Quick story –In 1991, I accepted the Golden Globe for Howard’s work on Beauty.  Walking to the after party, following Jeremy Irons and Robin Williams on the red carpet, I saw people who looked like me – they were audience people, the ones who watch, and they were on the other side of the rope separating celebs from regulars.  I’ll never forget the look on the faces of those people when they saw me come traipsing past.  I was carrying the award, so I had to be “someone” but I knew what they were thinking…“I waited all night for this?”

But I digress.

When the people at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) decided that they were going to produce an evening of songs written by Howard, in connection with the AIDS Walk fundraising season, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  But I couldn’t really stop them, and lord knows GMHC does good work, so, to paraphrase Audrey, “me, I said sure.”

Turns out it’s sometimes a good thing to go with the flow.

The event was simply wonderful.  The depth of ridiculously talented people bopping around NYC always stuns me.  And Monday night was no exception.

There were a whole lot of guys from Jersey Boys – which meant there were a whole lot of men who know their way around tight harmonies and aren’t afraid to show it.  Which is no slur on the non-Jersey Boys (and Girls) who performed.

I refuse to play favorites but let me just tell you that the Belles of the Ball Mashup was outstanding.  Audrey, Belle and Ariel singing their “I want” songs separately and together – if I were my Aunt Anne, I would have plotzed.

GMHC used the evening to announce the Howard Ashman Award, which will be “given annually by GMHC to honor musicians and songwriters who have made significant contributions to world culture and have utilized their success to make a difference in the fight to end the HIV epidemic.”

I don’t know if GMHC made much money from the event, but they should have.  It’s an important organization – still relevant in the age of “cocktails” and longer lives.  AIDS diagnoses are on the rise again in New York City.  There was a recent article in the New York Times about the difficulties of living with the disease.  It’s not easy, it’s not good and the people at GMHC are determined to help.  If you’d like more info about the group, here’s a link.

I kind of like this bully pulpit thing but I promise to climb down off of my soapbox for the next post.

For a long time Sarah has wanted me to contribute to her blog, but I’ve resisted.  It’s not that I’m uninterested in the website (I think it’s great), or that I have nothing to share.  It’s that writing isn’t easy for me, especially if I really care about the subject.  But after lots of encouragement and a little arm-twisting you may occasionally see something here from me.  So where to start?  As Glinda tells Dorothy, “It’s always best to start at the beginning.”

Howard and I met in 1984 on a February night close enough to Valentines Day to claim it as our anniversary.  We met, as many pre-internet single gay men did, at a bar.  Boy Bar to be precise.  Now long gone, it was in the East Village on St. Marks Place between Second and Third Avenue, close to where I lived at 14^th Street and Avenue A, and less than a block from the Orpheum Theatre where “Little Shop” was running.  Later I learned about Howard’s practice of popping into the theater and watching the show from the back to give notes and keep his “baby” in good shape.  I suspect that’s exactly what he had done earlier that night.

Boy Bar had two levels, a loud dance space on the first floor and a quieter lounge upstairs.  Our first words were exchanged downstairs but we quickly moved up out of the noisy crowd to chat.  He was immediately likable with handsome Germanic features and blondish hair that was short on the sides, loose and wavy on top.  His blue eyes were friendly and his smile revealed a cute little gap between his two front teeth.  He was out-going, confident and energetic.

Howard around 1984

Initial conversations at bars are frequently awkward, but I recall ours being relaxed.  We talked about our families and hometowns and work.  I was at an architectural firm in mid-town, the third I worked for since moving to NYC from Columbus OH four years earlier.  Howard said he wrote and directed theater.  I wondered if he’d done anything I might know, stunned when he said, “Little Shop of Horrors,”  with a question in his voice.  I wasn’t expecting something I’d actually seen.  It was great to be able to say I thought it was wonderful and really mean it.  He asked when I saw it to determine which cast I saw, and the late summer of ‘82 meant it was the original with Ellen and Lee.  That pleased him.  Nothing wrong with subsequent casts, he just liked that I saw the first.

Countless times in years to come I would watch Howard’s work on a stage or screen, often right by his side, eventually with only the memory of his essence.  But on St. Marks Place that night, getting to know this nice guy I just met, there was no clue how his life and mine would entwine from that moment on.

Howard and I were raised in a family that worried, with very good reason, about money. Debt was a given, not a theory, in our home. There are two ways to come out of that family dynamic – being a spendthrift and being a skinflint. Howard was a bit more of a spendthrift than me (actually, Ebenezer Scrooge is more of a spendthrift than me) but we both worried about money and going broke.

