Jim Forest, Peace Activist

 

       Jim Forest, a longtime Catholic peace activist, is the author of many books, including Praying with Icons and biographies of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Dan Berrigan. 

    At age 27, he got himself arrested as part of the Milwaukee Fourteen, when in September of 1968 a group of peace activists raided a consortium of nine draft boards all located in one downtown office building. Among the activists were five Catholic priests, one of them a Benedictine monk. Included in the mix was also a minister from the Church of Scientology.  

 

   “My knees shook every inch of the way,” Forest confesses in his recently released Orbis Books memoir, Writing Straight with Crooked Lines. “The nine doors were opened, the many burlap sacks we had brought with us were filled to bursting with 1-A files---10,000 of them, it was estimated during the trial---and dragged out to the park across the street. Napalm, made ourselves according to a recipe found in the Us Army Special Forces Handbook, was poured on the files and a match struck.” Once the fire was raging, the group prayed the “Our Father” and sang “We Shall Overcome.”  

   In his memoir, Forest admits having second thoughts about his involvement in the Milwaukee Fourteen. A single father of a young son at the time, Forest writes, “…It troubles me that I put work for social change ahead of my responsibilities for him [Ben], much as my father had done to me during my own childhood.”

 

   Forest finds it ironic that the judge who arraigned the group after their arrest was named Christ Seraphim. Six months later, the jury—eight of whom were Catholic-- found the group guilty. Forest writes that he “then spent the better part of a year under lock and key,” where he led a mostly monastic life despite his wide band of supporters which included New Yorker staff writer Francine du Plessix Gary, who sent him books and an Olivetti portable typewriter.   

   The names of Forest’s associates and the people he interacted with during his long career as an editor and peace activist would fill a substantially thick Who’s Who volume.     

  The book includes fascinating stories about Dan and Phil Berrigan, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Henri Nouwen, Ed Sanders, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A.J. Muste, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gary Synder, Pete Seeger, and many others.   

    Jim Forest was born in a Latter Day Saint hospital in Salt Lake City in 1941 to American Communist parents. ”Mother was, I gradually realized, a Methodist atheist and Dad was a Catholic atheist,” Forest writes, adding, “As a child I once asked Mother, ‘Is there a God?’ She paused and then replied, ‘I don’t think so.’ What struck me more than her words was the sorrow in her voice.”

 

     The family moved to Chicago and after that Denver where they would picnic in the Rocky Mountains. A younger brother, Dick, “grew from a bothersome infant into a cheerful companion,” although life was really terrible at home. In June 1944, Forest’s Dad, up to his neck in an extramarital affair, filed for a divorce. Forest recalls the excoriating scene of his father leaving the house, suitcase in hand: “I can still feel the tears on my face and hear myself pleading: Dad, please take me with you.”

   Dad’s exodus was the catalyst for Mrs. Forest’s rebirth, as she went on to receive her master’s degree in social work from the University of Denver, afterwards taking her small family to New York where they rented an apartment Red Bank, New Jersey.

    A little boy with a wide Cheshire cat grin, Forest was already doing little acts of civil disobedience. In the school cafeteria one day he decided that the green peas on his plate “tasted rotten” so he refused to eat them despite threats from the kitchen manager. “I sat alone at the table in silence the rest of the day, ignoring a series of demands from several people, including the school principal,” Forest writes. In the end, the adult pea-advocates gave up; they were no match for Forest’s obstinacy.

 

   Driven by a wanderlust from an early age, Forest convinced his Mother he was mature enough to travel alone at 12 from New Jersey to visit Dad in Saint Louis. One year later, at 13, he took a transcontinental Greyhound bus trip to Los Angeles where his father was then living. The 3,500-mile bus trip included traveling through a tornado in the Texas panhandle and a near death experience in Arizona’s Grand Canyon when he opted to hike into the canyon while waiting for a connecting bus.

    

   In Los Angeles, he lived with his father and attended a local high school. A LIFE Magazine article on The Beat generation caused him to travel to Santa Monica to visit the Beat Café featured in the piece. But instead of finding Allen Ginsberg reading his poem Howl and interesting people in black turtlenecks, he found the same mundane conversations he’d heard in roadside diners.  “No poetry was being read, nor was anyone discussing existentialism,” he writes. 

 

    At age seventeen, in 1959, after returning to Red Bank, he dropped out of school and joined the Navy.

