Actor George Gerdes once bit me on the thigh. He did not pierce the flesh but his teeth marks lingered on my skin, as I recall, for months.
I will miss him because, as widely reported in national print and digital news media, George experienced a brain aneurism on New Year’s Eve 2020. He perished on New Year’s Day. He was, like nearly all actors noted here at Supporting TV Cast, a keen, crafted talent who graced the worlds of TV, film, and stage as a staple, reassuring presence with no garish red-carpet glare. His credits are numerous. Sometimes he is tucked away in the cast, playing characters denoted as “Man #1” in the “Bubble Boy” episode of Seinfeld (1992) or as “Uddevalla Detective” in the film Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). On Broadway, he played several roles in the original cast of A Few Good Men (1989). Through the years, he made substantial guest appearances on such TV series as ER and The X-Files and he enjoyed third billing in 2020’s critically acclaimed political thriller with a sci-fi twist, The 11th Green, in which he portrays Dwight Eisenhower.
But it was the young face on the cover of his album Obituary whose teeth sunk into my leg at Carnegie Mellon University.
Some knew George as an innovative singer/songwriter in the 1970s, warming the performance platforms of intimate Greenwich Village music clubs and recording for United Artists – the aforementioned album Obituary and a second album, Son of Obituary. He holds a distinguished niche in the folk/pop culture world; after his death, an earlier quote from Joni Mitchell started recirculating in which she says of his piece “Say So What Else Is New?” that is was, “the happiest sad song I’ve ever heard.” New York Times reviewer John Rockwell in 1978 described George’s voice as an, “uncommonly sweet and penetrating tenor,” and noted that his songs, “often as not have a strong component of quirky, even crazed humor.”
That component of quirkiness is how he came to bite me. It was an in-class improvisation, framed to delve into the underlying catalysts in a scene from, of all things, Romeo and Juliet. I was exploring Juliet’s need to resist her longings; George was unmistakably exploring Romeo’s drive for contact with Juliet and his frustrations with the barriers between them. So, he lunged and bit me – an unorthodox channeling of Romeo’s love which the drama teacher immediately stopped. (In the study of acting, real emotions and sacrifice of one’s comfort zone are a must; real physical injuries, however, cross the line.) I’m certain that that unbridled creativity was the kernel that developed into a distinct balance of intuition and craftsmanship that George later brought to every role he played in his career.
I think his quiet, contained aura elicited a degree of affection from nearly everyone who ever knew George. We maintained only a diaphanous contact after graduating from CMU, with him once spelling out to me in an email, “We are fam-i-lee.” When news reached him on the west coast through a mutual friend that I, in New York City, was pregnant with my first child, the friend reported that George expressed his congratulations by saying, “Bite her on the thigh for me.”
~ FW