Big Girls Don't Cry

Big Girls Don’t Cry

I hung out in Cuernavaca in the mid 70s, a time when Mexico was peaceful and prosperous. I ran a theatre company in town which attracted all the expats and backpackers passing through, there to teach ESL to support themselves.

Most of them ended up in our plays. Amateur theatre in a foreign country is very liberating, it gives you chance to don a double disguise. One of the first plays I did, “The Death And Life Of Sneaky Fitch”, a western farce, had a lot of townspeople and supernumeraries; it was perfect to get started with.

A sidebar; a key moment in the play is when the villain, Rackham, has to cave in before the comic protagonist, Sneaky Fitch, and plead for his life. The man playing Rackham, our brilliant scenic painter, was a proud Mexican who made an excellent chilling villain in black. He told me later, in confidence, that getting down on his knees and pleading, even in jest, was the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. I thought differently about the Mexican character after that.

I was the director, there were a lot of young women in the company, single and otherwise, and I slept with most of them at one time or another. My best friend and lover, though, was Gayle Anderson, who played the lead floozie in the farce.

Anderson wasn’t her real last name, that was the name of the man she was living with in town, pretending to be his wife, for society’s sake. He had a casita and a novia in the capital, he split his time between his two households. I got Gayle in her spare time.

Gayle was gorgeous, in her mid 30s and about six feet five inches tall. She towered over me and weighed twice what I did. Despite her enormous size, though, she was perfectly proportioned, gorgeous, thick haired, and also quick witted, funny and smart. She had been Miss Oklahoma 1965, and while she didn’t don the tiara, she made it to the show in Atlantic City with Bert Parks.

Making love with Gayle was like climbing Mount Pussy, you wanted to yell from the peak when you got there. She was a fun lover and always had time for me when Brooke was out of town. One day, we lay entwined in bed and watched the backyard pool slop its contents out into the ravine below as another earthquake hit Cuernavaca.

The gravel drive saved our ass more than once. If you heard the car, you had just enough time to get into a bathing suit and then into the pool before the front door opened. I was living a Feydeau farce, with absent husbands, mistresses and wayward wives. All I needed was a window to jump through, and it almost came to that more than once.

I don’t know what happened to Gayle. She was a professional society wife, good with servants, place settings and flowers, and wasn’t really suited for much else. I sensed she was being slowly edged out of the Cuernavaca house by Brooke, he was spending more time with his novia in Mexico City. It’s a privileged life (or was) living as a foreign executive’s wife in Mexico, and you can get used to it. The only record I can find of her is her name in the rolls of the Miss America Foundation. I wonder if she dreams of tiaras?

A Fun Crowd

A Fun Crowd

I’m a Boomer, and, unlike hundreds of thousands of people my age, I had an actual ticket to Woodstock ($7 a day for three days) but didn’t go. I was 15 and I couldn’t get a ride (from my home a hundred miles away in Connecticut). I was full of regret at my friends’ stories of music, mud and marijuana (there wasn’t much sex, not enough privacy).

So, four years later, at 4:30 one Friday morning in July 1973, three friends and I piled into someone’s mother’s station wagon and headed off for Watkin’s Glen, NY, in the Finger Lakes, the former site of the US Grand Prix, and still an active racetrack. Our destination was Summer Jam 73, “to be held rain or shine”, featuring The Grateful Dead, The Band and The Allman Brothers.

We started to run into pre-show traffic around Syracuse, still 70 miles from the concert site. We’d all seen the film Woodstock. We had visions of hiking for a day to get in, and missing the show (it was a one-day affair, all Saturday and late into the night). We were going to be there a day early. So apparently, were hundreds of thousands of others.

We got through Watkin's Glen (the race track was on the other side of town) and parked in the increasingly dense fleet of cars beside the road. We hitched a ride with a caretakers’ pickup truck that had right of way right up to the back door of the concert site. Just like in the film, the chicken wire fence had been trampled and there was no one around collecting our tickets ($10).

There was a pop-top VW van, however, with a big hand painted sign on the roof saying “Grass - $10”. As we hadn’t brought any, crossing the border and all, this was very welcome. There was a guy sitting at a card table out front of the van filling baggies from a garbage bag at his feet as fast as he could, while a girl beside him took the $10 bills. Inside the van, they were pushing more garbage gags out the door. Business was brisk.

When we got past the fence and the van, we were in the field, at the top of a long slope leading down to the stage, with the woods in the background and a small pond hidden in the trees. We had a theory that the sound would be best by the mixing board, so we went to the middle of the field where the control station was and sat right in front of it. We basically didn’t move from there for two days.

