You need a Christmas story? Don’t we all?
I started two of them a week ago, and only last week’s “Tinsel” survived. It’s Christmas all around us and I have to write one.
She, who catalogs all of my adventures somewhere in the back of her head, reminded me about one such Christmas.
“What about the one about the shoes, and what’s her name, Mary Jane Nottage?”
Oh my God, of course. Mary Jane Nottage, good old Mary Jane, my acting classmate from Cleveland, who got me the acting job in Cape May, New Jersey, that summer.
I had just come to New York that fall, ready to begin my life as a Broadway actor.
Then December happened. I was surviving in a fourth floor cold water flat on unfashionable West 64th over a laundry, with no gifts, no tree, and my rent was due.
Along came Sid Berns, or Bernstein, neither of which was his real name, Mary Jane’s ex boyfriend. Sid was working for his uncle in the garment district, and, on the side, was selling suits and shirts out of the trunk of his car. Don’t ask, it’s none of your business or mine.
Sid — feeling sorry for this sad gentile with one blue nylon summer suit, a pair of Converse sneakers, and Mary Jane’s deceased grandfather’s overcoat — opened his magic trunk, and gifted me a new suit, a sport coat and six pairs of argyle socks. True story. .
With Christmas weeks away, I got a job at Bloomingdale’s Department Store, working with my best friend, Dom DeLuise, eight years from becoming famous, playing Santa. True story.
Coming home from work one cold night, I found my apartment door broken open. Sid’s gift clothes had all been taken but for the nylon summer suit.
There I was with that suit, a blue nylon thing I had worn all that past summer, acting in theater in Cape May, where I had lived in various borrowed costumes for three months, a waiter, a killer, a lover.
So there I stood in my street clothes, a ratty winter sweater, one pair of corduroy slacks and Mary Jane Nottage’s overcoat.
I told my sad story to Santa Dom and his roommate, the dancer Jimmy Tucher, who took me in, fed me lots of Italian food and cheap wine, and let me sleep on their couch.
Jimmy had a solution for this poor fool.
“You gotta go down to the Actors’ Fund office, show ‘em your card, and they’ll give you money to get you through Christmas.”
Dom looked at my Converse sneakers and added, “And don’t forget the shoes.”
“Shoes?”
All these years later, after Dom and Jimmy have passed, I did learn about the Conrad Cantzen Shoe Fund that replaced my Converse sneakers.
Conrad Cantzen, a struggling, poor character actor, died at the age of 78, on June 28, 1945.
The Actors’ Fund buried him and paid his bills.
When his room was cleared out, they found a will that said Cantzen had left $226,608.34 to establish the Conrad Cantzen Shoe Fund for the actors who only have sneakers.
The shoe story. When you live long enough, your pockets are full of them. Merry Christmas.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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