All Ruinous Disorders
Matt Izzi
The summer I met Lucas, my last in Boston, I volunteered as prop runner for a new comedy at the Footlight Club. On trash days I combed the rolling sidewalks of Forest Hills, in the valley of the triple-deckers. Boston was a lovely town for garbage-picking. The century-old buildings had the façade of permanence, with all the accumulated multigenerational junk of families who had settled there before the Wars. But what did I know about permanence? I’d returned from London to an expiring lease and a summer full of funerals.
It was 1984, a year of death: three ancillary friends in March, a fellow actor in April, and later, in December, from unrelated causes, my mother. That May, I’d escaped my stateside sorrows by blending in with the rouge-cheeked New Romantics who used Piccadilly for a catwalk. My acting troupe had been invited to stage a joint production of King Lear—in drag, like the original. I played Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, one of the few who survive to the curtain. What that said about my resiliency I don’t know.
The Footlight comedy required an old-fashioned icebox that was, for some reason I now forget, crucial to the third… Read more »