Traveling With David Mamet in the '60's

Thursday, December 31, 2009


  First, since this blog has just rolled off the assembly line, let me take a one small paragraph to describe what a "sunbug" is: broadly speaking it refers to sheer, naked ambition. We Americans know all about this and it shocks or dismays or otherwise unsettles most of the rest of the world. This blog is about ambition & David Mamet's characters, quite a few of them, reflect having a problem with "ambition". Is being ambitious good? Is greed good? Do we, as a people, commonly look up the highway to the horizon and see the rainbow of our "15 minutes of fame" to light our way?
  I think we do and I was fortunate enough to be around a few people, in my early '20's, who went on to become famous. David Mamet is one of them.
  David has always worked hard as a writer and you probably would not be reading this blog if you did not know his work. Funny thing is, when you know someone as a friend, BEFORE fame & recognition changes their life, you reflect on the work that person produces differently.
  I met David Mamet at Goddard College, a tiny little school set up in the boonies of Northern Vermont, a pretty little campus folded into the hills of a Robert Frost poem. It was started up in the '30's by some sorta radical-chic lefties from where? Boston and NYC, just like most of us were. Or soon would be. I had roamed the Village in 1962 and listened to alotta folk music. I was a folk-singer, too. I had seen Odetta and the Kingston Trio and Pete Seeger Live, man. And Mamet had schmoozed at Second City in Chicago, catching the Theater bug that would lead him to enormous fame as a writer/director.
  Chicago was a city I also knew, because I grew up in the Midwest. I had them coming and going! I was a unique little character in my own right, already. And my buddy, my newest and best friend of 1964, was David Mamet, Sons of the Plains.
  Now, Goddard College in the '60's was on the cultural map of the East Coast as a hip place to be. You got no grades there from the professors. You pretty much studied what you wanted. Every student took a 3 month "work-study" semester in the dead of winter to go off into the Real World and find a Real Job and Work. The real draw-back and what eventually killed the school as we knew it (It has been reincarnated several times and is reportedly alive and well today, though changed) is that there was only a small selection of people walking around campus as students to find a friend in. Plus you were set off a mile from a sleepy little Norman Rockwell painting-come-to-life called Plainfield, which is a story unto itself, a town completely separated from the lifestyle most of us came from.
  David was a year younger than me so showed up in my second, "Sophomore", year. He was from Chicago. Like I say, there were not many people to chose from so one cannot say for sure, in retrospect, if David and I would have been close friends in any other environment. But at Goddard, we clicked. Referring back to the subject at hand: was David Mamet ambitious at this time? Golly, no, not on the surface, at all! He was like a puppy after a bath in the sprinkler: energetic, open, funny, laughed a lot, cracking a smile every time he came to you.
  One thing to remember, ALL of us, back in those days, of the set where Mamet & I came from, were budding artistes.
  The later generations of teenagers who use ring tones, clothing or makeup or filthy language & rap-music to make their "unique" social statement are surely a mystery to those of us who came of age in the early sixties; we who, yes, are of the generation that watched, reverently [&rightly so, it turns out], as the Beatles & Bob Dylan & the   Stones, were born, literally before our very eyes.
  Many of our generation were revolting against the Catch-22 inherent in American life. With astonishing clarity as children, we had stood by helpless & repulsed, as the '50's were grinding on; we, each of us, alone, often physically sick in dead of winter, bided our time as our mothers and fathers stupidly enslaved themselves to a freaking 9-5 job and fretted over what the neighbors thought. McCarthy had cast his fascist shadow over America. Many of our parents all had ulcers, were in debt, were divorced or divorcing [as were my parents during that year I met Mamet]
  The point was: Be alive and Create. Shit, the most creativity our parents ever showed was picking out the new car every year! Screw That! We drove clunkers and fixed 'em up ourselves: we were making up our own rules. Yeah, Buddy: Look Out: Our Generation was gonna Sing and Write and travel the world on jets and be Free! The Republican Party & Frank Sinatra were OVER, man. We loved Rock'n Roll & The Blues.
