Part 2 of "Farewell My Lovelies", a Long Overdue Goodbye to 3 Deceased Dancers from my 1st Dance Company

Goodbye to Susan Kimmelman, aka Max the Clown

Jul 26, 2024

I’m surprised by how many readers responded to Part 1 of this post about the loss of my dear friend, William McKinney. Perhaps it was not only the joy, spirit, and beauty of the man, himself, but also the sad way in which he “blew up” and faded away into invisible anonymity. Or even, more probably, it was how he reminded you of one of your own, dearly departed friends that you still miss so deeply.

As I said, “such is life.”

Another beautiful soul who I danced with from 1970-77 in Chicago was Susan Kimmelman.

Valedictorian of Valley Stream High School on the South Shore of Long Island, Class of 1966, graduating just one year after me (I was definitely not valedictorian of W. Tresper Clarke High in 1965 in Westbury, Long Island), Susan was groomed and expected to become a “lawyah”, in the same way that I was groomed and expected to become a “doctah”. I mean, that’s what good girls and good boys of The Tribe did and became in those days, the buttoned-down post-WW2 Eisenhower years. We became doctahs and lawyahs and Indian Chiefs, the next generation on the upwardly mobile food chain: from blue-collar working-class Ashkenazy New York Jewish immigrant plumber-painter-cabinet maker - to first-generation white-collar businessman in the schmata (textile) business taking the daily Long Island Railroad into Manhattan for work - to “collarless” college-educated “professional” doctah-lawyah-university theatuh professuh!

But Susan and me - “the professionals-to-be” - we end up taking “the road less traveled”.

So while I spend my first post-college graduation year, 1969-70, trying to figure out “who the hell I am” - by modeling nude for figure drawing classes at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, driving a taxi following speeding ambulances up and down the ever-congested avenues of Manhattan, and selling blond Lebanese hashish imported from London shipped Stateside in immaculately-packed holiday chocolate tins, my “future dancing twin”, Susan, is still enrolled in her final year at the University of Chicago, living somewhere between a state of recovery from a long bout with the ever-popular-on-college-campus disease, mononucleosis, and her all-too-frequent state of full-time depression. Her only salvation, naturally - modern dance… which her fellow University of Chicago “student-at-large”, and also coincidentally Long Island friend, Donna Sugarman, from Roslyn, New York, calls to her rescue, enrolling the ailing Ms. Kimmelman in modern dance classes on Chicago’s Northside… with the talented new dance director of Hull House and founder of the Dance Center of Columbia College, Shirley Mordine.

Yes, this is very same Shirley Mordine who gives me, just a few months after she gives Susan’s hers, my one and only chance - to miraculously transform myself, in the summer of 1970, from an uptight, overly educated, doctah-to-be - into a clumsy-at-first, but then passionate and hard-working, professional performing artist and modern dancer! Just about the most unexpected and unpredictable of all probabilities for a 22-year-young Trules.

To discover myself… a “modern dancer”… is absolutely unbelievable to me. It’s like going to sleep one day as an inhibited, self-conscious adolescent and waking up another day… someone else - entirely. Say like, going to sleep on the planet Earth, and waking up on - the planet Mars. Or perhaps, like going to sleep one day as Rip Van Winkle and waking up - twenty years later - and not recognizing anything about myself, or the world about me.

In high school, to my friends and parents, I might have been thought of as “the boy most unlikely to become a modern dancer.” Even more surprising to them, and myself, would be,

What the hell IS a ‘modern dancer’?

Certainly, we would have had no idea. As a goody-goody, repressed high schooler, I never took a dance step, sang a note, or thought of trying out for a school play - of ever doing anything at all - creative. Art? Self-expression? Definitely - not for me.

Sure, my parents took me to Broadway shows “in the City.” I saw the original My Fair Lady, Bye Bye Birdie, Oklahoma. I went to museums—The Met, The Modern, The Guggenheim. We were “culture vultures.” But that was just something we did. Me? Myself? Nyet. Be footloose or fancy-free? Never! I was too scared of what people would think and say. I was monumentally afraid of looking stupid and acting foolish. Of having a hair ever be out of place.

So… when the strictures of self-consciousness finally start to break, first with marijuana in college - it’s just a matter of time, until this volcano of inexpression - both physically and emotionally - finds an outlet through which it can erupt. First slowly, in college yoga classes, then afterward, in avant-garde theater workshops in New York, then finally through modern dance with Shirley, I finally find a way to - circumvent my repressive, judgmental brain, and to set myself free!

