Boys in the Band Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Sunday Stealing says, “C’mon, Get Happy!”

walls of books

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

We found this one at CreativeGene. It’s designed inspire “happy thoughts on a frigid January day.” Obviously, temperatures vary based on locale, but it’s a lovely sentiment, so let’s go.

Before answering this, I should note how much the title “C’mon, Get Happy!” resonates with me. I was in a production of Boys in the Band in 1975 in Binghamton, which I wrote about here. The only music cue I can recall was Judy Garland singing Get Happy, from the 1950 movie Summer Stock.

This should not be confused with the Elvis Costello album. Get Happy!

Here are 10 things that make me happy:

1. Having enough money to pay all of my bills. I’m not one of those people who balances his checkbook. (What’s a checkbook?) I just want the money in (Social Security plus some other sources) to be greater than the money going out. It got out of whack in 2025 because some medical reimbursements were less than what they should have been. (It’s too complicated to describe here.) But it has been resolved as of February 2026.

The usual

2. Listening to the music, which should be no surprise. It’s just TOO HARD to wash the dishes, clean the office, etc., without listening to music. (Currently playingMega Hits Dance Classics, including Let’s Get Serious by Jermaine Jackson, which features Stevie Wonder.)

3. Knowing stuff. I will freely admit that I fare less well watching JEOPARDY these days because I’m less up on current popular culture. (How can I keep track of all the shows on all of the streaming services and the big hits on Spotify?) But I know a lot of other things. I keep up with current events. My wife and I do the New York Times news quiz each week, and generally get 10 out of 11 right. The 11th question is usually in the “who cares” category.

4. My office, specifically the wall of books therein, built-in bookshelves in every direction. Many I’ve read, but more I have not. But there are a couple of rows I refer to often, books on music (of course), movies, and television.

5. Singing in the church choir. It’s an oddly collegial thing, especially after retirement.

6. Living in a place with accessible mass transit. The CDTA buses will get me downtown (to the library and church), to the nearest hospital, and to the Best Buy, which is the only store in Crossgates Mall I actually shop at.

7. Reading scripture in church. I’m told I do it well.

8. Reading the newspaper, the physical manifestation, not online.

9. Writing this blog. It’s my therapy and, increasingly, my memory aid.

10. There is a 10th.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

Spring 1975 redux

getting back at “the system”

Photo by Andre Carrotflower – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121389827

Here’s a Spring 1975 redux item. When I hit my 20th blogiversary in May 2025, I said I would occasionally repost some items I wrote two decades earlier. So far, I have done that once. I’m excluding my Emmett Till post since I added so much new data. If I add information, it will be [bracketed]. I substituted a later recollection link about Boys in the Band.

At the end of the fall 1974 semester at the State University College at New Paltz (NY), I broke up with the person who would soon be my ex-wife, the Okie. She moved to Philadelphia for reasons that were unclear to me then, and certainly no clearer 30 years later. [Or 50 years later; I suppose I could ask her. Or I could let it go.] The primary relationship issues were religion and money.

I drifted to Binghamton, my hometown. In January 1975, my sister Leslie and I kidnapped our 75-year-old grandmother and took her by train to Charlotte, NC, where her daughter (my mother) had moved the year before. Gram was getting lame. She had a coal stove, and it would have been dangerous to get up and down the stairs to get it. Nor could she walk up the steep street on which she lived.

13 Maple Street

When we came back a couple of weeks later, I didn’t have any idea what to do next, so I ended up living in my grandmother’s home. Funny thing, though: as often as I had seen her tend to the coal fire in my childhood, I could not keep it going at all. I suffocated it, essentially. I even got help from a friend, but no success.

Eventually, the pipes froze. It was an old wooden house with old wiring, so I could run the refrigerator or the space heater, but not both. Given the cold of the house, I opted for the latter.

