Thomas F. Cook

I’d have to go through my playbills and figure out when it was that Stephen Sondheim and his husband sat down next to my friend. He died in late 2021 so I’m thinking it was before Covid. Anyway, what struck me during the performance was how loud he was with his reactions. He was the type of person who would annoy me, if I hadn’t known who he was — someone who gasps loudly at an obvious plot reveal in a movie. Or worse, someone who sighs very loudly when they’re bored.

But, like the time I sat across from Philip Seymour Hoffman on a subway, I realized that certain artists live with a natural intensity of observation that most people don’t engage. Shirley Maclaine was also described as having this quality by Pete Hammill, who dated her, in his memoir “A Drinking Life.” I think, in Sondheim’s case, just from observing him, he approached watching a play (even a revival) as a completely new experience. Every laugh or revelation was completely brand new and he responded with the eagerness of a child listening to a story being told by a parent.

The title Art Isn’t Easy is one of the lines from the song “Putting It Together,” from the show “Sunday In The Park With George.” Despite his status as a giant of the musical theatre world (and I have to add it is one of the nastiest and bitchiest of all the professions available, so don’t do it, if you have any sense. And it’s also dying.) he didn’t actually have a lot of great hit shows and he had only one song that “crossed over” to the radio, “Send in The Clowns.”

His greatest show and achievement was “Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” That was 1979. But then there’s some confusion about what’s considered “his show” and what’s considered a show that he contributed to. This book adds more flesh to the story but I don’t think it’s definitive. For example, the music for West Side Story is by Leonard Bernstein. The lyrics are Stephen Sondheim. But then Gypsy came along and the lyrics, again, are written by Sondheim but the music is by Jule Styne. This is solely because Ethel Merman refused to have a “new” songwriter do the work on a show that was designed specifically for her to play. He was both composer and lyricist on “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum,” but it wasn’t until “Company,” that he finally refused to write lyrics without also writing the music.

And then it was a hit and a miss, almost in alternating order. Company was a hit. Follies was a miss. A Little Night Music was a hit. Pacific Overtures was a disaster. Sweeney Todd was a huge hit and has remained so. Merrily We Roll Along failed after 9 nights. Sunday In The Park With George, Into The Woods: hits. Passion: failure. Assasins: failure. Road Show/Bounce: No one’s heard of it. By now he said he was too old — that the juices weren’t flowing anymore. There was a posthumous production called “Here We Are,” which was dreadful, in my opinion — like copying the script of a movie and then presenting it with some background music.

Almost all his failures have been revived and sometimes rewritten in a way that has brought them up to a certain level of great. Follies, in particular, has grown in people’s eyes — especially with the help of Cameron Mackintosh in London and The Roundabout Theatre Company in New York. Merrily We Roll Along has been rewritten so many times it’s hard to list, but the recent production with Daniel Radcliffe was an enormous success. I suspect that Passion will ultimately find this same kind of rejuvenation.

My first Broadway show A Chorus Line and the second was The Wiz — both in 1978. I saw Sweeney in 1980 (I think) and I might even still have the Playbill. I was on a class trip, and I also saw “Talley’s Folley” by Landford Wilson. My classmates thought I was crazy.

But I think with Sondheim, pulling off the layers of cult-madness that adorn him, what you find is a very talented writer and composer — he was actually more interested in composition than in lyric writing — who was animated by revenge and had the gay man’s ability to be an absolute bitch. But one thing I will always be grateful for, is that when he and the stupid slimy usurper named Arthur Laurents — a poser if there ever was one — “reconciled,” Stephen Sondheim told him “You’re just smart enough to know how mediocre you are.”

I have my own personal reasons for hating Arthur Laurents but that in no way affected any of my feelings about this short, terrific, biography, part of the “Jewish Lives,” series. And if you believe that, there is a president who would like you to join his fan base.

I think I’m going to keep here, and add many more items over time, all the things the local, state and federal governments need to do that they should have done a long time ago, but are too busy raising money for their re-elections, to actually do their jobs.

Free luggage carts at all airports. (Every other country in the world provides free carts, and some even go up and down escalators. In America, you have to pay $6.00 when you might not even need to use it for 5 minutes.)

