True Stories Well Told

By Nancy Levinson

I am sitting on a front seat reserved for the elderly trying to catch a read of a few paragraphs at the red lights. At Wilshire and Greenley a man boards, and although he’s not elderly, sits across from me and right away asks, “What are you reading?” He has pleasant brown eyes crinkling at the edges as he smiles beneath his mask and doesn’t appear to be an unfortunate down-and-out fellow like some who ride the LA bus.

So I hold up the cover, smiling beneath my mask because it happens to be a high-falutin,’ impressive-looking book (and challenging) by a fine poet and writer, Kevin Stein, “Poetry’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age.” 

Up rise the eyebrows of the man. “I just finished reading Hamnet, an ambitious Shakespearean historical fiction,” he dives into an adjacent topic. “Have you read it?” “I have and loved it,” I share.  We two gregarious, loquacious ones dip into literary talk, but only for a mile plus, as coincidentally we both reach for the stop-request-cord to exit at Santa Monica Blvd.

At the corner we exchange destinations. Mine across the street for an ophthalmology appointment.  His to meet Barbara Rush at Whole Foods. Do I know her, he wonders. “Of course, a lovely movie star of yesteryear,” I reply. It turns out that Hank, his name as he has told me, has known her since his days working as a Hollywood agent, and now in her nineties she is just as lovely as ever.

“Hey,” his eyes light up. “It happens that tonight we’re going to a Hammer Museum showing of an old TV production, CBS Playhouse 90. Barbara starred in it with a slew of other well-knowns in the cast. Come join us. Tickets are free.”

At home I google Hank. He is sixteen years younger than I, and way younger than Barbara, who is in her mid-nineties.  Hank seems to be a solo guy who befriends older women, no doubt among any number of other people who appear interesting to him. 

Barbara is not able to make it, as it turns out, but Hank and I enter the museum’s Billy Wilder Theater, and he sits in the Billy Wilder ‘memorial seat,’ so marked on a small bronze plaque, then mentions that Wilder once kindly helped him write a movie script.

The film opens on the large screen, presented exactly as it was shown on TV in 1960, program sponsors, station identification and all. “Alas, Babylon,” is the title, purportedly adapted from a book somewhat as a civil defense guide. In a small Florida town life is fine for a bevy of characters until a massive nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Mushroom clouds everywhere.  We witness destruction, death, radiation burns, blindness, violence, starvation. . . all the aftermath horror that the United States of America hopes to prevent in reality.

The tense drama (dated as it is) is broken by a sponsor, Camel Cigarettes. Hank and I totally remember that spokes/ad man, James Daley, who narrates. An esteemed pilot lands his plane, and upon stepping onto the field, the first thing he does is light up . . . ah that good taste. “Are you smoking more and enjoying it less?”  We film goers peppered throughout the theater laugh, an OMG laugh. Really? Then Hank whispers that Daley was the father of Tyne Daley, the TV actress.  Hank is a font of inside Hollywood industry asides.

He walks me the few blocks back to my apartment, as we talk further about the production (it was broadcast live!) and the current national and world scenes . . . imminent dangers and threats we live with right now.

What a super evening! I smile beneath my mask and thank him ever so much.  As he turns to leave he simply suggests meeting for another show or a new art exhibit one of these days, and we exchange phone numbers.

I have not related this day’s story to anyone yet. Imagine the dropped jaws when I tell my sons and friends that I spent an evening with a man I’d just met on a city bus.

© 2022 Nancy Smiler Levinson

Nancy is the author of MOMENTS OF DAWN:  A Poetic Memoir of Love & Family, Affliction & Affirmation, as well as work that has appeared in Poetica, Voice of Eve, Panoplyzine, Rat’s Ass Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Constellations, Jewish Literary Journal, Sledgehammer, and elsewhere.  In past chapters of her life, she published thirty books for young readers.

By Joshua Feyen

Click here to read the first two posts in this three-part story.

I stopped to ask Jay about his time in the Hotel. We walked for a while in silence, and then he shared how frustrated he was with himself and with the evening. He had decided not to follow the crowds, and instead to see what he could discover on his own. This resulted in missing many of the performances and not experiencing as much of the Hotel as I had.

For several years following this immersive event, I was as haunted by Jay’s disappointment as I was by the surreal Hotel and its performers. I considered adding “Sleep No More” to one of our subsequent trips to New York, but I was apprehensive that a second visit might disappoint Jay again, or be too familiar to me to be of interest.

Despite these hesitations, four years later, I suggested that we visit “Sleep No More” again and Jay agreed, saying “I’d like to get back on that horse.”

