Welcome to my past.
Welcome to my past.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. HOMEFRONT, Or, LOVE SPOONS FOR JANET
2. ECHO JUNTO BEATNIK EPIPHANY
3. LOTUS HANDS, TA’I CHI NUDE, AND THE MONGOLIAN ADVENTURES OF THE WHITE CROW
4. THINGS FOUND IN OLD ENVELOPES #16, Or,
A SOFT SPOT FOR DRAGONS
5. DAISY PHOTOBOMB BEATITUDE
6. THE LIVICATED WORLD OF ROGER STEFFENS, Or
WHENEVER BOB MARLEY FART
7. THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
8. A THREE-WAY COLLABORATION
9. VAN ROZAY: MUSIC, SEWAGE, PASTRY, AND A MAN ABOUT A DOG
10. ONE SMALL LEAP; Or, DAD DOES 3-D
11. LOVING BIG TREE: A TOWERING CONUNDRUM
12. TEN YEARS AFTER
13. ALL THE WORLD’S A CIRCUS, Or,
MUM’S THE WORD
14. THINGS FOUND IN OLD PORTFOLIOS #17: THE ENFORCERS
15. THE CORSET IN THE CORNFIELD AND OTHER TIMELESS MOMENTS WITH AUNTIE MAYME
16. MORE THINGS FOUND IN AN OLD PORTFOLIO:
CAPITAL TIMES WITH THE ROMANS
17. THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW SUBMARINE, Or, THE IMPOSSIBLE LURE OF RIDICULOUS THINGS
18. REMEMBERING ROBERT ALTMAN
19. MORE THINGS FOUND IN OLD PORTFOLIOS: AGRAVE REFLECTION
20. NOT IN KANSAS ANY MORE: 885 CLAYTON ST.
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1. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Bangor and Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania; Early 1940s-Present
HOMEFRONT, Or, LOVE SPOONS FOR JANET
In the early 1940s, when WWII looked to be settling in for the long haul, citizens of Bangor. a little town located in eastern Pennsylvania’s “Slate Belt,” began to publish a magazine called Homefront, to be distributed to local men and women away serving in the Armed Forces.
In Fritz’s case, he didn’t have far to look for inspiration; he and Janet celebrated their 70th (!) wedding anniversary in their nineties, and Janet treasured a wall full of carvings that wordlessly and painstakingly celebrated her as The Fairest of an Entire Lifetime.
2. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Wilson Borough Area Joint Junior-Senior High School, Wilson Borough, Pennsylvania, 1960
ECHO JUNTO BEATNIK EPIPHANY
On the way to the hospital to give birth to me, my mother was frightened by a train whistle. This is not as much of a non-sequitur as it might seem, because my parents told me several times as I was growing up that my facial expression as a newborn reminded them of someone who had inadvertently gotten off at the wrong stop. They loved me anyway, although it was obvious that they sometimes thought I was likely to go off the rails at any moment.
In spite of all this, by the time I’d become a sophomore at Wilson Borough Area Joint Junior-Senior High School in 1960, I was a busy and relatively popular kid. I had a number of friends and had accumulated a respectable list of scholastic honors and music, drama and social-service activities, including a minor editorship on the Echo our school newspaper.
That fall, someone decided that there should be a tie-in between the paper and the big pep-rally assembly for a football game against archrival Easton High.
The Echo's advisers came up with a scenario in which the assembly audience would first see a scene set in our school paper’s office, with the marching band playing, peppy clean-cut kids discussing the upcoming game, sportsmanship and school spirit, a visit from the cheerleaders practicing cheers, etc., etc.
Then there would be a switch to the office of the Easton High paper (which was called, for some reason probably stretching back into the 19th century, the Junto). The Junto, pronounced by us exactly the way it looked, was re-named the Junk-O (get it?) for the occasion, and its office (here was the best part) would be filled with degenerate and unwashed beatniks holding a “happening” (which all the civics classes had recently read about in LIFE magazine with accompanying photo layout), and generally displaying lax attitudes and poor sportsmanship.
I was, to my initial annoyance, chosen to play part of the Junk-O crowd, which included several dramatics-club stars whose parts were specially written to display the latest LIFE magazine version of anti-social behavior, while the rest of us were relegated to wearing “beatnik-style” clothes and hanging around in the background behaving strangely.
My snit was soon tempered by the odd fact that a number of the upperclassmen I thought of as cool and talented — boys who moonlighted as jazz musicians, girls who performed in school plays—had wound up in this particular scene. There were also one or two other girls (like me) who took modern dance or ballet and sometimes wore black tights, along with some “arty” kids, offbeat types, and a few of what were just starting to be called “nerds.”
Since we were to be mere background, no one thought we needed any rehearsal. Somebody whose New York City uncle had made a filmed documentary of a happening tried to explain to us what had gone on. We were told to watch the antics of a “beatnik” character called Maynard G. Krebs, who had recently begun to appear on a TV show called Dobie Gillis.
This all certainly looked and sounded weird enough, and a few of us suspected that we were just going to look stupid. I resolved to get behind Ronnie Liberti, our chubby bongo-player-designate, and remain there as inconspicuously as possible.
Came the day of the assembly, we could hear the marching band (of which I was a member, but had been excused for weirdo duty) booming fight songs in the background as the beatnik crew gathered, for some reason segregated in our own dressing room from the wholesome Echo staffers, to don costumes and make-up.
I put on black dance tights and borrowed a large gray-and-black striped boat-neck shirt from Ronnie Liberti, who was dressed in a beatnik-greaser combination of black turtleneck and jeans with ducktail hairdo and shades. One of the advisors had bought white lipstick and a variety of eye shadows and eyeliners. I watched the other girls dab tentatively at their faces with these and thought to hell with it.
I grabbed green shadow, white greasepaint and eyeliner and drew huge exotic cat’s-eye shadows around my own eyes, whitened my lips, and secured my hair messily on top of my head.
The other girls began to warm to the whole idea and started doing similar things; one of the boys who was a musician and considered slightly “hip” darkened his eyebrows into demon-points. People tried on strange combinations of clothes, did peculiar things with costume jewelry.
By the time someone came to say it was nearly time to go on, we had converted ourselves into a tribe unlike any group of teenagers any of us had ever seen. People standing backstage in the auditorium did double takes and looked at us oddly. This had the effect of drawing us more closely together as we waited for the teeth-on-edge rah-rah of the Echo-office scene to end.
The Echo staffers and cheerleaders came pounding off to wait in the wings (they had another short scene after ours), as stagehands draped the office set with black burlap and, for some reason, a Russian-domed castle backdrop, perhaps to suggest Godless depravity. We slunk on, waited for the principal actors to get in place and the curtain to re-open on our dimly lit scene.
