Stephen Macht Stage and Screen Actor, Scholar, and Chaplain

Shareen Anderson interviews acclaimed actor Stephen Macht, reflecting on his childhood in Mystic, Connecticut, where he was raised after the loss of his father. They discuss how those early years shaped his path to a successful career in film, television, academia—and later becoming a chaplain. Macht was also honored as the 2025 Mystic Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award recipient.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, everyone. I'm Shereen Anderson.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

And hi, I'm Alec Aston.

SPEAKER_01 0:03

And we are your hosts of the Mystic Mash podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:07

We're excited to show you our little section of the world in Mystic, Connecticut.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

And today we're really excited to share with you our interview with Steven Mocht, who's a well-known actor. At the age of eight or nine, Steven moved up to Mystic, where his grandparents lived, and his grandfather ran a habadashery on Main Street.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Right next to the drawbridge on the on the left-hand side when you're in Groton, heading over to uh Stonington.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Right. Yeah. And his grandfather had a house on Pearl Street. I believe it was 8 Pearl Street.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

You're kidding me. I lived in 8 Pearl Street. What? That's crazy. Yeah, that is absolutely crazy. When you first said Pearl Street, I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. But yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, rented out the first floor in 199 to 1995. I was there. It was an old green stucco building there, um, just down the corner. When I was there, there was a deli called Two Sisters that was at the corner. And now it's now the uh the Irish bar that's there.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

When I started talking with Steven, we discovered that we both lived in the same apartment building in Brooklyn Heights.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

What makes life so beautiful and serendipitous when you run into these kind of similarities that we all kind of exchange in life?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Yeah. So as our listeners will find out, Stephen's had a really amazing career as a stage actor, as a film actor eventually, and a television actor. And he's also a very spiritual person. He always was interested in Judaism and wanted to become a rabbi. So he pursued a spiritual education and he's able to officiate weddings and funerals and life celebrations.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

And then now he went on to school, right? He went on to Dartmouth for a while.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Yes, he was at Dartmouth, but that was the beginning of his academic career. He also, I believe, got a degree at Tufts University and then went on to get his PhD at in in um the stagecraft at Indiana University. He taught at Queens College and Smith College. He studied in the UK for a while. Um, and this was all before he became a screen actor. He was discovered by a Universal Scout in 1975, and that led to being cast in many of the movies that we've seen him in. And his his son, Gabriel, is an actor too, Gabriel Mocht, and is in suits. And uh a fun thing is Gabriel actually got his dad the role of his father in the show Suits. So you can see them playing father-son in the actual television show.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

So awesome! That's great.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

We were so honored to have him at the eighth annual Mystic Film Festival. We were honoring him with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was able to come to Mystic to receive that award, and he also ran an actor's workshop. People who attended said it was fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

It's great we have these people that can kind of be larger life, and yet they live right down the road or they grew up down the road here in Mystic. That's a real honor.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

So true. So without further ado, let's kick off the episode.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

All right, excited.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Hi, Steven. Welcome.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Shireen, thanks very much. Nice to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

So today we have Stephen Mocked joining us on our podcast, which is called The Mystic Mash. Everything Mystic. And you are you are the perfect person to talk about Mystic Connecticut. So why don't you tell me a little bit about your connection to Mystic? Sure.

