Essential NOLA Cinema— episode 9:

Michael Martin on "The Sons of Tennessee Williams"

"The krewe system, the ball system, gay or not gay, is just magnificent farting around. It just really is." — Michael Martin

New Orleans theater-scene Renaissance man (and Bloody Nose Empty Pockets star) Michael Martin brings THE SONS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS to the table, the 2011 doc about the birth of the first recognized gay Krewe in the 1960s, as told by the men who were instrumental in creating it as they put together their 40th anniversary ball. Archival home-movie footage mixes with photographs and newspapers to open a window into the culture of New Orleans in the 1960s, when Jim Garrison (aka Kevin Costner's character in JFK) was District Attorney and terrorized the gay population with public shaming campaigns and "morals raids" on clubs and bars. Michael dishes on New Orleans theater, Chicago, Mardi Gras, creating characters, and more.

Recorded 7/10/20. Show index: Tim Wolff's baby • Krewe of Yuga • Jim Garrison vs Harry Connick Sr. • Co-co-editor Tim Watson • Home movies, 1960s-style • Miss Dixie's • New Orleans cultural civil war • Michael's journey • Krewes as country clubs • Parallels with Zulu • "A memorable but manageable amount of trouble" • New Orleans' insularity • Theater journeys • Camp vs Miss America • Mardi Gras blues • Creating "Trente-Sous Serge" in Laundry Day

Michael Martin • Michael Martin Memorial Group

LAUNDRY DAY • BLOODY NOSE EMPTY POCKETS

Watch THE SONS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Sons of Tennessee Williams official site

Listen to the conversation

Download the transcript

Transcription—

Michael Martin: I wanted to warn you, I have a fair amount of, I think, interesting things to say about the movie. [Laughter] So you’re just calling the podcast “Essential New Orleans Cinema,” right?

Randy Mack: I take the title to be more of a question than an assertion. It’s not about ranking, it’s not trying to create a canon of good films and bad films. It’s not supposed to be that kind of thing. The idea of it is that it’s supposed to be more like an inquiry— Does this work? How does it work? Does it work for you? Does it work for the city? What kind of city does it represent? Is it something we can learn from moving forward? I’m always trying to balance the conversation with an eye towards the future because the larger scale purpose of the podcast is to inspire new work and to get people thinking and creatively stimulated. So that’s why I always have an artist guest in the film arena. [dog coughs] Speedy is allergic to dog hair. That’s my joke.

MM: Oh dear.

RM: [to dog] You okay, Bubba? It’s allergy season. [to MM] I’m going to warn you in advance, I’m going to compliment you.

MM: No, I get - I know how these things work. Everybody has to be very special and wonderful who appears.

RM: Oh, yes, ahh okay, my notes. So I’ll just do a quick introduction and then turn it over to you. Okay.
Hello and welcome to Essential NOLA Cinema, a podcast about New Orleans movie making by New Orleans filmmakers. I’m here today with actor, performer…

MM: DIY producer.

RM: DIY producer... Writer, I assume…

MM: Occasional drag queen. Yes, writer and director.

RM: Towering pillar of the local theater community, Michael Martin.

MM: Hi.

RM: How is it going?

MM: It’s good.

RM: How is the global pandemic treating you?

MM: Actually, it’s fine. On a day-to-day basis, it’s fine. As soon as you think five minutes into the future, it’s not so good. But on a moment-to-moment basis, it’s fine.

RM: Right. It’s fine until it isn’t. This is the first ENC recorded live. We’re in the same room, socially distanced, on separate microphones. It’s like a very special episode.

MM: Oh God. I hope that’s not true. [Laughter]

RM: What we get is what we get. [Laughter] Michael brought “The Sons of Tennessee Williams” to the table today which is a 2015 documentary about the evolution of the gay Mardi Gras krewe scene. The Sons of Tennessee Williams is an interesting doc because it’s made entirely out of archival footage and with contemporary interviews with the people in that archival footage. So in a way it tracks several specific people over the course of almost 50 years from the ‘60s and the turnover from D.A. Garrison into Harry Connick Sr., which seems to be a massively pivotal moment in the history of the New Orleans gay community. A turn from near daily persecution into, at least on the police level, tolerance. There’s so much to unpack with it because it doesn’t give you a ton of context. This is where I have a lot of questions for you today, because it’s like…

MM: Oh boy.

RM: I’ve never even heard of these krewes for starters. I was really interested but I also kind of wanted to know more. They may have been assuming a lot of cultural understanding going in.