Every business must have a phone number: Most customer service lines have been eliminated. It’s distressingly ignorant to assume and FAQ will solve every problem unless, and this is probably the case, they don’t care about the problems that can’t be solved, like a fraudulent charge.

Hire people at the social security office. I don’t know how badly Elon Musk and his DOGE twinks hurt social security, but if you can’t, again, solve your problem with their ridiculously incomplete FAQ/web site, you are directed to a national number where you have to wait possibly 4 hours to speak to someone.

Keep cash legal tender. In NY, to solve the problem of many places refusing to accept cash, the city council in its stupidity enacted a cash for card option, where you can buy a plastic credit card for the amount of your purchase, and then use that card to pay for your popcorn. This is just an enormous waste of plastic, gives someone a pointless fee for providing this service, and it does not address the issue of legal tender. “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” It says so, right on the bill. They are, in my opinion, breaking the law by not accepting cash.

By me.

A long time friend — a short black woman who always described herself, jokingly, as a “poor black child from Harlem,” asked me in… roughly… 1999, maybe 2000, to be her executor of her will — actually what she asked was to take care of her things if she died. She was too cheap and stupid to hire a lawyer to do a will. But oh God, I wish she had.

I had managed to get her a 3-page internet based will which she signed and had witnessed and notarized. The will basically said that all her money would be divided up and given to 3 charities. She was a very cheap and somewhat horrible person and she just kept saying, for years, that she didn’t want anyone spending her money and that she’d never rest if she knew someone had it. (She is money obsessed.)

Anyway, flash forward to 2025 and she just seems to be having one problem after another, and I was too blind or ignorant, maybe, to see that her dementia was advancing on her. She had just turned 88, when she had a fall on one of the coldest and iciest days of the year. That put her in the hospital where she needed surgery and she just kept saying, I just want to die. When I spoke to her on the phone she asked me why they couldn’t just give her some pills and I told her that’s not how hospitals work. After a week she agreed to have the pins put in her leg and then, this year long nightmare began. She was no longer able to walk and, physical therapy did not improve the problem.

Now the odd thing is that if she hadn’t had the surgery, the big “threat” was that she would never be able to walk again. So surgery or no surgery, she can’t walk. And she has dementia. And she has COPD — has had it since the time when they called it emphysema. And she has a large section of her left lung removed because she had tuberculosis as a child — she was in an iron lung for six months. And she has glaucoma. And she has no teeth.

I’m going to cut this memoir down to nothing and flash forward to yesterday. Almost 1 year and 2 weeks after her fall and the surgery. We had finally found a place for her to live out the rest of her years but, since personality doesn’t change, she has been nothing but uncooperative and vicious to all the people that are there to help her. The administrator of the center is going to tell me tomorrow that she has to be moved to their second floor, which is $7,500/month, or that we have to find a proper nursing home for her.

And I am so angry now. I am angry that I ever agreed to help this woman. She is ungrateful and spiteful. She gets combative for no discernible reason. She is racist — hates any Spanish speaking person and supports Trump’s so-called “crackdown.” She is self-hating because she also hates other black people. And most insulting — I guess most personal to me — is she has absolutely no respect or consideration for my sexual orientation. She knows I’m gay, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s a real thing in exactly the same way many people today do not accept that transgenderism is a real thing.

She is always carrying on about how she knows I want her body and she says it with so much anger. She said this yesterday in response to nothing at all.

“Listen. I know my body better than anyone, and you will never have it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Yes you do you fucking liar. And you’ll never get it.”

Yes this is the way she talks, at 89, with almost no ability to even push herself across the room in a wheelchair, or find her way back to her room because she’s forgotten where she stays.

But I also find it upsetting that someone who has known me for so many years — about 4 decades — can no longer accept, and maybe never did accept, that I actually am gay. That it’s a real thing and not a phase or an accident or something caused by the mother’s hormones in the womb. Perhaps one day they will find a gene that most gay people have in common — sort of like that gene that makes people sneeze when they get sunlight in their eyes, or the gene that causes some people to smell cilantro and think it smells like dish washing soap.

