Let There Be Light...Show: An Alien's Journey Through Humanity

By Marc L. Rubinstein

    In late August 1951, the strange phenomenon known as The Lubbock Lights leads to days of UFO sightings from Texas northward through to Canada. An infant appearing in a Chicago hospital is swiftly adopted and whisked away to New York as quickly as health and law allow. As the child grows, it is obvious he is not quite like friends or family. By adolescence, his jokes that the events surrounding his "birth" prove he is an alien are met without ridicule, without argument; the "joke" is always met by some form of, "That explains a lot!"

    Maybe you knew someone similar, someone who didn't fit in…even with those who liked and loved them, someone who was there and apart all at once, and all the time.

Four friends are drawn together by strange serendipity after nearly forty years apart; talking through the night, reliving that place and time they turned from teen to adult becomes a magical experience. That weekend with old friends causes a fundamental change in the alien. This book is a reflection upon that life that caused even his closest friends to say, "Marc, you weren't like the rest of us."

    The experiences of a young musician turned light artist by age fifteen to legendary Fillmore East House Light Show by eighteen produce many interesting stories. But an entire life is not the same as a youthful success. However, the continued creation of niches, excelling in each, is even more remarkable. How did he get there? Where did he go from there? What did he learn over the years about HOW he wasn't like the rest. Find out the WHY behind it all.

    One of the last things his adopted father, the only father he ever knew, said to him was, "I hope you learn before you die how lucky you were to go through life doing things you loved." 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marc L. Rubinstein
• Release date: Jul 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223413967

Marc L. Rubinstein

Marc appeared in a hospital in Chicago, IL on August 31st, 1951, was adopted and swept away to Long Beach, NY at four days old to dream and grow. Musician, lighting designer, sound designer, Macintosh guru, high school drop-out, college professor, architect, and, most remembered as, a pioneering light show artist whose Pig Light Show became House Light Show at Bill Graham’s legendary Fillmore East, and at Al Hayward and John Scher’s Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ. Reimagined in a digital solo performance format in 2007, Marc performed till retiring in April of 2023. Pig Light Show performed live from 1967 to 2023.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Write The Damned Book!

Mark Hudson B&W.png

You need to write a book, a friend recently encouraged...vehemently; one of many over the years.

How many times have I heard that?

You’ve got so many stories to tell, another would say.

Do I?

"You were there, man!"

Indeed I was. And I, at least, will never forget.

But so many others were there as well. Why me? Why a book from me?

––––––––

That’s the question I asked each of the friends when they’d tell me to write. Why me? Why indeed? Mickey, a friend who passed away a few years ago once said, You were not like the rest of us! None of us had your focus ... not in high school ... not anytime.

"You were not like the rest of us!" is a refrain I have heard in many ways throughout my life. But it was my life ... how was I supposed to know it was unusual, much less interesting? Yes, it was interesting to me, otherwise I would have bored myself silly, I suppose, or found something completely different to do with it. But what other life had I to compare it to? One person suggested I was like a kid brought up in the circus, able to walk a tightrope or fly on a trapeze from my earliest days, without ever realizing that normal kids never did what I did. I always assumed my friends were sharing the same road and thrills as I; we traveled that road together, after all. But I’ve since been told it was like riding the coattails of a hurricane and most of the time no one really understood what was happening to them. I never felt as though they were just along for the ride, and not an active part of everything going on, but they did. That was how they felt: out of control. But I always thought we felt the same things; hopes and joys, dips and torments, achievements and accolades: we were in it together ... weren’t we? What was there to make me think I was so special?

Four friends from Long Beach, New York got together by strange serendipity in Fort Lauderdale, Florida after nearly forty years apart. Drawn – one from somewhere in Sweden, another from Maine and two then living in Florida – back to that place and time; it was magical. We talked all through our first night back together, just as we had so often in the heady Sixties when first we drifted together through shared dreams and values and friendships. From settling in my shared hotel suite around 5:00 PM till falling asleep sometime after 5:00 AM, the talk didn’t pause.

In those missing years so much had happened to each of us; we had a lot of catching up to do ... and we tried like crazy to make up for lost time. From our shared days of teenage angst and early adulthood, we were telling stories of marriages, divorces, births, deaths and realities; times of joy, times of sorrow, times of psychosis, love, and loss ... until we were finally as up to date and in the here and now as that experience was able to bring us.

And still, I wasn’t like others. They all told me. I really had no idea. I was me. I did what I did, had always just done what I did, and to me it just wasn’t all that special. It just ... was.

Above all, on that journey through our pasts, Larry, Patti and Mickey made me see things about myself, about my life, and of my affect on the lives of others. I had never imagined much less known how differently various people in my life had seen me from what I had thought; how differently each had seen me from one another. In a book Patti had written to help her work through a very hard section of life, Larry was Larry, her deceased husband David was a young David, Mickey was Mickey (or Mildred)...I was a fantastic character everyone knew and liked but didn’t fully understand, who was a wizard of art and science and given a fictitious name. One of what I thought was among my closest friends of the era had seen me as a mythical being; part here, part somewhere else in another plane of existence. Even those I thought closest to me weren’t quite there...with me.

