xaviertrevino

When Alan Cumming first appears in the current version of Cabaret at the Studio 54 Theatre he is wearing a long black leather trench coat, the kind favored by Gestapo officers during the Nazi era. He takes it off to reveal the familiar suspenders and stylized black pants of the Kit-Kat Club’s Emcee. For the next two and a half hours I was thoroughly mesmerized and entertained, though the man sitting to my left kept dozing off. He was a lot older than me, so I take pity. At least he didn’t snore.
It was a great show, and I thank the lovely Danusia for buying the tickets since I’m unemployed and can’t afford theater tickets. I really wanted to see this show, and more because of Alan Cumming than Michelle Williams.

                                       The Stars of the show

I first noticed Alan Cumming on a BBC TV show in the 90’s called The High Life, a Scottish sitcom about a pair of gay airline stewards. I thought he was very funny and entertaining and he had a lot of charisma. Then he was suddenly in New York doing the role I saw him in last night, and I wanted to see that at the time but I wasn’t a “theater person” yet. Then he went on to do Threepenny Opera and numerous film and television roles. I felt I’d sort of discovered him, but I also discovered Colin Farrell on an early episode of Ballykissangel in the 90’s when he was just 16 years old. Bally-k was also a show on BBC America.
I even inadvertently know where he lives, and one day I was with friends on the corner of Avenue A and 10th Street when he stood right next to me to hail a cab. He was with a couple of friends too, and when I nudged my companions and whispered “there’s Alan Cumming” he turned to look at me, having heard his name. A cab pulled up and he and his friends got in. My friends said,  “Who’s Alan Cumming?” Not theater people, I guess.
So it was wonderful to see him up on stage at last. I don’t know what I expected; I guess I was expecting a reproduction of the Bob Fosse movie where Liza Minnelli set the bar high for any aspiring Sally Bowles. That’s not what this production is about.
In the movie the Cliff Bradshaw character is British and Sally Bowles is American, in the stage production it’s flipped. The doomed interfaith couple is Fräulein Schneider and Herr Shultz instead of the young couple Fritz and Natalia.
There is no Maximilian von Huene or outdoor beer garden scene, or a love affair between Brian (the Cliff character) and Max. Cliff’s bi-sexuality is brought out early by connecting him to one of the Kit-Kat Club’s “boys.”
Aside form trying to suss out the differences and making comparisons I laughed and cried at all the right places, so this production worked for me.
There was a lot of criticism in the press about Michelle William’s performance, and I have to say her Mayfair accent was a little annoying. But her singing and dancing were superb. She was the one that brought tears to my eyes, first with her Maybe This Time, and she took Liza’s wonderful rendition of Cabaret and made it her own in her unsure, vulnerable way. When she sang that not only did my eyes tear up but also my breath caught in my throat.
It’s funny that since she’s such a wonderful actress Danusia and I thought she’d be great at the acting part and not so hot on the song and dance, but we were wrong and delightfully surprised. After all, Cabaret is a musical, and that’s what counted the most.
Of course this was Alan Cumming’s show, and when Danusia remarked that the guy playing Cliff (Bill Heck) was no Michael York I said none of the male cast members come close to Alan Cumming, maybe he wanted it that way.
Well, veteran stage actor Danny Burstein comes close as Herr Shultz, he’s a wonderful actor, but that’s a character part.
The women in the production, on the other hand, were outstanding, especially Kristin Olness as Helga (she did this role in the 1998 production as well) and Gayle Rankin as Fräu Kost, both amazing. Linda Emond as Fräulein Schneider was a standout as well.

