Chewing the Fat

Editor's Note: The following is expanded from a recent, personal email exchange that triggered some specifying thought on my part. I've left it in direct-address form because it's a personal subject, and I believe it will resonate with many more people than I may even have in mind.

You're not fat.

The trouble with the word "fat" is that it inevitably implies certain things about lifestyle, be it laziness, genetic permanence, social status or what-have-you. It's self-limiting, even when said with loving kindness. So, while some may insist it's just bluntly accurate, to my mind the word is way too laden with bias and implication (not to mention far too unspecific) to be of much use as a description. Heck: it's not even a description - it's a state of being, reducing a person to just the actual, biological element: fat.

I have seen things (I have seen such things!!!) in Italy that have convinced me that the difference between a hot person and an ugly one has way more to do with carriage and knowing yourself than it does with fitting a so-called standard of beauty. My personal adviser in all things Italian used to tell me this - that the Italians just knew how to carry themselves - and I assumed he was simply enamored of them in general (and so he is). But once I went there myself, I saw what he meant.

The old, the infirm, the pre-adolescent - nearly everyone there seemed to look me straight in the eye, and present themselves with a complete lack of shame. Even when we say "lack of shame" here in the U.S. of A., we're implying shamelessness. As in - that's a bad thing. Why do we value shame {ahemPuritans} {ahem1950s} {ahemFEARBASEDOBEDIENCE}? Shame is very ugly and insidious. It's a message too many of us carry around and broadcast: Do not give me what I want; I am unworthy; anything good I receive is a miracle. Ugh. Presenting it as a virtue is one efficacied-up thing about this country, for sure.

Photo by THIS GUY HERE.

The Italians (generalizing here, I realize, but:) The Italians somehow learn to work what they've got, to believe that there are people who will want what they've got, and perhaps they'll never find those people if they don't put it out there all the time. Not showily, and not with tremendous effort - just as a way of being. You don't walk into a room. You WALK INTO a room. A public square isn't something to be gotten across. It's someplace YOU are CROSSING.

We way-Westerners reduce this to saying that sex appeal is about confidence, but that doesn't cover it. A) It's not just confidence, but a larger perspective, and B) it's not only sex appeal! That's just what we put on it! It's bearing, man. It's your moment-to-moment engagement and communication with the world at large.

This is a radical idea for me, in spite of what people who've only known me in my adult life may assume. Sure, maybe a positive attitude and outgoing approach should be easier for me, with my hair/weight/sex/uality. But it isn't. And it isn't easy in part because I can still feel my 14-year-old belly folding around my jeans waist, or rubbing against my gym shirt during "running" the mile, as though it was this morning. The abject shame of that lives, one of those insidious ideas that once imagined can't be entirely eradicated. Should I just get over myself? Yes. Sure I should. I'd love to. And in some moments, I do, and those are awesome moments.

Perhaps the idea would seem less radical, or my feelings would be less inextricably entwined, if it was only the angst of my youth that gave me my perspective. Maybe if it had only been that elementary-aged kid following me as I walked home from high school, daring me to respond by laying every fatness adjective across my soft back that he could think of, maybe if the bullying was all, then I could embrace this release of shame after all. But I also have a mother, who has struggled with herself over her weight her entire life. Who, in photos from her youth was certainly somewhat full-figured, but also beautiful. Who sacrificed her body utterly for the sake of bringing me and my sister into the world, and never gave up trying to "improve" that body afterward through senseless diets. Who detached from her body, and its sensations and responses, so thoroughly that she was amazed in middle age to discover that it had some important information to communicate with her brain about her mood, and her health, and her overall being.

Now too I have watched my wife throw her body on the circumstance of motherhood, watched it transform itself and be wrenched about by doctors, watch it knitting itself back together and watch her work at accepting where it is, where she wants it to be, and where it may not be able to go. I see much more work and will, not to mention intelligence, go into those transformations than ever I was capable of in my small struggles. And I see the grief endured by both women that I love more than almost any other, as the rest of the world casually maligns them, assuming a standard imposed on it by wish fulfillment and power fantasies. People will call them by this word, "fat." I see this, and I see my baby daughter, and I want so much to be so different. Right away, right now.

Maybe we'll all just move to Italy once our lease is up. Ci vediamo!

Found here, which is just...wow.

So, where does that leave you and I, in our wonderings about body image and making sexy duck faces in Facebook photos? I take all that baggage and the stunning Mediterranean example, and just try to present myself with a little pride, while keeping my self-perception as accurate as possible. That's not the same thing as our "Italian" ideal, but it's the closest I can come so far. When we were in our circus days, training regularly, I used to comfort myself with regard to my physique with the mantra, "It's not about how you look, but what you can do." As I've gotten older, that's no less true, but frustrating at times - because age, dang it, makes me have to work harder to be able to do the same things.

So my suggestion is that you boost what you already occasionally do, depending on circumstances - take an unapologetic approach to presenting yourself to people day-to-day. In fact, I think that's the concerning part for me - hearing you fret over anyone else's perception. Try to let go of your concern about how some one person preconceives your physique. Own it. Focus on your attributes positively, sans B.S. You can't do a thing about what this or any person likes. Like yourself.

Sometimes that's about losing some weight or gaining some strength, so you feel good. But it's always about how you feel, and perceive yourself.

Today

I've been waiting for you. We've been waiting for you, of course, for months, weeks and weeks and with rampant research, speculation and apprehensive love. But I've been waiting for you too. I've wondered about you most of my life, imagined you in a thousand ways and continually checked in with myself about whether I'm ready for you. I can't wait to meet you. Literally - I'm failing at waiting, which feels awkward as all hell, given that there's close-to-nothing I can do to speed your arrival. And today's the day.

Well. Today isn't actually the day. Not necessarily. I've made a lot of jokes in discussing your arrival - jokes about being punctual and taking after your parents, and jokes about you getting an early start on your teenage rebellion. (Ok, so really: Two jokes. But I've made them many, many times now.) In actuality, today is just another today. I've gone to work. Your mother's working at home - lucky her - and it's a rather beautiful summer day in New York.

Tomorrow they're predicting storms and a heat index of 103°. So we also expect you exactly then.

Here is another line I've laid out a lot with regards to the experience of you: Childbirth is an ongoing lesson in unpredictability. And: ...And probably will for the next eighteen years. As in: "She's making her mom really nauseous tonight...and probably will for the next eighteen years." We've had to learn a lot about flexibility of expectations over the past several months, from when we yelped in surprise upon hearing you were a girl (subliminally and separately, we had decided otherwise) to our uncertainty about how much room we thought we made in the apartment, versus how much stuff we drove up from the baby shower.

