Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XX)

For beauty is but

the beginning of terror, that we are yet able to bear,
and we adore it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us.
Duino Elegies — Rainer Maria Rilke

In the mid eighties the Office of Alternative High Schools and Programs transformed many New York City small alternative schools that had been neglected by the larger bureaucracy. City As School, the child of innovative educators from John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, had established itself as a school without walls by placing students interns throughout the city. West Side High School set up in a dance school by West Side activists, like Doris Rosenblum, for students refusing to attend the larger public high schools.

Traditional public high schools were unable to serve to all students. Some students were certified for special education, others were forced out of overwhelmed schools. Alternative Schools and Programs offered a means to include school phobic teens, immigrants, parenting teens, incarcerated youth, children in homeless shelters, chronic truants, and low performing students who were aging out of the system.

Beginning in 1986 the Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players, in partnership with Offsite Educational Services and the Office of Alternative High Schools and Programs, brought small press poetry publishing to adolescents attending public school classes in drug rehab programs, teen parenting programs, and community centers. Barbara and I worked with Richard Organisciak, the principal of Offsite Educational Services (OES), to visit sites and develop small press literary magazines for his students. The New York State Council on the Arts helped fund the project. In our first year, we visited LUCHA, East Harlem Music School, PRACA, Muse School, Harvey Milk School, DAYTOP, Veritas, Phoenix House, Project Contact (Educational Alliance), Odyssey House, and the YWCA Teen Parent Program.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XIX)

The first perfect bound volume of Streams came out in time for the last New York Book fair in 1987. It was typeset on an electric typewriter and printed by the Print Center, a not for profit corporation, that assisted many small literary presses.

Richard Organisciak, the principal of Off Site Educational Services, encouraged his teachers to participate. Marcia Klein coordinated the schools creative writing program and presented awards to students whose works were included in Streams. I chose one selection from each of the site based publications that came out that year and included work from each teacher that sent in material at the end of the year.

Ten Penny Players editing, design, and production skills were rough-hewn. Some of that was our folk aesthetic. We were harnessing the new print technology to create simple poetry publications for the public school students attending alternative high schools. Our funding was minimal. Barbara and I donated time, space, and salaries to the project.

The Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players was a small press publishing project that took on an ambitious venture. We inclusively engaged all the students we came in contact with through the Alternative Schools. We were revitalizing an appreciation for the printed page in a segment of the society that others had written off.

Streams became an annual anthology, lasting through sixteen editions. It featured writing from each of the school sites with which we’d been working during the year. It also attracted writing from other students throughout the system.

Streams 1

Waterways published many site based small literary and expressive magazines during the year; and then gathered together the sites for an exhibition, small press book fair, and poetry reading. As teaching artists, Barbara and I shared with the schools not only our publishing skills, but the fellowship we knew from the New York Book Fair and the Waterways events that would generate excitement about small magazines and poetry chapbooks.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XVIII)

By the time of the last New York Book Fair, held at Columbia University in ’87, I was collecting student writing on five inch floppy disks, publishing school site based magazines, and including students who had been kept outside of the mainstream. Waterways’ annual anthology, Streams, made its first appearance in Alternative Schools across the city.

Ten Penny Players brought the Waterways small press publishing project to New York City’s public schools. Limited editions were given away freely. Student authors received multiple copies. One of the authors, a teen parent living in a homeless shelter, told me it was the first book she ever owned.

We taught the students that books were good company. Books spoke to the writer in all of them. Their responses were inspiring. Students who had been written off as triage and failed by their schools wanted to write and be published. They were looking to Streams to find the most congenial way to articulate their experiences.

We began Streams as a means of inclusion. The Streams of individual voices came together to make an anthology. The students skills ranged from raw to refined. Their contributions ranged from derivative to original. Each school site was represented in the publication. We reached out to the many students with learning disabilities who were segregated from the general population, despite the passage of PL 94-142 that mandated inclusions of these youngsters.

Ten Penny Player’s Waterways Project invited students to participate at the New York Book Fair poetry readings at Columbia. And the small press poetry book fairs, we held along the waterfront was invited into New York City’s Alternative High Schools and Programs.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XVII)

So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate: there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
John Milton (Paradise Lost)

I hammer away.  These characters emerge.

After NYU, the book fair relocated to the Park Avenue Armory. The military presence was off putting.  The next year it moved to Madison Square Garden.

