Israel Horovitz
AS A LITTLE kid growing up in Wakefield, Massachusetts, Boston was where my parents took my sister and me for Chinese food and Red Sox games. Nothing else. At age eleven, however, Boston played a life-defining role for me, with two defining events.
Life Defining Event #1. I was younger than most kids in my grade by two years. Thus, when I was in sixth grade, at age eleven, most other boys were thirteen. Thus, I tended to follow more than lead.
On one particular day, I skipped school and followed a half-dozen older boys from my class to the train from Wakefield to Boston. The train conductor questioned us, and Dave, the oldest of the group, told him we were on a class outing and he was the student leader. Our goal, according to Dave, was the science museum. The conductor bought in.
In fact our goal was the Old Howard, a burlesque house in Scollay Square, which had once been a legitimate theater featuring stars the likes of John Wilkes Booth. By the time of my visit, in 1950, burlesque stars the likes of Ann Corio, Sally Rand, Sophie Tucker, and Gypsy Rose Lee had bared (mostly) all on the Old Howard’s stage.
The particular day of my particular visit brought a stripper named Valkyra (The Amazon Queen) to the spotlight. Not to be confused with the modern-day video-game star Valkyrie, Queen of the Amazon, Valkyra (The Amazon Queen) was, in my memory, a fiftyish, ginger-haired, pituitary-mammary gland freak, with a body I could only compare to the bodies of my sixth-grade classmates at the H. M. Warren School, or the body of my sister Shirley clad in circa 1950 gym bloomers. Valkyra (The Amazon Queen) was a definite eye-opener. But not life-defining.
A few days before my Valkyra (The Amazon Queen) sighting, I had been given reading glasses, prescribed by my parents’ optician friend Paul Kline. Dr. Kline had written Horovitz 33 Elm St Wakefield Mass. on a sticker inside the eyeglass case. Since I had no intention of ever wearing eyeglasses, I neither took the eyeglasses from their case nor took the eyeglass case from my pocket. Nor did I realize that the eyeglass case had fallen from my pocket, presumably during the excitement of Valkyra’s bumps and grinds.
Three days later, a letter arrived at my family’s home from the manager of the Old Howard Theatre. “Dear Mr. Horovitz, Your eyeglasses have been found by our usher. If you would kindly . . .”
My mother screamed at my bewildered father. “A man your age!” My father not only swore that he’d never in his life been to the Old Howard, but also produced his one and only pair of eyeglasses, in their proper case.
And, within the same millisecond, my parents realized . . .
When I came home from school that day, my mother was still teary-eyed. My father dragged me into his office, a leather belt in his hand, slamming the door behind us.
“Did you go to the Old Howard? Don’t lie to me!”
“I did.”
“Did you go alone?”
“No, I went with Richie and Buzzy and Dave and some other kids.”
“And you lost your glasses?”
“I guess so.”
And then my father said something life-defining: “Yell ‘Ow!’ when I smack the sofa.” And he smacked the leather belt against the sofa three times and I yelled “Ow!” three times, until my mother screamed from the next room.
“Enough, Julie, enough!”
And my father yelled, “One for good luck!”
Smack!
“Ow!”
“You’ll never do that again?”
Smack!
“Never!”
My father then opened the door and I ran past my mother, head down, sobbing, up the stairs and into my bedroom.
Legend has it that in 1953, the Boston Vice Squad secretly filmed a performance by Irma the Body and used the footage as evidence of gross indecency, resulting in the closing down of the Old Howard forever.
Life Defining Event #2. Somebody gave my father three tickets to a performance of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, in its pre-Broadway tryout in Boston.
My sister had to study for exams. I got to go.
Watching Hansberry’s play, about a black family living on the South Side of Chicago, I realized that plays could take their audiences to places of privilege. I thought, “How would I ever see inside the house of a black family on the South Side of Chicago if this play wasn’t taking me there?” And it was in that moment that I realized there was something called a playwright.
At the end of the play, when the actors were taking their bows, I looked at the family onstage, looked at my own family, and thought, “I don’t want to go home with my family, I want to go home with that family.”
Within days of seeing A Raisin in the Sun, I began to write my own play, with a devilishly clever title, The Comeback. Eventually the play was put on at Emerson College in Boston, where the director Paul Benedict was teaching acting. It was a father-son play. I played the son, Peter MacLean played my father.
Nobody said it was a good play, but several friends said, “It’s a play.”
So, there it was. I had written a play. I was a playwright.
Nearly fifty years later, I’m still writing plays, with as much, if not more, excitement than back in my Boston days.
For me, Boston will always be a place of discovery, a place of great intelligence, a place of unquestioned freedom. Young people come to Boston by the hundreds of thousands each year, not just to study but to discover who they are . . . and who they will be.
Boston is where the spirit of America was born. It is America’s intellect. America’s brain.