  It was in the Navy that his religious sensibility began to take shape. The catalyst was Audrey Hepburn in “The Nun’s Story,” a movie Forest saw one Saturday night at the base. While expressing embarrassment at having a mystical experience while watching a movie, he concludes: “The old question ‘Is there a God?’ evaporated. I would never again begin a prayer, ‘Oh God, if there is a God...’”       

        The next day he attended Mass at the base chapel. He was now thinking of becoming a monk so on the advice of a friend he took a Greyhound bus to Holy Cross monastery, an Episcopal congregation of monks near West Point on the Hudson. On the way to the retreat he bought a copy of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain in a roadside drugstore. 

 

     On his second visit to Holy Cross in 1960, one of the monks asked to see him in the community room. “Once the door was shut,” Forest recalls, “he embraced and kissed me with sexual passion, his stubbly unshaven face pressed against mine. I struggled free of his grasp, exited the room, and soon afterward left the monastery in a state of great confusion.”     

    But Forest was more troubled by the wide disparity of belief among Episcopalians—some high, some low—and soon opted to receive instructions in the Catholic faith. A priest assigned him the German catechism, Life in Christ at about the same time that he became aware of The Catholic Worker newspaper. Forest liked the emphasis the Catholic Worker movement placed on the poor, The Beatitudes and on the Corporeal Works of Mercy. He liked it so much that he was then inspired to hitchhike to Manhattan to the Catholic Worker headquarters in the Lower East Side. 

   Dorothy Day assisted him in obtaining conscientious objector status when she introduced him to a Catholic priest who had been a CO himself. With the support of his Navy commander, John Marabito, Forest attainted the reclassification, enabling him to leave the Navy with dignity and work full time for the Catholic Worker cause, and later for the Catholic Peace Fellowship.

    One evening Dorothy Day insisted that he accompany her to an ecumenical meeting of Christians who were interested in Orthodox Christianity. Among those present was the poet W.H. Auden and  Orthodox theologian Alexandar Schmemann. “Day had a longing for the healing of the centuries-old schism dividing Eastern and Western Christianity,” Forest writes. Later, he would accompany Day when she frequently attended Orthodox Vespers at the Russian Orthodox cathedral on East 97^th Street in Manhattan. 

 

    For several years, Forest lived in a special albeit ramshackle apartment owned by the Catholic Worker, sharing living space with one or two roommates, accompanying Day on her trips downtown while periodically having arguments with her. After Dorothy assigned him the task of answering letters from Thomas Merton, Forest soon began writing his own letters to Merton. 

     “From that point on, Merton and I began a frequent correspondence that lasted until his death in 1968, averaging a letter per month from Merton,” Forest writes.

   When Merton suggested that Forest come visit him at the monastery, he and a CW friend hitchhiked to Kentucky.

     “As we stood on the roadside with our frozen thumbs in the air, armies of dashboard statues of Jesus of the Sacred Heart, his plastic arms spread wide, blurred by us,” Forest says.

     After arriving at the monastery and being given their respective room, Forest heard laughter coming from his traveling companion’s room. The laughter, it turns out, was coming from “a black and white robed monk lying on the floor, knees in the air, face bright red, hands clutching his belly.” Forest adds that the monk on the floor was “more like Robin Hood’s well-fed Friar Tuck than the fast-chastened Trappist monk I had imagined….” 

 

     A romantic involvement with a fellow CW worker named Jean resulted in a surprise pregnancy. Forest, naively assuming he could shack up with Jean in the CW apartment, was told by Day to get married or find living accommodations elsewhere. Forest complied but the marriage was not a happy one. 

     His romantic relationship with Jean ended, as did his relationship with another woman. Thomas Merton, on the receiving end of Forest’s troubled letters, advised him not to burn out and to be careful:

   “The trouble with movements is that they sweep you off your feet and carry you away with the tide of activism and then you become another kind of mass man…” 

   The early days of the Catholic Worker movement in New York attracted a number of famous faces like Allen Ginsberg (who read sections of his poem Kaddish before the staff.) Forest also had “peace work dealings” with social critic and author Paul Goodman and writes how Goodman once chased him around a sofa, so taken was the author of “Growing Up Absurd” to taste the young man’s charms.  

    With his current and long standing (permanent) wife, Nancy, Forest makes his home in the Netherlands. 

 

   In the late 1980s Forest and Nancy entered the Orthodox Church but Forest doesn’t regard the switch as a ”conversion” but simply “a change of address in the same neighborhood I had been living in since  I was eighteen..” In explaining his switch to Orthodoxy to the Dutch Catholic priest and author, Henri Nouwen, Forest wrote:

     “The impressive thing is that Orthodoxy makes no attempt at producing an updated ‘relevant’ liturgy. Far from keeping with the times, the Orthodox liturgy has hardly changed from ancient times. The Orthodox seem to realize that liturgy itself is the touchstone of relevance.”    

   Forest added:

    “You expressed the hope that we would be bridge builders. I share that hope. I have brought with me everything that was dear to me in Catholicism.”

  

 

   Thom Nickels

    Contributing Editor

 

Philadelphia's Fear of REAL Skyscrapers

 

         When it comes to Philadelphia skyscrapers that never got off the drawing board, one example comes to mind: Philadelphia, architects Gene Kohn and Bill Louie of Kohn Pedersen Fox (creators of the city’s Mellon Bank Center with its iconic pyramid top), 1,500 foot high American Commerce Center, which never became a reality. 

The project, which was to include a 26-story hotel and 6-stories of street accessible retail along 18^th and Arch Streets, not to mention a striking 300 foot spire (described by most who have saw the design as “iconic and breathtaking”) that would make it taller than the Empire State building, never saw the light of construction.

          For Philadelphians excited about the prospect of mega-skyscraper as potentially changing Philadelphia’s reputation from a “connecting” city to New York and Washington to a world class destination, this was not good news. Had the idea for the project survived it would have  provided over 2,000 construction jobs to the city over the 3-year period. 

          Philadelphia developer Garrett Miller, Vice President of the Philadelphia division of Hill International, Inc., told me when the project was still in progress that when the American Commerce Center finally got built, it will create a dynamic new environment for Philadelphia.

          “Cities are dynamic environments,” Mr. Miller told me. “They either improve or they get worse. Philadelphia needs to put itself in a position to change for the better. Although we have a great historical past that we should respect, it’s important for us to realize this and embrace our future. Cities don’t stay the same. When you choose to live in an urban environment, you choose a dynamic area that is always evolving.”

 

 

Immediately after the tower’s proposal, a small but formidable opposition group was ACC’s biggest problem. These were mainly older Center City residents who wanted the height of the tower reduced significantly. Opponents feared a taller tower would block views of the city from their Kennedy Blvd. high rise windows, or cast so called “unsightly shadows.” These groups of neighbors also suggested that the building’s height was out of scale with the neighborhood, despite the fact that the proposed project was not specifically in the Fairmount neighborhood but smack in the middle of Philadelphia’s financial district.

  Of course, Philadelphia has always had a fear of record-breaking skyscrapers. When the City Hall Tower Billy Penn height limit was broken in 1986, it was the result of highly emotional debates about the ‘character’ of the city. City Planner Ed Bacon was dead set against any building going past the traditional Billy Penn’s hat height limit. Yet once the height limit taboo was broken, and as skyscraper plans began to be realized, the buildings built were largely conservative, ‘dwarf’ skyscrapers that in no way compared to New York City’s towering monoliths.

Philadelphia was still being careful—and conservative.

   Nothing, it might be said, is out of scale when it comes to money.

           When I asked Mr. Miller at the time why there was a work stoppage on implementing the American Commerce Center, he could only tell me,

          “Who knows what’s going on with the economy and with the American Commerce Center. When will the economy come around? When will the world get better? Who knows…!”

      Many think that the economy at the time killed the ACC.

       But one city’s skyscraper Requiem is another city’s hallelujah chorus. Several years ago in New York City, Anthony Malkin, owner of the Empire State Building, asked New York City officials to block the construction of a 1,216 foot skyscraper at 33^rd and 7^th Avenue, less than ¼ of a mile from the Empire State Building.

       Malkin wanted Vornado Realty Trust, creators of the new project, to scale the building back to 825 feet and put a 17-block buffer around the Empire State Building to protect its viewing province. While Malkin never mentioned “shadows,” he disn’t want the iconic structure that many know as “King Kong’s perch” to be outdone by a competitor.

But Vornado Realty Trust, unlike the city of Dubai, seems to have no worries about money. They just wanted to build—and build.          