As the skit began, Ronnie Liberti began to play a soft, edgy rhythm on the bongos. Another boy joined in, noodling on a saxophone. The rest of us began to sway and dance tentatively to the beat. One girl suddenly dropped to all fours and pretended to be a cat. Two guys began an invisible game of ping-pong. I came face-to-face with another modern-dancer friend, and we mirrored one another’s movements as we danced together. She spun away, and I found myself slithering up to ballet-pose on one leg on the seat of the Echo editor’s chair.
Someone else joined me, and we began what’s now called a contact improvisation. By this time most of us had lost all sense of the assembly and of the lines being said. We were having too much fun, in a way that most of us had never thought of before. Nobody knew what was going to happen next, and, my gosh, wasn’t it interesting?
When the curtain came down on our scene, we just didn’t want to stop. Somewhat brought to our senses by stagehands shoving us out of the way, we managed to get offstage and back to the dressing room, where we stared at each other like people sharing a breathless secret.
Then we realized we all had classes to go to, and raced to get out of our beatnik attire and makeup and back into “normal” mode. None of us, oddly enough, ever really discussed what happened. We accepted the comments from our classmates on how “it looked so real.” We went on being small-town teenagers and all that that entailed.
And some of us, consciously or unconsciously, quietly switched paradigms.
3 THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California, 1972-78; Moscow, Russia and Mongolia, 1980s-Present; Sonoma County, CA; 1979-Present
LOTUS HANDS, TA’I CHI NUDE, AND THE MONGOLIAN ADVENTURES OF THE WHITE CROW
One day in 1972, during a break in a workshop I was attending at San Francisco’s Lone Mountain College, I walked into what I thought was an empty dance studio, and encountered something life-changing.
Two young men were moving, side by side, across the floor in some kind of graceful, synchronized and hypnotic form of dance. Although I’d never seen such a thing before (1970s, remember), my visceral reaction was “I WANT TO LEARN TO DO THAT!”
When the guys had finished, I asked about it. They explained that it was a form of martial arts called “Ta’i Chi Chuan,” (taijiquan in Pinyin) and that they studied it at a place called the Inner Research Institute (IRI), which they said was the best Ta’i Chi school in the city.
The next day, I located the IRI in the midst of a quasi-industrial cluster of buildings, and received a pleasant surprise when I walked inside—my former Syracuse University (1966) classmate Martin Inn was its proprietor. We were both pleased at the coincidence, and that day I became a student at the IRI.
I quickly discovered that those gracefully linked movements—with exotic names like “Step Forward to the Seven Stars,” "White Crane Spreads Its Wings,” “Step Back and Repulse Monkey,” and “Embrace Tiger and Return to Mountain”—that looked so effortless when performed by accomplished students, were astonishingly difficult to execute correctly. Fortunately for my ego, all of the others in my beginning class were equally klutzy.
There were three teachers at the IRI at that time: Martin, all lithe grace and lotus hands, managing to infuse even the most practical instruction with an air of spirituality; Susan Foe, a calm, almost maternal presence, with seemingly endless patience with beginners; and the wild card in the deck, Bob Amacker (of whom more later).
I got hooked quickly, going to classes several days a week, and soon observed that it takes a certain kind of mindset to become invested in T’ai Chi Chuan. At the student level, at least, there are no cool uniforms, no colored belts to earn, no Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon theatrics. For the uninitiated, back then, watching someone doing T’ai Chi was right up there on the excitement scale with watching paint dry.
I learned that although the requisite spins, punches and kicks are very much present in the Tai’ Chi form (movement sequence), they’re executed with excruciating slowness, the emphasis almost entirely on internal movements, the same ones that, expanded, underlie all of the showier martial-arts forms.
Back then, the only sparring in basic IRI T’ai Chi was a granny-looking exercise called “push hands,” in which practitioners, barely touching, go through a series of repetitive movements, trying to simultaneously evade attempts to get them off-balance, while channeling those attempts into (non-) efforts to unbalance their opponents. Boring from the outside; non-stop internal action for those doing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSYPOhSgiis
The world of traditional T’ai Chi was (and still is) a tangle of tradition, hierarchy, styles and schools of thought. All three IRI teachers, however, could cite impeccable lineage in the art, all having studied with Lo Pangjeng (1927-2018; mostly known in the west as as Benjamin Lo), and Bob and Martin with Chu Chufang (1913-1988). Both Lo and Chu were masters in the direct line of students from Yang Luchan (1799-1872), who initially refined the “Yang Style” taught at the IRI.
After a few years, though my form was far from perfect, I figured that I’d grasped enough underlying principles to put together a California Living article. (It still works as an explanation.)
In 1978, I moved to Sonoma County, where I continued to practice the Yang short form on my own until a bad road accident in 1994, after which I learned a Qigong form called “Tiger Mountain”—T’ai Chi moves performed in a stationary stance—which I do every morning to this day, followed by the opening T'ai Chi sequence..
Ta’i Chi may require a certain mindset, but, as indicated by the ongoing bios of the IRI’s three original teachers, it can also encompass quite a range of personalities. For instance:
Susan Foe married an IRI student and retired from teaching in the late 1970s.
Martin Inn continued to administer and teach at the IRI while becoming a licensed acupuncturist and earning an OMD from the Postgraduate Institute of Oriental Medicine. He went on to a distinguished career as a Doctor of Oriental Medicine. With Benjamin Lo, he co-translated The Essence of T'ai Chi Chuan and Cheng Tze’s Thirteen Treatises on T'ai Chi Chuan, standard texts for all students and practitioners of T’ai Chi.
In 2017, after their house was destroyed by fire, Martin and his wife, intuitive healer and author Melinda Iverson Inn, relocated to his native state of Hawaii, where he now works with advanced T'ai Chi students.
BOB AMACKER’s electric presence and inventive explanations/demonstrations made his T’ai Chi classes both challenging and vibrant. He was also an astoundingly good drummer, and once, with no formal dance training, astonished us all by partnering his then-wife exquisitely in a recital pas de deux.
In 1975 (under the pseudonym of Fu Ling Yu—say it out loud), he published T'ai Chi Nude, a provocative photo-essay book that created a storm of controversy in T'ai-Chi circles, but was actually a brilliant explanation of the martial art and its forms and movements.
Bob traveled to Russia in the early 1980s, and was next heard from in the form of a magazine article detailing a strange interlude: it seems that, while exploring Mongolia, he was overheard drumming by a Tuvan woman. (The Tuvans are a Turkic indigenous and nomadic people of Mongolia, known for a unique art known as “throat-singing;” they’re nominally Buddhist with an overlay of shamanism).
The Tuvan woman marched up to Bob, informed him that he was a great shaman, but needed training, and proceeded to get him some. He practiced as a shaman, apparently with great success, for some time. Since his prominent nose had become more beak-like as he aged, and his hair, worn long and parted, wing-like, in the middle, had by this time turned pure white, he became known throughout Mongolia as “The White Crow.”