So all I can really do is ask. Throw myself on the mercy of my daughter. Please come out soon. I'm dying to meet you.

I've never really considered it before, but I knew I wanted to meet you before I knew much else that I wanted, before even I was aware that I wanted to act. It didn't take me long, either, to realize that I wanted this for myself; not for the expectations of my family or society, for example. So for nearly my entire life, I've pondered you, hoped for you, imagined you. You've been some pretty wild permutations of a person in my mind over the years, let me tell you. That narrows somewhat once you actually find the mother of your child, but I'm certain you'll still surprise us somehow. Like, as in, say, just for example: By starting this entrance-to-the-world thing right on time.

Some things you should know about me up front:

• I'm bad with planning, math, organized sports, making the bed and colors. (Your mother more than makes up for the first one and the last two, at least.)
• I'm decent with words, emotions, imagination and organization. (So's your mom, but somehow in almost opposite ways.)
• I'm the one who cooks. I've no reason to expect this to change within my lifetime.
• I am a very deep sleeper, and very irrational when I get much fewer than seven hours. So: apologies in advance for my personality during at least the first two years of your life.
• I'm a performer, try as I might to occasionally fight it. My best hope is that we can take turns as audience for one another.
• I am, rather by default, rather high-strung - but I have developed numerous feints and coping mechanisms over the years!
• None of those feints or coping mechanisms are working for me today.

So you can count all that as fair warning. I am sure you will have your fair share of quirks and idiosyncrasies to share. Hopefully you will not have inherited too many of mine ... though actually, go ahead and take the sleeping thing. That's good for all concerned, ultimately.

As my day ticks on, I come more and more to accept the notion that perhaps after all I will not meet you in a matter of hours. You'll learn that as you mature, that awful skill of dampening your hopes and excitement a little at a time to avoid cataclysmic crashes of disappointment. Just remember that the hope is always there, no matter how successful a dampener you may prove to be. The excitement is up to you to protect, so don't get carried away.

Today there's little danger of my over-diluting the excitement. The promise of you is too great, too inevitable. So I'll wait. And you'll arrive. If not today, then the next today.

Tiny Black Specks

Ed.: This was supposed to post on Halloween this year as a companion piece to Pavarti's post of the same story from another perspective. Alas, I was too occupied with more important writing-related work (I'll get no arguments from Pavarti) to finish it, so I'm clocking it in late. Sorry, super-fans!

Photo by "Murfomurf."

Even as the seeds of our relationship's destruction were being sown, my first love saved my life.

Let me back up a bit.

I got sick a lot as a kid. I have to some extent been a method actor all my life, which is to say that I've felt that believing the circumstances wholly is the best way to a convincing performance. A healthy dose of masochism doesn't hurt either. Odds are that about half the sick days I took in high school were more like anxiety days, or self-flagellation days. Still, I believed them, even without that important DefCon 1 of childhood illness: the antibiotic.

You knew if you actually went to the doctor, and the doctor actually prescribed something, then you were sick, real and true. In the autumn of my senior year of high school there was a lot going on, and I really did get sick. I was put on just such an antibiotic, and deemed therefore fit for society once more. I was glad for that, since the day was a holiday, and my favorite one at that. On Halloween Day, 1994 - a Monday, as it is this year - I returned to school, fortified and ready for all the excitement once more.

The thing I will always remember are the tiny black specks.

It could have been caused by anything. My mom always gave us a double-dose of whatever antibiotic we were prescribed right away, to jump-start the blood levels. I could, in fact, be allergic to this particular cocktail of micro-organic missile, as my every doctor's form has reflected ever since. Or maybe, just possibly, I rushed through my regular breakfast routine that morning without stopping to consider that the semi-viscous substance suspending my Rice Chex in that bowl was, in fact, milk. And maybe, yes, there was a certain bovine injunction on the side of the orangey, childproof bottle. I may never know.

I may never know because the day itself is an astonishing blur. Not the kind of blur one associates with tremendous speed or urgency, either. Rather, the sort of blur that happens when something is smeared across, or great heat melts something, or some synthetic psychoactive drug chooses to make a mess of your internal relativity. Or, as was the case with me that Halloween Day so long ago, all three, concurrent and consecutive (see note about internal relativity).

Sometime not too far into the school day, maybe after first period, I started to feel nauseous and following fast on the heels of that sensation I vomited into a garbage can. I had the nurse call my mom. Luckily for me, she worked at an elementary school just down the road and had the time to swing by to take me home. I remember lying on my left side in the back of our maroon minivan, trying not to be sick even as I contemplated whether I was making the right choice. I was feeling better. Maybe I could make it through the day, and on into the night's festivities. This thing could still be saved.

It's difficult to remember these events, but not solely because of my altered state. No, as with many other times in my life that proved to be turning points, I've blocked out a lot of details of sequence and experience in my memory. Although I recognize I have a tendency to get mired in my past, I also have a great deal of trouble letting go of my own volition, and so I frequently and by default "forget." That is, "wall memories off where they are forced to live in confinement forever and/or until some silly, silly suggestion that I give them some air is made." It's a bit of an effort to dredge some of this up.

At the time, in the fall semester of my senior year, we were rehearsing a show called Stage Door, in which I played the closest thing to an antagonist the story had. Senior year represented a sea change in my high school experience, having gone far too quickly from chubby band nerd to skinny, upperclassman, leading-man-somewhat-by-default drama nerd. My dearest, passionate, first true love was a junior, but making more headway in choosing a college for the next year than I was. I had also - extremely unexpectedly and as a result of an acting exercise brought to us from a summer intensive our stage manager attended at Northwestern University - recently fallen for my co-star.

A memory doesn't have to be painful for me to quietly wall it away in the intervening years, just embarrassing. This one happens to be both.

I think I went straight to bed when I got home that morning. I think I might've tried water and toast at some or several points, in the hopes of hanging on to the idea of healing. I think I heard the phone ring once or twice. But I know that by the time the phone started ringing I had already vomited at least three more times, and resigned myself to staying in the bathroom. Eventually, the floor of the bathroom became the best place I could imagine and so I laid there, years before I would ever experience the divine punishment of alcohol. By the time I heard the front door opening and my girlfriend's voice calling my name, I was pretty certain it was  a hallucination.

The door to the bathroom was closed at first. Was the bathroom door closed at first? At this point it's all a mess of fingerpaints in my mind. She was always lightly on the goth/punk side - Doc Martens strapped on over fishnets, but a girlish giggle as easily and likely as a throaty guffaw. I'm not sure, but I think my guardian angel was even more punk that particular day, in a nod to the holiday. Regardless of when I let her see me, I somehow remember bright sunlight coming in from the open door downstairs, that same door that still displayed the knuckle-dents from when I punched it in frustration the previous May and broke my metacarpals. The pain of that was fresh in my mind, and it had nothing on what my abdominal muscles were going through as I spasmed and vomited yet again.