            Mayor Bloomberg, New York’s mayor at the time who could be the voice of ill-reason on many issues but on this he encapsulated sound logic when he said, “One guy owns a building. He’d like to have it be the only tall building. I’m sorry, that’s not the real world. Nor should it be.” 

      Getting back to Philadelphia, every city resident is aware of the opposition when they wanted to build Liberty I and II. Detractors said those buildings were too big but few would say today that they are not a spectacular addition to the city.

          Many Center City residents were supportive of the ACC project, including those who lived in two-story houses.

          Retail re-merchandiser Andi Pesacob, who designed the (first) 6 floors of high end retail space for ACC, said that when the architects presented six possible renditions of the proposed new skyscraper, both she and Mr. Miller pointed to the one in question and said, “That’s the one!”

          ACC’s design was called a piece of art.

          Ms. Pesacob’s retail design, which included a glass floor on street level so that one can look down into another part of the store below, was an idea she got from a club in Las Vegas. While this may have a honky tonk connotation, the design was anything but.

     The architects took Pesacob’s design, went over it with L&I, then flushed it out with technical details.

          An impressive design characteristic of the ACC was the pedestrian-friendly street level design. The artful ‘ground scale’ design was also a feature which made the rising tower above look even more fantastic.

           

           A City Planning Commission meeting is a grandstander’s paradise. At the last ACC City Planning Commission meeting opponents voiced their opinion that Philadelphia doesn’t need the American Commerce Center because “Philadelphia isn’t that kind of city.”

          But what does “that kind of city” mean?

           What is means is this: Philadelphia should always be careful and conservative and avoid bold visionary projects because it is a humble town that’s not as good as New York.      

            Much like the debates over buildings exceeding the height of City Hall Tower in 1986, the debates around ACC were loud, passionate and sometimes vicious.

          The odd intrusion of Senator Vince Fumo into the controversy only added to the confusion. Mr. Fumo, a politician and not an architect, vowed to fight the construction of the American Commerce Center and even went on record as calling the building a “monstrosity.”  

        The opponents of ACC were persistent in their insistence that Philadelphia needed to be aware of its limitations.

          But this is like telling a young child to scratch dreams of going to medical school because his low elementary school grades don’t indicate that he’s capable of such high aspirations.

           Philadelphia needs a world class building that would ordinarily be built in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. When you curtail the wing span of a skyscraper because it might create shadows or ruin somebody’s view, you’re thinking like someone who can’t find his or her way out of a very small mental space. (One immediately thinks of the Cira Center, which was designed to be much taller than it is but unfounded fears about another 9/11 attack caused the building to be scaled down. The scaled down look did not escape the eye of critics who have criticized Cira as being “too squat, as if it had its head shaved off.”)

          As Mr. Miller observed then, Philadelphia should celebrate its history but this doesn’t mean it has to be stuck in it.  

    In the end, the City Planning Commission gave its approval to rezone the area around 19^th and Arch Street for the proposed American Commerce Center.

   But once approved, the project died, although the reasons for the project’s death were never succinctly explained, or if they were, I never saw them.

 

 

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor                   

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, activist, painter and publisher, died on February 22 in his home in San Francisco holding the hand of his son. He was 101 years old, 30 days shy of his 102^nd birthday.

Ferlinghetti wrote that he became an “instant pacifist” in 1945 when he visited Nagasaki and saw the carnage of war shortly after the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on the city. The memory of that visit would stay with him forever.

     “Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical,” the poet told Interview magazine in 2013. “Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.”

         Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights bookstore with a friend in 1953, then became sole owner in 1955. The bookstore became the central nerve of the emerging Beat Generation as, well as the publisher for Beat poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

     Younger people today may not realize just how important City Lights Bookstore was to aspiring writers and poets as well as to those interested in reading their works. City Lights was both an idea and a destination, a place of pilgrimage.

    The bookstore acquired a magical quality, as if just by visiting the place one could be transformed or instantly illuminated.

      “Have you been to City Lights?” became a litmus test for the serious minded lover of contemporary literature.

   I was a high school student when I visited City Lights Bookstore in the late 1960s. The offer to visit San Francisco and City Lights was extended to me by an older male friend, Master, who had published a series of detective stories in his youth and who was a close friend of the famed Idaho writer, Vardis Fisher.