Bob now owns and operates a T'ai-Chi school in Moscow, where, with his wife Olesya, he teaches a form of classic T’ai Chi and “push hands” in his White Crow style, (also online at https://whitecrowtaiji.com/ ). His version of sparring is obviously influenced by his early studies in aikido and karate, and is much more fun to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvzjGApaf-Q (Bob Amacker narrating explanations of Classical Ta’I Chi/Moscow/2017/4:10)
The IRI continues to flourish, both in San Francisco and online: https://iritaichi.org.
Both in and out of the formal tradition, a staggering number of people worldwide (Google sources estimate around 500 million) do T’ai Chi. It’s great for health and longevity, balance, physical and mental strength. In China especially, people tend to practice it en masse.
When I started working for an acupuncturist in San Francisco’s Chinatown, I’d often see groups of older people practicing T’ai Chi in Portsmouth Square, and marvel at the combination of lined faces and silvering hair atop lithe, toned graceful bodies.
And what do you know, nearly half a century later, I’m pleased to be one of them.
4. THROWBACK THURSDAY San Francisco and Sonoma County, California, 1970s-Present
Ever since I got a bit tearful over Ogden Nash’s charming Custard the Cowardly Dragon as a kid, I’ve had a soft spot for the critters. (Here’s a reading of the Nash verses.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpBF3h5g0tw
Through the years, as I practiced drawing, dragons would pop up occasionally of their own accord. Mine were not ravening greedy fire-breathing monsters, but tended to sleekness and slyness, with a shifty draconian sense of humor.
Recently, while going through some old papers, I found a photocopy of one of my earliest dragon-related verses, “Christina Had a Dragon,” composed and illustrated, with somewhat shaky calligraphy, in 1980 for my niece Christina Susanna Richards.
Inspired by this find, I decided to take a look back and see just how many of the sneaky reptiles had found their way into my work. “Gotcha!”, “Ouroborus,” and “The Seduction of Rex” were all done in the 1980s.
OBSCURELY ALPHABETICAL (2017) & D IS FOR DYLAN (1985) https://obscurelyalphabetical.blogspot.com/ (41 lines, 8 illustrations)
“Dragon-Riding Lesson with Mad Maudlen"” emerged as part of a series in the 1990s.
In 2016, I produced a drawing called “Draco and Cameron,” for my great-niece Cameron Richards.
That became the inspiration for a set of verses, which you can see in blog form here:
http://dracoandcameron.blogspot.com/ (36 lines, 18 illustrations)
Then there was the “Mad and Muddy” series (2018), for another young friend.
and a cameo in 2020 in a set of verses written and illustrated for Christina’s daughter, Kaylin Sue Church:
FLYING TIME; OR, THE WINGS OF KAYLIN SUE (2020)
https://amiehillflyingtime.blogspot.com/
Also about that time, my young friend IssHak Habib described his ideal dragon friend for me to draw.
So there’s the entire collection for your pleasure and curiosity. Who knew I had so many dragons inside my head?
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5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Interlocken Center for Experiential Education, Hillsboro/Windsor, New Hampshire; September, 1980s
DAISY PHOTOBOMB BEATITUDE
One fall day in the 1980s (it had to be the eighties—look at that hair!), when I was working at Interlocken in rural New Hampshire, my parents dropped by for a visit.
My dad, as always, had his camera along, and was intrigued by the photographic possibilities of a sweep of orange hawkweed between the tennis court and the sports field. He asked me to sit in the middle of it to provide a focal point.
Neither of us realized at the time that a random patch of daisies would have such a beatific effect on the outcome.
6. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Saigon, Vietnam; San Francisco, Berkeley, Marin County and Points North and South; 1967-Present
THE LIVICATED WORLD OF ROGER STEFFENS, Or
WHENEVER BOB MARLEY FART
It was there that Tim introduced me to Roger Steffens, with whom he was then sharing a small apartment on Channing Way in Berkeley.
Both Tim and Roger, as it happened, were at that time in the process of recovery, Roger from an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, Tim from the residual effects of a near-fatal head wound suffered while on assignment in Vietnam. Both were still clearly processing the livid stoned insanity of the Vietnam War.
But for me, this was the beginning of a dreamily surreal era of shuttling (mostly on weekends) back and forth across the Bay Bridge from my rental and work in San Francisco to that tiny apartment, which seemed to operate in a kind of Vietnam-flavored fantasy time-warp, populated by artists, writers, photographers, remarkable women, and wounded warriors.
For example, there was Tim, brilliant, still a bit brain-scrambled (shrapnel will do that), the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now and featured prominently in fellow Vietnam journalist Michael Herr’s book Dispatches, which the New York Times called “the best book ever written about the Vietnam War.” Scottish heartthrob Iain Glen would later portray Tim in a British biopic, Frankie's House.
Then there was Ernie Eban, a mysterious character who came and went, involved in various international schemes; journalist Richard Boyle (James Woods would play him in the film Salvador), a bit sad and fragile under a cynical exterior; and the irrepressible Bill Cardoso, who at 23 had been made editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and worked with a young Hunter Thompson, for whose erratic in-your-face workstyle Bill invented the term “Gonzo Journalism.”
Richard Boyle photographed by Roger in December of 1977 (from The Family Acid book and gallery show).
An especially poignant presence was that of wheelchair-bound Ron Kovic. Tom Cruise would later play him in the movie Born on the Fourth of July, based on a bitter but astounding memoir that only saw the light of day because Roger followed Ron around for over a year, collecting edge-to-edge unpunctuated pages as they flew from the typewriter, editing and shepherding them into print, and occasionally stunning audiences with selections from them in his one-man show “Poetry For People Who Hate Poetry.” (Roger performed this tour de force around the US and in Vietnam from 1966 to 1976, featuring poets known and unknown—even me at one point.)
It would be years before I heard Roger’s own Vietnam story. He was drafted in 1967, a self-confessed “Goldwater conservative.” His rich, deep, oratory-prize voice and radio experience got him assigned to the Army’s Psychological Operations division, where his unquestioning patriotism was rattled by the use of Nazi propaganda films as training tools, after which his stars-and-stripes were blown away for good by the rampant corruption on all levels that he encountered in Vietnam.
One bright spot: he was given a camera and unlimited access to film and processing, and told to photograph anything that “looked interesting.” For Roger, during his 26 months in Saigon (which included the Tet Offensive), this soon came to include the plight of the thousands of refugees displaced by the war and living in the city’s streets, gutters and drainpipes.
He wrote to the many contacts he’d made while performing his poetry gig, and one day, as he describes it, “a convoy of trucks pulled up to Saigon headquarters, carrying 10,000 pounds of packages with food, clothing, tents, and medical supplies, all addressed to me.” He was put in charge of organizing distribution of this largesse and of additional donations, all of which he accomplished so fairly and efficiently that he was awarded a Bronze Star.
