Last night, I had two strange dreams, one I now vaguely remember, with two elderly British actresses like Margaret Rutherford and Edith Evans, the other was a Manhattan cabaret around 1982. My composer friend and Drama Book Shop cohort Thom Heinrichs, who died from AIDS, was in the dream, along with someone like Rachel Ray, who was interviewing performers there. Some young man kept urging me to do a show and he would play piano for me.
I haven't thought about Thom in years. He was a former protégé of Mr Sondheim's who had moved to Manhattan from Oklahoma or Texas. He was the son of a wealthy physician who had disowned him for being gay after institutionalizing him and putting him through electroshock torture. He was a very good composer and an even better friend, and I find typing this tears out my heart. He wrote a couple of songs for our cabaret group "Just Good Friends," and I gave him the title for a show he was writing, "They Had Faces Then." He made the ordeal of crazy employers much easier at the book shop, and it was he who got me my first orchestration work in Manhattan.
Around 1983 or so, he met an actor in the revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat with Laurie Beechman and Bill Hutton. When Ken decided to leave acting for law school, they moved to L.A, Ken died around 1986, and Thom's letters ended around 1990.
I have no idea what made me dream about him last night; perhaps it's so we do not forget?
