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The Eleventh Hour graphic and show opener.

Host Lipsyte cuts away to The Wedding Factory in the New York Municipal Building.

A couple, shot from behind, heading toward the Marriage Chapel. Woman wears a black coat and short bridal veil (hat), followed by another female

Cut to hand signing a document (certificate of marriage supposedly)

Close up hands holding bouquet of white and yellow flowers.

Close up young Asian Couple, female turns and gives the male a little smack on the face

Montage of var happy multi ethnic couples getting married nor united in simple ceremony , woman dressed in lace , older African American couple, young African American couple-woman wearing beautiful white jacket and skirt

Teresa Dorry, Marriage Officiant speaking with unseen unknown interviewer about the marriage ceremony.

Talking heads African American couple (woman dressed in white with ring of flowers on her head, bridegroom dressed in suit with bowtie and flower in lapel) sitting talking about getting married - groom telling bride he loves her and they kiss.

Talking heads young white couple, male groom talking with bride about how the ceremony doesn't make a difference, bride does not agree, but they laugh

Talking heads happy African American couple talking with unseen interviewer about settling down, the responsibility of being "tied down".

Couple embrace tightly, woman holding flowers, they hug and kiss as unseen Officiant pronounces them man and wife to the Elvis tune "Love Me Tender"

Couple embracing tightly and kissing, unseen Officiant says, "you may kiss the bride", people clapping as they embrace

Seated African American couple, smiling, happy. Man kisses his new bride.

INTERVIEW

Ethel S. Person
Well, it matters because the people suffered dreadfully. But if you're asking me, is it better for them to have had the experience? I think for most of them, the answer is absolutely yes. That it's changed them in some way. Internally, I think people spend so much time thinking about how you overestimate the one you fall in love with that they missed the point of love, which is when you really fall in love. And it's realized it changes you. And those changes. If you look at last even long after the love has gone.

Robert Lipsyte
Well there is something really singular about love. I don't want to say narcissistic or reflecting in a mirror. But there's something singular because you're really falling in love with an image of yourself and how you want to be in how you want to reshape your emotions.

Ethel S. Person
In part, that's true, you're falling in love with an ideal, idealized image of the other and of yourself which you become better in the process. I think. I mean, I think if there's one dirty secret that we all Harbor, it isn't sex and it's not money. It's how self preoccupied we all are. So what happens when you really fall in love and put somebody else on an equal footing with you, you escape from some of that self centeredness. And I think that you feel good, that makes you feel good

Robert Lipsyte
people sense this. I mean, they know this. So we are falling in love with love.

Ethel S. Person
You're falling in love. No, you are and you aren't there are people who fall in love with love and not with the other person. But I think in realized love, there's also an acknowledgement of the reality of the other person. And that's what makes it different from totally imaginary love. I mean, somebody who just falls in love with love and doesn't know who they're falling in love with, is missing out on part of the experience.

Robert Lipsyte
Now there is a difference between love and sex. And that gets confused in our society, doesn't it?

Ethel S. Person
Oh, boy. Is there a difference? Well, everybody knows I mean, you can have sex with an innumerable number of people. Doesn't mean you fall in love. But when you fall in love, sex is changed. I think one of the distortions is that people in our society thinks that automatically love and sex go together. And I agree with you. They don't. Many people

Robert Lipsyte
I'm not so sure I said that. Did I say?

Ethel S. Person
I thought you said that, that people confuse them. But I think that historically, there's certainly lots of times when people have fallen in love and kept that as a beacon and never had sex with the person. Dante and Beatrice he met her three times and never spoke to her different era. I don't think we would like to do that with our love.

Robert Lipsyte
And yet the the depth of the long relationship and love I thought it was so interesting. There was a line in the in your book about perhaps the real idealization of love is not Romeo and Juliet, but Ma and Pa kettle.

Ethel S. Person
Oh yes, there is something wonderful about people who grow in love together. That complete naturalness. And I think sometimes the keep those moments of passion. So they still have the passion, but that absolute comfort,

Robert Lipsyte
the line that I held on to was love does more than restore, love catalyzes change. And I had this kind of image of, in a society where there are not a lot of things we can do for ourselves anymore. Pumping Iron is something that we can do to reshape our bodies. And love is something that we can reshape our souls,

Ethel S. Person
you can except you can decide to go out and pump iron, but you can't as easily go out and decide to fall in love, well you can but you may or may not be lucky that way. Because I see love as coming out of the unconscious in the way that I think all the major decisions of one's life are made. So it happens when it happens. I mean, that's part of the mystery. Part of the real mystery is why you fall in love When you do and with whom you fall in love. So it's harder to decide that you're going to. But I agree with you, I think that you're my ideal reader. That's what I that's the point I wanted to make

Robert Lipsyte
Do you any suggestions for people who want to fall in love?

Ethel S. Person
Well, they have to take certain risks, they have to open themselves to the experience. And they have to have a kind of knowledge that to get the real benefit. They can't manipulate somebody else, you have to worry less about whether you're loved and more about what you're feeling so you can ride the wave yourself. So in that sense, I think that would be the advice I would give, not to try to make someone fall in love with you which is what people so often do, but to go with your own feelings

Robert Lipsyte
and to make yourself vulnerable, totally open to somebody else.