                                                   The wonderful Kristin Olness

The songs and choreography (a big debt to Bob Fosse here) were great, and even the band was beautiful.
This was a very gay production, in the Two Ladies number one of the ladies is a man, and Cumming’s asides and audience interaction are strictly out of the gay handbook. The only over the top moment comes at the end when he takes off his Gestapo coat for the last time (he takes off the coat numerous times during the performance to reveal different very gay costumes) and appears in concentration camp garb, with the pink triangle added below the star of David. We get it, Mr. Cumming.
We left the theater totally satisfied and glad the rain had ended, no need to run to the subway. We walked down to 51st Street to catch the downtown 8th Avenue train, and when we descended the stairs there was an A train waiting. We ran for it along with a bunch of other people, but we needn’t have, the doors remained opened for another minute. Just before the doors closed another wave of people came running down the platform jumping on just in time, and among them was Ms. Rankin, Fräu Kost. She was wearing jeans and flip-flops, and we recognized her right away.

                                                     Gayle Rankin

“You were wonderful,” Danusia said to her as she touched Ms. Rankin’s arm. Another couple on the train that had been at the show congratulated her as well.
“Thank you,” she said in her Scottish accent. Now that was a New York moment.

Yesterday morning I went to my very first Taskrabbit gig. I had been hired right off the bat by a young woman whose profile said: “first time using Taskrabbit.” So she was a first timer, I was a first timer.
She’d set a time of 8am on Friday when she hired me, over the weekend she moved to time back twice, first to 9, then to 10am sometime Sunday night while I slept. She also inquired if I had the tools/nails/screws to hang a closet bar and a “heavy” picture on a wall. All of this was done by text messages on my Taskrabbit app on my iPhone.
I showed up at 10, at some commercial building on West 14th Street, there was a nail salon on the second floor and a wax/massage/who knows what else on the third floor. I rang the bell she’d indicated and got no answer. Maybe it was a big joke on me, or a test to see if I would show up. I used the “call” feature on the app, it’s a Google phone so you can’t see their number and they can’t see yours. She answered and said she’d be right down.
She was a young “Desi” woman in her mid 20’s, pretty but with a perpetual expression of distaste on her face that made her seem less attractive, what my mom used to call the “shit smelling” face.
She was on the top floor, it was a floor through loft with two sheetrock bedrooms built into the back part of it. It was a nice space, but a little disorganized. We went into to the bedroom where the closet was and she showed me where she wanted the rod. It was a big long closet, and the shelf that was there already was bowed in the middle from the weight of too many clothes hanging from it. The closet was 82 inches wide.
“If you want to use a rod that long, you’re going to need a center support, otherwise it will eventually bow in the center like that wood did.”
“I’m not going to be here that long,” she said.
We went down the block to the local hardware store and got the rod, I recommended the more expensive chrome rod over the wood, which I knew would break right away. She had a lot of clothes piled up all over the place.
I hung the rod, and then we started to figure out where the heavy picture should hang. It wasn’t that heavy, but I figured a screw and anchor would be just fine. She knocked at her roommate’s door to ask for her opinion, and a really beautiful girl in black panties and a tee shirt appeared.
“Yeah, that looks OK,” the girl said before disappearing back into her room. The whole thing took exactly one hour, and we pressed “submit hours” on the app. I left and went shopping at Trader Joe’s just up Sixth Avenue.
I got home around 12:30, and as I was checking my emails and thinking about eating something a flurry of task “rescues” appeared on my phone. One was a guy who wanted a ceiling fan hung and he wanted to pay $17 an hour. I can hang that fan in 20 minutes, but I won’t touch electricity for $17 an hour. Let his ask a licensed electrician how much they want to hang a ceiling fan. I would guess a minimum of $200.

