Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:10:18 -0700 (PDT)
I am so glad to hear that the LFS and Five Clover Films are making the Planet Ant film festival their own by volunteering and creating an entourage for the weekend event. Last year, summer 2005, I was well nigh totally broke after taking a half-year of acting lessons in San Francisco (and taking too many drives up to Napa and Sonoma for free tastings), and I worked with a crew to clean up that backyard, erecting tents and stringing catina lights.
I remember working with the stage director of the Ant, a fellow by name of Rollo or Roland or -- some guys are soo cool even first names are unnecessary. If you know him, you know he's the guy who played trombone with one of the great East Lansing bands, the name of Duke Tomatoe comes to mind. We hauled all kinds of props, junk and dreck into his trusty but rusty pickup truck, and he whisked it off to storage at the Hastings Street Ballroom. We put all the 1950s era bowling balls back into place edging the garden beds. A crew of working actors put together a concession area out of boards and sawhorses, covered with white tableclothes. As twilight rose, Rollo-Roland insisted I drink from his case of beer. (Turns out, searching back into my archives, I have his email address from 2005 !)
Hal Soper, the guy who turned his three story tenement into Detroit's answer to Steppenwolf, came back from L.A. for the night, and held forth from a green, plastic deck chair. According to legend, Soper started the Ant as a coffeehouse, so Ascension UK, and began staging plays to pay of the expenses of filming Garage, the rock musical filmed in Hamtram. Hal's roots at the Ant go back at least ten years; it's going to take an culture critic a book to see how deep.
I washed every deck chair myself. Jeff Caruana still lived full time in Detroit, was planning his departure to work for a film distributor in Santa Monica, and he pitched in with ticket taking and spiffing up the Ant for guests. The long hand of Jeff C is still present at this year's festival. Jeff made rain last year and this year by selling ads for the festival, selflessly. Jeff has roots that cross the country. If you go, you are going for friends who are far away and you go in their stead.
Most of Detroit's last three generations of home-bred comics came for that opening night, drinking beer under the stars of Hamtramck. I think it was Nancy Hayden who declared it like, "A family wedding party," only better. She was encircled by a coterie of comediennes she had raised by hand, some of whom had married and mothered since startings classes at the Ant. Nothing better than rooting yourself in Detroit cultural by raising a crop of comics, writers and actors and keeping their talent alive until Hollywood spots their talent.
It's cool to imagine the LFS as an "arts gang" showing up in force tonight and throughout the weekend. We had "arts gangs" on the Cass Cooridor in the sixties and seventies, but the scene dwindled and was hard to find in the eighties. I'm in Dallas, Texas, and I wouldn't know where to begin looking for such an excellent evening with my engaged friends, in the French sense of engaged, going to see a film I saw in early editing, with actors I have befriended. That's the key to a very intimate weekend, when you are IN with your MATES. If you want to put down roots in Detroit's art and culture scene, it takes an urban beer garden.
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