That weekend with my old friends caused a fundamental change in me.

Ah, but why the Hell should you care?

Good question. Why should you?

Well, I’ll tell you...

Maybe you knew someone like me, someone who didn’t fit in. Not even with those who liked and loved them, someone who was there and apart all at once and all the time.

If not for that reason, how’s this? Because when I stood around with my then wife and kids, or friends in a mall or elevator or in a car or bar or wherever, and we heard what used to be Muzak (but is now more often than not the music of My Generation: Classic Rock), I stood there and said, half of me joking and half in absolute wonder that I could never have experienced at the time I did it, "I worked with them...and them...yeah, them too. I knew them."  And the same goes for most of the artists we hear. Even when my kids got Guitar Hero, as they’d play to Ozzy’s Crazy Train I’d say, Ozzy was fun to work with, but nothing like people think. Or when the opening guitar riff to Mountain’s Mississippi Queen blazed out of the speakers in Leslie West’s signature style, I’d say, Oh, I worked with him so many times, but, then again, I knew him and his brother Larry from The Vagrants when they were playing bars around Long Island (the Island).

Then, my kids would laugh and scream, Shut up!

Others who have not so often been assailed by this might simply ask, "How the Hell did you work with all of them?"

I smile.

That very question uttered in Raoul’s Roadside Rest in Westbrook, Maine in 1992 or so by a now dear old friend, Eric Reeder, started me on a mental quest that brought me through memories gloriously recalled and some less happily dredged back to the surface that later made this memoir a reality.

Well, it might be that I grew up on Long Island at the same time as Billy Joel, Leslie West, Carmine Appice, Tim Bogert and so many others, and worked at so many of the same places doing my Pig Light Show or the stage lighting I did before starting the light show ... and before pretty much anybody else was doing stage lighting of any kind for any bands. Or it could be any of the many other places where I worked with bands not from Long Island. It could be the festivals, The Fillmore East where I was house light show after my one-time mentor Joshua White (yes, of The Joshua Light show) hand-picked me to replace him when he went into television. It could be the years I spent at The Capitol Theatre in Passaic or the work that I did to pay my way through college at SUNY New Paltz where I did stage lighting and/or light shows for concerts almost every weekend for years.

It might be.

It might be that I kept the light show together, doing it alone or training my lighting students over the years, to keep it alive doing concerts when and where I could just not to lose it, and to keep it alive in at least a few minds.

It might be that even, today, I still keep some unusual company and do work that makes my previous wild, psychedelic visions seem placid.

Perhaps you should read on because this is not so much a story of my life, as a story of one person’s drive, creativity, and desire to do what no one could have imagined, while ignoring the naysayers, and at an age younger than anyone else so attempted, and doing it successfully. Maybe you will learn something about people, music or an incredible era.

Perhaps you should read on because there is a good reason why so many others told me I should write a damned book in the first place.

Around 2007, I met a man who became a dear friend. Mark Hudson had been a producer for Ringo Starr, as well as Ozzy (who I had worked with back in his Black Sabbath days). Mark and I knew a lot of the same people. It was easy for us to come together as friends and we quickly felt like we’d been so for a long time as we shared many memories of events, even though seen from opposite ends of the Country. It didn’t hurt that we were born eight days apart, him on August 23, 1951 and me on August 31, 1951 which placed us on the same historical time line so that many of our memories were paralleled but mine from Long Beach, NY and his from Portland, Oregon.

But it was Mark’s early years as a member of The Hudson Brothers that clicked, because like me, he had gained success while fairly young. We also shared that weird experience wherein we got busier as we became more well known, so much so that we didn’t have a clue as to what we were becoming, what we meant to others who were not part of that tempestuous entertainment world, and that we’d done anything except work, and work harder. Many years later we looked at each other and understood. Everybody else expected us to have been aware and excited by the concerts we did, the TV shows we appeared in, the stars we worked with, and all that they considered exciting and strange but we went through it as just work. We discussed all of our co-workers who had lived through the same strange growth into adulthood. We were all just people who worked hard. When it was happening, it was work. "They" were the people with whom we worked. I was never too excited or impressed by those people, other than maybe meeting Paul and John and George ... but, come on, they were Beatles!

The night Mark and I first discussed these things was within a few days of when we met. We were walking back through an underground maze of stores and restaurants to our hotel after a late dinner and a drive around Las Vegas sightseeing with one of the architects who had designed most of the biggest of the big there, David Mexico. As I was describing being at Woodstock, Mark turned to me and said for the first time, You should write a [expletive deleted] book! It took till September 2013 before I listened to him. And by then he had said it many, many more times over the years, but this time there was an unusual seriousness to his suggestion.

