Farewell My Lovelies, a Long Overdue Goodbye to 3 Deceased Dancers from my 1st Dance Company

Part 1, R.I.P. William McKinney, aka Mac Randall

Jul 12, 2024

It’s common knowledge: that the older we get, the closer we get to our own “departure”, the more and more frequently we experience…. loss. The death of those we love. First perhaps, it was one of our grandparents, then perchance, unluckily, a brother or sister; eventually… both our parents die, and along the way, with more and more inevitability and feelings of emptiness and grief, we lose the closest of friends, family members, lovers, spouses…

You know what I’m talking about.

Such is life.

I remember…

…my maternal grandfather, Murray Rosenberg. This is the only photo I have of him.

Almost completely faded, unlike my memory of him. He was… a gregarious, bald-headed, and strong-hearted immigrant, fresh off the Ashkenazy-Ukranian boat from Kiev, arriving in Middle Village, Queens, New York, “The Land of Opportunity” at the turn of the 20th century. With his American-born wife, Sally Berman, they had 3 kids, rocking Roz, my mother, buttoned-down Phil, and black sheep, Harvey. They ran a working-class grocery store on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and drove out to Westbury, Long Island almost every Sunday afternoon with cardboard boxes full of canned soups from the grocery store’s highest shelves, fresh vegetables from the ice-cooled bins, and pounds upon pounds of frozen steak, lamb, and hamburger - that would heartily feed the Trules family for the next week - or two. “Poppy” gave me my first bottle of Knickerbocker Beer at the Hempstead Bowling Alley when I was nine years old, and

Damn, if I don’t still remember that innocent beer’s golden-smooth taste.

Murray died at the beginning of my freshman year in college… at the University of Freezing Cold Buffalo New York. That’s why I remember him here. I was living “by myself”… for the first time… in an alienating college dorm of 19-year-old strangers… 500 miles away from my family. It was my first experience, and my first memory of… death. All alone. My “Poppy”, suddenly dead at age 67. I had nobody to share my feelings with.

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PART 1, William McKinney aka Mac Randall

Just a few years later, far away in another city called Chicago, but in quite another lifetime,

I’m reinventing myself as “an artist”, in the body and career of “a modern dancer”.

I’m now living by myself in a cozy little one-bedroom house with pink petunias in the front yard, on a street called Wolfram, just half a block from where the Steppenwolf Theatre Company will find a home for itself years later on Halsted Street on the near Northside of Chicago.

I’m a young man about town, a member of Shirley Mordine’s “Dance Troupe”, well-known and well-reviewed in the Chicago Tribune by New York-bound critic, Linda Winer. I’m also a gadfly in my early 20s, footloose and fancy-free, on Lincoln Avenue, the hub of Chicago’s up-and-coming 1970s theater scene that features Stuart Gordon’s “Organic Theatre”, early home to David Mamet’s new plays, and seedbed to future Hollywood and Broadway stars Joe Montegna, Dennis Franz, William H. Macy, Andre De Shields, and a host of others. We all hang out at The Oxford Pub, eating fried chicken together until well after midnight, doing theater and dance shows, and learning Second City improv skills from dark comedic guru, Del Close.

Right in the middle of us all, there is William. Six foot-three, sculpted from hard onyx stone like a black Achilles, straight from the Southwest side of Chicago’s “African American ghetto”, he’s probably no more than 19 years old, an artistic runaway from his overbearing father and straight-laced mother, who has tumbled into Chicago’s near-Northside, unleashed and unwashed, not unlike myself, who arrived exactly the same way into the Windy City in 1970.

If Chicago has a NYC-Greenwich Village equivalent arts and music scene in 1970, Lincoln Avenue is it. The tall, long-bearded, and magnanimous Reverend Jim Shiflett has founded “The Body Politic” as a community arts center, and by the time he hands its artistic reins over to Stuart Gordon in the early 70s, and music clubs like Ratso’s and Orphans are hosting Southside Chicago blues legends like Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Junior Wells, and Buddy Guy, the Northside is spilling over with production and creativity.

It just seems like everywhere I go, there’s - William. With kinky, uncombable hair, and a smile and enthusiasm as wide as the State of Texas, here, in my new sweet home Chicago, is my fast future friend of a lifetime.

Just one without a home. You see, William lives night to night… on Chicago’s rakish Northside, finding himself wherever his wits land him… which more and more frequently… becomes… 854 Wolfram Street - on the couch, with me, single, or “engaged for the evening”, behind a flimsy closed door, on the waterbed in the bedroom.