SPEAKER_02 3:47

You know, we have to go way back. We're talking about 1951 when my father passed away in New York, in Brooklyn. I lived in Brooklyn Heights, which we shared it another time before, that you and I lived in the same building, 68 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, years apart. But what what is that for serendipity that we uh that we connected through that, as well as other things. Anyway, my mother decided to come home to Mystic, Connecticut. She was raised in Mystic, so we went to live with my grandfather, Simon Curlichick, who uh I had known through a couple of visits, but he had a men's habadashery store up on the bridge right next to the uh the ice cream shop that I still think is there. Anyway, uh Mystic means a lot to me, you know, from its streets to the river to the bridge, my coaches in grammar school and high school baseball, my family. My mother went home, little did I know that I had an extended family. We had my uncles and aunts had five stores in Mystic. Not only my grandfather's, but the Bendits on Main Street, across the street to Topkins, and my mother's sister, Fanny, Fanny Glaro, had two shops on Main Street. They were right across from Kretzer's, which was the local 7 Eleven at the time. You know, it was for a young boy who was sort of fighting gangs at the age of nine in uh in Brooklyn, New York, coming to Mystic was kind of like an idyllic thing, and it took me time to get used to it, but it gave me a family that was supplanting the family that I had had in the city, my father dying early at 44. My first job was at the bowling alley with the Mystic Lunchonette that no longer exists there. I was probably 10 or 11 when I worked there for 10 cents a string, setting up little duck pins. I had a boat when I was nine years old, and my brother and I, who knew nothing about boats but saw everybody who had boats, we bought a little rowboat for probably about 50 bucks, and I can remember painting it and launching it. And on the first day of the launch, my brother and I were rowing, but the thing sank right into the mud at low tide. Why? Because two city boys in a in a rowboat had not put water in to allow the boards of the boat to expand. We just thought we could put it right in. So the boat sank in the mud. We had to draw it out. And one of my friends, Bruce Burrows, who still lives there in Mystic, told me, Steve, you have to put it up on sawhorses and fill it with water so the boards um expand and yet it doesn't leak. So from that to, you know, a three-horse motor to nine-horse motor to a 15-horse Everen route, all of that. I skied, I I plane boarded, not actually water ski because it wasn't strong enough, but we cut out plywood boards that could be pulled by our motorboats, and we plane on the Mystic River. I don't know how many times. It was idyllic, but it encouraged me. Mystic itself gave me a sense of a family at home, and at the same time, I carried with me that sense of danger of losing a father at the age of nine. So those two things worked in 10, I would say, to uh you know spur me on to achieve. I was a good student. I wasn't a great student, I was honest society, but I always remember, you know, being well trained in English grammar and the grammar schools, and then Fitch Junior High School, which had been the senior high, but was a junior high school, so in ninth grade, and then 10th, 11th, and 12th, I went to the new school up on the hill there, in between Mystic and Pequanic Bridge. Somehow I had in me I wanted to succeed. Somehow I wanted to prove myself. So I became, I was president of my seventh, eighth classes, my ninth grade, tenth, eleventh, and then twelfth grade, I was president of the student council. But the guy who sort of held me back and really demanded more from me than an inflated ego was my baseball coach of the junior league. His name was Ted. I can't remember his last name, but he was the guy who founded the pizza shop before it became Mystic Pizza up on the hill towards the church. We used to have pizza there, and he exact he exacted from me, you know, you got to become a team player. You can't be the boss of everything. And when I would um sort of express my own ego, he would bench me, and I wouldn't play for two or three games until I learned to curb my temper and my mouth and become much more of a team player. My first job at Eastern Point Beach Park as a lifeguard under Steve Zabersky in uh in Groton. It was a major growing experience for me. She looked like a a linebacker or f or nose guard on the Chicago Bears, which I think he probably was at one time. He would look at me and he said, Matt, get your nose. I could put a quarter up there, you could set you could it could become a piggy bank for you. He was like the the demanding father that I never had. And the work schedule, the sweeping of the beach, the raking of the beach, the light guard training, all of that really demanded of me a certain kind of discipline until I went away to Dartmouth College and following my brother who had been there. I was never in any place at Fitch High School. Never. That was his sort of area and as well at Dartmouth while he was there, but he had left Dartmouth by the time I I got there. And so Mystic became a very um it was a supportive place. Our grandson, our recent grandson, we just went to Hawaii. This grandson and the and his brother, our youngest son's son, we had all of our grandchildren there and our children recently in Hawaii. The kid is adored. He played with all of us. He played with his with his uncles, with his aunts. What's what's not to feel secure about? He had never experienced the death that I experienced, so I had an ambivalency. And in a sense, I draw to theater, I came out of that ambivalence. At first I was going to be a uh political science major, then I was going to be a religion major, then I became an English major. But the guy who opened up the theater for me was Michael Moriarty, who was a really famous actor. He was my roommate in my senior year. Absolutely. But he wrote a one-act play. Dartmouth was it was all boy school dreaming. He was famous for the Dartmouth players, and he was one of them. And we had all kinds of play contests, original one act contests, fraternity contests, and where I had tried out for the swimming team, and all I saw in front of me were the prep school guys' bubbles in front of me. I didn't make the baseball team, but somehow he wrote a play for me. It was an allegory, and I played a lion who ate Christians for a living. That sort of opened up a whole other world for me where I could express the fears, the ravages, and yet the feeling of being at home on stage. That was my first one act. And I went on to do several one acts there. But Mystic did give me that sense of daring and achievement that I could achieve.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

It's interesting because you would think that having your first nine years in a big city would give you a lot of confidence and you know, worldly kind of knowledge. But it sounds like Mystic really gave you a safe place to become who you are today.

