“He described his influential one night performance of “Life Without Grace” at New York’s Pyramid Club in a recent special issue of T, The New York Times’ style magazine: “My first loss was my partner, around the time Grace Kelly died in 1982,” Kelly says. “I made a short performance called ‘Life Without Grace,’ a kind of eulogy. The title was an intentional lure – the work wasn’t about Grace Kelly, but the painter William Schwedler. When he got sick, we were in a downward spiral for a year and a half. … When you’re at a memorial mourning the passing of a friend or lover and they’re really young, where do you put that stuff? One of my responses was to just keep working. I chose a very mournful, elegiac, orchestral piece of music … I went from area to area of the performance space, onstage and offstage. It was totally improvised, like a live prayer: ‘Do you know that people are dying?’ ” – Wicked Local