But never mind. The problem with dementia — perhaps one of the main problems people come to realize — is that you can no longer actually have a conversation. They are still the same personality, but the levels have shifted. She is on a level closer to that of a child. And I’m supposed to be the adult. And last night, after learning that she is being kicked out of the center, I never hated her more. She knew something was up but she could only be nasty about it and asked my co-guardian, “What’s wrong with his ass?”

And then two minute later she throws a fit, starts sobbing about the pain her mouth which wasn’t there last week. I just can’t take it anymore. I want to find a place and leave her there for other people to bother with. I will probably let them move her up to the second floor which is their memory unit and then we will look for a place that takes medicaid and provides memory services, or proper nursing care. But all I can see at this point is her continued decline and, because of her nasty personality, a lower and lower standard. Right now she’s in her own room with a small kitchenette and a tv and a table and a big bathroom. And she hates it. And they will kick her out and she will end up in a hospital type room with a curtain for privacy and virtually no room at all. And it will be all her fault because we have bent over backwards for the last year.

And ultimately it was the judge’s fault. but that’s another story.

With apologies to the joke told through the ages in various forms. The joke, which is really just a reaction to an ancient belief that the world rested on the back of seven elephants, goes something like this:

An astronomer who lived in an era long ago was giving a lecture about how the earth traveled around the sun when someone in the audience asked what the earth was resting on.

— It’s not resting on anything.
— Of course it is. Everyone knows the world sits on the back of a giant turtle.
— If that’s the case, then what is the turtle standing on?
— It’s turtles all the way down.

I think it’s called the problem of infinite regress. It’s an issue with existence, I suppose, because even now, with unbelievable calculating powers of computers, it is still impossible to describe anything before the big bang. So we’re stuck in the same (useless) problem. What came before the big bang. Turtles. What came before that. Turtles all the way back. And of course religious lunatics say now that that’s where God exists. Who knows. The bible may be right in a way: the universe more or less expanded into existence in less than a second. It was so hot that light could not escape for the first 100,000 years. The expansion was so large and fast it’s really impossible to even conceptualize, except in math. Basically the current “expansion theory” is that the universe began as a “sphere” of energy that was about the size of 4 x 10 to the negative 29th power meters, which means: 0.000000000000000000000000000004 meters large and expanded in 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds to something that was about 9/10ths of a meter in size — let’s 3 feet. From that point, it went “much more slowly,” to quote Wikipedia. I don’t know much about the expansion after that but it was faster than light but it was also dark and it was not an explosion. The “let there be light” phase of the universe didn’t begin until about 100,000 years had passed. But time being relative and affected by gravity, who knows what this really means. All we know — and it’s still a theory but with some pretty good evidence to help the proof along — is that it began, somehow. And that’s the problem of infinite regress.

So in our world right now, it’s lies all the way down, instead of turtles. And I just will never understand, I think, how it is a pathological liar like Trump is able to so totally infect the world with his lies that everyone — literally everyone including the media, newspapers, and so on — loses sight of what started this whole thing in the first place: a lie — or several lies.

The very superficial top of this stack of lies is the horrible case of a named Pretty. Pretti is the proper spelling, but I’m using adjective here because it feels so appropriate and its the way he pronounced it. The government killed Pretty. A few weeks earlier they killed a woman named Good. Pretty and Good. It would only be more appropriate if they killed a person named Justice. Or Honesty. Or Integrity.

And while the media focuses on this vicious act of killing, and forgets the horrible things Trump said last week about almost all of Europe and the rest of the world, and forgets the killing two weeks ago of Good, no one covers or even asks the question is it necessary to control immigration, because the accepted answer is yes. EVEN THOUGH, our growth rate has now slowed to a trickle and that will have severe consequences as was shown in the tome “Capital” by the French economist, Thomas Piketty.

But I want to work our way down to the base of these topics.

