Page 399 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 369

that art, more intensely than loose reality, tightens down into those old
Aristotelian satisfactions of unity: this time, this place, this action, this
certain resolution. Stage and screen in two hours resolve plot and charac-
terization and concepts in a definitive way that real life, suspended open
ended, rarely does.
Distractions, unforgivable distractions, in a theater make me want
to kill the gum-poppers, the coughers, the whisperers, and those self-
important few who wear wristwatches that beep, once, then twice, like
electronic crickets calling feebly to one another throughout the dark field
of the audience.
Only once for me was the distraction in the audience, perhaps some-
thing like the front-row murder committed by the Hell’s Angels during
the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, more intense, tighter than the
action on stage.
It was a winter-season night at the Curran Theater when Katharine
Hepburn, playing her starring role in The West Side Waltz, must have felt
even her grand self being virtually dragged from the stage to the orchestra
where Ryan, glowing more intensely passionate than the Luminous One
herself, became larger, immense, explosive, dangerous in the seat next to
me. That night in that theater, because of all that was happening, a cast
of six and an audience of six hundred sank, in one grand collision, like so
many dark ships under the brilliant intensity of Hepburn’s face, of Ryan’s
face, and the third face from which neither Hepburn nor Ryan could keep
their eyes.
Kick was where he shouldn’t have been. Handsome. Glowing. Radi-
ant. On the arm of Logan Doyle.
It was Saint Valentine’s Night. Ryan had bought rear orchestra seats
for himself, Solly, Kweenie, and me. With Kick lodged in up at Bar Nada,
Ryan was strung out writing what he called “Dear Kick: Letters You’ll
Never See.” They were turgid Journal entries.

I feel you receding from me like a sleek white ship moving
under heavy sail from the Embarcadero into the windswept Bay
and out toward the Golden Gate. Cries of lonely gulls screech
over the waves churned up behind the boat. Everything in life
seems borne backward on the tide. Time is the only villain. I lie
sleepless in the night. My sheets, unwashed, smell of the suntoast
sweat of your blond body. I dream of sunlight whipping through
your blond hair in the wild wind of your topless Corvette. Once
you moved toward me. Now you move away from me.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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