MM: All right. I’m already on the spot because I’m no historian of New Orleans culture in general or even the New Orleans gay culture specifically. The movie does cite the Krewe of Yuga as the first gay krewe which I had never heard of before seeing Tim Wolff’s film, The Sons of Tennessee Williams, as essentially Tim Wolff’s baby. It’s very plain that he did all of the heavy lifting in creating it and conducting the interviews, and editing the footage. But I had not heard of Yuga prior to seeing The Sons of Tennessee Williams. It was shut down within the first year or two of its existence by a police raid. People, once they picked themselves up, and dusted themselves off, went back in to city hall and incorporated... incorporated isn’t the right word, but they established a legal basis for their krewe, whatever that is by laws, whatever that is you have to file with the city to become a Mardi Gras krewe.

The police raids continued at least occasionally with those newly formed krewes after Yuga’s demise. But none of them seemed to have struck death blows. The various krewes that existed over the years from the late 50s and early 60s until today suffered more what you would have expected them to suffer - loss of young membership, Katrina, the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s. All of those were more decisive to the expansion or contraction of the gay krewes than the police were. It did - as Randy said, it didn’t really stop until sometime in the ‘70s, sometime after Connick won the race against Garrison. That was another historically interesting bit which again I was not aware of until I saw it. I have never quite understood... Connick as Randy said was apparently the first city official to come and solicit the gay community’s support during the course of his campaign.

That movie doesn’t argue that the gay community support was decisive, but it certainly was a big deal. It was the first time that a mainstream politician had solicited the support of the community as a community. So they put their backs into Connick’s election and he did get elected. It goes a long way towards me understanding why he is still a well-regarded figure among older generations of the community even though he has proven to be so controversial in the other areas of his career. How am I doing so far?

RM: You’re doing fine. You’re doing great. You referred to me in the third person which I thought was an interesting choice.

MM: Well, I don’t know who is listening. [Laughter]

RM: We’re not on the radio or whatever. The audience is just eavesdropping on our conversation so you can just talk to me.

MM: I see. Okay. I’ll stop talking about you in the third person. [Laughter] Randy, right over there, sitting right in front of me. I’m not real well-qualified to discuss The Sons of Tennessee Williams as a movie. You are or Randy is.

RM: [Laughter] Okay but I’m not a documentarian.

MM: No, but you are a filmmaker and in the world of film, I’m at most an actor. I’ve never occupied any other seat. What impressed me most about the movie as a movie is how much work Mr. Wolff plainly put into making it - lyrical is not too strong a word - making it lyrical, making it flow, inserting a lot of imagery and snatches of music, and artistry that the storytelling really didn’t require. He had fabulous archival footage of the krewes balls and very good street footage of old carnival parades, even dating prior to the ‘50s. He had good archival footage of the men that he was interviewing, still photos and videos both. It could easily have been simply “Here are some splendid old footage and here are the men today answering,” talking heads interviews. Tim Wolff did a great deal more with it than that.

RM: Yes. It’s funny, in the documentary community of New Orleans, there’s one towering figure who looms over, a fellow named Tim Watson, who’s got an editing, co-editing, assisting editing, extra editing credit on just I think almost every documentary we’ve ever seen in the city. The man is tireless and apparently likes to help first time filmmakers. He was the co-editor or additional editor on this film.

MM: Oh, I’m sure he must have helped a lot then.

RM: Yes. I was really impressed with that archival footage in terms of just, it’s not easy to get footage at all from the pre-video days. It was just so hard to film anything. You’d have to understand how to load magazines and you’d have to have a projector at home, and know how to process it, and all kinds of... It was just really difficult. People weren’t just running around with super 8 cameras and stuff. So the fact that the subjects of the doc had filmed all this stuff in the ‘60s is just really amazing window into life back then - especially some of the stuff of Miss Dixie’s bar.

MM: Miss Dixie’s bar is something I had actually heard of. That is a legend that had reached my ears prior to seeing this film.

RM: It’s on the corner of St. Peters and Bourbon, right?

MM: That sounds right. [00:10:00]

RM: I call that the four balconies corner. It’s the…

MM: Yes. I don’t know what’s there now. Through the ‘60s at least, Miss Dixie’s was the watering hole for gay men who were leading double lives, who were leading secret lives. It was where you went.

RM: It’s interesting. I wonder if the sort of gay section of Bourbon Street begins abruptly at St. Ann now, and I wonder if it had been pushed up the street a bit over the years.

MM: That’s possible. I’ve never heard anything to that effect.

RM: Or maybe it was more integrated back in the day.

MM: Yes, yes. I’ve never heard anything to that effect but I’d be more likely to suspect normal economic forces rather than a deliberate effort to push them. I mean, what difference is two or three blocks going to make? Just you never underestimate just the force of changing moirees... Conducting your life in secret became significantly less necessary after the ‘70s, certainly by the ‘80s. So places where you could hide and be yourself became less necessary as well.

RM: My brain just went to three places at once, so sorry.

MM: No, that’s all right.