• Top is the murder of Pretti and Good.
• Below that is the untrained thugs who enjoy killing people that are currently acting as agents of ICE and CAB or whatever that acronym is. The government uses two agencies to conduct these attacks because legally, customs and immigration is only allowed to work up to 100 miles from a border. Most people live in 100 mile zone. But in a place like Iowa, they need another agency, so they use the second. Anyway they are thugs and untrained. Many of them are probably the same people that Trump pardoned from January 6.
• Below that lie is the 3,000 “agents” they sent into Minneapolis to control “rioting” and assaults — all of which they claim are being waged against the first agents they sent in. But that doesn’t matter because they lie about the assaults. There aren’t any. Most people back away from assault rifles and have to leave places where they’ve deployed tear gas.
• Below that lie is the initial group of “agents” sent in to look for “illegals,” which they have identified as Syrians (Or Ethiopians — check this, but I’m pretty sure it’s Syrians).
• Below the Syrian lie is the lie that Syrians are committing a 2 billion dollar fraud against the government.
• Below that lie is Pandemic Era relief funds from late in the Trump administration and early Biden administration that provided money for companies to keep their employees paid and keep the economy from collapsing. There were flaws in this system that made it possible to defraud the government.
• Below that lie is the notion that people in the rest of the world are not even allowed to ask for asylum. (This is getting into basic human rights of travel, starvation, the search for help.)
  Below that lie is the idea that the United States controls the world. (This is where Trump’s mind is at.)

There is one truth to this whole bizarre matter. There was a 250 million dollar Fraud committed by a Syrian American woman in Minneapolis during the Covid pandemic. It was dealt with. They were prosecuted. 50 people in this scam pleaded guilty. They’ve recovered approximately 75 million of the 250 stolen, probably by seizing bank accounts of the actual criminals. I believe the ringleader might be in jail but it’s hard to find information about this group. This is the “2 Billion dollar Syrian fraud,” the lie that sits at the base of Trump’s attack on Minneapolis. This is the lie that caused Alex Pretti and Nicole Good’s deaths. And this is how we end up talking and screaming about the surface of things, and don’t dig down into the very base of it and start looking at some of the more egregious things he has done.

Asylum seekers are often lying. They are often looking for economic gain and are not actually threatened back in their homes. Just because someone asks for asylum should not mean that they are thrown into a concentration camp/jail. Common morality, whether you’re religious or not, says you should not jail someone who asks for help. And until Trump, they weren’t. They were allowed to live in the United States until their case came up to be judged.

Unfortunately, Trump and his ilk decided to slash the number of judges, so that their cases never come up due to a lack of judges. This doesn’t even address the matter of incompetent judges. They COULD have dealt with the asylum seekers. But they would rather cause death and destruction because it’s better for their side.

His disdain for all people is bottomless. This is where he starts to violate human rights by indicating that anyone who even asks for asylum should be criminalized. And especially if they’re from south of the Rio Grande.

[NB: There are no human rights. No one has a “right” to live, or to reproduce, or to health care, or to drive a car, or own a phone, go to church, or eat or sleep. But in a proper civilization, we recognize that there should be some sense of rights, thus the framers called them “inalienable rights,” even though they are basically made up.]

America is the richest country in the world and has a reputation, which it is happy to spread and boast about, that you can achieve anything you want. This myth is still being perpetuated by both liberals and conservatives, by progressives and Maga-nuts. When an Oscar or Tony winner gets up and says to the camera, “Never let go of your dreams,” instead of just thanking people, or any other one of those platitudes that Americans are so good at spouting, it sends the message that this is the country of dreams come true — and we’ve been selling it for decades, if not centuries. There is a certain truism to the notion; and that goes back to the initial reason we decided, mainly with the help of Thomas Jefferson, not to have kings or to allow religion any governmental power. Before coming to America, people could not own land. If they were lucky, they could lease it from their local “Downton Abbey.” If they were unlucky, they simply had to go from one farm to another and offer their labor for sale. But America, since 1630 when my first ancestor came over as an indentured servant, was always a dreamy place where you didn’t have striations like England, or France before the revolution, or Germany with all its fiefdoms.

