Lynne Wintersteller, “Patterns,” Baby
In our backyard in New Hartford NY (1983? 4?)
A year or two after Forum, they put on Maltby and Shire’s Baby at Utica College. It’s a musical: about three couples at different stages in their lives either trying to have a baby or having one anyway. The oldest of the three women, Arlene, conceives in her forties: her husband and she had gone to a hotel for the weekend to celebrate their children’s having grown up and left the house and he impregnated her. She was ambivalent about starting over again with a newborn just when she’d become free to do other things. It was plum apart for someone Esther’s age with her talent for acting and singing.
I was excited. If Esther got cast as Arlene and me as her husband Alan, we’d be on stage again in another romantic pairing, thirty years after we had played the lovers in The Fantasticks. Our chances were good. As icing on the cake, Kirk, the director of Baby, had directed me in Forum, Marilyn and Nancy, the choreographer and music director ditto, so they knew I could do the role.
I came down with laryngitis before auditions. I could barely croak during auditions. So much for planning. Peter Pelletiere, a quite good actor and singer, auditioned and Esther would up playing Arlene opposite Peter while I got a bit part and helped out in the chorus. Esther was great in the show –she had two great solos, one alas, in duet with Peter. My ‘solo’ was part of one verse in a locker room song.
Baby (prob. 1984)
A summer or two later, E. played Mrs. Belotti in The Hot l Baltimore, with the Ensemble Theater Company at Hamilton College. (1986?)
Here are my Mom and Jack. They were companions for well over a decade, the last years of her life. When we visited in Florida, Mom would sit at the organ Jack had bought her and Jack would take out his guitar or mandolin and they’d play for us.
Jeremy sang and acted in his first musical at thirteen. He met his first girlfriend there -an omen of what was to come as he grew older and even more attractive. Here (above) is Jeremy in Auntie Mame (prob. 1986), playing Mame’s long suffering but loving nephew, Patrick. As you can see, he’s singing.
A year later, it was Little Me.
Esther at 24, Jeremy at 16, me at 37
I did mostly straight plays then, though I did get to harmonize on “Aura Lee” in Gurney’s The Dining Room. That was it for singing, though. By the end of the 80s, I was sure my singing days were over.
Then Esther put on a talent show at the college where I was dean. Shots 1 and 3 below are of my comedy quartet, the Fabulous Hung-Los. 2 and 4 are of my friend Tom Hassler. In #2, he’s dancing in costume to “The Flight of the Bumble Bees” and in #4, singing and uking. If you’d asked me, I would have said that ukuleles disappeared from the scene with Arthur Godfrey. (In high school, I had a banjo-uke, but I only learned three or four chords on it and that wasn’t enough to make a career of it.) The lounge pants I wore for the Hung-Los were specially made for me –they were tie-dyed, a psychedelic orange and white. The tie was an eight-inch-wide puffy gingham fabric flower pattern tie I’d had made for me after seeing drummer Elvin Jones wear an eight-inch-wide leather tie pat a gig in Connecticut. I still have the tie.
Here I am with Kevin Edick, Mike Thompson [hidden by Kevin] and John Borner arguing over who had sung “off peetch.” Seconds later, I shoot Kevin, then in successive tries, Mike and John, leaving me to sing alone, only to discover that it was me and not one of them who had been singing off key all the time.”Ha, ha, what a joke!,” I said and walked off stage.
Esther sang in the show, “This One’s for You,” which she’d also sung in our cabaret special at the Stanley Theater years before.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Barry Manilow: “This One’s for You”
A barbershop quartet rendition of “Aura Lee”
MUSIC & ME 