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

Au Revoir to Barbara Clay: Michigan, Chicago, and Santa Monica

Aug 09, 2024

Before I got married for the first time at 54 years young in 2003, I’d lived previously - with only two women. They were both women I had danced with in “The Dance Troupe” in the early 1970s in Chicago. But there was a gap of about twelve years between one and the other. The first was in Chicago in 1971, the other in LA (Santa Monica) in 1983.

I spoke about the first, Kasia, in the first of these three “Farewell” posts, the one about William McKinney, when the three of us lived together in a little pink-petunia front yard, one-bedroom on Wolfram Street on the near Northside of Chicago, when I was twenty-two years old, had first moved to The Windy City, and first discovered myself a modern dancer. Kasia was my first “live-in girlfriend” and it didn’t take me long at all to discover that - I was a terrible boyfriend indeed. I had been sooooo socially-misfit and sexually-repressed my entire adolescence and four years of college - that I was entirely unable - to be either loyal or loving to a single woman, no matter how loyal, loving, and devoted to me she was. Especially… just as the 70s counterculture was exploding with sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, and… countless available women, hungrily exploring their own sexual appetites and the casting away of their own sexual inhibitions.

I was a much better cad than boyfriend, as I shamefully admit, and when I happily escaped to Paris for a dance troupe vacation in the summer of 1972, I was even happier to discover - that Kasia had replaced me on Halsted Street when I returned - with a much more devoted and loving boyfriend, who she ended up marrying and having children with - for the next 50 years.

End of living with girlfriend #1.

For the next twelve years, I lived… unattached. Except… with yet another lovely dancer from The Dance Troupe, Jackie. But actually, we never lived “together”. She had her own place on Orchard Street, and I… lived “around”. I house sat. I lived in “The Bozo Room”, on the top floor of MoMing, the dance-theater building, an old church rectory, where we all danced together: me, Kasia, Susan (from Part 2 of these Farewell posts), Jackie (yeah, it was an incestuous time), and the rest of “the collective”. I was just a damn un-c-c-c-ommitted cad. In-c-c-c-apable of love. Young, in my 20s, never going to settle down, get married, own a home, become a father… Mark my words!

I left Chicago, unattached, in 1977… moved back to my native New Yawk. Moved into the seedy, one-time glamorous, residential Hotel Woodward at 55th and Broadway. $55/week, into a room as big as a shoe box. Enough space for 9 humans to change their clothes to become clowns on any given Saturday afternoon, but not big enough for a girlfriend!

Then… I moved into a big loft on 23rd Street and Park Ave South. Big enough for ten clowns and a girlfriend, or two, but hey… toooo many damn clowns. Because that’s where I ran NYC’s Resident Clown Troupe from. I couldn’t find a girlfriend who could stomach allll those clowns. Except for 2 costumers. Clowns and costumers - a good match. At least they fit together - for a heartbeat!

Then in 1982, I moved to LA, but just before I did, Barbara Clay, yet another dancer from the old Dance Troupe, Shirley Mordine’s Dance Troupe in residence at Columbia College, early 1970s, the one before MoMing, … Barbara Clay… reappeared in my life… at the loft on 23rd Street.

Beautiful Barbara Clay, from Port Huron, Michigan. An auborn, sometimes blond-haired, multi-talented Midwestern “artiste”, who came to “us” via the Goodman School of Theatre, still in her early 20s. So “nice”. “Midwestern”, as they say. “Wholesome.” “Honest.” “Pure”.” Not as tenacious as Long Island Donna and Susan, the New York dancers in the Troupe. Maybe in that way, “not Shirley’s type”, like the other Midwestern beauty in our company for a short while, Janet Gerson. Shirley rarely gave out praise, and seldom to these self-effacing Midwestern girls, although they could really dance.