Which I guess is one reason why Howard might have wanted to keep on working even after he had been diagnosed with HIV in 1988.

But there were other reasons as well. Reasons that I think say much more about the man. An essay in the New York Times with the wonderful title, “Sprinting Towards the End” started me thinking about this. Dwight Garner, who wrote the piece, talks about Nora Ephron and Mike McGarry, two writers who worked until the very end.

As did Howard.

Although Howard’s work has become his legacy, I don’t think that’s what compelled him. I think that what compelled him was as simple as the need to create.

It’s something that all imaginative people feel – along with the need to run away from the compelling need to create and just sit on a beach and watch the world pass.

In Howard’s case, he needed projects. Without them he could get caught up in all sorts of minutiae, making stuff up for the pure pleasure of making stuff up. I remember a long summer where he worried – amusingly – about the state of Jane Pauley’s hair (her styles changed with the ratings). Another fallow period of writing was spent working on baking the perfect Sacher Torte, much to the pleasure of his foodie family and friends.

I have a “cast list” Howard created while working at Grosset and Dunlap Publishers where he re-imagined the people in his office as characters on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was pure silliness to keep the creative juices going until he got himself tied into a new project.

Re-founding the WPA (it had existed previously with different artistic directors and producers) was like an injection of wonderful for Howard. He had the reins of a theater and he took off. That’s where he created Rosewater and Little Shop, finding a composer in Alan Menken who worked to his sensibility so well.

Once he was at Disney, Howard had the confidence he needed – and all the toys a creative person could want to go full force. Animation unbound him from the real-world necessities of stage, his first love.

Then Howard got sick. And he thought it would all end – he thought that the creative options, the toys that Disney provided, the collaborations with animators and directors and his composer would disappear. Remember, at that time, many people still believed that they could catch HIV from casual contact, they were frightened and very little was being said by the government or anyone else, to dispel that fear.

Howard did not believe that he would be allowed to keep working.

That he was, that both before and after he finally announced his illness, his ideas…his creativity…were wanted and needed and welcomed, sustained him.

Which takes us back to the NYT article.

Howard complained mightily about the work he was doing, about the fuss, about the people who wouldn’t – or couldn’t – do what he wanted and the people who he perceived as getting in his way.

Howard was in a race all of his life and to the day he died – a race to create one more song, one more character, one more moment, one more piece of theater. I don’t know if Howard had a feeling he would die young – I didn’t. I thought he’d live forever until the die I found out he was dying, but I do know that well before the AIDS crisis, Howard was in a hurry to get to the next thing.

There are people who say that this sprint to the end is a form of denial and maybe that’s true for some. And, as I said in the start, they may feel a need to keep working that comes from fear of failure and poverty – for them, a fear that even outweighs the fear of death.

But I think it’s more than that. Like the people in the Times article, Howard had a visceral need to connect to others through the work he created. I think that meant not only the ultimate audience for his work but the collaborators with whom he worked.

Whether it’s painting a picture, writing a song or penning a poem no one will ever see but yourself, nothing takes a person out of himself more fully than the act of creating. So it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that when the world and your future seem dim and sometimes intolerable, going into that place of creativity is a salve and a saving grace.

It never occurred to me to suggest that Howard stop working when he got sick. I doubt it ever occurred to him either.

First head shot

Later head shot

Sadly, that’s not always the case. Recently, both Bill Lauch and I had occasion to regret giving interviews to a writer.

It’s not that the writer got everything wrong – but he got a lot wrong. And worse still, his tone was sensationalistic – something that I’m confident in saying, would have appalled Howard.

You can’t control everything, I know. But I’m my brother’s sister, and I’m a bit of a control freak myself. That’s why we started this site in the first place. Among other things, there was a Wikipedia entry that gave Howard a different surname at birth. I had to prove that I was right and that the unseen person who kept overriding my change was wrong.

The piece that upset me is not mean spirited. In fact, I think the writer meant it as a homage. He just got so much wrong, some small things and some larger. There are descriptions that make good copy but are just off. There are events that never happened.

I don’t want to stop giving interviews and neither does Bill. But I think we’ll have to learn to be more selective in who we talk to, and more circumspect in what we say. I believe that journalists should be free to write what they know to be true. But they can’t cut corners and they can’t massage events for dramatic tension.