SPEAKER_02 11:30

Brooklyn Heights in 1950 in the 50s. Well, I was born in 42 in Philadelphia. My father moved to Brooklyn Heights because he was a regional attorney trial judge for the National Labor Relations Board. And we moved right into thick, a heavy political period. It was a very rough period. I can remember having to fight my way home in kindergarten because of the influx of foreign elements into Red Hook and then coming on up into the Brooklyn Heights area because that was supposedly the posh area. And I got picked on, I can remember that from the age of four until we left. So my memories at Brooklyn Heights are not good at all. I was a kid growing up and had to defend myself. So when I got domestic, it was sort of idyllic. There was no threat. You know, those were the days when nobody locked their doors. Kids were always friendly to me, but I had a sort of defensiveness about me because there I was from two to nine, feeling a sense of attack. And I brought that with me. So there was both a defensiveness and an adjustment period over the over time. And Mystic allowed that. Much more a feeling of well-being, as well as my grandfather, who was a very religious guy, although never proselytized with me. He was always he was just there, a silent sort of figure. We talked much, but he was encouraging all the time. I remember when I gave to be fifteen years old, he gave me his 1939 Buick, stick shift, with a curtain in the bag. That was my first car, and you can imagine how what a hit I was with the with the ladies. My first love was in it was in the high school. I fell in love with a beautiful blonde, and nobody could understand why she was interested in me. I I to this day I don't understand it either. She passed away several years ago, but that was my first love, at any rate. So Fitch High School was a nourishing ground for me. It didn't provide me with an excellent high school education. And believe me, when I got to Dartmouth, it took me nine hours, eight hours a day of study to catch up. The freshman year and sophomore year. I got over that hump, that learning hump. But what it did give me was the urge to succeed, that I could bring out whatever was there in me and somehow find a place in the outer world. As I look back at it, that's sort of my feeling about Mystic. And I I I return to this day. My my friends, I have two or three friends still living there. I lost one good friend that I grew up with who was went to Stuntington High School, who was on the other side of the bridge. But his father sort of adopted me, Tommy Law. His father, when I started to play Little League Baseball, he understood that I was a kid without a father. And I used to caddy for him. I went with Tommy everywhere. So I had a sense of being fathered by Mystic itself.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

For everyone who's listening, Steven is our 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. And we're so honored to have you in Mystic to receive this award. And when I talked to you the first time, it was wonderful just understanding all the interesting connections we had, really because of Montague Street. And then obviously you attending Dartmouth and my father, my also my stepfather, your stories and comparing them to my father's stories and all the things that I've heard about Dartmouth.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

Sorry, my wife is not coming with me because your mother and my wife a lot in common because they slept up to Dartmouth. And you told me I think she came from the Boston area. And they slept up, it took them five hours to get to Dartmouth in those days because there were no freeways in. But so too did my wife from Boston University. Sort of she was a first-generation Russian, so she not only slept up but snuck up because her parents did not want her to date a Dartmouth guy and leave Boston. I will have if your mother attends, I will I will have something to say to her.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

She will be there.

SPEAKER_02 15:44

Great, because that brings back all kinds of memories to me. And it was just as a passing story. Later in life, when I got out of darkness for my 50th reunion, one of my classmates comes up to me with his his wife. He says, Steve, I want you to meet my wife. And I say, Hi. She says to me, Mr. Marx, you are so lucky. You're lucky that your son Gabriel, the actor, looks nothing like you. I broke off. Our son Gabriel, you know, was a past the past starved suit. I had to say that in front of all of the Dartmouth grads because I was a featured speaker at the time. Anyway, so I'm looking to forward to speaking to your mother.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Well, she's looking forward to meeting you too. I told her all about you. So you got involved in theater at Dartmouth, and then where where did you go from there?

