Two
Jr. High
School, as opposed to dancing school, was a story of diminishing enjoyment.
One of the tests to see if you were ready for first grade was whether you could walk to school by yourself. Nowadays that would only be evidence of parental neglect, yet we happily walked those several blocks unmurdered every day, then home for lunch, then back again to John Muir Elementary, a big old brick schoolhouse that smelled of chalk and furniture polish.
Mrs. Graves, my third-grade teacher, was tiny, strict, and Chinese American and wore sensible witchy shoes. You had to stay after school for five minutes if you dropped your pencil, and of course the desk was on an incline, and the pencil rolled. She once forbade the use of the colors pink and red together. On another occasion, she announced, “Jupiter is the largest planet in the world.” I pointed out the flaw in this remark. That was my downfall.
I mostly liked grade school, but I don’t know how much attention I was paying, given all the extracurricular dancing. I had one particular friend, a girl called Donna Miller, with an absent GI father and a very reserved traditional Japanese mother who took me to the Bon Odori Festival, just a short bus ride away at the Seattle Buddhist temple, where we’d gone in advance to learn the dances. Every dancer had a fan, and we ate shaved ice with bean paste: fully Japanese. I was dancing everywhere I could.
Donna loved origami, and her mother was an expert in bankei—related to ikebana (flower arranging) and bonsai (miniature plants)—a hobby in which I was briefly very interested. It’s a crazy subset of Japanese culture in which you make miniature scenes with living things, involving a tray with a canvas frame above it and water underneath, and a kind of mud-peat soil in which you sculpt miniature islands and mountains. You can’t actually grow things, but the soil is just damp enough that moss, placed upon it, stays alive. Then you might decorate your scene with little bridges, boats, or figures (all on sale at your local Japanese emporium), and design, say, a coastline with blue sand for the seas and white sand where it breaks. I loved these beautiful tableaux, but it was clear you had to devote your life to bankei, and this was a commitment I couldn’t make. Donna and I fell out for some petty reason, and she started the I Hate Mark Morris Club. She actually bribed people with candy to join, to sign the petition.
I certainly wasn’t much into sports either. I fenced for a few years, solely because there was a woman who exchanged her daughter’s dancing lessons at Verla’s for fencing lessons. I fenced foil only, pre-buzzer, but I stopped because, though I loved it, I didn’t want to develop one giant lobster arm. (The choreography I did for Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare many years later is full of those moves.) My father used to take me to see his students play basketball. I didn’t like the sport, though I did like the boys, the noise, and the bleachers. Once a year we went to see the Harlem Globetrotters at the arena. That was my sports experience—comedy basketball. Mind you, now that I think of it, the Harlem Globetrotters weren’t too dissimilar to Sol Hurok bringing vernacular dance around America. That’s it for sports, though I will say that I was exceptional at hopscotch, which, although it isn’t yet an Olympic sport, isn’t thought as sissy now as it was then.
Fencing class at Verla Flowers’s studio, Seattle, 1968. (Courtesy of Maureen Morris)
We had Spanish language lessons on TV for fifteen minutes a week—“¡Buenos días, Señor Ybarra!” We were all supposed to respond together, but I wasn’t talking fucking Spanish to a TV! And there were a couple of hours of music for everybody. We were taught the Autoharp—“Roll On, Columbia” by Woody Guthrie—and we sang rounds and harmonies. There was always a talent show, and there is nothing better than a talent show. When I opened our dance center in Brooklyn, I wanted a monthly talent show: seven-year-olds telling knock-knock jokes. What beats that?
There was culture galore, and the school took it upon itself to educate us in that way. The first opera I ever saw, on a school trip, was La Périchole by Offenbach at the Seattle Opera. The star Edie Adams, a popular singer in the 1960s, famous for Muriel cigar ads, wasn’t even a legit opera singer. I loved it. And it wasn’t only José Greco I saw with my mother. She also took me to see the whole world of dance—a kathakali company from India, Moiseyev Russian Folk Dance Company, and Bayanihan, the Philippine National Folk Dance Company. My father used to take me to the musical events, including recitals of the great Vladimir Horowitz (who, as a scary, shriveled-up old man, came on to me many years later in a Manhattan restaurant).
