GLR November-December 2023

Correspondence

was good friends with the guy who ran the flower shop in the Park Plaza Hotel, who in turn was friends with the guys at the front desk. As luck would have it, Cardinal Medeiros had a group of people staying at the Plaza that same weekend, so our friends at the front desk just billed an extra suite to the Cardinal’s tab. It was admit tedly not a huge suite, but a nice large room on the second or third floor—large enough for a cast party, and it was free, courtesy of the Cardinal. The afternoon before the show, he came over to the theater to be interviewed by Michael Bronski for TheBoston Phoenix . After Michael left, Robert told me that he had a tradition (superstition?) of al ways masturbating on the stage before a show, to bless the theater, as it were, by spewing his offering across the stage. He asked if I wanted to join him. I politely de clined, but sent him upstairs to make his of fering. (After reading about his time at the Caffe Cino I can see how this “tradition” may have started.) We had a successful run that weekend, and Triangle went on producing gay the

ater for a total of eighteen seasons (al though on many different stages). So, who knows, maybe his offering to the theater that June afternoon worked. I would like to think it did. David Hough, Boston, MA To the Editor: The essay “Robert Patrick at the Caffe Cino” contains an error in the description of Patrick’s comic play about God raping the Virgin Mary. The author of the essay com ments that the bawdy dialogue is “in the service of undercutting pious belief in the Immaculate Conception.” The Immaculate Conception is a 19th — century Catholic doctrine that the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) was conceived by her mother, Anne, without Original Sin, so that she could give birth to Jesus. The BVM’s conception of Jesus is called the Virgin Birth. Protestants and other Chris tian denominations believe in the Virgin Birth, but not in the Immaculate Concep tion, which is accepted by Catholic de nominations. Downplaying the Catholic adoration of the BVM was an important

Ritual and Robert Patrick at Ca ff eCino To the Editor: I read with interest your recent article ti tled “Robert Patrick at the Caffe Cino” (Sept.-Oct. 2023). It brought back memories of the weekend in June of 1980 when I had the pleasure of meeting him. I was the founder and first artistic director of the Tri angle Theater Company, Boston’s first gay theater, and our first production was an evening of three one-act plays, one of which was Patrick’s TheFog . While I was negotiating the rights to the play, he offered to come up for the opening, as he was going to be out in the Midwest somewhere getting an award from the International Thespian Society (the honors organization for high school theater). Ap parently, he cranked out so many one-act plays that a lot of them were done at high school state theater contests. So, he negoti ated with them to fly him to the conference, and then afterwards to fly him to Boston. My job was to find him a hotel and get a train ticket back to New York. Fortunately, one of my board members

November–December 2023

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