I.M. Read online

  It was always confusing how my father could be so closed-minded about black people, using terrible racial slurs, and then be so friendly, even familial, with Maureen. I felt that duplicity deeply. I felt an awkwardness, a resentment, when he came home evenings, into the house, which was otherwise dominated by a comfortable culture of women and girls. I was happy at home with my mother, my sisters, and Maureen. It felt like an invasion when he came home from work. It was life as usual, acceptance, love; then he’d enter the picture, I’d feel his reserve, his disappointment in me. I knew he sensed my longing to be seen as the person I was, instead of the person he wished I was. I knew there were things I wasn’t doing with him: manly things like sports and carpentry, which was one of his hobbies. There were endless references to mysterious responsibilities and heavy burdens I was to carry as the only son. I felt the ominious approach of these obligations as I got older, along with a deficiency in me that would need to be made up—a kind of paying of the piper, some sort of terrifying reckoning always seemed imminent in his presence.

  On the complete other side of the spectrum there was Maureen. She was an attractive Southern woman with long, slender legs, medium-brown skin, and dark-brown coiffed hair, also like Jackie Kennedy’s. Maureen lived with us six days a week and was quite mysterious about her personal life. I couldn’t accept that she had any other reality besides the life she led with me. If our family went out to dinner, to a place called Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay, or to the Palm Court in Manhattan, I was incensed that Maureen wasn’t invited to come with us. I didn’t understand why such a dear presence in our lives wasn’t considered essential to a family outing. As my way of making her feel included I would bring her sugar packets as a souvenir of the dinner she missed. When I presented them to her she’d put them in the pocket of her uniform and remark that coming from me they were “too special to ever use.”

  Maureen’s easygoing, judgment-free lifestyle made far more sense to me than the rigidity of the rules and regulations of our family. Hearing the fun stories about her Christmas celebrations made our holidays, and the Jewish religion in general, seem dark and miserable. I aspired to a life full of ease and Christmas presents, as opposed to the dour holidays and guilty fast days. Yom Kippur in particular is the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar—fasting and atoning are the only things allowed during those twenty-four hours. The first year my sisters were old enough to go to temple, I stayed behind with Maureen. When the family returned they were scandalized to find Maureen and me blasting the family Victrola and singing at the top of our lungs along with “Message to Michael,” a Dionne Warwick record we loved.

  When I was eight years old I was devastated because Maureen announced that she was leaving our family to work for the Mattel toy corporation. She was my lifeline to the outside world. When she left, I was entirely on my own. With no one to tell me about Christmas or play records with on Yom Kippur, my existence at yeshiva and within the community seemed even more like a jail sentence. I consoled myself with the knowledge that if I had to lose Maureen, at least she was going to a better place, to work for the company that made Barbie dolls.

  * * *

  No doubt this dreadful body shame I was born with made me acutely sensitive to our culture’s obsession with beauty and physical worth. I was surrounded by judgment: fat versus skinny, tall versus short, blond, brunette, almond eyes, hook nosed, busty, hippy, etc. I’ve always found that no matter what, curvy women dream of having stick figures and thin women go to great lengths for breast or butt implants. Any kind of fashion sets down its demand for a singular kind of perfection; one way or the highway. It translates essentially as one large punishment on women. Only recently are we beginning to acknowledge that beauty is a broad subject, one in which all people can participate. But when I was a kid women were only considered beautiful if they were between a size four and a size ten, with small noses and straight hair. Skinny women judged zaftig women, often implying a speculation about their virtue, while full-figured women felt sorry for those without obvious anatomical gifts. Women themselves were guilty of proliferating these convoluted ideas, and I was an observer of the sort of chatter that went on among my mother, my aunts, their girlfriends, and eventually my sisters.

  “She’s fat. If she was my daughter I’d lock her in a room till she lost all the weight.”

  “She’s too skinny. A man likes a little meat on the bone. It’s no wonder she’s not married yet.”

  “Her hair is all wrong. If they were smart they’d take her to have it ironed.”

  And the greatest sound-bite of all time, my mother’s favorite way of describing someone she considered ugly: “She’s a thing.”