Meanwhile, his photography habit had become a permanent fixture—after awhile, being around Tim and Roger, I got so used to being photographed by them that it hardly registered. Later, in 2013, Roger’s son Devon and daughter Kate would discover their dad’s stash of approximately 40,000 Kodachrome™ slides, and around 260,000 other negatives and prints, many of which they've digitized and curated on an ongoing Instagram site called The Family Acid, which now has, oh, about 55,000 followers.
A number of the photos have also been collected into three books (The Family Acid; The Family Acid: Jamaica; The Family Acid: California and a ‘zine, The Family Acid San Francisco. (I’ve been tickled to find images of myself in all of these except the Jamaica edition.) The first book was turned into a gallery show that has drawn rave reviews all over the US.
The unusual name of this enterprise came from an observation by a visitor, who saw the genuine affection and rapport between Roger, Devon, Kate, and Mary (Roger’s wife of over 40 years), set amidst their psychedelically colorful lifestyle, and exclaimed: “You guys are like “The Waltons” on acid!
Those months in the 1970s were for me a trippy blur of fascinating characters, new experiences, warm friendships, quasi-magical road trips, and a unique and powerful version of the Vietnam conflict in the stories of those who were there.
By the beginning of the summer of 1974, however, Roger, Tim and I were beginning to drift off in different directions. I headed to the east coast for a couple of months of traveling and writing about music. Tim took the first steps in resuming the photojournalistic career so rudely interrupted in Vietnam.
On a road trip in 1974: me, Tim, graphic designer Clare Francis, and Roger.
He was sent by Rolling Stone on assignment with the ever-more-outrageous Fear and Loathing Hunter Thompson, who finally seemed to have met his match, complaining to RS editor Jann Wenner that: “I can’t work with this guy Page; he’s crazy!”
Tim would go on to produce nine outstanding books of writing and photography, become the subject of numerous documentary films and that romanticized biopic, and return to Vietnam many times as an unofficial ambassador He passed away in Australia in 2022, and posthumously was awarded the Order of Australia (similar to the US Medal of Freedom) in 2023.
As for Roger, he caromed off in a totally unexpected direction. In July of 1973, he’d read a Rolling Stone article on reggae music, of which writer Michael Talbot memorably proclaimed: “[It] crawls into your bloodstream like some vampire amoeba from the psychic rapids of Upper Niger consciousness.”
Utterly intrigued, Roger went out and bought a used copy of Bob Marley’s Catch a Fire album and never looked back, collecting and studying everything he could find on the subject. In 1979, with fellow enthusiast Hank Holmes, he started a radio program called Reggae Beat, which exploded onto the LA airwaves; soon thereafter he received a phone call from the promoter of Island Records with nine life-changing words: “Would you mind going on tour with Bob Marley?
This led to deep friendships with Marley and many other prominent reggae musicians. Roger's archives are now visited by musicologists and fans from all over the world, and his modest early collection has grown to a seven-room archive packed with priceless reggae materials—records, tapes, interview transcripts, manuscripts, photos, books, buttons, posters, clothing, novelties, and much, much more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=equpeylp-Cw&t=48s (Four-minute trailer for the film LIVICATED, which features Roger and the Archives)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvsdsa2TZA8 (Archives Tour: The Reggae Experience with Roger Steffens)
Roger is, without a doubt, regarded as the ultimate scholarly authority on reggae (and on numerous related types of music), as well as on the man he calls “the most important musical and political figure of our time; anywhere I go—Switzerland, Japan, Africa, Israel, the bottom of the Grand Canyon—people love and revere Bob Marley and his music."
(Or, as Rastafarian poet Mutabaruka once colorfully summed up Roger’s thoroughness and dedication—which Marley would have called “livication:”—“We have a saying in Jamaica: 'whenever Bob Marley fart, Roger Steffens have it on tape.'”)
Roger and I have stayed in pretty close touch all these years, and he’s as wild, wise and funny as ever. However, since it’s beyond my skill and word limitation to sum up the m’s lifetime rainbow of activities here (including several other careers in parallel with his travels with Marley), I’ve gone to Wikipedia and other sites. (For more of Roger in person, see the links at the end.)
Ladies and gentlemen, the almost unbelievable resumé of Roger Steffens:
••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Roger Steffens is an actor, author, lecturer, editor, photographer, reggae archivist, director and producer. His professional radio career began in N.Y. in 1961, and was highlighted by a ten-year stint on NPR's L.A. outlet, KCRW, where he hosted five shows (including the award-winning Reggae Beat during the 1980s. and Reggae Beat International from 1983-87, which was syndicated internationally to 130 stations.
He served as a syndicated weekly contributor from 1993-97 for Planet Reggae on the radio station Groove Radio 103 in Los Angeles. Steffens also worked on several other radio shows, including Offbeat: The Roger Steffens Show (Host, 1987–89), Sound of the Sixties (Host, 1984–1986), Morning Goes Makossa (co-host, 1980–84), Future Forward (ethnic music commentator, 1985–86), and a radio revival of his one-man show “Poetry For People Who Hate Poetry” (1983, 1987).
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| Roger recites in two different lifetimes. |
In the 1980s, Steffens was named "Most Popular Reggae DJ in the World" by Martin's International Awards in Chicago, and "One of the Forty Who Matter in L.A." by the Los Angeles Reader.
In 1978, he narrated an Oscar-winning documentary, The Flight of the Gossamer Condor. His voice has been prominently featured in films such as Wag the Dog, Forrest Gump, Ghosts of Mississippi, The American President: as "The Loooove Jock" in Can't Hardly Wait, and in Liberty Heights.
He appeared in person in Dean Quixote, Deterrance, and Rollercoaster. In addition, Steffens has been involved with many other films and television shows in uncredited roles.
He’s narrated The Man from St. Petersburg (Warner Audio), Big Two Hearted River: the Short Stories of Earnest Hemingway (North Star), and Mother Earth Father Sky (North Star), and from 1996 until 2003 was the corporate voice for Time-Warner Audiobooks (for which he received a recent Audio Book Publishers' “Audie” Award nomination for his reading of Bill Gates' best-selling book Business@the Speed of Thought).
He also provided narration for the television documentary Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam, and is one of the main voices for the Museum of Tolerance in L.A. In addition, he has narrated documentaries for the Getty Center and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Steffens has contributed to countless music anthologies as a writer, photographer and producer. His most important aural contribution to the reggae legacy is the ten-CD series entitled The Complete Bob Marley and the Wailers. Released in 1998–2003, this 220-track series revealed over a hundred rare Bob Marley & the Wailers recordings to the world, many of them previously unreleased.
