Finding Eddie at The Speakeasy

Over the Moon at The Speakeasy (w/ Jon Deline)

You find yourself in a random street corner somewhere near the border of North Beach and Chinatown in San Francisco. The smells of simmering garlic risotto and sizzling Szechwan mingle in the evening air. You've been told to keep your eye out for a fellow in a faded overcoat and a canary colored fedora. You see him slouched insouciantly against a lamp post. He whispers a password to you past his down turned brim and upturned collar, gestures with a granite jaw towards either a Chinese laundry or a dusty clock shop. A goon at the door puts a hand the size of a porterhouse steak against your chest.

"Password." he grumbles.

"Skidoo." you reply.

With a grunt he lets you pass and you make your way down the rabbit hole.

You're in one of two places: either Sam Lee's Laundry Emporium or Joe's Clock Shop. Let's say you're in Joe's. The place is littered with clocks in various states of disrepair on every available surface. A desk bristles with springs and cogs and clock faces from every drawer. There's no Joe. Instead a dame in a sequined dress that fits her curves in all the right places reclines on a bentwood chair. Her gimlet eyes smolder at you. 

"Are you here to get a clock fixed?" she murmurs, lips painted the color of a day old bloodstain.

"Not really." you manage to stammer.

"Then you've come to the right place." She purrs and gestures you with lacquered nails towards a grandfather clock that probably last worked sometime around 1902. 
You open the door that should contain the innards of the clock. That's when you hear it. Music. Ragtime. A honky tonk waltz. You step into the clock and out the other side...

And you are in an illicit gambling den filled with flappers and dandies, swells and slatterns, bootleggers and roustabouts all decked out in the full regalia of 1923. You make your way past a Bellows boxing painting that hangs above a roulette table, past craps and blackjack players hunched over the green felt of the gambling tables, their chips clicking together in their sweaty palms and past an outstretched gloved hand holding a long cigarette holder belonging to a women resplendent in spit curls. Everyone is drinking. 

A bookshelf glides to one side on hidden wheels and you find yourself in a bar where a mustachioed piano player named Oscar Frost plinks out some forgotten moonshine sonata on a creaky upright. A bouncer with a face like a clenched fist and tougher than the calluses on a barflies' elbow gives you a wink and sends you through a secret passage marked only by a Dégas forgery. You make your way down a long hallway. Still more music beckons you past a velvet curtain the color of a bottomless lake. 

You emerge into The Palace Theatre Cabaret, swollen with swells swilling in the sepia glow of their table lamps or spilling over the mezzanine above the bouquets of drunken boozers in the booths. 
And onstage, caught in the glare of the footlights is a bevy of beauties in matching sequined hot pants kicking their long legs in perfect unison to the din of Mr. Arnie Topman and his Infamous Five. 

In the center of the chorus girls a man in a top hat and tails sings. He's the master of ceremonies, an ever ready joker with a bucket full of clever asides in his brain pan, sporting a jet black wig and a powdered face. His name is Eddie. The song ends and he raises a flask in your direction, his lips inches from a 1923 vintage microphone and says in a voice redolent of that era "So glad you could make it. Welcome to The Speakeasy!"

Three swells swilling.

Under Construction.

It started back in 2016 and even before that at another venue in 2014 and is the brainchild of Mr. Nick Olivero of Boxcar Theatre and his peripatetic business partner David Gluck. I was brought on to create the role of Eddie the Unlucky, the irrepressible gadfly emcee of the cabaret (loosely based on Eddie Cantor and a host of other comic luminaries of the Prohibition era) in their immersive theatre  recreation of a 1923 speakeasy.  I had just emcee'd the Theatre Bay Area Theatre Awards at the Geary Theatre for Nick and he asked if I was interested in creating Eddie for this 3 million dollar project he was embarking on in San Francisco. The venue was still fully under construction. It was a dusty, echo-y inhospitable environment to do theatre in. Now, almost a year later it is one of the hottest tickets in the city. And "Eddie" is at the center of it.

Becoming Eddie.

First was finding the material. Nick had done the heavy lifting of creating a cabaret order of where the specialty acts, the chorus girls, the comedy vignettes, the dream ballets would go. Eddie would be the one to tie them all together and keep the ball rolling. The only rule: nothing written after 1923. Authentic vaudeville humor. That plus what turned out to be seven songs, mostly from the Eddie Cantor songbook; If You Knew Susie, The Dumber They Come, She Don't Like It Not Much, etc. along with classics Lonesome Pine and even Those Were The Days are sprinkled throughout the evening with patter and plain ol' stand up of the time which needed to be part history lesson and part crowd control and all funny all the time. That's not true. When things go awry Eddie waxes philosophical and even holds forth with a Shakespeare soliloquy.