  As a not-very-good-looking kid, I organically acquired my own ideas about beauty. I thought of tiny noses and perfect features as trite and fell in love with atypical, offbeat faces. One primary example was Barbra Streisand. I know I sound like the gayest thing in the world, telling the story of how I fell in love with her at age seven, but I’ll go one step gayer and say that she saved my life.

  In the 1960s, if you wanted to see a movie, you had to make a special trip of it. And when you went to a theatre like the Criterion on Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, the experience was as grand and exciting as any live theatrical event. The theatre’s red-and-gold interior had an old-world feeling, like a palace—a real sense of contained excitement. It was all so dramatic—the crowd, in those days people actually dressed up to go to movies; the ushers, the sconces, and my favorite thing as a kid: a curtain that parted slowly while the lights dimmed and the picture began, as dramatic as any live performance.

  Funny Girl grabbed me from the opening credit sequence: photos of old New York retouched in eye-poppingly bright colors and juxtaposed next to equally colorful titles. And then Barbra came on. I think what really got me about her was that she didn’t look so unlike my own sisters. She didn’t talk so unlike them, either. And yet … Who is this extraordinary woman? All that boring religious stuff about being Jewish I learned in school—that meant nothing to me. Far more powerful was this vision of a beautiful Jewess, full of talent and personality! That was the moment I became aware of an outside world, a tangible reality—something I could pursue. There had been a few glamourous moments I bore witness to earlier on TV, but finally, sitting in that theatre, I understood that there was something wonderful out there on a grand scale—something to aspire to. All that color, all those magnificent Irene Sharaff costumes on those gorgeous, statuesque women, so artificial, made-up and coiffed for the gods. I think it was that movie that sparked my obsession with color (and my obsession with wigs and eyeliner). The women in that movie substantiate my claim that bodies were bigger back then—and shown to their best advantage in the draped and jeweled costumes. (Our idea of what is acceptably thin has really changed. The beautiful showgirls in Funny Girl would be called fat now.)

  It’s such a cliché: a kid sitting in a dark theatre, the world opening up—a kind of shifting. And yet that’s truly the way it happened. Inspiration presented itself to me, perhaps not for the first time, but fully fleshed out and definitely in its most potent form to that point. That moment marked another first for me. This flood of inspiration was accompanied by a feeling of dread and a hint of resigned exhaustion. That particular mix of emotions has become a regular event in my life. Whenever I feel most inspired, I’m simultaneously struck by a feeling of sadness and exhaustion at seeing the distance left to go, the labor ahead to achieve anything near to capturing perfection on that level.

  But it was a small price to pay for having so much possibility open up before my eyes. From that day in the movies I knew that the world that I’d been born into wasn’t the one I had to stay in. Escape was inevitable.

  * * *

  My early life might be described as hopeless. Stuck in a school, in a neighborhood—to some extent a family—I didn’t belong in. But by the time I turned nine my world changed. I lost Maureen. I found Streisand. We moved into a bigger
house in a new neighborhood. In the spring of 1971 my mother took me to see a matinee of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, and after that, literally everything was different. I was definitely too young to get the true meaning of the show—an ironic telling of show-business tales—but I took away my own truth about it. I loved the music and the production. I also took away the ennui, the neurosis, and the sadness of the characters—all qualities I recognized in myself.

  The house we moved into was a huge old thing with six bedrooms and a detached garage whose access was blocked by the extension my parents had built. Nothing could have looked more ordinary from the outside than that garage, but when the door opened, it revealed my fabulous, glittery puppet theatre that I created that very year, inspired by having seen Follies. My theatre was a glowing, spangly, pink-and-gold thing, a light in the darkness, a happy place I could see in my mind’s eye even before it was real. I named my first full-scale puppet revue Follies, but my puppet version wasn’t a reproduction of the Broadway show. Mine was more a sequence of fluff—unrelated numbers about glitter and lights. The musical numbers changed from month to month; I put in new ones as I created them. I set many of them to movie-soundtrack overtures, and my puppets danced in over-the-top costumes I made, inspired by the fabulous showgirl rigs in Funny Girl and Follies.

