I Hate Memory! | BorderLight 2026

 "The past is a dick."

Esme Thorne (with Balint)

My brother introduced me to the works of Jim Jarmusch in the late 1980s. When I first visited his new St. Paul apartment in 1989 he had a handsomely framed poster of Stranger Than Paradise. It's one of his favorite movies, and we often quote that or Down By Law whenever it seems appropriate. And cousin Eva taught me about Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

Much later, I took my fourteen year-old son to see The Dead Don't Die, Jarmusch's 2019 zombie comedy film. I thought it was okay, but he really dug it. I thought I recognized Fern the waitress, and sure enough, that was also Eszter Balint. It was crazy. I have only ever thought of her as a teenager, but she's my age.

The other night she made an appearance at the Cinematheque, and you might ask why she would come to Cleveland for the screening of a film she made over forty years ago, or maybe you were already aware that her musical memoir I Hate Memory! is playing BorderLight.

A Hungarian immigrant, and the child of dissident theater artists, she first settled in New York City in the late 1970s. They lived at the Chelsea Hotel. No, really. She was in the thick of it, at that time, in that city, as an adolescent. As a child.

The show is a happening, as Balint tells stories, plays songs (great band) penned by herself ... and Stew! The young musician and actor Esme Thorne takes turns as the teenage Balint. The playwright's own vocal quality is a like a punk rock Blossom Dearie. There are projections and banter. It's a play, it's a concert.

It's a rough show. I mean that in any number of ways. It is a rare opportunity. Get there.

BorderLight Theatre Festival at Playhouse Square, July 8-11, 2026

"Stereophonic" at the Connor Palace Theatre

The 77th Tony Awards, June 16, 2024

The KeyBank Broadway Series at Playhouse Square has something between forty- and forty-four thousand subscribers, which is the largest season ticket base in the country. If an average season is like this one, subscribers will have the opportunity to witness six new Broadway musical productions and one play.

For a short moment, when the kids were in their adolescence, we had a subscription. During the 2017-2018 season we had the chance to see the musicals Waitress and Hamilton and also Stephen Karam’s Tony-award winning play The Humans. And it was weird. On Broadway, the show, which takes place in a realistically rendered Lower East Side duplex apartment, played to an audience of one thousand. The Connor Palace seats nearly three times that, and seated as we were in the balcony and off to the side it was like watching someone’s Thanksgiving dinner from the far end of a football field.

Sometimes, subscribers get confused by these theatrical offerings, the ones without songs. Even I was surprised, though not unpleasantly, to learn that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was not a musical. That one, at least, was so full of visual stimuli that our seating was actually a blessing.

Andrew Gombas as Peter

This year, we were treated to Stereophonic, David Adjmi’s roman à clef about the turbulent creation of Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 album Rumours. Two years ago the show was nominated for a record number of Tony Awards, and won the Tony for Best Play. Best Play, not Best Musical. It’s not a musical, a fact which apparently left a great many subscribers, especially Baby Boomers and aging Gen Xers confused, and in some cases, outraged.

One old dude went on social media to decry his experience as “HORRIBLE” (yes, all caps) going on to report that “AT INTERMISSION THE AUDIENCE LEFT IN DROVES!! THIS IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION.” He concluded his rant with, “I am sorry to be so negative,” which I do not actually believe.

Before I go any further, I would like to report that not only is Stereophonic a good play, I think it is excellent. I saw it twice, the first week of the run, and then again last Saturday night. More on my experiences in a moment. Suffice to say, when thousands of folks buy into a series of productions, the vast majority of which are musicals, and you are presented with a show about a rock band, you might expect a rock musical. I wouldn’t have been surprised if some folks thought they were going to see a Fleetwood Mac cover band or something.

"Hedwig & The Angry Inch"
Cleveland Public Theatre, 2001

When I was public relations director at a certain local theater company in the late 1990s, they produced the intimate, three-person opera Bed & Sofa by Polly Pen & Laurence Klavan, inspired by the 1927 Soviet silent film of the same name. It was a beautiful production from top to bottom, the score, the singers, the set design (by the late Ron Newell) however, we were dinged by audiences and critics for advertising the show as a musical, and not as an opera. My boss thought the word opera would drive people away.

