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Fellow colleague Deborah Klugman was in the room at the time and assured him that he was not crazy. He leaned forward in his hospital bed – not an easy task, when hooked up to oxygen – to remark in a now piping treble cleff, “They they must be crazy!”
Stoccardo is among an elite pantheon of Los Angeles actors, living and dead, whose every moment on the stage appears sculpted from some combination of craft and charisma. These would include the late Chris Pennock, a maven of The Actors’ Studio, and Pamela Gordon, who showed up on the Theatre of NOTE Stage, as well on stages such as the currently shuttered Evidence Room.
For starters, SB 805 would bring countless of impoverished theaters across California, out of the shadows of non-compliance with AB 5 – a risk with draconian financial penalties.
Chris was a very good actor, on Broadway in 1967 in The Rose Tattoo and A Patriot for Me, before being contracted to the soap opera, Dark Shadows. He also appeared on General Hospital, Baywatch and Melrose Place, and countless other television shows, and in the 1982 movie Frances, opposite Jessica Lange. He was a lifetime member of The Actors Studio.
You stop remembering the past. You stop imagining the future. You stop just to breathe. A pause. In that breath comes the perfume of the narcissus and hyacinths. Next week, it will be gone, that perfume, the season will pass, like a play.
I was hired in 2014 as Executive Director to bring some kind of meaningful change to what was, even then, a calcified operation. I resigned at the end of 2018 for all kinds of reasons, the primary one being that I was unable to affect even incremental change, let alone meaningful change.
Sometimes I hit a combination of notes in a prelude – a combination so enticing, I have to stop and say, oh, that’s really nice. It’s like walking in my local meadow when the sun is melting the snow through towering pines, and a coyote dashes off in one direction, and a family of deer in the opposite. That much rustling triggers a flock of quail to take flight. It’s just a moment when you say, oh, that’s really nice. Or, when walking the dogs, a neighbor shouts out your name cheerfully and waves, and you say, oh, that’s really nice. A collection of such moments is a kind of photograph album to be brought out when things get too arduous. And through the clamor of a pandemic, the cacophony of lies, the babel, the losses, the disappointment, the disgust with hypocrisy, you can still find some fleeting snapshot, some snippet of music, and say, oh, that’ really nice.
The question is, in some ways, a question of how to survive during cultural climate change: In the midst of a tempest, do you stake your survival on the smaller rafts that have demonstrated some capacity to ride out harsh waves but can easily topple, or on the massive ships adrift at sea, vessels that can be brought down by an unseen iceberg or pandemic.
The death tally from this virus now exceeds 210,000 Americans. That’s if we believe the official numbers. And, frankly, in October, 2020, why should we?
Zoom is responsible for “the death of the pause” says performer-playwright Morgan Smalley. “Whenever there’s a pause, everyone thinks their Internet has gone out.”