RM: A Confederacy of Dunces has a giant subplot that ends in terms of basically the climax of the novel around the French Quarter’s gay community. My osmosis impression I’ve gotten from the 15 years I’ve been here is that New Orleans has always been a bit of a laissez faire Mecca where people didn’t have necessarily the societal pressure to live double lives within certain parameters so to speak. It’s interesting to me, it’s like you dig down a little bit through the history and there always seems to be a little bit of a cultural civil war in the city happening between a let-your-freak-flag-fly Downtown where there’s really low cost of living, where I call it America’s orphanage where every weirdo who didn’t fit in anywhere else in the country can come and find themselves, and we’re talking huge amounts of artists coming together in all kinds of unexpected ways and so on. Then you have a sort of conservative... I mean, I would like to believe it’s all outside the Parish Line but of course we know it’s not, that there’s a conservative element in the city as well, but then we’re the blue dot in a red state thing is this Creole city, what I’ve heard called the northernmost Caribbean port town…

MM: Right. Yes, that’s a good one.

RM: …as opposed to a Southern American city stuck in this white conservative state. That cultural push and pull seems to exist in every chapter of the city’s life that I found, although I can’t speak for the 1700s or whatever. It seems to have always been there. I’m curious how you... You’re not a born and raised native, right?

MM: No, I moved here in 2002.

RM: Okay, great. What’s your path here?

MM: Gosh, it lines up with what you’re saying. I had... I need to keep this brief. I had grown up in Minneapolis kind of Rosanne-style poor, white suburban trash poor, and did not really leave the confines of Minnesota but once through my 20s. A couple of things in my personal life happened to prompt this. I realized that if I ever wanted to get out and see the country without much money to do so, that if you go bumming around in your 20s, you’re a kid on a lark, but if you go bumming around on your 30s, people think you’re really a bum. So, I blew out with like $500.00 when I was 29.

RM: Just got in under the wire.

MM: Yes, just got it in under the wire. My route was primarily determined by where I knew people who would put me up. So it was a very erratic weird route around the country including Corpus Christi, Texas and Washington, D.C. and Knoxville, Tennessee and such like because those just happened to be places where I could find sofas. And it also included most notably Chicago and New Orleans which were the two of the cities that I fell in love with. I tried to settle in New Orleans first as part of that same trip after about four or five months on the road, on the Greyhound bus.

RM: No hitchhiking?

MM: No, no. I wasn’t that adventurous. It was kind of past hitchhiking’s heyday. The town whipped my ass and sent me home. I had to call Mommy for the emergency bus ticket. Went home for two or three years, licked my wounds. Came back to New Orleans when I was 34; the town whipped my ass a second time. [Laughter]

RM: Were these Mardi Gras ass whippings?

MM: These were your "unemployed and have no place to live and $10.00 in your pocket away from sucking cock in the French Quarter for loose change" ass whippings. This is not a town for the defenseless.

RM: Interesting. I mean they call it the Big Easy…

MM: That’s ridiculous. That’s always been ridiculous. It’s an easy place to visit, it’s a very hard place to live. Anyway, to finish my biography, I went back home a second time. The third time I left home... I’m messing up the timeline a little bit. The third time I left home, I decided to try Chicago rather than New Orleans, and that worked. That was the right throw weight for me and I lived there for 10 years until I was old enough to return to New Orleans and not quite be so readily getting into trouble as I was in my 20s and 30s.

RM: Were you acting, performing the whole way?

MM: No. I didn’t really start acting until I got to Chicago. I really did not make much of my time in my 20s. I didn’t take my life until I was in my mid-30s.

RM: Because Chicago is one of the great theater towns.

MM: Yes, and there I did a lot but again, I did not start in my 20s. I wasn’t acting while I was traveling. I started building an adult life once I got to Chicago. I lived there for nine years and then Eric and I came here.

RM: You didn’t meet him in Chicago?

MM: I did meet him in Chicago. Yes, we met in Chicago. He is a Southern boy. The only reason he was in Chicago was because that was where his career was. He was one of those guys who would go into the house in November and not come back out until April unless there was a running car waiting for him. He just couldn’t bear the winter.

RM: [Laughter] He’s like a hibernating bear.

MM: Yes, yes. So Chicago was a bad match for his temperature preferences. I just found and still find, as everybody does, New Orleans’ unique in the country. It just is - there is - it is one of a kind.

RM: To say the least.

MM: Yes. We were in the housing market down here. We could afford property down here; we couldn’t afford it in Chicago. There were a couple of other reasons as well. Primarily, it was still my first choice for home. I just was too young or too immature to do it the first times I tried to do it. Eric was totally ready to be somewhere else than Chicago.

RM: Did you have people in New Orleans to show you the ropes or…?

MM: No.

RM: You just came…

MM: No, at the end of…

RM: You’d been visiting off and on.