He soon moves in with me… full-time… my first “unofficial” roommate, and within a year, he sees my first-ever “live-in girlfriend” join us. A cozy trio we are, me, William and Kasia, a pretty, round-faced, German-bred, Art Institute of Chicago-trained and talented painter, who within the year, is somehow miraculously, a member, along with William, of Shirley Mordine’s professional Dance Troupe! In residence at Columbia College Chicago, which also miraculously, pays me to be a member of their dance faculty… but which… doesn’t prevent the three of us from getting evicted from the wonderful $75/month Wolfram Street residence, by the bug-eyed landlady, Mrs. Fisher, who definitely doesn’t approve of her little petunia-ed, one bed-room house being occupied by a Jewfro-donning modern dancer living in sin with his unmarried girlfriend and his very visible black Adonis roommate!

Ahhhh, those were the days………… where within a week, Kaisa and I move into a 3-bedroom apartment right around the corner on Halsted for - $125/month, and William finds his own bedroom in another friend’s apartment right down the street on Halsted - for free.

But back to - that “flimsy closed door” behind which William slept - on the Wolfram Street couch - before our eviction.

Perchance… there’s the rub.

Because I believe that… the story and direction which William’s life takes - is entirely based on - the “closed door” (closet) from which he never comes out.

Sure, those were the times, the 1970s, during the rise and height of the alternative “counterculture”, especially in the arts scene, when many, many people “came out”. But - in this case, William’s - he never did. He never could. I just think he couldn’t ever admit to his stern religious parents, and therefore even more importantly, to himself, that - he was gay. It was just too hard, and too shameful for him, no matter how strongly he was attracted to men. No matter that he had very occasional, secretive affairs with men “behind closed doors”.

He did fall deeply in love with his male roommate on Halsted just after he moved out from Wolfram Street, even though Bob, a long-haired Japanese American man, was “straight”, and was in a full-time, committed relationship with Marilyn, their other housemate. Honestly, I never got the full details of their menage a trois arrangement, only that William never fully recovered from it, nor did he ever have a serious or committed relationship afterward for the rest of his life.

Instead… he ate. Mightily…

…until eventually, his one-time, perfectly sculpted, six-pack dancing frame expands and… expands again… to over 400 pounds.

But not before… he moves away from Chicago - to New York. In 1974, just when we five dancers are leaving Shirley Mordine’s company at Columbia and forming MoMing, a new “dance and theater collective”, William decides that his future isn’t going to be next to mine anymore, but rather, on his own. He finds a one-bedroom apartment on 17th Street in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, and he becomes “an actor”. He even changes his name - to “Mac Randall” - because there is another “William McKinney” in the actor’s union.

I don’t see him much for the next three years - until I, too, eventually leave “The Second City” and move back to my native New York in 1977, where I live in The Hotel Woodward on 55th and Broadway, during which time William and I both study acting with Lee Strasberg, and I found “The Cumeezi Bozo Ensemble”, NYC’s Resident Clown Troupe, of which, of course, “Mac” becomes a member.

That’s “George”… as you can see from his nameplate…. “on the phone” at Grand Central Station in New Yawk at one of our many public Cumeezi escapades around town. Of course, the “Cumeezis” don’t tawk; we’re silent, white-faced “clowns” in the Chaplin busker tradition, and George is about the most outgoing, rambunctious of the bunch. Unfortunately, headstrong and independent Mac basically refuses the very physically-specific training that I impose on the rest of my company, but “George” just carries on and clowns naturally - on his own - as the well-seasoned and compulsive performer he is, and… when it comes time to choose a select group of Cumeezis to go on a Holland-French-Swiss tour in 1979, of course, there’s George/Mac - at the top of my list.

One of the things that I love most about my friendship with William/Mac is his closeness with my parents, Roz and Joe. They absolutely adore him and he loves them equally in return. It’s a mutual admiration society that begins first with their visits to Chicago and blossoms further when they move from Long Island to Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the late 1970s. He always remembers their birthdays with a sweet card, and he even sends them cards for Mother’s and Father’s Day. In a way, my parents become his proxy parents. It’s an easy substitution; for as hard, judgmental and unaccepting as his own parents have always been of him and his lifestyle, my parents are, contrarily, just that loving and embracing.

I stay in The Big Apple until 1982… when the demands of running a non-profit clown company and booking enough commercial gigs to support a gaggle of ten - just wear me down and take the fun out of clowning for me.

George and Gino atop NYC’s 42nd Street Library Lion

While I move to LA, Mac moves to Yelm, Washington, country miles south of Seattle and east of Olympia, to a rural center for the study of the teachings of “Ramtha”, a “spiritual being” who purportedly “channels” i.e. speaks through the mediumship of — the school’s leader, JZ Knight. At the time, Ramtha’s school is drawing more than 3,000 students from more than 20 countries around the world, and Mac Randall is one of them.