Ethel S. Person
Absolutely vulnerable because part of the payoff of love is to be validated for who you are. And if somebody falls in love with you and they don't know who you are, you lose part of the benefit of being validated just doesn't work. You think that they fallen in love with the phony image that you've been projecting?

Robert Lipsyte
Thank you doctor person. Thank you very, very much. That was lovely.

The Eleventh Hour graphic with cartoon Cupid overlay.

In the studio, Lipsyte shot from behind sitting, listening to Christopher reading.

INTERVIEW:

Nicholas Christopher:
In your poetry current poetry, particularly with Stella is that undercurrent of danger in love? Is this love dangerous?

Nicholas Christopher
I think love when you really open up with someone with another person has to be dangerous because you're opening up things you just wouldn't elsewhere with anyone else.

Robert Lipsyte
Do you think it's worth it.

Nicholas Christopher
I think it can be often it's not that's what a lot of love poetry is about after the fact. I think of course it's worth it.

Robert Lipsyte
Yeah. Poets poets seem to be at least psychically in love all the time. I'm you're constantly pressing your own love buttons to kind of create. Do you feel that? I mean, did you feel that kind of roiling sensations of love?

Nicholas Christopher
Well, I think you're you're passionate a lot of the time if you're writing well, even if we the people around you're not particularly passionate. I mean, you're going after things inside you that are connected to love. I don't know about always being in love, ideally. Yes, but

Robert Lipsyte
Do you think a poet needs to be in love to write well of love.

Nicholas Christopher
I think it helps

Robert Lipsyte
let me put you on the spot. I've been following your poetry for some time. As you know you're one of my favorite living poets and And this seems to be a change. And of course, you know, we invest what we want in our poets, right? Stop me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be a change from that, that kind of horny seeker of love the younger man, to someone who in a little more maturity is kind of seeking a certain stability or relationship, which in some ways may be more dangerous, right than the hunt itself, right? Is Is this a maturation of the poet or of the man?

Nicholas Christopher
Well, I think the one goes with the other I think the poems I wrote in my 20s, especially my early 20s You know, you're seeking something you're pretty sure you're not going to find, but the quest is so much fun. You certainly don't want to stop and you certainly don't want to stop writing the poems. I think sure later as you get older, as your life stabilizes, perhaps you're seeking deeper things in the same kind of love. I mean, it's not shorter affairs, pursuit for the sake of pursuit, which can be wonderful

Robert Lipsyte
as a young poet with their poets that you read that you found sustenance from

Nicholas Christopher
a huge number. You know, Don Yates, I mean, just the whole in terms of love poetry, I'm thinking especially if Dunn's love poetry was very intriguing to me he hates is Shelley's Marvel's Henry King I think of poets who took love specifically the way Dunn did and connected connected it with deeper aspects of his work. You know, I mean, to answer your other question really, as you go on your your themes seem to come down to the same three or four basics love, sex, death, maybe not in that order.

Robert Lipsyte
That changes as you get over

Nicholas Christopher
that changes, death seems to move around. But when you're younger poet, they may be the themes which are coming at them from a lot of angles. As you mature. You sent her more and they become interconnected, which is what always intrigued me about done in any good love poet. I mean, his poems, death is always at the end of those poems and love is a way of staving off death. And the rich in your life, obviously, but also getting on to the other plane that a really fulfilling love entails. You know, to use the word high, it's worth it doesn't mean much anymore. But it's that kind of thing where you're a few notches above where you usually are. And that entails bringing in lots of other parts of yourself your fears. I think especially the fear of death, being connected to love in terms of my works,

Robert Lipsyte
do you think love Love was the kind of immortality at least while you're in love?

Nicholas Christopher
Yeah, I mean, it gives you It gives you perhaps that illusion and certainly physical love brings the body to its highest point so makes you feel ecstatic, rapturous, something you don't feel otherwise? Certainly through through more intellective intellectual pursuits.

Robert Lipsyte
Let me ask you, another poet wrote, to is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all

Nicholas Christopher
I agree completely. I mean, I don't see how you could even argue with to have loved and lost many times. Because one you'll never really love unless you have lost a few times. And learn something. And to not to love is I don't know I can't really imagine going through life like that.

Robert Lipsyte
Are you in love now?

Nicholas Christopher
Yes I am in love now

Robert Lipsyte
An older, wiser love.

Nicholas Christopher
Oh, I think it gets younger and Wilder all the time.

Robert Lipsyte
Really? Is that because you're a poet?

Nicholas Christopher
No, I don't think it's because I'm a poet so much as maybe I've forgotten a lot of what I learned as a poet to make it Wilder as my poetry gets more. You know, carefully modulated and gross. Other parts of me loosen their restraints a bit more than

Robert Lipsyte
what we're going to keep reading you. Thank you very much, Nicholas Christopher, fir being with us.

Clip from the movie, "Torch Song Trilogy" about the character Arnold Beckoff, a Jewish homosexual, drag queen and torch singer living in New York City in the late '70's early 80's

Interview concludes, Robert Lipsyte sitting at his desk holding a long stemmed red rose and with open box of Valentines candy, announces show and introduces himself.

Funding for the show by Announcer and overlay the Eleventh Hour graphic.