Memories of Mikey

By Doug Morton his lucky collaborator and musician

My great and beloved colleague, Michael Lutin, passed last year, to our deep sadness.

His writing, especially his lyrics, are brilliant, touching and pretty darn funny.

Michael Lutin (1940-2024) was a world-famous astrologer – mainly amongst astrologers, a surprisingly large and world-wide community. He rose to fame as the astrology columnist for Vanity Fair and (when they did this kind of thing) for America Airlines. The author of many books, a teacher, lecturer and counselor – he also had a huge creative gift and loved the theater.

A New Yorker in every way (except for being born in Connecticut), he brought that acrid and hilarious personality to his writings – especially his lyric writing, which IMHO, are some of the finest, most expressive, insightful and seriously funny lyrics I’ve come across. He and I had a kind of magical bond – he wrote his words musically and they sang to me. It was as if we could read each other’s minds. Together we produced several musicals that were performed for big astrology conferences – “I Was Nostradamus’ s Girlfriend”, “Alien Follies”, “What God Says Goes” and “Plutopia”, and laid plans for “The Greatest Joke Ever Told”. These were over-the-top fun and played to full houses. He somehow knew exactly what to say and when to say it. Plus, I was often reduced to breathless tears by his stream of deeply truthful humor. Over and above all of that, he came from love and a higher understanding of life, with a twist of lemon.

We managed to completely record only one full musical - "What God Says Goes". Here it is with all of Mikey's colorful, insightful narration.

I first met Michael on a love-drenched weekend in July of 1984. My wife-to-be and I were gifted with a weekend up on top of a mountain in Marin with a glimpse of San Francisco and its beautiful bay. That was significant weekend for me in so many ways. Of course, letting the glue set on a life-long happy relationship with my soulmate, then finding a book of Bill Evans transcriptions with a thoughtful, inspiring intro which opened up the world of jazz piano (a world I inhabit now), but also seeing Mikey for the first time.

I had taken a job to supplement my uneven musician's earnings at a well-known law firm called Baker & McKenzie, doing word processing. The head of that department was a women named Linda Shaw, who turned out to be one of Mikey's gal pals (he had multitudes). She had been sharing stories about him, and some of his recently published books and career news such as the Vanity Fair breakthrough, but Michael Lutin was only an interesting abtraction at that point. (BTW, I also met my wife Paula in the same word-processing department. Talk about serendipity.)

Then that fateful weekend in July, Paula and I drove down to a bank (!) in San Francisco (25th & Geary) and climbed the stairs to the 2nd floor to join a crowd listening in fascination to this elf of a man with a devilish grin and hilarious East Coast comic style lay out the principles of astrology in a very absorbable way. Paula and I were highly magnetized in our young love and clutched each other as we laughed and nodded with Michael.

Maybe he'd been told to expect me, I knew that Linda had been telling him about me and my musical experience, but the feeling of inevitablity and rightness was very present and I could "feel fate". After his talk, we made a beeline to each other. His magnetic eyes drew us in like tractor beams. We instantly connected and he basically decided to work with me then and there. I had no objection but had no idea what I was in for.

We started with his already written musical "Pluto in Scorpio" (he was perpetually fascinated by Pluto and we kept track of its progress with our musicals). I inherited most of the music from a Robert Lewinger, who I never met, and learned the music, rehearsed the singers and assembled a band. It was a wild mix of human beings to be sure. Nowhere close to the relatively smooth and relatively well-funded productions I'd experienced before. This was shoestrings and duct tape. I remember how we all piled into a van for the drive down from San Francisco to San Diego for the 1986 UAC. Something happened when we hit LA - there was that amazing purple color you get down there permeating the skies, there was a general giddiness and a bit of nervous anticipation. The van broke out in song and laughter for what seemed like an hour. We rolled into San Diego several hours later and checked out the venue (a tent) and tried to put something presentable together. We had no idea what to expect.

