PILGRIM'S PROGRESS: 7/4/26

My Last June Days in Provincetown and My First Few July Ones in Tangier

1.

I am now in Tangier. Arrived on Wednesday. Busy settling in. Beginning this column on Friday from the Grand Socco where I sit typing at the outdoor cafe at Cinema Rif. Heading to a dental appointment at 11 a.m. Then shopping for a green (or maybe blue) wooden stool to put at my little fold-out “kitchen desk” in my new apartment which is located right off the Petit Socco. My landlord is the languidly kind, languidly elegant Majid Rais El Fenni, the proprietor and curator of one of the chicest emporia in town down in the medina. Three hours after arriving on Wednesday, I was at photographer and artist Johnny Rozsa’s opening upstairs at Kent Gallery. And yesterday, my first full day here, I walked up the mountain to Veere Grenney’s estate, Gazebo, for lunch with Veere and Johnny and our mutual friends, World of Interiors Editor-in-Chief Hamish Bowles, (who is also Vogue’s Global Editor-at-Large) and co-CEO of AEVITAS David Kuhn (who was once my editor at Vanity Fair) as the rehearsal for Dames at Sea echoed down below on Gazebo’s grounds where the tap dancers were being put through their paces by director Rob Ashford after we had visited a bit with Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, its two stars, before our lunch was served. The yearly one-night-only theatrical event is hosted by Madison Cox to benefit three organisations here - The American Legation, the Creche orphanage, and ALCS Tanger which is a free clinic that combats HIV/AIDS. This evening there is a cocktail party at the Legation for those of us who will be in the audience tomorrow. Last night I went to another cocktail party thrown by British decorator and artist and ceramist Gavin Houghton at his beautifully charming bohemian abode in the casbah which also served as an exhibition space for the latest showing of his work.

After my dental appointment today, I am having lunch with my friends Jane Stubbs, another Mississippi transplant who oversees the Legation’s library, and writer and documentarian Emma Hewitt and Emma’s husband, actor Jason Isaacs, and their daughter Lily, a writer, as well as Saf, their other daughter Ruby’s friend from college who’s here visiting. Ruby is helping stage manage Dames for Rob before she and Saf head off to Spain for a summer semester abroad.

After the cocktail party at the Legation there is another “do” of some sort to which I’m not invited. But there are often two or three things going on within the expat community here so going to one and not the others can make you feel as if you both belong and don’t all at once which, I guess, is why I feel oddly at home here. Other than all such expat communities in all countries throughout history relying on such a belonging-but-not-really overlay to convey what underlies the incongruities which congregate entertainingly when they also do - we, I mean: we - I’ve felt like that outsider from the inside all my life actually because oddly, not Tangier, is where I feel most at home. So instead of continuing on with the contingent with a communal cut of their jib that is as congenial as it is continental, I, with a more local cut of one’s jibba, sauntered down deeper into the depths of the medina to the hostel where I first stayed two years ago and visited with Anas, the young man who still manages it. We talked about politics and football and how complicated Morocco can be. It was - more incongruity - less worldly than the continental lot, whom I do adore, and yet somehow more deeply even adorably so.

All of that is to say that this lone pilgrim’s life goes on in its onward way - but not waywardly on - as life itself has become one long semester abroad full of new knowledge and that which I thought I already knew reimagined, revised, restated not so much as a disavowal of status as it is a stripped-down disavowal of stasis since I am a skilled navigator at reaching the perception of reaching a few of status’s higher levels from a more right-sized recovered compass-like daily discovery of the ever-truer meaning of keeping it simple. I’ll write more (and less breathlessly) about my unfolding first few days here in Tangier early next week once I’ve dutifully folded my damn-it-ly durable djellaba about me a bit more and relaxed into the city’s own languid elegance which Majid so naturally mirrors.

But first I wanted to catch you up with my last few days in Provincetown which coincided with my final two onstage conversations for the Provincetown Arts Society at its Mary Heaton Vorse House. One was with writer and actor Ernest Thompson, above, who won the Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of his play On Golden Pond. His novel, Out Clause, has recently been published and reminded me of Raymond Chandler if Philip Marlowe had a more metaphysical bent. I forgot to ask him, however, about Greer Garson, who was one of the producers of On Golden Pond when it reached Broadway. I had read that she wanted to rename the play A Boy for Rent during its initial run when it was having a hard time finding its audience. So I emailed him about Greer before boarding my plane to Tangier.

“I never could understand how Greer Garson got involved with my play in the first place, other than the small fact that her husband, Buddy Fogelson, was a major cattle rancher and oilman in Texas and presumably sank some serious pesos into the $240,000 (!) budget,” Ernest emailed back.

“I wondered if perhaps Greer dreamt that she would play Ethel in the movie version but, obviously, that wasn’t to be,” he continued. “The reference to which you’re referring came in a phone call from the great lady (OBE) who informed me that the play wasn’t doing better business because of the title and that we needed to change it. I said, ‘It’s sort of already opened, a bit late in the day to be changing the title.’ She said, ‘Worry not, we’ll take an ad out in Variety.’ I said, ‘I’m not sure that our target audience reads a lot of Variety.’

“She’d taken the liberty of jotting down a few alternative titles, May September, Autumn Romance, and her favorite, A Boy For Rent. In obvious reference to Ethel’s saying, ‘I should’ve rented him a 13-year-old boy years ago.’

“I told Greer that I thought that that might attract a certain demographic, but wouldn’t necessarily be a cure-all. And though I was thrilled to have conversations with the Oscar winner and true aristocrat, when I took it upon myself to ask her and Buddy to consider ponying up more moolah for a TV commercial, something rarely done back then, she asked the lead producer, Arthur Cantor, to have the playwright discontinue calling her.

