all turn out.

• The whole gender-fuck aspect was missing in the current show. What was majorly comical about the Cockettes was simply their appearance: slender young men with bushy beards and longhair, wearing dresses and women’s attire from the Goodwill, with fancifully painted faces and perhaps a crazily perched head-dress, and more often than not no underwear. Their appearance was hilarious before they even hit the stage.

Hibiscus, Beloved founder


• The present production includes (gasp!) a substantial number of women, in my view a useful improvement.

• The Cockettes shows at the Palace were performed on the stage of a movie theater which was elevated at a considerable distance away from the audience, in contrast with the cabaret-style atmosphere at the Hypnodrome, which puts the performers right in your face—and in other parts of the anatomy for those in the first row.

• The political consciousness is much more a background issue today. Before they even hit the stage, the Cockettes represented a venomous assault upon Nixon’s America, and a full-scale attack upon “family values.” It would have likewise been clear to everyone that had Pearls over Shanghai been produced even five years earlier, both the performers and the audience would have been carted off to jail.

Daniel Ware as Martha Mitchell (wife of Nixon's attorney general) at Tricia's Wedding—A political affront?



• Early shows at the Palace were pretty disorganized, with long periods of time between numbers, which however meant you could go trolling for sex around the back rows of the theater, and thus find creative ways to dispel the periods of tedium.

• This changed: with time the shows became incredibly popular, so you had to stand in line for an hour in front of the Palace to get a ticket, your bladder bursting from beers consumed at the nearby Capri. Eventually the audience started to dress up the like the Cockettes, creating a festive chaos in the movie theater like nothing seen before or since.

• Of course it goes without saying that everyone was absolutely ripped to the tits, onstage or off. This makes it more than just a little difficult, seen from a distance of 35+ years, to remember the details of the individual shows, but, my God, just to listen to those tunes again and the floodgates open and memories of all the good times come racing back.


[The pictures are screencaps from Bill Weber and David Weissman: The Cockettes.]

Return of the Color Lady

Thanks to Ron Nelson, who writes: "Ran into the wonderful color lady at the muni stop @ 16th & Bryant. She has 8 different outfits and only wears a single color at a time-plus she makes her own clothes! She's spending Christmas day with her family."