Stereophonic was advertised as a play, and it is a play with music, which is not the same thing as a musical. What else can one say? How else can one advertise? Except to emphasize that Stereophonic received the most Tony nominations in history, and even won the Tony for Best Play. Were they also supposed to tell stupid people not to come?

I was excited to see this show for several reasons which I will (eventually) enumerate. A couple years ago the podcast Decoder Ring with Willa Paskin produced “Making Real Music for a Fake Band,” an episode centering on the development of Adjmi’s new play. The conundrum; playwright wants to produce a work about the creation of an album which will eventually be regarded as one of the greatest of all time. If we are to hear that music, it better sound pretty good, right? And Adjmi is not a songwriter. But he found one in Will Butler, late of Arcade Fire, and together they wrote songs like Drive and Masquerade for the show which do amazingly capture that mid-70s Malibu sound.

Jack Barrett & Steven Lee Johnson
"Stereophonic" National Tour, 2026

Paskin’s episode also included references to other works that feature hits that never existed, like the film That Thing You Do and TV shows like Daisy Jones & The Six. What was not included in that list was another stage play, one which deftly blurs the line between play, musical and rock show, Hedwig & The Angry Inch. 

We saw the legendary 2001 Cleveland Public Theatre production of Hedwig, starring Dan Folino and Alison Garrigan, and soon after the film starring creator John Cameron Mitchell. The songs, co-written by Mitchell and Steven Trask, are entirely original, they do not sound like other songs, but they owe so much to the style, the substance – the vibe, if you will – of David Bowie, Elton John, Marc Bolan and so many others, that they trick you into thinking you already know them, and even love them, the very first time you hear them. And that’s what Adjmi and Butler were going for.

Matt Zitelli & Tim Keo
"The Vampyres"
Cleveland Public Theatre, 2005

I have also written a couple songs for my plays (plays that are not musicals) including the lyrics for “Come” and “Doctor” (music by Dennis Yurich) for the play The Vampyres, and both lyrics and music for “If You Were a Train” which was written for The Right Room. For that last I set myself a simple task, to create what David Byrne might call a “naive melody” or somewhat repetitious. I even included a fake biography in the program in an attempt to lead people to believe it was a real song by a real artist.

I always planned to see Stereophonic, the podcast was very persuasive, and anyway, I like plays. When I then found out my friend Andrew Gombas is an understudy on the tour, and that he was scheduled to play the role of Peter (do I get sued now if I call Peter the Lindsey Buckingham role) the last weekend of the Cleveland stand, I got a ticket to see it then.

Then I lucked into a pair of tickets for the first week of performances. Seeking someone to join me, I asked my friend Sarah, who is a singer and interpreter of late 20th century rock songs. She accepted the invitation gleefully, and over dinner I asked what she knew about the show and she told me she’d already seen it three times, including on Broadway. She loves this show!

During intermission David, one of my new work colleagues, joined us for a short chat, and I was intrigued. Sarah knew the show well, it was new to me but I was familiar with the source material (i.e. Rumours) and for David, who is in his mid-20s, it was all something new. I was very curious about his opinion and while he was engaged he wasn’t sure where it all was going. 

After, we three had drinks at Parnell’s where Sarah said something which stuck with me: Think of it like Chekhov. And that made great sense, because, like Chekhov, Stereophonic isn’t about plot, but about interesting characters and how they bounce off each other, in search of an elusive happiness. Chekhov is a vibe. And if you can’t dig that, well. You aren’t going to like it.

And by the way, happy birthday, Anton Chekhov.

I was very much looking forward to sharing the piece with Toni at the end of the run (and to see Andrew in it) but first we had the chance to see a special event, hosted by Playhouse Square, featuring the entire company, playing classic tunes from the 1970s like "Rebel Rebel," "Ventura Highway" and a breathtaking reinterpretation of "Being Alive" from Company. The absence of songs by a certain bi-national quintet was not a surprise.

