Tony Montanaro as Herr Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker 1987 Rehearsal.
Photo: CC Church

When Tony first asked me to marry him, I did not take it personally. We had met only a few hours earlier; he didn’t know me at all. I reasoned that I was merely a catalyst, awakening something in Tony that was so intense and single-minded it scared me. It also intrigued me.

For months, I did everything I could to convince Tony that we did not have a future as a couple, that his dream of a husband/wife relationship was nothing more than castles in the air.

Predictably, Tony’s face would cloud over. He’d lean toward me and ask, “Do you think you could ever love me?!” In those moments, I desperately wanted to say, Tony, I love you, but not the way married people love each other.I will never ever love you that way!

The words were right there on the tip of my tongue, but a passage from the Bible stifled them. It was a warning against making promises. I thought, Karen, if you cannot make a single hair on your head either black or white, how can you make a promise like that?

So, rather than tell Tony how I really felt, I’d say, “Oh, Tony. I can’t predict the future, but at this moment, I cannot imagine loving you that way.” For Tony, this was a ray of hope — a green light for him to keep courting me and being whatever I needed whenever I needed it.

At the time, my most urgent need was transportation. I did not have a car or even a driver’s license, but I knew I could call Tony any time — day or night — and, even though he lived an hour and a half away, he would hop in his car and be on my doorstep an hour and 20 minutes later. After helping me complete my errand, Tony would thank me for doing him a favor. Who does that?

I once heard that the secret of initiating and sustaining a love-relationship is to maintain the most amount of contact and the least amount of force. Tony modeled that principle for more than a year, and it worked.

Now I ask myself, Why did I stay? Why did I keep going out to dinner with him and letting him kiss me goodnight? Two reasons. First, even though Tony courted me with a chivalry found only in fairytales, he also respected my boundaries. We could kiss and that would be that: no pressure, no expectations, no sulking. That was important to me.

Second, I stayed because I loved Tony’s way of seeing things. One night after one of our many dinners together, we were looking at the night sky. After a few minutes, Tony pointed out that light is invisible; we see light only when it bounces off of something. According to Tony, that is why we can see the stars but not the space around them. His physics may have been a bit wobbly, but I didn’t question it. I sat there thinking, Very good! This is important information — a metaphor of staggering implications. I can use this.

Tony’s words come back to me now with something to say about love as the “light of the world” — a light that reveals things the eye cannot see. I fell in love with the way Tony saw things, the way his mind worked, and the way he operated long before I fell in love with him as a man.

I vividly remember the moment when I fell in love with Tony as a man. August 1988. Tony was teaching his last workshop as the owner of Celebration Barn Theater. Many of his former students had taken the workshop, and there would be a final performance that night. Tony wanted me to be there. Again, the obstacle was transportation. Tony was not able to pick me up, so he arranged for our friends to drive me to the theater.

During that 1.5-hour drive, the anticipation of seeing Tony sparked a brand-new feeling — like a giggle deep in my throat — as if my heart was bubbling and bouncing up and down. I was out of my mind with excitement. I was also petrified. Sure enough, I had fallen in love with Tony and now I was seriously and helplessly vulnerable. With the onset of these scary new feelings, I realized that if Tony had not made his feelings for me perfectly clear over such a long, sustained period, I would have run in the opposite direction. Instead, he and I were married in January 1989, and our relationship was (and still is!) “the stuff of which miracles are made.”

The days following Tony’s death were some of the worst of my life. And then, they weren’t. It was as if an army of angels gathered around me in the shape of my friends and also in the shape of miraculous happenings.

Tony called those miraculous happenings “occurrences,” and they became the sole/soul focus of his approach to improvisation. His improv exercises weren’t designed to make us funny or dramatic or deep or anything else. The humor, drama, depth, etc. were side effects of a particular kind of trust — a quicksilver response to whatever moved us from the inside-out and the outside-in — a transparency between our private experience and our public expression.

After Tony died, I continued to learn more and more about his “premise” — his spirit — which carried me and so many others like a benign avalanche toward Godknowswhere.

In one of his love poems, Pablo Neruda writes, “I want to do to you what spring does to cherry trees.” This is the best “definition” of love that I’ve found. Love is the intersection of selfishness and selflessness, where our greatest joy is to see our effect on someone else. This is what performers want to do for their audiences and teachers want to do for their students. It is what lovers want to do for each other. It is what I initially did for Tony and what Tony continues to do for me.