Post 197 - September 24, 2020

Day 197…

I am sitting in downtown Georgetown, South Carolina.

Today’s post is late because I kept getting distracted.

Just now I had what was supposed to be a fifteen-minute talk with an elderly man named Andrew Rodrigues who runs the Gullah Culture museum here in Georgetown. It ended up being a truly fascinating and rather moving hour and a half.

The museum is a tiny hole-in-the-wall and, inside it, the history of the Gullah people is told largely through a series of beautiful story quilts that were made by his late wife. I sincerely hope that somebody tapes Mr. Rodrigues talking through the panels so that people will be able to hear it after he’s gone. Once he started in, there was no leaving - both for politeness sake and because it was riveting.

I slept last night in Savannah, Georgia. Ever since John Berendt’s book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I’ve wanted to see it. The book is the more or less true story of the murder of an Antiques dealer and all of the quirky and odd people in the city who were involved.

The photograph on the cover of the book is of a grave marker in the nearby Bonaventure cemetery. The grave marker is of a young girl holding out two bowl on either side of her. It is known affectionately in town as the Bird Girl. When the book became a runaway bestseller, so many people flocked to the cemetery that it was decided to move her into a museum in town so as not to disturb the graves.

I’m sorry that I had to see her inside the museum. Bonaventure is everything you would expect from a coastal Georgian graveyard. Huge live oak trees covered with Spanish moss filter the light perfectly down on the crumbling old tombstones.

In am on my way to visit my sister and her family who live near Raleigh, North Carolina. It is about three or four hours from here and I can already see that I am not going to get there until much later than I thought. Sorry Sis!

When I drove down into Charlestown a few days ago, I missed this whole coast because I was driving through it in the dark.  This area is called the Low Country because it is mostly endless flat tidal marshes. Until the road went in, it was largely cut off from the far land further in. Many of the novelist Pat Conroy’s books are set here or trace their roots back to here.

The Gullah people are descended from a large group of slaves from West Africa who were brought here to work on plantations. They retained a lot of their African culture because this area was so secluded. Gullah is a creole language with its basis in English but with many elements of West African languages added in. Even today there are about 125,000 people in this area who still speak it.

Michelle Obama’s family traces its roots back to this area. One of the quilts that Vermelle Rodrigues made was for Barak Obama’s inauguration. The quilt tells Mrs. Obama’s family story from her Great, Great Grandfather who was enslaved on a farm near Georgetown right down through to the last panel which is the White House. In the middle of it is an almost life-size rendering of Mrs. Obama in a graduation gown with the words Harvard and Princeton on top of it.

I asked Mr. Rodrigues if the First Lady saw it at the time but he wasn’t sure if she had. I certainly hope that she did. According to him, it was the only quilt his wife ever needed help with because of the deadline of the inauguration. There are some great pictures of the circle of ladies who helped her sew it.

There’s an amazing amount of history in that tiny little space. I do truly hope that it can keep going in the years to come.

Tommy DeVito, one of the original founding members of The Four Seasons died this past Monday from complications from COVID-19. He was 92 years old. He had some amazing stories to tell, himself, and I fear he may have taken many of them with him.

Wherever he is now, I guarantee that he is claiming that he was the 200,000th victim.

All told, I didn’t spend a lot of actual time with him but working on Jersey Boys I feel I got to know him pretty well. Truth be told, over the last sixteen years, I spent far more time with his Jersey Boys fictional self than I ever did with his real self.

He said that he thought that the show was about 85% on the up and up. The only thing that he truly took exception with was when the character of Nick Massi complains, “He wears the same underwear three days in a row.” In an interview, Tommy said, “I was the most cleanest guy in the whole group,”

Whatever he thought about how he was depicted in it, he seemed to genuinely love Jersey Boys. After nearly forty years away from the limelight, the musical made him famous again. In some ways, it made him more famous because the guys other than Frankie Valli were not generally known by name in the group’s heyday. He saw the show on Broadway several times but in Las Vegas company he was a fairly regular fixture. He brought friends to see the show with him all the time and then came backstage and hung out with the cast.

When he would call me, it was always because he had an issue with something he had seen in the show in Las Vegas. My phone would ring, and I’d see it was Tommy, and I’d immediately catch my breath and start to wonder what was wrong now. He loved the guys who played him and often went to bat for them when he thought they weren’t being treated fairly.

He had an extremely checkered youth - in an out of trouble the whole time. He would steal milk off of people’s front porches. This was when the milkman would come and deliver milk to your door every day.  He always said that he never left somebody without milk. If they got three bottles, he only stole two of them.

He did his time in jail where he improved his guitar playing.

If you don’t know how The Four Seasons came to be, then you must be among the very few people on the planet who have never seen the show. It’s a good story. He had a lot to do with it.

After he left the group in 1968, he did some… work for one of the crime families that got him sent back to jail. He told a story about one of the guards who would tell him that there was a guy in The Four Seasons rock group who had the same name as him. The guard told him that he’d never be as good as that guy. Tommy never told the guard that he was that guy.

When he got out of jail that time, he needed a job, so Joe Pesci hired him to be his driver and that’s what he did until both of them started slowing down. Tommy shows up in a lot of Pesci’s movies. In 1991, Joe Pesci won the Oscar for the movie Goodfellas. Tommy makes an appearance in it. Pesci’s character’s name in that movie is Tommy DeVito.

When The Four Seasons were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, they were only interested in honoring the original four guys, despite the fact that Joe Long had been with the group longer than Tommy had. Tommy and Nick Massi, who had also left the group, were, therefore immortalized along with Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli and Tommy got to perform with them again.

As far as I know, the next time he appeared onstage with Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio was fifteen years later in 2005 at the opening night of Jersey Boys on Broadway. Nick Massi had sadly passed away five years before. The three guys joined the cast onstage for the final bow that night. It was, I have to say, a truly thrilling moment.

In some ways, Tommy is painted as the villain of Jersey Boys. One of the reasons that the show makes such an impression on people, I think, though, is that all of the guys are presented warts and all. None of them are saints, as the character of Nick Massi says at the end.

The truth of the matter is that would have been no group The Four Seasons without Tommy DeVito. It was his drive to succeed that pushed the guys forward. He never gave up even when it seemed hopeless. Whatever he did that was questionable, and to be fair there was quite a bit of that, he was as vital to the magic of their phenomenal success as the rest of the guys were. Whatever IT is, those particular four guys had it together.

I took this picture of Tommy with Frankie, I think, the last time that I saw him.  It was a few years ago, but I honestly can’t remember when. It was in Las Vegas and they had agreed to appear together for some event that I now can’t remember.

The Associate Choreographer and I were standing backstage with them as they were waiting to enter. Everything was running behind, so we had to wait there for quite a while.

They didn’t speak to each other.

We don’t necessarily choose the people who influence us the most. I’ve spent 16 years trying to figure the guy out.

There aren’t that many people, fictional or real, that I have spent that much time with.

The world is going to be a less interesting place without Tommy DeVito in it. I’m grateful that our lives intersected.

I don’t know how much longer Tommy would have survived had he not come down with the coronavirus. He would, however, still be alive right now had he not gotten it.

For those COVID naysayers who would say that he was so old that he was probably going to die in a year or two anyway, I would ask you a question.

If you were told by a doctor that you had two years left to live, would you be happy to just get COVID-19 and go now?

No?

I thought not.

Gaetano DeVito - June 19, 1928 - September 21, 2020

RIP Tomooch