"Jeff, I'm calling your mom."

That's a bold sentence when you're a teenager, for any occasion, but especially when you've just skipped school to check on your sick sweetheart. I didn't try to stop her. I stared at the results of my latest heaving in the bowl, and was baffled. Nothing but a little clear fluid, but swimming with tiny, black specks. It was almost funny.

Later, in the emergency room, they would tell me that those black specks were the scrapings of the bottom, the digestive granules produced by the...bile duct? Something. By that time I had been on an IV for dehydration for hours, so I really should be able to remember. Strange that I would let that particular detail go. Maybe it takes days for dehydration to kill you, even when it's accelerated by an allergic response (or whatever) but I certainly wouldn't have made it to the emergency room until late into that night if it hadn't been for my girlfriend knowing it was time to break the rules.

She's always had that kind of unconventional clarity. That's the quality, I think (though also to a lesser degree the fishnets) that made my initial attraction to her so strong. I think of her as one of those kids who never knew they weren't an adult, and now that she is an adult she's got all that assumed authority the years bring to back up her keen perception and audacity. I'm proud we're still friends after all these years, after long stretches of no contact, after I shoved the self-destruct button quietly down on our relationship, after all kinds of personal emergencies and my inauspicious and unrelenting crush on her that started it all.

Having now lived twice the number of years I had then, I'm not sure I can claim any greater wisdom. Nowadays, a lot of the gusto of that time of my life seems smarter than where I am. Certainly not all of it, but much of it. Teenagers have an emotional sincerity from which we can always learn a little something. While age may not have increased my wisdom, distance has bettered my perspective.

I can see now that it was all a little funny and a little horrible, and even that those two aspects are usually paired up to some degree. I see past the imagined drama and the true consequences that it's a story about people who love each other. In fact, struggling through the melting, smeared mess of my memory of this event has helped me see myself a little clearer, even as the teenager I was, the woman who loved me, the girl who surprised me, our teachers and parents and friends of that time fall farther and farther away, into the distance, into tiny black specks.

Rom Com

Found here, and I heartily recommend.

It might surprise some people to learn that I really like romantic comedies, but I do. I like the genre, and I like a format in which we laugh at what's really a huge concern for most all of us, and then - when it's done well - really feel the emotional tug of the narrative at its climax. As I've said before, high and believable stakes make for the best comedy.

The trouble is, most "romantic comedy" by conventional Hollywood standards misses the mark for me, and there may not be much worse than a bad "romcom" that's neither funny nor emotionally effective. Such misses just end up making us feel trivial, having wasted two hours of our time on something superficial that purports to represent us.

Now, this is not a Harold & Maude argument, or anything like that. I love that movie, but it tends to get plucked as an example of an unconventional genre movie, one that proves its case by being the exception from it. I like far more conventional fare, like My Best Friend's Wedding. Of course, that one defies convention in certain ways, but the mechanics are true to the genre. Others I appreciate include Charade, When Harry Met Sally, and Punch Drunk Love.

I'd like to do a romantic comedy of some kind, possibly even a web series. I think it's a format that's perfect for that kind of story, especially if you're looking to build a longer episodic story. Mine would have two people who really need one another (not just pretty faces that you want to be) with intention, less misunderstanding and more genuine conflict, and it would probably use New York City for its backdrop. (Just to ratchet up the difficulty of filming, I suppose.) I'm going to do some thinking on this.

And you? What would your romcom consist of?

Why Study Theatre (follow up narrative on "The Younce Meme" [from the Facebook])

Found here.

It's entirely possible to pursue acting "on the side," and you don't have to be James freakin' Franco to make it work, either. In fact, when it comes to acting, plenty of people will tell you that classes - much less higher education - are bunk. Personally, I have mixed emotions about my college education. I'll never regret it, but in hindsight I believe I could have made more honest (and thereby daring) choices.

But what made me do it? That inspired idiocy of our teenage years that makes our choices just a little more instinctual than is conventionally wise, I think.

I was not, to put it mildly, a good student in high school. I was largely distracted by the usual things, and maybe one or two more-unique ones. So my freshman and sophomore years were a relative wash, academically speaking. I played in band and did one play - Midsummer's - finally, in my sophomore year, and I loved it and was utterly terrified and pretty much spent the entire time I wasn't on stage reading gay-themed sword-and-sorcery novels crouched in a corner next to the door of the dressing room. And then I quit band, and then Kara Schiffner cast me in her play, and then I fell ridonkulously head-over-heels for her, and I suddenly lost 40 pounds, and . . . well, life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you might suddenly find yourself being asked to choose a college.

At least my work went way up in quality for those last two years of high school, and I discovered for the first time just how much I enjoyed being hopelessly busy, so long as it was with projects to which I could make a unique contribution. When I started visiting schools, I figured the most memorable and significant aspects I could market (already I was concerned with advertising myself) were things I had done at the theatre conferences we attended. So I called myself an actor, and visited the theatre departments. At the same time, I was geeking out like nobody's business over writing of all sorts, and kept an eye on a double major. It is totally possible that I never gave a practical thought to my future. Money? Psh. Security? What is that, exactly?

My driving principle was that I didn't want to live with any major regrets. I didn't want to take the easy way, follow a set path. I had to at least try to make a life out of the things I loved to do. If I failed, I should at least be able to look back and say I failed honestly and had my answers.

So VCU it was for a BFA with nominal minor in creative writing (nominal because the theatre department at the time wouldn't recognize a minor in anything). It was urban, relatively speaking, which would prepare me for my culturally adventurous future. It had an English department (Shenandoah did not) and it didn't intimidate me the way Virginia Tech did with its vast Jeffersonian persona. (I didn't get into William & Mary, presumably because of my wastrel years.) And, yes, okay - there was a certain person I was seeing at the time on her way to the same school. Instinct over convention.

I was a person who needed that experience, so I'll always treasure it. Some actors can excel without technique or training, but I'm way too analytical for that and I quickly discovered in college that I had never known how to act, to be an actor. Personally, I don't think I would have figured that out if I had simply tried out for plays while pursuing a major in business, or skipped college altogether to live in Chicago. Maybe - who knows - but I doubt it. So it became a mission, to learn as much as I could about my "chosen" major, and my obsessiveness had a good excuse to flourish.