OUR ANNUAL VACATION was to visit our incredible uncle Jim Crittenden, my mother’s brother, in Great Falls, Montana. He was flamboyant, married, and fabulous. It was where I learned how to put on a show.
My father, being a teacher, had three months off every summer; my mother worked sporadically, depending; and every year we made the road trip. Both sides of the family had relatives in Montana, mostly in Helena (where we’d see my father’s many brothers, one of whom was a John Bircher). One uncle lived in nearby Tacoma, another (Chuck, a crazy born-again Christian who used Hawaiian Punch concentrate as salad dressing on his iceberg lettuce) lived in Seattle, but everyone else was in Montana—all the Morrises and the Munzenriders (Maxine’s sister, Eva, a Crittenden like her and Uncle Jim, had married a Munzenrider). The Morris cousins were more my parents’ age, but the Catholic Munzenriders (who were fun, particularly compared to the Presbyterian Morrises) were our contemporaries.
In the olden days, it was a two-day drive to Montana with a stop somewhere in eastern Washington at one of those motels with matching cabins. As cars improved, we did it in one long day over Snoqualmie Pass, five of us. I’d sit in either the middle or the back of the station wagon, and we’d sing the whole way: “The Church in the Wildwood,” “Don’t Fence Me In,” and “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down,” during which my father would misbehave on the horn at the relevant moments, not to mention “K-K-K-Katy,” a stammering novelty song that would today be regarded as a hate crime against the disfluent. I always wanted us to stop and loiter at every point of interest and roadside attraction along the way, but we never did. Just as you get into Montana, there’s the Continental Divide, and I imagined that a drop of water would split in two at that exact place and go to either the Pacific or the Atlantic, a fifty-fifty chance. Another roadside attraction usually denied me was Frontier Town, supposedly a full ghost town with boardwalk. Years later, when my company was on tour one January, in ten feet of snow, I got to walk around the buildings, automated trains, and wagon wheels. At that time of year, it really was a terrifying ghost town.
Uncle Jim and my father (right) on the banks of the Blue Danube, 1944. (Courtesy of Mark Morris)
Uncle Jim, who had been an ambulance driver in the war in Europe, where he’d met up with my dad, was corpulent, not to say fat. He was married to an English lady, a beautiful ginger war bride from Sheffield. Audrey, or Old Aud, as he called her, had terrible back problems and was always frail, having endured numerous surgeries after a fall from a horse years before. She was normally found reclining on a divan in their split-level ranch house, her English accent (of which my mother used to make fun, “I’m going to take a bahth in a minute and a hahlf”) exaggerated from years in America. I don’t know whether they managed sex, but they did have one child, my lovely cousin Caroline, who looked a lot like the beautiful Doris Day and was close friends with Marianne. Audrey was messed up, poor thing, a semi-invalid constantly in pain, yet she died only recently, outliving her husband by decades.
Jim was the Western states distributor for Miller High Life, “the Champagne of Bottle Beer,” and a very dreamy entrepreneur. A lot of his ventures failed, and he and Audrey pretended they had money when they didn’t, but he somehow always had enough for the latest model of Cadillac, in which he’d drive with his little dogs on his shoulder. He and his wife always had a pair of little white toy poodles that Audrey would dye to match her hair (say, champagne). And they had the exact same Margaret Keane prints that I have in my front room in Manhattan today, not to mention a fiberglass dish fountain with a plastic lotus in it and other waterworks, rekindling my love affair with water features, post-bidet. Being effectively housebound, Aunt Audrey would reupholster the furniture every few months. You’d arrive and everything would be leopard, then the next visit, green corduroy, and the next year totally gold and white. And we’d go for other holidays: Christmas was a thrilling winter wonderland of a million blue and red lights.
Jim was a complete showman, but it wasn’t only the poodles, the upholstery, and the car. He was flamboyant even in his choice of cigarette—Nat Sherman Fantasias, the brightly colored ones with the gold tips. He had a great sense of humor and was, most memorably, a cinematic pioneer, an auteur of elaborate homemade movies starring all the cousins. These were full-costume dramas, with titles rather than dialogue, like old silent movies but in color, with special effects, musical numbers, and a voice-over, sometimes primitive stop-motion animation. We lip-synched to songs.
