rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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art from the fabric of my life

Portrait of an Artist Becoming a Modern Dancer

I’m working on a Memoir called “Discovering the Fountain of Youth, Becoming a First-Time Father at 70”. How do you like the title? ___________________ Here’s a small excerpt.  ___________________ It’s 1970. I’m  22 years old. I’ve just randomly arrived in the Windy City of Chicago, climbed an old wooden staircase up into a rehearsal room on Wells Street in Old Town. A month later, my life will change forever……. ___________________ “Somehow, miraculously, at least to me, I become a modern dancer. Soon a professional one. In the summer of 1970, I’m invited to take a hard-working, new piece-creating, summer workshop for six…

Alley Pond Park, the Cousins’ Club, and the Loony Bin

I remember two things about Alley Pond Park from my early childhood in the 1950s. Neither was that it was the second biggest park in Queens County, one of the five boroughs of New York City, nestled at the far east borderline of Douglaston, Queens, just a stone’s throw from suburban Nassau County, where I grew up…. long before they built the east-west, Long Island Expressway right through the middle of Queens and Nassau. No, what I do remember vividly, is that Alley Pond Park was the green-grassed, red picnic-tabled immigrant park of my forefathers, where my helter-skelter Russian Jewish…

Vaccine Tale with a Twist

Also posted on the ” Cultural Weekly“: https://www.culturalweekly.com/synchronous-vaccination-tale/ ———- So I’m driving home past Dodger Stadium, perhaps the biggest Covid vaccination site in our country. And living in Echo Park, as I do, actually in the hills called Elysian Heights, I live only 4 stops signs away from the World Series Champs of 2020. Seeing a very short line of cars on my way home from grocery shopping with the Fam about 4:30 on January 19, I slow down near the entrance gate at Stadium and Academy Ways, and using my gregarious New York cab driver persona, I shout out to…

Family & Christmas. Like Love & Marriage, rrrrright?

December 24, 2013 Family and Christmas go together, right? Like love and marriage. Like horse and carriage, right? Well, I won’t disagree. But growing up in a mostly non-practicing Jewish family, I didn’t know much about it. Sure, we had Christmas in Salisbury Elementary School and W. Tresper Clarke High School in the 1950s and 60s suburbs of Long Island, New York. Of course, the other-side-of-the tracks O’Farrells and the D’Agostinos let us upper middle class Jewish kids know all about their Irish and Italian blue collar ways, with their anti-Semitic middle school harassment and their Catholic jock-swearing braggadocio. “Fuck…

Turkey Day in the Time of Corona

        Frozen turkey’s in the oven since last night. Special Trules recipe. Last employed almost forty years ago, on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South in New York City, in my clown loft, when my parents were still alive, in the early 1980s. Slow roast. Get the bird to stew overnight in its own juices. Guarantees a moist, delicious feast. Or least it used to, as I said. Let’s see. Forty years is a lonnnnnng time. The times, they have-a changed. Indeed. Bob Dylan, the sage himself, is almost 80. I’m 73. I’ve lived in sunny California…

“Man Overboard” at Poetry in Motion

  Poetry in Motion is one of LA’s oldest and most esteemed spoken word series, and this year it is celebrating its 31st anniversary in Los Angeles. As one of its featured poets/spoken word artists/story tellers over the years, I’ve been privileged to see, experience, and enjoy its longstanding evolution over three decades. The series was created in 1988 by Eve Brandstein, Michael Lally, and Michael Des Barres as a “poetry salon” at Helena’s private supper club on Temple and Rampart in East Hollywood. The invited readers were first called the “Temple Street Poets,” that is until Helena’s closed its doors to the public for…

Karma, Coincidence, and Clowns, or… a Perfect Circle of People

Sometimes… on a certain night…. or on a certain day…. or in a certain moment, people come together in your life… in an inexplicable, maybe karmic, and if you believe in it, even in a magical way. There’s no logic for it. It’s just something like “life is stranger than fiction”.

Chicken Little

We all know the story of Chicken Little, right? “The sky is falling! The sky is falling?” Well, do you remember how that little folk tale and bedtime story ended? I didn’t. So I looked it up. Actually there are two different endings… one much more optimistic than the other. And this little blog entry is about optimism, or…. the lack thereof. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start: “Chicken Little likes to walk in the woods. She likes to look at the trees. She likes to smell the flowers. She likes to listen to…

Finding Myself… at “Mo Ming”. Or… What the Hell is “Mo Ming”?

I don’t know about you, but I was raised to be a good kid. As a child of the 50s and 60s, that meant: going to school, getting good grades, being honest with your parents, getting into the finest college, graduating Cum Laude, becoming a doctor, working hard, getting married, buying a house, having children, making lots of money, retiring and have grand children. No one mentioned the bumps in the road: puberty, adolescence, repaying student loans, dating, co-dependence, landing a job, changes of career, changes of cities, sickness, divorce, doing taxes, Medicare, 401(k)s, disappearing pensions, getting old, cancer, or……

Why the Hell Do I Do This?

Why the hell do I write this blog? Why have  written it since 2005? Why have I written my e-travels blog since 2002, with stories as ancient as 1970? What for? It’s not like I get a lot of feedback, positive or negative. Does anyone read it? Does anyone care? And if they do, or if they don’t, or if I don’t know they do, does a tree exist in a forest if no one can see it? Good questions, eh? Why? What for, Trules? Now a long time ago, in 1977, on East 15th Street in New Yawk City,…

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