Piggy, listen to me! Write the fucking book!

––––––––

It had been a tough year. The previous year...and the one before that had been increasingly hard and bad years. Since the Mortgage Market crash and our suddenly finding that those weirdly named bonds our financial guy had been investing all our money in, and had been very good for my parents before they passed, were all mortgage related and all becoming worthless. At my parents’ urging before they passed I was encouraged to add my savings to the inheritance they would leave my brother and I, which I did, and which was gone now as well.

On this day, about September 3rd in 2013, it was a few days after my birthday and we were on the phone bemoaning what kind of legacy we were leaving, if any. We both had kids, so there was that, but we had also been active in the music industry, he a musician, producer and celebrity, me a sometime musician (as with our recent CD Running Wild by my then band The Gray Lions which Mark produced) but mostly as a light show artist having at one time been the house light show at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East and after at John Scher’s (and Al Hayward’s) Capitol Theatre.

The last few times he had encouraged me to write a book my reply was that he was the Rock and Roll Star with all the preferred stories of sex, drugs, and celebrity. Who would read a book by me?

I would, he said each time. And each time he convinced me, or tried to, that I was at least as much a legend, more of a pioneer, and it was just that my Wizard of Oz appeared on those Rock Palace screens and no one really knew much about that man behind the curtain Oz tells people to ignore.

We were talking about getting older (our birthdays, as I said, are eight days apart), and what kind of, if any, legacy we each were going to leave. That’s when Mark said, Piggy, write it. Write it now. Write it for those who love you. Write it for those who don’t know they love you yet. Piggy, listen to me – write it! I think you need to write it right now.

There are no lurid tales of Rock icons running around naked with plaster dripping from their privates or hardening on their pubic hairs while a bevy of pulchritudinous groupies dance bare-assed, fighting over who gets to do who first, and wondering what that guy over there is going to want that red-haired dancer to do with that mud-shark like some manic, raving ones, followers of the god Dionysus, the Maenad. This ain’t that book.

Howard Kaylan of The Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Mothers of Invention fame had just put out his book, Shell Shocked, (which had exactly those kind of stories) when we chatted online around that time. Howie’s reaction was, You weren’t into all the ‘sex, drugs and Rock and Roll’ stuff people want, what’re you going offer? I answered simply, Stories. He laughed and asked, not in challenge but seriously wondering, What stories do you have beyond backstage memories and such?

So I told him one. It involved him and Mark Volman when they were first making a dent as The Turtles and my slight resemblance at the time to Mark Volman (a little overweight, glasses, long curly dark hair) involving a class trip to the Bronx Zoo, and a radio station sponsored meet and greet there that day. There had been an announcement on the zoo’s public address system about The Turtles meet and greet sponsored by Who-Remembers-Now Radio and groups of young girl fans wandering around in search of their idols and seeing me with my friend after he had called out my name (which though his ends in K and mine in C both sound the same). Screams of adoring crazed fans rang out and suddenly these two virgin young men were being chased by random bevies of similarly aged females on the prowl! I thought of my deepest horny-male-teen fantasies being fulfilled in the middle of a nightmare of being chased through a zoo full of animals by some of the most dangerous predators in the Rock and Roll world!

Howie laughed and said, Okay, you got me.

If you are hoping for tales of piles of drugs and police and people hanging from the rafters snorting coke and all that, you’ll also be disappointed. I realized I was in the position where I had, under my control at every show, hundreds to thousands of people’s minds to do with as I would. They trusted me. I felt I needed to earn that trust...to deserve that trust. I hope I have never let any one of them down. Although there was one exceptional night with The Grateful Dead where the entire light show was dosed, drug use while at work on a concert was seriously frowned upon...by me.

What follows is not quite autobiography, in that I am not a very well known (outside of certain groups) individual and, although in my own words, it isn’t meant to be a retelling of my entire life, though it may cover a great deal.

It is also not quite meant to be a memoir, though these are personal retellings of moments, vignettes of my life, I plan no great service through this effort save maybe entertainment, reliving various times even if through a biased guide, showing people I’ve known through my life, those who have only known me virtually, as well as those who may never have heard of me how it looked from my side, and perhaps alerting you to what certain people in your experience, who you think remind you of me, may be about.

––––––––

Whenever Joshua White would write to me (at least in those days we actually used stationary, ink, stamps...you know) he would add at the end, Fiat Lux! Latin for Let there be light. Now I say to you: Fiat Lux...Ostendo!

Let There Be Light...Show!

And, obviously in this case, Pig Light Show!

Chapter 2

First There Was A Boy

Toddler Marc.png

August 31, 1951, in Chicago a couple from New York first saw and adopted me. A very few days later, wrapped in the lady’s arms, I was hustled upon an Eastern Airlines plane and whisked off to Long Beach, New York.

I grew up in a typical 1950’s, very visibly normal-in-every-way middle-class environment.

