Trules Reviews... Not the Year, but the Decades, Part 1

His.... and Maybe Yours?

NOTE: This post was published on my “Santa Fe Substack”, but I’ve decided to move it here to “Trules Rules”, because I think it’s more appropriate here. So… if you’ve already read it, no need to read it again. Thanks.

I’m home alone, about to ring in the New Year - 2024! Enjoying, dare I say, my 3-week, enforced bachelorhood, in my 8th decade on planet Earth, while my Indonesian Batak family are back in Sumatra, visiting their birth family for Christmas, no time at alllll - for their Santa Fe Santa Trules.

So why, just hit the highlights of the year — but rather, why not - since I have the time — take a tour — through the decades — mine and America’s — to see what stands out - in my mind - and perhaps — by association, memory, and metaphor - in yours?

Because… believe it or not… I do write these self-centered, narcissistic newsletters/blog posts, not only for my - self — but also — for YOU… thinking that, like any good storyteller, autobiographical, or otherwise, that in the specific details and truths of the personal, “microcosmagical”, perhaps also lie, the boilerplate and truths to the universal and “macrocosmagical” of YOUR LIVES, if you catch my drift….

So ok, here goes…………………….

1940s (0-3 years old)

Ahhhh… I remember the ‘40s well! Born 8/21/1947, it was a hot August day at 4:40 p.m., in Queens Hospital, New Yawk, New York. My parents, GI Joe Trules and his post-WW2 bride, Rocking Roz Rosenberg, were living in the very first suburb in America, “Levittown”, Long Island, eponymously developed by sightseer, Arthur Levitt, exactly 36.2 miles, as the crow flies, from Times Square, midtown Manhattan.

The United States of America, having “defeated the enemy” on two fronts, both the European and Pacific, was now, for the first time in world history, the mightiest nation and empire on earth. Having dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to “end the war”, sure, there was a new Cold War with Russia on the immediate horizon, which the new United Nations could do little about, but American preeminence was on the rise, and bursting Baby Trules and his entire Baby Boom generation would soon both arrogantly and self-centeredly taste this “thrill of victory”, along with its nauseating upchuck of hubris, in the next many decades to come.

1950s (3-13 years old)

It was the button-downed, conservative, “duck and cover” 1950s of Ike Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during WW2, and 34th President of the United States. It was also the one and only “age of innocence” for lil’ ol’ “Errie Trules”, class president of every one of his elementary school classes, usually captains of all the softball teams, teachers’ pets, etc. etc. Just like Eisenhower was a “five-star general”, I was a “five-star student and son”, before, by the end of the decade, I first started to notice “the darkness on the edge of town”.

America was celebrating its WW2 victory with a new stability for its middle class, giving its soldiers back home from the war good jobs, houses, education, loans, and upward mobility. My family was on the ladder up, buying an even better suburban house in Westbury, Long Island, for $18,000 in 1952, and like the rest of the neighbors, having brand new elementary and high schools built for their sons and daughters. Mickey Mantle and the NY Yankees ruled my universe, and the new omnipotent tv, the internet of its day, was filling up our hungry minds with cowboys, Indians, made-for-television drama, live comedy with Milton Berle, Sid Caeser, Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton, along with spoon feeding us insidious PG commercials to brainwash us to buy Coca Cola, Alka Seltzer, Frosted Flakes, Marlboros, Chevrolets, Fords, and yes, even Barbies.

I think 5th grade was the highlight of my young mid-50s life. I was 11 years old, in Miss Ann Lockledge’s class at Salisbury Elementary School, just a three-minute stroll, or quick sprint, straight up Valentines Road, where we lived in our 3-bedroom brick ranch house. Miss Lockledge was a first-time teacher who looked a lot like Howdy Doody, the wildly-popular, freckled-faced, wooden tv puppet with human sidekicks, “Buffalo Bob” and Clarabell, the Clown, who I watched every day after school. Miss Lockledge had curly red hair and glasses, and she was a sucker, I’m afraid to say, all too easy to take advantage of, for us wise-ass suburban Jewish kids.

One day Richard Franks got out of hand and threw a black hightop Converse sneaker to the front of the room. It hit Miss Lockledge in the face, broke her glasses, and she started to cry. The room went dead silent. In a heartbeat, the Principal, Mr. O’Farrell came in and took me and Richard Franks to his office. Why me? Oh, did I say, I was the ringleader?