  When we first moved into the new house, the only things in the garage were some wood scraps, old doors, and a rusted cast-iron swing-frame that was stored in the center. But I saw a theatre. I saw the opposite of my life. A complete escape. Through these puppets I could express every aspect of my creativity: writing the shows, making the scenery, selecting—sometimes composing—the music, creating the characters, guiding their every step, their every wardrobe choice. The puppets themselves were naïve labors of love. Crude marionettes, each about a foot in length, made of dowels, with no sense of proportion or perspective. Huge heads carved out of balsa wood that I got at the local lumberyard. (I nearly killed myself so many times carving those heads with an X-Acto knife I procured from the craft store near school. My hands were always covered with cuts and Band-Aids.) Comparatively tiny bodies, hinged at the waists with eye-screws. Garishly painted faces and coarsely stitched costumes fixed with fish wire to the control sticks I made from wood scraps and which rested in the riggings at the top of my theatre.

  It wasn’t one show, it was many shows, a grand variety show with a huge cast of characters. A colorful, glamourous world of shows, an amorphous Follies. And it was there in that garage—in that theatre—where I began to feel okay about my life. It felt like my home, like a hideaway. I kept a stray kitten there for a while and smoked my first cigarette there.

  My parents weren’t exactly proud of this puppet dalliance. They didn’t encourage the theatre so much as tolerate it. Yes, I sought their approval. And when they gave it, I felt good. Yes, I loved the audiences that amassed in the driveway, but I didn’t do the shows for that. I didn’t do them for approval or acclaim. I did them for the same reason I do what I do now: for the boundless pleasure I take in the simple act of making things. A distraction away from common, boring reality.

  It was around this time Dr. Mossey gave my mother books about “the gifted child” to read. I assumed this was about me, and I got the implication of the word “gifted” immediately. It meant having the ability to live a heightened, less-boring life. I was gifted with the ability to pursue beauty, to make and surround myself with things I loved.

  Freezing cold, boiling hot, it didn’t matter what the weather, I was out there working. The garage wasn’t electrified. All of my electricity—work light, stage light, and an old space heater I got from our neighbor Mrs. Jenner’s garbage—came from a single extension cord that I snaked out of the house from a dinette window and into the garage. This cord was the sign to my mother that I was out there busy at work on my latest production. My commitment to that puppet theatre was obsessional. At that point I was choosing between creativity and the dark side of the gift, serious depression. The boredom of the real world. Sitting in front of the TV for hours watching reruns of I Love Lucy, eating compulsively, enduring overwhelming levels of fear and dread about not fitting in. My choice was to wallow there or become the star of another world of my own making. It’s a pattern that has repeated itself again and again in my life. Unless I’m making something—unless I’m working—I’m fighting off fear and some form of sadness.

  Another strong influence on my puppet theatre was seeing the Rockettes. In those days when you went to Radio City Music Hall to see a movie you got a stage show first. One of the great technical breakthroughs I made was constructing a line of eight identical dancing-girl puppets that moved and kicked their legs like the Rockettes. In my biggest numbers—the opening set to the overture of Gypsy, and the finale set to the overture of Funny Girl—the climax was the appearance of these—my own personal Rockettes. They sparkled in their costumes, and kicked up their right legs (it was way too complicated to get both legs to kick), which were made of wooden dowels, jointed at the knees with eye-screws and covered with lamé knit tights that ended up looking more like pants. They were controlled by strings that connected to two old sticks, one attached to their knees and one to their ankles. This might seem like a major accomplishment for a ten-year-old, but in my mind it was a great disappointment. I envisioned thirty-six lithe, gorgeous puppets, with legs like the Rockettes themselves, all dancing in lines, breaking into geometric shapes, some facing back, others forward. And all I could physically manifest was eight clumsy static puppets in pants.

