Humble Beginnings

In October of 1980, a thirty-five year old artist named Allan Bridge plastered hundreds of handbills in the streets of New York City. "Attention amateurs, professionals, CRIMINALS, blue collar, white collar: You have wronged people. It is to people that you must apologize, not the church, not the state. Get your misdeeds off your chest. Call Apology. When you call you will be alone with a tape recorder."

From the outset Bridge thought of this as a grand experiment.  He wasn’t at all sure what to expect.  But he rigged up an answering machine in his downtown loft apartment so he could record all the incoming calls.  And as his posters clearly stated, callers were warned to remain anonymous because he intended to play the calls back to the public at a place and time to be subsequently determined.

The experiment succeeded beyond Bridge’s wildest imaginings. Almost immediately the phone started ringing and it kept on ringing for the next fifteen years.   Over the course of those years, Allan recorded thousands of hours of apologies from serial killers, battered wives, rapists, thieves, men with a new disease called AIDS, shop lifters, drug addicts, soldiers grappling with their actions in Viet Nam, racists, homophobes, Katherine Hepburn impersonators, animal lovers, queers, messengers of God, hate criminals, war criminals, and countless others, all of whom poured their confessions, perversions and heartfelt declarations into Allan’s telephone confessional.

Allan himself assumed the identity of Mr. Apology - the eponymous creator and caretaker of the Apology Line -- it was a role to which he dedicated the remainder of his life and artistic career.   Like a modern day Pygmalion  he ended up becoming entrapped by his own creation, an artist compelled to pay the highest price by sacrificing himself to the maintenance of his brilliantly crafted mise-en-scène. 

The story of the Apology Line then is all of these stories rolled up into one.  It is the story of the callers and the story of Mr. Apology, and it is our collective story, because each of us has our own apologies to share.  While the Apology Line may have started out as an art experiment, it soon outstripped its downtown origins and became an expression of something much vaster, as it addressed itself to fundamental human needs and universal themes.   

In that sense, we are all heirs of Mr. Apology and this blog is where I intend to explore and explain the gift of our common inheritance from Allan.

Allan Bridge, aka Mr. Apology (1945-1995)