Bob Sickinger Is Dead – Long Live Sickinger!

Bob Sickinger Is Dead – Long Live Sickinger!

If John Hersey is remembered today it is for Hiroshima.  The book I remember is The Child Buyer.  Our paperback had a memorably menacing cover: a boy sits, book in his lap, looking up at a hulking figure in dark raincoat and hat.  In 1967 an oil version painted by the illustrator’s roommate won Honorable Mention at the Mystic Seaport art fair, and hung on our walls for many years.  I read the book in March of 1966 while commuting to an acting school, Jack & Jill Players.  I was reading a lot of dystopic fiction at the time – Brave New World, 1984, Brotherhood of Velvet – and my dad, who had recommended the others, steered me to this one. 

The story unfolds as the transcript of hearings by a state senate subcommittee in the town of Pequod, Connecticut.   Civil disturbances occur in the town, and the senators come to get to the bottom of things.  As the testimony details recent events, we learn that a mysterious figure, Wissey Jones, Vice-President of the large corporation, United Lymphomilloid of America (an important defense contractor) , arrived in town and set about trying to purchase a ten-year old boy named Barry Rudd.  It seems that Barry has an IQ of 189, and U. L. of A. seeks out brilliant children like Barry, buys them “before the schools ruin them,” and then turns them into organic thinking machines by removing most of their sensory organs and sterilizing them, though a few select ones “are bred.”  Buying children, Jones explains, is never simple; one must buy off not only the parents but any who assert a tie, the “buying” often in the form of wishes granted rather than actual cash.

One afternoon in April, a month after reading the book, Franklin Adams, the headmaster at Jack & Jill Players, called my mother and asked if I would audition at the Jane Adams Center of Hull House, 3212 N. Broadway: they were looking for a boy to play Barry Rudd in an upcoming production of The Child Buyer.

To get to Hull House I had to ride the Chicago & Northwestern down to the Loop, then walk to State Street and catch the Howard L north to Belmont Avenue.  It was a half mile walk from there to Broadway.  The area is now called Boys Town, years ago it was called New Town, or at least the portion south of Belmont, especially along Clark and along Broadway, was called that.  The official name is Lakeview, but as far as I know it wasn’t called anything in particular in 1966. It was far from the worst neighbourhood in Chicago, but in those days was still rough around the edges, which was probably why Hull House had a branch there.

The original Hull House was a mansion on the near west side owned by a family named Hull.  By the 1880s the mansion was in a festering slum district when it was taken over by a remarkable woman named Jane Adams who turned it into the nation’s first settlement house.  Fifty years ago there were five branches of Hull House, three of which had stages and theatre programs.

In 1963 Hull House hired a Philadelphian named Robert “Bob” Sickinger as director of its theatre program. He had charge of all three theatres, but the flagship was in the Jane Adams Center on Broadway. 

Chicago in those days had drifted into the horse latitudes of theatre.  Once the nation’s theatrical second city, the home base for vaudeville chains, the city where Laurette Taylor introduced Amanda Wingfield, by many considered the greatest stage performance of the 20^th century, it was by the 1960s reduced to a few grand old theatres, the Schubert, the Blackstone, and the Studebaker, where the road companies of Broadway hits passed through on their way elsewhere.  There were only a few promising signs on the horizon.  The Compass Players of the University of Chicago had moved to Old Town, changing their name to Second City.  The dinner theatres Candlelight Playhouse and Drury Lane were playing in the distant suburbs.  There were some amateur theatre guilds here and there.  But no one was doing what in New York City they were calling Off Broadway theatre. No one until Bob came along and began staging Off Broadway shows on Broadway. 

