Unruly Grandeur | The York Plays

Chelsea Cannon as the Angel Gabriel

Next weekend, the Cleveland-based company Unruly Grandeur will caravan to the University of Toronto to perform a brace of medieval mystery plays.

This weekend, they are presenting dress rehearsals out-of-doors in Lincoln Park. You can attend, and I recommend you should, today, Sunday, June 1 at 2:00 PM. A couple dozen of us braved to cooler temps to witness the event yesterday.

The York Corpus Christi Plays are a series of short scripts which, taken together, tell the story of Christ. Festival organizers describe these seven hundred or so year-old plays as “Bible fan-fic” as they depict moments from the Bible and expand upon them, often with great humor, and they are certainly still, after all these centuries, entertaining.

Those who performed these works then, and those who will be presenting them in Canada next weekend, would and will take all day to do so. There’s almost twenty companies participating who will cycle through all the plays, using wagons to cart their ensemble to three different locations across the university campus.

When you attend today, and I recommend you do, you will see just the two pieces produced by Unruly Grandeur, and it will only last an hour. The first, Joseph’s Troubles, plays like a mid-century sit-com. The hapless and no-longer-young Joseph (Stuart Hoffman) presses his young and pregnant spouse (Chennelle Bryant-Harris) to tell him who the father is.

Michael Montanus as King Herod

The second, Herod Antipas is a broad clown show with overt modern political imagery and honest-to-God red noses, in which Herod (Michael Montanus) interrogates a silent Jesus (Jailyn Sherell Harris). Directed by Charlene V. Smith and Kelly Elliott, their two scenes are bright and colorful, big and broad and beautiful.

Sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of Tremont, I was reminded of that Good Friday in 1993, when Guerrilla Theater Company were engaged to perform a series of medieval monologues on the steps of Zion United Church (right up West 14th Street from the park) as part of a “prayer walk” inspired by the seven last words of Christ, in which the faithful would walk to each of the many churches in the neighborhood. That day, I was Pilate, in a fresh charcoal gray, double-breasted suit and floral tie, and I condemned a man to death.

Civilization has come such a long way in the past two thousand years.

Unruly Grandeur presents the York Plays, today at 2:00 PM at the gazebo in Lincoln Park, Tremont. Admission is free. Donate to send Unruly Grandeur to Toronto!

Hamlet by Jack Kerouac - or - You Crazy Dane

Professor Street Theater

Guerrilla Theater Company opened the doors at the Professor Street Theater thirty years ago today, on Friday, October 23, 1992. Our production was called You Have the Right to Remain Silent! which was fashioned as a game show, with the audience playing games to select from a list of titles which of twenty-one short plays we would perform next.

If that sounds like the Neo-Futurists, you're not wrong. Anyone performing short plays in a random order could be accused of the same, but the plays were original, and so were we.

That night we actually recorded the show on cassette tape. The performance sounds a bit rough, but it was opening night and I am still amazed we got through it. We were so young, and callow.

The show started with two plays, back-to-back, about toxic masculinity. Like, they both feature men shouting horrible things at women. Makes me wonder if some members of the audience were concerned about what they’d gotten themselves into.

Then there’s Hamlet by Jack Kerouac, which some might have heard before, even if they’d never been to Guerrilla, as I cannibalized the entire piece for These Are the Times. It’s one of two pieces I had written which were in the half of the performance that was recorded. It’s just the kind of cerebral drollery you might expect from a theatrical hipster.

The less said about the other piece I had written, the better. Let’s just say the propensity for young Cleveland actors to complain about their being shut out of local professional theater companies is nothing recent.

Guerrilla Theater Company: Thirty Years On

Guerrillas in the Professor Street Theater

Now we are here. Now it is time. Now we have come to rule you.

Dusk in Tremont. A tortured dog, a coat hanger wrapped around the base of his matted, entangled tail, ran down Professor, yowling in pain, followed by two or three other mutts. 

The dog stopped every few yards to turn around to snap at the metal dragging the ground, an entirely useless attempt, the coat hanger whipping around with it. The other dogs yapped in delight and surprise, also trying to bite at the wire hanger.

The seven of us emerged from the building for which Torque and I had recently signed a lease, the building we would soon call the Professor Street Theatre. We were going to rehearse one of our new short plays outdoors. I was anxious.

“Let’s do it over there,” Torque said, gesturing down the street with a mallet, toward the steps of St. John Cantius. Torque was wearing a bass drum, Wee-Bear had a pair of cymbals.

“Uhm,” I said. “Okay.”

We walked over to the church. I stood at the top of the steps, with Torque and Wee-Bear a few steps below, flanking me. The others stood around, scattered here and there, on the sidewalk, in the street, like they would do if they were standing among the crowd at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry, or the Yard as it was called. The way we were going to do, there, in a little over an hour.

Torque beat out one loud rhythm on his drum, Wee-Bear a different one on her cymbals. And I began our first ever play, calling out into the darkness.