The internet is a great place, no doubt about that. I have been thrilled with the reception this site has gotten and the people who have found us here. Howardashman.com has done exactly what I’d hoped, it has clarified and amplified Howard’s contributions to musical theater and to the renaissance of Disney’s animated musicals. And, it has introduced Howard, as a man, to many new fans and friends.

But please, be careful what you read and be careful what you write.

Ann was our grandfather’s sister and she was, like her brother, a force of nature.  Indeed, she was a force of nature not unlike a hurricane or tornado or, come to think of it, a tsunami.

Like our grandfather, Ann was born in a place called Grodno in Poland.  Ann moved to Baltimore first and our grandfather followed a few years later – both arriving in the first few years of the twentieth century.   They had no love and no sentiment for the old country and I never heard it discussed.

Neither Aunt Ann nor Pop pop ever completely lost their accents.  They substituted V’s for W’s with merry abandon, growling their guttural English to the end of their days.

Ann married a man who owned an automotive warehouse.  He was a lousy businessman but Ann had the brains and killer instinct to survive in the man’s world of trucks and transmissions and she was soon running the business.

After the second World War, Ann hired former enlisted men to buy Jeeps through the GI Bill and resell them to her.  It was illegal, but profitable.  The business grew, Ann’s husband died, and she took over the business completely.  Ann driving a truck all night to pick up auto parts from some shady dealer became the stuff of family legend.

Ann was the only person we knew who owned a color television and I longed for the occasional Sunday evenings at her home when we could watch, you guessed it, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in its full glory.

Recently, I found a picture of Ann with my grandparents and her second husband (her walker, he was a kind man of undetermined sexuality who looked good in a suit and danced with Ann all night, whenever and wherever she wanted).  Looking at the photo, I began hearing Ann’s voice in my head.  It was a low growl, female though not feminine, kind of a cross between Harvey Fierstein and Bea Arthur.

Ann is second from left

It was a voice, indeed, not unlike that of our favorite Octopus-esque Disney villainess.  Ann’s greeting to Howard and me was always the same:

“Come, darling.  Give your Auntie Ann a kiss,”

Then, grabbing our hands as we kissed her powdered cheek, Aunt Ann would push a crumpled dollar bill into our palms, bestowing a life lesson best not pondered.

Could have been worse, we had no fishtails to trade and she did not ask for our voices.

Howard taunted me in song,

“I won’t dance, please ask me.”

He angered me to incoherence.  Angered me and made me laugh at the same time.  Which only angered me more.

We still had our moments, whispering about Mom and Dad and our grandparents.  Analyzing them, we parsed the personalities of the adults in our family as if they were difficult sentences waiting for the logic of grammar to release their mysteries.    We made up stories about them, whispered secrets, looked for reasons and answers that were beyond our understanding.

And the stories we created were often funny.  Howard brought out my creativity – just trying to keep up with him and reach the golden grail of getting a laugh – was work.  His impressions of Nana and Aunt Ann and Pop Pop were cruel and funny and right on target.  We were both pretty good at imitating Mom singing Summertime.  Though, looking like her, I had a definite edge.

We didn’t imitate Dad.  He was too much of an idol and we were both too afraid of his death, for that.  Instead, we romanticized him – his hardscrabble youth and tough guy attitude.  His Walter Mattheau looks and Willy Loman sadness and his genius at getting a laugh.

When Howard was fifteen and I was twelve, our parents had bought a house with our grandparents.  It was a stunningly bad idea.   Our grandparents, Nana and Pop Pop, were overwhelming in their need for attention and, more importantly, proof of affection.   We all understood that without them we could never have afforded to live in the new house.  And the price we paid was their overwhelming presence.

We had moved up from a row house to a house that stood on its own.  But though we no longer lived in a house that shared walls with strangers, in this new house with family, we lost our privacy and maybe our center as well.

Nana and Pop Pop got the master bedroom, relegating Mom and Dad to something like childhood status again.  Howard’s room was next to the clubroom – his high windows, just above ground level, suitable for a quick climb out of the house and into the cars of his older friends.

When Howard was home, he’d disappear downstairs and I’d only occasionally get to see him.  Among so many other things I’d lost in those teen age years, I felt the loss of my brother most deeply.  One day, I remember sitting in his room, flipping through a paperback,

“Can I read this?”  I asked.

Howard looked at it…

“No,” he said.  “Not yet.  Try this instead.”  He handed me a copy of The Once and Future King.

Every now and then, the brother I remembered – the one who could make magic happen – would reemerge.   We were both great fans of Judy Collins.  Her album Wildflowers had just come out and she would be playing at a small club in DC. Howard and a crowd of his friends were going.  Unexpectedly, miraculously, Howard said I could come along.