The evening of the performance we walked towards the tent and saw to our astonishment what seemed like a mile-long line to get in - of jovial astrologers no less. There was an electricity in the air and a bouyant, what-the-hell feeling. We started the show and pretty much as soon as Michael came on the stage we were treated to gales of laughter. He had an amazing stage charisma. I've never experienced it before - or rather I have but in different forms - this was something special. He held the audience in the palm of his hands and in the gleam of his eye. He knew how to tell a story and a joke (and that's a rare gift) - it's about timing and breathing and ups and downs and expectations and releases. He had it. This may have been his first time getting that kind of response and he was over the moon. The lovely crowd of intelligent, wise and "hip" astrologers got every nuance and it was a rip-roarer of a show. We were all happily stunned and grateful, no one more than Mikey.

The deal was sealed and Mikey and I began our creative collaboration with "I Was Nostradamus' Girlfriend" produced for the 1989 UAC conference in New Orleans. (The title itself gets laughs). It's about a New York (Brooklyn?) housewife named Goldie who gets bonked in the head and somehow travels back in time to the studio of Nostradamus. And hilarity ensues. She was not very good at history which explains Nostradamus' vague and sometimes inaccurate predictions. She makes quite a splash in that period in France but really doesn't fit in (the townspeople are a bit cranky) and she misses her TV shows, and her "Howard" (pronounced like a Brooklynite). I got to write a wide variety of music - Middle Ages / Renaissance to modern love songs - working with Michael's lovely lyrics. This was another one-night wonder. The hall was huge and magnificent and it seemed to be filled to the rafters. Again, gales of laughter and appreciation. If only these shows were more than one night - and so began a quixotic quest for a running venue (never to be satisfied, sadly). But the journey was ever the reward.

A word about our collaboration. As I describe above, we had a kind of magical relationship. Lyricists and composers that can work together well are like a great marriage. They don't get along on everything, but do in spades where it counts, they think and feel together. Mikey had a musical soul and I was pretty good with words for a musician. I would read his lyrics and immediately hear the music in them. This is not a common occurence, I can assure you. Some of the tunes seem to "appear" in final form, others required shaping but eventually came together. Mainly though we were serving the same god - enlightened entertainment. Plus, we were having a ton of fun. We would work ourselves up into blinding, breathless laughter. So funny it hurt. And there were the tender moments, the dramatic moments, the crazy hair-pulling moments - you know, theater. I don't know this for sure - but I really believe Mikey had a 3rd house Leo moon. He had such a natural gift and a lifelong desire to share it - he didn't have to work on it, it came to him. (I myself am a 4 planet, ascendant Libra - so, duh, music).

Our next project was his masterpiece - a profoundly silly and over-the-top extravaganza titled "Alien Follies". The premise was that aliens had been watching our world for many years, especially our TV broadcasts, and by way of introduction, came down to Earth (or maybe the audience was somehow transported to their world) to put on a show for us. The transmissions were a bit garbled, apparently, so we had a green Elvis and a multi-armed Marilyn Monroe. We had a hundred-husbanded "madam" and a lonely cowboy who had crashed in Roswell many years back. We had a full alien chorus and dancers and greeters - seemingly a cast of thousands. Mikey, of course, was the M.C. and was (un)dressed in the most hilarious costume. He'd constructed a inter-dimensional tube the audience passed through and there were alien table settings and even alien ushers. It played in 1992 in Washington DC and we were even covered by NPR (not sure if the story made their broadcast but the reporter sat with the band). It was another smash hit but so elaborate we both were completely drained. I don't think I'd worked harder in one weekend in my life. This was an unrepeatable spectacle that lived in Michael's memory forever. There was always another hilarious detail or incident to recall and we laughed about it for years.

Partly due to immensity of that project but also a desire to do more complex music over more than one night (and I'm guessing an issue with the venue), we decided to develop a show called "Mikey's". This premise was to invite the audience to a club called "Mikey's" for an evening of jokes and tunes. We used four professional singers and the best musicians I could find. This happened over 3 nights at the 1995 UAC held in Monterey, California. Since this is pretty close to where I live in northern California, I was also able to assemble some classical musicians for the opening ceremony and to hire and work with the singers over many weeks - as opposed to one or two chaotic rehearsals right around the show. We also recorded the musical ahead of time (please listen to the full production above, including Mikey's intros), the only time we were able to do that. I'm so glad we did because it preserved a moment in time and will give you a good sense of our creative product. Due to factors out of our control - mainly a poor location - we couldn't fit big crowds into the shows so it didn't have that giant response we were getting used to. It was still a wonderful (if exhausting) experience.