SPEAKER_02 16:34

I got involved doing these, you know, one act plays. I with I appeared in a couple of them and I directed. For three years successfully, and my fraternity, Sigma won the Dartmouth uh fraternity contest. But the turning point came when Moriarty told me we went out as juniors in our junior summer to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. It's a funny story. I had been in one play with the Dartmouth players at that time. And I play Xerxes, who was the Persian king. The play was called by Aeschylus the Persians. And it's about the defeat of the Persian army by the Greek army at the Battle of Salamis. And Xerxes had to come home and confess to the chorus and to his mother, the Queen Mother, who nobody will know except maybe you, was the actress Blanche Jerka. Blanche Yerke played Madame Dufarge in a Tale of Two Cities in that old movie. She was a famous elder actress who was known by the head of the Dartmouth players. We used to have semi-famous people come up and play with us. Blanche came up and she played the Queen Mother, and I had one scene with her where I did nothing but wail. That was it. She would say, You came back a defeated king, and I started to wail, and I started weeping. Now my brother had come back to school, he had left school, and he played one of my servants. So he used to say to me as we walk on, Steve, if it gets too tragic, I'm going to tip in one direction. And if it's not tragic enough, if you're not wailing loud enough, I'm going to tip in the other direction. So keep your eye on me and I'll let you know. The reason that the story is meaningful, because I applied with Moriarty to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. And the audition, the tradition there was, and we're the plays that we were uh auditioning for was Romeo and Juliet Othello and Comedy of Errors. And there were open auditions. All of the actors and actresses had to do a monologue. And I only knew how to wail. And before the collected company and all the directors, I wailed my toothis off. And at the end of it, I finished silence. I think I heard a little twit out in the audience. I walked off. The next day, the casting came out, and Gordon Wickstrom, who was the director of Romeo, stood up and said, Stephen Mott, you are my Romeo in front of everybody. He says, a guy who can wail like that has the potential to be a great Romeo. And my my roommate, Michael Moriarty's face, dropped. I got the coveted role. And Gordon trained me to be able to deliver Romeo in my own ardent, initable way. As one of my friends, a great actor, where he played every bad man that you will ever see, and he's passed away five, six years ago. His name was William Lucking. He stood about six eight and had a face like somebody hit him in the face with a bag of needles. But he's played every bad guy. And we became very friendly. I did a uh it was called the Big Hawaii when I first got out here. And I would say to him, Willie, why did you become an actor? Tell me, why'd you become an actor? So he just looked at me with a deadpan face and he'd say, Because some asshole clapped. And that was the beginning reason I became an actor. To learn how to burnish that off and actually find a trade took a long period of time. I was 20, and you can imagine that sense of boy, I thought I had come home. So that was a pivotal thing that happened. After that, at Dartmouth, I played a major role in a play called uh Dan Tom's Death by Bichner. And it opened the first Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, a new center, and a man who became pivotal in my life and who really established the Juilliard School, not Houseman, but his name was Michel Sandini. He came to open and give the uh footnote speech. And he saw me as as um Saint-Just, the killer in the French Revolution, in it was a play about the French Revolution. And he came back after he came back to the um dressing room and he patted me on my face and he said to me, Mr. Mark, you have a wonderful face. You don't know how to use it. I send you to England, to Landa. They'll teach you how to use it. So I got accepted on his say-so to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art out of darkness. And I got a fellowship. My mother had had breast can breast cancer. She was okay when I went, but I got about three months into it, and my brother called me and said, You have to come home. And I had gone to see Sandanini, who was a director of the Royal Shakespeare, the inner company in the experimental plays. And I said, previous to the time I had had to go home. I said, I want to stay when I finish this training. I want to come and join and be with you. He said, Stephen, you can't. You're not you are not uh Udish. You go home and plant the scene there. You learn and become an actor in the States. Anyway, my training was cut short. And I went home. I stayed with my mother for about a year until I couldn't take it anymore. I she began to wake away. And so I I I went to Boston because The gal I had fallen in love with, and just to step back, we had we had gone to a party that night in front of Sandanin, and we were sitting celebrating the opening and his speech, and he looked at me and he said, Who is this young lady? This is when my wife had dared her mother and snuck up to Dartmouth for that weekend. And we went to this party and he said, Who is this young lady? I said, This is my date. He looked at me and he said, You should marry her. Two years later, 1964, after doing some work at the Boston Theater Company, the Hartford Stage Company, and going to New York and not being able to get anywhere at all. And remember, I thought I was going to get a stage manager role. I had asked for $15 a week. And they said, okay, uh, come Monday, we'll pay you. So when I appeared, the stage manager came out and he said, Look, Stephen, I'm sorry we found somebody who was going to do it for nothing.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 22:58

