rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

Subscribe

creativity

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…

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…

Psychedelic Home Schooling

Happy, 4/20/2020! What have you been doing with yourself during our now, more than month-long, prescribed shelter-at-home pandemic? There’s so much opportunity for those of us who aren’t wrestling with antagonists like sickness, joblessness, inability to pay rent or bills, buy food, take care of our family, friends, neighbors, or loved ones, become home schoolers, and/or not get on each others’ nerves. Of course, there’s universal fear, but fortunately, although my wife has been laid off from restaurant work, she is collecting unemployment insurance, and although my son has just sadly celebrated his 13th birthday alone with just his Mom…

“Be Here Now” – The Impermanence of Live Performance

I became an artist from a need deep inside—to find my voice, to express something I didn’t yet know, to explore, to explode, to rebel, to find my…self. I first became a modern dancer in the early 1970s, rejecting 15 years of schooling where all I was encouraged to develop was my…mind. In dance, I discovered my body, my instincts, improvisation, creativity, self expression, and what it meant to become an artist. My post-college, early adulthood was entirely filled with company dance classes, sweat, injury, healing, hard work, rehearsals, community, performing for the first time, and teaching dance to make…

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,…

July 4th, 2015: Cassius & the Kid Soften the Curmudgeon

Yeah, ok, so I’m a curmudgeon. A parsimonious tough guy. On first approach, I have a stern face and a menacing growl. I put people off. I’m not very open to meeting new folks and not very easy to get to know. Some take it for arrogance, but c’mon, you know that’s not the real me. I’m just a big, over-sensitive softie. Inside, where it counts. All that barking and menacing? It’s just a front… a defense… a performance persona… to keep the hostile world at bay. It’s been that way ever since… well, forever. Or at least ever since…

Losing My Old Voice to Find A New One

Just about everyone who knows me knows I have a big mouth. Not just the size of it (I once fit 12 eggs into it), but also my compulsion to say whatever I want.   Because of it, I have burned far too many bridges, hurt far too many feelings, and stepped on far too many toes. More than I would ever like to admit. But… I like to see how far I can go… to get away with something… to fight for “the right”… right up to the precipice… before I pull back… without injury or damage… to myself…

Site Developed and maintained by Webuilt Technologies