I am an autodidact who comes from a prominent family of academics. My great grandfather was John Dewey, “a major voice of progressive education and liberalism.” My grandfather’s brother, Daniel Frost Comstock, was a member of the faculty at MIT in theoretical physics, and invented Technicolor. I was given the middle name Barr after Stringfellow Barr (my father’s favorite cousin). Barr was a historian, author, and president of St. John's College where he, together with Scott Buchanan, instituted the Great Books curriculum. My maternal grandmother was the Headmistress at Deerfield Academy, one of the oldest prep schools in the country.
My father, Alex Barr Comstock (who was teased as a child for being a smart aleck) chose to go by his middle name, Barr. He was sent to Browne & Nichols School and went on to Harvard University where he graduated in 1940 with John F. Kennedy. During the war, he served as a Lieutenant in the US Navy.
It was the hope of my parents that I would follow in the family footsteps, and make something of myself; maybe even become a Rhodes Scholar like my namesake. I attended St. Edmund’s Academy in Pittsburgh, and the North Shore Country Day School when my father was transferred to Winnetka in 1956.
As fate would have it, I was not cut out for academic success. I suffered a brain injury as a 4 year old that resulted in mild aphasia, a language disorder that make it difficult to communicate through speech. After the injury, I started stuttering and developed dyslexia. I had trouble paying attention in school, and became the class clown. I recall being sent out to the hallway by my 4th grade teacher nearly every day for being disruptive. I assume the reason I was not kicked out of the school was because the Headmaster, Nathaniel French, was a family relation. Eventually, I was expelled in 1968 for hooliganism, and sent to New Trier West, a public school, where I graduated the following year. My SAT and ACT scores were so low that I was not accepted into a university. No career path lay before me, especially one requiring language skills. Luckily, 1969 was the year the Selective Service started the draft lottery, and I drew a very high number. I was not sent to Viet Nam as I feared.
It was around this time that I read King Lear for the first time in Shakespeare The Complete Works edited by G. B. Harrison, —not as an assignment for school, but out of primal curiosity. Reading it was a road to Damascus experience for me. I was struck by a vision of the play that looked nothing like the one in Harrison’s edition. It was so palpable and real, I believed that I had been contacted by Shakespeare himself, and sent on a divine mission to restore the play back to its original form. It became an idée fixe, and I could think of nothing else.
I immediately began researching the publishing history of Lear, and the methods used by Shakespeare’s editors in establishing the narrative. The internet did not exist until 1983, and textual scholarship was limited to college libraries. I moved from my family’s home into an apartment in Evanston, within walking distance to the spanking new library at Northwestern University, where I did all of my early research. My father gave me a fancy IBM Executive typewriter from his office, and I fastidiously typed up the version of the play I saw in my revelation. I mention the divinatory beginnings of this edition because the question of how knowledge is come by is the main philosophical subject of the play.
I moved to New York City in 1977, and worked with Michael Moriarty's Shakespeare Company “Potter's Field.” By March 22, 1979, I had become so manic that a friend took me to AA. After a few years of constantly attending meetings, my obsession with Lear began to dissipate. I enrolled at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1982 as an adult student and then transferred to NYU | Tisch School of the Arts . From 1990-92 I produced Channel 69 with Linda Simpson, a weekly television series on Manhattan Cable Television featuring live drag shows from The Pyramid Club. In the Fall of 1992, I produced the lesbian dance festival Turn Out, which Jennifer Dunning citer as one of the year's best. It was in that year that I shot the video Soup of Evening, which showed the horror of AIDS in NYC in the early 90s. A few years later I produced Sons of Hercules with MGM Archivist John Kirk. It was presented at gay film festivals around the world. “These mincing musclequeens might as well be Hercules’ daughters!”
In the hope of developing our Sword and Sandal presentation into a feature documentary, I moved to California in February 2000, where I co-founded the now defunct website graphicmuscle.com with Mickey Hargitay and Gordon Mitchell. I was later hired as staff photographer for commercial bodybuilding magazines Iron Man Magazine, FLEX, and Muscular Development. I retired in 2016, and resumed work on Lear.