The view from the steps of St. John Cantius was not a particularly interesting one. It faced a vacant lot. There was a huge, grassy lot between our building and the boarded up delicatessen on the corner, where there were once three other buildings. You could see where the buildings had been because the land sagged in the middle. None of us ever walked across this lot for fear of popping into the ground and never being seen again.

I was shouting at a vacant lot. An abandoned storefront. The empty street. A Tremonster, just out for a walk. I felt like an idiot, calling into the night air. And if I felt stupid here, how would I feel an hour later, in front of actual people, in Cleveland Heights?

Earlier that day we had sent faxes to all the major news outlets -- Channels 3, 5 and 8, as well as the daily newspaper, the Plain Dealer -- announcing that Guerrilla Theater Company would be staging a “Hit on Coventry” at 10:30 PM that night, Thursday, September 10, 1992.

We had never performed in public before. We were still creating the show which we planned to open in late October. No one knew who we were. This was the reason we were doing this stunt, to announce our arrival. So all would know our name. 

Steps of St. John Cantius at night.

When no one called the office number (the one we called the Guerrilla Connection) for more information, we called them.

WKYC couldn’t find the release, and didn’t know what we were talking about. Ditto WJW and the Plain Dealer.

The guy at WEWS, when we pressed him as to whether or not we would get covered, asked smartly, “Do you believe your little stunt would be of any interest to 10,000 people?” We were unable to convince him that it would.

Screw it. We traveled in two cars out to Coventry Village, a fifteen minute drive from Tremont, and began the assault.

Coventry Yard was bustling, the tables were full of folks enjoying coffee from Arabica. Guitars were being plucked. Beemer and Jelly Jam wandered in from Coventry Road, and moved among the throng, passing out cryptic little flyers with the Guerrilla Logo on it, and the number for the Guerrilla Connection.

We had two phone lines, one for regular office use, and a second, the Guerrilla Connection, with a funny answering machine message on it that we promised to change once a week to encourage people to call back.

Mammy and Retro approached from Euclid Heights Boulevard, passing out these same flyers. The four of them mingled amongst the folks sitting out in the Yard, enjoying the last of the late summer weather.

Torque, Wee-Bear and I waited in the car.

“Do you see any cameras or anything?”

“No.”

“Well, forget it, let’s just do this.”

We strode in lock-step, I at point, my long, black, cotton jacket whipping behind me. Torque and Wee-Bear were at my corners with their instruments. Once into the Yard, I hopped up onto the topmost step of the long cement bankment and turned to face the crowd.

There may have been fifty people spread out around the patio, chatting, playing hacky-sack. Standing up there, aware of what I was about to do, I felt very tall indeed, and far from everyone but dreadfully exposed. I felt vertiginous.

Before I could think too hard, however, Torque and Wee-Bear were in their places, just below me, as we had rehearsed, and beating out their rhythms very, very loud. I had expected such an arrival to create a great hush amidst the throng, but I was mistaken. They looked up in surprise, but their response was louder than the normal cacophony of a crowd of voices. Some laughed, some said “What the hell?” I waited not an instant.

“I am here,” I said, loudly. Now they got a little quiet.

“I am here!” I repeated, as though I had not gotten the response I wanted. There were giggles.

“So what?” someone called back.

“Who are you?” Mammy, sitting at a table, called back to me.

“Yeah, who the fuck are you?” someone else said.

“I have come to lead you!” I yelled.

“Why should we follow you?” Jelly Jam said, standing close by, looking up at me.

“Because I know what's good for you,” I said, pointing at him. By now no one was heckling, some still laughed, but they were listening. It was a show!

“You know what's good for us?” Beemer and Retro said together.

“I have a plan to end the bad times we are currently suffering and start anew the good times we all remember,” I said.

“Where have you been?” said all four crowd-member Guerrillas. Torque and Wee-Bear stood silently at attention below me.

“I have been living life as one of you, making mistakes, achieving great victories, and now I am here,” I said. “Now it is time. Now I have come to rule you.”

“I’ll vote for you!” someone called out.

“Tell us more!” said the Guerrillas. They were slowly stepping towards me, through the Yard.

“The people who rule you now don't care about you!” I shouted. “I care about you!”

“You care about us!” they cried in disbelief.

“The people who rule you don't know how to make things better! But I know how to make things better!”

“Make things better!” they wept.

“Yes! I can make things better! And I need your help!” I said.

“What can we do?”

“I need your support!”

“We support you!”

“I need your money!”

“Take our money!”

“I need your trust! I need your love!”

“We trust you! We love you!”

Anchorman Ted

“And …” I said, looking down at them all, my hands outstretched “... I need you to love each other!”

They all stopped in their tracks and looked at each other. The crowd of strangers in the Yard waited for what happened next.

“Kill him,” they all agreed. Torque, Wee-Bear and I looked shocked and scared.

