Michelle Williams & Sam Rockwell as Gwen and Bob in the FX series Fosse/Verdon
stayed in the theater for six or eight weeks.
And he was that German guy that I kept
looking at - and I was the American girl
that he kept looking at. And it is actu-
ally a sweet story. There was an internal
courtyard to get to the backstage door of
the theater. And he and I had been sort
of eyeballing each other, looking at each
other for a couple of weeks. And so he
was walking into the backstage door, and
he opened the door to walk in and he
turned, looked over his shoulder and saw
me. I was quite far away from him, but he
decided to hold the door open for me. But
it was too far of a distance to really hold
the door open for me. So he was standing
there, and he started to blush. And I’m
trying to, like, run - so he doesn’t have
to hold it for as long, but I didn’t want to
run - because that’s not cool. Because I was
really cool with my motorcycle boots and
my leather jacket with fringe. And so he
holds the door open for me, we get into the
theater, he heads down to the stagehand
area, and I head upstairs to the dressing
room. And we turn and look at each other
over the railing of the stairwell. And I said,
“Do you speak English?” and he goes
42 VERMONT MAGAZINE
“Enough.” I said, “Good” - and that was it.
We have three kids! Yeah, so he looked like
the bad boy. And he was just a marshmal-
low sweetheart inside, but he looked like
Axl Rose.
Sherman: So how did you get to Vermont?
Fosse: Andy and I lived in New York City.
He was a stagehand at Lincoln Center. Our
first child was two years old. We decided
that we weren’t spending enough time to-
gether as a family. And we went out to my
mother’s house on Quogue, Long Island,
and spent the summer out there. He col-
lected unemployment, and I was being the
mom - and we got a Newfoundland puppy.
We just spent the summer being together.
When we moved back into the city after
that summer, he switched his job. He was
no longer a stagehand. He worked at, what
was then called, “Scandinavian Ski Shop”
in the city, because he had been a big skier
when he grew up in Germany. And so he
did boots and bindings and all that stuff.
And that was the preparation to leave New
York and come someplace to northern
New England. We didn’t know where yet.
But he was certified to tune and fix all the
different brands of skis, makers of skis,
and snowboards. So that was prepara-
tion to move up north. And then we just
started experimenting. We would jump in
the car and pick a place. I was doing a lot
of research. You know, there was no real
computer research then. So I had maps
and encyclopedias and phone books. I was
learning about, you know, the politics and
the demographics of different areas. And
we chose Vermont, because the little ski
towns reminded him of little ski villages in
the Alps. It was still accessible to New York
and Boston, so we didn’t feel disconnected
from the places that we knew and where
family and friends were. We wanted to see
the mountains and the clouds and the deer
and the trees. And we liked the politics.
We liked the recycling. This was before ev-
erybody was recycling. And Vermont was
ahead of the curve on a lot of things. We
just liked it here. So we started coming up
to different areas of Vermont and checking
it out. And we ended up here. It’ll be 25
years, this coming spring.