My favorite thing though, was to stand in front of my house, on Valentines Road, every day after school, to wave to Miss Lockledge, as she drove home from Salisbury, in her 1956 green and white Chevy Bel Air convertible. She’d wave back. Just like Howdy Doody. So cooool.

1960s (13-23 years old)

It was all over by the time I was thirteen. With my dreaded and hated Bar Mitzvah! The one I never wanted. Because I didn’t have any girls to invite to the big reception after the service at Temple Sholom where I “became a man”. And because of the stupidity of Hebrew school, never teaching us what one frigging word meant in English!

Are you sure you don’t want a Bar Mitzvah, son? You may come to regret it?

I’m positive! I’m just doing it for the both of you!

Yet another case of me being the good, good boy, of pleasing my parents. No voice of my own. Something I would be sure to correct for the next many many decades!

By the end of 6th grade, also thirteen, I was separated out of the general student population, and “put in with the smart kids”, something that I would definitely regret for the rest of my young life.

I don’t care about how smart I am, Mom. I’m gonna lose all my friends. They’ll never talk to me anymore.

Are you sure? It’ll be very good for you. So many opportunities….

Yeah, I’m positive. I don’t want to have to take all my classes with Nicky Bloomberg with the Coke-bottle glasses. Please don’t make me! (Even then, I guess I had something against Coca Cola!)

But in the end, I was a “good boy”, needing to please my parents; I did just what they desired.

And when I graduated high school in 1965, even then, I bitterly went to the cheap, State University (at Buffalo), when all I was groomed for, and encouraged to do, was to apply, and go to, an Ivy League school. Brown, Columbia, Princeton? No, for not me, the parent-pleasing, “good boy”! Forgeddaboutit! Not in the cards.

Instead, I got angry. Very very angry.

And that’s primarily what I remember about the 1960s…. my anger… until… I cut the umbilical cord and ran away from home. Several years later….

But I was in line with the times, wasn’t I?

“The times, which were ‘a changin’.”

After JFK got shot in 1963.

Where were you on this day?

Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Cassius Clay, soon to become Muhammad Ali, all my end-of-childhood “heroes”.

By 1967, I had dropped my pre-med program at college along with my family’s wish for me to become “their son, the doctah”.

Instead, I “turned on, tuned in and dropped out”, as Timothy Leary preached back in the day.

The war in Vietnam dominated the political and cultural consciousness of the mid to late 60s, as did protest, alternative culture, and “sex, drugs, & rock ‘n roll”. I watched the Summer of Love, Flower Power, the promise of peace, civil and women’s rights, and so much more… turn sadly and violently into Malcolm’s, Martin’s, and Bobby’s assassinations in 1968…

…and instead of going to my college graduation in 1969, I crossed Niagara Falls and lost my much-belated virginity in a rooming house in Toronto, Canada.

As college graduation hurried past me and with the end of the decade looming ominously in front, with all my former high school friends going safely to either law or medical school, having just voted for Eldridge Cleaver in my first presidential election, I had the huge movie poster of a dazed, aimless Dustin Hoffman from the film “The Graduate” tacked on my old childhood bedroom door, and it was presciently clear that I had “no direction known” punched as my ticket to ride into my chaotically unknown future.

1970s (23-33 years old)

Then things changed.

On the first day of spring, 1970, I packed up all my road-worthy belongings into a green army duffle bag, and along with the $850 I had buried away from my hated 13-year-od Bar Mitzvah, I traveled up and down America “like it was one big map”. In a right rear fender, camouflaged-painted, 1964 Pontiac Tempest named “Wolfie” - who took me from the Bowery and Delancey in Lower Manhattan, to still bomb-dropping Washington DC, to the hanging Spanish moss of Savannah, Georgia, to Papa Hemmingway’s Florida Keys, to Selma “Bloody Sunday” Alabama, back up to Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, to Louisville, Kentucky (to see the home of “The Greatest”), and to every place in between that I had ever heard of, without ever knowing where I would rest my near-hippie, Jewfro-ed head, from one night to the other. Gas was $.33/gallon in 1970, and it was a “groovy and far out time”, one when I could pull into any random coffee shop in almost any “long-hair part of town” in America, and find myself a free place to stay for the night, or for probably as long I’d like.