“Kill him!” they yelled again, and lunged for us, but we had turned around and were sprinting through the shrubs and bushes that blocked the way behind us. We tore through the traffic across Euclid Hts. Boulevard as Jelly Jam, Mammy, Beemer and Retro took after us, shouting with hate.

Who knows what happened at the Yard, we were too full of the notion that maybe we were being pursued, that perhaps our actions were somehow illegal, which they weren’t, but that maybe cops would try to stop us or something.

In any case, we jumped in our cars, and took off, back to Tremont.

We were putting things away at the building when my fiancée called.

“Turn on Channel 5,” she said.

“What? Why?”

“No time!”

So we all gathered in the sitting room and switched on the TV, and there was Anchorman Ted.

“From the strange to the bizarre,” said Anchorman Ted, “Impromptu theater took on new meaning tonight in town when a group of actors paid a very unannounced visit to the Arabica coffee shop on Coventry!”

The image on the screen switched to that of Torque, Wee-Bear and myself, striding past the Centrum movie theater towards the Yard.

“Oh my God!” Wee-Bear said.

“Can you qualify how ‘unannounced’ something is?” Mammy asked.

Anchorman Ted continued, “Happened around 10:30 tonight, the performers rushed into the restaurant, surprising absolutely all the patrons there …”

“We didn’t go inside!” Beemer said, squinting.

“Say our name!” Torque said.

“... they put on a short performance, then they rushed out again.”

The image switched abruptly to our running away from the scene, Wee-Bear clanging her cymbals, all of us dodging traffic.

“They missed the performance,” I sighed.

“Now from what we’ve been told,” Ted said, “troupes of actors in New York City have been staging similar performances like this one. No harm done, really, but it certainly comes as a surprise to those who see it happen.”

“Similar performances like this one?” Mammy said.

“Say the name!” Torque said.

“I wonder how our cameraperson found out it was going to happen?” Ted asked as the picture switched back to three happy TV people on the set -- Ted, Don the Weatherman and their newest arrival, Evelyn.

“Because we sent you a fucking press release?” I said.

“He’s sharp,” said Evelyn, the new female anchor, and significantly younger than Ted or Don. “Maybe Don is going to surprise us with some nice weather this weekend,” she said, making the perfect segue.

“You haven’t been around long enough to know,” cried the ancient meteorologist (he was fifty-four). “Only on Coventry!”

“Is that right?” she asked, appropriately interested.

“Uh yes,” Ted added, with fatherly insight, “Home of the strange and the unusual for over three decades now.”

“Ha ha ha.”

“Heh heh heh.”

“Anyway!” Don said, facing camera two.

Click.

“They didn’t say our name.”

Boy Camp 2014

Boy Camp, a mescla of high and low. The girls are camping in the Pennsylvania wilderness, getting their feminist on, while we sleep late and watch a lot of television. We look like we smell of beer, but there is no beer.

Last night, culture. It was opening night for the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo & Juliet, set this night in the Coventry Peace Park. Highlight of the evening were the rising of a half-dozen police vehicles which sped east along Euclid Heights Blvd. just as the deadly fight began Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo.

“Mercutio, one of the ballsiest males in Shakespeare, is played for some elusive purpose, by a woman.”
- Jim Damico, The Free Times (1994)

 As intense as that was, it was hard to keep a straight face when, just as the Prince decreed, “Bear hence this body,” an ambulance flew down the street behind him.

(Side note: Calimoxo is an excellent drink to put into a travel coffee mug.)

After we went home and watched Red vs. Blue and MST3K: Gamera.

"Kenny!!!"

Saturday morning I made chicken & waffles, and then to School of Rock, where the boy kept time rather successfully, in spite of an injury to his right hand at a ball game last Tuesday. I wrote.

We took a visit to the garden center, and then he introduced me to Critical Hit Games across the street. Some day I am just going to drop him off there and let the geeks teach him how to play Dungeons & Dragons while the wife and I have drinks at Melt.

Just kidding. We don't like to go to Melt.

Spreading hardwood mulch was thwarted by a delightful summer downpour, but that’s cool, that’s why we have Minecraft videos.

"This is crap."

 Saturday evening things got a little crazy, as we made our annual pilgrimage to go bowlin’ in Solon. The boy was joined by two of his high octane companions, fortunately I had Dr. D. as company and got to engage in the first big-people conversation in 24 hours.

The good doctor inquired about my writing, after I had claimed to have drafted one page that morning. He asked, “When that happens, do you think, Euerka! I have written a page! Or is it more like, Ugh. Only one page.” What a great question!

In that morning’s case the latter, but this morning, as the boy played video games with a friend who had slept over, I wrote another page and thought, Eureka!

Photo: Brent Durken

Our final journey before the women returned was to attend Emily & Benjamin's wedding in St. Theodosius in Tremont. Such an iconic building, but I had never been inside. It's beautiful! The boy was very patient, though I regretted my ignorance that Orthodox services are spent largely standing. If I had known this, I would have chosen an aisle seat so the boy could see the proceedings, but he was very mature and patient.