We were again separated at the elevator, and I revisited familiar rooms, had a few new interactions, and came upon the witches’ scene from a different hallway. But this time, I didn’t need to pursue Macbeth; I knew what happened next, and hoped that someone else would follow the naked guy, decipher his gestures, and help him dress. As the performance wound down, some doors shut while new doors opened, directing the wandering audience toward the finale below.

Jay and I found one another right away, more than 20 minutes before the conclusion. This gave us time to explore the banquet scene together. We found a hidden staircase to the balcony and watched the finale from above. The lights brightened and we left the Hotel silently.

I remained quiet to give Jay space to tell me about this second experience. He was glad we returned, and this time decided to follow performers when he came across them. He enjoyed watching the dancers, and discovered new scenes. “I found a room with a billiard table, a bar, and some stuff on the floor,” he told me. “They danced a tango.” He also had two interactions with performers; one gave him a small ring. And he was happy that we explored the final scene and balcony together, a location neither of us had visited previously.

Thanks to having returned, I confirmed that indeed fortune favors the bold. And even though I didn’t follow the naked guy on my second visit, I take that attitude when it comes to making choices outside the Hotel. Since our first time experiencing “Sleep No More,” I started and didn’t give up on a master’s degree while working full time. I published a book that I had been working on for 35 years. And I started a new project; this story is one of 50 I hope to write during my 50^th year. While each of these goals involved challenges, frustrations, and long-range planning with uncertain outcomes, the journey and the results have all been worth following the naked guy.

Read about the play “Sleep No More” on Wikipedia.

© 2022 Josh Feyen

Josh Feyen was raised on a farm, went to college in Milwaukee, lived abroad for four years on three continents, and now finds himself with pandemic free time and stories to tell. In the middle of 2021, Josh set about writing 50 short memoir stories in his 50th year. Sharing this story with truestorieswelltold.com is an unexpected surprise; the main focus of Josh’s 50 in 50 writing journey is to share what he’s learned with his four teenage nieces and nephew. Josh lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and writes from his COVID-converted attic studio.

By Joshua Feyen

Click here to read the first post in this three-part story.

I explored a couple more hotel rooms, rifled through a suitcase full of trinkets and more letters, climbed into a wardrobe and discovered it had a false back. I pushed it open and stepped into the apothecary. That’s where I first spotted someone without a mask. A woman danced by, pursued by a man. It was time to watch the dancers, so I joined the dozen guests trailing the couple. We stopped in a large room with a bare Edison bulb suspended over a billiard table. The walls were made of stacked cardboard boxes, intact, not flattened. The floor was covered with rubber shavings. At one end of the room, a second man without a mask tended bar. I pulled up a stool to watch the performance.

The couple danced a tango on the floor, the billiard table, the bar, and even on ledges protruding from the box walls. The music ended abruptly and the woman hurried out. Her companion walked to the far end of the room, lifted the flap of a cardboard box, and disappeared into a hole in the wall. I turned to the bartender who was engaged with one of the guests. He pushed a glass of brown liquid toward the woman, she pushed it back to the bartender. He pushed it toward me, I picked it up and drank it. It was scotch, which surprised me but didn’t disappoint. I set the glass down and returned it to the bartender. He refilled the glass and pushed it back my way. I drank the second glass, this time merely colored water. The bartender put the glass away, locked up the bottle, and walked out of the scene.

I followed him down a narrow flight of steps to a cavernous room. “Sleep No More” is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and I recognized this is when the three witches gave Macbeth advice. The room was dimly lit, the witches were macabre and they swayed around a steamy cauldron. The music picked up, strobe lights flashed and the witches danced frenetically. Macbeth removed his clothing, donned a taxidermied deer head with a huge rack and the witches painted him with something red. The room went black, then got very bright. The witches had disappeared but I spotted Macbeth running down a hallway.

At this point, I had to make a decision. I could stay and explore this room. I could track down the witches. Or, follow the naked guy.

And that’s when I made the most important decision of that day, that year, and what I like to think of as the rest of my life. I followed the naked guy, trailing bloody Macbeth down a narrow stairwell. We descended two flights, exited, and arrived at a small bathroom. Macbeth sat on the floor, the shower rinsing his naked body. The red paint washed onto the white tile floor and curled its way to the drain.

Macbeth turned off the water, and with his raised hand, pointed toward me. It took a moment to realize he wasn’t pointing at me, but rather at a towel hanging on the wall behind me. I handed it to him. He began to dry himself, at first sitting on the floor, then standing up. He pointed again past me and now sensing what to do, I handed him a pair of trousers, and then a shirt. He returned to the stairwell and I followed him to the basement.