I'm not. I am not going to stay in New York and do this. I can't eat. And my mother was passing away. I decided then and there to go back to graduate school. I talked with my wife Debine. I got a fellowship in playwriting at Tufts, and we were married in the cancer ward in front of my mother. She passed away two weeks later, and we went to Tufts. I was on a full grant. I did it in two summers and a year. I finished the MFA in playwriting. I wrote a play. And then I directed a lot of plays. I applied to Yale, and I was accepted in directing, but they wouldn't give me any money. As at Indiana University, my mentor at Dartmouth had told me go get in MA and a PhD. And then he said the only place to get a PhD would be Indiana University because they have the wick of all the big academic scholars. And I think I can help you get a fellowship. And I got a fellowship. To act on the weekend at all the, you know, the Indiana State schools. So a company had been formed, and we left on a Thursday night and performed Friday, Saturday, and came back Sunday. So for my assistantship and halftime study, I did that for a year. We went to Indiana with a baby who had just been born, our oldest now, Julie, who was 60 years old. After a year, my wife said, This is not working for me, and you got a did off the road. So I taught. I got an assistantship and taught acting. Then went back to finally finished the PhD, went back to England to write my dissertation. And when my first job was at Smith College as head of the acting department. And then my old tutor in England became the chairman of the Department of Drama at Queen's College. And he offered me a job to teach 8 to 10 and hustle in New York. He said, I know you want to be an actor and you got a PhD, and I want you to teach the introductory courses and hustle and build a career, because that's what you want to do. And he accepted every role I got off Broadway Broadway as my tenure track. Until I took over in a play called When You Coming Back, Red Rider off Broadway. I took over for Kevin Conway, who I think won an award for that, and a young director for the songing in that and offered me all the lead roles at Stratched Ontario Shakespeare Festival in 1977. And I was scouted off that stage, primarily for having played Proctor in the Crucible. And I was scouted by a Universal Scout and offered a Boynier non-exclusive dudo to come to Los Angeles and begin my career as a full-time actor. And my friend, the head of the department, said, You earned it, go. If it doesn't work out, I'll have a job for you. And my career took off in 1976 because I was successful under the Universal Banner. And they, you know, they really helped me step by step. I was doing episodic, I was doing mini-series, doing features, and uh began to really learn what the difference between stage, TV, and film was all about. And that's where I really got so much.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

So maybe people know you for your television and film work, but you're a scholar as well.

SPEAKER_02 26:14

So Alex Singer put me on to a woman who was the head of the UCLA Extension, and I told her I want to teach her kids how to read plays. What's the difference between tragedy, comedy, and melodrama? What's the structure, how a plays built? Because that's the academic background that I got with my PhD. And those are the courses that I taught while I was at Smith's and at Queen's College. And that course was probably one of the most fundamental courses that affected the way I look at a script to find out how the playwright constructed it. How do I fit? What kind of role do I fit in either as a protagonist or an antagonist? And where are the strengths and weaknesses of the character that I'm going to play and how to flesh out both the strengths and the weaknesses because that's what tragedy is all about. Serious plays talk about how we ourselves, every individual, female, male, make errors of judgment in our lives. That's the ignition, the point of attack in any great, in any great serious play. And that error of judgment launches an action for all the characters in response and for the protagonist. And what the play is about, discovering how we become our own worst enemies. The enemies are not from outside. The enemies are from inside. That's why tragedy is difficult to write. At any rate, it allowed me to really look at scripts. And I've done a lot of horror movies. I've done episodic, but I've done serious episodic as well, to find out how I, as a character, make mistakes and then how I discover that I am responsible for it. And how I either make amends or pay for my mistakes with my life. What are the real emotional feelings that you have inside and how to translate and allow them to come out inside of a rule? Whether they be good, bad, and there's nothing indifferent.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Tell us a little bit about your family history and Mystic Connecticut and how your your family background led you to become a chaplain.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

