Saturday, November 27, 2021

Memoriam for Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)

 I don't know much about Sondheim. There were no high school musicals or showcases during my childhood. I knew his work was in the pantheons of great musicals but it didn't seem to be about me, anyone I knew, or my interests. It was similar to when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize and I started reading her short stories. I got them. I enjoyed them and saw their beauty, but nothing brought me back to consume Munro. Sondheim felt like someone talked about by people who went to theatre camp or that annoying date who came to NYC to make it as an actor and ended up being a legal aide who scored their lives by Sondheim references..."that was a joke from Follies...that was a pun off from the Patti Lupone and Bernadette Peters blah blah blah." Check please! As a child I watched the "Dick Tracy" movie but that didn't leave an impression on me.  

I didn't see a Sondheim musical until the 2007 movie version of "Sweeney Todd" and I think I got some of 'it": the Sondheim darkness, ambivalence, witty lyrics that seemed half-drunk with dizzy rhyme schemes and meters. Years later I saw the movie adaptation of "Into the Woods" and a recorded performance of "A Little Night Music." 

In 2017 a friend lost his Valentine's date and I got the extra ticket for the Jake Gyllenhaal led revival of "Sunday in the Park with George." That was my first live Sondheim experience. Then I flew back to LA that same year and caught a spring revival of "Merrily We Roll Along" starring Wayne Brady at the Wallis Annenberg Center. I saw recorded versions of "Gypsy." In 2020 I attended the Broadway revivals of "West Side Story" and "Company" right before the covid shutdowns.  

All in all, I've seen 4 stage revivals of Sondheim that were artistically "adventurous," and 4 recorded/movie versions of his work. It still feels like I could walk around in his music for years and never get to the end of the road. But I am grateful to continue exploring this world created by a cultural giant who left behind so many treasures. 

Friday, November 26, 2021

Making an Effort

 Some days it really hits me: everyone is doing the best that they can. That doesn't mean they're doing the things most helpful to themselves. It doesn't mean they're not self-destructing from old triggers or plagued with anxieties, or lashing out from insecurities or riddled with addictions. It just means that everyone is doing the best that they can under circumstances that are both in and outside of their control. As I was walking to tech rehearsals, a homeless man asked me for change. I gave him some. Then he paused and said 'so how was your Thanksgiving?' We talked as two people crossing paths with brief pleasantries. He was on his way somewhere. And I was on my way somewhere else.


The interaction reminded me of a friend who got hooked on drugs a few years ago. His life spiraled. Amidst this chaos he texted me to ask if I could buy him a sandwich. I told him I was in tech rehearsal (different play) but I could meet him at the sandwich shop near the corner. He walked 80 blocks down to this place...for a sandwich. I got him two and gave him some money. We talked about life. Then I had to go back to rehearsals and he had to go back to whatever he was doing. That was the last time I saw that friend. He died of a drug overdose. But I think about our last exchange and I would like to believe I did the best I could...and he did the best he could. And that's how we left things. Some times I have these brief exchanges with other people and think 'I wonder if that is my reincarnated friend....trying again.' I'll meet him the next time around on this carousel.

Saturday, November 20, 2021

Lucky

Did I know how lucky I was?

He asked me with a mixture of envy and mirth.

Yes. 

I've attended three schools where I studied writing with mostly talented young minds. Two decades later I'm one of the last people still writing. Back then the talented prospects were in the dozens. Thrivers are now in the single digits. At several points I thought of quitting. The ego tires itself out in face of bills and expectations. It felt like I was pulled back to writing several times in my life, despite the typos, despite the erratic periods of creativity, despite the doubt. 

Luck, guile, and timing were my gifts. The ability to keep saying the most honest thing possible was my uncomfortable default. It costs me friends and fair-weather relations that could have benefited me in the short-term. In the long-term, being the uncomfortable truth ranter helped to burn off the ticks and leeches. There was nobody left but other truth tellers. 

Then a TV job happens. And you're told the statistical luck of this feat. Less than 1% or some absurdly small probability...that's you. You're the less than 1%. And then one succeeds at the business of television. More tv, more money, health care, retirement funds. You can start looking around and considering the possibility of kids. But maybe the kid impetus has been burned away from all those years of truth telling. All those years of watching your friends slump into marriage and slump into parenthood, becoming weaker and blander version of themselves. All the lame postings that you liked grudgingly. Was it a grudge or was it envy? Was there some parts of me that made the feat of kids seem lame because it was not on my horizons? Who can say, at this point? 

How accurate is that truth meter? Is it weakening just a bit as one enters middle age...or are the 20-something's just really fucking irritating these days? They seem irritatingly smug, but we were probably just as smug, perhaps?

No, we didn't have social media. We didn't have that echo chamber. We pontificated in college, had those late-night debates where we fixed the problems of the world. Then we went to sleep, woke up the next day, and went to class. The bubble of perfection was burst by our daily routine. But now those late night college debates can carry on infinitely online, the bounce around and build. It is different somehow. 

But back to luck...yes, it is a small fraction of a tiny percentage point. That's my reality. It would be foolish if I didn't acknowledge that a few jobs could have ended my luck streak. A few prospects that I desired could have put me in a bad situation. 

Luck is wanting something enough to keep you going, but not wanting it so much that it blinds you. It's that 'blinding want' that's dangerous. Con artists and scammers specialize in figuring out other people's blinding wants...the desire that's so strong that the holder can't see the red flags and warning signs. Being an artists means living on that razor's edge of passion. You have to be driven enough to have some discipline. Usually that drive comes from something outside of writing that you want to convey into words. But that source of desire can't be so overwhelming that it blinds you because then you stop writing and become prey to the scammers. 

I've known several artists ruined by blinding passion. They fell victim to catastrophic relationships, bad investments, devotion to false prophets, drugs-alcohol or the desire to exist in a mind-altered state. It's amazingly simple how the same 4-5 blinding passions repeat themselves and ruin humans. It's been the same things for thousands of years. And yet every generation has to discover for themselves the error of loving too much a thing which does not love back. 

Luck is dancing on that edge of passion and not falling. Luck is meeting the right teachers and side stepping the shady ones. Luck is timing timing timing. I have been in places for reason far beyond my conscious understanding. Some times it's just a willingness to follow a gut instinct or to move the feet in a certain direction. The timing of being here, and not over there. 

Luck is mental seed planting. Luck is perception. You would think wealth was luck but plenty of people have been destroyed by money. The same with good lucks or talents. Every lucky thing can turn into a curse. Conversely every curse can be a chance encounter with a divine purpose. There was a time when I thought being fat, black, gay, asthmatic loser was a curse. Certainly no one was standing in line for these 'gifts' in a straight, white, beautiful world. These things that I saw in myself depressed me. I considered suicide for many years. I planned it out in my mind before losing my nerve and I guess that was luck too: the lack of nerve. Maybe there was a deep mental seed that knew even suicide would not be the end...that I would probably be back here in samsara. That deep awareness would certainly be the luck. 

Anyway, those things which were curses drove me inward. I skipped the parties and proms. I detested what I assumed people saw in me. I wrote about it. I wrote through it. I wrote to confess my shame to a blank page. Some of my teachers judged my writing and found it...revelatory. Messy, unrefined, filled with typos, but brutally honest. I was brutally honest because I had nothing else to hide behind. When you think about death every day, it cleans away a lot of the nice pleasantries. You skip the small talk about the weather and jump right into the mud and misery and madness of the world. And while sploshing around in this shit no one things 'how lucky I am to be in this sewer!' You just think the world is shit and maybe you can throw some of this muck onto the clean people...here take a handful of this excrement right between your eyes. 

So the curses were gifts. And the gifts that my childhood friends had -affable beauty, decency, obeying parents- were shackles to some of them. They grew up to be inexpressive gray clods with mediocre jobs. It wasn't my choosing. I was just down here in the sewer...enjoying my good fortune.

