8/26/2011 Pygmalion

The sun had fallen behind the bungalow recording studios hedging in the patio at the Cat and Fiddle and the waiters were lighting the squat candles that sat in their glass tumblers at the center of all the tables.  In the midst of telling me how she had fled San Francisco, Wendy described how after graduating from high school she had left Wisconsin with Jane, her volleyball coach and gym teacher, to be part of the gay Bay Area community.

“Jane said she was quitting her job, but when she got to San Francisco all she did was play, so after the summer was over, she went back to Wisconsin.”  Wendy smiled wistfully.  “She said she wanted to win state before she quit.”

That left Wendy fending for herself in a city where she had no friends.  “I was trying to get into San Francisco State, but I hadn’t applied in time, so I got a job waitressing at a fancy Mediterranean restaurant.  Barbel came by a week after I started working and introduced herself as the owner.  She invited me to join her in the bar when my shift was done.  She was like this short, busty woman in a sexy power suit, silk jacket and a low-cut ruffled blouse with these amazing dark eyebrows and thick curly hair.  Two drinks and we went back to her place.  I moved in a few days later.”

With the sun almost all the way down and the shadows on the patio turning to darkness, my second beer started to take effect and I began to split-screen.  How long had I paid undivided attention to Wendy’s story?  A minute?  Minute-and-a-half?  I couldn’t help it, her meeting with Barbel triggered a memory of Maureen, an actress I had scouted in New York when I was working of for the Public Theater. 

“Barbel wanted to teach me how to succeed in business,” Wendy said, “She had this Pygmalion thing going on, telling me how to dress, what books I should be reading, operas I should be listening to. “

Shortly after I began working for the Public Theater, around 1980, I was sent to cover a play that was being staged in a Chelsea loft run by a woman who, as it turned out, had been in a play of mine a few months earlier.  Her name was Cecily Ya-Ya, and she had acted the part of a woman fleeing her Los Alamos scientist husband who has her sports car break down in Gallup.  Cecily’s theater space was so cramped it was only conducive to putting on one-act plays.  The production I was reporting on for Lynn Holst at the Public Theater, featured a teenage boy and girl hanging out playing pinball and eventually getting into trouble.  It wasn’t much of a play, but both of the actors, in their young twenties, were very good.  I gave them laudatory coverage, and months later, when I was looking for a woman to do the lead role of a three act play I was having read at the Whole Theater in Montclair, New Jersey, I called the actress I had covered, Maureen Testelinni, and asked if she would consider auditioning for me.  She did, she got the part, and was wonderful at the reading. 

As it happened, Maureen was renting an apartment from my same landlord, Sam (the super capitalist) Marx, and lived catty-corner to what was to become my burnt-out digs.  Living so close by, we became friends.  Since she had a TV, and I didn’t, I was often invited to her place to see the crucial this-moment-in-history replays, like Reagan getting shot.  But it was Wendy’s mention of Barbel playing Pygmalion that brought back my most vivid recollections of Maureen, for I had a similar experience with her, only I was, fittingly enough to go with my split-screen personality, to share half my Pygmalion spot with another woman.