After that show, and a series of what we called "run-outs" to smaller astrology conferences where it was just Michael and me, we kind of took a break. I had become principal trumpet of an orchestra and became a home-owner and a computer programmer, that drew my focus. Michael continued to entertain UAC, including a kooky version of "Gone with the Wind" and travelled the world doing conferences.

Eventually, we came back together to develop "Plutopia" in 2008 for the UAC in Denver. This was a more political show than the others. There was a lot of talk about a fellow named Barack Obama (who got nominated in Denver, actually) but the world had started to curdle a bit. 9/11 had happened and there was a growing feeling of paranoia and fear amongst some of the population. (It now seems to have spread to a majority, to my great sadness.) The world seemed to be a lot less fun and care-free. Maybe it's just that we were growing up but one can mourn the passing of child-like innocence. In the current moment (2025) we seem to be tottering on the brink of something we were warned about many years before. In fact, I remember a session I went to at the Denver UAC where a couple astrologers were raving about the chart of Barack Obama and how he probably would serve two terms. But, they warned, beware what comes next. The "next" is here. I'm an optimist, ultimately I believe in evolution. I experience the interplay of light and dark every day. I get the yin-yang of it all. But these days I have to work hard to keep my optimism. I remind myself that we've gone through plenty of dark times and we somehow always seem to find a way through.

Anyway, back to the show. It was getting harder to work together. The music was still coming but I couldn't get a sense of an overall design of the show from Mikey. We had written songs about compulsive behavior, political radicalization, even vaccinations - along with some hopeful love songs and uplifting gospel pieces. We found some wonderful singers and musicians - it turned out to be quite a production - but no one could ever get a sense of the over-arching structure or narrative out of Mikey. He wasn't even sure himself and his room was full of scribbles and scrawls on scraps of paper. Then he got a bad cold. Compounding all this was that the hotel we were in had been sold and no one really wanted to help out an ad-hoc production of "astrology music". It got a bit gloomy. The actors were begging me to beg Mikey for lines or scene ideas. The staging people had no idea what to prepare for.

The show must go on, as they say, and 8PM on that Saturday it did. Boy, did it! The lights turned on to focus on an unmade bed with Michael in it, with scraps of paper scattered around (art mirrors life). What now, I thought? Then Mikey opened his mouth and groaned and made one of his patented comments (I truly wish I had written it down) that completely busted up the audience. I could see Mikey revive in the moment and with a devilish grin he turned to me with a kind of "told you so" shrug. We were off to the races. Every performer surpassed expectations and the show went seamlessly - an improvisation that felt written. Everything worked! The star, of course, was Mikey - who pulled humor and truth out of the clouds (or maybe from under the bed) and surprised even himself. Another smash! But this was a bit too much for me. I'm a planner and a methodical executor. Mikey works off crisis and climax and in the moment.

That turned out to be our last live show, but we connected regularly even after that, often discussing Mikey's next hare-brained and wildly impractical ideas (that sometimes became reality). However, he also had that mystical healer's gift of being in the right place at the right time with just the right medicine. His sensitivity was astonishing, esp. considering his love of sex jokes. He also had a most amazing ability to sum up a very complex concept (or personality) with a visual - a mental picture - or a perfect turn of phrase. It was uncanny.

He continued his work and we continued to make promises to do some more together but he started declining in health. He had a stroke and a fall and was never the same after that. I visited him in 2023 in NYC but he was frail and weak and I knew our arc had completed. We had a last conversation in the Fall of 2024 when we agreed that it would make no sense to try to put on a production in Australia for 7 astrologers, but he still had dreams and wanted to plan for the upcoming UAC. Maybe we'd finally produce the long-(un)awaited "The Greatest Joke Ever Told". Or some show at some off-off-off-Broadway sliver of a venue in NYC. He never ceased to love the show world and especially making people laugh and cry. It was ambrosia to him.

And he was ambrosia to me. God bless, Mikey.

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Plot Synopsis
Dates
Collaborators
Picture gallery
Final thoughts
My chart and me