MM: We’re getting really into the weeds here. We made the decision to move here in ’99. Me being kind of feckless, and also by that time I had been in Chicago long enough that people were starting to offer me interesting projects, and that was hard to say no to. I was getting a little bit of a small circle reputation that although the decision to move was made in ’99, we didn’t actually make the move until 2002. People in Chicago tease me about my endless farewell tour, but we just kept delaying.

RM: [Laughter] I mean it worked for Cher.

MM: Yes, we just kept delaying the departure. That three-year delay did mean that I had time to research the city up, sideways, back and forth. I made a lot of online connections and did a lot of online research before we set our bags down here.

RM: The reason I’m asking for this context, I mean it’s also because I’ve never sat down and talked to you about this before…

MM: Yes. It’s a complicated story.

RM: …as a person but my experience is that I came here basically sight unseen to hang out with a very old friend at a time where I needed somebody who was like family because I just lost my family, and Mardi Gras just kind of hit me like Wile E. Coyote getting hit by a train from the right while he was looking left. I just didn’t know what was happening. It’s come up on a lot of these conversations about the sort of love-hate relationship people have with Mardi Gras. Some people are all about it. I mean it’s almost like a year-round thing for them, krewe memberships are like country clubs, and that kind of mentality I find where it’s very much a sort of caste system where everyone is talking about it. It’s also like an auspices for drama because you have hierarchy and it’s a lot of volunteers and there’s always money and dues and there’s all kinds of reasons for people to get butthurt, and they have different people who wield authority with different levels of competence and grace and so on. I mean I’m thinking of Nyx at the moment because of that whole thing, how Nyx has gone down in flames.

MM: Oh Nyx, yes. That’s an interesting story even to me and I don’t know a damn thing about Nyx. Yes, I have been following that.

RM: So, it’s interesting to me, I mean watching Sons of Tennessee Williams, how the importance of the validity of the krewe makes complete sense on a just basic self-preservation level as an oppressed minority with this police force raiding them all the time and publishing their names in the papers and stuff. Seeing how The Times-Picayune was complicit in this oppression made my stomach turn because I’m a former journalist. You’re supposed to hold the press to a higher standard and they were simply an instrument of public shaming in that era, which is just unconscionable.

MM: Right. Well, they weren’t the only ones.

RM: Yes. So the fact that you have this population forced to lead double lives being outed in the paper after the results of these ridiculously arbitrary raids on absurd morals charges, the fact that they were able to use Mardi Gras as a cover to legitimize themselves was fascinating to me because it’s kind of outside of the story of how Zulu was formed, it’s one of the few times I’ve ever heard of a krewe being formed for really a righteous and clever reason. You know what I mean?

MM: Yes. I want to stop on that just for a second and then go on to actually address what you’re talking about. I wish someone with - in fact, let me see if I can find someone - I wish someone with the cultural and historical chops to do so competently would do a comparison of the histories of Zulu which is much older than the histories of gay krewes and how they each serve the self-preservation purposes of the groups who founded them because it’s fascinating to me. That’s not what Sons of Tennessee Williams is about and it might even be offensive to try to compare the histories of the two different marginalized groups but holy hell, it would be interesting. This is me; this is not the movie. The one thing that I come back to again and again as an explanation, the essential explanation for New Orleans’ enduring mystique, let’s go with that, is the sense of license, the sense of permission. The cost of having that permission is, by and large, grinding poverty and miserable weather, and although it doesn’t seem so much that this is the case during the pandemic, insanely bad politics and ownership by the extraction industries, the oil and gas and cancer industries. And in exchange for putting all up with all of that, utilities that don’t work…

RM: Infrastructure.

MM: …infrastructure from a bubblegum machine, is that you get to do what you want. I don’t know that I’m leading to a point here. When I was still waiting tables, it’s been thankfully a piece of time now because I stopped being good at it and I kept doing it for a couple of years after I stopped being good at it, but people would ask me for, “Where should we go? What should we see?” There was one night I was chatting up a particularly lively crowd at Irene’s and one of the women said, “Well, what do you think people come here for?” I said, “Well, I think they don’t come for the food or the music or the architecture or the river or anything else. I think they come to get in a memorable but manageable amount of trouble. They don’t want to spend the night in the OPP but they do want to get into enough trouble to have a good story to tell when they’re sitting in their rocking chair.”

RM: That’s so funny, yes. First of all, I want to repeat that because that was just perfect, the “A memorable but manageable amount of trouble.” That sounds like a hip-hop lyric from Hamilton or something.

MM: Yes. That is what the city is for.

RM: That should be on the license plates here. [Laughter]

MM: [Laughter] “Come to Louisiana for memorable but manageable trouble.”

RM: Oh, I mean New Orleans specifically. After we have blown the bridges and become our own fiefdom or whatever. To your point, I think that whole idea of taking that memorable but manageable trouble back to their city to tell the story later is one of the big eureka moments I had in this city, and led directly to the creation of “Laundry Day,” was first the observation of like, “Wow, people are really good storytellers here.” Then it was like the second observation, “Oh, so much of these good stories are incidents that happened that they stumbled into that were in the street, that are in public spaces, bars or outside music clubs or onstage or whatever.” Then it occurred to me that like people basically come here and their tourism money is spent to create stories because what I call the homogenization of America, the loss of unique regional culture in this country by the Walmarts and strip malls and so forth, the mass corporate takeover of the country that has just eroded.

Every city now seems to have like a three-block historical district that everyone takes a walking tour for 15 minutes and then it’s like let’s go to Applebee’s or whatever afterwards. I think the hunger, the feeling of alienation that’s created in people where let’s say they’re a regular 9 to 5, like Friday is karaoke night and Tuesday is watching - or Sunday is watching Game of Thrones night or whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it in this consumerist pattern that is just not fulfilling any kind of feeling of community. Community is deep in our ancestral DNA. I mean, community is how we survived our early days as a species. The alienation from the sense of community created by modern capitalism is part of what drives people to New Orleans, I think. It’s like people come here and they come away and they feel closer to their friends and they feel bonded and they feel like they’ve been touched with something deep and they laughed most of the time when they weren’t crying or being robbed or whatever. And they have great stories. Even if they’re getting robbed, they sometimes get great stories out of that.

It’s something primordial, that feeling of like, oh, the stories we tell are such a vital fabric and just the churn of downtown, especially the Quarter, the Marigny, the kind of French Quarter/St. Claude areas are so rife with the churn of interesting kinds of people mixing in. I’ve always loved border towns, border communities. Places where the brackish water of culture is coming together have always been my favorite places. So I think why I’ve always kind of spent most of my time in the city downtown is because every bar that I like to hang out in is like a quasi, it’s a multi-hyphenated kind of bar. It’s like you look down the stools, there’d be two bikers arguing about Motörhead next to a gay couple having an anniversary next to the bartenders’ like three boyfriends next to two tourists from Cincinnati wearing beads out of season and holding hand grenades like who are confused because they’re looking for the Katrina museum which doesn’t exist or whatever.

That melting pot quality of like normally there’d be like a gay bar or a biker bar or a tourism bar, but suddenly, all of these cultures are clashing and they’re all forced to interact with each other in this interesting way of service industry, the stripper, sex worker culture, you have the musicians... They’re all forced to negotiate and come to terms with each other as people and as fellow members of their communities, no one is allowed to stay in a bubble here, or at least in the areas that I like to hang out in. That is where the great clashes come and the great stories come out of. I think it’s also where we learn about ourselves and where we learn about the broader worlds. So in a way, like New Orleans for all its unhealthiness on a physical level, is super healthy emotionally and spiritually.

MM: I hope so.

RM: Compared to Cincinnati. No offense, Cincinnati. My dad is from Cincinnati.

MM: One of the things that was most interesting to me about Sons of Tennessee Williams and it goes to what you’re talking about although kind of by the side door, and again I think that this is probably me bringing something to the table rather than something that was already prepared sitting there. I’ve listened to it very closely because it’s promotional material. It’s presentation of itself. It talks very much about the establishment of the gay krewes in the ‘60s as linked to the larger, perhaps even a model of the larger gay civil rights movement. That is very much part of the argument that it makes for itself. If you listen carefully to the film - and no disrespect intended to the film; it’s quite lovely as it is - that’s just not there. Stonewall is namechecked, the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s is namechecked, the Reagan years, Katrina is a little bit more than name-checked, but the connective tissue between the gay experience in New Orleans and the gay experience in other cities and in the culture overall is never presented. I think it’s never presented because it doesn’t really exist. [00:30:00]

RM: That’s interesting.

MM: Again, I want to emphasize that’s probably me bringing my prejudices to the table.

RM: I wonder if that was an honest mistake or if it was just a question of focus perhaps.

MM: I don’t think it’s either an honest mistake or a question of focus. I think you just want to be able to tell people who you hope will consider looking at your movie that something that they want to hear in order to get them to look at it. New Orleans has a heart, and I’m not talking about the gay community here specifically. I’m talking about the city as a city or the state of mind as a state of mind. New Orleans has a hard time copping to its insularity. We are a closed system. [Laughter]

RM: That statement pulled me up because I love the insularity. That’s my favorite part of the city.

MM: Yes, but then when it comes to justifying our existence - again, I’m speaking in very broad terms or generic but when it comes to justifying our existence, we feel that we have to point to, oh, we’ve had a big influence over here or we’re very connected over here or we’re a significant part of this history right here. We’re not. [Laughter] We’re a little island of insularity and license.

