People
In 1971, prodigal son Hibiscus returned home with his boyfriend Angel Jack (born Jack Coe). They arrived at the door of the Harris family’s East Ninth Street apartment wearing long hair and white robes, looking like two apparitions through the peephole. “He was screaming, ‘HONEY!’ ” sister Jayne Anne Harris said. “So I knew it was him.” No longer the preppy-looking teen who left the fold in 1967, he was now wearing outlandish Angels of Light costumes all the time. This was no shock, for she and her sisters were used to crazy clothes growing up in New York’s avant-garde theater world. “Regular life moments in those days looked a lot like theater,” recalled Mary Lou. “No one walked around in regular clothes.” Hibiscus hit the ground running, recruiting his sisters and mother into the Angels of Light. “It was like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes in Arms,” Jayne Anne said, “when they do the show in the barn: ‘Let’s put on a show!’ That’s what it was like.” Their brother was a one-man Off-Off-Broadway Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio system, and whoever happened to wander into Hibiscus’s view was cast in a show. He had an eye for spotting talents and skills, whether it was tap dancing, crooning, or ballet dancing. The entire family knew how to sew costumes, build sets, and other theater basics, and their mother also taught the kids how to tap dance. Ann Harris had learned tap routines while attending the Dan Harrington School of Dance as a kid in the 1930s, until her father pulled her out because the costumes were too skimpy. “But she remembered every single dance,” Jayne Anne said, “and taught all the queens in the West Village how to tap dance. The Vietnam War was still raging, and we just did these colorful, happy midnight shows, and whoever came was in it.”
From Chapter 26 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore