AUGUST 2012

Follow Johanna Nutter on her discovery tour of Southie

I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. This fall, I get to be the first Canadian to play Margie Walsh in David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, the role for which Frances McDormand won the Tony Award last year. In preparation, I'm on a scavenger hunt to discover the world from which the playwright has torn the characters from - Southie, Boston

Johanna Nutter

Some people think acting is all about fakery. For me it’s kind of the opposite; it’s about getting as real as I can be. So, playing a woman from South Boston, in a play written by a South Boston native, I wanted to spend as much time there as I could. That way, when it comes time to talk about all these people and places that Margie knows, I will actually know them too. I’ll have pictures and sounds and sometimes even smells to go with the words, and I’m convinced that the people in the audience will sense this somehow. In Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire has written a love letter to his hometown, and I want to honour that.

My director, Roy Surette, was keen to soak up the Southie as well, and we managed to coordinate our visits so that they would overlap for a day. I went to meet him at the Andrew Street T station. Armed with a list of all the places mentioned in the play, we set out on a sort of Southie scavenger hunt.

Here’s Tudor Street. The Lower End. This is where Margie lives.

Director Roy Surette

Here’s the Boys and Girls Club, where Mikey Dillon, Margie’s high school sweetheart, was a guest speaker. As Margie’s best friend Jean explains, “Every year they give these medals to the kids for being good, or not killing each other, or whatever.”

Here’s Margie’s high school. This was where all the riots happened in the seventies with the forced bussing. It’s just behind Dorchester Heights, where George Washington won the first battle of the American Revolution on March 17th, 1776…

This is where Margie would have gone to school if her mother had been able to afford it.

By this point we were pretty thirsty, so we stopped in at the Boston Beer Garden for a pint. Carly, our bartender—named after Carly Simon—was extremely helpful. She answered all of our questions and more. Both her parents are from Southie, and they both worked their whole lives for Gillette (almost everyone in the play works down at Gillette; line work, mostly). Turns out that Southie is the “World Shaving Headquarters”. Apparently, Gillette used to treat their employees like royalty, until they got bought up by Proctor and Gamble. Roy and I are like kids on Christmas morning as one after another of the places on our list turns out to be real. We ask Carly if she’s ever heard of a grocery store called Flanagan’s and she points across the street at the Stop’n Shop; there it is.

At the top of the play, Margie tells a story to Stevie, the manager of the dollar store, about the time his mother attempted to shoplift a turkey from Flanagan’s when Margie was working the cash. As she tries to push past the register, the turkey falls out of her coat and hits the floor. Without missing a beat, Suzie looks up and yells, “Who threw that bird at me?!”

Everyone in Southie is friendly, and helpful, and full of stories. After getting a lobster roll at Sully’s and walking the Sugar Bowl, we head down to West Broadway. There we meet James, who comes out of the back of his store to find out why we’re taking pictures of his dumpster. He tells us all about the Dropkick Murphys and Whitey McGrail, who was gunned down in his bar, just up the street; “He was a rogue but he bought a lot of people groceries”. We ask him if it would be safe to go into Croke Park Tavern for a drink and he said, “Sure. Just tell them you’re brushin’ up on the vernacular”. We ask James why his liquor store is called Al’s and he tells us that he and his brother (whose name is also not Al) decided it stood for “ah’ liquor store”.

So we head into the tavern and pull up a couple of stools at the bar. Joe, the bartender, looks like he could’ve been a character study for Christian Bale in The Fighter, and he serves us two pints of Guinness for six bucks. For both of them. That’s three dollars cheaper than the two earlier glasses of Harpoon at the L-Street Tavern, which looks like the Disney version of a Southie bar next to Croke Park. Unfortunately, because of the Olympics, the locals are mostly silent. There’s a little excitement when Rod Stewart—I shit you not—walks in, but with the exception of our chat with James, we have been unsuccessful in our search for the proper vernacular.