Gombas was Emcee for the event, recalling how he had gotten his professional start as an actor-teacher with the school residency program, even calling out to me in the house to ask if it was in fact that very building we were in in which we rehearsed, and indeed it was.

Eli Bridges, Christopher Mowood & Andrew Gombas
January 12, 2026

Toni held off on listening to the songs that were to be created during the telling of the story of Stereophonic, but hearing each of these artists sharing their talents that evening meant she was even more excited for the actual production.

So what, after all, is Stereophonic about? This is what it is not about; it is not an episode of Behind The Music, a lascivious kiss-and-tell in which we are witness to orgiastic binges of passion and drugs and the total destruction of human souls and minds. No one throws a keyboard through the great glass window in that beautiful set. To the contrary, there’s even a character arc in which one goes from booze swilling degenerate into insufferable (not quite) ascetic.

No, it is – and if you have been paying attention, you know why I am attracted to this piece – about craft, about the act of creation, and how interesting characters bounce off of each other in the pursuit of that craft. Everyone is serious about the work, and they all have different ideas about how to make it happen.

The creation of Rumours is legendary, due in large part to the disintegration of the romantic relationships between the two couples in the group. But the group didn’t disintegrate, at least not right away. They even leaned into the controversy, agreeing to that Rolling Stone cover that shows them all in the same bed together. But this play doesn’t take place in bed, it takes place in the recording studio, and in that way it is a “locked door” play in which the players cannot depart until they are through completing their task, namely recording the album.

This is a story of a very specific time, when record labels would throw absurd amounts of cash at a band of young artists, giving them all the time they need with access to the best equipment available (as well as access to gallons of alcohol and mounds of blow) in the hopes of creating solid gold. For better or for worse, this particular time will not come again.

And time is a character in this piece. This is perhaps why a lot of subscribers “LEFT IN DROVES!!” at intermission, because the first act by itself is ninety minutes. Because that’s the time it takes. And when the music plays, it sounds really good.

The U.S. Tour of "Stereophonic" by David Adjmi at the Connor Palace Theatre, Playhouse Square, Jan 6 - 25, 2026.

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

Juke Box Hero

Keith McGrath's Big Gas Band (plus Dave)

“You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!” - Biff Loman, "Death of a Salesman"

Have you ever been in a bar and there’s a band playing and the drummer gets sick and the band asks if anyone in the place can play the drums and you say, yes. I can play. And then you play for three hours, basically saving the evening? Yes, this actually happened.

I was in Athens for Father’s Weekend at Ohio University, visiting our eldest. I had dropped them and their sixteen year-old brother off at their dorm for the evening and thought I would drive past the Smiling Skull Saloon. My siblings-in-law own the place, I thought maybe I would run into somebody I knew.

I was incognito, usually I walked in there with my mother-in-law but everyone looked at me with something like suspicion, wearing my “Smiling Skull Saloon STAFF” jacket, a Christmas present from years past. Like, who donated their staff jacket to Goodwill? And what’s this old nerd doing with it?

I paid the four dollar cover, there was a band (wait for it) and got a PBR at the bar. I kept my head down and watched as groups of fathers and students came in in small groups. You could tell them because they kept trying to pay with cards and the place is cash only.

The World Famous (2017)

From what I’ve heard, the Skull is a popular place for students who might otherwise not come to bring parents.

My sister-in-law Adrienne did show up and we talked and the band took their first break and that’s when things got weird.

A regular came up to Adrienne, this biker dude and he was very concerned: anybody got any Benadryl? Apparently the drummers arm has swollen up, he was having some kind of allergic reaction, no idea to what.

So, look. I’m at the opposite end of the bar. I’m minding my own, as they say. Then the band, ending their break, announces, “Is anyone here a drummer?”

And I think, “This is not my problem.”