One movie, Safari to Irafas (it may not have escaped your attention that Irafas is “safari” backward), began with sand blowing off a piece of paper to reveal the title credit: very Desert Song. My sister Marianne was the beautiful Arabian princess and my sexy cousin Pinky her dashing lover. There was the Riff clan and the Raff clan, and at age seven I was one or the other. In one scene, we, boys in Arab outfits (and I still have mine), tortured my cousin Caroline, a French Foreign Legionnaire in pith helmet and safari shorts, tied by her arms to stakes in the “desert.” There I was, slicing her wrists with a wooden scimitar as the director applied fake blood. There were love songs and a big fight on the beach. It was deadly serious.
Being one of the youngest, I wasn’t in all of them. There was a great western (one of many), supposedly set in the town of Skunk’s Misery, for which they went on location somewhere far away in Montana. Maureen was shot in the forehead, and one of my cousins, aged twelve or thirteen, was hanged in the movie; my mother hated the shot of the swinging feet. That movie was called, brilliantly, The Day Skunk’s Misery Smelled. Another title was El Toro Guano: only the adults got that one. There was a jungle-themed movie (actually shot outside Seattle in the forest, where we tied bananas to rhododendron bushes) for which Audrey rallied to play the beautiful (white) queen with a snake coiled around her and a big diamond ring; we cut off her finger to steal it. Maureen played an ape (for which she wore a fur coat backward, a gorilla mask, and her ponytail down to her ass). You can only imagine how good these movies were. On the video versions I have, the sound is slightly out of sync, which makes them even better. You see a gunshot and a second or two later . . . bang!
We, the kids, were more or less feral for the summers, and this extended beyond the movies. I was gay but we didn’t talk about it; we just acted on it. Even before that, back in Seattle, Steve Munzenrider and I, cousins, had shared a bed. He’d seen Rosemary’s Baby, I hadn’t, and, late at night, he told me how you could see the profile of Satan with a gigantic erection (which you can’t). Well, you know where that led. In Montana, we slept in the same room, he’d tell a scary story, and we’d jerk off. He tutored me in fellatio. I was thirteen, and he was fifteen, and I remember having gay semi-sex and then going outside and looking at the Apollo 11 spacecraft. You could actually see it, and we were looking for it, because they knew the stars in Big Sky Country. I’ve always associated the exploration of space with sex. A small step for me, a giant leap for mankind.
Steve, handsome, dark-skinned, and usually mustachioed, became a musician, teacher, and puppeteer, and went to live for a while in Alexandria, Egypt, where he ran an international school for children’s early education. He died of AIDS, from which he first went blind, about twenty years ago.
Once he drove with Uncle Jim to Canada in the big Cadillac only to be stopped at immigration. Of course they were! Not only did Steve have a bong with him, because he was a hippie, but my uncle smoked the gayest gold-tipped cigarettes. Jim had every symptom of being a fabulous queer, and maybe he was; we don’t know. He was lonely and his wife was impossible. Where did the talent and urge to make those movies come from?
JUNIOR HIGH—A BUS RIDE AWAY—was a 1960s modern school called Asa Mercer, after the man who founded the University of Washington. (His big idea was the Mercer Girls, the mail-order brides imported to boost the female population of Seattle.) I hated everything about that school, and I used to leave the grounds. I was a pain in the ass and I got into a lot of trouble. In eighth grade, a bunch of us stood as one and walked out of a class to go to a demonstration against the Vietnam War. It started to be thrilling to be a revolutionary.
The cartoonist Lynda Barry and I were very close friends. She remembers one day in the corridor when a couple of guys were calling me a fag: “Hey, are you a guy or a girl?” As she tells it, she was nervous, but I didn’t even break stride. “Follow me to the bathroom,” I said over my shoulder, “and see which door I go into!” Lynda also came to a Bastille Day party I threw with a French theme; I’d just started taking over the home cuisine, and I successfully made crepes with chicken cream sauce for thirty people, almost dying in the attempt. She’s quoted as saying someone came as Chef Boyardee, but he’s Italian, not French. I do remember someone coming as the Eiffel Tower, and someone else as Marie Antoinette, a bloody stump; we were fun and hip, pretend bohemians. I wore old men’s overcoats and a different rhinestone brooch, shoplifted from the Goodwill store, every day. Later in our respective high schools, we were both coincidentally voted the “weirdest” (that on top of our earlier joint win in ninth grade for “loudest laugh”).