RM: That’s so interesting, yes.

MM: Most of the progress or lack of progress, most of the forward motion or the backward motion that the country and the community and the cultures have experienced as a whole has nothing to do with us, and we had nothing to do with it.

RM: Yes, no, exactly. Again, I love that. That’s like my favorite thing.

MM: I think we may as well admit it. [Laughter] We’re not a key player in the history of the gay civil rights in America. We’re just not. [Laughter]

RM: It’s so funny because there’s - I just thought of all this - Ken Burns’ jazz documentary talks extensively about the life of Louis Armstrong who was obviously born and raised here, was an orphan, was on the streets, was taken into a Jewish home, wore a Star of David on his neck until he died, but he couldn’t make a living really until he moved to New York and Chicago.

MM: If you are egotistical enough or confident enough, whatever you want to call it, vain enough, crazy enough to think that you have something to say that the world needs to hear, you can’t say it from here. You can’t say it from here. I mean, no metaphor is perfect but I’ll go to this. What makes New Orleans special in so many people’s hearts is that it doesn’t connect to the rest of the world, and we may as well stop claiming that we do.

RM: I mean honestly, it’s like our culture - it’s trend-proof, it’s fad-proof. It doesn’t have these clear - you know, you show a random photo from The Times-Picayune or from anybody’s scrapbook and unless you can tell by the quality of the paper the photo’s on, you can’t tell what era it’s from really. There’s a deep cultural persistence here that has resisted American influence. I think that a lot of that is the historical protectionism of the architecture and the zoning has done a lot to basically discourage predatory capitalists.

MM: It hasn’t been very successful. [Laughter]

RM: Well, that’s just the dream -

MM: We lost - I know what you mean. I do know what you mean, but we’ve lost 90% of our historically important jazz buildings.

RM: Yes. And the Hard Rock Hotel is sitting on a civil rights monument.

MM: In strictly acting terms, I do not remember who first said this to me, but when I first came to New Orleans in 2002 again, and as I say I had made some introductions prior to my arrival, there were a few people I knew by email at the time, not by social media, to have a cup of coffee with, and I just can’t even tell you how often - well, I can. Three times. Three times in the first two or three months I was here because - and I was not any sort of named performer coming out of Chicago. I had simply worked there for eight or nine years in a fairly small pool. Three times I heard variations of “Why would you come to this backwater?” from people who lived here and from people who were making art here. These were not office workers; these were other artists. “Why would you come to this backwater?”

I will admit I didn’t say it in my original statement but it was part of my motivations. I’d had a couple of setbacks in Chicago. There was one solo show up there that I did in particular which I thought was going to be my best ever work. As it turns out, it wasn’t; I subsequently did better work. But it was very good. I toured it. I did a tour and my tour led to a couple of different cities and I lost thousands of dollars. At that point, I had been doing it long enough that I didn’t throw a major tantrum, but I did say, “All right, you’re not going to ever break through commercially. That’s not what you do. So, if you’re doing it for love rather than for money, you can do it from anywhere.” A big reason for my - and again, it still took me three years to fold up my tent, but a big reason for me wrapping it up in Chicago and coming down here besides preferring to be here is that I gave up on my professional ambitions. I continued making work but I just didn’t think - I gave up thinking I was ever going to make a living at it.

RM: That’s so interesting because you’re the most prolific performer in the city as far as I can tell.

MM: Yes, but I clean things. I don’t make a living at it.

RM: Yes, I know. It’s interesting, the economics. Putting that aside for a sec though, I wanted to - one of the things I admire most about you is that you have such - you never stopped trying. You’re not one of those once-a-year-do-a-thing kind of people that there’s a lot of in this town, where they have one signature production and that’s kind of all they do. You have an openness to going out for things that would not seem like an obvious fit or whatever, [laughter] and you go for every kind of medium like music videos, theater productions, drag. Every aspect of theater has had your fingerprints on it.

MM: I have a very low amusement threshold. [Laughter] I do want to try to - I don’t want to talk about myself more than I absolutely have to. Sometime in the transfer from Chicago to New Orleans, I don’t remember if it was here or there, but somebody knowledgeable said to me in vis-à-vis the different tone between the cities. They said Chicago is where you go if you want to master your craft as perfectly as you can. Los Angeles is where you go if you want to make money. New York is where you go if you feel like you need to speak to the world.

RM: Interesting.

MM: Yes. And New Orleans is not on that list. [Laughter]

RM: Theater is a - it’s an artform that requires a little bit more control than the city is kind of comfortable with. Theater productions have to be done on like a kind of collective willpower together.

