Forty Years Ago Today in Brooklyn: Draft Physical at Fort Hamilton

From an 18-year-old Brooklyn College freshman's diary:

Friday, January 9, 1970

I got up at five, and Dad drove me to Fort Hamilton in the four-degree darkness. First about 150 of us were seated in an orientation room, the roll was called & we went through an hour mental test.

After an hour filling out endless forms in quadruplicate, the actual physical began. It was just like Alice's Restaurant: I was "inspected, injected, rejected."

I took off everything but my shoes & shorts & waited on endless benches to have everything checked: my vision, hearing, blood pressure, urine, blood tests, height (5'4"), weight (130!) & everything else.

Finally at about one, I was allowed to get dressed & presented my doctors' letters to the guy at stop #11. (All the soldiers were expectedly gruff, especially a sergeant who looked like Flip Wilson.) He classified me 1-Y, said I would be rejected for a year, and said I could go home.

I called Dad & he picked me up. A quick late lunch, and then I was off to school. The French final was pleasant & not hard. Exams may make some people nervous, but the mental working relaxes me.

It's difficult to believe that there are no more classes this term - I'm going to miss some of my friends, but hopefully I'll be seeing them in the future. I'm going to take this weekend off to relax, & then I'll study next week.

The family went out to eat, but I was so exhausted I just had a hamburger at home. Tonight it's supposed to get even colder - it's going to be in the 40's in Miami.

We couldn't write for shit in those days, so there's a lot we can remember that we left out:

How they distributed from bags two of the new 30-cent subway/bus tokens to everyone.

How the guy who took your clothes in a plastic bag and put them on hangers had one arm, just like our friend Bud from Marine Park and others had told us.

How we checked, along with all our other physical and mental defects, "homosexual tendencies" and how the sergeant who reviewed our papers asked us why we checked that and if we had sex with men. Turning beet red, we said, "No, I'm only 18," and nobody laughed, and the sergeant said, "So why did you check that box?" We said softly, "I like guys, I guess," and the sergeant smiled and said, "Then you'll like the army; we got a lot of guys here."

How, curious, we tried to watch someone ahead of us get his blood taken to see what it was like and when we lifted the curtain a little, a sergeant yelled, "Stop that, you'll faint if you see it" and we said, "I don't faint at the sight of blood" and he didn't say anything back.

How the little hearing booth was really claustrophobic but it didn't bother us because we didn't have claustrophobia and how we would later hear from friends who were freaked out by it or pretended to be freaked out by it.

How we had notes about our agoraphobia and anxiety attacks from our former psychiatrist, Dr. Lippman from Albemarle Road, and our then-current psychologist, Dr. Wolk from Concord Village, and how the guy at station #11 said the psychologist's note was no good, but the note from the M.D. saying our prognosis was guarded was good enough to keep us out of the army.

And how we never heard from Selective Service again. We thought "1-Y" meant "one year" but that wasn't quite right.

Years later, we learned that our brother's friend's sister was a secretary to our draft board in Coney Island, and she was quietly taking home with her in a big pocketbook the manila folders - the only records at the time - of guys she knew in the neighborhood and thought shouldn't go to Vietnam. She recognized our name, and although she knew us only slightly she figured we would not make a good soldier, even in a national emergency, which was the true nature of the 1-Y classification.

She was right.

For a much more articulate account of a Vietnam-era draft physical, read Doug Rigg's "Adventures at Fort Hamilton." And other guys who got their 1-Y classificatons from Fort Hamilton draft physicals include the great guitarist Waddy Wachtel and former Democratic National Committee chair and Vermont Governor Howard Dean.

Superstition Mountain Press publishes Richard Grayson's SPRING IN BROOKLYN

Supersitition Mountain Press announces the publication of Richard Grayson's Spring in Brooklyn (ISBN #978-0-557-28195-4), featuring entries from the author's diary for the spring of 1975, when he was a 23-year-old first-year creative writing MFA student at Brooklyn College and a first-time college teacher at Long Island Univerity.