 

 

     The offer to go to San Francisco occurred while I was visiting Master and his family in Colorado. Master told me that he had bought me a one way ticket to San Francisco so that I could go and make some contacts at City Lights Bookstore.

    Excited about traveling to the mythic city, I was also terrified at the prospect of introducing myself to strangers. Master wanted me to go to City Lights and make magic happen.  

  

    Master saw me off the following day at Denver’s Stapleton International Airport. While we were waiting for my flight he didn’t say much although he made me promise to really try and “extend myself” at City Lights. “Be on the lookout for Lawrence Ferlinghetti,” he said. “If you’re lucky, you might catch Allen Ginsberg.”

  While the possibility of meeting a famous poet was exciting, I knew that unless Ferlinghetti came up to me (I could never bring myself to go up to him), I would probably let the opportunity pass. But I was happy that I was going to see San Francisco and imagined myself walking around the city and having as many experiences as possible.

  The plan was to spend one day in San Francisco and then to take a Greyhound back to Philadelphia. That one day in the city could be extended if I showed true verve and found contacts in the city that would help me prolong my visit.

     “You might even run into William Burroughs,” Master said. 

        I boarded the flight to Oakland then transferred to a helicopter that took me into the city. There were only a few passengers in the copter and we were all squeezed in together like military paratroopers. I made no attempt to speak to the passengers despite a constant inner urge to practice reaching out to people via small talk. Small talk, after all, often leads to greater talk, and greater talk sometimes leads to opportunities.

       My silence in the copter did not bode well for City Lights. In my mind I was already giving myself a failing grade. I longed to reach out to others but I just didn’t know how to do it.

   “Talk to the people, talk to the people!” that inner voice kept saying, but I did not listen.  

 

 

    In San Francisco, I felt a rush of exhilaration as I boarded a cable car and rode it until I got up close to the Golden Gate Bridge. I disembarked near the wharves where I had planned on walking and maybe even running into Eric Hoffer, America’s famed moral and social philosopher. The wharves were nearly empty but I did run into a hippie in a headband who asked me for a dollar. That inner voice told me to make contact with him but I remained silent. I recall thinking, “If you can’t bring yourself to talk to a panhandling hippie, who can I talk to? “

   I found a cafeteria and got an ample lunch, hoping somebody—anybody—would talk to me. By now my “I want to be alone” vibes had probably encased me within a psychic wall that worked like an electronic insect repellent.  

   

    After agonizing for a time, I found the never to ask somebody where City Lights was located. When I came to the familiar storefront, fear overtook me. I walked towards the door. Would Ferlinghetti be sitting in a chair in the hallway? Would Allen Ginsberg be in a side room combing Peter Orolosy’s hair, or maybe humming mantras while playing a harmonica?   

     As I entered the bookstore I saw a hallway of books and one or two clerks off to the side ringing up purchases.  My entry seemed to go unnoticed. The bookstore was not crowded, and it was also smaller than I imagined. I went to the stacks where the City Lights Pocket Book editions were arranged in neatly processed rows and began taking out different volumes and skimming through them. There were chairs for people who wanted to read but I didn’t want to sit down.

   I read Howl for the hundredth time.

   I also kept waiting for something to happen. A tap on the shoulder, anything, but it soon became obvious that Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets were not there. Nobody was there except the clerks.

     I kept waiting to feel the magic. Then I came to the awful realization that I had built the bookstore up in my mind--- the mind of illusion, as Ginsberg would say. In many ways the bookstore could have been any generic bookstore in New York or Boston.  

   I debated talking to one of the clerks and asking the whereabouts of Ferlinghetti  and the Beats. Yet even if I found them, what was I supposed to say?

     What would Master do in a situation like this? No doubt he would schmooze with the clerks. Small talk, after all, sometimes leads to greater talk and greater talk can lead to opportunities.   

   I left the bookstore, my hopes dashed. The only thing I had managed to say all day was “Yes, let me see if I have some money” to the hippie asking for change, and then asking for directions.   

 

   I spent the rest of the afternoon riding cable cars and sightseeing.

    On a whim I stopped into a small bookstore on Geary Blvd. The sign simply said Orthodox Bookstore, as it was next to the Russian cathedral, reminding me of my visit to the New York World’s Fair with my family as a boy in 1964 where I saw wooden replica of the Russian Orthodox chapel modeled after the one at Fort Hood, California, in the 1800s. Although the World’s Fair chapel was locked, I was able to peer through a window and view the large 16^th century icon of Our Lady of Kazan, known as the protector of Europe.

