[OutVoice] THOMAS "BUNNY" ROLANTI

[Gordon P. Smith]

Thomas Rolanti, known to many as Bunny Lake, one third of the band
Rubberlegs, passed away last night after a long fight with liver disease. He
was 51. His friends and family will miss him tremendously.

It's hard to believe that I've known Thomas for almost 30 years. He was one
of my very first gay friends after I came out and moved to New York, in the
late '70s. Anyone who knew him knows how much he loved people and what a
total social butterfly he was. He could charm the pants off just about
anyone, and Anthony and my other straight New Jersey friends were no
exception. A lasting friendship began in 1981, when Thomas and his friend
Guy started inviting me out clubbing with them. Our first real connection
was a musical one in club Berlin, at the Reggae Lounge, where we danced all
night to amazing underground new wave music, and where Thomas introduced me
to my first love, Bob.

When Bob and I moved in together and started writing electronic music and
songs, Thomas was very interested in being part of the music-making process.
He was a budding new wave deejay, and used to play our parties, with his two
turntables on an ironing board. Bob and I both sang and played synthesizer,
and Thomas became our sound shaper and mixer, quickly becoming expert at
live signal processing. He played the digital delay like an instrument,
adding polish and excitement to our live at-home experimentations. In two
short years, thanks to his insistence on recording everything, we
accumulated a large cassette library of jams and ideas that are still being
developed into Rubberlegs songs.

Life was often tragicomically hard for Thomas, and in 1985 we experienced
his first disappearance. He was missing for almost two years, a
gut-wrenching experience for all. On his return, we had the good fortune of
another golden musical period in which we developed our sound even further,
though we still never played outside of the apartment. Bob had a dream in
which we were on tour in a big bus, with the name of the band (back then it
was the "Busy Bodies") on the side. The bus was towing a small pink caboose
with Thomas sitting inside, and on the side of his trailer was written "and
... BUNNY!" Thus Thomas became Bunny, and he appended the Lake surname in
fondness for the 1960s Otto Preminger film "Bunny Lake is Missing." In 1990,
Ms. Lake went missing again for a couple of years, and on his reappearance,
we were unable to successfully resurrect the music-making process together.
It was a difficult time. We lost friends and lovers to AIDS, including Bob
in 1995.

Thanks to Thomas's persistence, the two of us started producing Rubberlegs
songs again in early 2000. We launched our first web site and posted our
material on the internet, in memory of Bob. A couple of years later we were
inspired by new friends in Outmusic to put together our first live
performance outside of the apartment, and this began an amazing new era for
us in which we learned how to truly be a "band." Thomas knew his way around
a keyboard and could read music, but was frustrated by bad habits, ingrained
in his childhood by not-so-good teachers. In fact his very first instrument
had been the accordion (as in the Gary Larson cartoon "welcome to heaven,
here's your harp / welcome to hell, here's your accordion!"). So Thomas
became my first and only pupil, and we've spent the last few years in a
fascinating process of discovery, finding root causes of his performance
dysfunctions and ways to work around them. It sounds like therapy, and in
fact many of our discoveries triggered epiphanies in his real therapy
sessions. We both learned a tremendous amount from this
break-it-down-to-basics period, and were able to make Rubberlegs come alive
again, in an entirely new way.

Thomas suffered from recurring bouts of pathological fears, which would
cause life to come to a screeching halt every few years. And yet he managed
during his best times to put himself out there and push his boundaries, and
I feel very honored to have been allowed to help him work through
performance anxieties, so symbolic of all his fears. I know that Thomas felt
most alive when he was immersed in music, and there is no question that from
day one he has given me some of my most alive musical moments, all the more
special for being shared with him. We spoke the same language, a language
that is not often spoken or understood these days, and I've lost my musical
soul brother.

Peace,
Gordon


---------------------------------
Gordon P. Smith 
RUBBERLEGS
2006 Outmusic Award nominee for
"Outstanding New Recording Duo or Group"
 <http://www.rubberlegs.com/> http://www.rubberlegs.com
 <http://www.rubberlegs.com/> http:// <http://www.myspace.com/rubberlegs>
myspace.com/rubberlegs