Just Kids (book)

Pengo’s 2022 Summer Book Club

“I was full of references.”
- Patti Smith, “Just Kids”

Earlier this month, Luke and I had a “New York City 1980” double feature (viewings spaced by seven days) where we watched Alan Parker’s Fame and Allan Moyle’s Times Square.

Fame is, of course, the fictionalized story of a few teenagers making their way through the School of Performing Arts, and as such it had a remarkable effect on me as an aspiring performer. 

Times Square, a lesser-known flick, is a rock and roll love story between the child of a rising NYC councilman and the street-dwelling kid she meets in a hospital as they are both treated for mental health issues.

While this version of Fame is not a musical, Parker employs his talents melding song with narrative, as he also did so successfully with The Commitments. Each tune is from a source – a rehearsal, a performance, a realistic moment alone creating a tune – but each could be its own music video.

Moyle’s film could have been a groundbreaking queer teen fantasy, had the producers not insisted on an alternate ending which is pure Hollywood bullshit. But it’s all worth it just for the scene in which our protagonists, Pam and Nicky, bop down 42nd Street to Life During Wartime.



They are both artifacts of a transitional moment in the history of the city, documenting a Midtown which no longer exists, but also in their own way setting the stage for the MTV era which was to come. Like the man said, don't you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?

“Today the city is populated by benevolent ghosts.”

Patti Smith’s 2010 memoir Just Kids is (tangentially) about another point of major transition in the city. The focus of this book is primarily her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it is also therefore about their paths, together and apart, as young artists in the very late 1960s and into the 1970s.

Photo by Norman Seeff, 1969

I believe I was only first made aware of Smith when someone produced a lab production of Cowboy Mouth, which she wrote with Sam Shepard in 1971, a roman à clef of a play, a thinly veiled examination of their brief time together. Yes, I knew the song Because the Night, which she wrote with Bruce Springsteen, which was a hit when I was ten years old, but I couldn’t have told you who sang it.

And I first became aware of Mapplethorpe when a retrospective of his works, many of which feature images of a sexual nature, became a convenient focus of attack by those authoritarian forces that are currently Panzer-blitzing their way over a half-century of American civil rights and progress. This, when the artist had died only four months earlier, in March 1989.

What is charming and affecting about Smith’s book, fulfilling a promise she had made to her friend and former lover decades earlier to tell their story, is how unaffected it is. It’s a sweet tale of a young woman and a young man who meet cute and have Downtown boho adventures as they make art and aspire to greatness.

Smith is one of those rare artists who had to become an artist because, by her own admission, she couldn’t hold down a steady job – though her ability to find rare books for cheap and sell them high is a skill I find enviable.

Patti Smith in Cleveland
(Photo by Judie Vegh, 2017)

But as I was saying, transition. Brief encounters with Hendrix and Joplin, shortly before they died. Dylan and Ginsburg make appearances, too. Rubbing elbows with the 1960s as it vanished into the new decade which would entirely define them as icons of rock and art.

“The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one's actions.”

Five years ago, we took the entire family to the State Theatre to see Patti Smith perform Horses, her first album, in its entirety. 

At the age of seventy it were a fearsome performance from a white-haired punk, full of grit and passion. Our children, aged 15 and not yet 13, recently traumatized by the election, were electrified and inspired by the performance. It was a balm for the parents, too.

Source: “Behind the right’s loathing of the NEA: Two ‘despicable’ exhibits almost 30 years ago” by Travis M. Andrews, The Washington Post, 3/20/2017

Circle Mirror Transformation (play)

Now Playing

I really did not think I was going to like this play.

I have read one play by Annie Baker, The Aliens, and that I did not expect to enjoy either, and I enjoyed reading that very much. I was looking forward to Circle Mirror Transformation at Dobama Theatre because it features one of my friends and co-workers and I was very proud of her and happy for her, and then I heard it was about a drama workshop in Vermont and I began to feel oogey.

The postcard did not help. Everyone on the floor, heads together. It took a moment for me to realize, okay, all right they are doing a floor relaxation exercise, and that it wasn’t just a horribly cliché group theater shot, but that only made me feel worse.