The 214-page paperback has a retail price of $12.50 and is also available for $2.99 for the Kindle from Amazon and as a free download at Scribd.

Saturday Afternoon in Northeast Mesa: Driving in the Desert

Our mom, who has Alzheimer's, is sadly deteriorating, and it's a big strain on everyone. But she still loves to take drives in the late mornings and afternoons.

We often go from our house in Apache Junction to the northeast, up to look at the expensive homes on the roads leading to the mountains in the far northeast corner of Mesa.

One mountain has the Phoenix sign, on top. Today was warm and sunny, and we sit the back seat with our parents in front, just the way we did back in Brooklyn in the early 1950s when we were close to 6 and not 60.

For someone who lived for so many years in lush, semitropical Florida, the Sonoran Desert originally seemed ugly and barren to us.

"It's all brown all the time," one of our South Florida friends, once said of Arizona.

Well, sort of. But we like to come out here. We still prefer the excitement of street life in the city or the beaches of Florida or the gorgeousness of Gainesville. But we've come to appreciate the stark beauty.

Not that the desert gives a shit what we think of it.

"The finest quality of this...desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going.

Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert." - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Besides, this is hardly the wilderness. Wildernesses don't have Walgreens.

Superstition Mountain Press publishes Richard Grayson's WINTER IN BROOKLYN

Supersitition Mountain Press announces the publication of Richard Grayson's Winter in Brooklyn (ISBN #978-0-557-25741-6), featuring entries from the author's diary for the winter of 1971-72, when he was a 20-year-old junior at Brooklyn College.

The 184-page paperback has a retail price of $12.00 and is also available for $2.99 for the Kindle at Amazon and as a free download at Scribd.

Tuesday Night in Tempe: Michael Montlack and "My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them" at Changing Hands Bookstore

We went back to the fabulous Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe for the second evening event in a row, and we're glad we did.

Michael Montlack, whose poetry we've admired for years, gave a wonderful reading from and talk about the well-received anthology he conceived and edited, My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them.

Like last night's event, it drew a smallish (about twenty) but enthusiastic crowd, including Big Bird sitting in the back row. We all pretty much adored Michael's talk about how he came to create My Diva and his readings, assisted by a friend, of not just his own essay but those of several wonderful writers who are among his 65 contributors.

The book has received wonderful notices, such as this rave in Publishers Weekly:

In very short, very tender essays, a variety of gay male writers, from poets to playwrights to a standup comic, pay homage to an even wider variety of women who have inspired them. Peter Dubé writes how the photography of Claude Cahun suggested "a delirious world of possibilities"; Jeff Oaks recalls a childhood of wearing wristbands fashioned from paper cups to emulate his "model of power," Wonder Woman; Christopher Lee Nutter looks back on his closeted teenage years and how Sade taught him "that there was a world somewhere that suited them better than the world they'd been born into"...such standout pieces as Mark Doty on Grace Paley are elegant and affectionate tributes to how these muses have been "fairy godmothers" and "older sisters," as Montlack's introduction explains, and illustrate how complex, sustaining and lifelong are the bonds between gay men and their divas.

And Library Journal:

The essays, mostly three to five pages, are touching and thoughtful as well as funny, as they lovingly detail what each author's personal diva has meant to him. Show business and popular culture icons abound, with most of the usual suspects present (Liza, Marlene, Cher, both Bettes, and Joan), as well as choices from history and politics (Elizabeth I, Eva Perón), the culinary arts (Julia Child, Jennifer Patterson), and even fictitious figures (Auntie Mame, Princess Leia, Endora)...This is one of those delightful books you can open at random and be amused, enlightened, or moved by.

Michael, who divides his time between New York City, where he'a an English professor at Berkeley College, and San Francisco, discussed how he came up with the idea of the book, a departure from his work in poetry (his chapbooks include Girls, Girls, Girls, The Slip and Cover Charge).

