I carry an indelible image of Griffin and eight or nine prisoners standing on the sidewalk, having just disembarked from the prison van, all staring at the front of the Changing Scene and the strip joint and bail bondsman's office on either side. Griffin's expression flickered between perplexity and rage; I was sure that at any moment, he would order the women into the van and haul them back to prison. But then Al was standing at the door, with that dignified, upright dancer's posture, smiling and ushering everyone toward the parking lot, the clown and the stairs. As the women took their places on the stage for a run-through, he vanished behind the scenes, emerging twenty minutes later with a sheaf of mimeographed programs listing the play's title and each actress's name.
The audience for that Sunday afternoon performance was unlike any that had gathered before at the Scene. Jovial, multi-racial, boisterous but attentive, friends and relatives urged the actors on with cheers and sympathetic murmurs. At intermission, Al handed out his china cups of espresso as if he were serving royalty.
Photo by Nick Del Calzo; inset courtesy Denver Pub
Al Brooks and Maxine Munt early in their career, and
at the end of the Changing Scene.
Details
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, February 7, Germinal
Stage Denver, 2450 West 44th Avenue,
303-455-7108
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Maxine and Al closed the Changing Scene in 1999 (the space is now occupied by Bovine Metropolis Theater); Maxine died a few months later, at the age of 87. Dancer Jan Locketz remembers that on her last visit to the Scene, "Maxine took my face in her hands and searched my soul with her clear blue eyes. She asked me if I was all right. It was such a caring gesture, intense and gentle all at once."
Al had a stroke about eight months after Maxine's death, and both his health and spirits declined last year. "He would say, ŒOh, I'm so old,'" Mangus says. "In a way, he lost the memory of his whole life and of Maxine. It was a real era that is just lost. I feel lucky to have had this passion, to have been a modern dancer, living on $2,000 a year, even though it didn't continue, because I wonder how many people have experienced a true passion in their lives, no matter what it is."
I think about Al's response to my comment about his presence in my novel -- "What am I doing?" -- spoken with such surprise and delight that he seemed to be envisioning himself in an alternate universe even as we stood together in the lobby. In an odd way, it made sense that a man who had spent his life in the service of art, and in examining the interstices between music and silence, would see fiction as something so concrete it could be inhabited. And if it is, every one of us who ever set foot in the Changing Scene knows exactly what he's doing.