There was another one that sounded easy, go to IKEA in Red Hook and buy 60 cups and bring them to a start-up coffee company in Williamsburg, less than a mile from my home. I accepted the task and got on a B-57 bust to Red Hook. The client was paying three hours for the task at $17 an hour. I was on that bus for a little more than an hour, meandering along the Brooklyn waterfront passing my old stomping grounds in Bed-Sty and near Pratt. I made it to IKEA and found the cups. I got 60 of them in their egg-carton like holders, cardboard sheets that held 24 cups apiece. When I went to the register the girl said: “I ain’t even gonna count that.”
“There’s sixty of them.” She took one and scanned it. I bought one of those blue IKEA bags and walked over to the wrapping table to secure my purchase so that they would make the long bus trip to Williamsburg. I was glad I’d brought my folding utility knife, because I had to cut the cardboard to make 5 stacks of 12 and tie them all together. Two of the IKEA guards watched me intently as I made my package and tied the whole thing onto my collapsible hand truck. I’m going to need one with bigger wheels.
I got on a B61 to downtown Brooklyn, where I would catch a B-62 all the way to Metropolitan Ave where the coffee place was.
If the B-61 took a straight route up Flushing Avenue to Williamsburg it wouldn’t have been too bad a trip. But what the bus does when it gets to Nassau Street (which turns into Flushing Avenue) is it goes on a slow, meandering trip around the Farragut Houses near the Manhattan Bridge before returning to Flushing Avenue. That alone took 20 minutes.

When we got to Williamsburg proper, there was another 20-minute meandering ride around another housing complex, this one home to predominantly Hassidic Jewish families. The whole ride from IKEA took almost an hour and a half. I spent three hours on the buses alone, if you count the 20 minutes it took to get home from the Bridge Plaza on the B-46 up Broadway. But it was an adventure, and it beat sitting at home watching TV and surfing the Internet.
I was exhausted by the time I got to the old warehouse building on Metropolitan Avenue, where a really young hipster kid helped me carry the cups up the stairs. It wasn’t a lot of physical labor, but the day was hot and humid and I made the mistake of wearing my Taskrabbit Tee-shirt, a 50/50

affair made by American Apparel (no kidding!) that has a large white Taskrabbit logo silkscreened on the back. The paint is vinyl, and it felt like some clammy hand was pressed against my back all day in that spot. By the time I got home the shirt was soaked with sweat and I took it right off and threw it in the hamper.

So, I didn’t make a hell of a lot of money, but the coffee guy gave me a good review and a thumbs-up rating. Hell, it’s a start.

37 years ago today I was living in a place called Francine Towers on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn. I was working at the Audio-Visual Department at Pratt Institute just blocks away, and living with my first live-in girlfriend Anna.

Anna was the soda and popcorn girl at the old Sutton Theatre on East 57th Street, and I would pick her up every night.
I saw the last half hour of a lot of movies waiting for Anna to count out and close the concession stand, most notably Between The Lines with Jeff Goldblum and The Big Fix with Richard Dreyfuss, both best forgotten little movies, but when you see the last half hour 20 or 25 times they are hard to forget.
That day, or evening rather, I was on my way to pick up Anna, and I usually called first to tell her I was coming. I went to the pay phone on the corner of DeKalb and Washington Avenues and dialed the number to the theater. Our phone was in the turned off mode that week.
The Manager answered the phone, and when I asked for Anna he said:
“Can’t talk now. The lights are going out.” He sounded anxious and distracted, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth the phone went dead. I looked up Washington Avenue towards the Manhattan skyline in the distance and saw the most remarkable thing I ever saw in my life.
The Empire State building was clearly visible form my vantage point, it was almost like it was at the very end of Washington Ave. I watched as the lights on it went out from top to bottom, floor by floor. At some point they just all went out, and Manhattan was plunged into darkness.