Yeah, probably about 13, 14 years ago, I decided I wanted to do something different. And I wanted to give back to the community, to the world, in a different way than as a performer. I wanted to do something really specific. And so I went back and took an MA in Jewish studies. I wanted to be a rabbi, but because my Hebrew school skills were not good, um, I mean, mediocre. My rabbitic friend says, Stephen, you got to go to Israel and learn to be fluent in Hebrew for two years. And we know you're starting to work again as an actor. So you have to make a decision. And one of my best friends said, Look, Steve, take the MA in Jewish studies. You will become an ordained chaplain because you know now all of the rituals, and you can marry people, you can bury people, you can do um baby namings, and you create your own niche. And I did exactly that. And that sort of links back to when I was a little boy at nine, when I came to live with my grandfather. My grandfather used to get up every morning and say the morning prayers. And in fact, his what's called pretty his divening used to wake me up from my room, and I would come into the dining room where he lit two candles and he would put on what's called it to fill in his prayer show and he divened. At first it used to scare me. What's this guy doing? He never explained anything to me. But mornings I would get up and stand in the doorway and just watch him. And there was an awe that I experienced watching him do that. I did become bar mitzvah. I didn't know what I was doing. You know, I did the ritual. But what was most meaningful to me is when my grandfather was passing, I remember clenching his hand and reading him The Mornis Kaddish. He had always said to me when we would spend time together on the hammock on our porch, I'm ready to go. I've lived a good life. I'm really ready to go. And as he was dying, I clutched his hand and I read the Mornis Kaddish, of which I had no knowledge of what it was except the words. I mean, in Hebrew, I knew. And I felt his hand clutch mine. And that has remained a link, an invisible link to the other world. And I've experienced a lot of death in my life. And so I decided I wanted to do something directly for other people. My wife and I also were in a car accident where we nearly got killed, and I felt some kind of presence protect me. My wife would say, Oh, you, you always think there's something more to it than it is. And I said, Do you didn't feel that brace? She said, No, I just felt this contusion of the seatbelt. We hit a an 18-wheeler hit us on a snowy road in the middle of Kansas as we were going to see my son at uh Washington University. At any rate, that was profoundly affecting me. And so I went back to take an MA in Jewish Studies. And what I discovered about myself, about the years of this guy who was running and jumping, and also had a lot of blame for other people. I discovered that I was the source of my own, and that I needed to take a look at that. And so it's been a transformative period in my life. Where I had married over a hundred couples and officiated at 125 humour bar and bots bit but mitzvah, all of my grandchildren. It wasn't until then that I began to really discover the inner processes of what I'm serving as an actor. And that's a lifelong process. That doesn't end until you're dead. So marrying those experiences as I get older in life helped me in when I played the suits role, and my son says to me, Dad, you know, I'd worked with a lot of directors. Now my first episode with me said, Dad, I'm the director. Just talk to me. You are really powerful. You don't do anything but talk. I'm gonna send you back to the makeup trail to take all the makeup off you. You don't need any makeup. You don't need to act. Truly, this is more. You are powerful influence in my mind. When you just look no and you don't even talk to me. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm 50 fucking years in this business. And my son is telling you that. I took a deep breath and I said, right? He said, So at the end of the scene, if if I want to do it over again, I'm just gonna say the words, and you'll just continue. And at the end of the scene, I was he was on me, the camera, and he said, That's been the most honest she'd been doing for a long time. And the feeling that came away was here's the son, transcendent, way transcendent the father. But look how he took care of me. When I gave up, and I can only wish that parents, any parent, feels that well-being of having been taken care of by their progeny. You just have to bring the truth of who you are in the situation as an actor. But that's a guy who was in his 70s when I did Suits, the original one. That's how much I had to learn again. So the process is never over.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

I work in film and television behind the camera as a producer and director, mostly in documentaries, but I can tell you every project I learned something new about myself, the world. It's a constant learning experience. I'm never bored.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

