You can meet all sorts of interesting characters wandering around the internet. I was thinking about writing a post about my favorite poems (which I still may write), so I searched YouTube to see if there was any video of Tennessee Williams reading "Life Story" which is a pretty amazing poem. It's probably just as well since one should enunciate when reading poems, and Tennessee, bless his heart, tended to slur his words. I did find this treasure, Dean Schambach performing "Life Story":
Perfect, really. I like play a little game called "What's Their Story?" where I pick a stranger (or strangers) and, well, make up a story for them. So, what's Dean Schambach's story? At first I imagined Mr. Schambach to be a Southern "confirmed bachelor" who had built a career out of performing some sort of traveling one-man show about Tennessee Williams. Then, YouTube nicely suggested I watch this:
Yes, it's T.S. Eliot's "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" also interpreted very well. So, maybe not so much a Southern gentleman but a British gentleman? (By the way, who knew a sports coat with a big plaid and even bigger lapels, a bow tie, and a jaunty hat would be the perfect look for both Williams and Eliot?) Still, clearly an actor and, like many actors, a loon:
Still, what is Dean Schambach's story? Mr. Schambach has a very small internet footprint. As of this writing, the three videos above have a total of 7,771 views--respectable but hardly a viral sensation. Well, he's an actor, so I tried IMDB. Nothing there.Wikipedia? Nada. According to LinkedIn, Dean Schambach is a "driver at moo juice transport" [sic for all capitalization], so I think that might be someone else.
Finally, I found him. In Woodstock, New York, of course. He is a poet and actor, of course. Who moved to Woodstock from Greenwich Village, of course, where he hung out with Bob Dylan (or "Bobby" as he calls him). Here they are hanging out (with David Boyle) when Dylan came to Woodstock c. 1967:
Apparently, another picture of Dylan, Schambach and Boyle by Elliot Landy is so famous there's a mini-documentary about it:
Going farther back in time, Dean Schambach was a champion ski jumper. There's great footage of him in the news reel 'The Ski Trials - Where Snow is Fun'. The mystery of Dean Schambach has been solved. My search over, I was ready to move on. The best part was that I landed on the British Pathé web site where I can happily meander for hours. There's all sorts of treasures there, like this "Daring Men's Fashion Show" from 1951:
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