This was a wild and wooly ride for a still-naive young Trules. When I first fell in love with travel. When I first found myself a capable, fun-lovin’ and “freewheelin’” creative improviser. Because before college graduation, and the miracle of marijuana “expanding my mind”, I was quite the opposite. I’d never taken a dance step, sang a note, or ignited a creative fire in my life. Rather, like my parents’ generation, and ol’ Ike Eisenhower himself, I was completely “buttoned down” - repressed, inhibited, and follow-the-rules, uncreative. I was also, perhaps unknown to myself, a volcano waiting to erupt and explode… too long the “good boy” who really didn’t know, and who was never encouraged to learn… who the hell I really was. But then pot… which finally allowed me to let go and open my mind, and which gave me the courage to drop my plans for medical school, and now - hitting the road - finally… set me… freeeeee.

And so… after over four, wildly-unpredictable and risk-taking months on the road, without contacting my family, former friends, or anyone I had ever known (there were rumors I was dead or selling drugs in New York’s East Village), I ended up in The Windy City, The City of Big Shoulders, Chicago, Illinois.

And it was there… that my life took a radical turn.

I met Shirley Mordine and The Dance Troupe in residence at Columbia College at 1725 Wells Street in Old Town.

Shirley was my first, and perhaps my only, mentor in life.

Shirley gave me this gift - by inviting me to take her dance-theater workshop on Wells Street in the summer of 1970. And by inviting me to join her professional Dance Troupe. Sure, she must have been desperate to take a chance on me, a twenty-two-year-old volcano waiting to erupt with almost no dance experience. But then again, she had just lost her one and only male dancer, and I’m sure, male modern dancers were very hard to find in 1970, as they still may be in 2023. But accident, incident, and perhaps fate (if you believe in it), and definitely, synchronicity – Shirley losing Mitch and my passing through Chicago at exactly that moment – are the precise moments that make for a life story. And also the moment, in retrospect, for which I’ll be forever grateful.

But to discover myself… a “modern dancer”… was… and still is… absolutely unbelievable to me. It’s like going to sleep one day as a repressed adolescent and waking up… someone else – on another planet. Say like, going to sleep on the planet Earth, and waking up on the planet Mars. Or perhaps like going to sleep as Rip Van Winkle one day and waking up twenty years later and – not recognizing anything about yourself or the world about you.

Suddenly, my 20s, the 1970s, became about “being an artist”. Taking company dance classes every day. Graham and Cunningham modern technique. Ballet barre. Company rehearsals every day. Teaching dance and theater classes for Columbia College Chicago every evening. Getting paid for it! Performing in public. Getting reviewed (positively) in the “Chicago Tribune” and “The Chicago Reader”. Leaving Shirley’s company in 1974 and co-founding “MoMing”, the best-known dance-theater in Chicago in the 70s, one of the City’s “Heavy 75”. Learning to choreograph, direct, produce, apply for and get grants (city, state and federal), growing up and becoming a young adult with a wild and wooly, free-wheelin’ sex life.

I hardly knew what was going on in “the real world”. The Vietnam War came to an end. Nixon got caught with his hands all over Watergate and was forced to resign the Presidency. I watched that! The end of the civil rights movement, the birth of the gay liberation movement. More Cold War, the passing of “Roe v Wade”, Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the UK, the breakup of the Beatles, the emergence of punk and disco, the death of Elvis… what else did I miss?

I had my first live-in girlfriend in 1972. I was a terrible boyfriend. I wasn’t capable of loyalty or love. What were they? I had too much high school and college social awkwardness to make up for. Too much sexual and creative repression to compensate for. I remember the incestuous and polygamous fabric of the time when we all slept with each other, our students, our friends, our friends’ wives, and any attractive and willing waitresses on Lincoln Avenue, usually not at the same time, but usually and eventually, to deleterious effect.

Women were newly empowered in the early 70s, gay people were coming out by the drove, and there was no AIDS menace yet on the horizon. I remember getting more than one woman pregnant, and watching more than one go through the awkwardness and pain of abortion, yet feeling no shame at the time. Years later, losing my fertility to Stage 3 lymphatic cancer and chemotherapy, I often think of the word “karma”.

But those were my 1970s in Chicago. Wild and wooly indeed. My coming of age. A young man in tune with his changing times. A portrait of an artist in search of himself.

I think I’ll pause here before I gallop off through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, and arrive here at the 2020s.

Maybe I’ll post Part 2 in a week, instead of waiting the full 2 weeks.

I hope that maybe I stirred some Decade-Recall of YOUR OWN.

Let me know if I did.

In the meantime, HAVE A GREAT HAPPY AND HEALTHY 2024!!!!

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Thanks so much!!!

Trules

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