Bewere the Night

A SONG TO THE MOON by Richard Bowes

This is the early nineteenth century part of Manhattan. Normally on such a night in a quiet cul-de-sac in the West Village you’d be able to see the full Dog Day moon hanging right over the low buildings.

But tonight outside the Cherry Lane, that tiny old theater, banks of klieg lights blot it out. You’d hardly think those still in town would be willing to come out of their air-conditioned apartments. However a crowd chokes curving, ancient Commerce Street on this muggy night in a torrid August.

We didn’t get intense publicity but with a cult that’s not necessary. All it took were brief notices in Time Out, a bit in the Village Voice, mention on internet sites, especially L-ROD the Luna-Related-Obsessive-Disorder blog. The message was: Thad Ransom live!

Just that slogan, this place and time. The crowd started to line up in the afternoon. The theater only seats one hundred and eighty-three and those first in line were let inside an hour ago.

Many others, old theater devotees and a lot of young people, are still in the street waiting for a glimpse of a legend, a touch of lunar magic.

People with a certain edge who have been in the city since mythic times remember a very young Ransom at a tiny café on Cornelia Street in an unknown writer’s first play on a night very much like this one. He was transformed before them, his eyes got huge, his face awe-struck as he described the crash of an airplane.

For others Thad Ransom is a screen icon, famous for moments like the one where the camera a slides past a crowd of onlooker’s in The Kindness of Wolves.

For a few seconds a face caught by the lens sharpens into a muzzle, the eyes gleam, the viewer tries to catch another glimpse and can’t. It’s the first sight of a serial killer.

Theories abound as to what tricks were used to produce that effect. But insiders know the scene was intentionally filmed at a certain moment on a certain night. And many believe that live on nights like this is the only way to see our kind perform.

Cops, emergency medics, and bartenders will tell you that a full moon brings out the beast. But all they have is anecdotes. Ransom is the proof, as am I in my way.

I should be inside but I feel the tension they call Moon Itch stirring inside me and need to be out here tonight. So I stand in the doorway of the old apartment house across the street from the Cherry Lane. In tight black slacks and a black turtleneck, wearing light make-up I’m ready to perform. A ritual is about to take place and I am the priest and also the priestess.

New Yorkers are ever on the watch for celebrities and some have noticed me. “Josie Gannon” I hear them murmur as they stare like I’m the Sybil or a shaman.

My book, The Why of Were, makes me an L-ROD expert gets me on TV as a talking head when Lunar-Related-Obssessive-Disorder gets discussed. And Ransom aficionados know I’m embedded in his story. When we were both new in this city, I was the androgynous roommate.

Edia, his first New York girl friend, died of an overdose and can’t be here tonight. Random and Selka, his first wife, parted under unfortunate circumstances. He stabbed her on a certain night of the month. It wasn’t a really serious wound and she didn’t press charges. But she also won’t be showing up.

Wife Two hasn’t been heard from lately. On parting she said, “It’s waking up every day figuring out how long it is till the next full moon and wondering who he’s going to be when it happens.”

Before and after each of them I was best girl, therapist and pillow boy. I think of myself as a shaman: a woman with the strength of a man and a man with the insight of a woman. But after all these years I wonder if this is love, obsession or the absence of an alternative. At times it feels like he and I are the only true examples of a breed.

Channeling our ability or affliction is the skill. A shiver goes through me and I let my face shift from older woman to young boy, from girl to old man. For all their fascination the fans are afraid to approach me and that I think is only right.

Some members of the crowd and I share a tension, a discomfort in our skin as the time slips close to midnight. A face here and there flickers, a appears to be fluid. The Moon Itch real or imagined is almost palpable. Many are impatient, some think this is a last chance to see Thad Ransom, the great shape shifter.

Then from a sound system in the theater lobby comes a crystal clear soprano: Dvorak’s water nymph Rusalka laments to the silver night goddess her hopeless love for a mortal. Our show tonight is called, A Song to the Moon.

On cue, hand drums are heard around the corner and the crowd turns. A voice proclaims, “You know who I am. I’m the thunder at twilight and the cry at the gates.”