It was a small club with round tables and candles melting in Chianti bottles.  It was smoky from cigarettes and loud with too many voices trying to be heard.

I drank soda and kept my mouth shut while Howard and his friends talked and were fabulous and amusing.  When Collins walked on stage, with her guitar and those blue eyes, the room quieted.  Our table was on the edge of the stage – how did Howard get those great seats?  I never asked.

But it hardly mattered, really, how he did it.  It was all part of the magic I believed in.  The magic only Howard could make.

Nana was easy to make fun of – she spent her life cooking, cleaning, shopping and gossiping.  To my knowledge, she never read a book, though she had a lifelong subscription to both Reader’s Digest and Cosmopolitan magazine.

She loved her family and her grandchildren as a matter of custom.  But she adored her only grandson as a matter of the heart.

Nana dragged Howard to her friends’ homes to perform.  One afternoon, he sang for a lady who was in bed with some middle-aged malady and Howard stood at the foot of the bed, singing while his audience of one clutched her tissues and cooed.

On the occasions of Howard’s command performances for Nana’s friends, I was invariably asked if I had some hidden talent as well.  Howard would make something up for me, “Sarah has a very pretty voice,” he’d announce.  But we all knew that Sarah’s very pretty voice would not be the equal of his and that everything about her made it absolutely clear she had no intention of letting her very pretty voice out in public.

Still, I did like going along.  And it was tough to get bitter when Howard spent so much time promoting me.  Whether he was acting out of love or out of guilt for his own shining status in the family, I never knew.

So I was thrilled when Nana announced that she was bringing Howard and me to a studio for a “real” photo.  A real photo was one that was posed in front of a paper backdrop and for which real money was paid to a real photographer.

The occasion was Howard’s Bar Mitzvah, which had occurred a month or two earlier. Howard’s Bar Mitzvah suit and my dress needed to be posed in before they were outgrown.  At ages 13 and 10, outgrowing ones clothes was a positive accomplishment.

The best part was that the excursion would include lunch at the Hutzlers Tea Room, a rare treat.  Hutzlers was one of Baltimore’s four department stores and a trip there meant a bus ride downtown with Nana, an exciting, though occasionally perilous, journey since Nana did not believe in looking both ways before crossing and her deafness made her oblivious to horns and cursing drivers – sounds Howard and I were all too aware of.

The tables in the Tea Room were draped in linen, the waitresses and the patrons were soft spoken and refined and the mood was that of a world that, even then, we knew was fast ending.   After lunch, the waitresses would wheel a dessert cart covered with sweets right up to the table, my choice of dessert was agonizing and always the same – a plate of three petit fours, covered in pastel icing and sugar flowers.

The professional photo studio was in the store and after lunch, we marched over for our appointment.  It was only then that we understood.  What Nana wanted was a photo of Howard – her Bar Mitzvah boy – alone.  “Not her,” she said, “Him.”

It sounds brutal and yes, it was.  But she didn’t win.  Because Howard wouldn’t let her have his picture taken unless I was in it.  There was an argument, I cried and Howard got stubborn.  Want my picture?  Take it with my sister.  Eventually, a compromise was found.  Nana got a picture of Howard and a picture with Howard and Sarah.

The point really is this – Howard was my childhood champion.  Not always.   We fought like brothers and sisters will, but when I needed him, he was my champion.

And that day, we both won.

Daddy got sick in a courtroom.  He was on trial for stealing goods from his employer to begin a business with his brother.  He didn’t do it.  This is what I was told, this is what I believe and, if you’d known my father, this is what you’d believe, too.

With Dad

Dad and his brother were installment men.  They worked for a company that sold crappy goods to poor people who could neither qualify for credit nor afford the things they bought on installment.  Everything was for sale on installment – kitchen bowls, summer dresses, furniture.  My dad and his brother went into business for themselves while still working for another company, which was a naïve and stupid thing to do.   Dad was accused of not only stealing customers but also stealing goods.  Though he was never actually convicted, Dad paid the price, collapsing in a courtroom with a heart attack that forever weakened him.

Howard and I didn’t know all this at the time, though Howard was at home alone when the police came to search the house.  I don’t know where Mom was nor why Howard would have been home alone at age 9 or 10, except that it was a safe neighborhood and we knew everybody and benign neglect was pretty much par for the course in our house at that time.  In retrospect, I realize that there must have been some pretty major stress going on that year, too.