Hull House was an amateur theatre, but Bob was offering Ionesco, Pinter, Albee, and other works that are forgotten now but were extremely controversial when first staged, such as The Brig and The Connection.  Mixed in with the amateurs were smatterings of pros that either received equity waivers or appeared under assumed names.  David Mamet volunteered there as a sixteen-year old, a few years before my time (and called Bob the greatest director he ever worked with).  There was a young fellow named Jim Jacobs lurking when I was there, but I never met the guy who shared my surname. A few years later he would write a musical about his high school days called Grease.  I did meet Bob Kidder (if that was his name – there were rumours about the lack of equity waiver causing him to change it).  I also met Mike Nussbaum, who replaced Bob as Senator Mansfield in The Child Buyer.  Plays were routinely double cast in those days, though I am not sure why.  Also cast was the urbane Don Marston, an English professor at I.I.T. who later became president of Columbia College.  Don spoke perfect Yiddish, among other accomplishments, to the bemusement of the Jewish members of the cast, because Don was “a WASP, though I think it should be ASP; if you are Anglo-Saxon Protestant the ‘White’ is redundant.” Don was our first Wissey Jones.  (He was also double cast.)

I say “our” because I got the part.  I was never actually told I had the part, but Bob told me to come back and read a couple of times, and no one else ever “read” – I learned some years later a friend of mine from Jack & Jill, Rick Wolcott, had also auditioned, but not while I was around.  All other parts had been cast, so they may have been getting desperate by the time I showed up, though we had two months before opening night.  Still, he never said the words, instead dropping subtle hints: “Don’t get your hair cut;” and “Your family wasn’t planning to take a vacation this summer?”

Not long after I began rehearsing I was told that I should report for extra rehearsals at Sickinger’s apartment.  The Sickingers lived near the theatre, on Aldine, two blocks north of Belmont.  There I found myself working with Selma Sickinger, Bob’s wife.  Bob was, for a theatrical genius, which he undoubtedly was, utterly unprepossessing.  He had the flat-nosed look of an ex-pug, and seemed open and simple.  He was neither, but at least when I was around he was anything but brilliant, yet somehow marvelous things happened onstage as if by accident.  Selma was as sharp as Bob was blunt; sharp featured, sharp-witted, and sharp tongued.  She was quick to tell me that I was terrible, but “the Director” knew what to do, and she was the one to do it to me.

I’ve read that when Moss Hart directed My Fair Lady he found young Julie Andrews not up to the part of Eliza. Andrews had enjoyed breakout success in The Boy Friend, playing a part not much different from her.  She was twenty years old when cast as Eliza Doolittle, opposite Rex Harrison, a great star and an even greater asshole.  Hart did something nearly unprecedented, and shut down rehearsals for several days while he gave Andrews line readings for the entire play.  To her credit she took the instruction as a gift, not an insult, and, as they say, the rest is history.

I was twelve, and had so far appeared in two shows, as the admiral in Sound Of Music, and as Bill Sikes in Oliver.  This was an era when Stella Adler and Lee Strasbourg taught the methods of Boleslavsky and Stanislavsky.  Mr Adams was a former child star who had played Skippy on radio; he taught the method of Hormel.  Selma did an imitation of my delivery, complete with wide eyes, breathless manners, and a big, artificial smile. Evidently I was playing Barry like a cross between Scarlett O’Hara and Bozo the Clown. “People don’t talk like that. It isn’t natural. We will fix that.”  Scene by scene, line by line she went through my part.  The coaching went on for several weeks, and by then I could deliver as ordered.

As the opening neared we rehearsed later and later.  By then school was out, but my parents didn’t want me wandering the streets and riding the L late at night, though that rule would be relaxed as the summer wore on.  The week before the opening we rehearsed every night, doing a complete run through, followed by the director’s notes.  After the rehearsal everyone would walk south on Broadway to an Italian restaurant named Dominick’s.  Whatever happened to fishnet ceilings with straw-covered Chianti bottles hanging from the mesh?  Dominick’s served pizza, which was enough to convince my father that we should join the cast there before driving back to Des Plaines.  I could sleep in, but he had to be up in the morning.  The first night we headed home at midnight, the next twelve-thirty, and by final dress rehearsal it was two o’clock.  One night we both woke up when his tires hit the curb on the Kennedy at sixty.

The theatre was in the round, and seated about two hundred.  The senators and their aide, Mr Broadbent, used the dressing room behind the set, which was done up as a hearing room.  The rest of us, men, women, and boys, used a classroom on the second floor, down a hallway behind the seats, out the door, down a corridor, through the lobby, and up a flight of stairs.  Preview night was Thursday, June 23^rd, two days before my thirteenth birthday.  It was a hot summer, and the theatre had an old and overworked air-conditioner that complained loudly when running.  Projection, even in that small space, mattered.  As I ducked around the seats at the end of Act One, hurrying before the lights came up and the crowd went out for the first intermission, I spotted Selma with an old man coming around from the other side.

