My widow's walk years. They were actually even better than my rock & roll tour years or my comedy writer in NY years.
After i got sued out of the music biz for poaching one of my agency's clients, i went back to Salem, MA and moped for a little while. Ran into this rich guy who'd bailed me out of some tough spots when i was a teen and he said he was still doing that kind of thing out-of-pocket because there were no programs for that kind of thing in town and he asked me if i would like to pay a little back by starting one. He gave me a few thousand bucks, a 6-month lease on a storefront and a grant-writing teacher from Boston's great Bridge Over Troubled Waters youth program. My street knowledge and skill for hooking people up turned out to be a good combo and we took off right away - rated #3 in the state in our first year of grant review, a source of pride for having put it together, though i had pretty much already moved on by that time.
During this time, one of my best buds from HS was a youth minister at a nearby church and asked me to help him work on a revue for his kids to put on for the church youth program's annual fundraiser. We both loved old movies so we combined Casablanca, the Marx Brothers' A Night in Casablanca and the apocryphal Charlie Chan in Casablanca to make Groucho the Claude Rains part in Casablanca and have Charlie Chan there to solve the murder of the couriers. We inserted the traditional Chico & Harpo talent segments to showcase some of the kids' skills and wrote quite a good, silly all-suspects-in-one-room ending so it went over real well. So much so that some audience members asked if i could adapt it for their community theater company.
They had a nice hit with O, To Be in Casablanca and asked me if i had anything else. I didn't, had never imagined writing, but they offered me dough so i gave it a try. There was a story in the news that, in those days of the tax code, there was such a savings for new two-income families filing separate, rather than joint, tax returns that affluent couples were going down to the Caribbean after Xmas, divorcing on New Year's Eve, remarrying on New Year's Day and paying for the whole trip & more on the tax savings. I thought that examining the dramatic possibilities which might occur with a couple's day of "single"hood on a tropical island might yield some humor and wrote Dinner & Divorce for them and they had a nice hit with it, so much so that it was later picked up by the Lyric Theater in Boston and there was even some talk of NY before the loophole closed.
And then, my gf Alix - who sold time @ a Boston radio station - asked me to use my studio "expertise" to help her produce her clients' commercials. The guy i chose - a friend of that youth minister pal - to help me do the tech turned out to have the same kind of sense of humor as me and we couldnt help doing our own shadow version of these lame-o local commercials for our own entertainment. Some DJ's heard those carts and, soon enough, we were doing blackouts for their shows and ended up with our own weekly half-hour comedy show, Zero Hour, which ended up being syndicated to several cities (and we sent free to a bunch of college stations) around the NE and eventually got me an audition for the 2nd cast of SNL.
And then there was my house. All the musicians i grew up with wanted a piece of me when i made it in music mgmt, but i didn't have time for them til i was of no use to them. Felt bad about that, so i used some of my musicbiz dough to lease a 100+ yr-old, 3-story, 13-room sea captain's house in Salem. Took a floor for myself and let bands use the other two as a practice/party/crash space just to keep my flow goin', know'm'sayin? I could keep my hand in and actually ended up running several bands out of it (though thru a ghost company as per the terms of my lawsuit) over the next few years. I've already told the liveliest of my stories about this, including one gal separately giving the clap to seven of us over the course of a weekend. Needless to say, the landlords were glad to be rid of us after our two years there (the house was so huge it was carved into 6 apartments after we left).
But the funnest, sweetest part of all of it was the widow's walk. There was a tiny, creeky stairway to a platform at the top of the roof where a sea-captain's wife would go to scan the horizon of Salem Harbor for her husband's ship. That was kind of cool and, not used to writing at all but now having to write grants for the youth program, a play, commercials for Alix's clients and my comedy show, i needed a quiet & inspiring spot - especially with the dramarama of that house - to cogitate and i weren't gonna get better than that. So i kept a card table & chair under a tarp up there and, on good days, i would bring my typewriter, a thermos of coffee, a cassette player w tapes of improvs between me and my comedy partner and my cat (who eventually learned how to jump off the roof & fall three floors safely, then find her way back up to do it again&again) and do my work looking over the roofs (some copper even, like Paris) of the grand old houses of sea captain's row and the harbor beyond.
A decade or so ago, when i first started formulating my theories on human happiness, i realised it behooved one to find a memory that most represented one's happiest state, to meditate upon for to bring peace to frantic mind. I settled upon the bliss & vitality of those widow's walk sessions and, now, i reflect on that until i can smell salt in the air and i am free. nufced
