Way back in the 20th Century...1992 to be exact...my lover and I donated a much-loved sofa to the Brown Elephant resale store. They came and collected it. Then a couple of weeks later we went to see a new play called Party, and as the stage lit up, my partner and I squealed, "Oh my God, there's our sofa!" Between leaving our house and arriving at the B.E. store the sofa had embarked on a theatrical career.
That night we watched men strip naked and bounce all over our old sofa. One of those naked men...although I didn't know it at the time...was Sal Iacopelli, author of the very funny book LOVE, SALetters from a boy in The City ( Grass Stain Press ) . He's really cute and very talented ... don't you just hate people like that?
"Salvatore, it means savior," said the author, sitting on another one of my chairs; this one in my dining room circa. last week. Sal does have those Italian Catholic savior eyes; imagine staring into them over pasta at La Donna restaurant. I have an urge to photograph him as St. Sebastian...you know, the guy who took on the starring role as Dartboard to the Romans. Very sexy! Anyway ...
Iacopelli is a Chicago boy: born in Little Italy, west of the Loop, until his family moved to the western suburbs in the early '60s ... "As did they all," said Iacopelli.
As a child he wanted to be an actor: "I actually started acting in '86," he said. "I started a company with some others called the Blue Rider Theater. It was in Pilsen. We did improvisational pieces, then created plays out of the improvs. It was really wacky hippy dippy artist stuff. I did that until 1990, when I studied more traditional theater and film."
Iacopelli then did the rounds of Chicago theater, got listed with agencies, did the acting-model thing, and in 1992 he was cast in Party.
"David Zak called me and asked me to do an audition. He said it would be a nude show, and I said, 'Sure,' thinking, 'There's no way I'm doing a nude show.' The chances of me getting the part were 1/100, but I wanted David Zak to see what I could do. Never thought I'd get the part. When I finally got the call saying they wanted me to play James, the leatherman, I said, 'Absolutely. I'd love to do it.' Then I hung up the phone and had a complete panic attack.
"But it was an incredible and hard two years. We worked our asses off on Party. We had no clue it would take off the way it did. The first time we performed in front of an audience, Ted Bales and I were backstage waiting to go on, and we're both freaking out, saying, 'We're going to flop horribly, people are going to hate this.' I remember wanting to vomit I was so scared. The only thing worse than being in a flop, is being in a nude flop."
When Party left Chicago for New York, work commitments and real life kept Iacopelli here in the city. Months later he was in San Francisco. "I'd always loved it," he said, "So I moved there just to see what would happen."
What happened in San Francisco is related in the book LOVE, SALetters from a boy in The City, Sal Iacopelli's journal in letter form. "These are real letters that I wrote to friends in Chicago," explained Iacopelli. "And it was a struggle to publish them because they're very personal. I disclose a lot about myself.
"One theme that runs through the book is my relationships with people, for love, friendship, and for sex. I was heavy into S&M and got pretty involved in a daddy/boy, master/slave relationship, and also I write about my relationship with a lesbian friend and her baby."
S&M love/sex, struggles of living with HIV, downfalls, upfalls; one guy's crazy off-the-rails life story related to his friends in weekly installments.
Iacopelli is a sharp and perceptive writer, painfully honest, and one who never loses sight of the fact that there's a funny side to everything.
Asked to review his own book in one sentence, Iacopelli said: "It's funny, it's bitchy, you'll laugh, you'll cry, and your mother will hate it."
I'll go along with that.
