After the battle, the good-time game
Andy Valvur, who was traveling abroad, was talking with his girlfriend, Maggie Lynch, who’d been at Sunday’s Giants game. Why would you bother going to a game after the team won its berth in the playoffs? he asked.
“’Cause it’s like cuddling after really good sex,” she said.
The ACT audience at “The Normal Heart” last Wednesday was dominated by older men I’d guess were veterans of the AIDS epidemic that erupted in the ’80s and still rages. The play itself expresses so much rage you leave the theater dazed.
AIDS is a medical issue, of course, but it’s also a political issue. On the way out, an usher handed us a letter dated June 2012 from playwright Larry Kramer, saying, among other things, “that after all this time the amount of money being spent to find a cure is still minuscule, still almost invisible, still impossible to locate in any national health budget, and still totally uncoordinated. … Please know that this is a plague that has been allowed to happen.”
ACT’s Carey Perloff said that the playwright himself had preferred sending that freestanding message to inserting it into the program; he’d handed it out himself at performances in Washington, D.C.
P.S.: We stopped backstage afterward to congratulate actor Bruce Altman —a college roommate of a pal we were with — who plays the lawyer brother of the activist who’s the protagonist of the play. Twenty years ago, said the actor, he’d lost an older brother to AIDS.
The Little Man is jumping out of his chair for Saturday afternoon’s Herbst Theatre tribute to the smiling man in the bowler hat: Chuck Huggins, philanthropist, See’s candy executive, traditional jazz lover, singer, musician, father and grandfather.
Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, Willie Brown, Charlotte Shultz and, most lovingly, Donna Huggins, to whom he’d been married for about 15 years, spoke. Nancy Pelosi was there but didn’t speak, a politician’s most eloquent tribute.
But the event was about music, not words. The SFJazz High School All-Stars played in the lobby. Onstage were the Jim Cullum Jazz Band and the Bob Schulz Frisco Jazz Band, joining forces for a Lu Watters/Turk Murphy salute and backing Pat Yankee, whose “What a Wonderful World” made it really seem so.
“This is San Francisco jazz,” said Jim Cullum, evoking the spirits of disappearing saloons, basement clubs that smelled like beer, and jazz lovers who answered the call of the rhythms and danced until closing time.
To honor World War II paratrooper buddies, Huggins had his regiment tattooed on his right arm. He was 85, said Donna Huggings, “He didn’t even flinch.”
“Well, there’s Ghirardelli and there’s Alcatraz. What else is there to do up here?”
Musician-filmmaker Paul Festa just finished up a three-year grant from ODC, and the documentary that came out of it, “Tie It Into My Hand,” showed there Friday and Saturday. To study the nature of performance, Festa, who was planning to be a concert violinist until a hand injury made that impossible, asked an array of musicians, theater people, fine artists and dancers to talk about not only performing in general but also about how he (Festa) performs.
Among the well-known local people who participated are Connie Champagne, Peter Coyote, Daniel Handler,
Tony Taccone, Wesla Whitfield and Carey Perloff, whose fast-and-furious monologue is overlaid with a monologue from fast-and-furious talker John Fisher, making an unintelligible but glorious symphony of words.
Violin teachers ask Festa to play this way or that, noting his altering facial expressions; in one section, a fine artist paints him as he plays nude (one such image was on display in the lobby); in a third, two men assess his level of sexual excitation as he plays an emotional passage.
You’ve correctly assumed that Festa, both physically and emotionally, is no shrinking violet. Nor are any of the other people spending their lives making art. “Resilience is everything,” says Perloff. P.S.: And keeping resilience in mind,
Tony Serra’s reading of “Walking the Circle, Prison Chronicles” is at City Lights tonight.