We continue our way up the hill and stop off in Shenanigan’s for some bangers and mash. On our way out, we decide to slip into one last Southie bar before leaving the ‘hood. Right next door is the Clock Tavern. The games are on, but without sound, and there’s music playing. Ben Harper. Sitting at the bar, there’s a pretty blond woman, a couple of old timers, a young guy who looks like a litigator, and a woman in a white velour track suit drinking water out of a plastic cup. We belly up next to her. You can tell she was once a real beauty: she’s got those crazy dark blue-green eyes everyone around here seems to have. She’s dead drunk and bored. Her name is Eileen and she is the daughter of a very powerful man. Just how powerful is a bit of a secret, but being the only lawyer in Charlestown, let’s just say she was well protected. She’s got a lot of stories, and she would be just the person to help me brush up on my vernacular, except that she’s just not all that coherent. Brian, the litigator (which he does in fact happen to be), is more helpful. He has memorized an entire speech from Good Will Hunting and he performs it for us then and there. He also coaches me on the right way to pronounce the word hockey. Shannon (the pretty blond) takes umbrage with the fact that Brian isn’t even from Southie and directs me to our bartender, Nancy. Nancy is Southie, bawhn an’ raised, through and through. As she’s telling me about working three jobs to put her daughter through school I realize that she is cut from the same cloth as my Margie. I ask her if I can take her out for dinner the next evening and just listen to her talk, and she agrees. The evening ends as all good evenings spent in a neighbourhood pub do: all of us buying each other drinks, playing each other songs on the jukebox (yes, “More than a Feeling” by Boston did come up), and becoming friends. We never made it out of Southie after all.

Here I go, flying over Southie, practically grazing the tops of the triple deckers along East Broadway. Goodbye, dahlings. It’s been a time. In between two Mondays I learned more about South Boston than I ever thought was possible, and I made three good friends—which is the best part of all.

First, there’s Shannon. Her parents are from Southie and she’s been back in town for 18 years. When she was ten she moved to Florida, part of the “White Flight” brought on by the forced bussing and other meddlesome political shenanigans that seemed to do way more harm than good to the people of Southie. She regrets the time away and even with the street cred she inherited from her parents, and the time she’s put in since, she still feels like a bit of an outsider. She’s had quite a week, brought on by her boyfriend becoming her EX-boyfriend thanks to some pretty bonehead moves on his part. ‘Nuff said.

Then there’s Nancy. She is my Margie and my Southie twin. We’re the same age, and we have spent about the same number of years in the service industry. I’ve been supporting myself through my craft for about five years now, but I did spend almost two decades behind a bar. Nancy divides her time between the bar and an insurance company, right above where the original Flanagan’s was on West Broadway (before that it was Purity Supreme and she worked there, too, as a young teen). When we met, she was in the middle of a 100hr workweek. Most Southie residents, if they’re lucky, work at least two jobs. As exhausted as she might feel on the inside, Nancy is always smiling and gracious on the outside. You can’t walk more than a block with her, anywhere in Southie, without hearing her give a quiet hi, honey to someone.

Like Margie, Nancy has an adult daughter, who happens to have the same birthday as me. Her name is Ashley and she’s a huge Markie Mark fan. One day, Nancy was over at Marian Manor visiting her mother and Mr. Wahlberg was there, visiting his dad. As soon as she saw him, she pulled out her phone and called Ashley; Get over here. Ashley, who was coaching cheerleading, dropped her pompoms and ran. As you may be able to tell from this picture, Nancy made her daughter very happy that day.

Nancy’s mother was one of 22. Her parents had 16 children and adopted 6 others. They had to eat in shifts. Her grandmother was actually photographed by the Boston Herald, coming out of the supermarket with quarts of milk in one hand and loaves of bread in the other. Here she is with some of her siblings.

Nancy went to Southie High, and she was one of the kids they put on the bus and shipped off to Rochester. See, this is the thing the papers never talked about when they covered the forced bussing. As Ralph down at the L Street Tavern explained, it wasn’t that they were bringing the black kids in; it was that they were shipping our kids out. The riots started because the tight-knit community of Southie felt like the government was coming in and breaking up their homes. For Nancy, always one to make lemonade out of any sour experience, it wasn’t so bad. She and her new friend at the school in Rochester were even used as poster children for the integration movement. But I get the impression that for most people in Southie, the experiment left deep wounds that may never heal. To be labeled racist by my entire country, when all I was trying to do was keep my kids close to home, would make me want to draw up the drawbridge, too. Then again, those children arriving at Southie High on the school bus definitely did not deserve to have rocks thrown at them. And I think about Rosa Parks, and her bravery brings tears to my eyes. Life is complicated. In any case, Nancy worked two or sometimes three jobs the whole time her daughter was in school, to pay the eight grand a year to send Ashley to Gate of Heaven.