During those years I published a series Bard Press poetry chapbooks, including Richard Davidson’s The Gentleman from Hyde Park, a tribute to FDR.

In the spring of 1986 the Waterways Project began a collaboration with the Alternative Schools reaching out to special needs students at Lower East Side Prep, City As School, the Muse School in Our Lady of Pompeii Church, and the Harvey Milk School.

The Office of Alternative Schools and Programs began to enroll special education students.  I provided resource services for the students by engaging them in discussions and writing exercises.

Shelley wrote in his "Defence of Poetry":
“Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts.”

The best writers were inspired by peer writing. We published students who never owned a book. We listened to the voice that was part of the flow of daily discourse and belonged to the conversations that our students were having among themselves. Our students were looking for meaning, trying to find direction, and in so doing pointed the way to their peers.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XVI)

Barbara managed 799, kept account books, collected rents, paid bills, lobbied at the Landmarks Commission to change the windows, and took on jobs like painting the fire escape.

She also served as secretary/treasurer to the West Village Committee. In the 1960’s Jane Jacobs had helped organize the Committee to fight the Robert Moses plan for highways to cut through the area. By the 1980’s the Committee (led by Rochelle Wall, Jim Shaw, and Bill Bowser) was involved in the fight against Westway, the highway that was planned to abut the area.

The West Village Committee opened a used bookstore to fund its preservation work. The store was located in donated space on West 11th Street, next door to the White Horse Tavern. I managed the little bookstore, stacking the books, arranging sections, and selling at affordable prices. Once or twice a year we held a street fair. Cartons of donated books were open to the browsing public in the middle of West 11th Street. It was a used book event where Waterways presses were also displayed and poets, like Richard Davidson and Barbara Holland, came to read in the street.

West Village Committee member Mel Cohen, a musician and special educator, joined Ten Penny Players when we were asked to bring our program to the new alternative high school on Rikers Island prison.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XV)

Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one.
A. J. Liebling

In 1967 New York City’s multiple dwelling law was changed for the late 19th century building at 799 Greenwich Street to allow artists to live and have studio space in the same loft. Bought at auction by the J.M. Kaplan Fund it was converted by the Foundation and sold at cost to visual artists with low to modest incomes. It was such a successful project that when the AT&T building became available on West Street it was bought by the Kaplan Fund, renamed Westbeth and converted for the use of visual, performing, and literary artists working in all types of media. The neighborhood then was by and large a low income community and redlined by the commercial banks. Although some artists had lived in the building before the conversion they were doing so illegally. Among the first tenants to move in after the conversion were Marcelo Bonevardi and his family, Nancy Holt and her husband Robert Smithson, Cora Kelly Ward, Jane Braswell, Ruth Richards, Hugo Weber, Bertha Case and her daughter Barbara Peart, Bradford Graves and his wife Verna Gillis.

The fourth floor loft where we lived was 750 square feet. Our bedrooms were separated from the rest of the loft by bookcases and dressers. There wasn’t very much privacy. We lived with close to a hundred free flying cockatiels, a blue crown, an African grey, and an Amazon parrot. We also shared the space with a dog, two turtles, and a rabbit brought home from summer camp.

I spent most of the day visiting multiple sites, working with students, collecting their work. At the loft Barbara typeset using a hand letter press or an electric typewriter. We leased a photocopier to print, and assembled the publications by hand. By 1989, the Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players had become a small computer based desktop publisher.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XIV)

“The measure of the worth of a society is how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable citizens.”
-- Ted Sizer

The child with a disability does not fit the standard mold. Parents and educators learn to accept the child’s differences, meet him on his terms, and see the poetry in his struggle with words.

Under Public Law 94-142 public schools were mandated to accept children with disabilities. Athelantis was attending the third grade at the local public school after years of home schooling. Barbara and I became part of the first vanguard of parents with special needs children attending U.S. public schools as a result of the legislation. Our experience as parents in the system convinced us that the Waterways Project would bring the voices of the special needs students attending class in hospitals, residential settings, community groups, rehabs, and alternative to detention centers into the mainstream.

At first Athelantis stayed in a typical classroom with supplementary resource room services. After graduating elementary school, he would undergo major surgery, a maxillary advancement to reshape his head giving him larger eye sockets (so his eyes didn’t pop out) and improved tooth function. That surgery and the rehabilitation that followed would interfere with his schooling. An appropriate placement would ease his passage through those difficult years.