I hung up the phone in disbelief, and was about to say “well goddamn,” when the streetlights on Washington Avenue started going out block by block in rapid secession from the East River until the corner I stood on was abruptly plunged into darkness. Then the screaming and yelling began.
Cars suddenly skidded to a stop, and slowly started to proceed. The honking began. I walked up the block to my apartment building, and though it was after 9:30pm it was summertime and the last vestiges of twilight gave some illumination. I didn’t want to go upstairs and sit in the dark so I kept walking.
There was a sudden caravan of police cars from the nearby 88th Precinct roaring up Washington Avenue, lights flashing and sirens at full shriek. They were headed west to Myrtle Avenue, the neighborhood main drag.
There were people running, too; mostly towards Myrtle Avenue but there was a trickle of people going the other way.
I reached the corner, my friend Eddie Martelly lived in a brownstone right at the corner of Washington and Willoughby and he had a stoop, Francine Towers had no stoop and I didn’t want to sit in the lobby.
As I approached I could see lit candles and people sitting on the stoop already, the lights hadn’t been out for 5 minutes and people already had candles out. I heard somebody call “hey Exie! Over here,” from the stoop. It was my friend Tony Dunner, the Black Mick Jagger.
“Whatcha doing?” He asked.
“Nothing. I was going to go pick up Anna, but I guess the subway’s out.”
“Hey, X, come and sit with us and smoke some weed.” It was Eddie, and he passed me a big joint as I sat on the stoop with Eddie, Tony, and some people I didn’t know from Eddies building. A few of them, including Eddie, held baseball bats.
“Whats with the bats?” I asked.
“Don’t you hear what’s happening on Myrtle?” I did indeed hear the screaming and yelling and sirens and breaking glass a block away.
“You think that will make its way down here?”
“That’s what we got the bats for, Exie.”
“Hey, I’ve got some beer in the fridge. You guys got any beer?” Somebody handed me a bottle of beer and I took the cap off and drank.
“We’ll go get yours when this runs out,” said Eddie.
Eddie was Haitian, from Port Au Prince. He and Tony were two of my poker cronies. Tony was more than that, we were pretty close friends, but Eddie was more Tony’s friend than mine. He often hosted poker games where he lost all his money and would start charging for joints and beer and sandwiches so he could get back in the game. I wondered if we could get a game going by candlelight.

Now it was getting really bad, fire engines started racing up and down the street, and we could hear people running up and down the block. People were walking with flashlights and candles, and cars were playing chicken with each other at the street corner. We heard a car crash up the block, followed by somebody cursing.
Somebody approached the stoop, it was our friend J.P.
“You’re all under arrest,” he said, followed by his unmistakable bark of a laugh. I hated that laugh, and I wasn’t too happy about how John talked too much during a poker game and always won. But he was a big weed dealer and probably had more weed on him.
“You guys wanna smoke?”
“Light up brother, light up,” invited Eddie.
After Eddie’s beer ran out me and Tony borrowed a flashlight and walked down the block to my place to get the six-pack of Bud I had. We drank and smoked and told jokes and stories and I wondered what had happened to Anna.
“Don’t worry about her,” Tony said. “She’s probably going to sleep in the movie theater.”
I finally had enough and made my way home with a candle Eddie gave me. I was awoken sometime during the night by the sound of a key in the door. It was Anna.
“How did you get home?”
“I finally got a cab after walking almost all the way downtown.”
“What’s it like in the city?”
“A lot of people hanging out and drinking in the streets. Lots of cops, car accidents.”
“They’re looting on Myrtle Ave.”
“Yeah, we saw all the cops and people running around on the way.”
She took off her clothes and joined me in bed. She was asleep in seconds.

The next day I went to work, since it was only just around the corner. The lights were still out and there was an eerie silence on the normally bustling campus. The door to the Main Building was open, and the lights there were on. Pratt had its own generator and had power. I used my key and let myself into the Audio-Visual office since there was nobody there.
I picked up the phone, and to my surprise I got a dial tone. I phoned my boss, Manny.
“What’s up, X?”
“Aren’t you guys coming to work?” I asked.
“You’re at the office?”
“Yeah, the lights are on.”
“Go home, X. There’s still a blackout, in case you don’t know. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I hung up the phone, turned out the lights, and headed back to Washington Ave. Maybe we could get a poker game going.

My friends the Amish farmers are back at our local Greenmarket on Cook Street. I’ve been anticipating their arrival for a month now, actually more than eight months, since they left the last week of November.

Their produce is the best, I especially love their tomatoes, and you can’t beat their prices. At the Union Square greenmarket you can pay up to $5.50 a pound for hothouse tomatoes that have very little flavor. I did get some decent ones last week, but they were the first ones I got there all summer that actually tasted like tomatoes. I keep getting suckered by the deep red color.

