RIPJFK

I don’t remember the Kennedy assassination well, I just remember that it affected my mother, as had Marilyn Monroe’s death the year before. Somehow it confirmed something in her that I, as a small child, felt rather than understood. The thing I remember about Kennedy’s death was Robert Patrick’s play, Kennedy’s Children, which played at Glasgow Citizens Theatre in its extraordinary heyday, when I was at school in the early 1970s, and which gave him an award for the play. A play like no other, radical in form: a series of monologues in a cafe when six or seven people tell how it was for them on the day Kennedy died, and since. Patrick didn’t do anything else quite as successful, nothing else that caught the rhythm and sensibility of an age, but that was enough. Kennedy’s Children taught me so much about what could happen on stage, how things could be remembered, the stage as a dream space, private and yet revealing. Today I realized that the wonderful Shirley Knight was in the film version, as she had been in the 1967 film of Dutchman, a bad version of which I saw this autumn in Performa at the Russian and Turkish baths on East 10 Street. Tonight these streets are teeming, bars and restaurants pouring onto the streets where homeless people now lie spread out next to one another, as if cosily relaxing in bed, and yet and yet. Lats night a long long line in the dark Tompkins Square Park, waiting for food.