I'm Flying

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 7

"Only the good can give good advice.

Rebels can't."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

I just broke up with my therapist via e-mail.  Isn't that trashy?

Well, I suppose it's more avoidant than trashy.  I told him that I was discontinuing our sessions over e-mail instead of during our regularly-scheduled session on Tuesday because I'm an "errant coward and a sappy pussy", and I don't know why I said that, because he knows both of those things.  I think they're my Axis II.

Even though he keeps trying to make me listen to sandal-wearing shamans masturbating on their podcasts, that's not the reason why I'm not going to therapy anymore.  It's dollars and cents.  If it were free, like it was in college, I could probably go talk about myself once a week until my dying day, because that's the kind of humanitarian I am, but our finances are taking such a concussive hit from childcare that it is necessary to make some sacrifices.  

It's funny to think of giving up therapy as a sacrifice.  It's such a New York, Woody Allen, pedantic, East Side, Jewish, pencil-prick thing to say, but it's true.  The plain fact of the matter is that ceasing therapy will save our family $1,200 a year-- a damn sight more than shitcanning my iPhone was saving us.  That, by the way, amounted to a $240 a year savings, and, last weekend, I caved in and re-activated the iPhone.  In spite of our draining bank account, I haven't looked back on that one.  iT's niCe to have an iPhone.

Maybe I'll go back when the babies start "school" in the fall and we're actually able to save a little money.  But maybe I won't.  I don't know.  I'm feeling pretty good of late.  The Viibryd seems to be doing its thing, making pirouettes in my brain or whatever the fuck it's doing to my seratonin, I have more energy around the babies, I'm more sprightly and ridiculous.  Sure, I still think about death pretty much all the time, but I don't know that there's anything or anyone that's going to necessarily be able to help me out with that.  I think that's just kind of my thing, unfortunately.

I was thinking a lot about death this weekend, especially.  That's what happens when you go to see a high school production of "Peter Pan" on a Friday night.  One of my private acting students was in the show and I went to go support her, and also, more selfishly, to go back to Neverland.  It's a place (where dreams are born and time is never yea yea yea) where I never, ever get tired of going-- either as an audience member or as a mustache-twirling, bewigged, Captain of misery, murder and loot ("eager to kill any who says that his hook isn't cute).

"Peter Pan", for me, is the most emotionally complicated show with which I've ever been involved.  For most people, it's about never growing old and the magic of fairy dust.  For me, it's about nostalgia, love, pain, and death.  

I was cast as Captain Hook when I was in seventh grade and, not to be immodest, I rocked out in a pair of Girl Scout boots that belonged to the costume lady's daughter, a Michael Jackson wig and a handlebar mustache drawn on with eyebrow pencil.  It was the role and the show that made me and theatre shack up together in a big way.  The applause during my curtain call rained down so hard it almost made my little 12-year-old heart freeze up-- it was narcotic.  But I got brought down hard a few months after the show closed when one of the Indians, who was a close friend of mine, went to go have her wisdom teeth out.  She went into cardiac arrest during the procedure and she died.  Shellshocked, I went to her funeral with the director of "Peter Pan".  I stood in the receiving line absolutely terrified-- I had no idea what I would do or say when I got up to her parents.  When I got up to her mother, she looked at me and said, "Oh, Captain Hook-- she loved you so," and she hugged me so hard I thought we would both break.

Seventeen years went by before I got cast in "Peter Pan" again, as Captain Hook again, directed by the same woman who directed me in the show in middle school.  I called my mother and told her I was going to be playing Captain Hook once more and she said, "Oh that's wonderful, honey-- are you going to play him gay again?"  

Not one to miss a set-up, I replied, "Of course."