“Was I loud enough?” I asked her.

Her companion replied: “You were fine, son.”  I learned later it was Will Leonard of the Tribune, the first critic to review us.

The noisy air-con was the bane of our existence. Bob was constantly fiddling with it, turning it on and off. Actors would be projecting with all their might, and suddenly find they were shouting in a quiet hall because Bob had turned off the air-conditioner.  They would lower their voice, but the theatre would start to bake, and they would be drowned out by the resumption of cooling.  The air-conditioner broke down under this assault, and most nights the theatre would be sweltering.  There was a 31 Flavors across Broadway, and the audience would troop over to cool off.  It took twenty minutes to lure them back, and this was a three act play, so we had to rope them back twice. They liked the show, or we would have lost them.

Personally I would have gone next door to the bookstore, which sold avant garde stuff; I remember MacBird on display in their window.

My first scene came at the end of Act One.  The act was long.  Plays used to be published by a company named Samuel French, the scripts in soft and colourful bindings slightly larger than the standard paperback book, albeit thinner.  The Child Buyer was just over seventy pages, and the first of the three acts ended on page thirty-five.  Most of the other characters had done their first turn on the witness stand, and the audience had been hearing about Barry for nearly an hour.  My scene began on page twenty-six, and ran for ten pages, nearly twenty minutes.  I learned the whole part in one week, but naturally worried about forgetting a line.  I got into the (bad) habit of reviewing my part while playing it.  I could see the script in my mind as though I was holding it in front of me; see the actual pages including the page numbers.  While telling the senators how I loved words, words like: “…platykurtic, mellific, inspissation …” I would read ahead to where I inform Senator Voyolko that it is possible to spell ‘fish’ g-h-o-t-i: “GH as in ‘rough,’ O as in ‘women,’ and TI as in ‘nation.’” By the time I was actually telling him that, I had finished the act and was reading Act Two, where we discuss the sex life of the stickleback.  I would read all the way through to the Act Three curtain, then go back and start all over, and catch up to myself before the end of the scene.

The other actors were amazed by my consistency.  I gave a nearly identical performance night after night.  There were two exceptions.  One came the night I forgot to remove my ring.  Barry came from a poor family, and Bob had me wearing old clothes (including an old sports coat, so I was kind of ‘dressed up’ for court) and had me rat my hair, which by then was long.  In the final act after my parents have received money and gifts I turn up with combed hair, a new suit, and wearing some rings and an ID bracelet.  One day I was on stage for the first scene when I realized I was still wearing a gold-plated ring with my initials.  I slipped my hand in my sports coat pocket, and tried to tease the ring off my finger without being obvious.  Several people told me my performance was spontaneous that night.

The other night came about this way. There was one other boy in the cast. Barry’s best friend was a thirteen-year old delinquent named Flattop, and the first of the two boys cast in the part was a fifteen-year old delinquent named Richie.  He asked me one day if I knew Brando.  “Sure, The Wild One is one of my favourite movies!” No, he said, not that Brando, he meant the one hanging around the theatre.  “There is a Brando hanging around the theatre!?”  There was. He was twenty-four, Puerto Rican, had an alligator leather eyepatch, a goatee, and shoulder length hair tied back in a ponytail.  He was an aspiring actor, taking classes at Hull House, and hanging around backstage to listen to the show almost every night.

“I went to the third floor john to have a smoke …” We both used it, figuring it unlikely anyone would catch us up there. “Brando was smoking a funny-looking cigarette. He said it was ‘grass,’ but I know what it really was.” I told Richie he was undoubtedly right. Neither of us had heard the term ‘grass’ used for marijuana, so we thought Brando was trying to pretend he was smoking real grass, from a lawn. 

We hid in one of the stalls, in ambush.  “Give us some of that or we’ll tell!”

