STUDIO STORIES
I went straight from work on Tuesday night straight to the recording studio to lay down tracks for the first musical I was ever in, Peter Dizozza's Prepare To Meet Your Maker. We share an apartment now, but at the time I had been in New York all of six weeks, living in a huge expensive apartment in Brooklyn, I knew no one, and I was working a day job and a night job, shoehorning open mic appearances in between the odd couple-hours of sleep.

I had never acted before, but Peter asked me, and in my new-emigrant hubris I took the gig, before I realized it was the lead role and I had a nude scene. (I wore boxers, but the buggery part stayed in the script, about which I'm still a little traumatized).

The play ran one successful month at Baby Jupiter, and then the momentum of the project kind of fizzled out. But I made a lot of friends in the cast, and seeing them on Tuesday again after (in some cases) months of disappearance was really sweet.

It's basically a romantic comedy. I played Quasimodo, a hunchbacked necrophiliac gravedigger. Quasi digs up graves and makes a little whoopie with the corpses, but one night he picks a magical cadaver named Cementeria, who through coitus comes to life! And Quasimodo turns from this scummy necrophile into a quite distinguished man! Of course, the effect doesn't last long. We have to keep getting our proverbial freak on, or else Cemmy dies and Quasi gets all beastly again. So of course we get separated, and we chase each other across the world and through various mythological comic setups.

It's probably more complicated than that, (here's someone else's stab at the plot, with illustrations from before I joined the cast) but that's all my little brain can handle. I know my motivations, so really, what the hell else do I care? And the songs are lovely, even if I'm singing most of them.

The last time we ran the show was at the Sidewalk Cafe, which is a dreary and totally inappropriate place to stage a play. The stage was so small, we changed the thing into a reading. It really took the wind out of everyone's sails, and after that we all kind of went on our way. But I really missed the feeling of hanging out with that cast.

The other nice been-a-long-timey thing about Tuesday was that I was back in a professional-type recording studio. It was in (actually, it was) this fellow's sixth-floor one bedroom apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. The living room had become a control room, the vocal booth was formed by closing a closet door and the bathroom door, and the only soundproofing I could see was thick shag carpeting nailed to every surface.

I pity the guy's neighbors. The equipment was professional, and the end result sounded fine. But I couldn't help thinking, dude, you spent all this money and time on equipment, splurge and get yourself a real space.