Blossom

It must have been Thursday, March 24, 2011, when remembrances of Elizabeth Taylor saturated the news, that the radio played a fragment of embittered dialogue from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, lines apparently familiar to the point of cliché to many people, but not to me. I had assiduously avoided Albee’s work, successfully, if altogether unfairly, for almost 40 years, since the alienating experience of my high school’s production of The Sandbox. For whatever reasons, I was shocked to hear Elizabeth Taylor ruefully intone a line lifted verbatim from a performance by Lawrence Steger.

(sound of a bottle smashing)

martha (elizabeth taylor):

I hope that was an empty bottle, George! You can’t afford to waste good liquor. Not on your salary, not on an associate professor’s salary!

I remember where I was sitting in relation to the small raised stage of Club Lower Link’s, as Larry perched on a bar stool and flipped through a Rolodex, pulling a card, reading it aloud, and tossing it aside—the Rolodex performance later absorbed into a longer solo work. Off one of the many cards, he read the line, sardonically, with none of the trademark theatrics, queering it, as they say now: “I hope that was an empty bottle, George.” The echo lands after all these years, like so many echoes of Larry, small disturbances, immediately apparent, blossoms in a wood where nobody goes. They are my echoes I think in the end. I mean they are not hauntings. His is not an unquiet ghost. They are questions that I did not know were questions until an answer arrived. Maybe that is why I remembered them, why they persisted. Now I will forget them. So small an event explains so much, and not just why other people in the club audience laughed. (I thought they, like Larry, knew this associate professor George.) I have to rethink Larry’s relations to Albee and Elizabeth Taylor and theater, at least at that point in his life and his work. Paul Hoover wrote of the work of Chicago Imagist poets: Truth is closer to irony than to direct statement of fact. So I think about Larry’s relationship to irony, and irony’s closeness to truth, and the strangely appropriate miniature alarm of Larry’s unexpected return that rang out of Elizabeth Taylor’s voice that day, recollected and replayed at her death, that I feel compelled to record.