Touring the Country

The thing I remember most is how excited I was to even read that auditions were being held for the Hair tour of Spain.  It was August of 1975 and I was in a traveling mood.  Seeing the ad in Backstage, I immediately began singing “Walking in Rhythm” replacing the word rhythm with the word Lisbon, ignoring it’s being in Portugal and not Spain. I had made some kind of psychic connection and kept with it right up to getting on the plane. The coincidence was, I’d been working on this song for an audition and here I was using it for the real deal. I knew it would get me the job and I’d be going. From  that fateful audition till departure was only two weeks and it felt like years. I couldn’t wait to be part to of Hair.

The producer, one Ignacio Occhi was there, along  for the trip with Jackie and Dee. They were the directors for this touring version and would  also play Shelia and Claude. They were English and I think they’d both done the West End production.

There were 8 or 10 of us. Bob (call me Robert) Camuto was escorting his friend Kate Buddeke to the plane. I remember speaking with Robert and Kate somewhere along Park Ave as we walked to get to the airport transportation. We all  exchanged the most excited greetings and got on board. It was most likely a hotel shuttle, this Occhi guy wasn’t a-hire a limo-type of producer. Trudy Perkins (appears in the Hair movie) must have been there, though I don’t remember her. Linda Compton, Bob Zanfini and his soon to be ex (sort of) girl friend Judy and three African American girls, all early 20’s who wanted to be called Champagne after they discovered how cheap it was in Spain. Althea -the mouth, very loud young girl and Yvonne – who’d go on to be spoken of as Stevie Wonder’s favorite back-up singer (they had already collaborated on one song) and Cathy, well under 5 ft tall. Cathy and I would become partners on ‘What A Piece of Work’ and the only ones to prevent each other from falling from our rickety tower during the number . We were supposed to started the song sitting inside the ‘tower’. The first night we assumed there had been a mistake. During the scene I climbed up to sit beside Cathy and noticed a scared look on her face as she frantically pantomimed the words ‘don’t come up here’. She was sitting on a very bouncy plank of wood that could barely support her 60 pound self , let alone both of us. She sang her part of the song with an urgency as never before till we climbed down to join the others.

Then there was Israel Vallee.  Even on the flight and checking in to the hotel in Madrid he seemed somehow off center. He’d brought his resume on the plane and gave us each a copy. I thought I’d get a leg up on this Spanish language thing so I volunteered to share a room with him,  he had loudly proclaimed himself-Spanish speaking,having been born in Puerto Rico, it didn’t help me a bit. This first night we stayed in Madrid and were to join the others the next day in the Northern costal town of Vigo. I loved the excitement of being freshly arrived in a foreign country, discovering how things worked how they differed from home; where to find things on the street, getting food in another language, buying cigarettes and stamps, making phone calls. The cold marble floors, cold rooms, tall ceilings, huge tall windows opening onto some Spanish Avenida and tiny jutting balconies.

We pulled into Vigo late at night. We had missed the show and got to the hotel in time for dinner. The producers had made a deal with the hotel to feed the cast after the show each night. Vigo was a “resort” town and as it was way off-season it was shut down tight every night after sundown. It was more like a quaint fishing village with nobody on the streets and nothing open, which accounted for the size of our audiences.

I was bringing greetings from several people in New York for Steve Curry.  He was in the original Broadway show and it was his head of hair in all the ads and record jackets worldwide. The New Yorkers who sent a hello all spoke of Steve in the most reverential and loving terms and here he was sitting in the middle of this group of people who all looked really pooped and did not act like they wanted to interrupt dinner-time to say hello or hear greetings. Why were they so aloof? They looked sort of out of focus. Did they think we were replacing them? Yes, would turn out to be the answer to that question. There was a certain amount of distrust as people would jockey for more money or perks, like such a thing even existed with this producer. Almost everyone was promised something they never got; a raise, a day off, a different role in the show or (like Steve) the royalties he was gifted by the authors. That’s what Steve told me, not one peseta did he ever get! When I took over as the Tourist Lady I had to brow beat him to make him pay for the “special” make-up I needed, it was just lipstick, but I got Chanel and it cost a lot.