As most in attendance were not Orthodox, the priest was explaining the service as we went. The boy, who remained attentive, whispered to me, "It's like he's giving us a tour of his process."  That's my son.

Off-Hollywood Flick Fest

Winter, 1994. Guerrilla Theater Company presents MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS at The Actors' Gym.

Loud, upbeat music, as always, blared from speakers upstairs and down in The Actors' Gym. Lefty sat in the box office reading a copy of the Weekly World News, Gooch wandered in and out, playing games with Digit. Torque was down in the Boutique with Beemer. I sat in the display, staring hard at the front door, but it failed to open. 

At 8:00 sharp we canceled another early Friday evening show. This was even following our latest gambit -- declaring the 8 PM show on Friday as the Two-Dollar Show. It was always the least attended so we thought it might boost sales. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. It seemed pretty arbitrary.

There was an extended tug-of-war between those who felt we should cancel the 8 o’clock show, and those who didn’t. Those for cancellation argued that as there were no doubt a finite number of people on any given night who would be willing to weather the storm and city streets to drive to Tremont of all places just to see avante-garde funny people, why distribute that number between two shows? Why not force them to all come to one show, maybe one 10 o’clock show?

The other side stated quite clearly that since so many people of a certain age had expressed so clearly that they would have come to see YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT except for its going on when all sane, aging Baby Boomers (and theater critics) are home and asleep, we needed to offer the earlier show. If we stuck to this regiment, the audiences would grow. Our followers knew they could depend on our being open at eight and eleven, every single week of the year. They wouldn’t even need to look it up in the paper or call "The Connection", we’d be here, for them. The idea of a 10 o’clock show was declared “unfeasible.”

As the argument for maintaining an 8 o’clock show was so strongly set forth by Torque and myself, it was pretty much set in stone.

And so it was, as on so many other Friday nights shortly after eight, some of us drove off to West 25th Street in search of fast food. Others went back into the apartment to watch tee vee. I bundled up and walked down Professor Street.

The Winter of 1994 stretched on forever and ever. I couldn't be warm enough. We kept The Actors' Gym pleasantly toasty, there were fortunately no real drafts in the building, just through the front door and we hung a curtain over the doorway to the space to prevent too much heat from escaping.

Wind tore through my ancient army coat as I stuck my head into Edison's to see if anyone was there. It was crowded with people, but nobody was there.

"Hey!" Sandy yelled to me, "shouldn’t you be doing a show!?"

"No audience," I yelled back -- I was just standing at the door, I wasn't going to make the effort to push through. I had to shout over a dozen of post-graduates from Bay Village who were, you know, slumming it. In the Slum. Where I worked.

She gave me a sympathetic smile. "Some of these folks are heading over at eleven."

"Great!" I said. Great, I thought, by eleven they should be plastered and either forget what they came here for or be having too much fun in this place to bother. I got resentful sometimes, thinking of all the people who came to Edison's after seeing one of our shows -- they came to this God-forsaken neighborhood to see our show. They spend five bucks to get in, quibble over the price of a T-shirt, and then drop a wad for alcohol and cigarettes here afterwards.

Bitter, bitter, bitter. I continued down the street.

Alcohol. That was another of the major changes that had taken place between the first and second years. We banned alcohol from the space. It goes without saying that drinking it was verboten among the company during performance -- besides, in the old days you hid your open container in the Green Room to pull on when you weren’t performing, out of sight. There was no out of sight in The Actors’ Gym, the entire space was open and actors watched every scene they were not part of in plain sight, standing there next to one of the seating sections. No more fist-fights. No more sloppy, unprofessional, bad actors.

But we also told the audience they couldn’t bring beer into the space anymore, that we would be happy to hold it for them in the box office until the show was over. We were adamant. And people either handed it over, or a surprising number of the them turned around and left. It wasn’t a party without beer.

I wandered to the former Professor Street Theater. Now christened "The Lab" by Retro, Geddy, and two of their associates, Bernadette and Annetta. The four of them were filmmakers, working for other people as editors, line producers, cinematographers, gaffers, camera operators, whatever. They had, as we all do, higher aspirations and had created a mound of their own independent work which they felt they had every right to show. And so they started The Off-Hollywood Flick Fest.

They gathered their own material, and that of friends and coworkers, put a tee vee monitor and a home movie screen at one end of the space, the end where the Boutique and Green Room used to be, set out maybe fifty chairs and floor pillows and carpeting, and invited their friends to come and see.

As I approached the building the night of the first Off-Hollywood Flick Fest, it didn't appear like anything was going on. The windows were still covered with black paper, there were still white, holiday lights lining the edges of those windows. Such an inviting looking building, it was much much warmer looking than The Actors' Gym. Windows. Lights.