Perhaps it was because the quality was poor in those days, but like many people I knew, the first several times we joined Brando the ‘grass’ had no effect.  Then one day he was joined by a friend of his, Jean.  Jean was an orderly on a psych ward who had volunteered for experiments with psychedelic drugs, including LSD, Mescaline, and Psilocybin.  “Mescaline will be your thing,” he told me.  Jean had a fat reefer of ‘gold’ he shared with us and … I got high.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it struck me too late that it was not a good idea to be in this state when I was supposed to be onstage!

I managed it, and Terry, the stage manager, made a point of telling me that he thought I had been exceptionally good that night. Not until I cracked that “Brando had some good stuff tonight” did it dawn on me this was not a smart thing to confide. Terry shook me, and called me a “stupid little shit,” and threatened to punch out Brando.  Brando never mentioned any repercussion, but he stopped toking up in the upstairs john.

There is a lesson for actors here, about the benefits of spontaneity, but please choose a different method than I did.

Brando also gave me some acting tips.  There wasn’t much to be done in the earlier scenes, which I played from the witness stand.  At the end of the play the hearing room is empty, the lights dim.  Only Wissey Jones and I are onstage.  Barry is leaving with the child buyer. In the end, even his price has been met.  His mother has packed his bags, but when he reaches for them, Jones tells him to leave them, as he won’t need any of it.  I nod my understanding, and we exit as the stage goes dark.  With Brando’s coaching, I began picking up a teddy bear and looking at Jones, before relinquishing it.  Bob liked that addition.  One night I added: “Can’t I keep it?”  My co-star whispered “you little ham” while we were doing our curtain call, but that also stayed in.

What a great summer that was!  The show ran three nights a week, Friday through Sunday.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays I was downtown taking classes at Jack & Jill, so I was in the city five days a week.  It was the summer of “Sunshine Superman,” “Cherish,” and “Summer In The City.”  WLS’ reign as the city’s rock ‘n roll station was being challenged by WCFL, and the CFL “sun balls” sprouted on car antennas.  My dad had gotten tired of driving down three nights a week, so several alternatives were employed.  One was for me to walk back to the L and ride to Howard, then take the Skokie Swift which got me halfway home.  We “vacationed” for a week at the Travelodge at Milwaukee and Waukegan Roads, and this was a great alternative that weekend.  (Curiously enough, we met another local family vacationing in beautiful downtown Niles, and became good friends until they moved to New York a few years later.)  Some nights I would ride to the Howard L station, and then walk over to a family friend’s place. She lived on the lake at the end of Howard Street.  Another family friend, Sandy, lived just a few blocks away, on Surf.  I stayed there several nights.  (Two years later Sandy and I toured Europe together.)

One night I was about to walk out the front door to head to Sandy’s when one of the cast grabbed me: “Don’t go out there!”  Just then several boys wearing the standard gang uniform of the day – tight black pants, ‘Dago-Tees,’ and black hats – ran by, with several more following a few seconds later in hot pursuit.  One of the first group had veered up the stairs, and dashed past us into the theatre.  He emerged carrying a metal stand of the kind used to hold cardboard price signs, intending to use it as a weapon.  He was disarmed by my fellow thespians before he could beat “15¢,” the price of a Coke, into the skull of a rival.  After the coast was clear I was ready to walk to Sandy’s, but they insisted I be driven.  It turned out several of the cast had lost antennas, which were used as makeshift weapons in the rumble.

This year was also when Old Town was in its fullest flower.  Old Town was Chicago’s answer to Greenwich Village or Haight-Ashbury.  The bars and restaurants – Pickle Barrel, Earl of Old Town, Chances ‘R, etc. – stretched from Division north to the end of Wells where Lincoln cut across it.  There were specialty shops with black light posters, Indian blankets, and incense.  There was the Up Shop and the Down Shop, the Down Shop selling exotic cigarettes. I tried harsh throat killers like Gitanes and Bulgar Tabac, and milder ones like Jezebel Perfumed Amber from Egypt.  I bought radical books in Barbara’s Bookstore and the shop at the end of Piper’s Alley.  These included Mark Twain’s Letters From Earth, Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, selected writings by Voltaire, and the nearly unreadable Little Red Book of Chairman Mao.  Out on the street an underground paper, the Chicago Seed, was for sale, comparable to the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press, or EVO (the East Village ‘Other,’ because by then the Village Voice was considered stodgy and establishment).  Also in Piper’s Alley was a button shop with buttons reading “Grok,” “Share Water,” “Frodo Lives,” and “C5H4N4O3 on AuH2O!”  And yet another shop in Piper’s Alley was upstairs at the very end, a pizza place that sold pizza in a pan.  Contrary to popular belief, most Chicago pizza has a very thin crust, and is cut hashwise, rather than into pie wedges.  This was the first pan pizza I tried, though it has been around since 1943 when my mom tried the original at Ike Sewell’s Pizzeria, later Pizzeria Uno after Ike opened his second, Pizzeria Due.

