AIDS DAY

i lost a lot of dear close friends as well as ex-lovers to AIDS, and don't know why it missed me, but that's my personal and all of our international history, and these jokers trying to erase that history can try all they want but will always fail cause you and me aint gonna forget or shut up about it

NOVEMBER SONNET

On a perfectly clear Fall day, heading back to

Fort Monmouth, I watched as other cars on

The Garden State Parkway veered onto the

shoulder and stopped, the drivers not getting

out, just sitting there. At the toll booth the man

said The president's been shot. As I drove on,

more cars pulled off the road. I could see their

drivers weeping. Back in the barracks we stayed

in the rec room watching the black and white

TV, tension in the room like static. When they

named Lee Harvey Oswald, I watched the

black guys hold their breath, hoping that meant

redneck, not spade, and every muscle in their

faces relax when he turned out to be white.

[(C) 2018 Michael Lally from Another Way To Play]

PENELOPE MILFORD R.I.P.

 

Penny and I got married on Valentine's Day 1982, about six months after we met. I had gone to see another actor in the play FISHING and afterwards our eyes, Penny's and mine, connected and that was that. It was a brief, passionate, volatile marriage, long ago.

What I'll remember most: her vivacious smile, her magnificent acting, her rambunctiousness, her stubbornness, and her (maybe too often misdirected) willingness to speak truth to power, including mine. Rest In peace and Power kid.

(wedding invitation by Joe Brainard)

BEERRY BERENSON R.I.P. 9/11

 

Berry Berenson was a friend to me in my early years in Hollywood. She was married to the movie star Tony Perkins at the time and until his death in 1992. They seemed really loving to each other and I admired their relationship. And I admired her.

Though she was often noted more as Perkin's wife or as model/actress Marisa Berenson's sister, Berry was a wonderful actor in her own right (see REMEMBER MY NAME). But despite her fame-for-whatever-reason, at least around me she was always the least pretentious or self-centered person I ever met anywhere.

She came to a play I was in early on in L.A, Landford Wilson's BALM IN GILEAD, and after the performance stuck around to talk to me. One of the things she said to me that night was that she had only seen one other person in her life who had the kind of glow, I think that was the word she used, that I had, and that was Marilyn Monroe!

She was wonderful on screen and off, either in front of the camera or behind it (she was a great photographer), and I only wish, as I too often do with many friends, that I had made more of an effort to see her more often. Especially after I heard the news that she had been on one of the two planes that crashed into The World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

I knew some others who went down with the towers on that tragic day, like Father Mike Judge, but Berry is the one I think of most often. As I later wrote in a poem ("March 18, 2003"), she was:

"a woman who was kind to me when
she didn't need to be[...]
How many people have died
before you got the chance to tell them what you meant to?"

R.I.P. to all those we lost on that horrific day (and those we continue to lose).

BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2025

 

Poetry of mine in this just released latest "Best" for 2025. Grateful to be included.

LONI ANDERSON R.I.P.

My only encounter with Loni Anderson was when I was hired for what turned out to be a single short scene in a TV movie called: My Mother's Secret Life. Loni played a hooker and I one of her johns, a construction worker. It was shot on location in San Francisco, so I was flown up and put in a hotel to report on set early the next morning.

When I showed up at the hair & makeup trailer, Loni was already being worked on and after being introduced we ran our few lines and then chatted while people buzzed around her. Then a youngish man burst in and began yelling about her being late to the set and holding up filming. It was around 8AM and she had already mentioned that she'd been there since 6AM, but the man didn't care.

Sometimes in situations like that, where a woman was being berated, I'd ask them "You want me to knock him out?" and the guys would back off, because they weren''t ready or willing to "throw some hands" as we called it when I was a kid (and I knew that of course, I wasn't that brave), but before I could she apologized and disarmed him, and me, with her humble and seemingly genuine sincerity.

The scene I was in took place on a sidewalk under scaffolding. When they called for our stand ins so the lighting could be set, Loni told hers to take her seat and she'd do the tedious standing in place while lights and reflectors were arranged and rearranged. This was the first time I'd had a stand in (the two indie horror movies I'd starred in didn't have them) so I followed Loni's lead and told mine to take my seat while I stood with Loni.

The lighting guy was up on a ladder looking down at us, focused on Loni, and she was talking to him like they were old friends as she began asking about the wattage or something technical and I listened as she very sweetly and humbly asked questions seemingly innocently that got him to change his choices to what she was nudging him toward.