                                    
The Amish farmer’s tomatoes run $2 a pound, and they are ripe and tasty. They also have the best cantaloupe and watermelons. It’s too early in the season for the yellow insides watermelons, but I wait patiently for the delicately different flavor they ooze of.
Today I looked up Cook Street from Manhattan Avenue as I went to the Food Bazaar to pick up some sparkling mineral water, our staple drink; and there they were! The big truck driven by a Mennonite neighbor of the Amish family, and their white tents. I picked up my three bottles of Güttig mineral water (I usually get more but they weigh 2.5 pounds each) and made a beeline up Cook Street to greet my Amish friends.

 This is the Mennonite driver chilling out.

The patriarch, a big blond guy with forearms like hawsers was not there, only three women and the two boys. The boys have wispy whiskers now, so they have to be 13-14 years old. There are two young girls around the same age, with their little white bonnets and ankle length blue dresses. The boys wear big straw hats and suspenders over their white button less shirts.
There is an older woman, a little plump with wire rimmed glasses, but I can’t tell if she is the mother or older sister to the others, she looks like she could be anywhere from 25 to 45; so she could be either.
I picked out a cantaloupe first, and I asked the melon boy (he’s always by the melons) if he minded if I took pictures of the produce. I didn’t want to ask if I could take pictures of them so I used an Internet picture for the featured image. I know they have breaking Amish on TV, and some do let you take their pictures, but I try to be polite and kind to people, respect whatever beliefs they have.
They have giant cucumbers, 2 for a dollar, and the lovely Danusia is on a cucumber kick so I got a couple of those. I got a bunch of pimply kirbys, I’m going to try my hand at pickle making. Danusia tried with some cucumbers that had already seeded, and she didn’t get the best result. I looked on line and read that the small pimply kirbys are best for pickling.

They had so much; jalpeños, peaches, corn, squash, zucchini, green beans, blueberries, cabbage, but no lettuce. I forgot to get lettuce from one of the other farmers; I’m going to have to go back.
Yes, there are other stands, most of them South Americans, and one Russian woman and her daughter. The Russian woman brings fresh eggs. I buy form the others, as well, but the Amish are my favorites.
As I was picking out some peaches the patriarch arrived with breakfast. It was a little after 7am and I wondered how long they’d been on the road from Pennsylvania. Breakfast was MacDonald’s! He had a big bag with sugary drinks and Egg McMuffins for the crew. I have to mention that dad smokes as well. He smokes these cheroots that look handmade; maybe he grows tobacco too.
I greeted him with a hearty “welcome back!” He smiled his thanks and nodded his head.
They are a very pleasant but shy people, and I remember one Christmas he’d brought a bunch of trees up, and set up on the same corner of Cook Street and Graham Avenue. The following summer I asked if he’d done OK with the trees and he told me no, he wasn’t going to try it again. It was a shame because I got a beautiful, fresh almost seven-foot tree from him for only twenty bucks. A tree like that in Manhattan would have cost $75 from the French Canadian chiselers that dominate the Christmas tree market.
I remember the first time I saw the Amish when we moved into the neighborhood seven years ago. The patriarch was wielding a 2-foot machete and cutting up watermelon, offering slices skewered on the end of the machete to the customers. I figured if somebody tried to rob them they could end up with out a hand, he was so skillful at chopping with that thing.
I’ve been in love with them since, and I go every Saturday to get my week’s supply of tomatoes. I wrote a post about their tomatoes last summer, look it up in the blog roll if you are so inclined.
I got some of the sweet corn, 2 for a dollar, and of course my tomatoes. I chatted with the mysteriously aged woman who asked how my winter had been as she weighed and tallied up my purchases.
“Did you have a cold winter?” She asked in her sort of German accent.
“It wasn’t too bad, not too cold,” I said.
“But it was sort of empty without you guys here. I’m glad you are back.”
“Thank you, we’re glad to be back.”
“See you next Saturday!”
“OK, see you.”

Maybe next Saturday I’ll get some of the jalapeños, make some homemade salsa for my upcoming birthday party. It’s going to have a Mexican theme.