The Flannerelles.

Body of Work, Work of Body.

Luckily, Eddie Cantor was an extraordinary source of wit and ribald humor for generations and we were able to cobble together a kind of greatest hits and misses into Eddie's monologues from his vast body of work. And after a couple of months I started thinking like Eddie. Seeing the world through his cockeyed eyes. 

But then came the physicality. There's plenty of footage available of Eddie in the 30's and 40's. (He was one of those rare ones that went from vaudeville to radio to television without losing any of his well deserved popularity.) But there is precious little of the work he was doing pre 1923. Just a few grainy kinescopes and some scratchy audio. 

My first clue into him was his eyes. Throughout his career he affected a goggle eyed look, eyebrows in a perpetual state of astonishment. Next came his hands, splayed and fan like, as if the palms were capturing the limelight and the fingers were directing it directly to his garrulous face. His hips were square, retaining some of that early 20th century Puritan stiffness above feet that were like mirrors of his inner state: lively, jivey and almost irrepressibly delighted at everything he saw, heard or suspected might be on the horizon.

Coy/Decoy
The interesting challenge was that he was small in stature. And that was part of his charm. And I wanted that. I wanted to cram his Napoleon complex into my 6' frame. I went to my favorite body part: the chin. By tucking it, while still letting my eyebrows have that Cantoresque buoyancy, I found I could feel like the world was a little bit bigger than me. Eddie is almost coy. But because he's got a trick or two up his sleeve, it's actually decoy. That along with a slightly oversized costume seems to do the trick.
 

Giggle Juice and Tonsil Varnish

Since developing the role, they've had 2 others playing Eddie in The Speakeasy (including the aforementioned impresario Nick Olivero) but I like to think that Eddie Cantor himself, up in front of those footlights in the sky, is looking down with those big eyes of his and smiling, knowing we're all doing our best to give the swell swells of 2017 a little glimpse into a time when girls had gams, goons packed heat and giggle juice could get you daffy at The Speakeasy.

Eddie the Unlucky at the afterparty.

Surreal Life

About Face

Andre Breton, in his Surrealist Manifesto published in 1924 described it as this:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

The “absence of control” part has had a special resonance on my Search For The Mask of Satori over the last month.

First there was the earthquake.

Very unlike the ones I have experienced in San Francisco and Los Angeles, this was a protracted sloshy affair that felt more like being on the deck of a ship than anything else.

I was even able to compose a poem during it. The font of the handwriting in my notebook can only be called Tokyo Earthquake.

Most of the artists and crew of Kooza were looking at each other with wide eyes and weird half smiles as the very ground we walked upon became this suddenly surreal landscape.

Of course the subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster was unknown to us at the time.

3 days later, when news of these horrors started to come in and the constant aftershocks were busy jangling the nerves of some of my cohorts, many of whom are the most fearless humans I have ever known, Cirque du Soleil decided to evacuate us.

With about half an hours notice I was told to get my ass to Narita Airport. We were all going to Macau where we would be staying at the Venetian Hotel and Casino while they decided what to do with us.

This set into motion the crossing off of three items on my bucket list in quick succession:

1. To run at full speed down a gangplank and dive into a plane as the doors are closing.


2. To sit in 1^st class.


3. To catch a night ferry in the fog from Hong Kong to Macau.

Accidental Keinholz in Macau.

Twangly

The less said about the next nine days in the gilded, carpeted hell of the Venetian with its chlorinated canals amongst the constantly yelling Chinese vacationers with their annoying twangly voices and their razor sharp and ever ready elbows the better.

Surreal.

Suffice it to say we were glad to get out of there.

Arrivaderchi Macau.

Finally the word came down that we would be offered a plane ticket for anywhere in the world.

As long as we had an internet connection and could check in about seven days later to see whether we were to report back to Tokyo and that the show was to go on we could go anywhere.

Many chose to return to Tokyo. Many went back home to wherever it was they lived to see family and lick their wounds.

Some went to ports of call in Asia just to save money and be close.

I went to Paris.

Accidental Faces (Paris/Tokyo)

Accidental Ooooog.

Avid Reader.

Avid Eater.

If these cobblestones could speak...

Thank You, Cheeses!

Dreaming

I rented a flat on Rue Tholoze’, up a cobblestone street from Place de la Abbesses, a few doors away from where Tristan Tzara lived slightly less than a century earlier.

.

Neutral Mask. Not So Neutral Mask

My nights were about Jazz, Theatre and dancing at the Caveau de la Huchette. My days were museums and food. I visited the Catacombs. I ate many baguettes. I soaked in to the city and apparently it soaked into me a bit as well.