Because I can drum. Or I have drummed. I practiced in high school. In my room, on a cheap set my parents got me. I was never very good. I never played the drums in front of an audience.

“Is there a drummer in the house?” they asked again. They were serious.

I tried to ignore them. This was not going to happen.

Do you know why? Because my instinct was to do it. If I’m at a performance, and they ask for a volunteer, I will wait. Because I perform all the time, and I don’t need to steal someone else’s opportunity. But if someone is needed for the performance to continue, sure. The show must go on, what do you need?

But this wasn’t that kind of situation. They needed a musician. They needed someone with a certain set of skills. And regardless of my desire to fulfill a lifelong dream of playing in a band, I wasn’t going to suddenly be good at something I had never been good at before.

Of course there were no other drummers in the room. And the band played on. They played one song, guitar and bass, and it wasn’t great. Because they’re a rock band. You need drums.

“This is not going to happen.“ I just kept telling myself that.

The guitarist moved the electric kick drum so that he could keep a beat. It wasn’t helping.

“OK,“ I said, taking off my jacket and my preppy sweatshirt. My sister-in-law said, “OK, what?“

“I’ll do it,“ I said. 

“What are you talking about?“ said my sister-in-law. I walked over to the band between songs.

“I can play drums,“ I said.

“Really?“ they asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe? Let’s find out.“

When I first moved into my house in Cleveland Heights, I bought a new used kit. Because I owned a house! I had always wanted one, a decent one. The person I was married to at the time had joined a band, playing keyboards, and I sat in with them (or they with me, practicing at our place) but this was shortly before we split. My ex-wife and I, not the band.

She left, I sold the kit. I haven’t played since 1994. My son is himself a very good drummer, we got him a set maybe ten years ago, but I’ve never played that. It’s his. You don’t mess with someone else’s instrument.

Now I was sitting behind this kit, at the Smiling Skull. It was an electric number, with pads and rubber cymbals, compact and simple. It had a nice sound, too, responsive to impact.

We started in with Mary Jane’s Last Dance, which is just your standard eighth note beat, 85 beats per minute, think an ordinary hit-hat, snare and bass rhythm. And that’s all I was playing, boom-ka-chick-ah, boom-ka-chick-ah, throwing in a crash in the right places. And we were off.

My sister-in-law was going crazy, texting my wife back in Cleveland, and my mother-in-law back at the house. It’s like Brian asked when I shared a photo on Facebook the next day, “Have you always had this hidden skill or have you been learning alongside your son?”

I have always had this hidden skill. I have to imagine that no one I have worked with has ever looked at me and thought, oh yeah, he must play the drums.

The guys in the band were pretty happy. It saved their night, having someone step up and play. I loosened up, took a few risks. I messed up, too, dropped sticks several times, but I kept going and I was all right at reading when to stop. It also helped that I’m old enough that I already knew most of what we were playing.

Somewhat ironic promotional graphic. 

Seven Nation Army. Walk This Way. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. It was a gas! I played for nearly three hours.

As crowds cycled in and out of the bar, the lead guitarist would remind the audience that they had no idea who I was but that I had “saved the night!” He’d holler “Let’s hear it for Dave!” And everybody yelled, “DAVE!!!”

Yes, when I am rocking you can call me Dave. My father-in-law called me Dave, and it was his bar. I’m Dave at the Skull.

We played an encore and concluded shortly after midnight. They joked about giving me my four bucks back. But seriously, they gave me a band T-shirt, effusive thanks, and they paid me for real. I tried to wave it off but he was dead serious, "No, man. We have to pay you."   

It was the opposite of an “actor’s nightmare” where you dream that you find yourself in the wings, dressed to play Hamlet when you realize you don’t know a word of Hamlet.” You don’t even know the plot.

But what if you opened your mouth and found out you actually do know every word of “To be or not to be,” and everyone called your name? It was a teenage dream made real.