And that’s exactly what it is. Freeing! Liberating! Physically. Emotionally. Sexually. My volcanic damns break loose, and my inhibitions explode. I discover a new self – below my neck. I discover - my body. I discover - freedom and improvisation. I don’t open a book for the next seven years.

Shirley gives me this gift. By inviting me to take her summer workshop. And by inviting me to join her Dance Troupe. Sure, she must have been desperate to take such a chance on me; but she had just lost her one and only male dancer. And I’m sure, male modern dancers were very hard to find in 1970. But synchronicity - Shirley losing Mitch - and my passing through Chicago at exactly that time - are the exact moments that make for a life story. And also the moment, in retrospect, for which, I will be forever grateful

I think Susan’s story was exactly the same. Dancing set her free. Gave her life a purpose. And after just a few months of taking classes with Shirley in her college senior year in 1970, Susan too, was invited to join Shirley’s fledging new dance company, just months before I was to be - with Donna and Mitch, in residence at Columbia College. Immediately upon graduation, she gratefully left her LSAT and law books behind at the University of Chicago, moved to Chicago’s Northside, and never looked back. She too, became a professional modern dancer, soon teaching classes in Columbia College’s Dance Department, and spending the next seven years of her life as my professional dance colleague and my intimate friend.

That’s Max the Clown. The saddest clown you ever saw.

Imagine Max - with two things:

1- A broken yellow and green plastic birdcage. One of the plastic bars has somehow been cruelly shattered. Max has lost her bird. It has flown away. She holds the broken cage eternally aloft, dangling it pathetically from her outstretched left arm.

2- A giant unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary, that Max endlessly lugs around (when not carrying the broken birdcage), hugging the immense albatross to her chest…. constantly asking members of the public to find the precise word that she, or they’re… looking for. Or more precisely - the word that she/Max - has lost. Because that’s the thing - the metaphor - that defines Max - she has been permanently and sadly broken; she has clearly lost something - a word, an idea, a friend, her heart. Pooooooor Max.

Max and I did a dance duet together once. A real, choreographed duet. It was back in 1976, or so. Right before I left Chicago in the Spring of 1977, after my having lived there for seven years.

But wait, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

First, Susan and I… dance together. In Shirley’s company for four years. We take company dance classes together. Every day. We rehearse together. Every day. We sweat together, work creatively hard together, create original dance-theater pieces together, perform in public together, eat countless meals together, lick labels on mailing lists together, spend our 20s together, grow up together.

You know how “they say”: only a few experiences can bond people together like no other: formative childhood itself, sports team campaigns, the cruelty of war. Well… being in a dance company - is like that.

Dance… art… clowning… become my/our… entire life/lives.

We have this unique and beautiful… friendship.

Ahhhh.. how to describe it?

We never see - eye-to-eye.

In fact… quite the opposite.

If I say, “black”, Susan undoubtedly says “white”.

And of course, au contraire, if she ever says “White”, naturally I, with my full heart and soul, just have to say “Black!”

And this isn’t only with the single words, of course, but with entire ideas, full-on philosophies… just about anything.

It becomes so funny and well-known between us, that arbitrarily, one of us will call the other, any time, day or night, when we’re on one of our few vacations away from dance (and well before the existence of cell phones!)

Black!

And without fail, the other will, automatically, mono-syllabically, reply

White!

And that’s all that’s needed. Along with a good, deep, life-affirming laugh - from the bottom of our two, bound-forever, dancing-clowning-morbid-Ashkenazy souls.

In 1974, we 5 dancers, along with prominent dance critic, Sally Banes, and Tem Horwitz, Susan’s husband, leave Shirley Mordine’s Dance Troupe at Columbia College and found a dance “collective” called MoMing (“Nameless” in Chinese). It is a big move, heard all around the cultural world of Chicago.

MoMing’s dancers: Susan Kimmelman, Jim Self, Kasia Minch, Eric Trules & Jackie Radis, 1974

But oooops, I forgot to tell you, those of you who are following Susan’s story here, that yes, she got married in the early ‘70s. To businessman, entrepreneur, and future Chicago land developer, Tem Horwitz. From Butler, Pennsylvania… who once told me personally, in all seriousness,

I don’t think there’s anyone smarter than me in the entire world.