I was so impressed that she not only knew what these technicians were doing and what with, but that she used all her glamour plus her one-of-the-gang camaraderie, to influence how the camera would capture her. Just the amount of work she did to make this one little scene work for her was beyond what I was willing to expend. And during all this she was also joking with me, charming me, and deflecting my attempts at flirting like a seasoned hockey goalie deflecting pucks. 

I admired her ever after, and still do. My condolences to all her family, friends, and fans.

THREE DEATHS IN MY LITERARY WORLD

EDMUND WHITE R.I.P.

 
Ed and I were friends in 1970s NYC. He lived uptown and me downtown, with Miles, my 5-year-old child who I was single-parenting, and Ana, my Costa Rican girlfriend. We had dinner at his place and mine a few times and met for lunch in midtown often during the two years when I had the only 9-to-5 job I ever had, as a writer and editor at The Franklin Library. I didn't know what I was doing half the time so he'd coach me.

He had published one novel, Forgetting Elena, that impressed me with its accessible if coded elegance in exploring being a closeted gay man without saying it. I had already published explicitly gay, sometimes graphically sexual, poems and short prose pieces so was able to return the favor as he began publishing openly gay books.

He was one of the smartest people I knew and often one of the wittiest. He could be tough minded and caustic too, and though I don't remember what exactly happened, our relationship became strained and  then I moved to LA. I'm not great at staying in touch, even though people I love remain in my heart, so I didn't see him much, but I continued to hear his voice and unique way of expressing himself in my head, and still do. I wish I had sent him my love more recently, so for what it's worth I'm sending it now.

JOHN MARTIN R.I.P.

In the late 1960s, John Martin, who I never met in person, started Black Sparrow Press to publish books by Charles Bukowski, and in doing so make Bukowski famous. Known as a "small press," Black Sparrow rivaled the big book publishers thanks to Bukowski's popularity and continued sales, as John added other poets and writers to his roster,

In the 1970s I was supposed to be one too as I garnered some alternative notoriety for my own poetry (one little mag critic included me and Bukowski in what he called "The Raw Meat School of Poetry"). But when John said my book would have to wait a year or more I became impatient and arrogantly demanded it go to press sooner, and John, instead, dropped it altogether.

In the late 1990s I sent a manuscript of prose and poetry to poet/publisher friend Geoff Young and he suggested I send it to Black Sparrow. I explained how I'd burnt that bridge back in the '70s, but Goff said I should do it anyway and let John know I wasn't that arrogant person anymore.

So I did, and John quickly got back to me saying he wanted to publish it. As we got close to going to press, I started having some regrets and wanted to change some of it, but John told me he got sent thousands of manuscripts every year and had chosen mine and a few others because he loved the writing and said not to change a thing, so I didn't. That book, IT'S NOT NOSTALGIA, was followed by another, IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE, and a third was in the works when John's health led him to sell the press.

John was the most gracious and responsive publisher you could want. Despite all the demands on his time and focus, he always answered my letters and calls promptly and patiently, always giving me and my writing his full attention. I was lucky to have had him as one of my publishers.

DONNA BROOK R.I.P.

[I couldn't find a photo of Donna]

Donna was a poet friend since the 1960s, and we saw each other at readings and over dinner and lunches for years, especially after she married the late Bob Hershon, a poet friend I knew even longer. She wass feisty and fun to spar with. I always enjoyed our sometimes intense political and literary discussions and debates.

Her health was often a challenge she faced courageously, and I'm happy she's free of that struggle. The best way to commemorate her is with one of her poems:

Pink Diapers

• 
• 
• 
• 

During my Joe McCarthy childhood
I was warned to "Never
repeat what you hear in this house,"
but I didn't know
which parts of what were secrets. At home
I was told to be proud of friends going to jail,
at school I learned prisons
are for criminals.
The Pledge of Allegiance was so hard to say
because I'm left-handed and got my sides mixed up.
At age three
I realized SP was salt and pepper
but I never figured out
what CP meant.

Still I vividly remember
a man who had been with Trotsky in Mexico
grabbing my brother by the ears
and lifting him three feet off the ground.
He brought him straight
up in the air saying "Jesus, 
you're a carbon copy of your father.
You poor bastard, you look
just like him."

From Present Tense: Poets in the World, edited by Mark Pawlak. Copyright © 2004 by Donna Brook. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press. All rights reserved.