Last but not least is Chris. He has an 8yr-old Neapolitan named Ajax and he is also Southie, bawhn an’raised. He went to Southie High and was a star defenseman, taking the number two for Brian Leetch (Ray Bourque’s number 7 was already spoken for). He lives just up the street from Al’s Liquors and he took me on several walking tours of the neighbourhood, stopping off for a pint when it got too hot. Here we are at Murphy’s.

This is the church of St. Vincent, brought over stone by stone from Italy. It’s got the most beautiful stained-glass windows on either side, but we couldn’t go in and see them in their sunlit glory because the church is locked. Last year, somebody stole the donation box. You can’t get much lower, but as Chris pointed out, the money’s supposed to be for the poor, and I guess some poor junkie did end up with it. There’s a church every couple of blocks in Southie, although, because of the ever-increasing gentrification, a lot of them have been turned into condos. As we passed the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Chris pointed it out to me as the place where his parents got married. Just after he did, a Yuppie couple came walking out the front door with yoga mats under their arms.

I told Chris he should leave off installing air conditioning and set up a business of South Boston walking tours. He’s a great storyteller. His accounts dip back and forth between the wistful (These houses here, all family. We used to hang out on the street, playing our own versions of hide-and-go-seek) and the macabre (Over there, the Station Pub; that used to be Triple O’s. It was a blood bar. You got called down into the basement for a chat, chances are you weren’t coming back up again). His dad was one of 16 and he had so many aunts and uncles that he couldn’t keep them all straight. And cousins? Forget about it. Here are two of the few Southie natives not related to Chris or Nancy. They called themselves Broke and Busted (with the younger it was the right ankle and the older it was the left leg).

I had such a wonderful time! Out for steak tips with the girls at the Seapoint (where they filmed What Doesn’t Kill You). Tom Connelly, the owner, and Linda, our waitress, were so nice to me. They even opened the banquet hall upstairs, so I could see where just about every wake, graduation party, and wedding reception in Southie has been held since forever.

By far, my favourite tavern was the Shamrock. This is where me and the girls spent my last night in Southie, playing songs for each other on the jukebox and dancing on the tiny dance floor. They showed me how to do my hair up in a proper Southie pouf, and Nancy told me stories about the infamous Whitey Bulger. He’s the gangster Jack Nicholson was supposedly emulating in The Departed who was finally caught a few months back in California. When Nancy was little, she always thought he was a cop because he wore this leather jacket and you could see his gun sticking out of his holster in his back pocket; He may have brought the drugs to Southie, but kids didn’t start overdosing until after he disappeared. And then, as if to prove that he still had eyes and ears everywhere, Whitey himself appeared on the TV set in the Shamrock!

One of the best parts of the whole week was going to bingo at the Boys and Girls club. When I showed up, Pattie McCormick, who runs the club, met me at the door; Can I help you? I explained to her that I was playing Margie in the Canadian première of Good People and I wanted to get a sense of what bingo was like in Southie. Her face lit up. She is an old friend of David Lindsay-Abaire’s and she was at the première in New York. She took me into her office and showed me the pictures of her, Lindsay-Abaire, and Frances McDormand. Note the crafty flower-pot rabbit in Frances’ hand. My favourite line from the play, spoken by my best friend Jean, is in reference these bunnies;

I hate to break it to ya, Dottie, but anything with googly eyes is crap.

She let me sit in on the bingo night. A woman two tables over from me won $450. Pattie told me that a lot of these people have been coming for decades. Last week, Dottie (Yes, Dottie!) was here for bingo, and this week, they had a moment of silence to mark her passing.

But I do go on. It’s just so hard to say goodbye to Southie. For all its hardships, and all its lost history, it is still so full of beauty. Both in its places…

and its people...

There is so much more that I could tell you, but I won’t. I will leave these good people their privacy. What happens in Southie, stays in Southie…except for what I’ll bring with me to the Centaur Theatre in November.

Follow Johanna on her blog at www.johannanutter.com