HB Studio, a Dream Place

This blog piece is for "Selfie"... who inspires me with her kindness and wisdom to keep pushing and to acknowledge my past which brought me to a reinvented present. And it is she who suggested this music.

In 1965, I attended HB Studio and took classes in acting technique and scene study with James Patterson. My scene partner was a young Robert DeNiro... and we performed one scene from the play "The Diary of Anne Frank." I remember that he was very quiet and mysteriously introspective and detached. 

I was still living in Valley Stream, Long Island and I drove into NYC in my 1962 gold Corvair with my friend Linda, who was a great actor and artistic motivation.

Back then, the view of the West Side Highway was quite different: there was an overpass that extended all the way from uptown to downtown and cars could pass under the highway as they drove in either direction. The high highway obscured the view of the Hudson River and the streets in Greenwich Village were quiet and uncrowded. That elevated highway is long gone, but it gave the area a darker feeling, and cast strange and haunting shadows onto Bank Street.

This photo was taken by Berenice Abbott; it is a southern view of the West Side Highway to about West 26th Street:

Back then and so long ago, I was a young girl and filled with hopes and aspirations. HB Studio was a dream place, but I never fulfilled my dreams. It just never happened, and that knowledge sometimes overwhelms me with regret and sadness. I am old now and getting older, but I did manage to find places where I could fulfill my dreams... in small scale ways. More about that later. 

This is now the bright, open and airy view of the West Side Highway. The Hudson River is visible in the distance. 

This photo was taken in June 1966, in front of the Broadhurst Theater... I was probably looking up and hoping to see my own name on a marquee one day. And so it goes, and so it goes. 

And here is that spot now: 

It is the "now" or the present that grounds so many people. But there are some of us who are always filled with great nostalgia: a sense of longing for something... for past places that have now changed or are gone and can never be revisited or for previous carefree times that were filled with wonder and exist only in memories.

"Selfie" gets it because she has what I call "the soul of a poet."

WHAT WAY TO GO TODAY

Almost dusk:

Last summer on one Wednesday, in July,

I sat on a bench, a grey wooden tired

Bench on a boardwalk out at old Long Beach.

In the sky a lonely and lost grey kittiwake tipped

As the hot pink sun set in blazing technicolor over

Hot pinkish sand and the fading blue ocean water.

That morning:

I had thought about seeing great art...

Vermeer, or Courbet, or maybe Monet.

But, I drove to the beach instead to think

To think about everything creative that had been

Created before I got here, and when I was here,

And what will be created when I leave this place.

When one day I leave my place and all places in my

Consciousness that is now in this time and was

At a past time and will be in some next time;

Maybe all time exists at the same time.

The great minds of theoretical physicists search

For the "Theory of Everything" as they sit

In their cluttered rooms, their great thinking rooms.

In universities, they ponder the mathematical equations

And Schrodinger's cat and all those mysteries.

In the evening:

It is during the quiet and still and sad night when

I miss most the people I never met:

Edie Beale, and the Rat Pack, and even Rod Serling

Who made me want to time travel: to go back to simpler places

Like Nedick's, or the Belmore, or Bickford's, and Willoughby.

Then the longing, a longing when distant sounds and faraway

Foghorns drive thoughts to reflect on a life visible through some

Smoky cracked mirror, a haunted and haunting steamy mirror.

As I am sort of old now and getting older

There is a vague and odd feeling that I,

Like the kittiwake, somehow must have lost the way.

--- Marjorie J. Levine © 2009