After traveling with the Traveling Company of Arden of Faversham to Italy and Yugoslavia, I went back to Amsterdam and along with Lamar Alford to begin what would eventually be known as La MaMa Amsterdam. Lamar wanted to stay in Europe and so did I, so with Ellen’s blessing and help, we decided we would bring the style and technique we’d learned at La MaMa NYC to Holland and have a good time too.  We workshopped and worked-out and put on quite a few different productions. We mostly produced works we had done in NY with a few tweaks here and there. We were able to re-create them and make them all our own.

Ellen called me to say that the Playhouse was coming over to tour. I wanted to stay and work with them again and seeing a golden opportunity to stay and get paid to tour around, I said yes. It wasn’t like anyone ever had producer problems or got abandoned mid-tour in Europe… right?

They all arrived at Central Station on Valentines Day. Marie (Antoinette) was the first off the train to greet me and she called me by someone else’s name. Good to be remembered.

The plan was to stay and cast the show and rehearse in town then go out and live on a beautiful farm/theater called the Mickery Run owned by Ellen’s friend Ritzart. So, like other La MaMa companies before us, we’d perform at the farm, then go touring from this home base. Lamar and I had to find places for these people to stay before everyone got to the farm and we did a good job. They all had homes and a few had new lovers. We only arranged for the homes.

John Vaccaro had decided to revive Cock-Strong and Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit. I hadn’t been in either one, but had seen them both and Heaven Grand was the reason I wanted to work with this group in the first place. Since we knew most of the “talent pool” in Amsterdam the show was cast and songs distributed. I seemed to be the only singer and got most of the songs in Cock-Strong. In Heaven Grand, I got what was to become a part I did all over Europe and in a bicentennial revival a few years later at La MaMa.

When I saw the La MaMa production of Cock-Strong in 1969 the policy allowed us to attend every performance after we bought the first ticket for $2 and we went to every performance, even bringing umbrellas for the not to be believed grand finale. We also brought a gallon jug of red wine every night. The order of events in the show always seemed out of order, but I assumed it was just the magic of the wine. Turns out the director wrote the number of each scene on paper then tore the paper into strips and drew them from a hat to establish the running order of the show. I would start the evening as God in a sparkly gold tunic, my long curly hair a definite advantage, then become some kind of feather hatted fop singing about having a chicken on the subway crapping in my face. I was a cheerleader in the autopsy scene-give me a big “P” and we spelled out psynosis or whatever gibberish letters I felt like yelling R H B O Q Q S etc.  At the end of the show we all came out dressed as American Indians for the Kama Sutra ballet/sex dance.  Finally, after running around in circles underneath the Cock chanting “cum, cum, cum, cum”, well… it did.  Ergo the umbrella like when we first saw it in NYC.

Ellen supervised the “cockstruction” and I never figured how she knew where to get a 10 foot zipper in Amsterdam but she did. At her instruction we built a totally collapsible portable penis 10 feet long. With a giant eyeball on the business end that pointed at the audience.  A garden hose was threaded through it and connected to a sink somewhere backstage. It rained and rained, except for that one time in Belgium.

We went to Basel, Switzerland then back to Holland for several dates, then to Paris at the City Université where we lived in dorms on the campus for a month, right in the middle of crazy student unrest and rioting.  We got very unfriendly reviews on campus and very unfriendly treatment from angry students who called us something untranslatable in French, something anti-American.  We ate in the student cafeteria and the staff loved us, not letting us order the tripe even though we didn’t know what it was and they couldn’t explain it in English.  The audiences loved us too and we had a lot of returns and happy fans.  We went to disco and met Pat Cleveland and some other models who were just becoming famous; we also met a not yet discovered Jessica Lange.  Jim Morrison died while we were there.  Kenny Hill was friends with Thierry Mugler who became a fan and came to see us many times bringing great groups of beautiful French people.  He too was about to gain great fame, but in the meantime he became a friend and we even went button shopping in the Flea Market when he next came to Holland.

Heading back to Amsterdam and home base we had a gig in Brussels. We couldn’t make the driver drive near it so we barely got a glimpse of the Atomium landmark image of the 1958 World’s Fair. The show was very well received and once again screams and ovations and lots of fans. One night we were invited to the city hall for a big reception with the mayor and bunches of local officials and flash bulbs and the star treatment. We all took turns sitting behind the mayor’s desk banging his gavel and him sitting with the pretty girls on his lap leering at them. We were toasted with champagne and ate little dainties. Good times.

Bright and early the next morning, we were woken by loud banging on our doors and screams of “Polizei! “and “ofen de doeur”. I most certainly was groggy but had the presence of mind to pitch my stash of hashish out the window. All our rooms were around a courtyard and every one of us had the same thought at the same time and chunks of hash went flying out the windows like it was a hail-storm.

We were taken to jail and threatened with arrest if we didn’t point out who the culprits were in a stack of the best pictures we ever saw of the show. It was a funny losing fight for the police because we all had very heavy white-face and glitter in the photos and none of our passport names were the same as in the program and we weren’t about to help. We had Reginald Rimmingtongue, Marsha Dimes, Helena Hallway. I was the only one using my real name but the fuzz didn’t notice. We tried stealing the photos but didn’t manage and ended up dragging our tired asses to the theater to find the place like a bee hive of activity. Ellen had showed up from who knew where and hearing what had happened she had rallied the artistic community to rebuild the cock as they had impounded it and refused to return it. It got done and, come curtain time, wet paint and all with about 100 extra people in the house and in the aisles, we went up.

They carried on hootin’ and hollerin’ like I’d never seen before and up until the “cum, cum, cum” part, it went smoothly and it was a smashing evening. It didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come and suddenly the water collecting inside the shaft split the cock open and drenched the lot of us. A good time was had by all and we packed up and got the hell out of dodge.