MM: I have no idea how the theater scene is going to survive here. Again, and I’m probably projecting, but in the extended segments of archival footage of the balls in The Sons of Tennessee Williams, especially the backstage preparation stuff and the rehearsal stuff, the costume-making, the gown-making, and also in the interviews, less so in the interviews, I feel like I watch it and I feel like there’s a sense in which these men, none of whom I could name by name. They were all really delightful to spend time with but I wouldn’t be able to say Sam said this and Fred said that.

RM: I was going to ask you if you knew any of them.

MM: No, I actually don’t. I am more disconnected from the broad community than I seem to be.

RM: Well, I didn’t recognize them either and I wasn’t sure if they had picked three people because they were average or because they were exceptional. I wasn’t sure where they fit into their own communities.

MM: I don’t know. I’m not part of the krewe community. I got the sense that there is a level on which they realize that what they’re doing is silly. That might again be projecting my attitudes onto them. They may feel no such thing. But there is just an inherent silliness that is either off-putting if you’re in a bad mood or endearing and ennobling if you’re in a good mood because they are just so intent on making this silly thing as complete and beautiful as possible. [00:40:00]

RM: Yes. I could sense some of the people had different - agendas isn’t the right word but a lot of those people had - they were getting different things out of it. Some people were going... like there were several off-hand jabs, I guess you’d say, where you heard one of the fussier people in the costuming backstage saying, “Oh, we’re not going for camp, honey,” like camp was like a dirty word. Or like, “We’re done with the whole camp thing,” or whatever. And you get the sense that there are some people who are in it for the laughs. It’s all satirical for them. There are other people who are like, “No, this is Miss America. We’re going to make this as serious and humorless as Miss America is.” Then other people are doing it for like self-expression reasons. Or like that person whose first time it was and all that. So it seems like there’s a lot of ways you can come at it.

MM: Yes. There’s never one reason for anyone doing anything. There’s usually a multiplicity of reasons.

RM: Can I ask you -

Respondent: Let me just toss this in the mic and then yes. In what is my new favorite quote, I only encountered it about three years ago although I’m sure he said it 30 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said apropos of what, I don’t know - he said, “We were put on this Earth to fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you different.” [Laughter]

RM: Kurt Vonnegut is the best.

MM: The krewe system, the ball system, gay or not gay, is just magnificent farting around. It just really is.

RM: Some of it gives me the creeps. The uptown balls, like that whole debutante thing is chilling to me. There’s a great documentary called “By Invitation Only” where a young debutante who was not into it was forced to do it, and so she filmed it all and made a documentary kind of without permission, and it’s like these secret balls that like…

MM: I’ll have to see if I can track this down.

RM: I’ve got a link. I’ll share it with you if you want it; it’s great. Really, it’s almost like a cattle call, the way they do it in that context. Very much a kind of parading our daughters to the highest bidder kind of thing. I wonder what your relationship with Mardi Gras is in general. Did you…

MM: I’ve usually worked. I’ve really only been out of the hospitality industry about two years.

RM: Right. Just on a personal level.

MM: On a personal level, I mean, it had meant a huge amount to me when I first visited in the ‘80s of course, that I had the same shock that everybody has when they encounter Mardi Gras for the first time. Since I didn’t return to the city until I was deep into my 40s, I am one of those guys who is wary of the most crowded situations unless I’m entertaining guests. So I will go out on Mardi Gras Day and a couple of the neighborhood parades.

RM: You said you don’t belong to a krewe.

MM: No, no. I did for one year and it was kind of, as you said, politics-ridden and expensive and I didn’t stick with it.

RM: I think you’re just not a joiner type.

MM: I think that’s probably true. Most of my life is so internal that in a serious way I don’t know why I want to be in New Orleans because I could do what I do anywhere. But I do want to be in New Orleans even if I don’t particularly connect with what makes it most valuable. Gay Easter Parade is way more big a deal to me. That’s the throwaway that - I’d like to use that expression again.

RM: [Laughter] The Keister parade.

MM: Yes, the Gay Easter parade is the level of public celebration that I’m comfortable with, not the enormity of Mardi Gras. The neighborhood parades, the day itself, a couple of other things, those I’ll enjoy. Honestly, a better answer is simply that I usually worked. I was usually working through Mardi Gras so I didn’t enjoy much of it whether I was trying to or not. The first carnival after Katrina sticks in my mind. That was very special.

RM: Yes. I moved here about six months after that.

MM: Yes. That was probably actually the last one that I was fully part of for the entirety of it. Since then, it’s been hit and miss depending on my job schedule.

RM: I’ve been told by many people that that was the best Mardi Gras ever.

MM: It was.

RM: It had almost no tourism. It was all locals and everyone had a deep appreciation for life.

