| It’s a shock for me to read this here. Billy and I hung out periodically a long, long time ago. In 1979 I was a young entertainment editor at a newspaper in Orange County, N.Y., and we did a profile of Billy. He and I discovered we shared a birthday, and we became friends. Moreover, his parents were living in retirement in my hometown in the Berkshires, so when I drove to my mom’s home, I would stop by Poughkeepsie and pick up Billy to take him home too. I even saw one of his plays in a grungy basement in Poughkeepsie, but I can’t remember the name of it. I do remember his energy and his long, curly brown hair. He was on the cusp of making it with Mass Appeal. On the 4th of July in 1979, he took me to Port Jervis, where Geraldine Fitzgerald was filming The Jilting of Granny Weatherall for PBS, and he introduced me to her as the director of the upcoming Mass Appeal, which I was lucky enough to see at MTC. I quit my job upstate early in 1981 and left for the West Coast before the Broadway production, and we lost touch. I don’t think I saw him again till a press preview of Avow. |