Imagine fog, in the middle of which a clear spot starts to spread until you see:

On the garden wall at the back of a little yard between the house and garage, a very young boy (between 2 and 3) crouches watching a praying mantis by the hour, its slow and stately movements mesmerizing, enthralling the little mind.

Fog clears.

The ability to focus...to not give in to boredom and absorb what’s needed is something you are either born with or work hard to teach yourself. It was a part of me, that inquisitiveness of a kitten. We had a swing set in that yard that my brother Bobby and I would fly on wearing our Davy Crockett raccoon caps, tails trailing in the wind. I would soar as high as I could, always imagining taking off into the swirl of marshmallow clouds above.

Thinking deeply and being still in concentration is nothing new to me. Sitting stock-still by the wall in the back of my yard on East Chester Street in Long Beach, facing toward Park Avenue where Atlantic Avenue cuts in, and watching, on that wall, a Praying Mantis, also still as stone was not unusual to me. I sat and watched for how long I do not know. Every now and then there might be a majestic but so very slight movement that would rivet my attention even more. And still we both sat. I remember adults seeing me do that kind of thing and seeming to tell my mother they wondered if I was okay in the head. My mother, always being so dependent on what others thought might shoo me away to play or do something normal. She loved me, as my father loved me, but neither ever understood me. Never understood why I was different from my brother and other normal children they knew. Eventually another bird, butterfly, raccoon or whatever, even a neighbor’s cat, would have me committed again to my personal study.

However, watching like that allows one to see that moment of amazement when the regality is abandoned for the lightening strike that most will only ever read about. The patience taught my young self that you never knew when reward would come, but that it was there for those who waited...who could wait.

It was near this time I remember being at The Colony Beach Club and my parents lounging in the sun by the pool. There was a normal pool and right next to it a circular diving pool, much deeper and with two to three diving towers of varying heights.

I was always fascinated by water. At three or so I toddled ever closer to the pool. If my dad was up for it he’d jump in, grab me, and pulled me around the pool like I was swimming. I loved it. I also loved the sunlight reflecting off the water. If he was busy with friends or not ready to go back into the pool, he or my mom would walk me over to the kiddie pool area where a little one like me could splash in the water, walk around in a couple of inches or stand under or run through a few sprays from shower-head like faucets on the wall above. Often my mom would get a little bored or distracted by other moms and start chatting, so one or another kid might start wandering off, usually to be caught quite quickly.

But I was quiet, compared to the others. I would often wander off, usually to be soon spotted and returned. However one day I got away too easily. I wandered back to the prettily colored diving towers and all the laughter and noise. I got right to the edge of the pretty circular pool and watched the divers as and after they hit the water. I noted the trail of bubbles that would rise after they hit the water and went under. I was spellbound by the wildly moving water like waves in a stormy sea. And the pool itself was deeper, the deepness making the water seem bluer. There came a point I needed to see it from under and in I jumped.

––––––––

Someone must have seen me, some sort of commotion must have entailed, perhaps there was fear and excitement as adults realized and responded, and surely someone, or many, probably jumped in to rescue the drowning toddler.

But my memory is of what I saw and heard!

The beautiful azure water! The white bubbles almost everywhere! The splashing and sloshing sounds mixed with the divers and the bubble trails off them! The sounds of the water jets streaming in as the water in other places pulled out with the occasional gurgle when air snuck into the intakes! I was stunned, fascinated, totally immersed (no pun intended), aware and in the moment in ways I am not sure I have ever been again!

Problem was, to all the adults around, I was a tragedy unfolding. When someone finally grabbed me and swam me to the edge of the pool and my parents I was angry with him, but no where near as angry (under the wild worry they showed) as my parents were with me! I was not let more than a few inches from them the rest of the day.

Just a few months under three decades later the movie Splash would be released providing me a wonderful epiphany with those glorious memories flooding back.

In any case I think I was left with a sitter whenever we were at that or any beach club after that, or left with a sitter at home. Once my brother and my cousin Paul watched me but got so involved in playing basketball they didn’t notice me sneaking into the garage under where the hoop was mounted, and supposedly they saw me drinking turpentine. That part I don’t remember, but I do remember when my mom came home and made me drink ipecac and vomit.

In our family room (sort of an add-on, it seemed, next to the kitchen and small living room ... I guess if we had a basement it would have been down there and called a Rumpus Room in those days), my parents had a bar with some little glass giraffes whose necks were filled with colored water. I’d bring them to the window in the sunlight and watch in awe as the reflections and refractions threw color everywhere. I was fascinated with the color and light. And I enjoyed playing with it, making it do things. There was also a cabinet on either side of the front window where my parents stored folding chairs and card tables for guests. Those cabinets were huge to my little eyes and I used them as my forts, my caves, and my hiding places where I could be alone, isolated from the real world. Funny, I was always very content, even happy, to be alone, but hated those few occasions of feeling lonely. I could always keep myself entertained, self-contained, never drained. My mom just thought me a bit insane, but only in the way of not normal, whatever the Hell normal really means. No one has yet to explain that little conundrum correctly. There aren’t enough normal people anywhere on Earth to comprise a statistical norm for any diagnostic purpose...but I digress. One day, as I often had, I fell asleep playing in my fort; this time it was the cabinet on the right where the chairs were kept and could be pushed around to make more room for me. Problem was, my mom was frantically searching for me while I blissfully slept, and, in a panic, she finally called the police.