In February 1975, I spent virtually the whole month in bed watching television. My grandmother’s TV only got one station, the VHF station Channel 12. So I watched the soaps, Hee Haw, and whatever was on CBS that month. It was undoubtedly the deepest state of melancholy I’d ever been in. [And that is still true.]

My mom rescued me

The space heater was on the ground and, of course, I had every cover I could find. One night, a blanket, handmade by the Okie, fell off the bed in front of the space heater. Fortunately, the acrid smell woke me up, and I was OK. My sister Leslie told me later that my mother (in NC) THAT NIGHT woke up from a dream in which I was surrounded by fire, and stayed awake for a time. Perhaps my mother woke me up, six states away. I don’t dismiss that out of hand.

Occasionally, I’d go to the library to listen to music on the record player and headphones. I remember once listening to the Beatles’ Abbey Road. The song that ended the first side was I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”. [I LOVE the Billy Preston organ!] During the dirgelike instrumental ending, I cranked it up louder and louder. So when the instruments suddenly stopped, I really thought for a half-second that I had died.

Now and then, I’d visit my friend Carol, where I got cleaned up.

The janitor gig

I didn’t have a phone, so I missed at least a few job opportunities. Eventually, though, I got a position as a janitor in the brutalist Binghamton City Hall. There were 4 or 5 of us covering the building. I used to empty the wastebaskets from the desks of the police officers, clean the holding cells, wash windows, buff the floors of the common areas, and perform other tasks. Two of the guys started calling me Flash because I would get my work done by the end of the sixth hour of my eight-hour day, at which point I’d hide in the bathroom or a storage room and read. It wasn’t that I was so fast; they were very slow.

I really liked the police captain, and we would occasionally have erudite conversations about issues of the day or my future (which seemed bleak to me, but I’m sure I didn’t say that.) The police officers, however, were a more hostile lot in general, and I often felt that they would intentionally make a mess so that I would have to pick it up.

Drudgery

Now, some folks ABSOLUTELY were making a mess I had to clean up; they were the prisoners. These were holding cells they were in, and the detainees were usually there only one night before being arraigned in the morning. So they thought nothing of taking a lighted match and melting the paint from the walls. More than once, they would take their own bodily wastes and smear them on the walls. Perhaps they thought they were getting back at “the system,” but all they did was make more work for a college dropout.

As the weather warmed, my spirits brightened somewhat. I started going out with this woman named Margaret, but it was a classic rebound situation that lasted about a month. At the same time, I ended up doing a play, Boys In The Band. In the fall, I successfully returned to school at New Paltz.

It was one of the more difficult periods of my life, and I figured that if I could survive that, I could survive just about anything.

Judy Garland would have been 100

“Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy”

Since Judy Garland was about to turn 100, I decided to see The Wizard Of Oz at Albany’s Spectrum Theatre in early April, and my wife accompanied me. We had never seen the film in a cinema before. There were only the two Tuesday showings, at 4 and 7 pm, so I figured it would be packed; there were less than ten of us there at the latter.

My wife said more than once afterward, “She could really act,” and I concurred. Her performance was vivid on the big screen. Of course, I had seen the movie on CBS-TV annually for several years in the 1960s, though only the last two times on a color TV. I had missed the “horse of a different color” joke.

My, those ruby slippers really sparkled when she ran. I did not know that one of the iconic dresses was missing until 2021. Nor was I aware that there was a black and white dress for the Kansas scenes and a blue and white dress for Oz. Movie magic.

It was strange, though. In the same timeframe that I’m watching the teenage Judy, I’d also see her on her eponymous show (1963-1964) or guesting on Ed Sullivan or another program. Also, I’m sure I watched the television special Judy and Liza at the Palladium (1964). Liza, of course, was her daughter Liza Minelli, about 18 at the time. (Liza’s 1972 movie Cabaret was shown at the Spectrum the week after The Wizard of Oz.)

Only two score and seven

I never paid much attention to the tabloids at the time, so I was very surprised when Judy Garland died in 1969 at the age of 47. I’ve viewed documentaries about her life since, though I never saw Judy, the 2019 biopic with Renée Zellweger.