And there amid a phalanx of young, black-clad players is Thad Ransom, six foot four with a shock of white hair, half man, half mythic creature, all actor. At this moment the voice is Barrymore’s, the eyes could belong to an intelligent coyote. But the haminess is all his. Ransom’s managed to become a man notorious for being notorious.

A camera and a boom microphone follow him. Another camera is inside the open door of the theater. He is the subject of a documentary which explains the venue, the lights and the hour.

As I step forward the young players see me, reach out and get me through the crowd. Some of our company are actors, a couple are musicians. Some are just shape shifter wannabees but tonight there are gleaming eyes and bared teeth in the group.

I notice that especially in Tomlinson, called Tommy, the company bad boy and favorite, the one who reminds everyone of the young Ransom. Tommy’s bouncing on his toes.

A couple of punks in the crowd bark, someone howls and Tomlinson answers with a long howl of his own. I’m used to danger but I wince at how the crowd plays with moon-driven actors.

A young actress Mary Kowal, puts her army around Tommy. Ransom kisses me on the cheek and sweeps me with him. He turns at the lobby door and says to the crowd, “I am the fear every factory owner feels when he finds himself awake in bed in the hours after midnight.”

Great stuff: 1940 Broadway socialism. This being the crowd that it is many besides me recognize the lines from the Kaufman and Hart comedy Sat On A Wall.

In act one the daughter of a dull, rich family brings home a Greenwich Village artist named Pierce Falkland. His specialty is huge murals of heroic workers and farmers. In the second act Falkland paints his greatest work on the living room wall and turns their world upside down.

A young John Garfield played it originally on Broadway. Clark Gable, of course, did the movie with a lot less socialism and a lot more kissing.

On the night of a full blue moon almost forty years ago young Ransom as Falkland blew the minds of the second string critics sent to view a revival of that rickety comedy. “Pure Animal Power!” one of them wrote.

Tonight, for a few moments, the white hair and the years are wiped off his face and he is the young stage radical. Ransom and I have planned and discussed tonight’s show for months. But this is unrehearsed and spontaneous. With such an actor at such an hour it’s impossible to predict what will happen.

The crowd, the people looking down from apartment windows applaud. A few howl. At times I wish the Food and Drug Administration would speed up the approval of drug therapy for Luna-Related-Obsessive-Disorder, not for the actors but for the fans.

A camera tracks us as Ransom and I go through the lobby and down the center aisle of the Cherry Lane. The curtain is up revealing an unadorned stage. The house lights remain on for this performance.

The audience turns to watch us. Our players stop in the standing room at the back of the house.

After this we’ll play larger venues—big old theaters, concert halls, open meadows in parks. The Cherry Lane is a choice both sentimental and artistic; an evocation of Ransom’s past, a chance to capture a performance in an intimate setting.

Ransom turns his back to the audience and stands motionless facing the rear wall. The cultists all lean forward in their seats. Behind them our players are a shifting background of black clothes and moving faces.

I sit on a stool stage center. When the music stops, I lean forward and slip into a favorite dual roll as man of learning and priestess of the moon.

“As I speak the clocks have moved past midnight.”

Someone down front gives a little yip and someone in back answers. I ignore this.

“In the wild, the hunt for food is all consuming,” I tell them. “Some of us have bits of that obsession, especially on a night like this. In the hunt the ability to choose your physical form is a huge advantage and some of us retain traces of that.

“We are a society addicted to turning problems into excuses and letting cable TV news define our character.

“They whisper that we are a menace. But in my entire career I’ve have seen just five full lupus transformations and all of them were in hospitals, jails or both.”

As I speak, the audience murmurs. I feel my mass shift, my face crinkle. Without a mirror or monitor I know that my face is half man of learning/half woman of magic.

Ransom turns slowly, faces the audience, steps forward. “My father,” he says softly, “would have looked the way I usually do if he’d lived as long as I have and gave up crew cuts.” This part he has rehearsed.

“Thaddeus Taylor Ransom preached hellfire in the fields. He’d done a bit of college, University of Nebraska, before he went off to war. Got wounded and frostbitten in the Battle of the Bulge. Won a Silver Star, two purple hearts, maybe lost a few things.