It was in Old Town I had my first brushes with being famous.  One day I acted as tour guide for two older cousins, Jay and Glen.  They lived in Mt. Prospect, the next town northwest of Des Plaines, but unlike me and my younger brothers, had seldom seen Chicago.  I took them to Old Town, to lunch at Chances “R, where we threw peanut shells on the floor.  A family at the next table looked around, spotted me, and said: “You’re Barry Rudd!”  Not long after that I was in Barbara’s Bookstore and met Barbara when she poked her head around a book rack, and asked: “Aren’t you Barry Rudd?”  It happened a few more times, once at Lincoln Park Zoo.

I started high school at the beginning of September.  My first day in school the teacher in the next classroom dropped by my homeroom to borrow whatever it is English teachers borrow from each other, spotted me and said: “You’re Barry Rudd!”  Which led to my homeroom teacher and his wife coming down the following Sunday to catch the very last performance.  Also during the first week of school the play led to a different encounter with a teacher.   There was a Mr Blake who taught business courses.  He was six foot five, had a long horselike face and large horselike teeth, and a very short blond crewcut.  He grabbed me by the elbow and lifted me up onto the tip of my toes, then leaned down until he was in my face and I feared he was about to chomp off my nose with his huge teeth.  “You’re getting a haircut, right!” 

“Uh, yes, the play ends … this weekend …” I said to his back, after he dropped me and strode off, looking for other kids to bully.  Mentally, I crossed my fingers and prayed I would make it to the following week without meeting him again.  So much for celebrity.

The Child Buyer ran for twelve weeks, with two extra performances during the run bringing the total to thirty-eight.  It was then the longest running show Hull House had done, most nights playing to full houses.  The reviews had ranged from slightly positive to near raves, one paper calling it “a happy, snappy farce.”  If that sounds like a different play than the one I have so far described, it wasn’t.  There was social satire in Hersey’s novel, and Sickinger milked it.  Some parts played fairly straight: Senator Mansfield, Jones, Barry and his mother, the school principle.  But the others had elements Sickinger tweaked: the brutal blue-collar father who feared Barry might be gay; Senator Skypacker, the venomous Cold Warrior whose anti-intellectual bent made him suspect Barry was born to be a pinko; his colleague, Senator Voyolko, who was senile, drunk, or both; the oleaginous school board president and the platitudinous PTA president (who surely voted for Senator Skypacker).  In some cases the characters were funny in spite of themselves.  Playing Barry’s teacher was an eighty-four year old actress whose real name was Sarah Neiderman, but whose stage name was Paula Gerhardt.  She took herself very seriously.  Sarah never figured out why the audience laughed at her lines. She would complain to Bob who would commiserate with her, then wink at the rest of us.  The comedy made the ending more effective.  It distracted the audience from the horror of what they were hearing.  Sure, Jones was talking about taking a child and turning him into an inhuman thing, and one by one the characters were falling into line, including the teacher, the school principal, even the boy’s mother.  Then Barry agrees to go, having told the senators he knows exactly what the company will do to him, and having decided he is looking forward to it.  That’s the punch the audience never saw coming.

After the play’s end I signed up for an acting class at Hull House.  I learned some of the elements of the Method, sense memories, and how to evoke them, etc.  It proved too hard to commute on school nights, and after one term I dropped.  I continued to act at Jack & Jill Players, and in all of the shows at Maine West.  As late as 1971 I did a show with a short-lived group called the New Chicago City Players, Joseph Heller’s We Bombed In New Haven.  Jim Jacobs lurked somewhere there too, but again, I failed to meet him.

