“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. The people ride in a hole in the ground”. That sort of sums things up, doesn’t it? The “act” of living in New York is very different from the dream of doing the same. I will admit to a period when I questioned my decision to move there. After the energy and excitement of the first few months, and then the show-less routine that began to settle in over the Spring and Summer of 1980, I was starting to tug at the bit once again. But it didn’t seem like there was anywhere to go. After all, this was New York, the pinnacle, wasn’t it? Where else was there?

I’d met a lot of people and made some good friends over the months. With Lincoln Center as the “center” of my world, the peripherals, like dance classes and acting classes, seemed to round me out and gave me, at least superficially, the feeling that I was doing something. But there was still that irrepressible urge to get on-stage and precious few opportunities to do so. The classes seemed to assuage that visceral desire.

I had been teaching a lot over the Portland years. Next to performing, it was what I loved best … and still do. I had developed classes in Musical Theatre performance and Auditioning and Acting techniques for young people and adults and those classes fulfilled me incredibly. To watch young people rise to the occasion and fearlessly respond to challenges, and to encourage older aspirants tackling the same challenges but with their very different mindsets based more in life experience and self awareness all served to make me a better performer myself. I was a proponent of side-coaching and a “what if” approach to my students. It was always a supportive and congenial atmosphere. These people became, through no fault of my own and for want of a better word, acolytes. One older student coined the name “Hurstians” I’m embarrassed to say, and nothing could sway them from that devotion and commitment, both to me, each other, and the classes. The approach was very different in New York.

Frank Corsaro (who passed away just a couple of weeks ago at the age of 92) was highly regarded as a director and teacher. His classes were hard to get into. I got in. One has to keep in mind that for an actor in New York, everything, EVERY thing was geared toward getting work … making money, not spending it. So the atmosphere in the room that first night was pretty intense. There were about twenty people and I could feel them all tugging at the bit to get in front of this revered man and impress him. Who knew where that could lead? Realistically? No where! But the tiniest chance that he might be casting something down the road created an on-going and somewhat ruthless pseudo-audition scenario.

I quickly learned that folks had been working on their “party pieces” for a long time and trotted them out, some shamelessly, for “The Man’s” response. I also learned that following the presentation of a scene in these classes the normal New York approach from the instructor was to ask “So, what did YOU think of that?” And then the class would descend into a heated back and forth between the teacher and the other students in the class about the pros and cons (but mostly cons – remember this was one big audition) of what they had just seen. The performer(s) would just sit on stage and try to find something constructive in what they were hearing from their rivals! I went through this gauntlet a couple of times with a number of scene partners and was just thankful that I had someone next to me who was experiencing the same thing I was and with whom I could commiserate and bitch over coffee following the class.

Corsaro was rarely at the classes. He was frequently out of town directing plays or operas and was usually replaced by a lesser light who wasn’t, well, Frank Corsaro. The only sub who caused a bit of a stir when he came into the room (and he did so a number of times) was Otto Preminger. Yeah, THAT Otto Preminger! His accent was very thick and he was hard to understand. He was in his late seventies and would sit in the chair with his cane and his bald head and squinty eyes and talk about his movies and the people with whom he had worked. That, despite his reputation, didn’t go down well with the students and a revolt was soon under way at the studio. We had paid for Frank Corsaro and that’s who we wanted. The class disintegrated and we got some of our money back.

Even now, thinking back, it was not a good feeling. Everything in New York felt so disconnected from reality. There was an urgency in the air that was exhausting. Dance classes were a bit more focused if only because dancing was a performing tool based mostly in techniques (jazz, tap, contemporary, ballet) and these techniques had specific vocabularies that could be used IN an audition, not AS an audition. I left those classes feeling I had accomplished something, like maintaining a center while doing a double pirouette or executing a “triple” in a time step.

The months drifted by. Giving the tours at Lincoln Center became just a paycheck and trying to find performing work was shunted to the back burner. The Roar of the Greasepaint? Not so much! Other small jobs came and went, one of which was helping to write a New York City Visitor’s Guide Book … as if New York needed another guide book! On the surface, this might sound like an interesting job, but my assignment, in my “spare” time, was to research and document the locations of and prices for all the parking lots in mid-town Manhattan! Reading that sentence back, I shudder at the memory. This job ranked up there with my short-lived nighttime stint on a Montreal golf course collecting night crawlers for fishing bait, or a summer unloading steel oil drums from a conveyer belt as a teenager or demonstrating Osterizer Blenders in the basement of Meier and Frank’s department store in Portland! There are a LOT of parking lots (and structures) in the middle of New York City!! I would walk up and down the side streets (those long, long cross-town streets extending off the Avenues) documenting the lot/structure location, number of stalls, hours of operation, and the mind-boggling complexity of the pricing – by the half-hour, hour, day, week; morning, afternoon and evening rates, week day rates, Saturday rates, Sunday rates and on and on. This job went on for months (like I said, there are a LOT of parking lots) but kept me physically active and making a few bucks. Then, over the month of December, the trajectory of my life changed!