Seven rooms of the Steffens home in Los Angeles house his archives, which include the world's largest collection of Bob Marley material. Based on these archives, Steffens travels and lectures internationally with a multi-media presentation called "The Life of Bob Marley," at venues ranging from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (where he was the first, and is the most frequent, speaker on reggae) to Amsterdam's Milky Way; Hopi and Havasupai Indian reservations; and Katmandu in Nepal.
Steffens has been the author, co-author or contributor to well over a dozen books on music, reggae and Bob Marley, including, in 2017, So Much Things to Say, an exhaustive a 12-year oral history project that Rolling Stone declared: “the definitive book on Bob Marley.” He was invited to speak on its contents and on the 2017 Marley oral history at the Library of Congress.
He was also the founding editor of the premiere reggae and world-beat magazine, The Beat, for which he edits an annual Bob Marley collectors' edition.
Steffens served in Vietnam and spent a year in Morocco before visiting Jamaica for the first time in 1976. He has a large collection of photographs covering his Vietnam service and Jamaican musicians, including many slides, which were discovered in his archives, digitized, and released via Instagram in 2013
In early 2015 the BBC did a report on Steffens' first collection of photographs, The Family Acid [S_U_N_). The Sunday New York Times Style section and The Observer in London both featured his photographs. His work has been exhibited at Paris Photo LA and Art Basel.
From Biogazine: "The Family Acid [photo exhibit] presents Steffens’ often transcendent vision and life as a psychedelic pioneer on the order of Timothy Leary and Hunter S. Thompson, beginning with his work in Vietnam and moving through his ever-revolving circle of friends and characters made up of Rastas, beatniks, musicians, artists, gonzo journalists, his family, and himself. The portraits, scenes, and freewheeling experimentation with the medium of photography coalesce into a body of work that both parallels and defines the countercultural ethos of his generation."
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| Roger and Kate with Tim Leary |
And that’s Roger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzAf7bs95HQ (Buckit Interview with Roger (46:50)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BABBE4SnA (Roger speaks at the Library of Congress, with Q&A following)
7. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Bangor, Pennsylvania, c. 1928
THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
My mother, Barbara Hill (1912-1999) was by nature rather quiet and reserved (perhaps growing up as the oldest of ten children had something to do with that). Although she was always trim, tidy, and often elegantly dressed, she never gave us kids any overt indication that she thought of herself as beautiful.
But just look at these photos of her as a teen in the 1920s! That marcel-waved and kiss-curled ‘do! That casually half-popped collar! Those stunning blue cat-eyes, innocent of make-up and un-obscured by the glasses she would wear in later years! That impish little grin and Mona Lisa smile!
At home, on the day of her memorial service in 1999, my dad said quietly: “I remember going to her family’s house to pick her up for our real first date. She opened the door, and all I could think was: ‘This is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.’”
He wasn’t wrong.
8. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Sebastopol, California, 2020
A THREE-WAY COLLABORATION
Last week I received in the mail a wonderful box from my amazing friend Roger Steffens, author, photographer, poet, musicologist, actor, archivist, and above all. artist (see above).
My young collage buddy Anya and I decided, as a challenge, to create artworks using only these images. (I did a few to warm up.)
We had a lovely session of creativity and conversation.
I created a single collage; Anya came up with two. I went all-Roger; Anya, who has a yen for flowers, finally wound up dipping into her own collection of images to complete Brainbow and Stormplay.
After all, she's only 18. But what an artist!
9. THROWBACK THURSDAY: 885 Clayton Street, San Francisco, California; 1970s
VAN ROZAY: MUSIC, SEWAGE, PASTRY, AND A MAN ABOUT A DOG
Of all the fine musicians and colorful characters (often one and the same) who came and went from the San Francisco Folk Music Club headquarters and rooming house at 885 Clayton St., one of the most unforgettable was a lanky cantankerous gravel-voiced fellow calling himself Van Rozay (say it out loud).
A prodigious singer-songwriter, Van had, even back then, pretty much mastered the art of condensing his observations into music, his lyrics mostly evocative, provocative, and playful, and only occasionally walking a fine line between quietly outrageous and humorously offensive.
He was essentially a solo act, although he did play a gig or two as “Van Rozay and the Ordinaires,” with a girl-group of backup singers. Some of Van’s song titles give an idea of his way with words, and the reason why his songs have since been called “the stuff of legends:”
“Marinated Alligator”
“Wishin’ Like a Fool (on Yesterday)”
"Playground Ballplayer"
“Women in Work Clothes”
"Does Your Guru Do The Dishes?"
…and one of my favorites: “You Don’t Need Too Much of a Voice to Sing” (link at the end). The accompanying melodies are somehow just right, often combining genres for a swing/jazz/folk/country/world music vibe.
This was due to a dedicated Folk Club member and family man named Ed Bronstein, who was, it seemed, a fairly important pooh-bah in the world of SF sewage (his folkie name was “Biggs Tinker”—say that one out loud, too).
For years, Ed facilitated the hiring of aspiring 885 musicians for gig-compatible shifts. (One of them, banjo-playing wisecracker Peter Kessler, was wont to remark: “Hey, it may be sh*t to you, but it’s our bread and butter!”)
(update: a fellow folkie named John Barger was actually the high muckety-muck at the sewage plant. I was misled by Ed Bronstein's "nom de folque." Ed was also a fine composer of original songs, such as "CooCoo For Cucamonga.")
Whatever his means of support, Van eventually became fast friends with Willie, the little brown dog belonging to Faith Craig Petric, 885 Clayton St. landlady and SFFMC prime mover.
Willie (who appeared to be the result of an unlikely romance between a dachshund and a Doberman Pinscher) had been adopted as a puppy by folk legend Gil Turner, former Baptist preacher; 1960s manager of Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village; buddy of Bob Dylan; the first artist to sing and record “Blowin’ in the Wind; and composer of the folk anthem “Carry It On.”
By the early 1970s, however, Gil had descended into a sad haze of drugs, alcohol, and occasional homelessness (Faith took him in from time to time), and Willie had been shanghaied into a truly hard-knock life. In 1974, Turner passed away from booze and hard living at the age of 41, leaving the little dog, whom he’d named “Sweet Willie Love,” to Faith.
One of Faith’s first acts as Willie’s new person was a name change, and for many years the second-floor residents’ phone was listed in the phone book under the name of “Willie Craig.” (We had fun pranking telemarketers and talking with actual Willie Craigs who called asking to speak with their namesake.)
The main residue of his neuroses was his tendency to: 1) bite strange men in crowded rooms, and 2) when anyone rang the doorbell, Willie would erupt, even from a sound sleep, and launch himself, barking ferociously, into a projectile charge, hurling himself violently against the (thankfully thick) beveled plate glass of the front door.