We saw every show at Hull House.  Bob announced one night that he wanted to turn The Child Buyer into a movie, and told my brother that by the time it was filmed I would be too old, so he wanted Munchkin to play Barry.  It never happened, to my (and Munchkin’s) great regret.  Some of the shows included The Tiger & The Typists, The Indian Wants The Bronx, and Mourning Becomes Electra.  Three in particular stood out.

Did he really get away with The Devils!? Yes, he really did.  The play by John Whiting was based on Aldous Huxley’s book, about a group of medieval nuns who in a bout of mass hysteria claim to be possessed by the Devil.  Several years later the film version received an X-rating, and was banned in many countries.  The Hull House production came at a time when a film like The Graduate could, and did, receive an X-rating.  Chicago was the home of the Legion of Decency, still very active, and was firmly under the thumb of the powerful, much feared, and very Catholic Richard J. Daley.  Were those nuns really simulating masturbation on stage!?  The authorities threatened to close it for obscenity, but somehow, it played on.

I think Venable Herndon is a name no longer known, and his Until The Monkey Comes won’t jog any memories, unless you were lucky enough to catch it at Hull House.  Until I saw the original production of Killer Joe at the Next Theatre Annex a quarter of a century later Until The Monkey Comes ranked as the roughest show I ever saw.  Some of that was because of the era when I saw it; boundaries have moved since then.  Oh, Calcutta, which I saw on Rush Street in the seventies, had more nudity and smutty humour, but seemed tame.  Some shows in the eighties, especially at Steppenwolf, were probably as violent.  But Monkey grabbed audiences by the throat.  The cast’s bodies were covered with bruises, on display during the course of the play.  After the curtain call Donna, the stage manager, came out and began collecting ice cubes from the set’s carpeted floor; they were among the debris.  “For the actors’ ice packs,” she told me.

My dad used to grow facial hair every summer, shaving it every fall.  I am not sure why, the courts were in session over the summer, but it was part of his routine.  “I like that,” said Bob.  “I am going to use you. I like that look! I don’t know what I am going to use you for, but when I figure it out, be ready.”  Over two years went by, and then the call came. Dad wasn’t ready.  “Bob, I have court in the mornings. I can’t commit to a play.”  Bob assured him he would be double cast, and would be called only to fill in. he wouldn’t even have to rehearse, except during dress rehearsal week.

The part was that of a prison guard, one with few lines, so a week was just about adequate.  The play was Fortune And Men’s Eyes.  Along with The Boys In The Band, Fortune was a landmark in the history of gay theatre.  The setting is a prison cell, built with verisimilitude right down to the drain in the floor.  Nelson Steel and Wire (Cliff Nelson was a good friend of ours) provided the steel bars, which were half an inch thick.  The floor was concrete. It is a wonder the floor the set rested on didn’t collapse, as the set reputedly weighed three tons.  Fortune And Men’s Eyes ran for sixteen weeks in the winter and spring of 1969, the longest run Sickinger’s Hull House would ever see.  It was a terrific show, its success was bolstered by the gay community; many of them saw the play multiple times.  It also received the first ever review from one particular critic at a major paper who had disdained Sickinger’s shows as “amateur.”  He decided this one was worth reviewing when his current boyfriend found work on the production staff.  Of the forty-eight performances (they still ran three a week) my dad was in forty-five. His part was double cast, but it was the other actor who was the fill-in.

Manipulating my dad was trivial.  What Sickinger did to two others illustrates an important part of his method.  One of the characters in the play is the cell’s bully, Rocky, a hardened criminal compared to the others, who are in for lesser offenses.  One of those is Mona Lisa, who is openly gay.  Rocky it turns out is dealing with issues regarding his own sexuality.  He bullies Mona Lisa mercilessly throughout the play, but winds up dragging him to the shower and raping him.

For the part of Rocky Sickinger cast a nineteen-year old from the West Side who had just served six months for dealing pot.  He had never acted, but he was the character.  He came from a neighbourhood that bordered a Black neighbourhood, and had grown up hating Blacks, battling them in gang fights.  You see where I am going with this? The actor playing Mona Lisa was six-three, but probably weighed one-forty if that. He was a slender reed, and he was Black.  I mentioned that the actor playing Rocky had never been on stage; he had no prior training for the basics of acting, and so had certainly never studied stage fighting.  Sickinger didn’t offer him any coaching on that.  Night after night he beat the living shit out of Mona Lisa.  One night my dad told me he grabbed Mona Lisa’s head and began beating it against the bars.  Those were the half-inch thick steel bars that weighed three tons.  Mona Lisa was “bleeding around his eyes” when he took his curtain call.

