Back in the day

The cast of "Relative Madness" at Lincoln Center in 1991. No, we didn't perform there. (Click image to up-rez.) — The cast of “Relative Madness” at Lincoln Center in 1991. No, we didn’t perform there. (Click image to up-rez.)

Twenty years ago, give or take, we were in New York City performing Jean Cooper’s Relative Madness inside a black box rental at Playwrights Horizons, our adventure bankrolled by company owner Buren Martin on the still viable theory that such credits increase a company’s marketability elsewhere.

We’d ridden up in a rickety white moving truck, perched on and among our scenery and equipment like the migrant workers we were. We numbered nine, I think, or maybe seven. Memory fades. We passed out flyers, performed for scant but polite houses, saw some of the sights, loaded out and left.

Nobody was injured.

Some of us got laid.

Buren proposed to his future wife, Dottie, at the top of the Empire State Building during that trip. Probably the most romantic gesture to which I’ve ever been privy. They have two children now. I auditioned for Moses Goldberg and was cast in the Louisville Children’s Theatre production of A Tale of Two Cities, the 1992 musical adaptation with book by Wendy Kesselman of My Sister In This House fame. I don’t think she liked me, but I enjoyed myself immensely.

Buren has returned to the City dozens of times with his family. Not I. Too big, too loud, too energetic. I regard it mainly as that gigantic urban obstacle between me and Bar Harbor and have gone back there only twice in all the intervening years, both times to attend Intruders Foundation seminars hosted by abduction researcher Budd Hopkins. Budd died last year, eliminating my last incentive ever to set foot on that accursed island again.

Speaking of things paranormal, this is the year that we’ll find out whether the Mayans stopped their calendar at 2012 because the world really is about to end, or because they just got tired of carving calendars. Where will you be December 21?

And continuing in much the same vein … A YouTube subscriber messaged me last night about a video that I posted in October of 2010. It was rumored at the time that an entire Chinese village had been abducted by aliens, so I videoblogged the rumor in my capacity as Technorati.com’s UFO reporter (news premasticator, actually). The YouTube subscriber thinks that we might be related. Her maiden name is Brosnan and she sees a family resemblance in my face. Funny, she doesn’t look a bit Asian to me.