By JERRY TALLMER
Photo by David Rodgers
In his memory piece, “It Goes Without Saying,” Bill Bowers traces a Montana boy’s coming out and coming of age.
Mr. Goodbody has been laughing himself to death for as long as he can remember.
Just imagine being a 5-year-old kid under the Big Sky of Montana who likes to play with Barbie dolls, landscaping the Barbie Parade routes with gladiolas. Does that with intensity until one day Mom, hanging out the laundry, sees what’s going on and switches him over to Tonka trucks. Some time later she enrolls him in Hunter’s Safety class. “This is Montana, everyone hunts, that’s what every boy should want to do,” says Bill Bowers, a/k/a Mr. Slim Goodbody. “I hated every minute of Hunter Safety except the prospect of wearing the bright orange vest.”
Second grade. Granddad drives him through snow to school, in silence. “He’s a big man of very few words and he scares me to death.” Reaches the school. Stops the car. “As I open the door to get out he hands me a silver dollar and says: ‘I don’t care how long your hair gets, just don’t ever squat when you pee.’ ”
Although Mr. Goodbody (who is no longer Mr. Goodbody, or The Seat Belt Man, or Captain Transit, or The Mechanical Man, or Bruce Spruce the Stand-Up Comic Christmas Tree, or, God willing, any of those things) — though he had to carve out a place for himself in show business as a mime, he actually is a man of a great many words. He’ll be saying many of them in “It Goes Without Saying,” the show that opens September 7 at the Rattlestick Playwrights’ Theater on Waverly Place.
He developed it — a memory piece — working with director Martha Banta. “Went to her,” he says, “because she doesn’t like mime.”
“Neither do I,” murmured an intrusive journalist.
“Neither do I,” said Bill Bowers with a burst of laughter.
Sixth grade. “Lots of things happened in our neighborhood that were never, ever, discussed … ”
One day “two airplanes filled with Smokejumpers crashed head-on over our house, and dead bodies rained down in parachutes. I remember I was washing dishes with my mom. It wasn’t hearing the crash so much as a feeling. We went out to the driveway. My hands were still wet.
“It was like 9/11, only smaller. Illogical. Things falling out of the sky. Very disturbing. I was 11 or 12. And for years I thought I’d maybe made that up. But then a few years ago my brother-in-law, a photographer, showed me some pictures he’d made that day.”
Bill Bowers was born April 19, 1959. Hometown: Missoula, Montana, pop. 60,000 to 70,000.
“It’s a big city — by Montana standards, a metropolis. My mom saw the show two years ago in its premiere at the Berkshire Theater Festival.” (Bill’s father, a 5-foot farmer who was called Shorty, is dead.) “She’s never said this was a strange career for me; her only concern is that I’m going to do it out there in Missoula, where the people — not theater folk, not city folk — will kill me.”
Growing up, one thing led to another. The kid wrote songs and sent them to Cass Elliot, designed cheerleader costumes, drew renderings of what a mall would look like if Missoula ever got one. “I was the arbiter of good taste at 11 years old.” And in junior-high freshman English class gets an A for a book report on Mime from the teacher he calls Mr. G.
“He encourages me to join the drama club — which I like to think of as Gay Head Start.” Time passes. Somebody makes passes. Somebody seduces somebody. “Mr. G. tells me that I am special. That what we have is special. It’s just between us. I learn to be quiet. I learn to lie. And even if I could tell anyone, who[m] would I tell? Oprah will not make it onto TV for another 12 years. There is no ‘Will and Grace.’ And I am 14. In 1972. In Butt Fuck, Montana.”
Quick cut to 2006.
“The import of all those things never came clear to me until I started working on this play. The importance of what is not spoken. Buried so deep that it’s taken the writing of this play to let it all surface.” And Mr. G. — “teacher, influence, the man who turned my life around” — is still a hero to Bill’s family, also to Bill Bowers himself.
Bowers was “Captain Kangaroo’s” flesh-and-blood spinoff Mr. Slim Goodbody for seven years, touring the schools, libraries, shopping malls, health fairs, cancer wards of 29 states in a Spandex suit with anatomically painted bones and muscles and tendons and organs. It paid the rent.
It was when he finally got to Broadway — first in “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” then in “The Lion King” — that Bill Bowers began to find himself sitting around in dressing rooms telling stories to one and all — these stories — between shows. Somebody said: “You ought to write this stuff down.” Somebody else steered him to Martha Banta. He and Ms. Banta went to work. “We actually left the writing-down to last.”
What does an actor do when not acting? He waits tables.
It was as a waiter at Greg Dawson’s Ballroom, just off Eighth Avenue at 28th Street, that Bill Bowers fell in love with the most beautiful man he’d ever seen in his life, the maitre d’, a young German with “these electric blue eyes.” His name was Michael Zibers.
On their second date “I had some confessions to make … Michael had some confessions too. He was HIV positive” and the caregiver “to his former partner, Joe, who had full-blown AIDS. This was 1987, and AIDS was running wild.”
Joe died within the year, “and no one in his family ever knew what he died of.” Bill and Michael moved together to Manhattan’s East Village — an apartment that had once been Ronnie Gilbert’s, she of The Weavers — where Bill has lived ever since “and which I will never leave.”
In June of 1992 Michael Zibers developed pneumonia. During his month-long hospital stay, Michael and Bill decided to visit Michael’s roots in the little town of Guben in — though the Wall was now down — what had been East Germany.
“When we change planes in London, Michael needs a wheelchair … ” At Check Point Charley, Michael wets his pants … “We clickety-clack across East Germany in an old wooden train. No one speaks any English and the countryside is frozen in time … I am thinking that when we get to Guben I have to find medical help … ”
They get to Guben, where things at Tanta Eva’s house, full of “an army of blonde-haired, blue-eyed relatives,” go from bad to worse. Guben is still in 1945. Michael is irritable, disoriented. “What none of us know is that Michael has a tumor on his brain, growing rapidly, and it will incapacitate him within days … With the help of an Etch-a-Sketch I borrow from one of the Nazi youth, I draw pictures of a hospital, a train station. I pantomime for the family that we must leave immediately and get Michael to Zurich …
“Michael is speaking exclusively German by now, and has taken to calling me Elvis … Tante Eva has prepared a farewell picnic. Kids are playing ball, everyone is drinking giant bottles of beer … toasting in German.”
Suddenly Bill hears Cousin Klaus say something to Michael about “zein beautiful Fraulein ein New York, ya Michael?” And all the men laugh. Then Klaus asks: “Haven ze Fraulein ein New York, Michael?”
And Michael Zibers, headed for death, replies, loud and clear, without missing a beat: “Nein, Billie ist mein Frau.”
Everyone freezes. “The ball stopped in midair.”
You can’t do that in mime. It goes without saying that you can’t.
IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING. By, and performed by Bill Bowers. Developed by him with Martha Banta, and directed by her. September 7 through October 8 at the Rattlestick Playwrights’ Theater, 224 Waverly Place, (212) 868-4444.