Right, TEM. Not simply TIM Horwitz. Nope. Tem! One of a kind… who was business managing Shirley’s Dance Troupe at Columbia College when he was fired just before we all left the Troupe and formed MoMing in 1974. Hence the bad taste, blood, and karma between Tem, Shirley, and her former protégées.

Nevertheless, MoMing, becomes immediately successful artistically in the Chicago landscape, bringing NYC “post-modernist” dancers like Laura Dean, Kenneth King, Steve Paxton, and other Judson Church-ers to “The 2nd City” for the first time. We “founding five” also do our own original dance-theater work, but this - at a great personal cost - making us more and more competitive between ourselves - over each and every year of our existence - as the brilliant Mr. Horwitz keeps us afloat with non-profit arts grants, fundraising benefits, and dance classes for the public, all of which I become a prominent source.

But back to Max’s and my duet. Or should I say Max and “Gino’s” (my clown name) duet. A sort of farewell to my seven lucky years in Chicago and a simultaneous adieu to my/Gino’s one and only clown “partner” in life, the sad and inimitable, Max.

We create it from scratch. Rehearse it for months. Sort of a cross between a Keystone Kops slapstick comedy two-reeler and a live, on-stage, exactly-choreographed, modern dance duet for two, late-to-learn, almost-cursed-to-become, doctahs and lawyuhs. It is physically challenging, full of pratfalls, lifts, slides, and… a special, on-stage water pyro-technique.

Unfortunately, it is the latter that gets the best of us in our very last performance… when…

I/Gino am lifting sad stoic Max in a beautiful spray of water from MoMing’s upper level, church rectory balcony, when…

OOOOPS……………

Gino’s Size 34 Klondike fur-lined Boots sliiiiide on the wet wooden stage and….

BAM!!!!

Gino… I… drop Max/Susan right on HER FACE… onto the hard wooden floor.

The audience groans aloud.

We don’t stop.

There’s blood everywhere.

We don’t stop.

Max instinctively grunts…

Go on!

She puts her hand over her bleeding mouth and…

Somehow…

We finish the piece.

After which…

Susan is taken directly to the hospital in an ambulance and has her mouth stitched up.

After which…

… her face never looks the same.

There is a scar that forever remembers that night.

On her upper lip.

That Susan has to live with for the rest of her life.

And I have to see for the rest of my life.

I leave Chicago and MoMing in 1977. I move to New York and life carries on. Susan stays in Chicago but also leaves MoMing. She stays married to Tem, but he is not particularly faithful to her. They do have three wonderful children together, Noah, Micah Rose, and Jonah, and motherhood replaces dance as the love of Susan’s life.

I don’t see her again, although we do keep up our “Black” and White” phone conversations over the years. She goes back to law school and actually does practice law, along with becoming a social activist and dog advocate, writing books, and continuing her lifelong practice of tai chi. She develops a heart problem, although she chooses not to have “the procedure” that will protect her from future heart failure.

Then, in 2000, tragedy strikes when… headstrong teenage Noah… shockingly hangs himself… on Mother’s Day.

Susan never recovers.

A little over a year later, she dies in her sleep in her Michigan summer home, on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2001. She is 53 years old.

The cause is believed to be a heart attack.

All her close friends say: “broken heart”.

For the dumbest of reasons, I don’t go to my dear friend’s memorial.

Why?

Ohhhh…. it’s the first day of the new semester at USC, the university where I teach theater and movement in LA. I have four new classes. The first day - very important. Can’t miss Important!

I don’t go to Susan/Max’s memorial in Chicago.

And I regret it - to this day, 23 years later.

How short-sighted could I have been? How could I have chosen the first day of four temporal college classes of students I had never yet met - over honoring the life of one of my closest and dearest friends? My dance buddy? My clown partner? My soulmate in art?

If ever there was a fool who made a stupid decision in his life, that was me that August, 2001.

Sorry, Max. Sorry, Susan.

Please forgive me.

Love in Clown Heaven forever!

R.I.P.

xoxo

Gino

Part 2 of "Farewell My Lovelies", a Long Overdue Goodbye to 3 Deceased Dancers from my 1st Dance Company

Goodbye to Susan Kimmelman, aka Max the Clown

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