I suppose even someone who's not obsessed with death can't help but think even a little bit about mortality when you're playing a role as an adult that you once played as a child.  You can't help but think about how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.  I was delivering lines in exactly the same cadence as I did as a thirteen-year-old, which doesn't really say much for how I've grown as an actor.  At least my voice changed.  It was wonderful, though, I'll admit-- to be surrounded by love and wonderfully talented children and a show that I hold so very close to my heart.  Standing off-stage every night, listening to the overture, waiting for the clock to play "Tender Shepherd", and the curtain rising, wondering whether the audience would applaud for the set, waiting for Wendy and John to dance-- "playing at Mother and Father".  That's my favorite part of the show.  

On Friday night I was back in Neverland again, watching that high school production-- trying not to compare myself to the Captain Hook on the stage (he played it very dark-- sorry).  I was really taken with the vocal abilities of the girl who played Peter Pan-- an astonishingly powerful performer-- capable, competent, confident, commanding-- everything Pan needs to be.  

It wasn't until intermission when I learned that, in January, she became an orphan under horrifying circumstances-- in an instant-- a terrible, shocking, disgusting instant-- a life changed forever.  And suddenly, all the lines she spoke and the lyrics she sang in Act I were searing through my brain.  Lines about mothers and fathers and Lost Boys and Act II was an absolute blur.  I just wasn't there.  I tried to be there, but I was far, far away.  And "Peter Pan" just got a little more emotionally complicated for one more aging Captain Hook.   

I probably would have spent a good part of Tuesday talking about this to my therapist, but, instead, I'm talking to you.  And I'm okay with that, because I love you and talking to you is free and I know I have to work on not judging myself and being mindful and keeping perspective and noticing my emotions and my tendencies and making little changes and accepting and acknowledging and just being. 

I know.  

And I also know that, some day, I have to be in "Peter Pan" again.  Maybe I'll be forty, or fifty, or older, and that'll only add another layer on top of what is already there for me.  But that's alright.  Because it's not all youth, joy, and freedom, and it's not all Christmas and candy, Michael.  Sometimes you have to take your medicine, just like Father.       

Festina Lente

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 29, Verse 13

"Rich and poor are alike in this: each depends on God for light."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

I heard on the radio today some stuffed shirt talking about how, typically, young men tend to get radicalized nowadays somewhere in their early twenties, and that extremist radicalization occurs at this point not just because young men are susceptible to fanatical idealism, but because this is when young men are starting to grapple with whom they are, they're struggling with their place in the world and the meaning of it all, and they've gotten angry and frustrated by inequality and failures.

Always ahead of the game, I got radicalized at fourteen. 

These days, twenty-something men get radicalized, according to this guy on NPR, over the internet.  In 1994, there wasn't all that much internet to speak of.  I got radicalized under the hot lights of my middle school's theatre.  I needed no anti-capitalist literature or bomb-making diagrams/instructions.  At my fingertips, I held perhaps the most powerful tool I could have possibly come into contact with at that extremely sensitive and formative time in my life: the script and score of "The Pajama Game".

While the idea of 100 (seriously, there were 100 of us) pre-and-barely pubescent children running around onstage singing about how "seven-and-a-half cents doesn't buy a *HECK* of-a-lot" might just be funny enough on its own, I was cast as the comedic lead to end a bit more humor to the already extant comedy of the situation.  Vernon Hines is his name and, as his introductory song reveals, he's a "Time Study Man".  An efficiency expert.  Vernon's job at the Sleep Tite Pajama Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa was to make sure that work moved along at a reliable, consistent, brisk clip.  

Hurry up.

Hurry up.

When you're racing with the clock, and you're racing with the clock.

And the second hand doesn't understand that your fingers ache and your back may break

It's a losing race when you're racing with the, racing racing racing with the clock!