Forever after, we counted Passovers — each one marking another year of Dad’s survival.  Dad’s first year after his heart attack was spent mostly at home – he couldn’t work, at least not at what he knew.  He couldn’t stand on his feet and sell things all day, he couldn’t drive a truck, he couldn’t load grocery shelves with canned goods.  Mom got a job at Social Security and relatives loaned money and we got by.  Gradually, Dad got his energy back and gradually he found work – finally landing with a man from Temple, a man who knew of Dad’s character and goodness and who hired him.  He had that job until he died, of another heart attack, thirteen years after the first.

I know this blog is about Howard but I think that in my attempts to be entertaining and light and focus on the good and the fun and the happy, I have sometimes neglected life’s other realities – those of struggle and fear and shame.  And you can’t have one without the other, life’s funny that way.

That first Passover, the night that Daddy got sick, Mom’s parents picked us up and took us to their home.  Howard and I didn’t know what had happened but we knew it was bad, we were both scared but if there was something I was better at than Howard, it was expressing fear.

Usually, when we slept over at our grandparent’s, I’d stay in Mom’s old room and Howard would stay in our uncle’s old room but this was not a usual night.  So Howard stayed with me in the room our mom had grown up in.  And that night, even though I was too old for it, he sang me a lullaby.  It was Brahm’s lullaby – the same one Mom liked to sing.

And when Mom finally left the hospital and returned to us at her parents’ house,  she climbed into her old bed with us.  She didn’t sing that night, but she held us and cried until morning.

Our Dad was a good and fair man but he was a man born in 1920.  I’m sure he would have been thrilled to toss a football around with his son, had his son shown the faintest bit of interest.  I’m also sure his son didn’t show any interest at all and that Dad pretty much rolled with it.

Our grandfather, Mom’s dad, wasn’t so easy going and I know at one point in Howard’s youth, Pop pop (yep, that’s what we called him) took Howard aside and told him to act more like a man – for his father’s sake.  I also was told that Dad took my grandfather aside soon after and told him to lay off his son.

Still, it was our grandparents who, maybe more than anyone, encouraged Howard’s love of theater and art.  This was not entirely because they wanted Howard to fulfill his dreams.  This was pride, pride in themselves for being this kid’s grandparents.  A pride, no doubt, that did no favors to the kid himself as they paraded him around to friends and relatives, saving every card, every program, every clipping.

The Only Grandson

There’s still a ringlet from Howard’s first haircut in one of the many photo albums our grandfather made.

Not all adults were so enamored.  One neighbor lady (we’ll call her Mrs. B) was especially furious when Howard took back from her daughter a role in one of our backyard theatricals (hey, if you’re not going to show up for rehearsal, you’re not in the show…even if the show is a nickel-a-head backyard extravaganza).

Mrs. B stormed into our living room while Mom and Dad were both at work and berated Howard in no uncertain terms.   She let him have it – that he was full of himself and selfish and should think more about other people.    Maybe one of the problems of being a kid who acts like a grown up is that grownups themselves sometimes forget that you’re just a kid.  And maybe one of the problems with being a kid with aspirations of greatness is that you have no patience for those who do not share your goals.  Mrs. B’s daughter just wanted to be in a show.  That wasn’t good enough for Howard.

I’m sure Howard got mixed signals pretty often.  The adults in our lives liked the reflected glory of this little kid who was running around impressing teachers and getting cast in local shows.   But when he was given an intelligence test and asked Mom how he’d done, she told him,

“Well, you’re no genius.

And he wasn’t.  But he was very special – which can be wonderful and can be a burden.  For sure, it can make you an outsider.  In 1960, a gay ten-year-old boy in a working class home definitely qualified as an outsider.  But in 1963, as a straight ten-year-old girl in the same home, I also felt like an outsider.

And I’m betting that since you’re reading this, regardless of whether you’re gay, straight, bi, trans or indifferent, you felt like an outsider when you were ten years old, too.

What Howard found, what many others have found, was theater — the ultimate insider club for outsiders.  It’s not a fix for everyone, it wasn’t for me, but when it works, it really works.

I think that sense of being an outsider informs much of Howard’s work.  Every character in Little Shop, even Orin, is an outsider.   Eliot Rosewater is one, too.  Ariel, Belle, the list goes on.  That’s what we all respond to.

I once told Howard that he was the only person I knew who got better with success.  He became a nicer person, quite frankly.  I don’t believe he ever got over being an outsider but like all of us who feel a little odd, a little off center, a little different – boy did he celebrate when the insiders finally invited him to the party.