The filtration system 

Friday, November 12, 2021

Short-Term Memory Americans

 Y'all really going to go after Biden after he cut child poverty in half, expanding vaccine program so every American could have access to lifesaving medicine, got another stimulus check, expanded Obamacare, stuck to the signed agreement by previous admin and left Afghanistan after 20 yr quagmire, passed more liberal judges through the Senate than even Obama, and passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that we haven't had for 30 yrs...and did this all with a 1 vote majority in the Senate in his first 9 months. Why?

Just cause he's not all the way there in his late 70s? 3 out of the last 4 Republican presidents have been demented, dumb AF, or  insane at a Hannibal level. Biden just wants to nap and not cause the world to panic by tweeting out bullshit at 3AM. You accepted a clearly senile Reagan, dumb as rocks Dubya who got us into 2 bullshit wars on lies, and a crazy ass sexual predator whose lies helped kill 500,000 Americans while he cozied up to Nazis and Putin. And you're pissed off b/c Biden isn't Obama sharp? 

Y'all need to go back to 2019 and 2020 to refresh yourselves on what GOP leadership can do: they will repeat lies that they know will kill half a million Americans so they make Fox News happy. They will use a pandemic to give tax breaks to billionaires. They will start a vaccine program and mismanage it so badly that Americans wouldn't have had widespread access to vaccines until the fall of 2021. And they will blatantly try to steal elections and overthrow the government when they don't win. This is not a discussion of conservatives vs. liberals. This is a homicidal authoritarian party built on stoking white fears that has no interest in democracy, life or the well-being of its citizens vs...a sleepy president who sort of gets the job done. 

But go ahead and destroy the one party still operating within the rules of sanity and law b/c they aren't perfect. You'll see what happens when the insane clown posse gets back in charge and makes everyone pay for their demented anti-science, anti-climate change, anti-fact white fears platform with more death and lies...but hey, the stock market billionaires will be happy for another tax break. 

Friday, November 5, 2021

Healthcare Story

On Wednesday afternoon I buy a Fed Ex mini-cooling box. It has to be delivered by Thursday b/c there isn't  a lot of time. The box arrives Thursday. I hopped on subway and headed to a specific Duane Reade pharmacy. I requested medication and the pharmacist warned me that it needed to refrigerated immediately. I showed her the refrigerated delivery box I brought with me and she shook her head like 'this is too much.' Ripping open the packaging, I pressed the start button on the box which gives us a 48 hr window of cooling. I take out the cooling system, shove in medication inside, repack box. Then I ran to a nearby Fed Ex. Fed Ex worker was a bit freaked out and didn't want to help ship an active box until I repeatedly show him the label on the side of the box which clearly read 'Fed Ex...this is you...this is literally the box your company makes. You have to deliver this.' The box costs $100 and shipping the box within its cooling window costs another $100. The box is shipped off to a friend in rural America who is taking care of their parents. The insurance, prescriptions, and loopholes mean that they can't transfer prescriptions. The medication runs out by Friday (today). 

As I run around town my limp returns. Some times on cold days it returns to me. Eleven years ago I fell down a flight of stairs. I didn't have health insurance. You just walk that shit off. I finally paid to go to Urgent Care Center. The doctor spent 45 seconds with me. He looked at my leg and said 'you need surgery.' That'll be $125 please. I went to a doctor who repeatedly kept thinking I wanted plastic surgery. I finally broke down and went doctor said you have to get a scan of the leg. I got the scan, followed up, nothing. The test results disappeared. I'm told to repeat all the steps over again starting off with the doctor who is itching to give you some plastic surgery. I paid out of pocket for acupuncture. it's the only thing accessible to me and affordable at the time. I went to training center in Florida for acupuncture students because it's even cheaper to have someone experiment on you. The acupuncture helped a lot...but I still walk with a limp some times while running around New York City to deliver medication to a friend in rural America. I go back to an acupuncturist today.

EVIL endings

 Evil: 2nd to last ep of the entire series. This morning in Bucaramanga I woke up and cut some fresh fruit and had a delicious changua, whic...