I summed up my feelings about Mercer in a very autobiographical dance called Jr. High, which we premiered in 1982 in the early days of the Mark Morris Dance Group at On the Boards, the Seattle dance and performance arts venue. It was set to music by the underappreciated genius Conlon Nancarrow from Studies for Player Piano. Nancarrow, who composed exclusively on modified player pianos, had only relatively recently been rediscovered (and died soon after that rediscovery), but he’d been writing a long time, counting composers Lou Harrison and John Cage among his friends. He volunteered to fight against Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and lived in Mexico City half his life, a citizen since 1956. He stayed there until he died, and if you wanted to hear his music, you basically had to go to Mexico City and have him play it for you. Many of his pieces are Spanish inflected.
We costumed the dance in the humiliating gym uniform we were required to wear at Mercer—white T-shirt, shorts, and shoes. At school, we had to write our names legibly on our white T-shirts with a felt pen, so for Jr. High, I insisted that our costumes were marked “M. Morris” and “C. Henry” (my friend Chad, who was in the show), our actual names. I hated gym class more than anything else in the world and skipped it, with dancing as my excuse, as often as I could. I hated the entire scene: I hated running; I hated climbing ropes. There was a creepy, handsome young gym teacher who took pleasure in humiliating us. He’d take roll call, for which we sat on the floor with our arms around our knees. When we said, “Here!” we were supposed to snap our jockstraps to prove that we were wearing them. Snap! Snap! Snap! down the line. He’d taunt us, “You’re wearing jockstraps, though some of you could get away with a Band-Aid!” Nightmarish, degrading, and kind of funny. My dance Jr. High even smelled of the gym: the only time I’ve ever used Odorama. In the blackout before that piece, I sprayed the stage with Right Guard deodorant, so it had the vile smell of the locker room, a smell I detest. I don’t know whether the audience could precisely identify it, but they certainly smelled it.
There was also a “sissy test” in Jr. High. I’ve heard there are regional variations, but here’s how I remember it from Mercer: First, the boy taking the test—in this case, me—was told to look at one of his heels, the idea being that straight boys look at their heel to the front, as if they’re looking to see if they stepped in dog shit, and sissies look over their shoulder to the back; next it was “carry your books”—straight boys carry them under their arms to the side like an ape, whereas sissies clutch them to their breast; then, look at your nails—butch boys make a soft fist, fingernails facing up and toward them, whereas sissies do it with their hand straight out, wrist flexed, fingers up, like a lovely lady. One movement of the dance included me taking that test.
I was subjected to that sissy test many times, not to mention other old favorites like “Why are you hitting yourself?” Of course I sympathize with and support the contemporary anti-bully movement, but in my own case, if there hadn’t been bullies, how would I have known I was a sissy? Thank you! I’d been wondering what I was going to do with my life! Another humiliating memory in Jr. High had me examining my chest to see whether I was growing breasts. It was tragic, at least to me, but I wasn’t surprised when people laughed.
There was more Nancarrow in Etudes Modernes, a dance for four women, which I did a year after Jr. High to some of the composer’s Spanish pieces, weird, swanny flamenco. Nancarrow’s music, far from being merely mathematical (although some of his best pieces are), also contains a great deal of ragtime and early twentieth-century influence, blues and frenzied honky-tonk; it’s just strange and disguised. I was very influenced by The Lawrence Welk Show, which I watched with my family. We all loved it (except during that brief compulsory period as an older teen when I found it corny and embarrassing). In order to force my family to watch me dance, I’d improvise between them and the TV set, so my parents had to peer around me just to get a glimpse of the dancers, Bobby Burgess and Cissy King. I worshipped the honky-tonk pianist on that show, Jo Ann Castle, who played straight to the camera. Those Nancarrow pieces sounded like her on amphetamines.
We finally did those two Nancarrow dances together, interleaving Jr. High and Etudes Modernes, male and female. I added a final part, the Zombie Dance, that could be done with any number of people in rhythmic unison. It’s a thankless, uncomfortable, robotic dance, a canon at the ratio of one to one, done in a straight line to funny and horrible machine music. You can’t copy anybody because you can’t see anybody, except in your peripheral vision; you simply have to know it.