This was the omen, a sign of things to come – the first (well, I guess second if one includes the pool thing) in a long list of times that I got into real trouble. But this time, like many to come, I got into trouble not because of what I had meant to do or even did, but by what was perceived I had done. Vivus est enim mea culpa: it is my fault for living.

Understand, my mom had had four miscarriages before my brother Bobby was born, and he had been premature. In fact my dad once told me one of the hardest nights of his life was his long vigil in the waiting room while my mother was giving birth to my brother and being asked by the doctor, Which should I save, your wife or your son, because I don’t think I can save both? Thankfully, both survived, but Mom and dad were told never to try for children again. Hence my adoption. But that ordeal also caused my mother to have trouble being physically affectionate with us...or at least with me. Most of the hugging, cuddling, kissing and all such I remember came from my father. I have long imagined that this was the reason why, though I knew she loved me, there was always some emotional distance...a fear of loss.

––––––––

When I was five we moved from East Chester street to Eva Drive in Lido Beach, no more than a ten minute bicycle ride but seemingly far away nonetheless. A bunch of the kids I had met in Mrs. Bozilarri’s Nursery School lived somewhere around the loop created by Greenway Road, Eva Drive and Audrey Drive and so became my home group of friends. Barry Barth and I remained best friends till I got married on that Eva Drive lawn in September 1970.

Ignore the Nike Missiles rising out of the ground in Lido Beach (where we moved when in that spring before my sixth birthday), ignore the Air Raid sirens screaming, ignore the drills where we marched from our desks out into the hallway to sit against the cinder block walls with our heads between our knees (which, when older, we’d joked was so we could kiss our asses goodbye), ignore the McCarthyism and Black Lists and all the Cold War fear and hatred: World War II was now in the past and we had won, and if worrying about missiles coming to Cuba was the price of that, so be it. It was mostly a calm world. And we were all expected to do our parts and fit in. And I did, or so I thought. I had no idea I was any different from any other kid, but my personal perception was that I, indeed, was. I knew from about the age of four that I was adopted, and my uncle had previously told me there was no Santa and he didn’t come for Jewish kids anyway, but that adoption thing was always presented as very special – I was chosen. And, at least in my conscious mind, I never really thought about it, never worried about it, may have even felt proud of it at times.

My mother was the first one who made me wonder if and how I really was different (beyond my perspective). From an early age I seemed to hate school. At least, my mom thought so. In a way I think I did...being told what I should be doing and paying attention to, and how I should be fitting in. That was enough for her to start wondering. After all, my brother liked school well enough. He even did well. He was Wally...I was definitely The Beaver or worse.

My mom was wont to remember and often repeat stories of how I had to be dragged into kindergarten and first grade to the point that our elementary school principal, a very sweet and wonderful woman named Anne Quinn, would meet us out front after all the busses arrived to help my mother get me out of the car and into school. It happened a few times. I even remember walking with Mrs. Quinn to the kindergarten classroom. But I also remember being on the bus with my friends most of the time. And if I was such a pain about getting to school, my friends would have noticed and commented, at least to each other, how weird I was. Kids are like that. They find ways to categorize each other and divide into groups. Didn’t happen – at least not then, or at least not that I knew of. In my sixties various social media platforms have put me back in touch with friends from my youth and it has been made clear to me that more than a few saw me back then as a bit weird.

I have always avoided situations where I was forced to try and be like everyone else, and resented it. I somehow understood from an early age that I wasn't.

I was never too worried about how others thought of me, to be perfectly honest. As I said, time left alone was not unusual and I liked it more often than not. I can be quite gregarious, but also as self-contained as I need to be. Is that why many seeming friends sometimes found me aloof?

Perhaps being the third bull in Ferdinand the Bull just didn't mean as much to me as to the other kindergartners. No challenge. However I very much do remember the play and our rehearsals and thinking as I looked around at everyone on stage with me that I WAS Ferdinand! I was the loner who didn’t play with the others, bucking and kicking out my hooves while bellowing and butting. I was that lonely little bull who happily sat at the edge of the woods or under that tree and sniffed the flower that all the rest made fun of and never really seemed interested in including him in anything.