The two-story room was large and surrounded on three sides by a balcony. The audience was watching Macbeth’s final scene. A banquet table was set on a dais, and many of the characters I had seen earlier were seated at or standing around the table. I found Jay just as the scene ended. The house lights came up, we collected our coats and phones, and re-entered the real world to walk to our hotel.

I excitedly related my experience in the McKittrick, sharing how I followed the “fortune favors the bold” advice and interacted with both the physical space and the dancers in it. Then I stopped, knowing my husband well enough to recognize that that while I was doing all the talking, there were other reasons he hadn’t yet said something.

Come back next week to read the final part.

Read about the theater experience “Sleep No More” on Wikipedia.

© 2022 Joshua Feyen

Josh Feyen was raised on a farm, went to college in Milwaukee, lived abroad for four years on three continents, and now finds himself with pandemic free time and stories to tell. In the middle of 2021, Josh set about writing 50 short memoir stories in his 50th year. Sharing this story with truestorieswelltold.com is an unexpected surprise; the main focus of Josh’s 50 in 50 writing journey is to share what he’s learned with his four teenage nieces and nephew. Josh lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and writes from his COVID-converted attic studio.

By Joshua Feyen

We arrived at 7:30 p.m. for our 8 o’clock entry, and shivered in line for 20 minutes on a dark and wintry New York City side street in Chelsea. The line moved, and we were grateful to enter the warm lobby. The bellhop showed us where to hang our winter coats, and how to stow our phones for the next three hours. The receptionist checked us in, handed each of us a playing card, the two of hearts to me and the three of diamonds to my husband Jay. “These are your room keys,” he said, “Enjoy your stay.” We proceeded down a hall lit by dim electric wall candles and arrived in a 1920’s style cocktail lounge. A woman welcomed us, saying “Hold onto your cards, get yourself a drink, and I will call you shortly.”

Jay and I take an annual trip to New York City to attend a conference, and we make time before or after to do something fun. On this January night, we visited the McKittrick Hotel. In one corner of the lounge, a three-piece jazz band played quietly. The bartender wore a thin mustache, a white shirt with black sleeve bands, and looked like he only served martinis in fragile glasses. To his chagrin, we ordered two sparkling waters and sat with a view of the trio.

Within 10 minutes the woman asked that guests with room keys 2 through 10 follow her. Six people met her at an elegant elevator door. Our hostess handed each of us a white plastic mask, asked us to put it on, and then delivered a brief set of instructions.

“From this point forward you are not to talk. You are not to remove your mask. And do not touch the performers. If you get lost, need some help, or simply want to get some air, find someone who is not wearing a mask. These are your hosts who can return you to the lounge. You may re-enter the Hotel whenever you want.”

We boarded the elevator and our hostess selected the fourth-floor button. When the door opened, she silently nodded to me to step out. Jay started to follow, but sensing that we were together, she stopped him, indicating that someone else should disembark instead. As the elevator door closed, she whispered a final bit of advice, “Fortune favors the bold.”

The other person disappeared into the darker reaches of the room, and I was left to explore the scene before me and ponder those final words. “Fortune favors the bold,” I said to myself as I entered a grove of leafless trees planted in the wood floor. Except for the three instructions, there were no further rules. I touched the trees, I ran my hands along the walls looking for hidden places, I sat down on a bench.

“Fortune favors the bold,” I repeated. I came across a tub full of reddish water. Wet footprints lead away from it; someone had just taken a bath. I picked a piece of paper off the floor. It was a correspondence scribbled in small handwriting but was difficult to read in the dim light, so I moved along.

This is how I started my three-hour exploration of the five floors of the McKittrick Hotel, a vast warehouse decked out like that 1920s hotel lounge, the leafless grove, this bloody bathroom, a taxidermy shop, an antique apothecary, and many other exotic scenes. This was “Sleep No More,” and as fascinating as the scenes were to explore, this was also an interpretive dance performance and I had yet to see a cast member other than the woman on the elevator.

Come back next week to read the next part of Josh’s story.

Read about the play “Sleep No More” on Wikipedia.

© 2022 Josh Feyen

Josh Feyen was raised on a farm, went to college in Milwaukee, lived abroad for four years on three continents, and now finds himself with pandemic free time and stories to tell. In the middle of 2021, Josh set about writing 50 short memoir stories in his 50th year. Sharing this story with truestorieswelltold.com is an unexpected surprise; the main focus of Josh’s 50 in 50 writing journey is to share what he’s learned with his four teenage nieces and nephew. Josh lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and writes from his COVID-converted attic studio.