It's it's ever learned. The demand in any project that you do is to get really clean, to really know what you can bring and expand upon that because you examine the depth of your past experiences and bring them as if they were present right in the moment. And you know, that's why Jews read the Torah over and over again the same text every year. Because you bring more or you don't bring, and the demand is what are you what are you learning new? What about you? What about the study, the interaction between the text and you and the and the uh the other people who pray with you? What do you bring that is significant and changing, ever changing? How do you deepen your life? Not necessarily linearly, but how do you penetrate more deeply into your soul? Anyways, it's a lot of fun, it's exciting, and it's dangerous. There's a lot of stuff there that you don't want to take a look at. And I didn't. And I sooner or later had to do it.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

I wanted to hear a little bit more about your grandfather's shop.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

It was the men's shop, and I I sent you one of the uh posters that I had uh I found in his attic after he died. And it's a it's a a poster of a high-laced boot, you know, one of the old-fashioned boots, leather boot, white and black on the top, a dress boot with uh, you know, leather uh laces that says Makes Life's Walk Easy. Simon Curling. And I I remember as a kid going up, walking up Main Street, to right as the bridge opens, there are two or three stores on the seaport side, not the sound side. His store was right next to the ice cream shop, which I think is still there. And I would walk up and visit him, and he would be sitting in the back, and every once in a while he would give me a dress jacket as a as a present. I wore one in my high school picture. Anyway, it would it's a very warm feeling. When he wasn't looking, I used to go out in the back and dive off the back of the little platform there into the Mystic River. And that was at a time when you could swim in the Mystic River, or when the the ice cream shop wasn't looking, I would climb over the fence because that was closer to the bridge, and I'd dive off there, and friends would come up and, you know, in their boats, and I would swim to them. It was a daring, idyllic time for young kids. Um, and my grandfather never let on that he knew I was doing that. And if you didn't have money, he'd just let you have this with pain him back when you could. He had a wonderful reputation. He came over from Lithuania and he became a peddler. And he peddled his way from New York all the way up to Mr. Connecticut, selling men's underwear, socks, whatever it was. And I can't tell you what date it was, but he created Kurlingick's men's shop. Not only that, but he earned enough money to give my aunt, Fanny, who was my mother's older sister, money to open up a women's shop down the street. His wife was a Bendit, and the Bendits already lived there in Nystik. Bendit's uh woman's dress shop, my grandmother's sister had uh a dress shop on the corner of Gravel Street and Main Street. And across the street, my uh grandmother's um I forget how she's related, but she was a Topkin, she married a Topkin, and they had two or three stores on the other side of the street before the bridge. And he was a religious guy. He went every Friday, you're not supposed to drive, but he drove to New London, Connecticut, every Friday night, 12 or 13 miles, to go to an Orthodox synagogue. He did that. And I just knew that was happening, and I couldn't explain what what was this religion all about? Sixty-five years later, I came to discover what it was that united him every morning, saying those prayers of thanks. It became alive in me again. An interesting transformation into adulthood. It took me a little longer to begin to grow up.

SPEAKER_01 39:41

So your family's been dressing Mystic. They were making sure everyone in Mystic looked beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 39:47

Topkins had a kids' clothing store, and my grandfather sold suits and work clothes and was a you know conservative. You went to him to get formal older people suits and work clothes. That's what he he specialized in. Whereas the Topkins and the Bendits had more moder, sort of more updated stuff. Um, it's my memory of it. And and, you know, my friends, their parents all shopped at these stores, you know. And as a kid growing up, I I didn't know what a wellspring of comfort juxtaposed to what I had been through in New York, what that was. But I'm able to talk about it now with you to really take a look back and say, what was what was it in Mystic Gave?

SPEAKER_01 40:35

Thanks for your time today. And again, looking forward to seeing you in Mystic and spending some time with you over the weekend.

SPEAKER_02 40:44

I look forward to it all and giving you a hug to me.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

So, what did you think, Alec? So, man, that was so interesting. Hearing in his words how Mystic was, I truly enjoyed because it's one of the coolest things that I find is like when we're walking around here downtown, it's like the community here has changed, but it really hasn't changed. To hear it through his eyes of how Mystic used to be was just a it was a thrill. And of course, now to to honor his success uh has been a real, real pleasure. So it was very cool. It was great. It was great. Thank you for conducting that interview. That was awesome. If you guys have stories that you'd love to share, and I know you do, please contact us through info at Mysticmash Podcast.com or send us a message through social media.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

Thank you so much for tuning in to the first episode of the Mystic Mash Podcast, and we look forward to having you here again.