(Never mind that almost immediately, people were divided into “Newcomers,” and “Oldcomers.” My own ancestor, only ten years late to the foundation of Plymouth, was considered a “newcomer” and therefore was not allowed to own land unless he could “buy” it from an American Indian, or was granted tracts of land from the Plymouth colony Oldcomers. Almost every town founded in New England and the Virginia colonies were founded because “newcomers” could not own land in the new world. This went on and on and included the great land rushes depicted in Tom Cruise’s movie “Far and Away,” as well as others. People actually had to race on foot to grab pieces of land and plant their own flags. Cheaters were shot on site — all of this took place on what we would call Indian land, of course.)

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that it’s a long way down this ladder of lies, and when you get to the bottom of it, it’s usually history that we’re talking about. Or lies about history. And sometimes, little posters or memes can dig right through all of this. The latest I saw was, “Every refugee boat is a Mayflower.”

True, in its way.

I think when I am finally able to start writing again, I am going to keep this little saying or aphorism by T.S. Eliot in my wallet, laminated, and look at it every so often to remind myself that I am now part of “last year’s words.” I think this might be freeing, in a way. One of the things I’ve had to come to understand — as an imperative really — is that I was not very good and my writing was unrealistic and actually a little bizarre. It was almost too much of a series of non-sequiturs that have no real meaning and, worse, no place even as non-sequiturs.

There was a character I once wrote who cut himself. I named him Greg because I was loosely basing him on a friend of mine whose name was Greg, but who basically dropped me without even the slightest concern once he had a boyfriend. He was weird in so many ways. New York is full of jaywalkers because it’s just the way people are and they step into the street in order to cross as soon as the car goes by. Well Greg thought that they were all trying to kill themselves by stepping in front of his car and he slammed on the brakes and screamed, “Oh my Godl They’re trying to kill themselves.”

He was constantly saying and doing things like that. He was insatiable when it came to sex and men and would have sex with any man that he could if the opportunity existed. Once, out on Fire Island, for example, we were at a house and he saw an outdoor shower that one of the guys in the house decided to use. So he went down to the back yard and sat on a bench until the guy was done showering and opened the door and saw Patrick just sitting there staring at him. Patrick got up and walked into the shower and the guy let him and they sucked and jerked each other off. Patrick thought absolutely nothing of it. He wasn’t even doing it to boast to the others. He would go to sex clubs and call me later and told me that he came six times in one night.

Then I learned he had been gay bashed outside a bar in Staten Island, where he was from. He didn’t remember the incident, but all the windows in his car were smashed out and his head was bashed in with a baseball bat. He was in the hospital for weeks. He was never the same after that and he spoke, almost entirely, in non sequiturs. We used to make a motion of “changing the chanel” every time he spoke up and said something that was completely unrelated to whatever the people were talking about. Gene Stanley would always roll his eyes. But I liked Patrick and so when it came time to write Greg as a character, I created a strange guy who came out with odd jokes told at completely inappropriate times, but had enough sense to know that he was odd. He cut himself, relentlessly, and his chest and upper arms were covered with scars from all the cutting. He did this cutting, supposedly, to release the emotional strain of loving people who could not accept love.

But when I looked at it again, I realized it was utterly ridiculous. It was absurd. And I think my work has always had that quality of being absolutely unbelievable and maybe stupid.

But that was, in fact, my voice. It was who I was. The entire quote (of course it’s from “Four Quartets” but I don’t know if it’s Little Gidding or another one), is:

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.”

When I resume my writing, which I must do soon, and I think before Ellie passes away, I must remember that one of the reasons — perhaps the main reason I stopped writing in the first place — was that I realized I was working in a language that was no longer contemporary. What I was writing had no more relevance, even to me. I still want to finish those books, and the Cigar Tree is now cemented enough in my brain that I don’t think there’s anything more that I need to do to that one.

I have to find a second voice. Another voice.

But as people get more and more frustrated they start to devolve into the usual homophobic, female-phobic tropes, and they start using the same insults as conservatives. So we get JD Vance prettied up as a fat woman drag queen. Other stuff that implies Trump’s toadies are effeminate. And the one that’s currently irking me, that Epstein, Trump and the others were pedophiles.