I've always been a little tunnel-visioned. It's interesting to realize that my dearest friends have all at one time or another had to decide to just trust and/or forgive me for that, and the way it makes me socially awkward or altogether absent. Even the woman who ended up marrying my silly ass was someone I knew in high school who was still interested in knowing me after I essentially vanished into my first professional theatre jobs for a year. The mixed emotions about my college education stem from looking back - free from tunnel-vision - and realizing I should have left after two years. I had learned everything I was going to by then. Maybe it was just an allegiance to the path I had set, but I stayed, and got a degree in the fine arts (as they say).

Going to school for those wacky liberal arts was the right choice for me; staying may not have been the best. But one more thing: There is value in committing oneself whole-heartedly to just about anything for a time. It can be a period of great discovery, as mine was, and we don't always have that luxury as we grow older and more encumbered with (in many cases welcome) duties. Does one have to pay tuition to do that? I think that all depends on one's personality in terms of a need for structure. I need structure, but in part as something to be a contrarian against. Let's not even try to analyze what freakin' Franko needs...

Versing the World

Because sometimes The Man makes shilling for him just too much dang fun:

Yes. Yes, I am looking forward to the movie. No; no I haven't read any of the books. Yes, yes I remain at heart a frustrated teenager.

Holding the Mirror Up

As you may have been alerted on The Facebooks, The Twitters and/or ma' brother 'blog, Loki's Apiary, I am performing this week in a short play called Princess. Jason Schafer is the writer of this play, Kay Long directs and Stacey Linnartz performs with me (or really: I with her), to drop a few names for The Googles. This is a tough one to write about midstream, as it were, because to reveal anything specific about the plot sort of jiggles the ride a bit too much. Suffice it to say that I play a young husband and father having a rather important conversation with my wife, about our son.

As you may also know from The Everythings, Wife Megan and I recently invited a new addition to our little family. Anton is not quite the same as having a son, but I have to admit that he has been full of more lessons and surprises -- not to mention, less sleep -- than I had imagined. A series of his more worrisome idiosyncrasies:

• He's named Anton . . . and I didn't name him. That was his name when we adopted him, and as a theatre enthusiast I am required to honor it, and yet everyone we tell responds, "Anton...?" in, you know, that way.
• Anton's got these stiff back legs, so not much of a jumper. He's not too old, but something's up there. Makes me wonder if he was a dog in a past life.
• He doesn't like being held, and won't sit in laps. Very affectionate otherwise, though, so maybe it's got something to do with the legs.
• When we go to bed, anywhere from ten minutes to an hour later he will meow from the other room . . . with question marks at the end. I AM NOT KIDDING. There is no other interpretation. Anton has somehow lost us between the two rooms of our apartment.
• He's a bit of a biter (not hard), fairly neurotic (see above) and . . . a humper. He humps. Blankets and jackets, mostly. He's neutered, but there you have it. He is humpy.

The son of my character does not have any of these problems (insofar as the script has detailed) but the emotions remind me of our recent feline complications. You worry, at odd times, and you spend a lot of time blindly interpreting, too. Does the love of a cat compare to the love for a child? Certainly not, yet I am surprised by how affectionate I have become of Anton in such a short time, and it reminds me of that old idiom about fathers not really being fathers until they actually get to meet their child.

Worry not, Dear Reader: I am not sense-memory-ing my way through Princess using my cat as an analogue for a son. (I might've in college, though, I have to confess.) I'm just sort of fascinated by the ways in which what I'm making happen and what is happening to me tend to become harmonious when I'm working in the theatre. Neither am I suggesting anything mystical in this -- I tend to view these things from a humanist perspective, at most -- yet it may just say something about how intention and deliberate action can influence one's sense of unity in life. And why the theatre in particular? Well, that may particularly have to do with me, and how much I love it, but it may also have to do with how much more evident observations can become when one is living out loud (much less in front of an audience).

It was actually in college that I really started to notice it, though somehow I aspired to "noticing" it even in high school. It's this "Oh...huh...yes..." kind of moment that occurs in rehearsal, and also starts to occur a bit in life, assuming you're feeling a strong connection to the work. In rehearsal you spend all this concentrated energy saying, for example, the same five words over and over again, in different ways, until at some point you nail it: oh...huh...yes.... It's great. Doesn't happen nearly enough, in my opinion. The act of searching -- not being in a generic search mode, but actively searching -- heightens awarenesses both internal and external. It can feel like a kind of magic, and you want to share it with everyone, but of course not everyone is interested. So, if you're like me, you end up humming quietly to yourself and every so often accidentally effusing all over some hapless and innocent Internet troller such as yourself.

Egad, I <3 the Internet.

Even if you accept my half-formed theories about how this synchronicity comes about, there remain some chicken-and-egg-type questions. Do you perceive a connection because you want to, or because it's pointedly poking you in the deep recesses of your brain? Did your searching begin with rehearsal, or did it start with looking for a job? Are the connections a result of the searching, or vice versa? Am I a proud cat owner because I'm thinking more about parenthood, or am I thinking more about parenthood because I have this weirdo cat, or is it all because of Megan?

Oh; huh: yes. Well, that last one is pretty clear-cut. But the rest are still unanswerable!

Virginia Elizabeth Wills

My sister was excellent at coloring. Remember how this used to be a quality one looked for in one's friends? We're talking around age 5 or 6, here (oh yeah, not admirable anymore, no siree, never impressed by that now that I'm an adult and have more important thing with which to be concerned) when you'd look over to that certain someone's desk as they labored over a coloring book similar to your own, and see that amazingly contoured section of pure color, evenly distributed with barely-perceptible strokes that nonetheless enhance their portion of the drawing, lending it an illusion of depth and texture. That good. And I -- as will no doubt shock those of you familiar with my "handwriting" -- I, was not. Am not, to this day. But when I was around age 8 or 9, I felt something had to be done about this sibling disparity, and so I convinced Jenny (don't ask about the nickname; that's a whole other story I never quite get right) that it was in fact far more fun and creative to make a horrible, ecstatic mess on the page.

Siblings have uniquely fascinating relationships, I find, and it's difficult to write about my sister without writing about myself, but I'll try to keep the Jeff-ness to a minimum. It's been said that theatre (and art in general) holds a mirror up to life. In this sense, I think siblings are a kind of interactive theatre to one another and -- especially in the case of just the two siblings, close in age -- there's an ongoing argument about who's in the audience, and who's got the stage.

