At the film’s end, the lights came up on the stage, the first curtain swept back, and, in purple sequins, a middle-aged black woman comic came out to regale the audience with a barrage of jokes far more sexually suggestive than I would have thought — in those days — it was legal to tell from a public stage.
Toward the end of her routine — which, vulgar as it was, was very funny — the orchestra players filed into the small pit. Then the music crashed up and out. Another curtain swung back. And an amplified voice announced to the multiple balconies in the dark: “And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, what you’ve all been waiting for: the fabulous Jewel Box Review!”
Why double my uncle’s description with accounts of the glitter and feathers and sweeping trains in which the female impersonators danced with their “male” partners — a maleness suddenly thrust into quotation marks by the fake breasts, cinched waists, and wigs around it, for here all masculinity seemed as questionable as any femininity on show. Be-tuxed and black-tied, Stormy introduced “Mr. Alberto Pavlova,” who, in tutu, toe shoes, and silver wig, began to dance the Dying Swan — only to break into something hot and kicky, with a sudden lurch of the music toward jazz. Now, from the other side of the stage, Stormy introduced “Mr. Georgie Brown,” a hefty black transvestite, who, in wig and high heels, with inch-long crimson nails, clutched a bit of sequined gauze to his padded bosom and sang “Day In, Day Out” in a volcanic contralto that laid chills all down my shoulder blades. Once or twice someone in the first row ran to the footlights to hand a bouquet of roses up to one or another of the stately queens. And, at the end, Stormy pulled loose her hair to let it fall over the tux’s satin collar, as the whole company came out to sing, “We’re Twenty-Five Men and a Girl …!”
Yet as the curtain finally swept across the tinsel, plumes, and lamé, and the house lights came up (briefly, before the movie began again), there seemed no way for me to break through the doubled and redoubled artificiality of this entertainment that had just made me laugh and thrill and madly applaud its falsifications, this one artful, that one pathetic, yet all insisting on the entire range of artifice that was art.
It was dark in the street when, hands in my army jacket pockets, I strolled from under the bright marquee to walk back home. I never even mentioned to anyone in my family that I’d gone.
It was some years later, when the Jewel Box had again made its annual swing through the Northeast, coming to light at the Apollo, that I overheard my mom and a downstairs neighbor talking in our kitchen.
“Certainly I was curious, but … well, I couldn’t have gone to see it,” Mom said, putting down her coffee cup. “You know how her mother feels about it. Really, she never would have spoken to me again, if she’d found out.”
“Now, that’s the one I read about who plays the master of ceremonies. …” The neighbor’s voice both repeated and confirmed at once. “The one they call ‘Stormy’ …?”
“Yes — that’s Mary.”
“Who used to be a counselor up with Sam and Peggy, at camp, about six or seven years ago?”
My mother nodded. “That’s right.”
And for a moment (and only a moment), it was as if a gap between two absolute and unquestionably separated columns or encampments of the world had suddenly revealed itself as illusory; that what I had assumed two was really one; and that the glacial solidity of the boundary I’d been sure existed between them was as permeable as shimmering water, as shifting light.
6.641. On my eighteenth birthday, while we were walking through Washington Square Park and looking up at the Washington Arch, Marilyn said, “Next year, let’s meet on your birthday under the Arch of Triumph in Paris.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
6.65. “Bronx Science is a very important school,” our new principal, Mr. Taffle, had told the student body from the podium on the stage of the old building — in an attempt to establish a dress code for the first time in the school. From the balcony’s great and curving gallery, sitting among the other students, not far from the film projection booth (while two or three more students stood behind it, chatting), I listened with the rest. “At this point you have to understand that what you look like is even more important than what you learn.” Unanimously we all began to boo, loudly and angrily. But that perfectly intelligent educators might make such statements, convinced that in them a radical truth was joined to common sense, was perhaps the greatest condemnation of that security-mad decade — the fifties — now drawing to its close.
In the new building auditorium, there was no balcony. Nor could the groundfloor space hold more than a fraction of the student population. The general feeling of demoralization was intense, and with various new policies, new inefficiencies, and a few more inopportune — or possibly misinterpreted — statements from the administration, it only grew worse.
Most of my extracurricular work for the past three years had been with the school literary magazine, yes, Dynamo. But Miss Baskind was the faculty advisor for both that and the school newspaper, The Science Observer. A fair amount of activity went back and forth between the two publications. That year, as well as a college calculus course, I was taking both a Senior Journalism elective and a College English course. I decided to write an article on the general student dissatisfaction with these attempts to orient the school so blatantly toward display at the expense of learning. At a newspaper meeting, it was informally decided I would take over Scott’s monthly “From the Gallery” column for one winter issue. (“After all,” Scott commented, “we don’t have a gallery anymore.”) My friend Jeff brought in his Polaroid camera; I came to school wearing a jacket and tie, and, in the first floor hallway so we could get as much light as possible, he snapped my photograph.
“Does that really look like me?” I asked, peering over his shoulder, as the black and white picture cleared.
“We’re just using the head. And it gets reduced to an inch by an inch,” Jeff reminded me. “I don’t think it really matters — but I’m going to take a couple more anyway.”
I was very proud of the article I wrote, though Miss Baskind suggested — firmly — I drop a sentence that seemed, in her words, “unwisely critical” of the school. Even thus edited, it was pretty strong. It came out in the February 1960 issue of The Science Observer, just after the winter break.
For some reason — possibly because that issue had been printed over the holidays — the printer delivered substantially fewer copies than usual. The bundles of papers left outside the attendance office for students to take had peeled away, sheet by sheet, particularly fast. People were actually talking about what I’d written, so I felt very good.
At that week’s Dynamo meeting, Miss Baskind mentioned she’d been speaking with the principal.
I asked: “Did he say anything about my article?”
“Well — ” She glanced at me; Miss Baskind was a short-haired woman, young and rather energetic — “I don’t think he was exactly happy about it. But.…” She shrugged.
A week or so after the paper came out, usually one or two unopened bundles still sat in the corner of the newspaper office. But after reading and rereading two or three copies of my own to a frazzle, when I went to Miss Baskind to ask for two or three more pristine issues to take home and preserve, she told me: “We’re all out. I don’t know what happened to them. We thought the printer was going to deliver another bundle, but they never did. We don’t even have any file copies of that issue!”