This is also the time that my dear friend, who I believe is sublimating his stifled sexual appetites into “spiritual studies” and food consumption, is starting to pile on the pounds, by the hundreds.

Then there are the rumors within the counterculture: former students accusing Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment of practicing brain-washing and mind-control, as well as using intimidation and fear techniques to keep students in the school, calling Knight a "spiritual predator" using methods such as “spiritual prophecy” which threaten that unless students remain faithful to Ramtha, they will become prey of "lizard people", and that “the ancient figure of Jehovah will return to earth accompanied by these lizard people in a spaceship”, which I hear directly about from a totally-committed, William/Mac.

Eventually, over the years, my parents stop receiving greeting cards from William-Mac, and I, too, hear less and less frequently from my old friend, until one of our fellow Chicago “Dance Troupe” former members, Barbara Clay (about whom I will write soon), dies in the late 1990s. I pay for a ticket for William (I always choose to call him by his given name) to fly down to Los Angeles for the memorial, and I pick him up at LAX.

And there he is, waiting for me curbside… all 450 pounds of him… my former perfectly-sculpted, Greek God-dancing-clowning friend in arms.

He gets into the passenger seat of my white Toyota Celica convertible. The car tips massively over to the right. I’m shocked and embarrassed. I don’t know if we can drive on the freeway without tipping over and having an accident.

Of course, we make it - home to “Lucretia Gardens” in Echo Park - where four of us surviving Chicago dancers all climb into the hot tub on the lower concrete deck and spend many hours reminiscing about our dear friend, Barbara, who had moved from Boston to LA to live with me when I first moved from New York to LA/Santa Monica in 1983. William’s 400+ pounds spill many gallons of water over the top of the tub, but it seems “appropriate”, like the hot tub itself is crying buckets of tears for the loss of wonderful, loving Barbara.

After that, I lose touch with William. I keep his former Christmas card on my frig, but his phone numbers stop working, and he has no email address, no social media, or any other way of contacting him.

Until another day… several years later, I get a phone call from his sister, Clara, who’s still living in Chicago.

Is this Eric Trules, my brother William McKinney’s friend? This is Clara, his sister.
It is. But I haven’t heard from your brother in years. Is he ok? Still alive, I hope?
He’s still alive and he wants to talk to you. He’s had a stroke. He asked me if I could get him your phone number. He doesn’t have a cell phone.
Oh no! My phone number is still the same. He should have it.
Well, I’ll give it to him and let him explain, ok?
Ok, thanks for calling, Clara. I miss him. Say hello to your mother and father for me.

A few days later, my old friend calls… with a caveat.

Is this Eric Trules? I have a collect call from Mr. Mac Randall in Yelm, Washington. Will you accept the charges?
Yes, of course.

Pause.

Sorry to call collect, Gino. I don’t have any money.
So what else is new, Mac?
Ha ha. I think I’ve gotten stupider.
What do you mean?
Well… I had some kind of accident and I’m sitting around this place in a wheelchair all day long doing nothing.

William is talking very slowly, like it’s hard for him to form words.

Well, why don’t you just get up and dance - or break out like Chief Bromden (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)?

Good idea.
Do you want me to come up and visit you?
That would be wonderful.
What’s your address?
I don’t know. I’m so tired, Gino.
I’ll get it from Clara,
Ok, thank you. See you soon, Gino.
Ok, see you soon, George….

We hang up.

I feel like crying. My beautiful friend has had a debilitating stroke. He’s sitting in a wheelchair. He weighs over 400 pounds. He hardly knows who, or where, he is. I better go see him - before it’s too late.

But I can’t find Clara’s phone number. It’s not saved in my cell phone. It’s not in a Chicago phone book. It’s not anywhere on the web. I can’t trace the collect call from Yelm. I call the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, track down one person who remembers “Mac”, but he tells me that,

Mac left years ago, and I have no idea where he is anymore.

What am I supposed to do? Fly to Seattle? Drive to Yelm and go from institution to institution?

I don’t… do either.

I don’t do… anything.

And I never see my friend again.

That’s been… more than a decade ago.

And I never hear from Clara again.

But I assume…

…that William passed away… sadly and anonymously… in a Yelm institution… without a loved one in sight.

I’m sorry, my friend, that I never made the trip to Yelm.

I should have.

I regret

that I never did.

But believe me when I say,

You live on… in my heart… just like every other loved one that I’ve ever lost.

Murray… Roz and Joe, Max… and all the rest.

Yet……………………….

There was

and still is….

…only one “George”.

Only one Mac Randall.

Only one William McKinney.

And he will live on with me…

Forever.

Adios, amigo.

Trules

Farewell My Lovelies, a Long Overdue Goodbye to 3 Deceased Dancers from my 1st Dance Company

Part 1, R.I.P. William McKinney, aka Mac Randall

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