This would inevitably evoke a chorus of “Thank you, Willie!” from everyone in the house, upon which, having protected his humans, he would scuttle back to the overstuffed armchair that was his special hangout. (After one such episode, I opened the door to a new mailman, who observed, shaking his head: “Y’all really need to get that dawg a crash helmet!”)
Although Faith was Willie’s main boo, he also bonded with Van, who took him for daily walks around the neighborhood and runs in the park to air him out and counteract a slight tendency to puppy fat.
They were an intriguing sight, the wild-haired, loose-jointed. guitar-toting guy and his funny little canine companion—when you walked down the street with Willie, you inevitably left a trail of smiles in your wake, provoked by his comically flopping ears, earnest expression, and rolling low-slung duck-footed trot.
The duo always wound up at a park bench located in front of the San Francisco Zen Center’s Tassajara Bakery at the corner of Cole and Masonic Streets. There, Van would sit and, wired on coffee, entertain the stream of passing pastry-lovers for hours, an activity faithfully recorded in a song called “Tassajara Bench.”
Willie quickly took to this routine, even, I believe, allowing himself to be petted and fussed over by passers-by. The only time (that I know of) that he backslid was on the occasion that Van, his mind probably full of song lyrics, got up and walked home, leaving Willie tied to the bench. (Luckily Van remembered and raced back just in time to find the “fierce bad dog” holding the dogcatchers at bay, and to prevent him from being carted off to the pokey.)
Van eventually moved to an East Bay barefoot-dirt-roads-and-forest-hippie community called Canyon, where, in 1981, he founded Golden Vanity Records and produced his first LP, Van Rozay from San Jose. In typical Rozay style, the address given for Golden Vanity was: 2001 Boulevard of the Stars, Canyon, CA.
Van and I lost touch for awhile after leaving 885 Clayton, although we were reunited online not too long ago. I’ve learned that he’s since recorded three more albums with guitarist Bill Kirchin and and steel guitarist Bobby Black. At some point, he lived in Hawaii, reflected in songs like “Dreamy Kona Side” and “Headin’ For Hilo.”
I don’t know the fine particulars of his life since we last met in person, but from what I observe on social media and YouTube , he’s still a true bard, spinning his songs out of experience, memory, sharp-eyed observations of the life around him, and the workings of a truly original mind.
Van’s now a bit weightier; a little less wild-haired; still capable of getting outraged or touched and writing a song about it; still surrounded by other excellent musicians (including his son Jesse); still cantankerous and articulate and gravel-voiced; and still living proof that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMujYSa3izI (You Don’t Need Too Much of a Voice to Sing; actual song begins at 1:15)
(For All of Van’s YouTube Videos) )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12pW6LfQJEo (Faith Petric at the age of 92, singing "I Wanna Be a Dog.")
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10. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; c. 1958
ONE SMALL LEAP; Or, DAD DOES 3-D
My dad, an avid photographer, loved gizmos, so when the David White Company began to popularize its “Stereo Realist”™ 3-D camera in the 1950s, he was so there.
The Realist was equipped with two lenses, set an eye-width apart, which, like the stereopticon viewers popular in the 19th century, took advantage of the human eye/brain tendency to combine nearly identical side-by-side images into three dimensions.
19th-century stereopticon, a parlor fad, with double-image cards.
Actually looking at the resulting double-mounted slide images was a bit cumbersome, however. It required either a clunky light-up hand viewer that had to be painstakingly adjusted for each person’s eye placement with two little levers, or a special projector and 3-D glasses, which, though kind of a production to set up, really made the images “pop” from the screen.
The shot below shows an activity specially requested by Dad for its 3-D potential. He asked me and my good friend Delana Kay Bish to take off from the top of a little hillock behind our house and jump toward the camera, while he stood at the bottom, camera at the ready.
As you can see, I really went for it, while Delana was a bit more circumspect.
In the photo, I’m wearing a brand-new-in-the-late-1950s fashion statement called a “skort,” a finely pleated skirtlet attached to tiny panty-like shorts.
After seeing how stupid this outfit looked in this photo, I never wore it again. Unfortunately the 3-D effect was so good that I had to endure its popping up every time Dad shared a slideshow of his “hits.”
This was, however, a valuable life lesson, and I don’t think that I ever committed such an egregious fashion blunder again (well, maybe not until that Hot Pants incident in the eighties).
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11. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Undisclosed location in Sonoma County, California; 1987-Present
LOVING BIG TREE: A TOWERING CONUNDRUM
In 1987, when I decided to give up my bi-coastal (California/New Hampshire) lifestyle and settle in Sonoma County, I needed to find a place to live.
While I was looking around, some friends, the Js (reasons for anonymity will become obvious), suggested that I camp out in their not-yet-finished rental house, on which construction activity was temporarily suspended, and which had a roomy and comfortable loft.
I didn’t know the Js well back then, and was not that familiar with their woodland property, but I gladly accepted their offer sight unseen and moved in one evening, happy to have a temporary place to roost.
The next morning, I woke up, stretched, and glanced out the window.
O.M.G.
I’d heard talk in passing of an entity called “Big Tree,” but I was totally unprepared for something on this scale, towering vastly only about a hundred yards away from the window of my temporary digs.
This was nothing short of a forest deity, officially the tallest redwood in Sonoma County, and the county’s designated #1 Heritage Tree.
Over the next dozen years or so (I would wind up living on a nearby property), I was privileged to hang out with and cuddle up to Big Tree frequently—practicing walking meditation on the path around his flaring paw-like base, and making informal visits to lean up against his huge fire-scarred and lichen-bespangled trunk.
This was a strange and wonderful sensation, stretching myself against mossy and craggy bark to sense the tremor of wind in high branches and the subtle silent hum of hundreds of gallons of water being pulled up from belowground.
Deity-like, Big Tree even made his own weather; I’d walk by on a perfectly dry day and hear the soft pattering of rain harvested from the upper layers of the air to fall all around him. Or, coming home after dark, I’d look up and see his top branches still aglow with the final rays of the setting sun.
Nobody’s really sure why Big Tree was left standing when most of the other old-growth giants around him fell to ax and saw in the 19th century. One theory is that, because of a trunk-sized branch curving up and out like the “arm” of a saguaro cactus, he was used as a “jig tree,” with chains passing over the arm to haul cut logs onto wagons.
Another take is that since Big Tree is clearly visible from Bodega Bay, he was left as a marker to guide ships into port. Nobody knows.
When the Js bought their woodland property in 1976, there was really no problem with their “ownership” of Big Tree. The few folks who, like me, showed up to meditate, honor, and appreciate the living monolith were quiet and respectful, coming and going with little fuss.
But over the next 45 years, as the area became more populated, it also became clear that Big Tree was moving into the legal category of “attractive nuisance.” Some visitors were still benign, though more numerous. Others, however, ignoring a growing number of “Private Property” and “No Trespassing” signs, showed up to burn incense and enact personal ceremonies, or to party, drink, and smoke dope, leaving trash scattered about (never mind the fire danger).
