The Late Club. New York Summer 1983
“What’s on your mind Deborah?”
“Seduction”.
The jukebox had pumped its closing beats, and we were walking back to the barroom long bar where gins sat cup by cup. She sipped and put a hand on my chest, her words quivering between us a long-ago promise about to be filled, blossoming in the humidity. We had danced all night in Tin Pan Alley and at 3:30 pm wandered off into this upstairs dive on 8th Avenue catering for the late late crowd, which tonight was us and a smattering of high-heeled low flyers simmering in the shadows of the loft. The lustre of heat, music and alcohol gave us an invincible glow; this was the night that would see impossibilities.
“Seduction”.
Being on stage with her was a double-edged delight. Her rhythm and timing were always impeccable, her gesture alluring, perfectly placed and graceful. Hers was an instinct that rang a bell all the way back to Sophocles, resounding in the prancing mischief of Harlequin and resting in the captivating quick of the single presence that enthrals a thousand. I became a performer through my own strength of will; she was born that way.
When we were on stage together, I felt part of an eternal correctness, yet I knew that no one was watching me.
“Seduction”.
We were kids when we first clambered aboard this glory band, and we had given it our all. One evening in September 1975, I had attended a performance of Cabaret Peking, upstairs in The Performers Theatre on Courtney Place, Wellington, at which the embryonic Red Mole was flexing its spoof. At the evening’s end, the players moved about with an upturned hat into which I dramatically emptied my pockets, proclaiming them to be the essence of excitement. I fell in love with them that night and within six months was part of the troupe, leaving my Drama School moorings and placing full trust in their laughter, courage and idealism. In the nine years of my life with them, they never failed me. It was an endless tour, mythologising ourselves as we went, each performance a lightning rod galvanising our energies and driving us deeper into the drama. The cheek by jowl existence saw an equal sharing of every portion, uniting us in a quest that achieved its destination each evening, Showtime!
“Seduction”
I was wearing a black vest that my grandfather Sydney Augustus Burnett had worn on his wedding day in 1917, my thin shoulders taut with rivulet muscles. The black jeans had silver medals sewn down the outside leg from belt to boot, like mariachi trousers that I had bought in Mexico three years earlier. Black was our absence, our fullness and when we marched as part of the ‘All Artists In’ to protest cuts to New York State funding for the arts, we wore our blacks, brandishing black flags. In the post hippy colour splash New England farm retreat juggler jester scene, we cut a hard shape. Two men, two women, gypsy anarchists, clothed in black. You become what you dare to believe. And so we did. One evening, we watched Bread and Puppet theatre perform in a Lower East Side street fair, which included slender stilt walkers dressed as angels and horses. Within weeks, I was up on makeshift poles and I stumped on various remakes across the cobbles of Sheffield City Square, the rock-n-roll stages of the New Zealand summer festival scene, in every cabaret and proscenium we played for the next 18 months.
That night on Eighth Avenue, which within hours surrendered to rosy dawn love, is just a memory like all other caper we cut. The escapades of our personal lives ran abreast of the main train.
The Big Mission.
The origins are as bright and immediate today as ever they were. The source is an inherent impulse, both distant and immediate. The impulse is to be Your Own King, to be a free radical to live your own revolution. Was that what I recognised in them? Seduced at tender 21 to join the madcap crusade? Victory was never a point down the road, but the moment-to-moment heat of adventure and performance. Deborah was my deep inspiration. I remain inspired and grateful for such a true friendship.