Robert Withers – 50th Reunion Essay

Robert Withers

202 West 80 St. #5W

New York, NY 10024

robertrx@earthlink.net

212-873-1353

Spouse(s): It’s been an interesting life.

Child(ren): Donovan Michael Withers (1967), Sophia Alba withers (1983)

Grandchild(ren): Julia Jeanne Withers (1999)

Education: Yale, BA ’69; Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, MFA ’89

Career: College film professor, pharmaceutical advertising copywriter, independent filmmaker

Avocations: Dancing tango

College: Ezra Stiles

My second wife called us the “wrong Yalies,” but we were the ones she liked. The classics scholar and consigliere-to-be from Little Sicily, the genius flaming leathergay composer who died young from drink, and me, the country boy from Missouri who fell hard for Zen, underground movies, psychedelics, and the avant-garde. In the same affectionate spirit I could call her one of the “wrong wives” but she is the mother of my brilliant, beautiful daughter who is now doing academia, so she’s been a right one too. The first wrong wife would have been the mother of my handsome boy, who first appeared in the Yale quadrangles in my sophomore year. Years and many tattoos later he’s a family man who teaches college kids how to drive big boats in New York Harbor.

Yale and New Haven were fabulous for the scenes…the roof of the Art and Architecture building at three in the morning, the amazing music theory classes I audited but never enrolled in, Robert F. Thompson demonstrating African polyrhythms with his fingers on the top of a desk in the classroom, steamy summer nights hanging with the townies, a gig projecting Bollywood features for Indian audiences in the art history lecture hall, drifting through the lobby during a Cream concert after what was really too big a dose of LSD, fall/winter/spring seasons in Woodmont and East Haven near the Sound.

I’ve lived 40 years now in the same rent-stabilized 5th-floor walk-up apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and watched all the quirky, lovable little shops vanish—the ballet school where Sophie wore her first tutu, the video rental shop owned by a French couple that’s now a nail salon, the candy store where you could buy jelly beans by weight, the 24-hour bagel bakery that turned into a Verizon mobile phones store, the three fabulous bookstores including the children’s store from You’ve Got Mail. Broadway has turned into a mall of brands, but Zabar’s delicatessen is still here and I visit every day because it’s my kitchen and they’re my cooks. Guess I’m the quirky neighborhood institution now.

What about me all this time? Teaching film at City College and elsewhere, tenure failure, switch to pharmaceutical advertising to pay the bills, now pretending to be semi-retired and working on the underground experimental films again.

Here’s the promotional bio:

Robert Withers is an author and film/videomaker who has created innovative and award-winning works since the 1970s. He studied with Standish Lawder at Yale and apprenticed with DA Pennebaker in New York.

His 16 Millimeter Earrings was a ground-breaking interpretation of the performance piece by Meredith Monk. In 2012, The New York Times called it “still an astonishing, riveting film, both eloquent and difficult.”

Withers’s work has been distributed internationally and is with the Filmmakers Coop in New York and Light Cone in Paris.

For several years Withers directed the New York Expo of Short Film and Video, a 40-year-old international festival of independent shorts. His recent work explores surrealist narrative, text-based film, portrait, and landscape. He lives and works in New York City.