My sister and I almost never argued when we were younger. (We've more than made up for it in our supposedly "adult" years.) We fought a bit, occasionally vying for control of the space, but by-and-large we didn't have it in for one another. Competitiveness (mostly my own) was the only stumbling block I can think of now, and even that circumstance rarely occurred; we had and have one another's backs. In fact, the only other competitive moment I can recall from our shared youth was when I discovered what a naturally great actress she is. And that doesn't really count because I knew, right away, I couldn't hold a candle to her, so no need to compete. I remember very clearly her performance of a couple of small roles in some select Shakespeare scenes during her junior high years, and being totally shocked at how believable she was. Jenny wasn't acting, she just was, and as if this isn't impressive enough in an adult actor, she was something like 12 years old, that time of life when ABSOLUTELY EVERYBODY is awkward and either pretentious or oblivious. And so, when in the next year she starred in another junior high production, this one Beauty and the Beast, and the high school drama teacher I was trying so very hard to impress made sure to say to me, "Well, we've got to get her," I wasn't at all surprised. Frustrated as hell, sure, but not surprised.

I could keep on this tack of things at which Jenny is amazing, but no longer does much of (I guess I can't say for certain about the coloring...) were it not for the fact that she's gone on to commit herself to doing incredible and important work. Jenny committed herself to more school than I can even fathom contemplating, and is now a nurse practitioner. You know about nurse practitioners, right? Those are the ones some people are opting for going to instead of doctors now-a-days because they're qualified, open and often more involved. Smarties, with a lot of influence. And she's not any ol' NP, my sister. No, she's a neonatal nurse practitioner, meaning she's dealing with the most delicate of lives and most harrowing of circumstances. Sometime amidst her near-decade of higher education, right around when she moved to New York, Jenny began going by her given name of Virginia. This was strange for me for a long time but, though she offered utterly pragmatic reasons for it at the time, it makes a perfect kind of personal sense. She's a different person now, one dealing with life-and-death decisions daily in a theatre I wouldn't set foot in, even had I her training and emotion for it.

My sister Virginia is still blessed with a kooky sense of humor, a passionate commitment to her perspective, powerful intelligence and sense of right and wrong. She still makes inappropriate observations in far too loud a voice, and illustrates a fervent disdain meeting me on time, ever. She's still far prettier than she realizes, and far more empathetic than is good for her, and she still is rather immediately liked by just about everyone she meets. She is different now, too. In the first place, she has taken control of her life and overcome some remarkable personal odds in a way that has taught me a lot about setting a good example for one's own family. In the second, she's recently left New York for a promoted position at Johns Hopkins, which involves authority and driving a hybrid car and all different sorts of things I as a near-naturalized New-York artist can no longer make much sense of.

And in the third, today she turned 30.

Happiest birthday, kiddo. Thanks for coloring outside the lines with me.

A Job + A Love

Last week I had two very different experiences with acting, neither better than the other per se, but both interesting to me. The first was an industrial with Lancer Insurance, a company with which I've worked once before, the other a surprise staged reading of Our Country's Good, by Timberlake Wertenbaker. As you might imagine, the first one paid (rather well) and demanded virtually no emotional depth, and the second I did for free and take my word for it: very rich with emotion. It's funny, but emotions can get rather short shrift in an analysis of acting. Critiques rarely mention them directly, and actors are discouraged from "playing emotion," as well they should. Still and all, it's an essential ingredient, and in one way what we're all there for. I think we're a little embarrassed by that, frankly, and that it contributes to our approaches to emotion. Yes, of course -- the actor must live the moment and play intention, not merely synthesize specific emotions. Yet we all seek that connection, that direct emotional interplay that only occurs between two people sharing the same space.

The industrial involved trekking out to Trenton and lingering in a parking lot behind a strip mall for most of the day. There Lancer had constructed a bus accident, hired on a couple of other actors, plus a group of their own employees to play passengers. I was fortunate enough to recommend one of the actors, Jason Carden, and so I had something really cool to do with the inevitably ample down time: chew the fat with a friend from college. To my great surprise, the other actor there was one Jason Griffin -- with whom I had worked on a completely other industrial, gained through completely other means, with no discernible connection. (To my even greater surprise, I actually recognized him.) The shoot involved a long period of waiting, followed by a short period of very brisk, camera-in-hand shooting. As I mulled over my position as an insurance adjuster, I thought how similar a position he's in at such a scene. He arrives at something that's a really big deal for others, where the stakes are high, yet is expected to make rational decisions and, ultimately, it's just another day's work for him.

Sunday's reading was another reunion of sorts, as all the friends of one Cynthia Hewett who could be found surprised her by being the fellow actors and audience in a reading on her day-of-birth behalf. There is this network of folks who were involved in the founding of The Metropolitan Playhouse (now under different management) of which both Cynthia and David Zarko are members, and it seemed they were all there that night. This meant that I was the youngest of the actors involved (an experience I haven't had in a while) and relatively outside the dominant social network. I knew one or two others, though, and it was a great reading. The play is full of humor and pathos and interesting characters, and working on it (however briefly) with such pros made the thing crackle nicely. Plus, every person was there for Cynthia. It must have been one of the most open and involved audiences I've ever had the pleasure of performing for. It was one of those acting experiences that reminds me of why I love it like I do.

It shouldn't be all that difficult, bringing together the work we do out of love and that we do out of necessity. I'm inclined to believe, in fact, that the separation is not only artificial, but of our own making. Subconsciously, perhaps, I like having the two separate, because it makes me inner world simpler to imagine acting as more pure, money-making as more virtuous by merit of it involving discipline. If you asked me, of course I'd say immediately that I'd like the two together, please. But just maybe some part of me has an interest in preserving that dichotomy. My hope is that acknowledging that possibility is a help in learning to overcome it a bit more.

Because buses or the colonization of Australia, gratis or paid, I really do love this work.

Winds of Change

Last night I sat down with Sister Virginia and began to help her study for a test she has to pass in order to achieve a job as a nurse practitioner -- I think of it as the Bar Exam for Insanely Specialized Nurses (henceforth, BEISN [though if you quote me on that, no one else will know what in the heck'n'shoot you're talking about]). I enjoy doing this with my sister, bizarrely enough. It feels like a familiar game, probably owing to my continuous necessity for memorizing lines, and I'm always eager to figure out new ways of encouraging her to order her thoughts and make details really memorable. My approach uses a lot of techniques I've picked up in memorizing scripts but, more significantly, utilizes one big acting idea behind all script memorization. That is: specificity is important because every word and structural element holds a clue to your story and has a reason behind its use. In other words, memorize meaning as well as facts. It's the only way to lock in those lines.

But I digress (probably because it feels like it's been a long time since I was writing here about an actual script, and I've been reading so many plays lately). This current bout of studiousness is in preamble to my sister possibly moving out of the city for work. She has a good thing going with Johns Hopkins, and passing this test would be the solidifying factor in that trial run. I'm very happy for this possibility, for a number of reasons. It would be good work for her, she'd be closer to my parents and NoVa, and I have learned to love Baltimore a bit. I'm very unhappy for this possibility for one reason. That is, it means my sister will, after some seven years in New York, no longer live in the same city as me. I love my sister, and will miss her.

