In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Mary's Tape (continued): Bennington "Following, following," Jeff said. "I'm alwaysfollowing. My feet keep walking back to you." That was a song. What happened, actually, was that he was not so much following as circling. What he was following was the Movement , covering teach-ins at a lot of the Eastern colleges, checking into Harvard and Columbia, Dartmouth and Burlington. He would come and go, talk to people, see them at their demonstrations, engage in teach-ins and rallies, then write his column: "From the Front Lines" by Your Roving Patriot. It was the patriot part that must have made Mother so wild. Meantime at the Bennington dance festival we had worked up a piece of choreography that fit into the spirit of the times. It started with an enormous crown onstage, and dancers swarming up it, gradually taking it apart, piece by piece. Next a hangman's gallows, all for us to frolic on, climbing up the supports, doing a playlike hanging, a trapeze act on the noose, finally skipping rope on the stage. And third a great big painted backdrop of LBJ himself, with a real papiermache nose and great big ears, bombs and airplanes sketched around him. We would end by swinging on the nose, dancing down the ears, painting out the armaments, then blanketing everything out in rock dancing for peace. (I never did rock dancing, but it wasn't hard to learn. We had amplifiers set up with Dylan's and Hendrix's tapes.) Talk about blowing in the wind. What happened was, our scenery blew down. This was important for us, but especially for me. Laura Lemming was out to recruit some new dancers for her group. I had had the biggest hand in the choreography and was hopeful. Then the 149 4 150 THE N I G H T T R A V E L L E R S auditorium had gotten too hot for some of the audiences and we'd set up for an outdoor theater in a big meadow beyond the main campus. It should have been great. All afternoon we worked on the lighting, tested the amplifiers, made the paint bolder on the backdrops . The crowd that came was big and murmuring. Our adrenaline was topping out. It could have been great. I always blamed the collapse, as we all did with one voice when we spoke of it afterward, on the wind that sprang up out of nowhere and rushed through. It turned the whole crown around. I was on an ascending place on the ramp, just where the crown skewered over, one divider twisting like the plywood it was made of. It hemmed me and two other dancers right in place. I knew we had to get down some way, so I turned and slid down the plywood surface like on a slide in the playground and my short little skirt flew up to my neck. The others followed. Everybody clapped. We got a poor substitute spot on the program after that and danced our second choice, something called "Dreamcatcher," pretty but not strong. I wound up with an interview on choreography, but no real audition, so I knew I didn't have a chance with Lemming. By then I knew very well what we all knew—the construction guys in our group hadn't been all that focussed. They were users who had gotten into something cheap and easy, and the set might have collapsed even without a wind. "Bad luck," wasJeff's comment. He was due up in Burlington to do some talking to a student group at the university. I went with him, having something to tell. I waited till we got all the way there and were moved into a trailer some student couple had turned over to us. "Well, now," he said, the first silence melting away into another, then a third (all different qualities), at last broken. "Well, now, a baby couldn't be anything but great." He stood and folded me up to him. (Men always like to pick me up; I have been forced to notice it.) "You said the wind was unexpected. How about this?" He held me like a doll that might break. "How about this?" He just kept standing, holding me off the floor, and I could feel his heart going like crazy. "Put me down," I said. I stood on my own two feet. "You don't want actually to go on and have...

Share