 

     The second I stepped inside the bookstore the clerk asked if I needed help. 

      “Perhaps you have questions?” he said.

        My ability to speak returned in a great rush when I told him about the log cabin chapel I saw at the World’s Fair in New York where there was an icon, but not just any icon. 

             He handed me a miniature icon. “Take this,” he said. “It will help you.” His beard and piercing eyes made me think of Allen Ginsberg, but this was a different kind of Allen Ginsberg.    

     Nobody had come up to me in City Lights but here in this religious bookstore, where I wanted to remain anonymous, I had attracted attention right away.  

    I did not know how I was going to explain this to Master, my teacher and mentor who was generally against religion, that the only real contact I had made in the City by the Bay was with a Russian Orthodox monk in a cassock who had a Beat looking beard. 

 

    

   Thom Nickels

    Contributing Editor 

 

 

 

My Mother Meets Linda Lovelace

 

    In 1973, my mother met Deep Throat superstar Linda Lovelace when the actress was in Philadelphia starring in a comedy called Pajama Tops at the New Locust Theatre on South Broad Street. 

   The encounter was witnessed by a cousin of mine, JA, the stage manager for the play that proved to be such a flop that it left the city shortly after opening night. 

 

 

     Lovelace achieved international celebrity after starring in Deep Throat, known as the first pornographic film to go mainstream because it offered a plot and character development. Lovelace’s co-star in the movie was Harry Reems, a long standing adult film superstar who would go on to renounce pornography in 1983 when he married and became a real estate agent.   

   In 1973 I was hobnobbing between Boulder, Colorado and Boston and had no idea what Mom was up to. I certainly didn’t think that my devoutly Irish Catholic mother was kibitzing with the star of Deep Throat.

     JA, being stage manager, was able to get tickets for my parents as well as his own. He also let it be known that he had made arrangements for everyone to go backstage and meet the star. Of course, it didn’t matter at all that ‘Pajama Tops’ had been a complete bomb. What mattered was that the star of the play was a cultural icon.

    It was no secret to we Nickels children that Mom had always wanted to be an actress.  The proof was in her genius for mimicry. Her kitchen table impersonations of aunts, uncles, the mailman and even the Fuller Brush Man nearly had us on the floor in stitches and disbelief.  

 

 

     When I first saw Mom in a production by People’s Light Theatre in Malvern— she played a French prostitute in a huge 19^th Century hat—I was more than impressed at her mastery of the role. This was no amateur thespian having fun with a hobby but a true talent, a talent that had never been given a chance to flower.

    Linda Lovelace, born Linda Boreman in the Bronx to working class devoutly Catholic parents, was known as “Miss Holy Holy” as a teenage girl because she “never put out” for boys.

   Mom, or Teresa Muldoon, was born to non-working class parents. As the youngest of thirteen children, she experienced a few years living in the family’s huge North Philadelphia mansion (complete with servants and private music tutors) before the Depression hit and changed the family’s fortunes. 

    Mom as a young woman was also devoutly Catholic, and a virgin until her wedding day, although she was never called “Miss Holy Holy” as far as I know.  

    The decade of the 1970s saw the disruption of  every facet of American society. The Mom and Dad I left in Pennsylvania when I went to Boston in 1969 were in many ways not the same parents I returned to five years later.   

   That’s why JA felt he could issue the invitation to see Linda Lovelace at the New Locust Theatre. Porn had gone mainstream, and even Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were talking about Linda Lovelace on their respective TV shows.  

   It’s easy to imagine Mom getting ready to go see Pajama Tops in Center City.

     I see her in her bedroom putting on her makeup, especially coloring and sculpting her eyebrows. She uses an eyebrow pencil as a darkener, then wets a finger to soften the effect only to pencil in areas she’s made too light. 

 

 

     The hypnotic effect of watching Mom apply eyebrow pencil worked its way into my life when I began to wish that my eyebrows were dark and pronounced rather than “invisibly blond.”

    Having mastered the art of eyebrow tracing from watching Mom, I’d use her eyebrow pencil on my own brows at various times, especially when company was coming to dinner. When I made my eyebrows too dark Mom would let this fact be known when she’d turn to me with a wet napkin in hand and scrub off the excess right there at the table.  She was discreet about this and never did it in front of Dad or guests.

