OT: Relax

And now for something completely different...



When I was running a theater, I used to put "Relax" on the sound system and play it full blast while I was doing my day work. When I took phone calls, the people on the other end thought I must be going deaf or needed to adjust my meds.

I now know that there are lots of different video versions of "Relax", but at the time, I'd only seen one, the one that's posted here (supposedly the banned version, but I don't know who "banned" it.) I thought it was a pretty accurate representation of what our theater was like, day and night. Our S&M Salome was one of the high (or was it low?) points, but there were many others. We did hundreds of productions and staged readings. Not all of which involved leather and the fat man, but some did.

We were infested with "Dogs," as in "Rebellion Dogs," a recovery group whose facilitator was a friend of a friend, a Vietnam Vet and a real character. His charges were characters, too. They took the sobriquet "Dogs" quite literally, forming themselves into packs and running completely wild when they weren't doing their recovery business. ("Rebellion dogs" is from a phrase in Bill W's AA book, something about "rebellion dogs your every effort to end addiction" -- it's a VERB!)

But they did a lot of the backstage work and of course they were very friendly, so I let them have their way most of the time.

Artists of all stripes and kinds became part of our community, some tried to become part of the family. Everything you see in the video is pretty much what was going on pretty much all the time.

Don't ask if I miss it. All I can say is politics is tame by comparison.

(NB: And while I have been around tigers, it was a lion that eventually ran a claw through my thumb while I was trying to extricate a young lady's hand from the lion's mouth. So there we were, the two of us, held fast by the lion wondering what the hell do we do now? Along comes someone with a stick and whacks the lion's cage with it. The lion lets go. Whew!)

(NBB: Holly Johnson was a friend of mine and a friend of the theater. But she wasn't THIS Holly Johnson, with whom it was easy to identify...)