Perhaps not for long, though. Coming up on my ten-year anniversary of having moved to the beeg ceety, I consider more and more the possibilities of picking my show up and moving it somewhere else. I used to fight this idea, but lately it has seemed surprisingly exciting to me; "exciting" being the last thing it seemed when I was a mere youth. I've lived my entire adult life around New York City, and have a lot to learn about living elsewhere. Plus it seems to me that more and more the kind of work I enjoy doing is better suited to a different environment. I'm not sure what, just yet, but figuring that out is part of the potential fun of it.

Man, but I love New York. Things I love about it, in no particular order:

• It's so messed up. Seriously: It is. There's plenty of facade of it being this gleaming pinnacle of mankind's ambitions, but every time I see a movie like You've Got Mail, I have to laugh. Give me The French Connection, give me The Warriors. That's still underneath it all in New York, no matter how much veneer Hollywood uses.


• New York is honest. To a fault. I'm not saying there isn't an absurd amount of lying that goes on, and on a second-by-second basis. I mean, it's the financial capital -- of course there's a ton of lying. But if you're walking down the street, and someone doesn't like the look of you, you don't know it from a plaster grin. You know it from an honest expression, and me, I love that.


• It is a petri dish of culture. At the same time a world-famous production of Hamlet is closing its run at Lincoln Center, a tiny show that only a handful of people saw is closing -- and we'll never know which will prove more significant. Music flows through here like a river wider than the East, and artists happily, slowly kill themselves to work out just what they're trying to say. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone is moved by something they come in contact with. You never, ever have to search for a cultural experience. Every day, all around, it's happening.


• New York is a city of individuals. I doubt that there's a better place for people watching, anywhere. Sure, it has types, and conformity, and all that (you've got to identify yourself with some tribe) but from one block to the next is a shuffled deck of personalities and ways of expressing that. Sometimes, too, I think of it as a city of superheroes, with secret identities, because who knows what the suit does with his nights, or the hipster does with her family. Love it. Love. It.


• Food. Twenty-four hours, from all over the world. Dig it.


• It's difficult to not be doing something here. I mean, you've really got to work at it. Sometimes I feel like I was reincarnated from a shark, because one of the worst sensations I know is to stop moving. Ask anyone who's vacationed with me: I'm a pain. I like having somewhere to be, something to get done, and when you take that away from me I eventually begin to have problems with very basic activities (such as: breathing). New York is good for keeping one purposeful, and on his or her toes.
  
  
• Circus. New York has it. Does your town?
  
  
• New York is about as historical as the U.S. of A. gets. "What about Jamestown, Williamsburg (we have one, too) and Plymouth Rock?", I hear you cry. Dudes (oh my dudes), I grew up near a lot of such history, and it's poppycock. Sure, significant stuff happened there, and maybe an earthen mound or two remains, but more recently what happened there is that it has been rehashed, developed into more tourism than history. In New York, in spite of all the development, you get to turn a corner and find extant historical architecture. We live in and amongst it, and that's what history is really for.
  
  
• People talk to each other here. This last one is a little difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it for themselves. New York sometimes gets referred to as "the biggest little town," and it's largely because of this phenomenon. Here, it is not considered rude to start up a conversation with a stranger. Here, you are likely to get advice from someone you don't know on the subway, because they have overheard your conversation. Different places have this, I realize, but there's something about this particular strange, unspoken, common identity shared by approximately 8,143,000 people that makes me very, very happy.

Of course, I could very easily make a "cons" list as well. After all, it's August in New York -- it would be very easy. But I think everyone knows the cons, to one degree or another. And anyway, the point is that someday . . . maybe sooner than we think . . . I won't live here anymore. People I meet thereafter may not understand why I moved at all, because I'll keep talking about missing the city. If and when I leave, it will be for good reasons, but it won't change any of the above.

Change is the only inevitability, it's been said, and I believe it. Still, some things in my life to date have proven especially resistant to change, and such things are usually related to love. And I love this town.

Wrapping Up Romeo

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!

[The actor is silent, twitching his fingers as if to draw something out, then upping the gesture until it is a furious, full-arm coaxing.]

Arise, fair sun! And, and and...

[The actor looks around himself frantically, finally spotting something in the distant horizon.]

KILL the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou her maid art far more fair than she!

[The actor gives a take to the audience as if to say, "Wow, did you hear me come up with that?" The actor is never sure if this take is going to land as he intends it {that is, as a gleeful sharing of enthusiasm rather than giving the sense that he's impressed with himself} and so, sometimes, he skips it. Sometimes.]

I'll miss my clown Romeo. Though potentially not for long, as the Italians are very encouraging about getting some part (if not all) of the production to Italy to perform, either this summer or next. Still, the curtain has fallen on this particular outing, and it's unlikely that another will be quite the same. So. To review:

The key to my take on Romeo lay in a late note from our clown director, Mark McKenna. He compared Romeo to a puppy -- all loyalty and enthusiasm, no strategy or subtext. This worked great, though I'm sure another performer could have done it better. One of the greater challenges for me in this exploration was to let go of my calculation and crispness in favor of an instinctive openness. I've never done so well at this before, yet I'm certain I didn't take it as far as it could have successfully gone. (So I'll be thankful for another chance, or two.) Romeo had big, ungainly paws and an ear-flapping energy. Part of the beauty of this puppy imagery was that it gave permission to be angry as well as cuddly, which helped me figure out how a clown Romeo could slay a commedia dell'arte Tybalt. It's funny: I used to attribute an animal to every character I played, a technique I've gotten away from in my adult career. Of course playing such a young lover would end up being nested in that work!

Prior to that image, there was a lot of struggle on my part to succeed as a clown in the role and, as I said, my success was mitigated by me just being me. I remember in college my TV/film acting teacher told the class that I shouldn't be going after non-brainy roles, that my "look" or "type" was too focused for that. I thought, thank goodness I'll be doing theatre, where I can more easily transform, but the personality traits she was picking up on were perfectly valid. I'm a thinker. That's not to say I'm especially intelligent, just that I work from my head first whenever I can. Bad habit for an actor, generally speaking, which is part of what I like about trying to do this amazing craft. I like the work involved in getting instinctive, getting into my heart. That didn't save me from some fury-inducing frustration during this rehearsal process (natch'), but even that was reminiscent of my teenage years, and so wasn't entirely an obstacle.