That was Sickinger.  He had an instinct.  He couldn’t tell you what he wanted, or why he wanted it, but he could find it in you, and find a way to bring it out.  If that meant getting laughs at their expense, like old Sarah Neiderman, or conning someone like my dad into working for four months because Bob liked the moustache, that was benign by his standards.  But he also tapped into the demons lurking within the actor playing Rocky.  When Rocky rapes Mona Lisa whatever it is Bob saw in him came out, even if the actor didn’t quite understand his own impulses.  If you think that is harsh, what the fuck did Bob find in the actor playing Mona Lisa that he would let himself be beaten bloody onstage time and again?

I graduated from high school in June of 1969, shortly after the end of Fortune’s run.  I went to work as a law clerk for my dad.  My stage career was more or less over.  The State of Illinois allowed fifteen-year olds to apply for a learner’s permit and I had taken driver’s ed my last term at Maine, but the teacher was a jerk who chose his favourites and concentrated on teaching them while ignoring the rest.  I was unprepared, and so my folks signed me up for a course with North Shore Driving School.  The instructor would pick me up in front of 188 West Randolph on my lunch hour, and by the time I finished the course and he drove me up to Elston Avenue for my successful test, I had mastered all the important skills including driving in city traffic.

I don’t know how the conversation one lunch hour worked its way around to Selma Sickinger, but she had recently learned to drive (“She never learned how to drive?”) with my instructor.

“She and that husband of hers split,” he told me.  “They were fighting all the time. There’s a place up on Broadway called Dominick’s.” (“Know it well,” I told him.)  “The place is old-style, with the Chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling.  They’re fighting, and Selma stands up – she’s screaming at him – and she starts yanking Chianti bottles, and throwing them at him! They hauled her out of there in a straitjacket.”

Like Bob, Selma was theatrical.

Shortly after, Bob left for New York, leaving the promise that one of these days he would film The Child Buyer hanging in the air. By then Munchkin would have been too old to play it.  I expected to hear great things when Bob conquered Broadway, but the great things never came. 

Our family connection with the stage at 3212 N. Broadway wasn’t over.  Ten years after my dad’s appearance, my mom did a Megan Terry play Attempted Rescue On Avenue B.  It was no longer Hull House; it was a stage for hire.  Attempted Rescue wasn’t much of a play, nor much of a production, but two years later she was back onstage there in Waiting For The Parade, with a group of talented youngsters who called their company Steppenwolf.  Gary Sinise was directing his first show, but already showed signs of a major talent.  The other cast members included Gary’s wife Moira Harris, Rondi Reed, Laurie Metcalfe who had already won a Jefferson the year before for Night, Mother, and Joan Allen, who would break out later that year in And A Nightingale Sang.

Around the turn of the millennium Sickinger returned to Chicago for a single showing of a play in development.  The play was an adaptation of The Blue Angel.  Bob had gone back to the original source, Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel Professor Unrat, bypassing the 1930 von Sternberg film.  The play didn’t quite work, but it was vintage Sickinger.  Leave it to others to do adaptations of comic books and children’s television shows.  He was drawn to a story of base desires leading to madness, and a woman happy to toy with and destroy someone who loves her because she doesn’t respect him.

Bob died the other day; he was eighty-six.  His name has faded from memory, but his theatrical legacy endures.  In the years after he left town Chicago theatre exploded.  New York City saw its own drift into the horse latitudes, and for a decade or so Chicago, with a hundred or more companies creating, exploring, staging, pushing boundaries, became the theatrical capital of the world.  Actors who never stood exposed in the light he shed carried his torch without knowing whose vision they were propagating.  Laurie Metcalfe as the feral savage in Coyote Ugly; Gary Sinise choking John Malkovich with a golf club in True West; Bill Peterson stoving in the side of a metal filing cabinet with his head when the guard tells him his mother is dead in The Belly Of The Beast; Killer Joe’s irrumatio with a drumstick, or the fight inside the refrigerator later in the same play – these are Bob’s children and heirs.

