Entry 3
By Steven Paul Lansky
"Lacey #1 "
We went to two parties together, both in one evening. The first was a fiftieth birthday for a local activist videographer I’ll call Barbara. Barbara’s partner, Michael, is one of Cincinnati’s most prominent theater directors. Both are friends and fellow collaborators of mine. Each has contributed to my education as a writer and performer.
The setting was the urban Mt. Auburn home of an architect and artist couple. Mt. Auburn is a racially mixed and mixed-income residential area between the hospital district and what could be called ghetto. It was a house surrounded by the green of foliage from trees, bushes and houseplants. Orange and yellow day lilies were in bloom. The owners are serious gardeners. The party started inside in the kitchen sprawled down some wooden steps into the back patio and beyond onto the driveway.
Lacey didn’t know how famous all the local luminary greats were. I am forty-three and have long gray hair, tonight covered by a Panama hat. Lacey, twenty-one wore a bright yellow dress and sandals—her legs were mucho furry. A lithe dancer, sleight, tiny compared to me, features elfin where mine are wide and generous, Mediterranean. Lacey’s eyes spoke of depth, their gaze and focus implored seriousness, her grin, whimsy blended discreetly with mystery as it held long as her gaze with a row of even white teeth. Her mother ran a small Empress Chili-shop ice cream stand on the river highway east of Cincinnati. Lacey had been raised in the small town of New Richmond. When I was a teenager, I used to bicycle upriver on the Kentucky side, take the New Richmond ferry, and then cycle home along the Ohio, past River Downs and Coney Island.
Barbara asked Lacey some innocent questions, to learn she is a theater and dance student at Northern Kentucky University. As the crowd grew we talked with Barbara’s mother, up to Cincinnati from Florida. A small group of early arrivals doted on her presence, gentle, sincere, and warm. Later, matronly women took my attention—is she your daughter? Your student? She is a daughter and a student. But with a deep breath and a wry smile, not mine. We escaped the matronly women for indoors where a jazz quartet performed with energy. Lacey sipped wine. I tried to fill up on chicken fingers, and stuffed hors d’oeuvres. Why? As the lawn began to fill with the artsy crowd with whom I had hobnobbed when married, I now beat a singular retreat, Lacey gracefully stepping along.
The second party at an industrial loft, in the David Shoe building was mid-performance when we arrived. This location, in a mostly black urban ghetto, had a frenetic energy on the street that slipped through the door with us. A blue bulb lit a microphone where poets were rattling away, toking joints, beating congas, angularly attired, in lumps on the floor, steel pillars blocking chairs, pillows around. A haze of smoke, bottles of wine—men with berets and velvet jacket shouting tension. Shtick pouring out of the poets’ young pores. Lacey drifted from me, unmoored as I was, after she confessed in an animate whisper, her face close to mine, a strong interest in the fellow with the velvet coat. Ahh—I had one in my past—but now I opted for white linen and silk—I felt nervous—too much party, too much buzz, buzz. Too much style, too much shtick elbowing here and there at others. Thinking remotely of decorative verse, The New Yorker and how this whole scene was painted a little rough-edged, a little Cincinnati urban. I had no idea of what was to come when I would leave this inbred city where I felt shtick was re-invented from shouting to cursing . . . . Yet my peers were here, too and I felt like I liked them better in the academic setting than here in the warehouse ghetto. My community-based roots were turning bourgeois and I could feel it. My shoes were scuffed but my heart was scraping.
Lacey’s charms were close but she had already wrenched more of my heart than I ever would of hers. She spun with ecstatic energy. I sat in serenity. She chided that I was too sedate, not wild and energetic. Too static, insufficiently kinetic.
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