“But my father believed that God in that very time gave him what Dad called his visions and the voice to tell us about them.”

Ransom’s delivery is slow and steady, growing hypnotic just like his father’s must have been. “He could describe the sun at midnight and the red eye of Satan. His family was Presbyterian but that church wouldn’t hold him when he returned. Instead he discovered The Children of the Fire, an apocalyptic sect. In your moment of spiritual need the Children were there with the comfort of a guaranteed fiery death.

“My father became a preacher. He was a charismatic, a hands-on healer.” When Thad reaches this point his face has become stark with burning eyes as its main feature. “He preached on Sundays. And sometimes in church it could seem like he was burning the world down.

“Often, though, he saved the most intense moments for his family. That was my mother and two sisters and me.”

Here Ransom’s voice rises. “And at certain times, nights like this one, he would gather us in the living room and run something like this, ‘The Lord’s Great Eyes, God the Father’s great eyes are upon us. His fiery gaze is upon us. It burns into your chest, into your heart, into your soul!’

“One of those nights, he woke me up, just me. I must have been ten, maybe eleven, dragged me out in my pajamas to a pasture where there was a pond and baptized me under the moonlight. I’d been baptized years before in daylight and in church.

“But this time he had a pair of torches he’d made with rolled paper and tar. He submerged me in the water, pulled me out by the scruff of the neck and held the torches so close they singed my hair.”

“THE UNION OF WATER AND FIRE IN ONE BODY,” Ransom yells, his eyes are huge as plates. “MY SON WILL NEVER REST EASY IN YOUR SERVICE, GOD OF FIRE.”

And at that moment Ransom is as big and as terrible as that father was to that little kid. I can hear the audience gasp, see their fear.

Then the voice softens; the eyes get a little sad, a bit pensive, become no larger than anyone’s. “He collapsed in the pulpit one ordinary Sunday morning six or seven years later and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Over time a bullet fragment had worked its way into his heart.

“Six months later my mother married a member of the congregation, a man who owned a Buick dealership. My sisters were regular kids. Maybe I was the old man’s only legacy.

“When I was eighteen I left town for state college. I ended up in the Drama Department. They say acting and preaching are related skills. At the end of sophomore year, needing more space between my family and me, I left home and ended up in New York.”

He sits on a stool. The audience nods: Ransom’s upbringing was extreme but lots of them came here from situations into which they didn’t fit. And more than a few get a bit turned inside out by the light of the moon.

I look up and smile. “My launching on the lunar path was a bit less dramatic.

“It was on a fine, warm night when I was maybe four. My Irish grandmother was taking clothes down from the line on the roof of the apartment building in Boston where she lived.

“Grandmother hadn’t really decided who or what I was—never did I think. They’d named me Joseph but were already calling me Josie. It’s a slippery name that over the years has come to be as much a girl’s as a boy’s.

“She pointed up at the moon and recited that ancient appeal to the goddess of the night sky. It was invented for protection against the creatures that mean us harm and walk in the silver light:

“I see the moon and the moon sees me

God bless the moon and God bless me”

“Was it also a prayer for those beings who are its worst captives, the women and the men ensnared in the lunar cycle? Could my grandmother sense that in me?

“It was part of the folklore of every nationality long before it became Lunar Related Obsessive Disorder and got discussed on TV and the internet.

“But if it’s a disease where is the virus? If it’s a mental disorder where are the conclusive studies? And if the moon’s role is a delusion, why are there nights like these?”

I hear my voice at a distance. My face moves on its own. The lunar priest and the woman of science flicker there and a camera catches them.

As I finish Ransom is prowling the stage. “I came to this city the usual way,” he says, “knowing noand nothing and almost immediately fell in with the perfect wrong crowd. A girl I met took me to an acting class at the New School.”

We are into an old routine, one I can almost watch myself do. “I saw him the first time sitting in that acting studio all legs and hostility,” I say. “Afterwards we talked and walked. It was late in the lunar cycle on a summer night with nothing in the sky but the Dog Star. Even without the moon he was intense. His eyes never blinked. He ended up crashing in the same pad I was staying at.”

“I’d never met anyone like Josie,” says Ransom. “But I figured this must be how people were in the big city. Josie explained a few things about my life. I realized there was noelse like Josie—except me in lots of ways.