MM: Yes. It got through even to me and as you pointed out, I tend to be pretty removed for most of it. The thing I want to say since this is where we started from is, for anyone who is listening to this, is that Sons of Tennessee Williams is just a deeply lovely movie, and very manifestly the work of one man’s dedication. It doesn’t make the case that the gay Mardi Gras krewes had an effect beyond the boundaries of New Orleans. At least, I don’t think it does.

RM: Yes, I don’t think it’s trying to, really.

MM: No, but it doesn’t need to make that case to justify you spending time with it.

RM: Yes, exactly. The whole idea of having to justify the movie or justify New Orleans’ existence to the outside world I think is an absurd question because you don’t need to justify things like that.

MM: Right. We celebrate our insularity. [Laughter]

RM: We’re a culture onto ourselves and that has given us a great resourcefulness as a community and a great strength as a culture. There are people talking about the roots going deep here. It’s entirely because of that insularity. It’s not a life for everyone.

MM: Right, no. Whenever anyone says to me, “I think it’s time to go,” I say to them, “You’re probably right.” Anyone who is starting to think that this town is too difficult to live in is almost always correct. I don’t ever urge anyone who is feeling trepidatious about it to stay. It’s very hard.

RM: Someone said to me, “I feel like I have to leave,” and I said, “Go with your feelings.”

MM: Yes, yes, yes. I mean I tried to live here twice as I said when what was theoretically the prime of my life. I just sent home with my ass. [Laughter]

RM: Do you find the theater work here more fulfilling, more diverse, or more eclectic?

MM: This sounds like a cop-out but it’s an apples-to-oranges. I create so much of my own projects that that’s not really - with the exception of Noises Off six months ago, eight months ago, it had been ages since I had been cast in a main stage production, the existence of which I wasn’t responsible for.

RM: So I got a question that has - this is one of the top three most common questions about Laundry Day. People love your performance in it. They always want to know this. I tell them how you took that character and made it your own...

MM: [Laughter] I don’t think I did a very good job for you but okay.

RM: You did great. People always say, like, why French Canadian?

MM: I don’t know. Because I’m terrible at accents. I don’t even remember if I remember my rationale anymore because that was however many years ago.

RM: "Trente Sous" - it had something to do with…

MM: Trente Sous Serge. Why did I approach it that way? I am going to say - and I might be rewriting my history. I could well be rewriting my history because it seems to me that I had a more substantial reason than this. In retrospect, I believe my basic reason was that I thought it would be funnier. I don’t know that it was more than that, that if I was playing a downtrodden dandy who everybody kind of amusedly put up with, that some kind of phony French accent was called for, and that I would have an escape hatch in that I wouldn’t be very good at it because it would be as performative I guess as his outfit.

RM: Right. But I was going to say he wasn’t a dandy until you took the role.

MM: True. I never did meet or see the man that you modeled him on.

RM: Oh, he’s still around. Although in the pandemic I don’t know, but he was still around when this…

MM: Yes, I wasn’t happy about that anyways, you know. I didn’t want to play a close inspiration to anyone who is still alive.

RM: Yes. I thought you were dead-on correct to bring that up because it’s one of those weird oversights, but in the panic into production and all the juggling of things, I completely forgot to change his name. So, you caught that oversight for me and did me a huge favor by coming up with this, creating the story, backstory, new name, everything.

MM: Yes, it was totally from need. I found Trente-Sous as a small coin first, went to Serge from that, and then built out from - I essentially built...

RM: Oh, yes, because he is Two Quarters George, so right, from quarters to Trente and then, George to Serge.

MM: Yes. I basically built out the character’s look and voice from his name. [Laughter] I started -

RM: You’ll be happy to know no one’s ever said that guy really knocked me out of the movie or too over-the-top or whatever. You can fit right in the fabric of that film. [Laughter]

MM: That’s good. Because I look at it and it seems very fakey to me, but he is a fakey guy so that’s probably why.

RM: There were a lot of performative types in it.

MM: Yes, exactly.

RM: People love to walk up and down the street, you know. That movie has become a time capsule. It’s got Uncle Lionel on the background at one shot and Mr. Okra and Amzie Adams.

MM: Every time I see Veronica [Russell, who passed unexpectedly in 2014], I stare for a moment.

RM: Yes. That was heartbreaking. That was just out of nowhere.

MM: Yes.

RM: On that note, thank you so much.

MM: It was a pleasure.

RM: Thank you for talking about this great movie, bringing it to my attention. Listeners can watch the film on Vimeo On Demand; that seems to be the best version out there. It’s a $3 rental and it’s HD quality.

MM: Yes. It’s also available in iTunes indefinitely. Its time on Vimeo might be limited, I’m not sure.

RM: Okay, cool.

MM: So, iTunes is a backup.

RM: Thank you so much.

MM: My pleasure. Thank you.

RM: Subscribe. Rate. Review. Tell your friends, et cetera. [Music]

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