Characters

A Series of Fortunate Events

Ed Holmes Makes the Leap from Sub to Stage

    Fate? Chance? Ed Holmes calls it a lucky sequence of events. Whichever way you cut it, the self-proclaimed political clown, actor, mime, writer, teacher, one-time bubblehead—and a whole lot more—is grateful that an aircraft carrier, the USS Hancock, brought him to Alameda.
    The year was 1969 and he was five years into his Navy hitch. Two Pacific cruises later, in 1971, his tour of duty complete, he chose not to go back to the “gray and grim” of Cleveland, home base of his youth. “I’d fallen in love with the Bay Area. It was the light,” he says, which included the enlightened attitude.
    By then Holmes had notched seven years in the Navy, starting in the engine room of a diesel submarine, the USS Tiru (a close copy, the museum sub USS Pampanito, docks at Pier 45 in San Francisco, where Holmes is a volunteer docent). From the Tiru he was transferred to a nuclear-powered sub, the USS Aspro; and then to the Hancock.
    When drafted in 1964, he had “sidestepped the Army by joining the Navy to see the world.” Holmes, a larger-than-life bear of a man with an embracing personality, talks as expressively with his hands as with his voice, using gestures that make one think of the mimes that rivet the crowds at Bay Area tourist spots. He laughs at the cliché of the young man headed for the Navy where one could volunteer for submarines, which he did. What followed for would-be bubbleheads (as distinct from “skimmers”—those who remained on the surface) was two months at submarine school and a battery of psychological tests designed to weed out those unlikely to cope with what, on the Tiru, was up to 50 days submerged; and, on the Aspro, up to three months.
    “Those diesel subs were old, smelly, sea-going jalopies. The crew was like the Hell’s Angels—hard core, tattooed, foul-mouthed. On the nuke sub [that followed] you were like an astronaut in a lab,” he recounts. The Navy, seeing nuclear power as “the future,” had steered him into this field. “At one point I was heading for Homer Simpson–hood,” he says drolly. “You know, he works at a nuclear power plant.”
    But Holmes was no Simpson. He didn’t like the field—and he’d had enough of the military. “I learned my left wing-ism in the Navy,” he will tell you. “I saw how the Vietnam War was progressing, and my view was that it was wrong—a lie—just like this [Iraq] war.”
    So, how did Holmes get from where he came ashore—the old Alameda Naval Base—to here? Here being on the stage and behind the scenes at Rhythmix Cultural Works, where he’s as well known as artistic director and founder Janet Koike, to whom he is married.
    His story is as filled with all the twists, turns and adventure of a classic seafaring yarn; appropriate in light of Holmes’s one-person show, Subhuman: True Tales from Beneath the Sea, inspired by his time on the Tiru and scheduled to run at Rhythmix to coincide with Veterans Day.
    “The GI Bill was pretty good back in the early ’70s,” says Holmes. Laney College was offering a photography degree, and taking photos was one of his hobbies, so he enrolled. Along the way, needing a filler, he signed up for a mime and pantomime class. “Theater wasn’t on my radar,” he says. But the teacher saw talent, and Holmes knew he’d found his path.
From the start, he loved being on stage and went from Laney to Cal State Hayward, where he got a bachelor’s degree in theater; and then to Mills College for a master’s in dance. “I cheated on the physical,” he teases when I ask how a man got into Mills. In fact, they were looking for two men for the graduate dance program.
    Holmes expected his degrees would take him into teaching, “but Prop. 13 had cut money flowing into the schools and there were no jobs.”
    A lucky break, it turned out, because it steered him along less conventional paths and into an eclectic mix of activities, all focused on performance. Among other things, he did commercials. “All kinds. United Airlines. Safeway.” He became a founding member of a commedia dell’arte group doing Renaissance street theater. The group’s lucky break came when its members were chosen to play the news guys—the Permanent Press Corps—in the 1983 Oscar-winning movie The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe’s book. “They wanted the press to resemble a multi-eyed, multi-limbed beast, and we had the physical capabilities to produce that feel,” explains Holmes.
    While doing the movie, their theater group had a show running in San Francisco. “We thought we’d made it, and were getting ready to leap to the next level.” But life being what it is, “things started falling apart, and the group split up.”
    In 1986, broke and on the verge of a move to L.A., fate in the guise of an opportunity knocked. The San Francisco Mime Troupe was looking for a guy to play a CIA agent, “and I got the part.”
    Holmes joined the worker-owned collective that will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2009. “It was a perfect marriage,” he says. His inner political clown had found a perfect vehicle of expression: doing left-wing political satire. If you saw a 2006 or 2007 Mime Troupe performance, you will have seen Holmes as Dick Cheney.
    His journey to date has included a seven-year stint teaching elementary school students the history of clowns and mimes. And on a personal level, two marriages to Janet Koike. First time round, it was an elaborate Balinese affair when he joined her on a performance tour in Bali. The second time was a garden wedding in Berkeley, to formalize the marriage for her family.
    When we talk, sitting on barstools at a kitchen counter in a practice space at Rhythmix Cultural Works, the two-day run of an environmental satire Holmes wrote and directed for a small German theater company has just ended. Just one more example of his versatility and talent and the scope of his life.
    Talking about life, the East Bay has been good to Holmes. “Right now in my life,” he says, “I’m doing what I love—comedy and politics and making fun of authority; I’m living in the Bay Area, which is the best place in the U.S., and I have a wife who is my soul mate.” The sequence of fortunate events continues.
    See Ed Holmes’s evolving one-person show, Subhuman: True Tales from Beneath the Sea, at Rhythmix Cultural Works at 8 p.m. Nov 11. Check the Web site, www.rhythmix.org or call (510) 865-5060 for details of a veterans exhibition in the gallery.

—By Wanda Hennig