Vernon Hines is ever-present.  His well-worn clipboard clutched tightly against his chest like a baby's bankie, his pocket watch hardly ever resting inside his vest pocket.  In Act II, Hines interrupts a meeting to complain that the elevator is stuck, which, obviously, is throwing off productivity at the pajama factory.  Which Hines can't have.  During the scene, Hines is convinced to remove his trousers and model a pair of pajamas, which he grudgingly does at first, and then finds he enjoys the attention.  The comic highlight of our middle school production of the show was a wordless bit of panto where my, um, pants are removed onstage to reveal boxer shorts featuring two enormous pocket watches on them.  After I model the pajamas, which slide down to the ground, I hastily put on my pants, backwards, not realizing, and try to zip up the fly, which is behind me.  I then remove the pants again, put them on correctly, zip the fly only to catch my cuff in the zipper (which, by now, is also slowing down productivity).  I try in vain to remove the cuff from the zipper and get tossed off stage by the woman playing my character's fiancee.  And she throws my shoes at me while I'm off stage.  It was the first time I had ever done a scene and received applause on an exit, and it was drug-like.

Obviously, I'm still talking about it, and it was almost twenty years ago.

But aside from that being the moment I decided to bite into acting and not think about removing my teeth, it was also the moment that I found religion.  And it wasn't a quaint, peaceful relationship either.  It was fanatical.  Radical.  When I got cast in "The Pajama Game", I went with my father to a jewelry store.  I used $300 of my Bar Mitzvah money from the year before to buy a gold-filled antique Elgin pocket watch, which I wore, strung across my vest, in the show.  I wore it in lots of shows thereafter, too.  There were other pocket watches to come, and wristwatches, too.  There's an Ogee clock on our mantle from somewhere around the 1880s downstairs.  

Tick tock, tick tock, tempus fugit.

Tick tock, tick tock, time goes by.

Aside from the accouterments, which are almost always expensive, there was a very clear and very strange relationship with the abstraction of time.  I began, almost instantly after the close of the show, to become obsessed with it.  Controlled by it.  I walked down to the bus stop a half-an-hour early in 9th grade.  Once I could start driving, the time I would show up to school was, um, not normal.  Let's just say I sometimes beat the janitor.  And everybody else.  

And I liked that.

Instead of wasting my free time after school and rehearsals on homework, I did it the morning it was due, sitting on the floor in the hallway outside my locked homeroom.  When I was too early to access the building at all, I scribbled my history or English work on my 5-Star notebook in my car.  

And, nearly twenty years later, it hasn't gotten any better.  I wake up at 4:37 in the morning.  I'm out of the house by 5:15.  I'm at work by 5:40.  I come down to the chartroom by 5:52.  The night-shift nurses know.  They probably think to themselves, "Jesus-- this is one sick bastard."

And they're psych nurses.  They know.  And, you know what?  They're right.  I am.  I can't help it.

I mean, I can.  But I choose not to.

I choose this.  I don't know why.  Anxiety?  Fear?  Identity?  Had Vernon Hines become who I was, or wanted to be, or am today?  Can I really blame a musical from 1955 for the mess I am today?

Maybe.

I don't know.  I do know that I don't believe in God, and I don't believe in Judaism, but I do believe in time.  And I suppose that's just as well, because time is just as man-made as the 1967 Seiko 5 Automatic on my left wrist, or the Festina 17-jewel dark-blue dial Automatic that's on its way to my doorstep from Oviedo, Spain and it's just as man-made as God and Judaism, too.  I hope one day that my fanatical devotion to the 12 and the 1 and the 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 and 12 again becomes more taciturn as I grow older.  Maybe one day I'll realize that it isn't so important when I show up for things, that people won't judge me if every task isn't done just so, that everything won't come crashing to a fiery end if I show up on time as opposed to forty-five minutes early or, God forbid, on time, or Christ help us: late.  

Right.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I don't have time to think about that right now.  I have to empty the dishwasher.

One thing, though, before I go.  I did have time, while writing this, to reminisce a little bit about that production of "The Pajama Game".  Remembering that moment onstage, with my pants off in front of my parents and yours and around 500 other people howling in laughter at my Gumby legs and my clowning and my pretending to be older even than I am now-- that might have been the happiest I've ever been.  Thanks for helping me remember.  That was nice.