OK, you’re thinking about toilets. So were we. They had learned since Woodstock, and there were probably a thousand well-attended porta-potties lined up at the back. The line-ups weren’t too long, and they were frequently cleaned, so it wasn’t horrible. What was difficult was making your way through 100 acres of packed humanity and then finding your way back. It could take an afternoon. I have no idea what people who didn’t have a reference like the mixing board to return to did.

By the time we got in and settled, it was drawing on evening, and the Grateful Dead were finishing their legendary three hour sound check - a major concert in itself which survives on (of course) a bootleg. I was used to the San Francisco Dead of the Workingman’s Dead album, scruffy, bearded, hairy, strictly civilians. But the Grateful Dead lined up on stage down there about 200 feet away looked like the Beach Boys. Haircuts, white pants, sports shirts, they might have been a boy band. Their music was anything but puerile, though.

We had missed The Band’s and The Allman Brother’s sound checks early in the day, but this was a concert worth the price of admission alone. The Dead were clearly into it, tearing off Tennessee Jed, Sugaree and others as though it was a headline show and they meant it. They were used to doing 6 shows a week, so this was probably not hard for them. We went to sleep (sort of) in our sleeping bags on the hard ground, after a dinner of trail mix and Caribou (red wine mixed with rye whiskey, the Quebec concert-goer's drink of choice).

The Dead opened the next morning about 11 AM, playing two long sets filled with classics. They were followed by The Band, who only got one set in before the clouds opened and a drenching downpour happened (apparently you can’t have a rock festival without mud). We didn’t bother sheltering, it was warm, and everything we owned was soaked. Kids around us were taking their clothes off and dancing naked in the rain.

The rain had driven everyone off the stage except big old crazy Garth Hudson, The Band’s keyboard player. He just stood there playing sweeping arpeggios through the rain on the Hammond B3. The Band released an album of the Watkin’s Glen concert, and this bit is called “Too Wet To Work”. When the rain let up, the rest of The Band slipped on stage and following Garth’s lead, slipped into “Chest Fever.”

The Allman Brothers followed The Band and played for hours, all their hits (and this was a banner year for the Allmans). At the end of the evening, the three sets of musicians jammed for another hour or two, covering The Dead’s show closers “Johnny B Goode” and “Not Fade Away”.

Six hundred thousand people attended, the largest population centre north of New York City that weekend. It’s said one third of all the people between 15 and 35 in the northeastern US were there. The worst thing that happened, besides the rain, was that someone who couldn’t abide the line ups tried to parachute in. His chute failed and he landed in the crowd, but he didn’t take anybody out with him when he cratered.

That was the largest audience for a concert in history until some time in the mid-80s, when The Chieftains played for a million people in Phoenix Park, Dublin. The Chieftains were opening for the Pope, though, and that's a hard act to follow.

Rocked and Rolled

Rocked and Rolled

I’m a Boomer, old enough that I saw the Stones tour Exile On Main Street. We were in someone’s mother’s Chevy, cruising down Sherbrooke to the Forum for the show, passing a joint between cars. Someone dropped it, and, without a beat, the car behind slowed down, opened a door and scooped it up. Shortly after, my buddy who was driving cruised over a traffic barrier and tore the transmission out. We left the car and hoofed it to the Forum.

The best show I’ve ever seen, however, was Elton John, at the old Pacific Coliseum in 1977. The show was 3 hours long, he took one short break, he never let up the energy and he did 8 completely outrageous costume changes. That was the best value for money I’ve ever had at a show.

The one I remember best (or don’t remember) was Pink Floyd’s Animals tour. I was living out in the Eastern Townships and getting around on a borrowed dirtbike. No helmet. No license. No insurance. Wasn't even my bike. Quebec was kind of lawless back then.

I was buzzing around town getting supplies for the concert. Wineskins (check). Red wine (check) rye whiskey (to make Caribou - check). I had gotten as far as the wineskins (from the camping store) and I was zipping up the hill (this was in downtown Sherbrooke) in the centre of town when a big old green Lincoln made a sudden right turn out of the wrong lane and ran me over.

I went down, the bike went down, the footpeg tore a hole in my ankle and the car screeched to a halt. The driver, an elderly French Canadian, was shocked and horrified. I could see, past his worry about my condition, his worry about his culpability (and insurance).

I got up, dusted myself off and picked up the bike. It was fine (they always are after an accident, if you live, you can drive yourself to the hospital). My ankle was bleeding but not broken. Our interaction was wordless. He looked at my ankle and the bike and reached for his wallet. I looked in, saw two hundreds and took one.

I rode to emergency on the bike, got the ankle cleaned out (the detritus from road accidents left in wounds is called “roadus”), disinfected and bandaged and got a prescription for some high test pain relievers (Demerol, if I recall, and I don’t).