  The entire stage rigging was a hand-painted, glittered mess of remnants and leftovers. Set into the swing-frame at about waist level was a wooden stage made from an old door, open to the top, over which I perched behind on a tall stool, pulling the puppets’ strings. The puppet controls rested on a rack that was part of the original swing-frame, located high up on the armature, masked by the top of the proscenium. I assembled and revised and drilled holes in my theatre. If something sagged on one side, I figured out how to bolster it with a board or an odd piece of plumbing from a discarded sink. The audience sat on anything that resembled a chair, or on a “bench” that was really an old metal radiator cover. I spelled out “Follies” on my Lite Brite, which I hung above the stage and at the climactic moment, timed to the music for the greatest dramatic effect, I’d plug the Lite Brite into the already-overloaded extension cord. Usually that moment got applause.

  My theatre might have been a mess of junk on the inside, but my audience, which consisted of neighborhood kids, never knew. And what I saw in my head while I pulled those strings and manipulated those shows was perfection. That’s a skill I developed way back then: the ability to press forward with the perfect picture in your head regardless of what the actual picture is. Even if it’s junk onstage, in my head it’s beautiful. To this day that’s the main reason I hate looking at any kind of footage of myself, I hate hearing my voice on any kind of recording: Because of the discrepancy of what I see or hear in my head versus the reality of what exists.

  The backstage area and all of the inner workings, including where I stood and where I kept the tape recorder, was concealed by old boards and fabrics stretched over frames. I decorated these with my own Magic Marker versions of Joe Eula–style fashion illustrations. The centerpiece was my blown-up copy of his impressionistic drawing of Liza Minnelli for her Liza with a “Z” album cover. Eventually there was a puppet version of Liza who was the star of my Follies. I mixed in cutout magazine images of Liza and Judy Garland on the proscenium, and in tempera I painted WELCOME and HELLO and other inviting words.

  I was mad about Liza with a “Z,” which I’d seen by chance on TV. I eventually got the recording, and I listened to it constantly at top volume, which drove my mother crazy. I also set a bunch of numbers to it. I adored Judy Garland especially. I was aware of her from watching old movies on Million Dollar Movie, which was on TV every day when I came home from school, or The Late Show on nights when I was awake lat
e. I loved the idea that this woman could embody so many incredible characters. I had a compilation album of her hits and modeled a few of my puppets on her. Between Streisand, Judy, and Liza, I never wanted for inspiration. They suggested my whole theatrical oeuvre, manifest in that junk kaleidoscope of puppetry.

  I constructed a pulley system for my curtain, which was a yard remnant of gold lamé that I got from the local fabric store, Midwood Trimmings, where I bought all of my cloth and notions. It was my routine to stop at Midwood Trimmings on my walk home from school, and I’d spend forever browsing. I used the money that I swiped from my father’s dresser, usually small change, occasionally a dollar or two when I was feeling really bold. He must have known I was taking it but he didn’t acknowledge it, and I was careful not to go overboard.

  Midwood Trimmings was a dark mess of a store on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, with a window display that had not changed since the store opened in what I’m guessing was the 1950s. It was always empty except for the woman who ran it—in my memory she’s a Hasidic woman who wore a scarf on her head and spoke to me only to say hello and goodbye. She stood there behind the counter engrossed in something and didn’t bat an eye. Occasionally I bought half a yard from a musty bolt of felt, which was easy to work with, since the edges didn’t need finishing. But mostly what I bought came from the bin of remnants. That bin had mystical properties; it often wasn’t replenished for months at a time, but no matter how many times I went through it, I always found something to work with. On the surface, the fabrics at Midwood Trimmings were ordinary, but I quickly learned the compensating benefits of sequinning, BeDazzling, and hand-painting.

  If the resources at Midwood Trimmings weren’t sufficient, I would look elsewhere for supplies. Our linen closet was a favorite resource. My mother often complained that household items such as daisy-printed dish towels or plastic flowers that were lying around the house might go missing when I was in production. Table accessories like figurines or even plates and bowls took on new life when glittered or painted or découpaged. One stage setting centered on a fountain, which I constructed from a series of shallow bowls that I somehow managed to stack between dowels. I painted them and strung shredded Lurex strips between them, simulating running water. I had a roving eye and no piece of detritus escaped my scrutiny. I built staircases and doorways out of cardboard for my marionette stars. Oak tag sold for seventy-five cents a sheet at the local five-and-dime, and I went through sheets and sheets of it, painting and decorating them as backdrops.