mostly my nostalgic and frequently puerile reflections on old movies, music and whatever pops from the recesses of memory....i have detailed memory of the oddest and more insignificant details.......these memories codify and indelibly emboss the past into my portrait of the future.......and a bit queer, to boot!
this is certainly on the earliest "art films" in my recollection.....i originally viewed it in 1962/3 during a sidetrip from my high school "class trip"....while my classmates were watching the Radio City Rockettes or some other mindless drivel...I was watching this mindful drivel....it seemed a logical enough extension of my fantasy life and a primer for the LSD trips that I was to travel a few years later, as Queen Bone and the White Cobra were drawn by Magnetic Grapples into the Matrix of Destiny.
In the late 60's I attended a performance of PARADISE LOST to experience the magic of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev.....It was the most wonderful dance that I had ever seen!
Later, I saw Nureyev, seated with Ed Barnum, a local one-armed real estate Baron who had escorted him to dinner at Gene And Gabe's, then a trendy Italian Restaurant, and later...through the marriage of dancer, Teresa McGehee to gay restauranter, Gene...a nightclub called Upstairs......where local talents such as The Wit's End Players and Teresa's old friends from the Atlanta Ballet could find jobs as waiters, if not entertainers......what a segue! ... anyway.... I left the treasured program of the Royal Ballet event on a table Upstairs and drifted through the remaining hours of a dreamlike evening, not thinking...until now...about this.........and not realizing, at that time, the monumentality of the great dancers that had come to Atlanta.....Perhaps, if Gene had not seen Nureyev at his restaurant.......the Dance scene in Atlanta would have been different......Life is such a chain reaction....If THIS, then That, or if this then THAT.......If Rudolph and Ed had not been there that evening, if Teresa had not met Gene that evening.......perhaps The Manhattan Yellow Pages. David Sheppard Productions, Showcase Cabaret. Venetian Room. and Club Atlantis would not have experienced their brief materializations before fading into the sea of urban mediocrity.