“I don’t know if going to Central Park in the dead of night a couple of weeks later was his idea or her idea.”

Laughter follows. “It was yours,” I say, “For several reasons I expected life to include some danger. And thought anyone we encountered would find you as scary as I did. So I went along.”

Remembering that night I begin to relive it. I can smell the grass, feel the night breeze. As I return to that night I can feel myself change and see him become young again.

“The wonder of that place at midnight is you can forget the city,” he says. “Our senses sharpened. We moved in shadows, dodged police patrols, and walked to the north end of the park. The Harlem Mere at two a.m. had the Harvest Moon shining on the water. There was a waterfall and lone cars with their lights on high-beam speeding along the drives: the only other sound was the wind rustling in the trees.”

“Our heads touched the sky—without acid,” I add. And I am there. We recited Shakespeare “Oh, swear not by the moon, the fickle moon, the inconstant moon … ” We sang, “Oh Moon of Alabama” A capella, we sing a few choruses about finding the next whiskey bar, the next pretty boy. For us the Cherry Lane stage disappears.

Ransom says, “Our senses grew more acute. We realized that a certain rustling in the bushes was not the wind and that it was following us. There was a moment of silence like someone or something was going to attack.”

I told him, “NOW WE HOWL!” And just as on that night our eyes narrow, our jaws jut forward. We move downstage screaming. Our company lining the back of the theater joins in.

I feel the audience gasp and pull back in their seats as we two come forward wild eyed. I hope the cameras got every bit of it. I remember to hold my hand up. The noise stops.

“It was kids up to no good—like us,” Ransom says. “We chased them howling first then laughing. Next day I remembered it like a dream and had to talk about it to keep the details from slipping away.

“But maybe a week later, this guy stopped me on Bleecker Street and said my eyes were insane. He was Sam Shepard and his first play was going to be up that weekend at Caffe Chino on Cornelia Street. He wanted me in it. That was my first time in front of a paying audience.”

As Ransom speaks his face relaxes but not all the way.

“My initiation was a lot less dramatic than Thad’s,” I say. “You can grow up in a city and stay very unaware of nature. But when I was eight we lived in a leafy part of Boston. There were hills and big old mansions that were now, many of them, divided up into apartments, into duplexes. But the yards were large and unfenced; the hills looked out on ocean and sky.

“Old Yankees in the neighborhood worked in their gardens by moonlight. They lived in houses they’d grown up in, planted vegetables and talked at night on their porches. They drove model A’s, had coal furnaces and got ice delivered by a man with a horse and cart just as it had happened when they were young.

“They followed ritual: Memorial Day and Fourth of July and Harvest Moon and at Halloween they had pumpkins with candles inside them on their porches.

“Instinctively I understood the power of a certain grain in the blood.”

That old neighborhood decades ago is where I am. I feel smaller. The face of the kid Joseph/Josie wide-eyed but guarded is my face as I speak.

“My parents often seemed very young. They had been actors, people of the theater who settled down but not entirely. My mother wrote for a local TV show Boston Common. On five mornings a week it was songs, the news, dramatic pieces (her specialty), a segment for kids.

“Sometimes she took me with her when she brought scripts over to the station. Old friends she’d acted with worked on the show. They greeted each other with kisses. She’d be flushed with excitement. I never thought to see if it was the full moon.

“My parents always wanted me on the show and I always said no. Maybe some part of me understood where I was going and wanted to delay the trip as long as I could. When Boston Common got cancelled after a few years my mother was devastated, lost.

“By then I had other concerns. At that time boys swam, showered, took group physical exams naked. As a small child I’d just seemed undeveloped and got teased. With the onset of puberty it grew obvious that I had a cock and a cunt as well. I was taunted, kicked, taken to doctors.

“Drug treatment was suggested, surgery. I didn’t want to change and my parents, who knew a little about being different, didn’t insist. They moved to another part of the city enrolled me at a school where I got excused from gym and swimming class.

The secret scared me but left me feeling superior to others. Danger and lust got intertwined.

“My parents still dabbled, did readings, took small parts in plays. My father was in a production of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple done in late spring outdoors in the Public Gardens.