  We may have lost JFK. He was dead almost a year now, but we knew what he had taught us: This is a NEW Frontier, baby! We got NEW Ideas and we're gonna Create a Different World with Art: You just watch. "Get outta the way, if you can't lend a hand, 'Cause the Times they are a'Changin', sang Dylan." And, by the way, that war in Viet Nam you got us signed up for? you gotta be kidding with that. Take that and the draft board and shove it. There aint gonna BE nor more war: are GONNA CHANGE THE WORLD.
  It was not some pose you put on for the world: you just really had already partaken of the soon to be bitter truth, that you either were creative or you were shunned. You died, socially and in every other way if you did not have some creative schtick.
  Mine was guitar and singing: infact, when I met David that Fall of '64, I had already written two or three songs, sung them in public at numerous coffee houses coast-to-coast, and one of them had been notated by someone at a drama workshop and been performed in a play.
I wasn't famous, yet, but I was more famous than David Mamet, or so the facts would seem. An actress of the stature of Rebecca Pidgeon would have been unattainable, even for a cup of coffee. Come to think of it, the woman I remember he was enamored of looked looked a lot like her.
  He was right out of high school & made it definitely clear, from the outset, he was into theater. I remember he got together, within hours [literally] of our first meeting, an improv group. See, he had worked as a sort of gopher, during the previous summer, at Second City in Chicago. He knew all the Second City people. In Chicago, he was already in the "In Crowd" --- this is history, according to his bio published everywhere these days. So I guess he had. Funny thing is: I never remember him ever talking about that. Gee, if I had met Mike Nichols and Elaine May and then went off to College, I think I would have told my friends what it was like to know them. And he never talked about that, so, one or two things seem to be true here: ONE/ He never had worked at Second City, yet. Or Two/ He was simply modest and unassuming and not thought it a big deal.
I am mystified with this, because neither solution makes sense. The David Mamet I knew would DEFINITELY mentioned his brush with the rich and famous if it had occurred.
  You see where I am going with this? Dylan worked in carnivals and hopped the freight cars, too, when he was 15. Or so the story went for awhile.
  Time kept on ticking, ticking into the future. David & I hitched down to Provincetown one rainy weekend from Vermont. It was just a lark. We both had girlfriends, of course, and I remember both of us were hurting from some of the mysteries of falling in love. I kept it all inside but that was the magic of knowing him as a friend because he did NOT! Hitching down a Vermont road in the early morning, [we walked and talked as we tossed our thumbs out to passing cars, the cold air creating clouds and fun and laughter --- always his laughter, and his big, brawling speaking voice] David laughing, "Man, she loves me! It's not fair!". I, with my guitar [I bet] slung over my shoulder [no case, like the moron I was, in those days] hitting the road with my Best Friend.
  Somehow we made it to Provincetown that night. We were working on a tight time-frame because 1)Of course we had no money, who did in those days? truly, we had no money! & 2)We had to get back to school and not miss too many classes.
  This little journey is still vivid in my mind for one important fact: We, almost inevitably, met up with a gay man. A little older than he and I, neither having even gotten into our twenties yet. Fucking Teenagers, man!
  The point we were making, of course, was that this was a Journey into the Unknown. We were FREE and footloose and we were leaving our love-life problems behind. Or so we thought.
And, with no money, we had to find a "free" place to crash for the night.
  I cannot remember the gay man's name but I can remember how lonely he was. And he was quite clear that a bed was available to us, individually or collectively, with a little sex thrown in. I think he even offered me and David a bottle of wine [surprise!!].
  Don't forget, we are both really young, teen-agers, out on a lark, far from home. And we are tired. It's been a tricky set of jumps from one highway to another and scrounging a ride all the way to Provincetown has really made us tired. Even David, always sassy and funny and clowning around, is subdued. It is night, near where the Pilgrims first landed. The Summer of Love is still four years in the future.
      ~~~To Be Continued Soon~~~

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