It is my sad duty to note the death of Brother Blue at the age of eighty-eight.
The very heavens do shake.
He was in palmier days, the wise counselor of my mis-spent youth.
A longtime fixture in Harvard Square, a man given to dancing atop the snow piles from the great blizzard of 1978, a storyteller, a friend to drifters, derelicts and children.
Now gone.
I will never again walk thru Harvard Square without wishing most ardently that he was still out on the damn triangle island in front of Wordsworth, rappin' on Othello (or as he called the moor "Big O")....It seems like I spent all four years of high school out there listening to him.
And when it came time for him to make his one and only feature film appearance, it was a foregone conclusion that he'd play Merlin in George Romero's modern Arthurian romance Knightriders (1981).
Typecasting to be sure, but what a natural!
The last time I saw him was maybe three years ago in front of the ART, it was clear time was at last digging it's claws into him, but he was still the friendliest most enthusiastic, most approachable of men.
He had many friends and no enemies, what more can be said of a superlative storyteller?
Rest in Peace Blue, put in a good word for us on the sidewalks of the hereafter, we are gonna need it.
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