The definition of paedophilia is a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. That means BEFORE PUBIC HAIR. That is very different to the age of consent and it’s an important difference because being attracted to someone who is under the age of consent is not a mental illness. Being attracted to undeveloped and hairless children IS a mental illness. They are both illegal under the law, but they are not the same thing. But you wouldn’t know it anymore, based on the constant screaming that both Epstein and Trump are pedophiles.

They weren’t pedophiles — although I wouldn’t put it past either one to actually try it out. Epstein was a sex trafficker. Trump had sex with women under the age of consent. Those are crimes, but not crimes of pedophilia. I have yet to see a single accusation of trafficking or having sex with prepubescent child. (Epstein trafficked girls as young as 14, [and I recently read 12, but I haven’t been able to verify it with accurate info] but because girls start puberty as young as 8 and sometimes 7, and menarche happens generally around 12, 14 is still probably not prepubescent.)

The age of consent exists because we recognize, in this supposedly advanced society we live in, that young people are not capable of making a consensual decision. This always comes up when, like in the brilliant Todd Haynes movie “May December,” the victim says he wanted it or that he was in love, at the age of 13, with the older woman. Young people do not have the legal right to make that decision, even if they are precocious and horny as hell. They do not have the right to choose a sexual partner until they reach and pass the age of consent.

Even then, if a young woman has reached the age of consent (over 18 — but I’m not even sure if that’s the age) — and decides to become a boy toy for wealthy men like Epstein and Trump — people will still refer to her as underage or to the men as pedophiles or child rapists.

Woody Allen, for example, ended up getting into a life-defining mess by marrying his girlfriend’s daughter. She is constantly referred to as his “step daughter.” (She never was. She is, in fact, Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter with Andre Previn. Her full name was Soon-Yi Previn. Additionally, but irrelevant, Mia Farrow destroyed his marriage and Soon-Yi’s mother went into an almost suicidal depression. because of it.) Soon-Yi was 22 when they began to date, but Allen is still referred to as a pedophile or child molester. He was never married to Mia Farrow and in the 12 years they were “together,” they never lived in the same place. They also, apparently, had a pretty awful relationship. But none of those details matter anymore, when people talk about Woody Allen or Soon-Yi. He’s a pedophile who married his wife’s daughter; or he’s a child molester who married his step daughter. He made a somewhat lame joke with Kathy Griffin when they were sitting next to her and he said, “This is my child bride.” (Soon Yi is in her 50s now.)

I think this tendency to label everything pedophilia is ultimately the vilification of the older man who dates or marries a younger woman. Women hate this — they call it creepy. However, it happens all the time, hence the jokes about “Who is Leonardo DiCaprio dating?” “Someone under 25.” Or the greatest offender of all time, I suppose, Jerry Lee Lewis.

[And as far as Leo goes, he has stated repeatedly that he does not want a family or children. Almost universally, around 25 or 26, women start demanding marriage, family and children. So of course he has to break it off with them. I also read from an extremely reliable source, ages and ages ago, that he’s gay but like Tom Cruise, they are too famous for the truth to ever be told. Who knows, but this person had listed just about every single gay actor/actress in Hollywood, many before it was known, like Zachary Quinto. I’ve never been able to find that site again.]

Anyway it’s also, I suspect, an easy way to vent rage and anger that doesn’t, in fact, force you to choose a side. You can be progressive or ultra conservative, neutral or an independent with or without leaning to one side or the other — you can be anywhere on the political slide ruler — and be opposed , even violently, to the molestation and sex trafficking of children. If you have a violent nature, or if you have some sort of Travis Bickle like need to rescue someone, making that victim a child, instead of a young teen, is almost a no-brainer. It’s one of the reasons I hate what Taco has done, with apparent ease. To bring down the level of discourse from one of simple disagreement, to something that resembles one of his favorites venues, the staged wrestling match. He’s said as much, in interviews, that he wasn’t a good student and the only thing that he enjoyed was when the boys got into fist fights.

Anyway, the blurring of the definition of sexual predation downward to pedophilia, plus the retreat to homophobic taunts and queer baiting, plus the usual mysogyny — insulting men by implying there is something girlish about them — and the almost ubiquitous “fat shaming” they do of Trump is a sad reminder that no matter how far we think we advance, we can always be brought down to name calling and childish insults.