(Many times I was asked directions by tourists, so convincing was my manner. Eventually I would just tell them to fuck off, completing my disguise as typical Parisian.)

Jazz Chats Taking It To The Bridge.

Jazz Rats in the Caveau.

Man vs. Rodin

On the same alleyways and at the same cafes where Dali, De Chirico, Breton, Tanguy and Arp did their thing I scribbled poems and dreamed away.

Everyday Dream.

My wake up call was in the form of an email from Luc Trembley that Kooza would indeed be starting up again in Tokyo.

Three days later I was on a plane. Six days later I was performing again in Japanese for a sell out crowd in the Fuji Big Top.

Surreal.

Zen King

Le Poisson Soluble

Then, on a day off, I went with my fellow clowns and an acrobat to see the Surrealist Exhibition at the Tokyo National Gallery.

It felt like the set up for a joke: “Three clowns and an acrobat walk into a Surrealist exhibition.” but it was really quite thorough and we were all inspired by both the work and the thought behind it.

How do you depict with vigor and accuracy an inner landscape, a world that is ultimately undepictable?

“Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.”

-Andre Breton

Apparently Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto was written as an article for Le Poisson Soluble. And there in a glass case was an actual copy. Tangible, real.

Yet what it was attempting was to somehow catch the Poisson Soluble, The Dissolving Fish.

And what could be more elusive than a fish that dissolves!

Cadavres Exquis

We attempted a few Surrealist inspired Cadavres Exquis, or Exquisite Corpses the next couple of days and clown alley became a kind of little artist colony.

Joining us in this experiment was our resident pick pocket Pierre Ginet, who did not accompany us to the exhibition but who is, let’s face it, French.

"If Hearts Could Tell" by (in descending order) Ron Campbell, Colin Heath, Pierre Ginet, Sean Kempton

"Breathe" by (in descending order) Colin Heath, Sean Kempton, Pierre Ginet, Ron Campbell

Un Obliged

Things are seeming a little less surreal now as Tokyo gains its equilibrium but flashes of that fine madness do surface occasionally. And I still get that odd feeling, just after I flash my pass at the security gate at the big top that the guard is going to stop me. He is going to say:

“Summimasen Sir. This is not your life. You are not about to perform for hundreds of people. You can’t just walk in here with your coffee cup in hand and your Parisian jacket. You are dreaming, sir. You have to go back to real life.”

But he never does.

And I keep walking.

"It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled."

-Andre Breton

Trying to find a middle ground.

The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex And Getting Out Of Your Own Way

Sometimes the way is not a path. It's an avenue.

Jazz musicians do it.

When they want to access that place inside themselves where the improvisation flows unfettered.

When they want to stretch the boundaries, bend the rules, get their jam on.

When they want to fully immerse themselves in the sea of sound and happily drown in it.

When they want to catch the spacebus to the Wayoutisphere.

When they want to get out of their own way.

They close their eyes.

Why?

They did a study at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Charles J. Limb, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology and a trained jazz saxophonist himself conceived of a way to put musicians engaged in this kind of spontaneous combustion into an MRI machine.

He wanted to see a brain on jazz.

They had to create instruments that

wouldn’t interfere with the powerful magnets of their functional magnetic resonance imaging apparatus.

The MRI.

While the musicians spontaneously improvised, they were able to monitor the brain activity.

They found the usual increase in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

It’s what lights up when we confess.

Brain On Jazz

But when they slimmed their findings to just those captured when the musicians were spontaneously improvising they found a pronounced decrease in the region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring. This is the area known to govern our inhibitions.

Clowns' Dressing Room Door at the Jay Leno Show

When Jazz musicians close their eyes they may not be doing it to cut out the distraction of their sense of sight. It may just be the physical manifestation of their attempt to shut down the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Play

Under the big top I do not have that option. My eyes must be open and alive to all the possibilities, scanning the audience, keeping connection to my fellow performers and alert to any comic ore that may be available to mine.

But I still need to foster that sense of spontaneity with every gesture, word and action.

How?

The amazing acrobats in our show train hard every day to keep their bodies in the condition necessary to perform their acts. They are like musicians playing their scales diligently in preparation for a difficult symphony.

The acrobats, for their safety, must adhere to a set routine. If something goes wrong, they have their hours of training to fall back on.

The acrobats are like classical musicians.

The clowns play jazz.

So even though I know our comic acts like a saxophone player knows the chord changes of a well-worn standard, I must infuse every moment with a percolating sense of spontaneity.

And like a good jazz musician, I’ll try to shut down the inhibitions and restraint that live in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, get out of my own way and just play.

Jazz Musician