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I’m not afraid you’ll tell the cops what I’m telling you. He recognized me and he knew he had two choices: take the pill and go quietly or let me tell my story. One thing about the old ham: he really liked putting on that ‘I was a victim of the blacklist’ crap, and he didn’t want anybody knowing him for the rat he was. I expected him to take the poison, the dirty coward. At least now I can go tell my Stella the bastard is dead.”
    â€œYour wife?”
    â€œYeah. She’s buried out in Woodlawn; I brought her home to be with her family. So I’ll take her a bouquet tomorrow and tell her that Mendy’s gone and she’ll maybe forgive me for going to those stupid meetings and screwing up my life.”
Scotty, present
    THE COPS HAD Mendy’s death down as a suicide, and now it looked as if it really might have been one. There was nothing for us to do but drift home and make a date to see another double feature next week.
    The newspapers reported the death of Paul Dixon, blacklisted “onetime movie hopeful,” about four months later. I figured he’d already been diagnosed with the emphysema that killed him; one more reason he wasn’t afraid of jail.
    There’s a strange undercurrent of sadness in movie musicals. Judy’s addictions, Mickey’s pathetic eagerness to please, the frenetic tone of thirties musicals, the ones that packed as many chorus girls onto the screen as possible, perhaps just to keep them eating during the Depression. And what the blacklist did to a couple of young hoofers.
    I once went to a church basement with an old friend and her deaf sister to see a silent movie. Before the film, a manmade a speech in sign language, which Beth kindly interpreted for me, saying that the great days of silent film were still alive in the church basements and libraries where, as he put it, “The lights are turned down, the projector is turned on, and the deaf watch.”
    It was a strangely moving experience, seeing Lillian Gish and John Gilbert with people who saw their movies as whole, not soundless. I think of that when I recall the days and nights we spent at Theatre 80. The movie musicals were made for Main Street, for families and “kids of all ages.” Old people and gay people bought the tickets at Theatre 80. We were an audience not planned for, but perhaps especially sweet because unexpected. We kept the musical alive in those lean years between Brigadoon and Saturday Night Fever —not that even Patrick, with his huge crush on Travolta, ever accepted Fever as a true musical.
    Patrick died a year ago today. He was our cruise director, our emcee, our encylopedia of all things Hollywood. Gay Hollywood was his specialty, and like so many of us, he took great pleasure in claiming the brightest, most incandescent stars for “our side.” As if straight America would come to tolerate us if they learned that some of their favorite stars were “that way.”
    Oh, Patrick, I do miss you!
    My life back then had more Patrick in it than I knew. I breathed him like air, and it never occurred to me that one day he would cease to exist, like the musical itself.
    No, not AIDS; he hated clichés, except when they were lines from old movies. Plain, ordinary, vanilla cancer, the kind straight people get, too. And, yes, I brought a VCR to the hospital so he could watch all the musicals his heart desired and I think, I hope, Footlight Parade was the last one he saw.
    So tonight Birch and I will gather together all the peoplewho loved him. We’ll make buttered popcorn, toast him with champagne, and celebrate the life of a man who was completely and totally big time in his heart.
    And perhaps we’ll raise one of those glasses to the late, never-great Paul Dixon.

Money on the Red
    EDWARD D. HOCH
    â€œ SO YOU’RE A performance artist?” the Las Vegas reporter asked. Wanda figured he was about twenty-one, probably on