“I never saw or heard from her again. But, as you no doubt know, a Broadway producer gets a piece of the action, including film proceeds, for 18 years after the opening, meaning that Mr. Cantor and the Adelsons and other investors (I had friends who bought quarter shares for 2 grand) made their money back and some fat profits.”

A couple of days before Ernest and I had our conversation, legendary HIV/AIDS activist Peter Staley and I had a tete-a-tete that fell back into the rhythmic tit-for-tat that we once had as a couple back when I had pecs and no tattoos. I forgot to ask him about his friendship with Tony Fauci, so I emailed him as well when I got here to Tangier. Peter responded: “My friendship with Tony is a gift. That it stems from our work fighting AIDS makes it even more so. The fact that it has deepened considerably since the first weeks of the COVID epidemic caught me by surprise, compounding the gift with each passing year. Like all of us, the man has flaws (and I know all of them well), but Tony Fauci is the most decent and ethical man I've ever known.”

The audiences seemed to have liked both those conversations. I was grateful that the Arts Society’s director, Gene Tartaglia, asked me to spearhead them - along with one with Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Jericho Brown. I was also grateful that I was invited by Gene to stay for three weeks at the singularly beautiful Vorse House during some singularly beautiful weather there at the tip of Cape Cod which I refer to as the End of the World but that those other pilgrims who landed there before heading down the beach a bit to settle in Plymouth thought of as the beginning of a new one.

I opened my conversation with Peter, in fact, with this quote from Larry Kramer, who played the role of matchmaker in our lives. I often called Larry our “Dolly in Levi’s.” I loved Larry and still love Peter, who is no longer a boy but will always be my friend. This is from Larry’s novel, The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart. He wrote: “Religion is such an icky, sticky thing, full of tortuous - well, everything. Why is it so essential for man to be forced, for that is what religion relies on, force, to believe in anything but himself? This is what John Winthrop should represent for us: the utter disdain he and Puritanism have for the self, for the human, for the human being … There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won't allow any deviation from that rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don't do it, they screamed, while that's exactly what they did ... All those Puritan preachers were vindictive, vengeful men spouting hateful thoughts and threats, and it's disheartening that they're still taught in the schools with reverence. They were shits. And they spouted shit. And a goodly portion of the world is still spouting shit.”

Morocco was the first country to recognise America as an independent one in 1777, a year after the signing of its Declaration of Being So and 157 years after that separatist sect of Puritans on the Mayflower dropped anchor in Provincetown and signed their Compact onboard it before disembarking on that beach where naked men now do what naked men do together when no one is watching or when other such men just might be since July 4th admittedly is finally about a kind of exhibitionism reimagined and revised and restated as nationalism paraded about in a patriotic costume.

(Above: Larry Kramer and Peter Staley at the Cleveland airport on Apri, 13, 1990. They had just spoken at Oberlin, Peter’s alma mater, where they rallied the Oberlin students and inspired them to send 2 to 3 buses of budding activists to ACT UP’S “Storm the NIH” demonstration the next month as part of the over 1000 strong who participated in it.)

The American Legation is located in the same building in the medina that Sultan Moulay Suliman gave to America in 1821 and thus became not only the first property “acquired” abroad by the young US government but also its first diplomatic outpost in the world. The Legation is now privately funded - hence the benefit performance of Dames at Sea - but it remains the only US National Historic Landmark located on foreign soil. It’s a special place. I love it there, just as I love it here in Tangier.

I am now writing the end of this section on Saturday, this latest July 4th, back here at the cafe at Cinema Rif. Last night at that cocktail party, I was making sure that my new friends, Lily and Saf whom I met yesterday at lunch, knew just how special the Legation is. I took them up to the attic to point out where, during World War II, it became a secret hub hidden in a closet behind a panel in the wall where America’s covert intelligence operations were headquartered in this part of the world. The desk and equipment and apparatuses are all still exactly like they were back then. When I read the code word “Pilgrim” on the signage below I actually teared up. But instead of crying at how heightened my life can be - how all of our lives can be when we mindfully pay attention to them as they whisper to us secretly in code - I whispered myself secretly to Lily, “We writers are all spies.”

Happy Fourth from Lily and Saf and Larry and Peter and me, e(a)rnestly.

2.

That’s my sister Karole with Peter and me after our conversation at the Vorse House. She visited me my last week in Ptown. Below, we were saying goodbye on the wharf before she boarded the ferry to Boston to head back home to Tennessee where she now lives. She might be 66 but she’ll always be my baby sister. This is what 70 and 66 look like hanging out and hanging in.

3.

And this is Lisa. She is my sister-in-law. Lisa is married to Karole. They mostly live in Gatlinburg, Lisa’s hometown. During their months-long honeymoon a few years ago, they came to Morocco for a week because it was one of Lisa’s dreams to visit here. She and Karole were the ones who told me three years ago that I had to put it on my pilgrimage’s itinerary because they know me well and they knew I’d fall in love with the place. I have. And I love the two of them with all my old, scarred, less-scared-these-days heart even though I still fret about America. In so many ways the. country frightens me - even from the perspective of sitting here at a cafe in a Muslim kingdom on July 4, 2026. But the fact that Lisa and Karole are married gals in Gatlinburg and Lisa can don that cap when heading out for a southern sip of cappuccino gives me hope.

I’ll hold on to hope. Hope too is hanging out and hanging in.

Everything connects.

Onward …