Telephone Live

There is an entire novel to be written about my collaboration with Nick Garrison. We were an artistic pair for over ten years—on stages, bars, cabaret venues, basements. We shared a deep friendship. We were family.

One of a hundred stories: Nick and I were in tech at the Bumbershoot Festival for my solo show Go There, which he had directed. When we arrived at our venue they were not ready for us—no lights had been hung, they were running way behind. So, we sprinted next door to the Key Arena where Prince was about to perform—we had been heartbroken that our tech time was keeping us from seeing him in the first place.

We bought nosebleed seats from a scalper, climbed up to almost the very last row of the 16,000-seat arena and took our seats. A woman who was sitting right behind us said, “Oh my god! I can’t believe this! Are you Nick Garrison and Sarah Rudinoff?” We turned around, said yes, and were feeling pretty proud of ourselves to be recognized in the middle of this huge crowd. She turned to her boyfriend and said, “Holy shit—honey, these are like, the stars of the small stage!” At that very moment, the lights dimmed and over the speakers came, “Ladies and gentlemen, Prince!” We both doubled over laughing and wanted to get cards made that introduced ourselves as “The Stars of the Small Stage.”

Nick was a Pacific Northwest original. Born in Kodiak, Alaska to a family of fisherman, he was an out, gay kid very early on. He was a devotee of Charles Ludlam, Edith Piaf, Stephin Merritt. Nick was a peerless singer and an actor of incredible depth and make-you-piss-yourself humor. He was known around the world as one of the first and best ever to play Hedwig in the rock-musical classic Hedwig and The Angry Inch. We were the first regional production to get the rights from the NY producers and we became close during the 2000 production when I played his husband Yitzhak.

Years later, in 2022, Nick died at forty-seven years old of a stroke. We had been out of touch for years and he had struggled with addiction and his mental health. But by 2020, he was sober, back with family, back with community and we had rekindled our friendship and talked about recording this collaboration record I was working on.

We were going to record “Origin of Love” from Hedwig. When Nick died, I thought that all I had of our musical life together were a decade of rehearsal voice clips from my phone. My friend Gretta then told me she had board recordings of a concert we had put together; This Is Me Sometimes. Finding this recording was like getting to stand side by side with Nick again. It is a six-song set that I want to release on its own, but I thought it would be fun to include our “Telephone Medley” on this record.

Nick, Chris Jeffries and I loved nothing better than to sit around planning the most ridiculous things we could think of, just to make us laugh. The “Telephone Medley” was one of those flights of fancy. “Let’s do a medley of songs about telephones—ELO, The B52s, The Partridge Family!” It was 2009 and we wondered if people would forget what telephone lines even were… We did our best “foreign land” accents (the general accent you can pull out in an audition when you don’t really know what you’re doing), we changed the lyrics “blue days, black nights” to “blue days, black tights” because it made us laugh. We committed 100% to the silliness, the absurdity. We worked on it with all our friends for four months like it was the most important composition in the world and performed it once. We had a fucking blast.

We loved doing art for “the 4 people.” It was a mantra that if we followed our instincts there would be four other people who might enjoy it too, and that was enough. The stage might have been small, but I was so lucky to share it with Nick.