The Actors’ Gym was one block to the east. Two doors down from Edison’s. That made it furthest outpost of Gentrified Tremont. The Frontier. How many people had driven to find our show, saw the uninviting facade, looked around at all the derelict houses, and simply moved on?

I pushed the door open. I could only get it open part-way, because three people stood in the tiny alcove. They were standing there, watching the show because there wasn't another seat to be had. I forced my way in to discover almost a hundred people, sitting standing, lying around in the dark, watching homemade movies.

"Hansen!" Retro called. He came over and gave me a big hug. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and holding a beer. "What's going on, don't you have a show?"

"Uh, it was canceled," I said. "Damn, Retro this is amazing!" I hissed in a whisper so as not to disturb anyone. For such a large crowd everyone was intently respecting the films by not talking.

"Isn't it?" he said, "we were hoping maybe our friends would show and I gotta tell you, I don't think I know a single person here."

"Sucks when your friends let you down like that," I said. I was happy for him. I was depressed as shit. "How much longer does it go on tonight?"

"We've got stuff to go until at least midnight." So much for asking him to plug our show up the street when the lights come on.

"You make any money?"

"Enough to cover our costs, just tonight," he said, "which is more than we were expecting. You want a beer?"

"Uh, no," I said, "I, heh, have a show tonight."

"Well, I gotta schmooze," he said. "There's another program tomorrow afternoon and tomorrow night -- maybe you could spread the word to the audience over at Guerrilla."

"This is great, Retro," I said, "I'm proud of you. Tell Geddy I said so."

And so I braced myself against the breeze and headed back to Guerrilla. And I did tell our 11 PM audience about The Flick Fest. I hope all eight of them checked it out.

In the late 1990s, the Off-Hollywood Flick Fest changed its name to the Ohio Independent Film Festival.

The Actors' Gym

1993

Guerrilla Theater Company lasted two years, in two locations along Professor Street in Tremont. We had disagreements with our first-year landlord, and were happy to move into a location just a block away which had more space in which to perform, including something like a lobby.

Unfortunately, what we named The Actors' Gym was rather plain or ugly from the outside. Unlike The Professor Street Theater there were no ground floor windows, nor even a nearby lamp post. We jerry-rigged an exterior light and that was it. At night -- when we did all of our work -- the facade was rather foreboding and I know for certain of at least one person who was in high school at the time, deciding to "slum it" by checking out some cutting-edge comedy in the g-e-t-o, took one look at the place and decided it wasn't worth it.

Prior to our occupancy, the space had been an actual gym. There was shag carpeting in the main space, gang showers upstairs and down, and even a sauna. The landlord allowed us to work off some rent through sweat equity, ripping up layers of carpeting, thick plywood, all-weather carpeting, and linoleum, before reaching the original oak flooring.

The lobby was rather bizarre, with a nautical theme ... wood and ropes and salty-dog wallpaper. The coved ceiling was stuccoed.  To the left of the front door there was a counter with a display case built in and a wall behind and to the side with cubbyholes, which we used as a box office.  To the right, another display case, and two small alcoves that could act as a coat check or a tiny office.  And directly in front, a raised platform with railings around it, a kind of display area.  We left the lobby as it was, didn't change a thing.

 

Beach Party Night (1994) 

The other day, after supervising some of our actor-teachers and giving notes and running lines over lunch at Grumpy's, I decided to give one of our newest members, raised in Chicago, a brief driving tour of this most interesting neighborhood, which had only started its gentrification twenty years ago.

2012

Approaching the former Actors' Gym I hollered, gaped, and pulled over. I couldn't even believe my eyes. Guerrilla wasn't my last experience with this space. Since then Bad Epitaph produced two shows there, when it was the art gallery called INSIDE and later *. In early 2001, my wife, very pregnant with our first child, performed in a show for J.P. Morgan's short-lived Radical Evil Drama company. But the facade was always the same, ugly paneling and no windows.

1989 Loma Prieta earthquake scene from Bad Epitaph Theater Company production of SIN by Wendy MacLeod at INSIDE, Cleveland, OH. September 1999. The performance space was tiny, the audience was limited to 40.

To create a realistic earthquake, the seating risers were cantilevered, one bank resting slightly on the one beneath, with large bass speaker cabinets lying on the floor beneath the audience, directed up. Actors on the still, hardwood floor throw themselves about as the set comes apart, but the audience was literally shaken by the sound, as in an amusement park ride.

What had never occurred to me was that the lobby was once an alcove. But of course it was! Stripped away, losing all of the crappy display boxes and adding high windows, the space is now an attractive show place.

 

You can ask Andrew. I was practically crying, it's so beautiful.

Superhero Night (1994)

Peeking into the space, there has not yet been any renovation inside the space. Just those hardwood floors I participated in discovering nineteen years ago. Signage indicates that the new owner is now in the public phase of attracting backers for a New Orleans themed restaurant.

Driving my young associate around the neighborhood, and describing what it was like two decades ago, I became excited for the city all over again. Tides rise, they ebb. But I still feel that we are moving forward.

See also: Romeo & Juliet (1994)

 

 

* No, seriously. An art gallery called "*".

Henry VIII: The Final

The Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII

closed in Tremont on August 4.

The Taming of the Shrew (1993)

Guerrilla Theater Company

The Taming of the Shrew
Tablework, May 1993.

We sat at the long high school table, in the middle of the space. All signs of 'You Have the Right to Remain Silent!' had been stripped away. It was May, and it was starting to get warm. A large industrial fan kept the air in the place moving.

We were reading the famous "wooing scene" where Petruchio first meets Katherina and they make fun of each other. In particular, Petruchio keeps jamming on her name; he says everyone calls her "super-dainty Kate" because that's actually the opposite of the kind of thing everyone really does call her.

"'My super-dainty Kate,'" I read, "meaning my Kate who is extremely light, which is the opposite of what everyone else in town --"

"Go on," Torque agreed.

"'For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,'" I read, "which is a pun on the word 'dainty' which means something that tastes good, and the cakes which were called 'kates' and so, Kate --"

"All cakes were called kates?" Torque asked.

"Some cakes were called kates," I said.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

I said, "Everyone knows that."

"Did you look it up?" he asked, "are you sure it means cake?"

"I know they mean cake," I said.

Pause.

"Look it up," he said.

I tried not to sigh as Beemer slid me the humongous first volume of the portable Oxford English Dictionary.

"While you're at it," he said, "look up dainty."

"'Cate'" I said, "it's under 'c' ... a choice article of food, a dainty, a delicacy."

"So they both mean cake!" he said.

"Yes," I said. "'Take this of me --"

"Did you know dainty also meant cake?"

"I think I did," I said, "I'm not sure. 'Take this of me' ... Shall I continue?"

"Please."

"'Take this of me, Kate of my consolation' -- meaning 'accept what I am about the say as truth, Kate who consoles me' --"

"What?"

"You want me to look up consolation?" I asked.

"No," Torque said, "the first bit. 'Take this of me' ... take what of me?"

"What he's about to say," I said. "He's about to make a promise and he wants her to accept it."

"You sure he's not offering her cake?"

"What?"

"He's just made a double-pun on the word cake," Torque insisted, "is it possible he offers her some cake?"

I was stymied. "Uhb. Where would he, uh. What?"

"Maybe he pulls it out of his pocket."

"That's ridiculous."

"He's making jokes about cake, he says 'take this of me,' he wants her to take something from him --"

"His word."

"I don't get that from the text," Torque argued.

"But you get that he slings a piece of cake at her?"

"A Twinkie," Torque decided.

I sat dumb-founded.

"We're trying to ... That's ridiculous. Is that what Shakespeare meant, that Petruchio, in the midst of wooing Katherina, offers her a Twinkie?"

Torque leaned forward in his chair. "You have to convince me, through the text, that he didn't."

An '80s-infused' production of The Taming of the Shrew continues at Great Lakes Theater through October 29, 2011. There are no Twinkies, though there is one Whatchamacallit bar.

My Summer Story (1993)

 

There's a lot of movie-making going on around town this summer. I am happy to say that some of it is taking place in Cleveland Heights. Like most cities these days, we can use the cash and I am getting a little irritated by the people griping about Coventry getting blocked off now and then to shoot scenes for Fun Size or I, Alex Cross. People, please.

The big story is The Avengers shoot, which began yesterday, downtown. I have a map on the corkboard in my office informing me off which streets are shut down when. I have a date for lunch on Friday, maybe we will head down the East 9th and Euclid and do some star-gazing.

Apparently they are making Euclid Avenue look like 42nd Street. Only, you know ... smaller.

There hasn't been this much Hollywood activity at one time since 1993, when we were host to not one but two big-budget films, Double Dragon and the much-anticipated sequel to A Christmas Story.

Double Dragon was notable for its cost and calendar overruns, and Mayor White had to finally kick them out of the city as two weeks of blowing stuff up on the Cuyahoga turned into three weeks and then four.

As for that other film, I wrote a piece about that five years ago for Cleveland Magazine:

Lost Summer

by David Hansen

First published in Cleveland Magazine, June 2006

(Thirteen years after "My Summer Story" was filmed here and forgotten, one of the movie's extras rediscovers a so-so sequel in the shadow of its famous forerunner.)

Remember at the beginning of “My Summer Story” when the narrator remarks how sometimes events in our lives come and go before we realize how important they are?

Wait. Back up. You’ve never heard of “My Summer Story?” It’s the movie based on Jean Shepherd’s boyhood memories of growing up in Depression-era Northern Indiana. It was filmed here during the summer of 1993 and many Clevelanders, including me, took part as extras.

Still nothing?