Those pieces together were my autobiography of queer humiliation, martyrdom, and triumph at Mercer. I was never ashamed of being a sissy, and I wore the bullying as a badge of honor. It may have hurt my little feelings, but I was defiant. I knew what was going on and I knew who I was, so I took care of myself by being funny. Nevertheless, every solo I made up in the first part of my career was a humiliation dance in one way or another.
As far as Mercer was concerned, I was simply too much.
I’D BEEN GIVEN A BOOK called A Doctor Talks to 9-to-12-Year-Olds (“you will see changes in your body”). Ironically, by the time I read it, I’d already been having sex for a while: hand jobs on a sleepover with a cousin, of course, but also blow jobs in the park with strangers. I wasn’t trolling, but I was cute, open, and into it. In fact, once I started having sex, I started having sex all the time with whomever I ran into, and by fourteen, I was having sex regularly. I wasn’t exactly hanging around bus stations, but I sought it out. My attitude was quite casual. By today’s standards, almost everyone I had sex with should be in prison, because I was underage and they were mostly adults. But I loved it. It was my idea.
The first time I ever had anal sex was with a full adult who probably shouldn’t have. It hurt, I didn’t like it, and I had to go to the doctor a few days later. He asked if anything traumatic had happened, and I said no, which was the truth. The doctor thought it might be colitis, but it was gonorrhea. He didn’t tell my parents; I have no idea why. But thank God he didn’t.
My father’s best and only sex advice to me ever was “Keep it in your pants.” That was it. He once said to me, as I was on my way out with friends, “You’re not going out dressed like that—you look like a homo.” He was right, and I guess he knew, but I certainly wouldn’t tell him. At that precise moment, I happened to be wearing a gospel choir robe, bell-bottoms, and platform shoes. I had long hair and I was high. My mother would never have said anything like that to me. Besides, she already knew, and therefore it wasn’t something worth saying.
My sister Maureen is gay too. She was never as obviously lesbian as I was gay, and I don’t know if she’s ever used the word “lesbian,” but she was a full-on radical lesbian feminist. I was careful not to use the word “lady” in front of her, let alone “bitch.” She had boyfriends (though the last nominal boyfriend, this beautiful young Thai guy, may have been transitional in more ways than one) until finally she brought home a girlfriend, Ruth, who then became a boyfriend, Rudy. When Ruth transitioned into Rudy, our grandmother was living with us, right through the reassignment period, and called him Ruth throughout, even when he had a beard and a baritone. Grandma would call out, “Would you like another Coke, Ruth dear?” And “Ruth” would answer in this deep, gravelly voice, “Sure, Grandma!”
AT HOME, we had a modest, semiportable record player with attached speakers in the dining room, along with an interesting collection of LPs, including Al Hirt, the trumpeter, and Spanish-flavored stuff that Uncle Jim used to send—the 101 Strings Orchestra’s album The Soul of Spain, for example, which he’d use as the exotic soundtrack for his home movies.
I had to use a nickel to increase the weight on the needle so the worn-out copy of Stars for a Summer Night, a record that was very influential on my burgeoning musical tastes, wouldn’t skip. It was dressed up as a pops concert with a mix of orchestral and vocal music—“22 brilliant performers in a sparkling program designed for summer listening”—featuring everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Ray Conniff, whose version of “Summertime” I didn’t like at all. But certain tracks have stayed with me forever. For example, the Columbia Symphony Orchestra’s March from The Love for Three Oranges by Prokofiev. That, to me, was classical music, and perhaps even my first taste of it. And the famous “Russian Sailors’ Dance” from The Red Poppy—it’s a late nineteenth-century Russian opera by Glière, but I wouldn’t have known that, because the cover didn’t care to name the composers, just the performers. That collection had everything: “Greensleeves,” “Clair de lune,” “Londonderry Air,” “Liebestraum”—not to mention the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Bernstein, playing “Hoe-Down” from Rodeo by Copland. Stars for a Summer Night is the reason why I like the music I like. It was the foundation of my interest in classical music, a sampler of everything that formed me. And on eBay right now, there are sixteen of those from ninety-seven cents.
