Nearly 50 Years Of Wild Performance Nights with Nicky Paraiso
The beloved curator at iconic performance venue La Mama on growing up Filipino in 1950s Queens, love and power with white men, and how the late, great La Mama founder Ellen Stewart "saved my life."
When I heard that Nicky (full name: Nicasio) Paraiso had turned 70 recently, I thought, "I have to ask Nicky if I can interview him for this series." Let me tell you why. For one thing, I'm a huge lover of theater and performance, especially the history of downtown New York City theater and performance going back to about 1965 or 1970, when the scene really started getting weird and interesting, and Nicky has been part of the scene since about the mid-late seventies, fresh out of NYU's grad program in performance. Since then, he's become—as he says in his own words of how he's often described—a fixture and a stalwart of the scene. Through the seventies, eighties and nineties, he was in countless pieces by downtown auteur legends like Jeff Weiss and Meredith Monk, often bringing his extraordinary piano skills to his work. These shows were often at La Mama, the experimental East Village theater founded in the 1960s by downtown theater legend Ellen Stewart, who died in 2011 at 91 after decades of nurturing some of the most influential, internationally-sourced performance artists of all time.
Around the turn of the millennium, Stewart noticed that Nicky, one of her favorite "children" for so many years, seemed lost, drifting between theaters and restaurant jobs. Knowing that he saw performance nearly every night and knew all sorts of up-and-coming talent, she offered him a job as head programmer for her Cafe La Mama space. He's been there ever since, having given a (sometimes first-time) platform to some of the biggest new names in NYC performance of the past 20 years, including Heather Litteer, Joseph Keckler, Shane Shane and Dan Fishback. If you want a taste of the world Nicky curates, check the La Mama website for when they'll post ticket sales for "Christmas in Nickyland," his annual holiday showcase, now resuming live post-COVID on December 18-19.
Although I used to see Nicky out often back when I was writing about performance about a decade ago, I never knew much of his backstory. I knew he was Filipino because he was part of a group of Filipino theater people in NYC I knew. But I don't think I knew that he actually was born and raised in the city, or...well, it's all here in this interview. If not all, then a lot. It has a lot of detail about several of my favorite topics: what gay life and culture was like in NYC both shortly before and for many years after Stonewall; what racial power politics in the arts were like before the moment of explicit reckoning we've had in recent years; and, probably most of all, how gay men who came of age in the second half of the 20th century put together a life of work, love and friendship with no hetero, spouse-and-kids rulebook to follow.
Nicky was not the easiest interview. As I pointed out to him, perhaps because he's been a curator of other people's talents for so long, he has a habit, when asked about himself, to deflect and start talking at length about other artists, usually singing their praises and noting their contributions. I was constantly trying to gently (he might say not so gently!) lead him back to the topic of himself and how he felt about certain moments and aspects of his life. He was not the first person I've interviewed for this series that told me it felt like a marathon therapy session. Which I hope suggests that I got somewhere with him. At one point, we discuss how he feels about the fact that his close Filipina friend, the writer Jessica Hagedorn, once worried that he's been too often seen as a "pet" by his white colleagues. I didn't feel that way about him. But there is a vulnerability and a self-effacement to him that makes you want to bolster him in his ongoing efforts to put his own story and thoughts in the spotlight—that makes you want to say, "Feature yourself, Nicky!" And he has, in his beautiful autobiographical performance pieces "Now My Hand Is Ready For My Heart" (which helped me enormously in preparing for this chat) and "House/Boy"—no video of which, unfortunately, is currently available online.
Here is my chat with Nicky, which took place for three hours on November 11, then another hour on November 13. (I've resequenced the talks a bit to give them a sense of chronology.)
Tim: Hey Nicky! How are you?
Nicky: I'm a bit nervous, as I always am when I'm in performance mode, even though I know this isn't a performance. But I'm just trying to be as open as possible to anything we have to say this morning.
Tim: Well, I hope you'll be open, but you can always say "I don't want to talk about that." It's up to you. So I wanted to start by asking you what the COVID era has been like for you as someone who eats, sleeps and breathes live performance. You told me that COVID was the first hiatus from being in a performance space, either La Mama or elsewhere, almost every night of your life for the past 40 or so years. That's a pretty dramatic break.
Nicky: Well, I've lived in the same studio in the East Village since 1980. I don't cook for myself, so once COVID started, I did a lot of takeout from Veselka and this Japanese place, even though now I'm back at my restaurant hangouts. But during COVID I ate cereal and whatever takeout leftovers I had. I also watched a lot of TV shows and movies on Netflix and Amazon Prime. And then I started sneaking into the La Mama office, which was exactly as it was left on March 12, 2020. To my unabashed delight, I had it all to myself—and when people started coming in again, I resented the intrusion. (laughs)
During this time, I organized a few Cafe La Mama events remotely, online. It was very strange that I would be the only person present in the actual building, communing with La Mama's ghosts and spirits.
Tim: Ha, that's funny, I wanted to ask you if you ever feel Ellen Stewart's presence or even ghost in the building.
Nicky: I think her spirit is not so much here anymore as in the hills of Umbria, Italy, where she started a La Mama residency and theater center after she won the MacArthur Genius award in 1985, and where some of her ashes are in a chapel. As [Stewart's successor as La Mama artistic director] Mia Yoo has said to me, "Ellen has left East 4th St to us."
But we've had some live events in the space since spring of this year [post-vaccines]. They were a relief and a rejuvenation but I also felt, "I'm not ready for this yet! The pandemic isn't over—why are we doing this, even if we're taking all these precautions?" During COVID, I experienced the death of a few mentors and colleagues that brought me into a state of paralysis and depression. I'm still there but I have more perspective on what I'm going through, which is kind of amazing. I turned 70 on October 14.
Tim: Oh, wow, recently! Happy belated birthday. What did you do for it?
Nicky: I didn't know what to do, but my two dear friends, Mark Bennett and Christopher Murray, organized a birthday party for me at Pangea [beloved hangout for the downtown performance crowd]. About 30 to 40 people came—just the right amount. Mia and about three or four other people from La Mama came. Mia said she wanted to read something from my writing. and she chose something from "Now My Hand is Ready for My Heart" where I talk about Ellen Stewart. And she also read an ending for the show that I cut out that goes, "Now you are here with me and I am here with you." That was very emotional to hear Mia read that as we were coming back into the theater after the absence of COVID.
Tim: That’s very moving. So let’s go back in time now. I want to establish that you were born in Queens in 1951, the only child of older parents who had actually moved to the U.S. only after your father, who'd been married before, moved back to the Philippines from the U.S. and met your mom, who grew up in Sarrat, across the street from Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines, mainly as a dictator, from 1965 until he and his wife, Imelda, were deposed and fled the country in 1986.
And your mother came to Queens with your father despite not wanting to leave the Philippines. But more on that later. I wanna ask: You've mentioned being literally the only Filipino growing up in your neighborhood or school, surrounded by Irish and Italian kids in Flushing. What was that like?
Nicky: The other Filipinos in my life were my father's brother and my cousins, who lived two blocks away. So my cousins and I would imitate our parents' accents and pick up all the Filipino curse words, as children of immigrants do. And we had Filipino food in the house all the time. There was always a steaming pot of rice ready for you. You'd walk in and the mothers would be like, "Sit down and eat!" My favorite was probably pancit, like the Filipino lo mein, because I love pasta. A dish I hated growing up but love now is a pinakbet, a steamed okra and eggplant dish with pork and shrimp. You can never escape pork with Filipino food. And of course chicken and pork adobo, the marinated meat. Filipino food is a very unique combination of Spanish and Asian influences.
Tim: So did you have a sense of otherness as a kid?
Nicky: That was huge for me. There were two-dark skinned Italian girls, twins, but otherwise I can't remember any Black kids. I was always at the front of the line in class because I was small. It was parochial school—the Dominican Sisters of Saint Mary of the Springs of Columbus, Ohio. They took on male names—Sister Mary Daniel, Sister Mary Mark.
Tim: Were you accepted as Filipino or made fun of?
Nicky: I look back on it more benignly than not. I think I was accepted. Maybe the more athletic guys made fun of me, but it wasn't overt. I'd give them the answers for their tests. And in addition to playing piano, I played violin in the school orchestra. Sister Corinne was very powerful and very strict and was maybe harder on me than other students because I was gifted musically.
Tim: Did people understand what you were ethnically? Had they heard of Filipino?
Nicky: Barely. They knew I was some kind of Asian—not quite Chinese, not quite Japanese. But the kids I grew up with got used to it. At the McBurney Y in Manhattan that was on 23rd St. then, they'd have Filipino, Ilocano [the part of the Philippines Nicky is from] events and I'd always be the pianist in my little barong tagalog, my Filipino shirt.
Tim: You're an incredible classical and pop pianist, and playing piano growing up was huge for you, as it was for me, wasn't it?
Nicky: It was empowerment. Even though I hated being carted out for parties by my mother. [In a Filipino accent], "Nicky, show off your talents!" But when I could really perfect and play a piece—that for me was the beginning of respect for craft. I played all classical except for those Filipino ditties. The aunties and cousins would come over and would sing in Ilocano [the regional dialect of Ilocos Norte]. There's this one Ilocano love song, "No Dua Duaem Pay," that my mother used to sing to me. "If you doubt the strength of my love, it's so clear that you are very cruel and selfish...please my life, my life...give me hope so that I can still learn to forget. But I will only forget you when I am in my grave." (laughs) My mother's mantra was, "No one will love you like your mamma, even when we find a Filipina to be your wife." (laughs)
Tim: So when did you have the first inkling you wanted to make your life about music and performance?
Nicky: When I was young, I went to this Dalcroze School of Music in Manhattan, started by a Swiss guy named Dalcroze in the early 1900s. We would physicalize the music and have to move to the beats, go to the blackboard and notate music according to the rhythm.
Tim: Yes, you talk about that in your performance piece, "Now My Hand Is Ready for My Heart," and you talk about being surrounded your whole childhood and adolescence, later at Stuyvesant High School, by Jewish kids. Hilton Als, growing up Black West Indian in New York City, has written about this as well. What was that like?
NIcky: Stuyvesant when I went there was 90% Jewish, before it became as Asian as it is now. My best friend was David Friedman, who lived in Stuy Town, across the street from the old Stuy High. So I became part of this inner circle of Jewish boys who went to Stuy High and lived in Stuy Town. David also went to Eurythmics class and became a very proficient pianist. So after school at his apartment, we'd have milk and cookies and play duets on the piano. And—this being the mid-late sixties—we became obsessed with the Supremes and Dionne Warwick.
Tim: Was he gay too?
Nicky: Yes. Although at the time, he had a girlfriend named Lynn and they got married for at least a couple of years. In our circle in high school, which was all boys at the time, we were all gay, but nobody talked about it, even though hormones were raging.
Tim: How did your gayness surface for you?
Nicky: Sometimes I was aware that I'd be furtively looking at a particular boy. I think people would say, "Nicky and David, they're hanging out too much—are they faggots?" But we were just friends. We would imitate the Supremes. Not in drag, but we'd go crazy every time a new single came out, "Baby Love" or "Stop in the Name of Love."
Tim: And then—and I love this–you went to see Judy Garland at the Palace when you were in high school!