It was the sequel to the 1983 holiday classic “A Christmas Story.” I know you’ve heard of that one.

Last December, you couldn’t pop a Red Ryder BB gun without hitting some reference to “A Christmas Story.” From Big Fun to Flower Child, any shop that could justify it had a leg lamp glowing in the window. The Cleveland Play House presented a stage adaptation, some of the original movie’s supporting characters made a public appearance downtown and a California man announced his plans to turn the West 11th Street home featured in the film into a museum. Then there’s TBS’s annual 24-hour “A Christmas Story” marathon that has made the movie a holiday favorite no matter where you live.

So whatever became of the sequel? I don’t recall it ever appearing in theaters. I do remember seeing a full-page ad in Premiere magazine advertising its upcoming release in 1994. By then it had a new title: “It Runs in the Family.” Then nothing. Bupkiss, as they say.

When I recently stumbled upon the film again (restored to its original title of “My Summer Story” for its video release), I wondered why the movie had been so quickly cast aside when it seemed to have so much going for it.

It had not one, but two Culkins (Macauley’s younger siblings Kieran and Christian) in the roles of Ralphie and Randy Parker, as well as Mary Steenburgen as “Mother” and Charles Grodin as the “The Old Man.”

Like “A Christmas Story,” Bob Clark directed the movie and wrote the screenplay with Shepherd and Leigh Brown. And, like its predecessor, “My Summer Story” was filmed in Cleveland. In fact, most of it was shot here. People often forget that apart from the Christmas parade, scenes with Santa Claus and exterior shots of Ralphie’s house, much of “A Christmas Story” was filmed somewhere else.

But for a few weeks in August 1993, “My Summer Story” took over downtown Cleveland. My involvement was brief. I was just a warm body in a costume as part of the Great Lakes Exposition scene (the part of the film where Ralphie buys a “killer top” from a gypsy). It was an impressively large set spread over the plaza beside Key Tower. (Look for me behind the camels. I’m wearing an orange Hawaiian shirt. Don’t blink.) Other shooting locales included the Palace Theatre, Wilbur Wright Middle School off 117th Street and Lorain Avenue, the industrial Flats and a large part of Tremont.

NewsChannel5 anchor Leon Bibb (then working for another station) was doing a story on the shoot and also worked as an extra. We were in the Expo scene together, so he and I meandered and chatted a little in the baking summer heat of Mall C, behind the camels.

“It was a long day,” Bibb remembers with a laugh. “Hardest $50 I ever made.”

Cleveland theater legend Dorothy Silver was one of the few Cleveland actors whose name appears in the film’s credits. She was “Neighbor No. 4,” in case you’re wondering.

“We had this long, long, long night shot,” Silver recalls. “I had no context for the scene; we didn’t know what was happening. It’s the ultimate impotence for an actor.

“I had a line or two — some kind of shouting, angry line. Not what I want on my gravestone.”

Whatever she said ended up cut from the film.

Local actor John Galbraith was only 15 years old when he played one of the Parker family’s numerous “hillbilly” neighbors, the Bumpuses.

“There were a lot of people of Irish descent there, and we shot around 4 in the morning,” he remembers. “This one woman brought out folk instruments, and we sang Irish folk tunes and it was pretty fun. … It was very Cleveland, the togetherness, the shoot — everything about it.”

What’s unfortunate is that none of those warm feelings come across while watching the movie. “A Christmas Story” leaves us to imagine the Bumpus family, because we only see their turkey-stealing hounds. What we get in “My Summer Story” is a caricature of the Appalachian poor that was better left in “The Beverly 
Hillbillies.”

“It didn’t have the charm the first movie had,” Galbraith says.

That’s a criticism I heard a lot while collecting people’s memories of “My Summer Story.” I felt the same way after watching it again with my 3-year-old daughter Zelda. For example, Charles Grodin says “son of a bitch” a lot for presumed comedic effect, while in “A Christmas Story” the old man’s cursing is a lot of mumbling nonsense that leaves us to imagine the worst.

There’s also a lot of stupid, cartoon-like violence in the movie. Getting your tongue stuck to a flagpole is funny. Getting shot in the hind end with your own Red Ryder BB gun (especially after receiving the legendary warning: “You’ll shoot your eye out”) and then howling in pain for a full minute? Not funny.

And then there’s the issue of Christmas versus summer. When the motion picture of the musical “Annie” was released in summer 1982, the Christmas ending was revised to a timely Fourth of July finale. I don’t care how patriotic you are. Is it “The Magic of Christmas” or “The Magic of Independence Day”?

Watching the whole thing again now, “My Summer Story” doesn’t seem worse than a lot of other nonsense I see on television. And there are a lot of sweet bicycling scenes, with Ralph and his pals Schwartz and Flick tearing all over Tremont. The opening is particularly promising, as Ralph’s teacher Miss Shields delicately gives him the third degree for a book report on a smutty novel. And the old man’s passive but earnest attempts to bond with his pre-adolescent son are truly touching.