Someone tried to climb Big Tree like a mountain. Someone dug a hole at his base and planted a memorial tree. Someone sent drones to circle and photograph him.
The Js, understandably, began to feel a constant sense of invasion. Finally, a few years ago, after confronting a set of mountain bikers who planned to ride circles around the tree for some unfathomable reason, their patience snapped, and a fence was erected around the entire property.
Here’s their statement: “A majority of folks just can’t get enough of Big Tree, needing to be up front and close.
“In spite of ‘no admittance’ signs, ‘tourists’ seem to feel entitled to make their way to Big Tree….[but now] even friends who ask are regularly encouraged to go to [another Sonoma County site with old-growth redwoods].
“,,,we don’t even go to Big Tree ourselves, in an attempt to minimize the damage to its habitat. All of our neighbors know of our no-entry policy, and they kindly respect it."
Of course, none of this human foolishness is a big deal to the big guy himself. He’s just doing his job—towering serenely, creating his own weather, each year capturing more of the sun’s final rays, and effecting the holy earth-saving miracle of transpiration.
He’s done all this faithfully through the birth and passing of saviors and avatars, the rise and fall of empires, and even through the brief holocaust of greed that reduced his landmates to charred stumps, but, for some unknown reason, passed him by.
I’d say he’s more than earned a little peace and quiet.
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12. THROWBACK THURSDAY: New York City; c. 1939
TEN YEARS AFTER
A few weeks ago, I posted some lovely photos of my mother as a teenager in the 1920s. This reminded my cousin Wayne Hill of two studio portraits he’d found while going through boxes of memorabilia. They show my mom as a young married woman, alone and with her guy, and still stunning.
The shots are labeled “News Studio, New York.” This was the photography department of the New York Daily News, and the photos were most probably taken by my Great-Uncle Lee Elkins, then the News’s chief sports photographer.
Lee not only invented the first one-shot color camera, but also worked intensively with department head Harry Warnecke on an ongoing series of celebrity portraits in color for their Sunday magazine section.
My dad and his Uncle Lee were great buddies and fellow photography enthusiasts. Dad had an open invitation to hang out in the background of the News studio as ordinary-looking people arrived and, through the miracles of hairstyling, makeup and fashion, were transformed into their famed personae and captured on film.
Looking at Wayne’s two photos struck a chord in my memory, and I went into my family photo collection and found a third portrait of my mother, obviously taken on the same occasion.
The Daily News has published, on their website, not only their remarkable images of everyone from Shirley Temple to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but also some between-the-shots scenes to compare with the finished product.
https://www.nydailynews.com/.../picture-perfect-daily...
However, the portraits here—no doubt slipped in at a quiet moment between famous faces—are celebrity enough for me.
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(NOTE: on the above website, all photos, even those taken by other photographers, are credited to department head Harry Warnecke. Lee took those of Jackie Robinson and Ted Williams, and apparently was involved in photographing Shirley Temple, Orson Welles, and a number of others.)
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13. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California, 1974: All over the US and the World, 1972-Present
ALL THE WORLD’S A CIRCUS, Or,
MUM’S THE WORD
As I’ve written here before, in 1975 I toured the US in a converted school bus with a 12-person circus/vaudeville troupe called “Dr. California’s Golden Gate Remedy.”
Among the performers on the tour was a 19-year-old bundle of energy named Nathan (then Nate) Stein. In spite of being one of the youngest in the troupe, Nate also proved to be one of its steadiest and most reliable members, sunny-tempered, hardworking, and wise beyond his years. He was also a kick-ass performer—in 1973 he’d won the International Jugglers’ Convention Junior Championship in a tough field of competition.
Nathan had participated in his first (original) Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1972. Then, in 1973, while taking music courses at Stanford University and performing at a local fair, he encountered another teenaged circus-arts phenom named Roy Johns.
The two hit it off immediately, and Roy introduced Nathan to his teacher, an eightysomething retired vaudevillian named Homer Stack, who proceeded to put the two kids through an intense period of training, polishing their natural assets and showmanship to a shine and fusing them into a brilliant dual act.
Roy, otherwise occupied during the 1975 Dr. California’s summer, elected not to tour, but he did find time to introduce a friend, future legendary Hollywood choreographer Kenny Ortega, to the equally legendary San Francisco rock/show band The Tubes, for whom Ortega would hone his skills by choreographing elaborate stage shows for years. The Mums’ friendship with Ortega would have some great professional benefits in the future.
(Wikipedia on Kenny:)
Kenneth John Ortega is an American filmmaker, touring manager, and choreographer. He is known for directing the films Newsies, Hocus Pocus,High School Musical, Michael Jackson's This Is It, Descendants, and Julie and the Phantoms.[1] He also choreographed the films St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Dirty Dancing; and directed multiple concert tours for Cher, Gloria Estefan, Hannah Montana, and Michael Jackson. For his work, Ortega was honored with a star on both the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Disney Legend Award in 2019.
Nathan and Roy and I had encountered each other at previous Renaissance Faires, but first got to be friends at the 1974 Great Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco. the two of Them were playing a dastardly pair of scimitar-juggling pirates in the Christmas Pantomime, and I, among three or four other roles, had a walk-on as a Chinese army.
It was at that same event that the duo first encountered brilliant Fair costume designer Dundii, who created the distinctive “French Clown” look with which, in 1976, they would go on to win $1000 on the very last Ted Mack Talent Search program as “The Mum Brothers” (Maxi- and Mini-).
In the 70s, young and hungry, The Mum Brothers took performing work where they could get it, with the venues becoming increasingly more interesting: fairs and Faires of course, Marine World Africa USA, and busking at the Cannery on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. On New Year’s Eve in 1975, they opened for the Tubes at San Francisco’s Winterland.
Moving south in ’76, they played the Mayfair Music Hall in Santa Monica (a Disney Production), as well as Circus Disco, the Variety Arts Center, and the famed Magic Castle, all in Los Angeles.
In 1977 they met producer Matt Gregory, who booked them for a six-month run in the Japanese spa town of Ito, where they shared the bill with a “tits-and-feathers” revue out of Las Vegas for what Nathan calls “a deep cultural immersion.”
Returning to LA in 1978, the boys co-created “Red Hot and Blue” a revue at the Playboy Club in Century City with a cast of dancers. At this point, they were busily expanding their range of circus skills (stage magic and legerdemain, tightrope-walking, unicycle-riding, stilt-walking, ball-walking, fire-blowing, dance, mime, and acrobatics), and gaining valuable experience in integrating these skills into larger groups and ensembles.
Later that year they would go to Hong Kong for a World Magic Festival, and return to be costumed by noted Hollywood designer Bob Mackie as lion-creature jugglers in a tabletop Wookiee toy for a CBS Star Wars Holiday Special. (See video links below.)