We found Athelantis a placement at the Horizon School in Queens; where he began calling himself Thomas, a name he still uses although his driver license annual tax statement say Athelantis. He had the maxillary advancement operation when he was thirteen and went to Horizon for another year before transitioning back into the public school system. Always a ham despite his differences, he auditioned for and was accepted at the Harbor School of the Performing Arts in East Harlem.

He graduated from Harbor to Satellite Academy, and became the first special education student officially given a seat in a NYC Alternative High School. The director at the Forsythe Street program of Satellite Academy was a nurturing, caring, and charismatic educator, and one of the first casualties of AIDS in the city. His funeral was packed with grieving kids, parents, and colleagues.

I had been assigned to work at a diagnostic reception site in East New York. The teenagers girls were often abused and abusive. Fights broke out in school. Barbara and I wrote about the site and published writing by the students in a newsletter aimed at parents working with the city's special education committees. As a result, I was removed from working at the site. That was the school system’s answer to the need for involvement and reform. But, a more engaged school administrator invited the Waterways Project into classrooms for students attending school at the Hospital for Special Surgery, Payne Whitney, Sloan Kettering Memorial, NYS Psychiatric Institute, Harlem Teams, LUCHA, Pyramid House, and the Karen Marsh Alternative to Detention Center. By 1982 I was teaching a class in an Intermediate School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The students had been labeled "EH" and gifted. Each week Barbara and I published their creative writing in a small magazine called "The Weekly Peeper."

Barbara was typesetting, printing, and binding the publications that came from all the sites where I taught. She also taught weekly writing workshops for children at the Jefferson Market Library. A series of poetry chapbooks entitled “In Search of a Song” came out of those workshops. By 2003 Ten Penny Players had published over a thousand small books in the series.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XIII)

Ten Penny Players began as a children’s theater. As a small literary press it continued its mission by involving children in readings and publishing poetry for and by children. Barbara used her letter press to print poems and pictures by her son and his third grade class at PS 41. Waterways invited children to perform their poetry at book fairs and led poetry workshops for children in the the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries.

In partnership with the Straphangers Campaign, Ten Penny Players worked with the schools to create a chapbook of children’s poetry about the subways, Subway Slams (1981). Forty five students were published and performed their poems under the 42nd Street Public Library in the subway system tunnel. Radio Station WNYC broadcast the student readings.

Subway Slams: Poems from NYC Children

Richard Ravitch, at the 1981 MTA hearings, listening to the children’s poetry as Barbara read from Subway Slams, said he needed to take the students’ testimony to Washington.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XII)

On April4, 1980, the New York Book Fair arrived at NYU with 500 presses and enough funds to rent the entire student center. Barbara, as treasurer for the event, negotiated the contract between the book fair and the university. I organized the small press readings. A marathon reading was held downstairs in the cafe. Among the poets scheduled to read were Frederick Buell, Marie Ponsot, Ellen Marie Bissert, Beverly Lawn, Elizabeth Marraffino, Ed Hogan, Jim Villani, Harriet Brown, Enid Dame, Ruth Lisa Schechter, Roberta Kalechofsky, Kathryn Nocerino, Bob Holman, Jeff Wright, Ernest M. Robson, Carol Polcovar, Robert Fox, Ron Welburn, Stanley Barkan, Diana Kwiatkowski, Zack Rogow, Dorothy Friedman, Barry Godensohn, Leah Paransky, Donald Lev, Mikhail Horowitz, Jan Castrow, Lyn Lifshin, Charley Shively, George-Therese Dickinson, Alice Mattison, and Oliver Lake. With the help of Home Planet News and Box 749, additional small press poetry readings were presented at the Cedar Tavern and the Cornelia Street Café. The readings were documented in the April, 1980, issue of our magazine:

NYS Waterways Project - 1980 2

In April, 1982, coinciding with the New York Book Fair, Waterways published an issue of poetry by children celebrating the act of reading. In response to our call for submissions more than 500 children sent in poetry about reading. The young poets whose poems were selected for publication were also invited to the book fair at NYU where they performed their poetry.

Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream Vol. 3 No. 2 The Joys of Reading

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XI)

By the winter of 1979-80 Barbara and I held a full season of Waterways poetry fairs and readings. Most of the events had been in the city. My hope was that we could arrange a series of Waterways readings and fairs along the Hudson River and then west along the Erie Canal to Buffalo. I also wanted to explore the possibility of holding readings at the Finger Lakes in the west and Lake George in the north. With preparations under way for the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, I thought we might be able to bring small press poets to that event. We contacted the planners and were invited to submit ideas for a New York City poetry event as part of the countdown to the Olympics.

We thought of a readings at Carnegie Hall and the old Custom’s House. Larger poetry publishers, Norton and Viking/Penguin, joined us for this event. We met with Grover Dale, who had helped in the early days of Ten Penny Players and had gone on to become a successful Broadway director. In the end, we were not able to find the backing to produce the large scale event we were imagining.

We decided to go ahead any way. I was a graduate student at NYU, and able to get space to hold the poetry fair in the student center. The Olympics did not fund us, but recognized us as an official countdown event. A third grade class of students from PS 41, a Greenwich Village school, joined the poets who read in the student lounge. The poets were Barbara Fisher, Hal Sirowitz, Susan Kronenberg, Phyllis Stern, Emilie Glen, Mary Lou DiPietro, Hilda Morley, Zoe Rita Anglesey, France Burke, Zizwe Ngafua, Patricia Fillingham, Sandra Maria Esteves, Madeline Tiger Bass, Virginia Scott, Alan Green, David Katz, Linda Stern, Carole Stone, Dorothy Friedman, Rose Sher, David Ferguson, Donald Lev, Enid Dame, Lucy Angeleri, Harry Smith, Sidney Bernard, Louise Jaffe, Ellen Marie Bissert, Roberta Metz, Concieri Taylor, Ellen Aug, Chuck Nechtem, Philip Shultz, Barbara Holland, Richard Davidson, Stanley Barkan, Carol Polcovar, and Richard Aland Spiegel. Exhibit tables were set up in an adjoining gallery. Kirby Congdon came into the exhibit irate that a publisher was exhibiting a recent book by Ted Hughes. That Olympics event was a test run for future New York Book Fairs at Loeb.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 9

Supplement to Waterways December '79

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part X)

On July 4th, 1979, the Waterways Project’s first event, a marathon poetry reading, was held at the South Street Seaport. Barbara had dealt with city agencies through her activist roles in the artist tenants movement and as the director of a children’s theater. When organizing each fair, before coming into the community, she contacted local arts organizations, small presses, and planning boards to assure that the communities wanted the event, that local presses would exhibit, and local poets would have an opportunity to read. We were able to get a poem from each reading poet in advance which we then published in the Waterways Magazine that was issued at each fair site and served to document each event.

We arrived on a rainy morning at the Seaport with books, tables, umbrellas, and our dog. The poets performed under an umbrella in the rain.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 1


The second event that summer was held at the Stapleton Pier, two Staten Island Rapid Transit stops from the ferry terminal, and a walk over glass strewn, cracked concrete streets. The Staten Island poetry community joined us on the abandoned pier which would be torn down in 1980’s for a proposed Navy base. There’s no longer a Stapleton Pier. There is no Navel base. Like many things in Stapleton, Staten Island, there remain only unfulfilled dreams of a revitalized community.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 2


We held the next book fair on the Manhattan pier where the Navy would later exhibit the Intrepid. One of our community partners brought a portable stage with microphones and amplifiers on a truck. But the rains again forced us to pack away the books.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 3


We were rained out at the newly opened pier-park at Long Island City. We took a borrowed car full of tables and books to the site in case the downpour stopped. Other optimistic souls (poets and publishers) also arrived and joined us for coffee and banana bread in the car where we stayed with the dog for several hours. Interestingly enough, people did arrive in cars to see if there would be an event and a reporter from Newsday showed up to photograph the fair had there been one.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 4

Our first Greenwich Village event was held on August 19th at the North River Bulkhead, Bank and West Streets. The wooden tables we made for the fairs, cartons of books, a portable microphone, and the rest of our family were loaded onto our heavy duty green dolly and I pushed the Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players along the cobblestone streets from Greenwich Street to the Hudson River. We set up a collective exhibit for publishers who could not attend. There was no rain.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 5


We held our sixth event under the Brooklyn Bridge. We set up tables at the Brooklyn Ferry Landing in the space next to Barge Music.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 6


On September 8th and 9th we were in Kingston at the opening of the Maritime Museum in Roundout Creek.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 7


We published an October issue after the first New York Is Book Country event, which was held along Fifth Avenue. Our small poetry presses were swallowed up by the huge event which exhibited the work of the city’s large publishing industry along many midtown blocks. The NY Book Fair had a booth where Barbara helped out and I emceed the small press poetry readings in front of the Museum of Modern Art.


NYS Waterways Project - 1979 8

The last 1979 issue of the New York State Waterways Project magazines was published in December when we presented a book fair and reading as part of the NYC celebration of the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part IX)

Barbara wrote proposals and handled fiscal for the book fair, designed curriculum for the schools, and was raising a child with multiple disabilities in an artist’s coop on Greenwich Street at West Twelfth. I was living in a studio apartment with my cat on West Tenth Street.

Together we submitted a project to develop audiences for poetry to the National Endowment for the Arts. The proposal was to display small New York State poetry presses at a series of book fairs on piers and by other waterfront areas that permitted such activity. People walking across the Brooklyn Bridge might encounter tables of poetry books by unknown presses and unknown poets. Then browsers would have the opportunity to read the books and hear the poets. We would bring poetry to new audiences by finding audiences on boardwalks, beaches, and piers. We were awarded a seeding grant of two thousand dollars from the NEA to keep us going that first year. Because we were going to hold the fairs outside in public spaces, we would need permits but not have to pay rent for an arena.

The New York State Waterways Project began in the summer of ’79 at the South Street Seaport. Nine months after the New York Book Fair at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School. The presses were eager to show their work more often than the annual New York Book Fair allowed.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part VIII)

The 1977 New York Book Fair was held in Bryant Park in the tent left by the flower show. It rained and the tent was muddy. Across Forty Second Street, Brooklyn poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera was hosting the readings in the CUNY Auditorium, which Jackie Eubanks was able to rent at a good price.

My mother's cousin, Ida Teitelbaum, a fine artist, accompanied me to the fair. She sat at the table exhibiting BardPress chapbooks. I roamed the tent, putting up posters for the Hell’s Kitchen Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s.

I met Barbara at the planning meeting for the 1978 New York Book Fair, when she helped Louis Reyes Rivera to raise funds for the event he was organizing. The Fair was held at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School behind Lincoln Center. Barbara brought and demonstrated her letter press.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part VII)

In 1975, I began the Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s Church in Clinton on West 46th Street. Also known as Hell’s Kitchen, the area west of the midtown theater district near is where Barbara had staged Noisy City Sam.

Small poetry presses from the book fair - Endymion, Home Planet News, Alice James, Hanging Loose, and Mulch - brought audiences to a weekly series of late night readings. Poets - Sandy Chapin, Ted Berrigan, Rissa Korsun, Enid Dame, Joel Oppenheimer, Bob Holman, Grace Paley, and Richard Davidson - read on stage sets borrowed from productions in St. Clement’s little theater.

At the requests of poets Louis Simpson and Muriel Rukeyser we staged benefit readings in the larger (200 person capacity) theater space on behalf of poets, Kofi Awoonor and Kim Chi Ha. Allen Ginsberg, Ntozake Shange, and Daniel Berrigan joined San Francisco poet Roberto Vargas for a reading to draw attention to the struggles in Nicaragua.

A room was set aside for a poetry library that began when Suzanne Zavrian and Michael Andre contributed a display of magazines from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM).

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part VI)

The New York Book Fair held on a weekend in July, 1974 was the brainchild of our friend, Jackie Eubanks, a Brooklyn College research librarian. It was her idea “to organize the most individualistic people in the world” and “to educate librarians to change their minds about small presses.” (Read her interview with Marianne Yen in "Small Press Magazine" November/December 1984)



The first New York Book Fair crammed two hundred small press publishers and a parade of 12,000 curious browsers along the narrow aisles on three of what had been Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art. Table after table displayed poetry books and magazines. At the same time poets held continuous readings in the lower level auditorium.



In the spring of ‘75 the second New York Book Fair was held at the old Federal Custom’s House in Lower Manhattan near Battery Park. The building was elegant, but in disrepair. I displayed a handful of little poetry chapbooks. The rooms, with wood paneling and parquet floor, were quiet.

Organizing the ’76 book fair began in Suzanne Zavrian’s Upper West Side apartment. An editor, writer and administrator in both commercial and small press publishing, Suzanne brought together a loose conglomeration of small press publishers to continue the tradition of “openness to the full range of alternative publishers, free space for those presses who cannot afford to pay for a table, free admission to the public, organizational independence, and the ability to enlist co-organizers of a high level of commitment, professionalism, and initiative.” (Read Ed Hogan’s interview with Suzanne Zavrian in CCLM’s “More than a Gathering of Dreamers” 1980).

A sporadic flow of thousands of visitors and opera goers strolled past the small press publishers who set up exhibits in the area that connected parking, subway and theater under the Lincoln Center Opera House. Three hundred small presses were eager to show their wares.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part V)

The baby was in and out of hospital for surgical procedures. The school system wanted no part of a mother who wrote books and a child with disabilities. Public schools were not yet required to admit children with disabilities. Barbara home schooled with a curriculum she received through the mail. Visual artists from the co-op, musicians, and friends from the theater came to help.

Her neighbor, Verna, gave her a small letterpress. Printing writing by and for children, Ten Penny Players evolved from a theater to a publisher of small books made for little hands to hold in quiet reflection. Barbara's father, David, had been a book collector whose love for books was greater than his love of family or his children. Her appreciation for books was learned in his library, endlessly dusting volumes, carefully holding fragile leather to protect even more fragile spines. She had studied fine art print making at Hunter College, but put aside the acids and etching press to make the loft child safe.

At the New York Small Press Book Fair, held in Bryant Park (autumn, 1977), Barbara exhibited her letterpress books. The audience at the fair assumed her highly illustrated books were for children, but she insisted they were for everyone.

Little Poems


Athelantis Perry 1977-8

August 1978

Knee Scene

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part IV)

Athelantis was born with Apert's syndrome. Amid hospital visits and operations, Barbara continued her work in children's theater. She helped organize a conference, The Hurt Child and the Arts, at Fordham University. She completed a manuscript chronicling her struggle with hospitals to find medical treatment for her son. The book, a landmark in patient rights advocacy, was published by Avon in 1972 as “Care Without Care.”

Care Without Care (Chapter I)

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part III)

Ten Penny Players, Inc. was founded by Barbara Fisher and Barbrah Messing who were working together at the Chelsea Theater Center.

In August of 1970 Ten Penny Players produced Barbara Fisher's environmental play, “Noisy City Sam”. New York Magazine identified some of the characters as "Edna the Social Worker, Ice Cream Wrapper, A Decaying Apartment House, Willie de Waffle and of course, Noisy City Sam." The show was presented in Clinton Park. Children came from around the city. The price of admission was an empty soda can. The Village Voice wrote that the audience was asked "to bring empty aluminum cans as their tickets of admission. This action is one method used by the troupe to stimulate children to be active participants in the anti-pollution movement."

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part II)

Athelantis, our son from Barbara's first marriage, was the best man at the ceremony on the Brooklyn Bridge. Winds blew about us. I feared the ring might drop between the slats onto the cars and trucks crossing the East River below us.

After he administered our marriage vows, Jim Proud pointed to the sun’s descent between the twin towers. His wife, Susan, wondered whether it was by design. Had the architects planned for bridge pedestrians to see the sun set precisely between the two towers every summer solstice? Was there a mystical design that linked the Brooklyn Bridge, the World Trade Center, Earth's orbit, and the shadows that fell at Stonehenge? No. It wasn't by design. The harmony of the moment chanced to happen on our wedding day in 1983.

Twenty seven years later, the World Trade towers have gone; but the bridge remains; and Barbara continues to wear the wedding ring I placed on her finger that June day.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (part I)

"O harp and altar, of the fury fused,"

Proem to the Brooklyn Bridge — Hart Crane

On the evening of the summer solstice of 1983, a hundred years after the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, a taxi brought us downtown from 799 Greenwich Street to the Municipal Building and the pedestrian ramp of the bridge. Barbara, Athelantis, Jane, and I walked up the ramp toward the bridge's first tower above the East River. From there we turned to look west, back at Manhattan. The sun was setting above the windows of the World Trade Center.

There was no need for a permit to hold our wedding on the Brooklyn Bridge. We didn’t bring a large crowd. Jane Braswell was there. She was our upstairs neighbor in 799, the artists’ co-op Barbara helped to legalize through her work with Artists Tenant Association. James Proud, an Episcopal priest and the attorney for Ten Penny Players, came to administer our vows. Joan Harrington, from Advocates for Children, arrived with her family from the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

From out the constant flow of everyday pedestrians crossing the bridge, a couple of tourists from Sweden, amused by our ceremony, stopped to take our picture.