   “Oh Tommy,” she’d say. “Is that really necessary? Go upstairs and wipe the rest off.”   

 

 

      Had this happened in 2021 and not the 1960s there would certainly be talk about sending me to a gender dysphoria clinic.  But I had no problems about being a boy despite my having tried on Mom’s high heels a few times when my parents were out on the town.  Trying on exotic clothing was a kind of theater, like watching Mom play a prostitute in a high Victorian hat.

        Yet long after I stopped darkening my eyebrows Mom would periodically check my brows every time we expected guests for dinner.

    Getting back to Pajama Tops, after the curtain fell on this flop of a play JA announced to everyone that it was now time to go back stage and meet the star.  

      JA said there was a bounce to Mom’s walk as the group followed him backstage. This indeed was a far cry from the Mom I knew when I was an adolescent, especially the time when she discovered that a classmate of mine had told me the facts of life in crude, raw language that also included factual errors like how human reproduction is achieved via a woman’s ear canal.

       “Who told you that?” Mom said, “What’s his name?”

        When I was finally persuaded to divulge the name of the informer, a much older boy who had been held back in school so many times that he was pretty much of a man with a deep voice in a class of seventh and eighth graders, I thought I saw Mom fight back a half smile. She was doing her best to remain serious. It was a People’s Light Theatre moment.    

 

 

    “He’s wrong about the ear thing,” Mom said, after which she turned and left the room.    

            Linda Lovelace’s problem, of course, did not concern the earlobes but another equally important body part.

     JA, who has often told me that Mom was his favorite aunt, said that when the group entered Lovelace’s dressing room, Mom exploded into a hydrogen bomb of celebrity worship. 

    “She was out of control but I loved it,” he said. “What happened should have been on stage. It would have improved the play.”

    Mom, JA said, let lose a litany of praise:

   “Oh, you are the star of the show! And just look at this room! You have your own special ashtray~!  Look at all the makeup, so much makeup. And look at you! This is beautiful, and you were magnificent… This is really marvelous! I can’t believe I’m here, I’m----------“

   Betty, Mom’s sister and JA’s mother, had a worried expression on her face that JA compared to someone about to say the rosary. The two men, JA’s Dad and my own, stood in appreciative silence as Mom continued to praise everything in the star’s room, including the quality of the door knob.   

   Through it all, Mom stuck to Pajama Tops and never ventured into the mechanics of Deep Throat. The 1970s may have been liberating but that decade was defenseless when it came to the rock bottom foundations of Mom’s Tyrone County, Irish Catholicism. 

     Mom was willing to go so far but then she’d boomerang back to her venerable roots.

    No doubt Mom brought up Catholicism although I'm sure she avoided talking about Linda’s onscreen sexual antics.  I can easily imagine Mom asking: “Did you go to confession after making that movie?” 

    JA still talks about Mom and Linda Lovelace 30 years after Mom’s death of lung cancer in 1993, 50 years after the actual event. The Locust St. Theatre, built in 1927, had a complicated history but closed in 1980. Preservationists attempted to save the building but they were unsuccessful.    

   In 1975, Linda Lovelace starred in a comedy, Lind Lovelace for President, directed by Claudio Guzman. All Movie Guide stated that the movie was :a time capsule from the era that made political correctness inevitable.”  By 1975 Lovelace was already on her own anti-pornography campaign, telling reporters and writing in her own book, that her husband at the time,   forced her to do Deep Throat and other adult films, under the threat of death.  Friends of the couple, however, disputed this so what really happened is still somewhat of a mystery.  

   In 1974, she told Variety, "I'm not going to sit here and say I'll never do another hard-core film because I was forced into this one, that I needed the money... I did it because I loved it. It was something I believed in. And if, when I'm 65 years old, they're making an X-rated movie and they need a little old lady to be in it, I'm gonna say, hey, I'm right here."

   Lovelace had a varied career. She once emceed a Led Zeppelin concert, and her name popped up in a number of rock and pop songs, including Elton John’s “Wrap Her Up.”

   She also published 4 books about herself.

  Her last days were difficult.  She needed a liver transplant and to fund the medications for that she had work as an office cleaner in Colorado. She died in April 2002 as a result of injuries suffered in a car crash.

   Both Mom and Dad died in the month of April though many years apart.

 

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor