AboutEnnis grew up in Cincinnati, the sixth of ten children. In his first life he was an actor and singer; embarking on his second, he completed his BA at Empire State College, where he was a Richard Porter Leach Fellow.
Read moreAttend this tale. I regret that I never ran into her at a cocktail party, nor was I privileged to have shared the stage or screen with her. Except for a brief moment, my story is the story of millions. I was an audience member, a fan who was the happy beneficiary of the talent…
Continue readingOn this day a hundred years ago the two men in this photo packed up their dreams in a UHaul and moved to New York (helped by our lovely, talented classmate Stephen Hope). It was a leap of faith for us Ohio boys to pack up and move to a place where we could live…
Continue readingGreg Tate, the prolific critic and culture chronicler, died Tuesday December 7. He happened to be a neighbor of mine. For close to 30 years we lived next door to each other in the Sugar Hill section of New York’s Washington Heights. We shared what neighbors share: a street/mecca where greats like Ellington and Strayhorn,…
Continue readingWisdom: when words convey a truth that’s irrefutable. The right ones echo, to the point where you realize you’ve memorized it because it’s something you never want to forget. Ever. Stephen Sondheim’s words and music have had that effect on me even before I knew his name. In “Something’s Comin’” from West Side Story, I recognized…
Continue readingOvid in Tearsby Jack Gilbert Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.They asked him what he meant by garden.He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”he said, “there are places walled off where colorand decorum are magnified into a civilization.Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How likea woman, they asked. He remembered their wivesand…
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The snakes. They were the surprising aspect of the Hugh Steers show on view this week at Alexander Gray (closing this Saturday April 3). I hadn’t seen them before. Later, when I read that this was actually late work I was no longer surprised; at the time Steers made them, the snakes all but shout…
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Last night I enhaled the glorious mise en scene of Steve McQueen’s Lover’s Rock, one of the five short films that comprise his Small Axe series (Amazon Prime). All that polyester! Sweaty dancers and swigs of beer redolent of high school parties in the basements of classmate’s houses! It’s the power of film, and its…
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When I was a 10 year-old boy soprano, a choirmaster proclaimed, “Music is a picture painted on a background of silence.” It was an abstraction that stuck, as first lessons of craft tend to do. Others I’ve heard: Show, don’t tellA cliché is a cliché because it’s trueAlways hold something backAvoid passivity in your attackThe music…
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A few nights ago at dinner out with new friends, our getting-to-know-each-other small talk circled around to coming out to our families. Our stories all had variants, but one thing seemed universal: how the presence of AIDS smoked the edges of each instance. Mine came at the end of a most challenging year, one spent…
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Joe Jackson’s music feels like home to me, so I felt lucky to attend his Town Hall Four Decades tour in support of his new album, “Fool.” He’s someone I know primarily through his recordings (I’d seen him live only once before, at Radio City Music Hall in support of the 3-sided “Big World” from…
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