He found that nearly all the gay male writers he solicited as contributors were immediately excited about the idea of writing about their personal divas; their only concern was that someone else might reserve her first. It turned out there were few overlapping requests. There's a diva for everyone, it seems.

After discussing how the book was put together, Michael read his own essay on his diva, Stevie Nicks, whom he's loved since viewing her on MTV in the early 1980s during his Long Island childhood.

The essays Michael read are fairly brief but interestingly varied. Surprisingly, the most stereotypical divas -- the trinity of Judy, Barbra and Madonna -- were not among them, but there were some fascinating choices. (Michael said he got a little grief early on for having such a "non-traditional" diva as Stevie Nicks.) For example, "Heart of a King" by Patrick Letellier is an appreciation of what the author admits is a "nerd's diva," Queen Elizabeth I.

RJ Gibson's penetrating look at Annie Lennox takes off from her legendary appearance with the Eurythmics at the 1984 Grammy Awards ("Mom, is that a guy?") and evolves into a meditation on androgyny.

We especially liked the unconventional selection of the brilliant and underrated comedian Margaret Dumont in Christopher Murray's "The Duchess of Dignity," which has brilliant insights about the Marx Brothers' straight woman as a role model for how a ridiculed outcast can maintain her power and grace.

And delicious is the first word we can think of for one of the essays on a fictional diva (others in the book include Princess Leia and Auntie Mame), "Afternoons with Endora" by the always-worth-reading Richard Blanco, who chronicles how the witch created by Agnes Moorehead on TV's Bewitched served to empower a sensitive Miami kid constantly ridiculed and demeaned by his homophobic abuela. Like the other divas, Endora helped a young man survive and thrive.

We look forward to reading the contributors' other essays in My Diva. Thanks to Changing Hands (don't forget their annual New Year's Day sale) and to Michael Montlack for tonight's event, and if he ever decides to do a sequel, we know at least one diva who merits inclusion.

Monday Night in Tempe: Mary Z. Maher and "Actors Talk About Shakespeare" at Changing Hands Bookstore

On a cool, pleasant evening, we drove over from Apache Junction to our favorite bookstore of all time, Changing Hands in Tempe, for a fascinating talk by Mary Z. Maher on her new book, Actors Talk About Shakespeare.

The book features interviews with Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Zoe Caldwell, Derek Jacobi, Stacy Keach, Nicholas Pennell, Geoff Hutchings and other American, Canadian and British actors talking about acting Shakespearean roles. Maher, who taught acting and Shakespeare at the University of Arizona, worked on BBC's The Shakespeare Plays series and has published over 50 articles and book chapters in her field, and her earlier book Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies is a classic in performance studies.

Maher now lives in Ashland, Oregon, home of the famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she lectures on the art of performing Shakespeare. We felt lucky to hear her talk over a wide range of issues related to the subject tonight.

She began by decrying the lack of documentation of acting performances and stage productions in the United States, saying that "when the curtain is struck, not a rack is left behind." Actors' unions make difficult the videotaping of theatrical performances, which with today's technology, wouldn't be that expensive. As a scholar, this lack has made her work difficult and frustrating; there really is no way we can compare Shakespearean acting styles of, say, the 1920s, 1950s and today.

There are some wonderful video resources, Maher said, at a few places, like the Billy Rose Performing Arts Library (near the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University, where we teach), but it's limited to one-time screenings by scholars, and Maher complained that there were no decent video performances of, say, the Lears of Stacy Keach or Kevin Kline.

So Maher began interviewing actors for her Hamlet soliloquies book and this one as a way of providing a record of some sort of these ephemeral but often historic performances. She began shyly, but actors, Maher said, taught her how to do interviews, and she told a charming story about Ben Kingsley, who'd suggested they do a Saturday morning interview at the Lyric Hammersmith Theater, unaware that a hundred noisy kids would be there for a drama group. The old pro Kingsley showed her how to muffle the sound so her tape recorder would work and proved generous with his time and insights.