People left the theatre after seeing one of Bob’s shows angry, confused, exhausted, or outraged.  They never left one bored.

Armed and Dangerous

Armed and Dangerous

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend, an intelligent friend, about gun control.  He owns guns himself, which he bought in his home state, California, and stores there. From what he told me the guns are all fairly ordinary – nary a flamethrower or rocket launcher or anti-ballistic missile in the lot – and with each purchase he went through the registration process and two-week waiting period without travail.  Yet, many of the standard arguments against gun control fell from his lips like last night’s dinner from a flock of pigeons.  Later that night I heard Posterity calling out to me: “Jake, the standard arguments need to be preserved, so later generations can see that in the days when their forefathers were card-carrying members of the NRA, the gene pool was already pestilent.”  A debate is called for, and luckily, having read so many of their posts on Facebook, I am familiar with all of their best arguments.  I will let them state their case first, though in the interests of clarity I may help by acting as moderator, prompting them with questions, or restating their point.

Gun Lover – Guns are for hunting.

Jake – Grandpa Walter kept a shotgun on the stairs off the dining room.  For a hundred years a shotgun was more than adequate for killing birdies and bunnies.

GL – You can’t hunt deer with a shotgun.

J – Very true. I wouldn’t think of killing Bambi’s dad and putting his head on the wall – Norman Bates isn’t my idea of an interior decorator – but it is your baby’s nursery.  If you need a dead deer’s head, why not use a bow and arrow? Ted Nugent (speaking of Norman Bates) hunts with a bow and arrow. Unleash your inner rock star, and do the same.

GL – Neither a shotgun nor a bow and arrow will stop a charging rhino or stampeding elephant.

Argument one: You need high powered weapons to kill endangered species.

GL – If you take away my guns, only criminals will have guns. If you ban guns I’ll just buy a 3D printer and make my own illegal arsenal.

Argument Two: You should have unlimited access to guns because you harbor criminal fantasies.

GL – Guns are for protection.  If an army of Colombians armed with Uzis besieges my home a shotgun isn’t enough, it will take an arsenal of automatic weapons to deal with them.

Argument Three: You need an arsenal because you are planning to become a drug kingpin.

GL – If we are invaded, we need our guns to resist!

J – Let me understand this.  Someday China or North Korea or Vanuatu attacks us.  And they are by then so powerful they are able to shrug off our thousand nuclear missiles, depth charge all our nuclear submarines, sink our aircraft carriers like paper boats, shoot down our fighter jets, flatten our tanks, toss back our grenades and mortars, capture our millions of soldiers and sailors and pilots, reduce our Marines to a very few good men, throttle our Green Berets and SEALs and Delta Force with superior kung fu, and then they will cross the ocean with tens of millions in their occupying force, they will brush aside our millions of state police, transit police, sheriff’s police, city police, US Marshalls, FBI, Fire Marshalls, New York City Streets & Sanitation police (yes, really, I had a buddy who used to be one!), casino security guards, and nightclub doormen, forces that are equipped with armored cars and battering rams and unmanned drones to deal effectively with the jaywalkers, turnstile jumpers and water-the-lawn-on-the-weekend scofflaws, and will fan out across our millions of square miles of countryside, rounding up our hundreds of millions of citizens and … The one thing that will stop them is your unregistered rifle with the 30-round clip?

Argument Four: You need unregistered weapons with high-capacity magazines because you are a delusional paranoid.

GL – It may seem farfetched, but one day we might elect a Black Muslim Communist from Kenya who wants to confiscate our guns and enslave us on behalf of the UN.  I need to be ready to fight them off.

Argument Five: You need a private, secret arsenal because you expect that one of these days you will need them to shoot a lot of police.

GL – Anyway, instead of worrying about the guns, you should concentrate on criminals and insane people!

Argument Six: You want us to recognize the urgency of dealing with criminals and lunatics.

J – After hearing your arguments I think you have won me over on Number Six!

Now, it is time for Jake’s rebuttal.

Jake – Rather than rebut, I think I will let the Gun Lover keep talking.  He is doing a more effective job of making my case than I ever could.