John Innes, an old friend from my UBC/Vancouver days informed me that Richard Ouzounian, another colleague from Vancouver, had been appointed Artistic Director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg. Richard had become an “enfant terrible” in the Canadian theatre scene, innovative, provocative and affectionately known as “The Campbell Soup Kid”. Hesitantly, I wrote to find out if he was “jobbing in” at all, reminding him of our time working together all those years ago. MTC is fabled in Canadian Theatre history. Headed by the legendary John Hirsch, it was Mecca as far as goals went for an actor in Canada. Each morning we symbolically bowed three times to the West (Winnipeg) when I was a student at Sir George. It was revered as the crucible of the regional theatre movement in Canada. Amazingly, Richard got back to me and offered me two shows in the New Year – “The Elephant Man” and “As You Like It”!! Rehearsals would begin in Winnipeg March 2^nd!

Then, Pat Swenson, the General Manager of KBPS Radio in Portland, called to ask if I would co-host the station’s Pledge Week in February with Dick Estell. That name probably doesn’t mean a lot to folks, but in the world of Public Radio, he was god-like. He was known as The Radio Reader and would read books on air. This would be a great honour. (As it turned out, Dick got sick and couldn’t do the hosting duties which left me as sole host – more of that later).

Then, Norman Leyden got in touch to hire me to do our Irving Berlin concert with the Buffalo, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee Symphonies in the New Year.

Then SRO Head Bill Dobson got in touch to offer me three shows for the upcoming Summer in Portland.

Then, to maintain cash flow, I got a job at a phone answering service … on the graveyard shift.

Then, I got a show in New York at the 18^th Street Playhouse starting in January, a new piece called “I Only Just Got Here Myself”!!

Mercy! How did all this happen at the same time, and, most amazingly, fit together perfectly on my calendar??

The Buffalo concert happened just before rehearsals for the new piece began in New York. This was a special night because Mom and Dad and Gram came down from Montreal to see me sing. Also making the trek down was Norma Springford, my beloved theatre teacher from Sir George (whom I’ve mentioned in other postings). I’d not seen her in 14 years, but she looked just as I remembered her, small and frail but larger than life at the same time. This was a glorious experience on so many levels. The orchestra was spectacular and I think I sounded pretty good. Mom told me afterward that Dad had cried from the start of the show to the end. He would never let on that that had happened but I could see he was incredibly proud and I could feel it when he hugged me afterward. It ended all too soon and I was back in New York!

The 18^th Street Playhouse was located in a dilapidated commercial building in Chelsea (It’s now part of “The Flynn”, an upscale Condo complex.). The “theatre” had no fabled past but had been created in the seventies as yet another street level performance venue in lower Manhattan to provide cheap space for new and developing work. It was, in theatrical terms, a “Black Box”, a large, low-ceilinged room, every part of which (floor, ceiling, walls, windows, fixtures) had been painted black, with various areas sectioned off to act as dressing rooms for the actors and “facilities” for the audience. Primitive to say the least! But when I walked in on the first day of rehearsals, it was magical. The magic wore off very quickly.

“I Only Got Here Myself” was a new work by two New Yorkers centering around a boy about to be born who, with the assistance of a heavenly “guide” named ‘Bolt’ (as in “out of the blue”), gets a chance to see what his life would be like depending on the choices he makes. Yeah … well. The last line of the review in “Other Stages Weekly” was “’I Only Just Got Here Myself’ should be re-titled “Knowing When To Leave”, and that sort of summed up the experience.

I had auditioned for the show early in the New Year, had heard nothing back and had forgotten about it. But because the man they had cast as ‘Bolt’ had dropped out for a better opportunity, I got the part … the day before rehearsals were to begin! This was, again, a Waiver show and we rehearsed, for the most part, only in the evenings, so I didn’t have to make any work changes. But this addition to my life made for very long days! I would work Lincoln Center from 10:00am to 4:00pm, grab some food for dinner, rehearse from 6:00 to 11:00, dash uptown to the Answering Service, work from midnight to 7:00am, dash home, shower and be back at Lincoln Center at 10:00!!! Fortunately, there were rarely calls at the Service during the night, so I would sleep on the floor for a few hours. This was my life for my last two months in New York.

There were only five of us in the cast, and very late in the rehearsal period, we lost two members to “other work”. These were tense, tense times because the show was being written and re-written as we went along, new songs added then cut, dialogue added or cut constantly and with new people coming in, utter chaos reigned. My one constant was Tim Barber as “The Boy” (who is in the picture with me to the left) with whom I had all my scenes. We became very close (out of self preservation more than anything else) and would console each other at every opportunity. That kept us both on even keel despite the madness swirling around us.

There were, mercifully, no major mishaps during the three-week run. But audiences (and we were full every night!!) were baffled and bewildered as we trotted about trying to make some sense for them (and ourselves!) of what we were saying and singing. I would cringe when I saw friends in the house, but they were always sort of generous afterward. In New York, one understands the situation when you see new work being done and try to be as supportive as possible. Sometimes that was hard. The show closed on a good note, we dutifully said our goodbyes at a small closing party and that was it. New York was over and done with (for the moment) and I left the next day.

What really got me through those final weeks was the anticipation of what lay ahead, of getting back to the clear air of the West Coast and then into the exciting Unknown of the Manitoba Theatre Centre! Boy, I was ready!!!