I have come to a new appreciation of the axiom that "there is no subtext in Shakespeare." This is a saying so often said that it is starting to lose letters, holes appearing like new constellations in the firmament of phraseology. (And yes, I do miss the language already.) In the little roles I've previously filled, it was apparent to me that every character says what is on his or her mind, and nothing less, but it wasn't until trying to fill out a role like Romeo that I felt how essential that no-subtext rule is. You don't just say everything as you feel it, you express it, wholly, and the whole thing is in motion the whole time. There is no stop to your internal life, there is no censorship or, ultimately, room for grand interpretation. Take, for example, the following:

"This gentleman, the Prince's near ally, my very friend, hath got this mortal hurt in my behalf. My reputation stain'd with Tybalt's slander -- Tybalt, that an hour hath been my kinsman! Ah Juliet; thy beauty hath made me effeminate, and in my temper softened valor's steel."

This ended up being the text I most had to mess with, interpretation-wise. Somehow in the clown world and with our vasty cutting of the text, it needed to be an upbeat bit, in order to more dramatically drop in the moment when Benvolio came back with Mercutio's mask in hand to tell of his demise. It's right there: mortal hurt. Romeo's upset and knows that Mercutio's at death's door, yet I felt I had to play it lightly, as though Romeo were oblivious right up to the last second. It never felt right, and it never would, because there's only so much room for interpretation. The conditions are all right there in the text, and honesty lives in living them out in their time and measure.

Apart from a few other little alterations, I feel strongly that our show was very true to the story and the characters. There was some doubt of this to begin -- we didn't know if a clown & commedia world would work at all, much less whether it could be convincingly applied to R&J. (Note: Next time, Jeff, read through the play a couple of times before you get super excited about your concept....) We were lucky in discovering, in my opinion, that this concept was in fact well-suited to the material. Romeo and Juliet are just as innocent and moment-to-moment as clowns, and they are surrounded by a world of connivers, and scarred fighters, and hypocrites. And all these people are lovable, even the worst of them, which makes the tragedy truly, uh, tragic. You feel bad for everyone. It will be a while before I'll be able to see the play as anything other than how we conceived it. Indeed, watching film versions of it I'm compelled to laugh, especially during the back-to-back "banished" scenes. You can't expect me to believe that he wrote those without some sense of the comic irrationality of teenagers.

One criticism of the show lingers for me: That it was too manic, that the tragedy was ultimately undermined by all the broad comedy preceding it, and came off as too abrupt. This sticks with me because I feel quite the opposite. To me, life is like that. Tragedy is abrupt, and I meant every emotion prior to our characters' deaths, regardless of how comic the effect was, so I feel that there was plenty of room there to believe that something truly sad was happening. This critique is also interesting to me because, technically speaking, Romeo & Juliet is not exactly a tragedy. The deaths are quite accidental and unnecessary, rather than inevitable. There is no return to the status quo, true (the hallmark of classical comedy), but neither are the main characters of especially high status. Furthermore, it seems to me that Shakespeare knew this, and spent some effort to counteract it. Of all the lines we cut, a great many were (I believe coincidentally) of a foreboding nature. Hardly a scene goes by without Romeo and/or Juliet saying something about a bad dream or sudden image of death. Methinks the playwright doth protest too much, in other words.

What we made, ultimately, was a very broad, structured comedy that aspired to inspire tragic catharsis at the end. I know we reached this aspiration for some, and not for others. Such is theatre, such is life. I feel very fulfilled, now all is said and done. It was not as I imagined it, but that's collaboration, and the show was probably better for it. I learned much, and kept learning, which I take as a sign that we were doing something right in terms of story and character. The audiences enjoyed themselves, and we achieved some measure of delight, surprise, and grief. It was funny, and it was beautiful, and if I never get to play another leading Shakespeare role again, I can happily hang my hat on this.

That's not my plan, though. I've got a taste for it now.

"Arise, fair sun...!"

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet has opened its three-week run, and I am on our first sincere day off (during the rehearsal/development process, no day off is truly spent "off"). I write to you now, Dear Reader, from my super-secret Astorian lair, where I will spend the next twenty-four hours in blissful avoidance of hemp rope and hard lumber. I love our set, but she is a harsh mistress.

How shall I begin to tell you of our process? Well, I'll start with the product by saying that this is the happiest I've been with a Zuppa del Giorno show in years. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's as effective as Silent Lives, nor as consistently funny as Legal Snarls, but it is a good, funny, heartfelt show that audiences seem to enjoy. I've grown accustomed to Zuppa shows being very reliant upon audience -- they're all broad comedy, and if we don't grab you, then we don't have you. TVNPCoR&J is no exception, but this time we have the benefit of a script and we're working with a story everyone knows to one extent or another, so it's easier to keep the audience even when a couple of jokes don't land. And we've had great audiences so far! Sunday was by far our smallest (and toughest) house so far, with only twenty or so, spaced out both is seating and in energy, it seemed. The rest were great; big audiences with lots of energy to contribute to the party. May the trend continue!

As it so often happens with the Zuppa shows, our process was varied and anti-linear. So many people contribute so many things, and everything has such equitable value that we can sometimes dissolve into a bit of confusion. David calls this "committing to the chaos," and it sometimes makes me want to tear his ears off, but he has a point. To a point. Whether it's order or chaos, Zuppa's process is inclusive and positive, and I appreciate it for that. This time around was particularly zesty. We were working with three directors and a fight choreographer, essentially. One director can't hear so well, one can't communicate in English so well, the third was only there for short periods and was trained in a different style of theatre altogether, so really it's kind of an accomplishment that we got a cohesive show of any shape to its feet, much less one that runs as well as this. There were many other scary/insensible moments and factors, but this is all just to say that I didn't come here to complain -- as with any show, there were points at which I thought, "Hang it up, all of it. I'm going to be a goat farmer in the east Andes."

The script went through various revisions. David did an initial cutting that he decided was just too long for the comedy we were trying to build. He suggested we choose lines that were especially important to us and feel free to improvise around those . . . which is a cool idea, but a little complex in practice. We were already improvising scenes based on the scenario set forth in the text, and reading the scenes straight, but to do the two together in the moment takes a particular genius, the first step of which would be (in my opinion) to know the text inside and out. We didn't yet. So eventually, David did another cutting, and we modified that through petition. (I want to keep, "Then I defy you, stars"; we can lose, "The fee simple? O simple!") For a while there, I found myself feeling heretical, slicing into the scansion as such, but eventually it became clear that what we were creating was going to be mongrel Shakespeare. After all, some of the text would be improvised, and some would even be spoken in Italian. Our priorities were sense first, then humor -- the music would have to be found in the spaces between.

