I just got the new issue of my alumni magazine and I was saddened to learn that my friend Bill Aue died last August. He was a good friend in college, a very good actor who didn't pursue it after he moved here. In the past 29 years I've lived in Manhattan, I probably saw him maybe four or five times. He clearly did not want to maintain old friendships but every time I saw him it was a nice visit. I ran into him last year and he looked fragile, but he was always tall and thin so I just thought it was age.
He and Dan Dietrich, a grad student in the very sexually repressed atmosphere of Donald Rosenberg's tenure for far too long as director of Miami University Theatre, dared to become a "couple" in 1968 or 1969. Dr Rosenberg was as lousy a man as he was a stage director. He still reminds me of Joseph McCarthy. He had a lovely wife who drank too much and a predilection for casting cute blondes with huge bazooms in his leading lady roles; most couldn't act, move, or chew gum and walk at the same time. He was evil, narrow-minded, bigoted, and worst of all a boring teacher.
When I got to New York, Dan had given up acting - he has a brief scene in one of Romero's Dawn/Day of the Dead movies - and he was in the Men's Chorus. I remember visiting Dan in the 1970s on one of my visits to New York and he was working with the WPA and letting some porn maker - Jack Deveau maybe? - film in his apartment for extra cash. Miami alumni Steve and Rebecca Young, married puppeteers who worked with Wayland Flowers at the Village Gate in an erotic puppet show called "Kumquats,", and I went to see a crazy midnight show at the WPA with Dan. I remember we had to wait for him to lock up the theatre and I have this memory that we went to Phoebe's - another long-gone hangout - on the Bowery.
He and his companion moved to Los Angeles around 1983, and he died of AIDS around 1985 or so. Both Dan and Bill died too young and I hope they achieved as much as they could from their lives.
And we who survive must tell the tale. They're not for the memoirs.