One last thought. When I was in the play Boys In The Band in 1975, there was a specific cue for the lead character Michael to be playing the Judy Garland track Get Happy. So that song has had a soft spot in my heart ever since.

Here’s a clip of early films from when Frances Gumm was seven until Judy Garland turned 17.
Waltz With A Swing/ Americana -Every Sunday, 1936
Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart -Listen, Darling, 1938

Somewhere Over the Rainbow – The Wizard of Oz, 1939; plus a discussion of the isolated vocal
Our Love Affair, with Mickey Rooney
The Trolley Song – Meet Me In St. Louis, 1944
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas – Meet Me In St. Louis, 1944

Get Happy – Summer Stock, 1950
Happy Days Are Here Again/Get Happy , with Barbra Streisand, 1963?
The Judy Garland Show with Peggy Lee and Jack Carter (November 1963)
By Myself, 1964

She was accidentally slapped at the 1954 Oscars

Judy Garland would have been 100 today.

40 Years Ago: How “Boys in the Band” saved my life

I didn’t know there WAS a gay bar in Binghamton.

When I was a janitor in Binghamton City Hall, cleaning up after the cops, and living in my Grandma Williams’ shack of a house, there was very little to look forward to. I’d see my friend Carol a few times a week, and a good thing too, because I would have been totally crazy otherwise.

My sister Leslie was in town, but she was busy in college and spending time with her boyfriend Eric, whom she would marry on Halloween of that year, 1975.

She was also in a few productions, including “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum,” at the Civic Theater. The lead in this play was a guy named Charlie.

Charlie’s next theatrical gig would be directing a play called Boys in the Band. It was first performed in New York City in 1968, and made into a movie in 1970. The storyline was about a birthday party one gay man named “Michael,” was throwing for a friend of his, “Donald.” One of the characters, “Bernard,” was specifically black.

When I met Charlie after a performance of “Forum,” he wondered if I were a thespian, like my sister, and asked me to audition. I hadn’t acted since high school, five years earlier, but I got the part; I suspect there was little or no competition for the role.

The six weeks of rehearsal were great. I had time to memorize my lines; because I really had little else going on in my life, the play became the primary focus. The cast hung out a few times, once at someone’s house, where a debate of the strength of Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon album raged; I probably should have played side two first.

We went to a gay bar in Binghamton, only a couple blocks from where I went to high school. I didn’t know there WAS a gay bar in Binghamton; it might have been established while I was away in college. In any case, a few guys there seemed interested in me, and I was oddly pleased.

The lead character “Michael” was played by a guy named Bill, one of the straight men in the cast. He usually gave me a ride home after rehearsal, and we often talked about the nascent sociopolitical gay rights movement, which in its own small way, the play was part of; and stereotypes.

We probably discussed the fact that “Bernard” was supposed to greet “Emory” with a kiss. I acknowledge that I resisted this the first four weeks of rehearsal, but not the last two, or the two or three presentations, by which point it was no big deal. I’m sure it helped that I had gotten to know the other actor, a guy named Mickey.

There’s a lengthy scene between “Michael” and his old friend “Alan”, while “Bernard” was passed out, drunk. I would feed Bill lines during rehearsal from memory because I was just lying on the stage. At one point, director Charlie, perhaps flattering me, or annoyed with Bill, said he wished I could have played the lead but couldn’t because he needed that black supporting character. I was perfectly happy with my relatively small part.

As I recall, the review in the local paper was less about the play or the performance, and more about the “cultural phenomenon of gay life” writ large on stage. One of my high school friends told the aforementioned friend Carol that it was “too bad” I was gay; Carol retorted, “He’s not gay!” But this perception was pretty widespread, as there was a black minister I met subsequently who expressed an unrequited interest in me.

There were guys I knew in high school who were gay, but only one who I knew was out. Performing in “Boys in the Band” was not only a great way to spend a few weeks but was a tremendous learning experience for me.