But Barbara was modest and lovely, and she had a great, tear-jerking sense of humor. One winter break, she took me home to snow-covered Port Huron, and to the midnight service of the Catholic church’s Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. This New York Jewboy had never seen anything so genuinely beautiful and “Gentile” (non-Jewish) in his entire life. The white snow, the chimes of the bells, the Catholic liturgy; I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Then, suddenly, Barbara left The Dance Troupe and surprisingly, like William, followed a “cultish” spiritual path, the one of the “14-year-old (at the time) perfect spiritual master”, Guru Maharaj Ji, leader of the Divine Light Mission. While I co-founded MoMing in Chicago, then moved back to New York and founded the Cumeezi Bozo Ensemble, NYC’s Resident Clown Troupe, Barbara lived in an “ashram” in Boston for ten years, where she was completely devoted to her spiritual practice. “Practicing knowledge” daily, meditating, being chaste, and doing community service.

Then, seemingly out of the spiritual, divine-clown blue, we “reconnect” in the clown loft - on 23rd and Park, just before I leave New York for LA in November 1982. “Mr. Unattached” and “Ms. Spiritually Devoted”. We “reconnect” - make love, remember the “good ol’ Chicago dance days, the Port Huron Christmas Mass, the love affair we never had… and right then and there, amidst all the packed-up clown paraphernalia, Barbara decides to leave her spiritual practice behind and - meet me out - in sunny California.

Which she does in the Spring of 1983. Me, a struggling 36-year-old wannabe Hollywood actor, starting anew after two careers as a professional modern dancer and clown prince of New Yawk, and her, a fresh-out-of-the-spiritual-womb “newbie”, having to rediscover everything about the “real world” again, including simple things like driving a car, getting a job, and most difficult of all, living with me, a confirmed and thorny artist-bachelor.

At least this time, twelve years after my first failure with Kasia, I’m a little more mature. In fact, I’m surprisingly loyal and faithful, even amidst the flashy allure of Hollywood’s cheap and available glamor. Barbara is about the “nicest” woman I’ve ever been with. She has no pretense and is entirely open and loving. I do my best to meet her halfway and to return the emotions. I “receive knowledge” from her spiritual master, try to develop a spiritual practice, audition for tv and film roles like crazy, discover that I’m actually not a very good actor (other than playing myself), get hired to teach theater at USC, and do my best to build a new life with Barbara in Santa Monica.

She calls me “The Butz” and I call her “The Wutz”. Cute, right? In a New York, Yiddish kinda way. She encourages me to trade in my first LA car, a tin-can cheapo mustard-colored Toyota Corolla that I buy for $1200 and I sell four months later for $1500, and I buy myself, instead, a sporty cranberry MG convertible sportscar… whose license plate is naturally… THE BUTZ. There’s nothing she won’t do, tolerate, try, enjoy, or endure for me.

But for how long can a 37-year-old, shape-shifting, protean snake of man - stay loyal and satisfied? After all, a snake is the symbol of eternity and continual renewal of life. A snake represents transformation, change, and shedding its skin, even phoenix-like, rising from the ashes, it represents rebirth and healing. And as a human being and partner, I’m loathe to admit, I used to be a “snake of man”. I didn’t cheat on Barbara, but nor could I stay with her. Or rather, she knew that I couldn’t stay, and… she left me. She moved out. Around the corner. Where we were still the best of friends, but no longer lovers. And from where I felt… this was to be the story of the rest of my relationship life. All my relationships.

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Then within the year, Barbara is diagnosed with a rare blood disease, an untreatable case of fatal leukemia. She will only have a matter of years left to live. I feel absolutely terrible. Like I have dragged her out of the ashram, thrown her “back into reality”, only to be diagnosed with a life-ending blood disease, without the support of her Boston spiritual community - to die out here in Santa Monica - alone. Of course, she doesn’t say any of this to me. She’s heroic. And as kind and strong as ever.

In fact, a few years later, in 1988, she is still alive and doing as well as possible, when I, having just returned from a triumphant run of a solo show at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, discover a swollen lymph node in my neck.

As steadfast as ever, she twists my arm to see her wonderful hematologist-oncologist, Dr. Daniel Lieber.

Why don’t you just make an appointment with him? He’s right up the street on Wilshire. You can literally walk to his office. It can’t hurt, can it?

I go see Dr. Dan. He’s as kind and gentle as Barbara is. Two weeks later, after having a biopsy of the lymph node in my neck at St. John Hospital on Santa Monica Boulevard, Dr. Dan calls me on Saturday morning, April 7th, my sister Alison’s birthday,

I’m sorry, Eric, the biopsy was positive. You have Hodgkin’s Disease, cancer of the lymphatic system, stage 3A. Why don’t you come into my office first thing Monday morning?