“I went with a couple of fellow outcasts from our high school drama department. The full Flower Moon rose over the trees. By then I knew all the names and phases and was aware of what was up with my parents. I felt my grow fluid and knew what I was meant to do.

“The next year I was a page boy in Henry the Fifth, not a big stretch. Shortly afterwards I was Yum Yum in The Mikado. We opened the night of Green Corn Moon and I was sensational.

Sex was a tense game. I had so many ways of disappointing partners. My freshman year of college I got picked up at a party by one of the boys who’d tormented me back in the old neighborhood. He didn’t recognize me. I showed him what I had. His eyes widened in recognition.

“Then I showed him this,” and on the stage of the Cherry Lane my face is the Gorgon Medusa’s. It’s my way of telling the audience we’re past the pleasant introductions. They recoil but don’t turn to stone.

Ransom has disappeared from the stage. I stand motionless, getting back my face and body. Drums beat out in the lobby and then in the house. Ransom comes down the center aisle. His hair is in golden ringlets; his face gleams. Behind him the chorus twirl, buck, roll their eyes back in their heads. They chant:

They are the wild maenads, the women, some played here by guys, who have followed Dionysius all the way from Asia to ancient Thebes. Several have leather drums on which they maintain heartbeats that will go on as long as the performance does. Two others hold aloft on sticks a light-reflecting silver disk: the full moon.

Euripides’ The Bacchae: maybe everyone sees herself in every great play. But those who follow the silver goddess are close to this one. Order—Pentheus the righteous young king of Thebes—confronts Chaos—Dionysius god of wine and frenzy.

The chorus sings and dances:

All are supposed to be wild-eyed. But tonight some are barely under control. Intentionally, we are playing with fire. Tommy is the worst, twirling, smacking into others on the crowded stage. He’s the company pet. Random lets him get away with too much. I catch Tommy’s attention, stare right into him. He subsides.

At Lincoln Center many years ago there was the legendary production in which young Ransom played both Pentheus and Bacchus. Tonight he stands at the back of the stage and announces:

His eyes are wide and blazing as he goes on to speak of his anger at the city and its ruling family—relatives who have disowned him and plans for vengeance.

In Greek drama, actors take multiple roles. With my back to the audience I wear a crown and am Pentheus; young, arrogant, full of hubris, speaking to what he thinks is a lunatic, ordering him imprisoned.

And all the time the chorus goes on chanting quietly, the drums beat. The silver disc shines on the stage.

Minutes later Ransom, young and severe, wears the crown and is Pentheus his face rigid and imperious. Tommy is a messenger describing the packs of maddened Bacchantes which include Pentheus’ own mother and aunts, destroying villages, tearing wild beasts and cattle apart:

Pentheus demands to see this for himself. Now I am Dionysius all golden hair and glowing face. I dress him in woman’s robes and lead him up the mountain while the chorus around us snaps their teeth like mad dogs. The night, the drums begin to take me. My eyes lose focus.

Then we are all supposed to exit except for Mary Kowal who remains onstage. Tomlinson passing by suddenly turns and bites her on the shoulder. She cries out, shoves him away. This is not acting and I hear the audience gasp. For a heartbeat everyone on stage stops. For a moment it seems that we might all start tearing at each other.

I know Ransom is being dead in the wings. He lies stretched out on the floor, mouth gaping, an expression of horror on his face. I’ve seen it many times.

It’s up to me. I grab Tomlinson, look right into his wild, staring eyes with all the authority of a priestess and the madness of an actor with forty-five years on the New York stage.

“Don’t waste this last chance, Tommy,” I whisper. His eyes focus and the troupe leads him off. Onstage Mary Kowal as a messenger describes how the Bacchae, maddened, fell upon Pentheus. Agave, his own mother, tore her son’s head from his believing he was a lion.

In the wings we form up in a tight group, pick up dead Pentheus and emerge onto the stage. And now I am Agave marching back into Thebes. In triumph I hold my son Pentheus’ bloody head by his mane of hair, his jaw flapping open. Foaming at the mouth I sing:

And the chorus chants:

Slowly Agave understands what she’s done. I stare with a face like a mask of horror. The drums cease. Suddenly the lights go down. One spot remains, shining on the silver disc above us. I stand shaking, catching my breath.