No, “My Summer Story” isn’t terrible. It’s just not as good as “A Christmas Story.” And Kieran Culkin, who has grown into an interesting actor in films such as “The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys” and “Igby Goes Down,” is not Peter Billingsley. The Great Lakes Exposition is not Higbee’s. A killer top is not a BB gun. Summer is not Christmas. And Charles Grodin is not Darren McGavin. Maybe they wanted to change the movie’s name because the film suffered so terribly in comparison to its predecessor.

In 1995 there was, at long last, a public showing of “My Summer Story” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The film went down pretty well there, especially among the Bumpus clan.

“All the random extras, the nobodies, we enjoyed it,” Galbraith recalls. “It was very family-oriented, like ‘We’re the Cleveland people! We’re all Irish! We’re the Bumpuses!’ We were really a family.”

We’re still one big Cleveland family, sharing a forgotten summer story.

More on My Summer Story.

Tremont

The Cleveland neighborhood called Tremont sits west of the Cuyahoga and South of Ohio City. It is a stunning, ramshackle, exciting and sometimes dangerous downtown industrial/residential neighborhood, featuring over a dozen attractive churches including Pilgrim Congregational UCC (founded in 1859), St. Michael the Archangel Church (1888), St. Augustine (1893), St. John Cantius (1898), and St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral (1912). It is also home to Lemko Hall.

It was the site of the short-lived Cleveland University in the 1850s, a fact which gave name to the still-extant Literary Rd. and Professor and College Avenues. The neighborhood was called Cleveland Heights, then University Heights, and finally Tremont after the Tremont School, founded in 1910.

Homebase to a fastener manufacturer, the neighborhood was home to working-class immigrants following a familiar cycle -- the Irish and Germans in the late 1800s, followed by Poles, then Greeks by the end of the century, and also Syrians and by the 1950s a large population of Ukrainians. By 1954, Puerto Ricans were joining the population, and they play an important part of Tremont's neighborhood today.

Lincoln Park is a center of public activity, bounded by West 14th and West 11th Streets and Kenilworth and Starkweather Streets. A memory of Lincoln Park ...

"Sundays people would gather on the grass and benches to chat with friends or play cards, checkers, dominos and chess on the picnic tables. Some would bring picnic baskets from home while others stopped after church. Children played soccer or played at the pond that was in the center of the park, they also had a carousel and swings, too.

"Water fountains were at the corners of the park off Kenilworth/West 11th and West 14th and Starkweather. There were bushes completely around the whole park and Post Lamps that lit up the park at night. They had toilets, but Mom remembers them being dirty. Mom seemed to think there were no sidewalks on the inside of the park in the early days, but brother Mike says there were always there.

"I remember goldfish in the pond and Mike says they broke ground in 1957 to put the swimming pool in that still stands today. Swimming was free from 7 years old and up, but you had to sign in your name and age before getting in. They would check our toes and make us take a quick outside shower spray before getting through the bar gates. Wednesday was Family night for swimming where parents could come. Teenagers would climb the fence and skinny dip late nights, too." - Maria Cairns-Yuras

Sources:
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
Cleveland Memory Project
Tremont History Project

Literary Cafe Talk Show

The Literary Cafe in Tremont used to host a talk show, and I was a guest in January 2000 to promote Bad Epitaph Theater Company and our upcoming production of Lysistrata. These programs would be recorded in the backroom during normal evening business hours - a small room with a live band crammed into it. In this episode I got to speak to the lovely Lara about Guerrilla Theater Company and how Aristophanes was like the "Capitol Steps."

Lemko Hall

Built in 1911, this recognizable Cleveland landmark is an unusually shaped building, resting as it does at the intersection of West 11th, Kenilworth and the diagonal cross-street of Literary in the Tremont. It once featured a saloon, gambling salon and a spacious ballroom. In 1936 it was owned by the Lemko Assn. Home Branch No. 6, a social club for Slavic people of Lemkovina (I kid you not) located in the Carpathian Mountains.

The Lemko Association of the USA and Canada was the largest social and cultural organization among Lemko immigrants in North America.

Really!

During 1936 it was officially a pro-Communist, supporting a plan to relocate the Lemko peoples from their Carpathian homeland to the Soviet Union to resolve socioeconomic and nationalist difficulties. They adopted an anti-fascist platform, and advocated a Carpatho-Rusyn Section within the International Workers' Order.

In 1939 the headquarters moved to Yonkers.

During my heyday in Tremont, the main corner space was a floral boutique named Wildflower, and the lower-level was the home of exotic art-and-water installations and impromptu "happenings." This video from 1993 features neighborhood legend Robert Richie and his penis.


UPDATE: And oh look - there's Daniel Thompson!

Sources:
Tremont History Project
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
Encyclopedia of Rusyn history and culture (Paul R. Magocsi, Ivan Ivanovich Pop)