UPDATE: “Brian (the drummer) is fine, thanks for asking! Had an allergic reaction to who knows what. Cathy, the other hero of the night, took him to the ER and they put in IVs , Benadryl, etc. and he was sent home around 4am. Random, out of the blue occurrence.” - Keith McGrath

Rock Hall, Revisited

Happy 65th Birthday, Sir.
Photo: Janet Macoska, Cleveland (1976)
Took the boy to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum today. Always been a big supporter of the Rock Hall, glad it's here where rock and roll, well, you know. Has always been really popular. Moondog Coronation Ball, Alan Freed. Brooklyn High. You know.

My wife and I checked out the hall shortly after it opened in September 1995. As the years have progressed, aspects of the hall remained firmly in the mid-90s. The 500 Most Influential Songs exhibit featured only a half-dozen tunes from that decade, and none since. The opening film, Mystery Train is an excellent short film, which shares, without narration, the different forms of early 20th century, American roots music which came together to inspire rock and roll by mid-century. But it was followed by another film (which felt much longer) called Welcome to Rock and Roll which attempted to describe the lasting legacy of rock, but was really an irritating collection of white, male artists (many now dead) lecturing us about why rock music is so important.

The upper floors change all the time, and is where most temporary exhibits are displayed, but the vast, main floor stayed in this time warp. No longer. Along with his new drum set, we gifted the boy tickets to the Hall (the boy is six, in reality he gets in free, we gave him the idea of going to the Rock Hall) and I was delighted to discover upon exiting Mystery Train that the second film had been eliminated! The other theater wasn't even there.

The Early Influences exhibit used to be a gallery of photos and a lot of reading about the pioneers of popular music. It now features touch screens to choose music by these artists, and for a time I thought I was never going to get the boy away from them. He wanted to hear everything from Woody Guthrie, and was seriously bopping to Willie Dixon's I Ain't Superstitious. I did my best to explain when he asked what Waist Deep in the Big Muddy is about, but the reasons for our involvement in Vietnam (and our enchantment with The Smothers Brothers) was a little complicated when there were so many pleasing diversions to be attended to right then.

A small boy is not so interested in artifacts; costumes and hand-written lyrics. When DMC's glasses were pointed out to him, he stated flatly, "I know, I saw them in a video." That's good enough, breathing the same air as Run's Adidas (His! Ah! Didas!) does not impress. The boy was much more enamored of the interactive exhibits, the escalators, and anything that had to do with technology that he could grasp and appreciated.

For example, guitars do not interest him. John Lennon's mellotron would be interesting, only you can't tell by looking at it how it works (it is actually quite fascinating) he was more into bass drum heads with the band's name painted onto them, and the exhibit featuring the advancement of sound reproduction from the wax cylinder to the iPod. He could also listen to Funkytown a thousand times straight, but didn't we all?

Concluding our tour in the Hall of Fame, watching short films of all of the artist, the boy observed, "They all smoke."

Yes, son. They do. That's rock and roll. And if you so much as touch a cigarette, I will kill you.

KISS

You wanted the best? You got the best.
KISS played the Richfield Coliseum on September 3, 1976, with opening act Artful Dodger. They were promoting the album Destroyer, which is a pretty kick-ass album. Detroit Rock City and Shout It Out Loud have become KISS standards, however they failed as hit singles, and despite a strong initial sales run (it went Gold almost immediately) the record was originally rejected by fans and dissed by the critics.

Then came the single Beth, which was originally the B-Side to Detroit Rock City. It peaked at #7, the first top ten single the band ever had. The song may never have made it to the record if Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons had their way. Written by drummer Peter Criss and a colleague from his former band Chelsea, is performed entirely by Criss and a piano, and a small orchestra.

Beth is the Yesterday of KISS, a track entirely unlike anything previously performed by the band, a schmaltzy pop ballad. Seriously, please, don't use the word "rock." It doesn't even have a soaring guitar bridge like any kind of so-called "rock" ballad requires. The single went Gold in January, 1977.

Beth did not appear in the line-up for the Coliseum gig.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Big O Zine