Anyhow, the dinner was a very ugly whole fish with it’s tail clamped in it’s mouth, battered and deep fried. It looked like a horrible bracelet by Salvador Dali. I for one went to bed hungry. I later learned there was a soccer team in the hotel and the other gay guy in the group (really, just the two of us) had spent the night ‘entertaining’ them,as he put it later,when we got friendly. Never friendly enough to share, however or say what he meant by ‘entertain’. Harold Coward was his name a former flight attendant. We had both done Hair in Germany at different times in different cities. Harold was one of the fashionables. Always long pant cuffs tailored to hide the height of his 70’s platform shoes and boots. The tightest blue jeans and the biggest Afro you ever saw. He was from Trinidad Tobago and danced like a puppet with rubber bands instead of strings holding him up. He was kind of a mascot, a sophisticated trendy-dressed mascot at that,but everybody liked him. One night Steve discovered a little bar that had blood sausage tapas. The only problem was it gave him horrendous gas. During Me and Lucifer, Harold had to crawl through Steve’s legs and say some line about ask how you can get it at home. When he finished his lines with his head still between Steve’s legs, Steve squatted down real deep and farted in Harold’s hair. It only took a second for it to penetrate but Harold went nuts and had to be pulled off stage. It was like a corpse was being shifted around all night whenever Harold came on stage.

Our group had each auditioned twice and were told to pack for a trip to Spain. Sunny Spain like in all the songs. At least I expected it to be sunny. To my shock when I later looked at a map I saw Madrid is directly due East from NYC and we’d arrived to the exact weather we’d left. I hadn’t packed a warm coat and only a few sweaters. So,when winter soon arrived it was every bit as cold as New York, snow and ice included. Many of the places we played were once grand opera houses, now ugly cold buildings, hundreds of years old. With their original old cold backstage crew of feeble pensioners some of them also hundreds of years old. These were buildings stripped of their former grandeur, most were hollow shells with 3 and 4 unused balconies and 3 or 4 floors of dressing rooms. If there was a spiral staircase you didn’t want to go above the first floor. I usually chose to dress in the wings rather than face the swaying clanking spiral-stairs, barely attached to anything. Each house had a new and unusual set of problems. Mostly no heat or hot-water and cavernous dark back stage areas.

We were told we would travel for a while before getting to Madrid as the theater was booked for some time to come, not committing to what ’travel for a while’ even meant. There were any number of indignities we had to endure along the way including re-staging the show for a small nightclub booking then a larger nightclub booking then a concert version on a stage too small to move on, no dialogue just songs. One place was low-ceilinged and still being built with plastic drop-cloths for walls and strong breezes fluttering through. All of us sitting around on the floor just watching each other stand up and sing as needed,then sit down again. We would not have scenery or costumes until we reached Madrid and that hung over us like a carrot on a string egging us on to bigger and better or so we hoped. In one of those clubs we witnessed the funniest thing. As we staged Easy To Be Hard, Shiela (Jackie) sings her broken-heart out, Hud (Gary) goes off-stage and comes back with a flower for her to end the song with, real pretty like while we sat on the floor watching. One night just to wake us all up,no doubt, Gary (Hud) came back onstage with a 12 foot  2 x 4. Jackie (Shiela) had no choice but to finish the song holding the lumber while the tribe (us) peed our pants trying not to laugh.

Then there was the nudity. It wasn’t advertised but the censors must have been paid off. There had never been full frontal nudity in Spain under Franco’s rule.When our town to town stage crews realized we’d be ending Act I running off stage naked holding our clothes, they started getting real inventive calling it being helpful. They’d be at the edge of the stage holding out big white sheets groping away till we made them stop and they were equal opportunity gropers all of us felt their helping hands. In another city they lit our way off stage exposing us more. When we put a stop to that,they were caught in the orchestra pit with their flashlights. They were crafty alright and plenty disgusting.

As we went from town to town I enjoyed meeting people along the way. Always a lot of American tourists and soldiers and med students who couldn’t make it in med-schools in the US. I shudder to think what kind of doctors they became.

One thing I noticed all over Spain was the amount of pregnant women. The larger cities more so, to the point of not walking more than a block or two at most without seeing at least one.

Somewhere in northern Spain our path was blocked by a parade with drummers and bag-pipe like instruments marching slowly, like to a funeral yet they said it was a celebration and we saw “Basque Separatists”, old in black berets sitting around in parks playing chess, plotting a revolution (our joke).

Further South in Valencia, a town famous world-wide for growing the tastiest oranges, we were warned to avoid eating the fruit of the orange trees that were planted everywhere. They were not planted to welcome and share but to keep vagrants from invading their sunny city, poison oranges.

We were always riding in a big tour-bus with huge windows on each side guaranteeing no sleep in the daytime. Always the sound of Stevie Wonder and “when do we eat?”as the soundtrack of the trip.

Finally Madrid was within our reach and we were ecstatic to finally get there. It must have been late October/early November. If I received a letter or a call from home the topic was always about Franco being dead or dying, this was the daily panic. It was way too Saturday Night Live for my comfort.