Memory bites

So this whole blog is one long memory. And being such, it is filled with inaccuracy. Just sayin'. Nothing purposeful, but the old gray matter ain't what it used to be.

Anyway, back at the Arlington Street Church. I never did join the theater troop. I believe they were on their way out of town, to do a road tour. They planned to attend other sanctuaries, rallies, protests and similar gatherings across the country. Or so I think. The memory. I know this. I continued to live in the house on Grove St. sleeping on the couch, with my sometimes boyfriend Kenny, who was real cute and also a real folk singer.

This was after Rick the Actor, so it had to be after the Theater group in the basement. Or so logic would dictate. With Kenny, I would go to all night hootenannies at a little coffee house on Charles St. (I think. Maybe it was on Revere? Note to self, find the menu I saved for the sake of my old age memoirs and see if the address is there. Not that anyone will care, it's just that I care).

Better than the menu, I found an article with a drawing from 1967 of the club, definitely on Charles St. Already in 67, they were lamenting the end of folk music.

Sword in the Stone, circa 1967, by S. Grosso

I think there was a curfew in Boston and no one was to be out after a certain hour. Keep your rabble indoors! Otherwise they might get roused up and, I don't know, throw some tea into the harbor.

Everyone was very stoned in those days, so anything could have happened in the wee hours.

Maybe there was no curfew and the guy who ran the coffeehouse, who was tall with short cropped hair and I think used to be a drill sergeant in the Army, he was the most unfolk like folk proprietor I ever met, maybe he just liked to make you stay and listen to all the performers, even the really bad ones, so he locked the door, kinda like my high school did the night of our prom, when we had to stay up all night and watch Sound of Music.

Kenny sang "My name is Jimmy Brown, I am the newsboy of this town." He was my true love until he discovered beer and started hanging around with the other guys out back of the Coffee house.

Then came May 20,  the Arlington Street Church sanctuary and the New England Resistance office on Stanhope Street next door to the Boston Police sub station, with the marijuana plant in the window. There I discovered Jim Havelin about the same time I finally got my turn to claim the closet as my own private room.

Sanctuary!

May 21, 1968, I am blithely walking down Newbury Street or one of those streets frequented by Crazy Jane where the rich people shop, when I see an unusual sight. A group of scruffy dressed young people (that is not the unusual part) are playing recorders, beating drums, and falling down on the sidewalk. (That's the unusual part). Street Theater!.

For the past several months, I'd been part of a rag tag theater company who rehearsed in a church basement and we were in the middle of readying a production of Brecht's The House of Bernarda Alba. This was sometime after my disastrous experiment in conjugal living with Rick the actor in Dorchester, where we pretended to be a young married couple. The landlady was so sweet, I hated to abandon her after only a week, when I realized all of Rick's charms were skin deep. ( know this is so unfair. I'm sure he is a truly kind and humanitarian, loving man, but in those days, it was true passion and radical inspiration I was after).

So things at the Theater Company were decidedly frosty. Rick had even left for a few days himself to go back to Florida and see if his former girlfriend wanted to marry him.  She didn't.

I was playing one of the three sisters. I was, you might say, integral to the performance, not because of my stellar acting abilities. A turnip could probably have delivered the lines more convincingly, but because we were a tiny troupe with no one to spare.

But the street theater people intrigued me. so I followed them, as they drummed and fifed and fell down and got up, and finally ended up at a church around the corner. the Arlington Street Church on the corner of Arlington and Boylston Street.

At the top of the stairs two men, flanked by many others. One is in military uniform. Someone has a megaphone and is telling the gathering crowd that they are taking sanctuary in the Church, an ages old custom of providing a safe haven for the persecuted. This was a moment in history.

They are Bill Chase and Robert Talmanson,  Bill a civilian resistor, Tally, as Talmanson was know, AWOL from an unjust war.

The guerrilla theater performers are there in aid of them, of drawing attention to them and their cause. I approach the leader, a woman named Susan. I offer to join their troupe. How can she say no? Volunteers are always welcome, acting talent is optional. I have found the Movement I have been looking for. Direct action, not letter writing, report writing, making phone calls in aid of getting others to go to far off Washington for demonstrations. Right here at home.

And a theater troupe to boot.

Now I must tell Rosemary, the director of our church basement acting group. I can no longer pose as a sister in a Bertolt Brecht play when the real world is beckoning. I am relieved, no more Rick the actor, casting moon eyes at me. But terrified, The wrath of Rosemary is well known. Guilty, as I am leaving them all in the lurch. Can they find a replacement.

As predicted Rosemary is pissed; calls me a prima dona. "But it's for the Movement!" I cry. I am called; I must answer.

She is not impressed. But history is happening on Arlington Street. Surely they can find a stand in for my poor performance, even on short notice. I leave one church basement rehearsal space and head for another church's nave and sanctuary.