Are we going there again? Is this play a bunch of theater exercises, that theater people know only too well and can laugh at because ho-ho-ho, we’ve all done this haven’t we and “civilians” (ever since my first acting class in college I despised the use of the word “civilian” to describe non-theater people … I might be a beatnik but theater people don’t generally put themselves in mortal danger for the sake of national security and do not have the right to distinguish themselves from those who do) can just sit back and laugh because those touchy-feely, promiscuous theater nuts sure do a lot of craaaazy things.

I saw Alan Parker's Fame on cable, and that was my first experience with theater exercises. I was thirteen. I was enthralled but also found it humorous. Finding that those were things people really do, and then being asked to do them made me more self-conscious than if it had been a new discovery. 

We do, actually, need to feel self-confident enough to do, well, anything, really, to create performances that are worth people laying down money to watch. And these exercises help. Unless you feel like a clown doing them. So making fun of them as part of a play, a play about learning how to act … you get my point. It has the potential to make me unhappy.

Self, Betsy Zajko, Rich Wiess
Guerrilla Theater Company, 1992

Let’s change the subject for a moment. Dobama. The new Dobama. Just bizarre. It looks like the old Dobama, on Coventry, for the most part. Seating on three sides featuring red chairs ripped from a defunct movie house (different movie house, different chairs) so it has the illusion of being the same place. And my emotions for that house run deep. The old house, the one on Coventry, not this place, in the library, in the former Lee Road YMCA swimming pool, where we did so many amazing things late at night. 

I said goodbye to my 20s in that theater. I am glad I am no longer that person. But it was exciting.

Earlier than that, when I was in my early 20s, Guerrilla Theater days, no, before that, when I worked at Karamu House and started getting involved in local shows and meeting the crowd I would eventually become so familiar with, I was offended by all of these middle-aged people, in their 40s or older, who were in the thrall of this certain acting coach. We won’t name names, it’s not their fault, it is not about the coach per se, but their pupils, who reversed this person as one would a sensei, someone who taught them everything, how to taste flavors a anew, to see the world as a baby, how to feel deeply. So deeply.

Dan Kilbane, Sarah Morton, self
Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1998

I knew what they meant, even at 23 years-old I understood what was going on. I had experienced all of these things at college, in theater classes, at the age of 18, 19, 20 years-old, when it is okay to embarrass yourself because you are young and stupid. 

And these were accountants and environmental lawyers who were finally, in middle-age, getting in touch with their emotions and learning how to function like feeling human beings -- but because they were adults with children and mortgages, they weren’t discovering things that others my age with my training already knew, they were discovering things NO ONE HAD EVER KNOWN BEFORE and this acting coach was a GOD.

Because they were too mature to be so young and silly. This shit was important. It changed their lives.

And so, after all, I was touched my this play. Because it confounded my expectations. Annie Baker can take the slackers-smoking-by-a-dumpster play and give it heart. She can take the amateur-drama-workshop play and people it with characters who I am glad to spend two hours in the presence of.

One moment I was particularly struck by, in the middle of the second act when the coach asks everyone to reveal a secret about themselves. This is five weeks into a six week course. It is a dumb, dumb exercise. Dangerous, and pointless. I have engaged in that kind of exercise, 

I remember an undergraduate directing class my junior year. In order to get into the emotions of a certain two-person scene, the director of that scene (neither of us performing in the scene respected her at all) asked us to hide in the wings on the opposite sides of the stage and probe each others’ deepest fears. 

The Sandman #6: 24 Hours, 1989
Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg

The actress in question and I, while not exactly trusting of each other, were unified in our disgust of what we were being asked to do and were able to a) say the most horrid sounding, spiteful things that we knew were already open secrets and didn’t sting when b) the MFA Directing Grad who was leading the course was in the room. 

The teacher stormed out of the space to visit another scene, but first admonished our scene work director in the harshest terms for engaging in “psychological bullshit.”

Of course, the actress and I were the ones experimenting in psychological bullshit, fucking over our student director in that way.

The scene, as presenting in Baker’s play, put me in mind, of all things, of a scene from the 6th issue of the comic book Sandman, where Dr. Destiny has Morpheus’s amulet and spends twenty-fours in a diner, influencing those present to live out their id until everyone has has sex with, mutilated and/or eaten everyone else in the joint.

Baker’s play is not literally grotesque in that way. But it did make me feel that creepy.

I would say I really liked the ending, only she stole it from my new play. The one I haven't finished yet.

God dammit.

The Sandman: "24/7"
(Netflix, 2022)