Samson Trules Tumbles the Pillars of his Life

Divorce Chronicles #1

Jul 04, 2025

Back in midlife, long before I moved to Santa Fe, I had three reliable pillars that, for decades, supported and held up my LA life: my job, my home, and my marriage.

My job, as many of you know, was teaching theater (improvisation and solo performance) at the prestigious and scandal-prone University of Southern California (USC), the largest private employer in southern CA. I never imagined or even applied for the job. It came to me, as much as my life has, by accident and incident, when playwright Rick Toscan, whose play reading I directed at a small Hollywood theater, became Dean of USC’s School of Theater and offered me a job teaching improv at the School in 1986. I had never taught theater games or improvisation in my life, but I had improvised and taught for much of my previous modern dance and clown careers, as well as improvised for much of my “real life”, so… I jumped on “The Train of Opportunity”, took the job, and years later, I did a TEDx/Fulbright Talk of the same name, singing the praises of the unplanned creative life.

“My home”, which I’ve also written about on Substack, was never really “mine” at all. It was a beautiful 3-bedroom, red bougainvillea-white stucco house, sitting on stilts, with a view of the Pacific Ocean, the Hollywood sign, and the San Gabriel Mountains, looking down at Charlie Chaplin’s first studio in “Edendale”, before it became known as “Echo Park”, the former onclave of gang-bangers, artists, and socialists, until soon after I moved there in 1993, when it was well on its way to becoming one of the hippest and most gentrified neighborhoods in America. (I wrote about it on the Huffington Post.) I was a very happy camper renting the house for 30 years, subletting the downstairs knotty-pine den as an Airbnb - until my once-friendly and kind landlady found out and became the Wicked Witch of East Hollywood.

My marriage, my third pillar, which I’ve also written about on the Huffington Post, took place on Valentine’s Day, 2003, two and a half years after I first met Surya, my wife-to-be, by serendipitously asking for directions in front of a random ATM in Kuta Beach, Bali, Indonesia, in June of 2000, after which I brought her to LA from Sumatra just before 9/11 on August 3, 2001. It was an odd match, to say the least. She didn’t speak more than ten words of English, and I mostly communicated with her in my best clown pantomime for the early part of our relationship, as she grew roots in Los Angeles, learned English, got her first job as a bartender on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood at a funky Thai bar, and then steadfastly worked her way up LA’s hospitality ladder, working for Wolfgang Puck, at the Oscars, the Emmys, and for all kinds of Top Chefs.

But Samson? C’mon, Trules!

Well, I had my first and only “Bible study course” - by comic book! True. It was a big, thick animated book full of all the Old Testament stories, which I gobbled up like honey, sitting on the clean shaggy carpet of my yellow and red-painted, cowboy-muraled bedroom, in suburban 1950s Westbury, New York.

Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, the Tower of Babel, Daniel in the Lion’s den, Jonah swallowed by the whale, Moses and the burning bush, the Ten Commandments and 10 Plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, and… Samson pushing down the pillars of the Philistines’ godless palace.

As I spread my fledgling wings and escaped my family’s and tribe’s childhood expectations, I grew my hair lonnng, joined the countercultural revolution, and became an artist/modern dancer in the Windy City of Chicago. In fact, I became completely identified with my long, curly-locked “Jewfro” - from my early 20s until perhaps my early 50s - when my Korean artist-Delilah-girlfriend seduced and convinced me to shear my locks because she preferred the shaved head of Buddhist monks.

Now it’s July, 2025,

and I have no more pillars supporting or holding up my life.

The first to go was, appropriately, the oldest pillar, my job.

FYI: your boss as a faculty member at a university is the “Dean”. For the first 24 of my 31 years as a Prof at USC’s theater school, I had two great bosses. They were kind, supportive, and sensitive men who respected their faculty and treated them like true academic colleagues. In fact, my two “bosses” seemed to like and respect me so much that they basically empowered me to do whatever I wanted. They let me teach when and what I pleased, and make up my own schedule and courses, which was just about the only way I could do it, since I never legitimately studied “theater” or had any college degree other than a general BA. But apparently, I had a “knack” for it, and over three decades, I made the university thousands, if not millions, of dollars, since my courses were always fully enrolled with waiting lists.

But then, my last Dean and I - didn’t get along. At all. She was a bully and a tyrant. I could go on and on about her various crimes and misdemeanors, but let it be said that after five years of her cruel, overbearing harassment, I asked for a three year “phased retirement” from the bigwigs in USC’s lordly administration (not without giving them my specific reasons), and they granted it to me. Ironically, however, midway through my phased retirement, my Dean-boss was providentially fired (I wonder why?), and replaced by another kind, supportive, and brilliant Dean, who like me, was also a professional clown.

In any event, my retirement decision was irreversible, and down came Pillar #1, my job. In 2017.

The second to go was my home, which, as I said above, was never actually “my” home. Merely a 30-year rental.

What? You “rented” for 30 years?
Yep.

Of course, only a dumb-ass, countercultural, non-materialist dinosaur would do that, right? Well, here he is, yours Trulesly!

Once Surya joined me at “Lucretia Gardens” in 2001, she protested loudly, more and more frequently over the years,

You know that this isn’t the only house with a view, right? And you know that you don’t own the house; the landlady does. And you know you can’t stay here forever? You don’t want to get evicted like my Mom, do you? Let’s buy a house of our own that you can afford.

But as anyone who knows me can attest — I am stubborn and hard-headed.

Barbara said I could live here as long as I like.

Never trust a landlady losing her mind to brain cancer.

The rest is history, as I comically and faithfully have told in my former post.

Barbara’s daughter, sadistic Shari, who inherited the house, did, in fact, try to evict us, which led to a long, ugly, and brutal, five-year landlord-tenant battle, from which we narrowly escaped with a tenaciously attorney-negotiated, “tenant buyout”…

…which nevertheless crumbled my second sturdy LA pillar, my home.

Leaving only one pillar remaining, my marriage.

And it’s here, dear readers and friends, that I have finally worked up the courage and chutzpah - to tell you, that yes, my third and final pillar has fallen.

I’m divorced.

Sad but true. Papers signed May 28, 2025.

I know that some of you - will not like hearing this. At all. Especially after the way I’ve sung the praises of becoming a first-time husband and then a first-time father over the last 24 years.

But… what can I say?

C’est la vie.

I know that I’m not the only divorced senior citizen on the planet.

And that…

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Right?

Let’s see……

But hell, I’m an autobiographical goddam storyteller! Am I going to stop telling stories - just because they’re hard to tell?

How, you say. Why?

Well, I’ll probably be trying to answer those questions for the rest of my days.

We certainly didn’t have an easy marriage. It certainly had its unique and daunting challenges. With 31 years between us, with Surya not knowing who Richard Nixon or Bob Dylan were when she first arrived in America, age, language, and cultural differences - all eventually - just wore us both down. And apart.

And for this first post, I’ll leave it at that.

Other than to say, I haven’t lived in my own home since mid-February, and I’m now writing from Denver, Colorado, where I’m housesitting.

And that, I’ll soon hopefully be living - somewhere outside the country where I was born.