Hairspray

My almost six year old spent a good deal of her summer studying musicals. She spent her August upright, pantomiming her way through double features of Annie and Hairspray with a kind of hermetic focus, mouthing lyrics. Afterwards, she would sing along to the music in front of her mirror and gyrate to herself in earnest. She pit her volume against the soundtrack’s, as if foes dueling for the attention of whomever chances upon them. To walk by her bedroom in mid performance, one might think Ethel Merman had recast herself in the form of a three foot Chinese girl. Add to that her two most practiced roles are the leads in both Annie and Hairspray. Even if she grows up to be a theatre kid – like her sister – I’m trying to imagine a director casting an adopted child in the role of orphan Annie or a tiny Asian kid in the role of Tracy Turnblad, the heavy set white girl who dares to mix with blacks. Issues of appropriateness might arise. And yet, right now she performs both those roles quite convincingly in our living room. When she asked if for her upcoming birthday she could have a “Hairspray” party we countered with a quick dozen reasons why that might not be such a good idea. Down around six or seven on the list was the possibility (probability?) of a younger set of parents not having seen or known about the musical and then coming to find out that it’s really made for older kids. Adults even. And deals satirically with the serious issue of racial discrimination. Suffice to say, Hairspray is not the usual fare for six year old birthday parties.

More to the point, what if in researching said Hairspray birthday for kindergarteners, these same younger parents accidentally picked up the original Hairspray, directed by cult-famous director John Waters? That’s not the one starring in drag the more wholesome John Travolta. Waters’ is the more suggestive less Hollywood version, starring the wildly unconventional 300-pound transvestite Devine, a pioneer whose largesse paved the way for future obese drag queens. Tragically, Devine, who starred in many of Waters’ films, including Pink Flamingos and Polyester, died shortly after their 1988 cult classic Hairspray debuted.

Neither Erin Hasley nor I remember the circumstances of Joe having met and subsequently photographed John Waters in Provincetown in the summer of 1994. But, as socially reserved as Joe often was, he was also an opportunist. I imagine that, whatever the scenario of their encounter, Joe must have made enough of an impression to strike John Waters as a photographer who took his art seriously. Waters’ must have admired how this young, confident, tattooed photographer took quiet control of his set, directing the Director where and how to position himself for this series of portraits. There are the qualities of intimacy and trust in these photos that we see as the trademark of so much of Joe’s work.

We nixed the Hairspray birthday party before the idea inflated too large. My poor daughter had already enlisted my help as planner, someone who could design Hairspray games and deck the house in Hairspray regalia. Sorry, we told her, releasing the air from this ballooning dream. We’ll take five of your friends over to Build-a-Bear, we told her. That way we could keep our standing as reasonably responsible parents. Maybe for her sweet sixteen we’ll festoon the house with Devine balloons and throw a dance party.

Buffalo Tom turns 25 Part 3 of 3: A Sheet of Paper

On the second floor of the Neilson Library at Smith College there were huge well-lit open rooms with rows of long dark wooden conference tables where students could spread out their textbooks and spiral bounds and chew on pencils while computing Calculus or studying Silvia Plath or contemplating aborigine customs in pre-colonial Australia. These tables were big enough to sit twelve or fourteen with adequate elbow room, which wasn’t always a good idea if the owners of those elbows were also your friends and housemates. The serious tables had no more than four or five while the social ones were crowded with eight or ten. In the fall of 1986, we were the latter. As Umassers living in Northhampton, we felt it a right more than a privilege to help ourselves to the luxuries the five-college consortium sometimes had to offer. We wore this “right” like a cologne. Those cool, crunchy Smithies would be drawn to our intoxicating danger when we, from the other side of the consortium tracks, slid into their library’s high-backed Windsor chairs.

Hamilton brothers Pete, Bob, and Paul at Paul and Amy's wedding.

One Sunday night when those girls weren’t paying us the attention we presumed, after a weekend of kicking ass western mass style, with Joe well on his way back to Boston, we were sitting at one of these trestle tables, sketching out possible names for the band three of our friends had recently formed. I don’t remember the exact list on the sheet of paper being passed around, but I remember the chief scribbler. If there had been a Varsity Doodling team at UMass, the captaincy would belong solely to Bob Hamilton. No surprise the guy today runs his own graphic design business. The sheet had a border of typical Hamiltonian characters - grotesques with bulging tummies and anemic tapered limbs. In the center was a list of possibilities, some of which were hybrids riffing on, for reasons that perhaps only Bob could explain, Buffalo Springfield. I don’t remember if Tom Maginnis, the drummer of the newly-formed band, was in attendance, but his name had also been penned into some of the hybrids. By the end of the “study session” the name with the oval around it was Buffalo Tom. I’m not sure any of the members of the band were present that night – maybe all were – but when the name was presented to them, it was Tom’s toothy resistance to it that sealed the deal. For however long they played together, a semester or twenty-five years, he would always have to insist the “Tom” part had nothing to do with him. How could it not, anyone with rational thought might ask. Then Tom would have to explain it on an ironic level, and then the joke shrouding it would wither in his unease. The name was perfect.

Lately I’ve been doing some home renovations. I’m at the mudding stage, whereby various materials – wood, drywall, glass, iron - have to merge together to create wholeness. I spend hours spreading mortar, sanding seams, hiding screws. My mistakes have to do with seams being seen. For not sufficiently camouflaging the process. I stand at the sink, picking out the dried joint compound and wood filler that has gunked up in the webbing of my fingers and wonder, watching the creamy mixture froth under the running water, how so much material waste there is in the process of construction.

Every now and then I wander down to my office and flip through the boxes of Joe’s photos. Sometimes I read his academic essays, written during his time at RISD and the Art Institute of Chicago. Sometimes they blow my mind. I don’t always understand them. Some really abstract stuff having to do with the memory and the construction of experience. Of course his drug addiction and recovery factored huge in his photography and video-making. In one paper he writes:

…Both psychologically and visually, my work considers the dilemmas of absorbing only a small part of the richness in the world in conjunction with dreams, memory and perception…From the path of perception to meaning, the mind is manifold, made in parts, operating on many computations simultaneously, bundling them together only as needed. I have been shown just how delicate and changeable memory is, as it forms and reforms after the fact. It has become clear that the act of memory is an act of construction. That is to say, we create our experience and our experience creates us…I’m constantly reconstructing my past experience when living in the present or even when designing the future…

There are two Joes in my memory. The concrete Joe and the abstract Joe. The former is the one I see performing a task, a skill, a maneuver – the one hurdling picnic tables in a tuxedo at my wedding reception or the one hovering over the hot glue of seam tape, joining two rugs together, rubbing them out and trimming with scissors the frizzy threads unspooling from the seam, like a proud barber. The seam is unseen. The abstract Joe is the one who operated in the internal world, who took his drug addiction and recovery and fashioned it into an art by which he could further understand himself specifically and human nature in general. This Joe could talk for an eternity about the human psychic condition. This was Joe the philosopher.

Anyway, I don’t remember if that’s exactly how Buffalo Tom came upon its name. It might not have been the second floor of the Neilson Library. It might have been the first or the sixth. But I distinctly remember the sheet of paper with the name Buffalo Tom written on it in Bob’s droopy penmanship. Those two words – Buffalo and Tom – written on that sheet of paper on that long conference table, surrounded by giggling, not so studious students, on some floor of the Neilson Library, on the campus of Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1986, is “a small part of the richness in the world.”