I was that kid, from Kindergarten through graduation who on Valentine’s day dutifully gave out preprinted cards to pretty much everyone while getting one to four, if any, from the rest of the class. I was the one who walked around trying to get people to sign my little graduation autograph book with so few pages signed by anyone other than teachers. I still have that little pale blue book my mother had saved all those years and left for me when she died and am totally underwhelmed when I look at it.

I also remember borrowing my brothers glasses and bringing them into kindergarten to do Sergeant Bilko imitations...Phil Silvers was a riot. By second grade I actually needed glasses, and I often wondered if I did that to my eyes. My mother said so. But doctors have said I couldn't have. Then again, moms say things like, Don’t make that face ... it will freeze like that! Or, don’t do you-know-what or you’ll go blind! Moms were famous for that one back then.

So, on the one hand, I never imagined my friends considered me any different from themselves, but I felt it – at least in what we considered important. I could tell you details about some legend we were playing, they could tell you stats from baseball cards. We each had our things. They could sing The Mickey Mouse Club Theme song, as could I, but I could also sing Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets from the show Damn Yankees (and, no, I never had an instant of gender confusion...I remember Gwen Verdon standing spread-legged, in black hose, hands on hips, singing defiantly on the album cover to the Broadway show – there were always lots of records in our house – and even back then, she did something to, um, my little ... mind ... and don’t even ask what those Lili St. Cyr ads in the backs of comics and magazines did to me ... I never wanted to be either, but I did want to do both, before my mind even knew what that doing entailed, but I did know I wanted to look...and touch). I could always find time to sit in the den alone playing my parents’ albums, and singing along with Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra (my dad’s favorite, but never mine), Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr.; a great way to learn to sing. And people like Gwen Verdon or Ethel Merman, Billie Holiday and Eartha Kitt sure had a lot to teach as well, if a person (even a little boy) were willing to listen.

And I enjoyed singing, felt, in comparison to the voices I heard around me, that I did it well. I wanted to be that lead voice that the others backed up. They may have had to ask me to speak up in class, but in music class no one ever had to ask me to sing louder. I remember in summer camp one year there was a kid with a very nice voice, and when the camp’s talent show was coming up, I wished so hard he’d catch a cold or something. I should have felt guilty, but...

Nah!

But, here’s the kicker, as I said, my own mom was the one who made me first feel different.

Starting around kindergarten, and then many times after till I was about thirteen or so, my mom would bring me to a rainbow, nay a kaleidoscope of child psychologists where I would play with blocks and puppets and tell stories and listen to whatever, and play with dolls and marionettes and take test after test, with the doctor watching carefully and taking notes. But then there would always be a last day that I saw that particular doctor, after a few weeks, or a few months, when on the way home my mother would be less than happy and I would hear her say under her breath something about, That quack doesn't know what he's/she's talking about!

Then a few months to a year would go by till I was brought to the next quack in the series.

I had what I now like to call informed imagination; sometimes, a bit out of control imagination, but imagination, nonetheless. I read. I absorbed what I saw and heard and read. I always have.

I was told many years later, by my dad or brother (or maybe a therapist after one of my divorces) that my mom was always looking for an excuse more than an explanation as to why I was not like her friends' kids – normal kids – and the explanation that perhaps I was more creative, or maybe just more intelligent or whatever was never enough. She wanted me to be like my brother, Bobby: obedient, sports minded, good in school ... all that stuff.

Apparently I was smart and had a strong sense of imagination, but other than that I thought I was pretty normal (whatever that was), and that was NOT what my mother wanted to hear. She wanted a reason I was so stubborn and different than your brother. The concept that I had come from an unknown, genetically different gene pool from over a thousand miles away never entered into her equations. Such was never a consideration.

Unlike my father and brother, and everybody else it seemed we knew, I didn’t like sports. I liked games of make believe where I could be a knight, a cowboy, an Indian, a gangster, or a cop. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to be active, just not regimented. I would have been a terrible soldier, but possibly a good warrior. I might have done wildly heroic things, but I would have been in deep shit the whole time, probably the one who fragged the lieutenant. I was never good with authority, and religion that was too regimented was just as bad, although I watched every religious epic many times, read voraciously about religion and their histories. I watched every movie I could and was able to recite many a scene, as I saw each a million times. Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Made it, Ma! Top of the world! Casablanca, White Heat, they were all fodder for the howitzer of my imagination. The first album I ever asked for was a Best of Al Jolson because of The Jolson Story, which I’d memorized, as I had Yankee Doodle Dandy before it.

I wasn’t the perfect child...my brother was. But if my teachers couldn’t interest me in school, why should I pay attention? And the first instrument my parents got for me, other than the French Horn or Trumpet I was given in school to try, was a steel-stringed guitar, a Stella, that hung on the wall of my aunt’s house for years and had a bowed neck. The teacher my parents got for me at the time, tried to teach me serious classical guitar, which should have been done on a different style guitar with Nylon or gut strings (much easier on the fingers, especially for a kid). To that teacher, how to read music was much more important than playing or making music. He was one of those who if you didn’t do it the normal way, you weren’t going to do it at all. I credit that guy with my inability (refusal?) to EVER learn to read music.

If my brother wanted to learn piano, they got a piano. If Bobby wanted to play drums they got a drum set. By the time he tired of whatever was the interest at that moment, when I would start playing the instrument when no one was watching, it would disappear.

As far as I was concerned, I was the same as my brother and the other kids, I just had different interests and priorities. But in that family, at that time, a kid not into sports and all the normal things was bad. The neighbors might talk! Worse, the people at the club might wonder. And there was this mindset that not normal was bad.

My mother's attitude seemed to be say Einstein was not normal, but that was different. He was okay. I, however, was weird. And you know what? I was totally untroubled by it. I have always been pretty proud of being different...and to be compared with Albert Einstein in any way pleased me. I was a great fan even as a kid. I had no yearning to be part of the crowd. Ever.

But Einstein was into music. He was creative. Math and science, and of course physics, to him was like art. He had long hair. He naturally became an idol of mine, and has been for a LONG time.

Maybe one day I would be okay like Einstein. Something different...something apart from the norm. Something acceptable.

While so young, and with the help of Miss Gwen Verdon, Lili St. Cyr and others, I knew there was something special about little girls. I didn’t fully understand what that was, even though my favorite in the whole world at the time, who had been my I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours partner, had shown how we were different, at least down there.

A few years after that time, at about seven or eight years old, I was playing outside of my house and there was a little girl sitting on the lawn of the house across the street where my friend Nancy Custen lived. Nancy saw me and waved, so I walked over. There was something special about Nancy’s friend who was about a year younger than me as Nancy was. She was a cute little thing with straight red hair, a cute little smile, maybe a slight overbite and she was just sitting there, casually every once in a while eating grass. I think she did it just to be different, just as she was wearing jeans in a time when Nancy and most young girls were always in skirts or dresses, but I never forgot that because the first moment I saw her a bolt of lighting reached down and smacked the crap out of me! I was rooted to the spot staring at this girl and don’t remember anything Nancy said as introduction or anything else till I slowly backed away and hid in my house.

Once in a while I’d see her there visiting, but then for many years I never saw her again. However, as I grew up I found I had a distinct preference for red haired women: one of the models at my father’s women’s coat company, my French teacher at Woodmere Academy, this hairdresser from next chapter, Shirley MacLaine, Ann Margaret ... and the list goes on; all of whom, though, I never noticed before because of their hair color till that little girl (other than my Tanta Becky, whose red hair I could tell, even while very young, had nothing natural about it). That little girl remained in my mind for many years. I remember Charlie Brown falling hopelessly in love with a little red-haired girl as well. Maybe that was one of the reasons I always felt a kinship with Charlie.

In summer camp, as in much of school, I was the weird one out. When playing baseball I was always sent to the outfield, and when you’re real young nobody could hit that far. So not liking baseball and being bored, I would spend more time watching the butterflies than the batters (at one camp I’d hide my butterfly net in the woods near where I knew I’d be in left field). I swam like a fish and won many of the races I was put in, but was more interested in watching whatever sometimes floated by from the camp’s rowboats and canoes that I adored going out in alone. We had these Sunfish sailboats (sailboards?) that I learned to sail so I could go out on the lake and be alone with the wind and the water. Nature held so many patterns and colors and movement and textures, and I was enthralled by it all. Art, nature, music and horseback riding were my favorite things, so much so that I would sneak away from the sports and muck out stables and groom the horses to get extra chances at riding and stay away from the grids, diamonds and fields of the various games everybody else loved.

In one camp I went to, with my best friend Barry, I remember a day on the courtyard between the ring of cabins, standing with some kids who were just hassling me near the flagpole at the center. Out of nowhere I stood straight and tall, pointed in a circle from one to the other and under the bright sun of a summer’s afternoon I yelled, Odin, the All Father, send your son Thor to smite these vermin for attempting intimidation on your acolyte! Yes, I did talk like that sometimes. I read a lot, and I comprehended more than most my age, and I have always been blessed/cursed with a good memory to go with my imagination.

The kids started to laugh but quickly clouds took on a grayish hue, suddenly swirling angrily. The sky darkened very swiftly. The laughing stopped as I just stood there, arms crossed and a condescending smile across my face. Lightning split the darkness followed by a thunderclap that seemed to startle all but me. Then the rain came pouring down like some huge Norse God’s drinking horn tipped over. Everybody save myself, counselors included, ran like startled sheep toward the safety of their cabins as I stood in that rain laughing with arms spread wide.

No one laughed when I finally entered my cabin and went to my bunk. Barry was sitting on the next bunk smiling. Barry was never surprised by any of my flights of fantasy...that is what best friends are for.

No one bothered me again that day or for the rest of the summer.

I was always a showman in one way or another. Never too shy in that arena. Maybe control was part of that. Many people get nervous about performing, sometimes too nervous to go on. I always have had the proverbial butterflies but once on stage alone or in a band became energized by the audience.

Famous Monsters of Filmland was my bible for many years and every year, whether near Halloween or not, I would find masks and make-up, and build costume dummies and scary characters with friends who would sit still long enough, and turn my unfinished basement into a house of horrors like we went to in Coney Island’s or Rockaway Playland’s spook houses. Often, for whatever reason, I would find a shopping cart on our middle-class, suburban, 1950’s to early 60’s street and hide it till the next spook house. Then, on those lucky years I’d found one, neighborhood kids would get charged a quarter to be sped around the darkened basement, which even then I would find ways to light spookily long before I ever realized I was doing lighting per se. When nearing a made-up or masked monster-kid, they’d see that fearsome creature jump at them; when near a costumed dummy some light would flash. They must have loved it because fifty years later so many seem to remember and mention it when we talk.

In retrospect, I had brought my favorite ride from boardwalk amusements to my basement.

My friend, David Richman was more often than not the Igor to my Dr. Frankenstein. He and I would plan, prune, build and paint, and then entertain. The girl who lived across the street, the aforementioned Nancy Custen, would come over and usually be the first one through the pit of Hell. A couple years ago she said she was thrilled to be our test-subject. That basement and garage saw a huge amount of activity even before my various bands and light show.

I love history ... not dates. The lessons we learn from history catch and inspire me. As a child I was fascinated by everything I could find about the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Norse, the Saxons, and the Celts. I could tell you about their religions, their intrigues, their wars, their kings and queens. However when I hit school all the teachers seemed to care about were the dates. When friends were reading things like The Hardy Boys, I was rooting around and reading archeology books. History and archeology were the most common things to be found in my possession (funny that now I love mysteries: and period mysteries set in the cultures stated above are my favorites).

On the other hand, I remember one of my favorite archeology books, upon my returning from one camp or another one summer, being ripped in half and covered in some patterned contact paper so it would match the others in my mom’s living room bookcase. I obviously did not inherit my reverence for books and the printed word from her.

I was fascinated with World War II because it ended so soon before I was born and so many of the movies were about it: Dam Busters, Sink The Bismark, The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, all those kinds of things. There were a whole slew of Jane’s Military books about various planes and tanks and guns and such that I read because I had to know what all those references in the books and movies were about. And the invasion of Normandy and Norman Invasion were both BIG with me. June 1944 and October 1066 both resonated in my brain throughout my life, young and old and I read and re-read accounts of the various beachheads.

I loved The American Museum of Natural History and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Whenever I could I would wrangle a trip to one or another out of my mom, until I was old enough to sneak on the train and go by myself. Honestly, those were the times I enjoyed most with her. She seemed genuinely interested when we were at either and they remain some of the clearest memories of us together. Years later my dad said traveling through Europe with her was (for him) a boring trek from museum to cathedral to museum ad nauseam. I guess I know who I got that interest from.

Thanks mom!

There was also that time my dad tried to do something together that I liked instead of dragging me to a baseball or football game or to The Club to yet again try to interest me in golf. He tried...oh how he tried! But renting a little boat, rowing out the the middle of Reynold’s Channel, trying to fish and enjoy the solitude and sunshine were definitely not his cup of tea. But he tried. For me, he tried. I will always remember that with a certain pride in him for making the attempt. From then on when he wanted time together doing something we would go to the golf club and I would just enjoy being with him. On my own I might walk over to the bay and fish alone or go out to the nearby ocean and do some surf casting, sometimes just walking out and sitting toward the end of a jetty when I got tired, just staring out into the watery distance.

I needed to see things, catalog them in my mind, link items to the stories history taught me, and connect how artists of a time saw their era. I could be at AMNH on Central Park West going through the Egyptian mummies and looking up at the dinosaur bones or at the dioramas, or at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the edge of Central Park East and ogle the armor collection, or sit in the Greek and Roman hall communing with their sculptures, or going again and again through the Impressionist or Expressionist collections as well as The Masters. They each painted with light, but different light. The Dutch Masters staged their paintings, light coming from many angles to highlight what the artist wanted the eye drawn to, but appearing in the overall composition to be very natural as if only the sun or moon or candles or torches seen in the painting were the light sources. I tried to share this love of light and insights with my students later. A painting to me was a textbook...as well as an escape into an artist’s mind, or the minds of an era. Renoir alone could provide a master class in light: Degas a thesis: Rembrandt a dissertation.

Light, color, form, line, texture were my Yang. My other haven, music, was the Yin in my universe’s balance.

Anyway, me and school.

One time in fifth grade English class we were assigned a book report on a biography or autobiography of our choice from the school library. At some book fair I had gotten a history book Hannibal: One Man Against Rome by Harold Lamb and supposedly read it for my assignment.

I failed the book report.

I asked why? I was told I hadn’t read the book. I