We rode into the concert in Montreal (this time at the Big O), on my friend’s café racer, with me riding pillion. Wineskins full of Caribou (red wine and rye whiskey) flapping off our shoulders in the breeze. I have a photo of me somewhere, sitting on the grass surrounding the Olympic Stadium, rolling a joint and smiling for the camera. I literally don’t remember that moment.

I do remember most of the concert though. The first act was Animals, and they had the balloons, all of them, especially the pig. I had come for the second act though, which was a reprise of Wish You Were Here, their previous album. The predominantly Francophone audience was enthusiastic, shouting “hostie!” in unison.

I saw Dylan 3 times, when he was good, awful and slightly better. The good was the Rolling Thunder Revue in Montreal in 1975, when he brought a circus of friends on tour. The awful was at Maple Leaf Gardens in the mid-80s, when he toured with Joni Mitchell. It's the only concert I've seen there and the sound was uniquely terrible, like nails on a blackboard. Even Joni's incomparable voice was compromised.Couple that with the fact  Dylan was at his hoarse, mumbling worst that year, and the only good memory I have of that show is the t-shirt.

The slightly better was the last show I've been to, when Bob played the Air Canada Centre in the late 90s. I was an executive by then, peak earning years. We went to Harbour 60 for $50 steaks before the show. We sat in seats on the floor, right at the sweet spot next to the mixing board. I actually lit and smoked a joint, but no one in the grey haired crowd was doing blunts. We got up and danced to Like A Rolling Stone (to which Bob actually devoted some effort and grace), but that was about it. I haven't been to a rock show since.

Kathy And Jean

Kathy And Jean

I was living in Cuernavaca in the late 70s, a garden city south of the volcanoes that ring Mexico City. It was a city full of ruins human and stone. The Zocalo was full of superannuated veterans of both sides of the Spanish Civil War, plus the retired CIA agents who had spied on them. They drank Café Mexicanos and fought the old battles together.

I'd been dealt a great hand of cards. I was director of a bilingual expat theatre company, with a hall, and an enthusiastic membership of amateurs who did 4 or 5 plays a year for the local and expat audience. My role meant I got to meet most of the interesting North Americans in town, because my theatre company was nothing if not interesting. We did farce (James Rosenberg’s "The Death And Life Of Sneaky Fitch”) and political theatre (Peter Weiss’s "Marat/Sade") and everything in between.

Kathy and Jean were both ESL teachers in town (what any young North American besides me was doing for a living there). They lived together in a charming garden apartment not far off the Zocalo, with an open air kitchen and a beautiful patio ringed by Bougainvillea. As an Aztec and Imperial resort town, Cuernavaca basked in eternal summer all year round, and walls were a matter of choice. The best casas were courtyard houses with roofs but no indoor walls, just curtains. Indoors and outdoors were the same in paradise.

After coming to an audition, Kathy and Jean asked me to dinner. Jean was tall, ethereal, blonde with long hair like the Lady Galadriel. Kathy was not so tall, but intense, dark haired and wiry thin. They finished each others’ sentences and ate the same things. In college, eight years before, I had known a pair of girls like them, Kat and Cyn. Kat was tall, ethereal and blonde, she pulled the guys, Cyn cracked wise, she got second pick. These pairs are hard to penetrate, they are closed biosystems. I wasn’t holding out much hope, but I thought Jean was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in years.

We ate and talked late into the night. Jean said she was going to bed. I said I should go. Kathy said no, I should stay. She took me to her room, and took her clothes off. “Are you coming to bed?”. It never works out the way you think.

Kathy was a wild lover, tense, excited and explosive. Neither of us carried much weight, and our hip bones clashed like battering rams, leaving bright bruises. I didn’t leave for three days.

I cast Jean as Charlotte Corday in "Marat/Sade", and she was perfect, a narcoleptic angel. Kathy was the wild woman at the asylum of Charenton who attacks the superintendent’s wife. I have a photo of her still, in costume, rags flying and her face etched in fury.

Kathy and I were inseparable for the next year. I had a problem, though. I had a long term girlfriend in Canada, whom I hadn’t seen in two years, and she was coming to visit me in Cuernavaca. The day of her arrival grew closer, and Kathy and I weren't getting any less close. By this time, Kathy had moved out of the garden apartment and was living in a hotel on the Zocalo that Emiliano Zapata had used as his headquarters in the rebellion in 1919. The brick walls were still pocked with machine gun fire. One afternoon, she looked close in my eyes and pushed me off her. “Your fucking girlfriend is coming to see you in a week, and you’re still here in my bed. Have some decency. Get out!”.

I saw Kathy around, but that was our last close encounter. I still miss her. The long term girlfriend turned out to be crazy, and I left Mexico several months later for good. I might still have been there, with mi senora Katerina, living la vida artistico in paradise, if I'd played that hand differently.