As if this weren’t enough activity, around this time, Nathan and Roy began expanding from The Mum Brothers to simply “The Mums” with the addition of more troupe members. In 1978, with a cast of six, they created (with director George Marchi) the Death Revue, a humorous punk skit-show, which had its out-of-town tryout at the Tivoli Theater in San Francisco’s North Beach.
This show opened in November, the week after San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by Supervisor Dan White. The city was in mourning, and I for one was hardly enthusiastic about attending such an event, but in support of Nathan and Roy, I bought tickets and convinced some friends to join me.
To our astonishment, the action-filled Death Revue, in turns hilarious, somber, deep, poetic and light-hearted—was a delightful, and (for me at least) mind-altering experience. Who knew?
The show would move on to a successful Sunset Strip run at LA’s Whiskey a Go Go, but after one more production (Mumfükle, Or, A Small Goat in Crete—don’t ask), the group disbanded, and the Mum Brothers duo evolved into a solid performing trio with the addition of troupe member Albie Selznick, another whiz-kid juggler/magician and aspiring actor who upped the act’s dark-lithe-and-yummy quotient considerably.
With their carefully managed Ted Mack winnings, they had commissioned, from Dundii and fellow designer Richard Beard, a black-clad edgy “glamor look,” around which they built an act that Nathan describes as “very Sex Pistols at first—a very fast-paced punk-ish rock-and-roll juggling/magic extravaganza.”
They became a commercial/for-hire act booked around the US and internationally, which gave them enough pocket money to produce a slew of theatrical story-based shows in LA through the eighties and nineties.
One of the Mums’ greatest strengths was their ability to perform either individually, as a duo or trio, or as part of an ensemble with other players, and to collaborate with other artists in the creative process.
Between their extensive world travels and their elaborate stage productions (with names like A Mum & His Symbols, Circus of Death, Mumf Afik, Mumbo Jumbo, WunderMum, Phantasmagorica (Revenge of the Living Dolls), and The Nannies), the eighties, nineties and early 2000s were packed with activity.
By this time, they’d acquired a crackerjack agent (Julie McDonald, who would eventually join with Albie Selznick’s brother Tony in an agency called MSA), and by golly, you never knew where those guys would pop up next.
There they were in a Fellini-esque 1980 Suntory Whiskey commercial (their first SAG gig); opening stage shows for Ry Cooder, Kenny Loggins, Tina Turner, The Tubes, Randy Newman and others; juggling for charity on the Jerry Lewis Telethon; cavorting on the stage of the New Zealand Opera House or in offbeat films like Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo, Monkey Bone, and Batman Returns.
They infused their unique blend of energy, skill and showmanship into mind-bending videos with the Steve Miller Band, Prince, Janet Jackson/George Harrison, Van Halen and Michael Jackson; schmoozed with Merv Griffin; posed draped in Las Vegas showgirls for noted photographer Steven Arnold; coached celebs for Circus of the Stars; enlivened corporate events and appeared in TV ads for airlines, cars, beverages, computers, financial institutions and athletic gear.
And they traveled: to juggling, theater and magic conventions, to museums, colleges and universities, to NewYorkCityTorontoSingaporeRenoBorneoMexicoBahrainNewZealandmajorcitiesandcountrieseverywhere, winning awards, grants, kudos and spectacular reviews along the way.
Through all of this, they worked individually as well as together, and gradually developed individual careers. Albie Selznick, for example, with his leading man-to-doofus versatility, has appeared in over a dozen films, over 60 TV shows, and numerous commercials,
(Wikipedia) Albie Selznick (born January 1, 1959) is an American film and television actor. His best-known role is Ben Rubenstein on the sitcom Suddenly Susan.
He has guest starred and recurred in several other TV series, including Dexter, Shark, NCIS, 24, Desperate Housewives, Cold Case, Without A Trace, Star Trek: Voyager, The King of Queens, NYPD Blue, CSI: Miami, CSI:NY, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The West Wing, Everwood, The Young and the Restless, Veronica Mars, Night Court, and others.
Roy Johns also kept busy with his own pursuits:
Roy Johns, Artistic Director and Co-Founder of the critically acclaimed performance troupe The Mums, formulated and defined their unique visual and performing style and has continued to do so, not only for The Mums and Girls On Stilts, but his latest creation Dolls On Balls.
…Roy is a professional juggler, tightrope, stilt, and ball walker, magician, dancer, clown, actor and artist for over 25 years. He devotes himself to performing, teaching and directing, as well as supervising the construction of all sets, props and costumes utilized in Roy Johns Presents. https://www.blogger.com/profile/02941542740958549811 (Roy Johns Presents website)
He’s also become a creator of Power Poles, elaborately painted staffs suitable for tightrope-balancing, as walking sticks, weapons or for use in magical invocations. http://royjohnsart.blogspot.com
Nathan Stein and I are still great long-distance friends. His C.V. is too long and complex to include here, but you can see it at https://nathanstein.tv/biography/ .
He’s mounted several acclaimed one-man shows, become an accomplished pianist, and enjoys going on the road with his wife Erin in a portable “store” that corresponds to their exquisitely curated vintage boutique site at https://www.tavinboutique.com.
The Mums’ last official performance, a weeklong run, took place at the Magic Castle in 2014, where they unveiled a collection of “Mummerabilia.” Bros forever, they reunited briefly in 2019 to entertain the residents of Albie’s mom’s retirement home.
And, amid all of the rave reviews they received in their 40-plus-year career, perhaps the most telling was a simple note from none other than Sting.
“I’d like to have you open for us,” wrote the laconic icon, “but, quite frankly, you’re too good.”
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And for a look at the Mums’ classic stage show, check out the Merv Griffin video.
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And, as always, he got his shot.
At last, unable to stand without swaying from fatigue, I escaped to my room and tucked myself into my new bed.
MEMOIRS (This is not as daunting as it looks. Each section contains 20 short essays, ranging in length from a few paragraphs to a few pages. Great bathroom reading.
They’re not in sequential order, so one can start anywhere.)
NOTE: If you prefer to read these on paper, you can highlight/copy/paste into a Word doc and print them out, (preferably two-sided or on the unused side of standard-sized paper).
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part One
https://amiehillthrowbackthursdays.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Two
https://ahilltbt2.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Three
https://amiehilltbt3.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Four
https://tbt4amie-hill.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Five
https://ami-ehiltbt-5.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Six
https://am-iehilltbt6.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Seven
https://a-miehilltbt7.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Eight
https://a-miehilltbt8.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Nine
https://amiehilltbt9.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Ten
https://amiehill10tbt.blogspot.com
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Eleven
https://11tbtamiehill.blogspot.com/2021/02/w-elcome-to-my-past.html
