Quite short by the clock, but very broad in effect was the beautiful paper, a prose poem actually, by young Mrs. Albert. In mounting cadences of being and becoming and flowing toward and into life she carried the whole meaning of who and what we are or want to be through musically subjective phrases which mounted almost beyond words.
When Chairman Greg tried to bring the afternoon to a close not a single person would leave. They wanted They wanted more, and more they had. For a full hour afterward men and women rose to tell of what these things meant to them, of how they were working out their own solutions of some of the big questions in life. While never solemn or stuffy and never without humor, still it was a day of coming together and of sharing, of exploring outwards. which some there spoke of as being almost religious, truly a deep experi-
ence.
As was said, it is one thing for homosexuals to sit in a hall and listen to a fine succession of talks by eminent "authorities;" it is quite another for them to experience many hours during three days together as a foretaste of "that mystic bond of brotherhood which makes all men one." For such is the spirit which underlies all that ONE does. Taking part in the 1966 Midwinter Sessions was the fine Negro intellectual, Guy Rousseah, who back in 1952 came up with the above quotation from Carlyle that so well expresses ONE's motivation.
When the Sunday afternoon finally did end small groups went off to private dinner parties, leaving themselves just time to get to the Sunday evening performance of INSTANT THEATER. ONE had taken the entire small theater for the performance by Rachel Rosenthal, King Moody and cast of their improvisations which have run for the past three years at the same theater with great success.
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Oddly enough, for the cast were not aware of the broad theme of the whole three days of Midwinter Sessions in which the Friends of ONE had been participating, the opening part of the performance was an abstractly danced and mimed telling of the story of the struggle of the Earth Mother, and Father God for Adam, with Eve and miscellaneous Furies and others wandering drolly about with blasphemous irreverance. As might have been expected nobody really won.
The cast then called upon the audience for themes, two of which-Dali and Gertrude Stein they then proceeded to develop most skillfully. Their Dali, entirely unrehearsed of course and thrown at them by a reckless Friend of ONE, was quite a tour de force. The Master himself might easily have composed several of the tableaux. Stein came out in rhythmic incantations of unrelated (but does that matter?) excerpts from her poems with dance steps polarized around a rose and an ice cream cone.
The "Zen Combo" was charmingly produced with occasional solemn burps, tweaks upon a taut string and an occasional rattle all to the absurdly frivolous tinklings of a little Swiss music box. The closing The closing "Scene de Ballet" might best be described as having been choreographed by Petipa and performed by the cast of "Waiting for Godot."
After-theater coffee was served by a Friend of ONE while the audience and cast chatted with each other. So closed the 1966 Midwinter Sessions. "I am glad I was there," quoted the Friend of ONE who had travelled farthest to attend, "for I really have the picture now." It was the mainstream which he saw, as it flowed broadly and serenely forward. No one there could have failed to feel himself "a part of something very big," in fact, of the Homophile Movement growing, creating.