Clearly, Maher is smitten with her subjects, some of whom are happy to go over the limited time periods they originally scheduled (Kenneth Branagh offered her only an hour but then said he'd come back for a much longer session once he'd "had a pee") and some of whom, like Kevin Kline, seem to have become her friends.

Aided by photos of some of the actors in their classic Shakespeare roles, Maher told some wonderful stories (and withheld others, like the theatrical gossip about co-stars and directors told to her by the legendary Zoe Caldwell). It's easy to get swept up in Maher's enthusiasm for her subject, and she tells nice stories on herself too, like the time Tom Stoppard startled her at Waterstone's in Stratford-Upon-Avon by coming behind her and putting his hand on her shoulder and praising her theater scholarship.

She called Kenneth Branagh "the king of networking" and described him going into "his little professor persona" as he talked about his work with such precision. Zoe Caldwell explained in painstaking deal how she prepares for a role like Cleopatra. And Derek Jacobi (who we saw in the wonderful Royal Shakespeare production of Much Ado a quarter-century ago) was frank about the shortcomings of some of his directors.

Kevin Kline seems to be Maher's favorite, inviting her to rehearsals of both theatrical productions and his work as a director for TV's PBS version of Hamlet. But it's obvious that Maher loves all the actors who's given her interviews, and she's got a treasure trove of stories about them; during the enlightening Q&A period, Maher proved just as interesting in her opinions of various Shakespeare productions.

Her favorite play? A Midsummer Night's Dream, which "unfolds like magic." She's naturally a partisan of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but she seems open to all kinds of productions of the Bard's plays, including Henry VIII and perhaps even Two Noble Kinsmen. Her books sound fascinating and we look forward to reading them.

Wednesday Morning in East Mesa: Christmas Eve Shopping at the Signal Butte Wal-Mart SuperCenter

After getting the New York Times and iced tea at the Starbucks on Signal Butte Road in far east Mesa near our house this morning, we moseyed over to the shopping center across the street to check out Christmas Eve shopping at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter.

It was just 9 a.m., but we thought the store would be more crowded.

The Great Recession has hit this part of the Phoenix metro area hard, with lots of foreclosures and a halt and reversal of the phenomenal Arizonan growth early in this decade (our house was bought in 1999).

Where we live, the Apache Junction unified school district, whose greatest problem always seemed to be keeping up with demands of an exponentially growing community, is now contemplating closing two schools due to fewer students.

Although yesterday's Census figures show Arizona still growing slightly, local leaders suspect the numbers are a desert mirage and that Cactus State growth is at a standstill or even declining like our former home state of Florida.

Still, we were surprised by the empty aisles and lack of shoppers. Of course, maybe everyone did their Christmas shopping on time. Or maybe the last-minute people will come later in the day.

Anyway, according to the New York Times blog Bucks yesterday:

Retailing groups...have been noticing that shoppers have been procrastinating a bit more than usual this year. According to the National Retail Federation’s 2009 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch and released last week, the average person had completed 46.7 percent of their holiday shopping by the second week of December, less than the 47.1 percent completed by this time last year and the lowest percentage since 2004.

But most of the people at the cash registers seemed to be buying groceries, not gifts.

Certainly, a few people were stocking up on Christmas presents, but we didn't see much evidence of frantic last-day shopping here.

Of course, we have nothing to compare what we saw today with, so this could be a very good Christmas shopping season for all we know.

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, our family had a place at the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop, the South's largest flea market, and we were highly attuned to the ups and downs of Christmases in years of recession and boom.

For the sake of the 2010 economy and our fragile recovery, let's hope everyone got out and spent more than we did.

After paying about $16 for socks and underwear - with only one guy with one item ahead of us at the cash register - we headed home to Apache Junction. As often as we see it, we're always in awe as we approach majestic Superstition Mountain.

Merry Christmas!