The treatment and story of my cancer ordeal is for another time and post. Let me just say that it’s a time when some of my friends stand close while others disappear altogether. All for reasons of their own.

But Barbara? She walks me to Dr. Dan’s office for every one of the chemotherapy treatments. And she walks me home afterward. She stands by me when I puke my guts out on my knees in the toilet bowl in my little one-bedroom on Berkeley Street, and she watches as my friend Charlie Davis shaves off what’s left of my hair that hasn’t fallen off already in heaps by itself.

While I’m too “worried” about my parents to let them get close to me during these brutal but transformative months of healing, I let Barbara Clay see me at my worst - and my best.

By 1990, I’m officially “in remission”. Perhaps, having shed my old skin, phoenix-like, I’ve been given a second chance. I rise from the ashes, reborn.

By 2024, I’ve been “cured” - now for almost 35 years!

Sadly, Barbara has no such luck. Other than finding a loving boyfriend for the last years of her life, she dies from leukemia in the mid-1990s.

She doesn’t complain. She finds her own peace - up until the very end.

As I wrote in Part 1 on William’s Farwell, Donna, Susan, and William, all members of Shirley’s Dance Troupe, along with Barbara, in the early 70s, all fly to LA for Barbara’s memorial. We all assemble in the hot tub downstairs on the back patio of “Lucretia Gardens”, the beautiful 3-bedroom house I rent in the old Hollywood Hills that I will one day be evicted from after living there for 30 years. But today, at least, the house and the Hills are gracious enough to host us for our own four-person “Barbara Clay Memorial”. Donna and Susan are the oldest of Chicago friends from the late ‘60s, and the first members of Shirley’s Troupe, and William and I are also the oldest of Chicago friends, his being my first “Chicago roommate” when he was 19 years old, then having followed me to the Big Apple and Europe, as a member of my clown troupe, almost twenty years later.

Now one of our fellow warriors, our fellow dancers from the original Troupe, has fallen, way before her time. It hangs heavy on all our hearts, and we spill tears of comradery, artistry, and love, for our dear Barbara. The hot tub overflows with sorrow.

Of course, Donna and I have no idea whatsoever, that two more of our fellow dancer-warriors, Susan and William, sitting right here in the tub next to us today, will also be gone within the very next decade. (See my previous 2 “Farewell” Substack posts).

“One never knows, do one?” - Fats Waller, blues singer and piano man supreme

and

Life… a funny thang, a quote from another big-bodied black man, Sonny Liston, ex-heavyweight boxing champ

Donna and I survive. She stops dancing professionally and moves to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1974. It takes me almost 50 years to catch up with her, but here I am, living ten minutes away from her - in Santa Fe. Looking at the Dance Troupe’s odds of survival, I’d say we’re both lucky to be here.

Along the way, I somehow ask a young girl from Sumatra, a girl 31 years younger than myself who speaks no English, for directions - in front of an ATM in the streets of Kuta Beach, Bali. She tells me to follow her, and I do.

A little over a year later, August 3, 2001, she arrives in Los Angeles, a young Indonesian immigrant with a belief in “The American Dream”.

That was 23 years ago, earlier this month - Surya’s American anniversary.

We’ve lived together for 23 years. I haven’t moved out. Nor has she. Hallelujah! We got married. I haven’t had any affairs. Blessed St. Yawyeh! We bought a home together, the first of my life. I’ve become a father by adopting her nephew, Exsel, when he was 8 years old in 2015, when he also arrived in LA from Sumatra without a word of English. We all moved from LA to Santa Fe in 2022.

And not only do I hope and believe that my deceased parents would be happy for, and proud of me, and know that still-living Kasia already is both (she’s told me so many times on Facebook), but I’d also like to believe that -

Barbara Clay would be too.

xoxo

Your former Bachelor-in Arms/Now Firmly Married Man (Mark my Words!),

Trules

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

Au Revoir to Barbara Clay: Michigan, Chicago, and Santa Monica

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