A few years later, I heard Switched-On Bach, Wendy (then known as Walter) Carlos’s groundbreaking 1968 debut, Bach reimagined for Moog synthesizer. So I bought the follow-up, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer. The jacket alone is wonderful, an actual group photo of Bach, Monteverdi, Scarlatti, and Handel themselves! I can precisely date my interest in baroque opera to this version of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, here called Orfeo Suite. I knew a little opera by then, but I’d never even heard of Monteverdi. It was scintillating, even in this synthesized interpretation.
But an even bigger surprise than the LP itself—and a surprise that changed my musical outlook—was the accompanying bonus single, The Wild Sounds of New Music, disguised as a 45 but meant to be played at 33⅓. It was simply the record company cross-promoting its modern catalog, but to me it was the whole point, a priceless object. Columbia had selected the most radical avant-garde music of the time, not synthesized Carlos versions but the real thing, excerpted so they fit on a single: Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, Harry Partch’s Castor and Pollux, Luciano Berio, Steve Reich, and Conlon Nancarrow (and also Lasry-Baschet, the Baschet brothers, whose music was awful then and remains awful to this day, despite the fact that they invented an inflatable guitar). Even the liner notes to the single are priceless: “Are you getting bored . . . with Jimi Hendrix, maybe a little put off by Jim Morrison? Jaws tired of ‘bubble gum music’? Want to broaden your horizons without getting trapped in that square symphony and opera stuff?” Columbia Masterworks wasn’t pulling any punches, and I’d never heard anything like it. In me, they hit their mark, because I then bought every single one of the actual LPs excerpted. It wasn’t only that I’d never heard anything like it. It was thrilling music, and I couldn’t believe my ears.
The Steve Reich piece, Violin Phase, freaked me out; you might even call it irritating if you weren’t listening properly. I liked the Terry Riley piece, but at the time A Rainbow in Curved Air was perhaps a little too pop for me, the sound of psychedelic rock; it seemed a little too easy, which is precisely what I didn’t like about pop music. (I soon discovered that Riley’s In C, written a few years earlier and perhaps the greatest piece of the twentieth century, was much more appealing.) The Harry Partch, however, made the deepest impression, and this was certainly the first time I had heard him. The sound of his music, played on homemade instruments—gongs and plucked strings—made perfect sense to me. It wasn’t just because it was exotic; it was also because the modes sounded so attractive. Within a year or two of hearing The Wild Sounds of New Music, I’d be choreographing Partch’s Barstow at dance camp, the Summer Dance Laboratory in Port Townsend, Washington.
Officially, however, the first dance I ever made up was Boxcar Boogie (piece by piece)—a terrible title; I was young—in 1971, the music for which were those exact edits of those exact tracks, the dance a pastiche of the little dances I made up to them. It was for a Verla Flowers recital, which took place at the Playhouse, the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s home base. I used not just Castor and Pollux, but Violin Phase, some of the Conlon Nancarrow, and even the Lasry-Baschet.
This music was all extremely complicated, and there were no scores available, so in order to choreograph it, I just listened to it over and over again. That’s what I did with all music anyway; still do, with the same yellow legal pad and precisely the same kind of pencil at the ready. (I’m a little crazy that way.) I’d listen, break it down myself, and notate it. Here’s how: I’d put on the record and, first, record phrase changes, then sub-beats within them, and then exactly how many counts per section until it modulated or repeated, at least until something happened that I might actually recognize. After it was finally broken down, I could decode it much more easily. I was already involved with some unusual music through my dancing and could identify compound rhythms pretty readily. It was a crazy amount of effort, but it worked.
We weren’t a tutored musical family, but we were a family that made a lot of music. I might not have shared my father’s taste in repertoire, but left to my own devices when my parents were elsewhere, I’d head straight for the organ and improvise for endless hours. I used to use a cassette player to record myself, overdubbing to multiple tracks. I’d try to layer stuff—make a part and play along with it and rerecord it—but the original decayed and the quality got worse and worse and worse.