The players who carried Ransom and blocked sight of his while I held up his head put him down and escort him off silently.

My Moon Itch has begun to ebb. The lights come back up. I am alone on the stage.

There is applause. But I shake my head. This isn’t over.

“Euripides wrote,” I say, “when people had begun to forget the time when woman and god and man and beast weren’t as separated and distinct as they are now. But his was a time when all humans male and female were tied by nature to the cycle of the earth, were servants to the phases of the moon.

“They still understood what seems a terrible alien disease to us now and that sometimes it was best to let that beast run.”

Again there is applause. Ransom and company are behind me on the stage. It goes on for a while. We take our bows after which we’re supposed to make our exit up the center aisle. Instead Ransom holds up his hands.

He looks drained, old. He puts his arm around Tomlinson’s shoulder and around Mary Kowal’s. “There’s a story theater people tell about a great actor playing a great part. He comes off stage to tumultuous applause and storms to his dressing room in a black mood. ‘You were stupendous’ they say, why are you so unhappy?’

“‘I was incandescent,’ is his answer, ‘AND I DON’T KNOW WHY.’ ”

Ransom shakes his head, says in rich actor tones, “Ah, the mystery of ART! But what if you do know why your performance is terrific and the reason why isn’t you? What if you’re the drum and not the drummer, the brush and not the painter? What if you’re a tool intended to give everyone a glimpse of ourselves as we are by nature?

“Descended from hunters of flesh, born to a hunter of souls, I’ve become a hunter of applause. I’m as surprised as you by some of what happened here. But each night the earth will take a small bite out of the silver goddess. In a week’s time it will be sliced away and Josie and I and young Mr. Tomlinson and even Mary Robinette Kowal will be very ordinary actors indeed. Try to remember that when the moon is full,” he tells Tommy. “You’ll not get nearly as many second chances as I was given.”

I’ve heard him say much of this on many different occasions. But it’s one of the reason why, when he holds out his arm, I take it and walk with him up the aisle. A camera backs up before us.

People rise applauding and he smiles his way into the narrow lobby and out onto Commerce Street.

Outside all is quiet. By arrangement with the block association, the Klieg lights are off. The crowd is largely dispersed. The moon has disappeared behind the houses. Cameras follow us to the curb then stop.

A driver opens the back door of a limo. We kiss the kids good-bye, promise we’ll see them all tomorrow, make sure Mary will have the shoulder looked at, and escape before the fans can get to us. The cameras don’t follow any further. We’ll see them tomorrow also.

Ransom and I settle into the back seat and I give the directions home. Yes. We are roommates again—un folie aux deux.

The energy of the moon has flowed out of us. The wolf sleeps after it has fed. I sink into the seat. “I hope they got the footage they wanted,” I say.

Next month we do this at the Chandler in L.A. In October under the Hunter’s Moon it’s the Colonial in Boston. We’re booked two years in advance. The documentary, the long farewell tour—we’re showing them how it’s done.

“Tomlinson was out of control, tonight,” Ransom says. He sounds tired and old. “Much as I like him I’m afraid Tommy’s got to go.”

“He reminds me of you at his age,” I say. “And he gave you the chance to make that speech.”

“What he did was unprofessional.”

“Hmmm. Remember the binge you went on after you walked out on Edia?”

“I remember waking up from a week-long blackout.”

“And discovering you’d signed on to play Cyrano de Bergerac in a former tin can factory in Jersey City.”

“The nose was great. You said so yourself.”

“They’ll find a medical cure for Tommy’s problem. We’ll be the last of our kind.”

But Ransom’s asleep and I take his hand. When I first saw him I knew he was dangerous. But it’s what I was used to. It’s easy to entice and easy to anger when you offer the mixed bag that I did. Now we are as you see us.

On my iPod, Dvorak’s Water Nymph sings to the moon of her troubles. I think of her as a creature caught between worlds—like me as a child. I want to tell her that I’ve seen over eight hundred moons both silver and blue come and go. And I look forward to seeing some more.