I got so I could fake my way through some of the two-part inventions of Bach on the piano, reading it slowly, then memorizing it. There was a songbook for solo voice and piano through the ages given to us by an old uncle, from which I learned “Come, and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastic toe” from L’Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato (music by Handel, words by Milton), certainly my first exposure to that masterpiece, which I played in time-stopping slow motion with Maureen singing. (It’s the origin of the lovely phrase “trip the light fantastic,” which was in a Christmas dance of Verla’s that the little kids did, called Mister Dancing Santa Claus: “He trips the light fantastic as he makes his merry rounds / He started taking dancing just to see if he could lose a few pounds!”)
I was singing a lot too. (Maxine had taken all three of us in to be “tested,” in the way people did in those days, to discover that we all had perfect pitch, about which she was very proud. It may not have been true, but she was happy to be told.) I was first a soprano, then an alto, in the choir at church when we were occasionally forced to go. I was also singing a lot of folk music outside school. By fifteen, I’d been singing with the chorus of a dance group called Koleda, which sang mostly Croatian, Serbian, and Appalachian music, full out, and also their all-male Macedonian choir. I loved madrigals, though the madrigal group at school, active when Maureen was there, was by then defunct.
I proudly bought myself a seventy-five-dollar piano from someone desperate to get rid of one. I had it forever. My friend Page Smith was (and is) a great cellist, and I was a very bad pianist, so I accompanied her on both very simple music and things that were way over my head, like Fauré and Hindemith. I didn’t have her musical education, and I learned a lot about music from her. To this day, she and I can still whistle those two-part inventions of Bach.
The entire crew back then, gathering variously to sing and practice drinking wine, was my next-door neighbor Nona, Maureen, Page, Chad, and me. Chad was actually close to ten years older—a big deal when you’re fourteen—and a very beautiful gay hippie with waist-length hair. I thought he was a genius: a very good guitarist and songwriter on the coffeehouse circuit, and a multi-instrumentalist who played the dulcimer and various stringed Balkan instruments, the long-necked tamboura and tamburica. Chad and I were never more than very good friends—he had a boyfriend/roommate whom he called Large Richard, a joke I only got later—but he knew what I liked. When I was fifteen, he handed me Snow White by Donald Barthelme.
The scene might be in the university district, late at night, in one of Chad’s many houses, a glass jug of white or pink wine on the table, terrible pre-box Cribari “premium altar wine,” and a pizza box on the floor. He’d be playing the dulcimer, perhaps the guitar, or an out-of-tune piano; Maureen, Page, Nona, and I singing shape note hymns, simple madrigals, or the Carter Family, or sight-singing from a hymnal.
Years later, Chad had a hit with a musical that played in Seattle for years, a hit in Tokyo, called Angry Housewives, about mothers forming a punk rock band, to their children’s embarrassment. The big song was “Eat Your F*&king Cornflakes.” I didn’t even know he had served in Vietnam until many years later, when we went to a Vietnamese restaurant and he spoke to the waitress in Vietnamese. He’d been a translator; he’d never once mentioned it, and we were close. (The draft disappeared right when I would have been eligible.) He’s now a visual artist, composer, and playwright with the Denver Children’s Theatre, still ten years older than I am.
BY NOW I’D STARTED WRITING my own music because why not? I knew just enough to start. I wrote a piece for two flutes and two clarinets, and when we went to play it, I found that the clarinets were a step and a half down, because I didn’t understand the concept of a B-flat clarinet. It was a very pretty canon for those four voices, despite the fact that two of them were a tone and a half off—it was a total accident, but it sounded better that way.
I strung up pots and pans for percussion, and I prepared a piano Cage-style (a necessity, really, because the piano had some really bad notes) with screws and paper and erasers to make it as exotic and weird as possible. I suppose I was a kind of by-mistake experimentalist, an avant-gardiste as a composer without fully understanding that any of it was avant-garde (beyond the fact that I’d heard that single). For example, I’d simultaneously play multiple piano rolls at the store where my father worked. I made that up. I had no idea that Charles Ives had done precisely the same thing years before. The only thing I ever choreographed that I wrote myself was Mourning without Clouds, another bad title, for seven-piece chamber orchestra, keyboard music instrumentalized. It was very primitive, and not on purpose.
I didn’t take any piano lessons until later. Even then, it took an act of church charity: they gave me a little scholarship. But by then my bad self-taught technique was ingrained and I couldn’t relearn it.
Besides, I was dancing full-time. It was too late.