An early rule we set, however, plays to our advantage: Romeo and Juliet's scenes together are whole, and wholly the original text. For a stretch it seemed we might have to make cuts to the balcony scene. It is, under the most formal conditions, like a mini-play inserted into the larger (making yet another case for Midsummer's being a parody companion piece to R&J), and Shakespeare had good reasons for giving everyone an act break and a chance to buy a few walnuts just before it. We did not have such a luxury -- our one intermission was resolutely set between Tybalt's death and Juliet's "gallop apace, ye fiery steeds" -- so for a time the scene was set on the carving block. Fortunately, we gained a sense of our style just in time to save the playlet. We chose early on to have Juliet and her Romeo speak the original text, as an indicator of their love and to distinguish them from what we assumed every other character would be doing at the time (that is, improvising dialogue left and right). Though we eventually decided it was best to have everyone speak mostly from the script, this early rule was somewhat prescient. By making the lovers clowns in a world of commedia dell'arte characters, we automatically made them a different pace and energy altogether. Commedia characters address the audience, but aren't ruled by them, whereas clowns have needs to ask permission, and must take even more sensitive cues from their audiences than intuiting what will make them laugh. It's as though the commedia characters are adults, enthusiastically sharing their argument with the audience, whereas the clowns are children, checking in with their parents to make sure they are pleased and eager to share with them each new discovery.

This has been the hardest work for me: Being, as a clown. I've done clown work for a few years now, but silently, and I wouldn't say it's my forte. Heather's much, much more natural with it than I. She has only to look at the audience, and they know everything she's feeling and thinking. I'm more calculating, less open, and am easily sucked into the rampant, frenetic energy of my fellow performers -- it's what I'm used to, I'm good at it and it gets laughs. But it isn't nearly as honest, vulnerable or interesting, frankly. I can hit the rhythms precisely, and get a laugh, but there's nothing precise about the clown. He is too present, too young to be precise, and that is part of his appeal. It works beautifully for this story, but it has been throughout an effort for me to make it work. (In some ways, of course, this is appropriate -- Romeo gets sucked into his environment and its violence, and spends a lot of his time trying to "make it work.") The most helpful note to me in this regard, a rather eleventh-hour one at that, was to think of Romeo as a dog, innocent, loyal and incapable of seeing past the next moment. Since I sometimes feel like a reincarnated dog, in both helpful and less-helpful ways, this resonates for me.

As if this work to "relax" in my work (oh yes -- many's the time that "relax" was my note for a scene, and not one but three directors almost got their respective ears torn off) weren't enough, hey: IT'S SHAKESPEARE. It is, to be perfectly honest, in spite of my abiding love of it, and four Shakespeare plays on my resume, my very first lead Shakespeare role ever. In fact, prior to this, my career in Shakespeare was particularly notable for playing roles that would just barely qualify as speaking ones: Philostrate in Midsummer's, Ned Poins in Henry IV 1 and Much Ado, the ONE messenger who speaks. So this was both great and terrible, and I've done it with no resident Shakespeare director, really. Some may be horrified by my interpretations, but I think I've done all right. I read up, and reviewed notes, and generally made the text a particular priority even at times when it seemed not to be one to others. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and I hope I'm doing it some small justice.

So through much trial-and-error, "finding the game" of the scene, improvisation, a little text analysis, collaborative gag making and general mayhem, we have made what I would describe as a very lively, very youthful cross-pollination of commedia dell'arte, clown, screwball and even a bit of Shakespeare. It's good fun and, I believe, loyal to the spirit of the original, for all we can know about it. When I read the play now, I can hardly believe it hasn't been played more comically more often. Even after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, the keening is so young, so naive in its way, I can easily imagine the rabble of Shakespeare's time eating it up with spoons as they chuckled in melancholic empathy. Friend John feels that the pallet is too heavily laid with comedy to prepare the audience for any of the tragedy, but I affectionately disagree. This is how life feels to me more often than not. We're all trying to live out a joyful comedy, especially in the face of tragedy, and innocence makes us weep just as passion makes us laugh. My feelings turn on a dime as our play's do.

I'm glad to have it up at last, and I'm proud of our work for what it hoped to be, and what it became. And who knows what it will yet become?

Short Shrift

Quick one here, as we've a manatee this afternoon, and I'm busily preparing for a quick trip home afterward for my day-and-a-half off. The coming week will be jam-packed for me: Shows, teaching acrobalance to the theatre's conservatory class (sans my usual teaching partner), teaching a workshop on career management at Marywood, and choreographing fights for North Pocono's Midsummer's (you may recall our teaching there back in October). My hope, however, is to do a proper entry about some of the process behind The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet sometime tomorrow, between getting my tax paperwork straight and working the kinks out of my rather bruised body.

For today, I just want to say thanks to everyone for their thoughts and encouragement in seeing us through this process. It seems to have been a project that has inspired a lot of enthusiasm in people, and created a certain synergy in the community -- both the local community, and the larger, meta-community of our far-and-wide friends and family. I was reminded of this vast, unseen network of support in a couple of ways in the past twelve hours. Last night, after the show, I was greeted by several students from both Marywood and North Pocono who had attended. This was a big deal to me. It's a kind of community that is only created by open sharing, and a willingness to learn, and I can not value it highly enough.

And then this morning, a different kind of reminder. I woke a bit groggy from a late bedtime, and lingered in bed, checking my email on my phone (not even thinking of casting news, I assure you). In my inbox was not one, but two messages from friends letting me know that I showed up in their dreams last night. One is a friend whom I haven't seen in years, that worked with me on the very first show I ever acted in with David Zarko as director, and the other is a friend who lives all the way out in merry olde England. I regard it as an unequivocal good omen when I show up in others' dreams. This is the kind of thing that I'm sure I have Facebook to thank for, yet I also feel that it's owed in part to the power of this play. It's the kind of story that signifies so much to so many that it has only to be mentioned and one finds oneself making strong associations, and perhaps thinking of younger times. That alone is reason to do a funny, mad-cap version of Romeo & Juliet; that alone is worth the work and tears. Thanks, everyone, for keeping the star-cross'd lovers alive in your hearts.

Also, in one of their dreams: I was Han Solo. That's neither here nor there, but I had to mention it...

News Brief

ITEM:

We have had our first preview performance of The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet. It went well. We had a capacity crowd for the pay-what-you-can preview, which seemed to include a great many students from the local universities, there by requirement. Nonetheless, they were a good audience. It's safe to say we learned more from them in one performance than we might have in a week's more reherasal.

ITEM:

The audition I attended in New York last Friday has resulted in a callback for this Friday. It's at 4:00, despite my protestations, and it will be a very narrow thing indeed to get back to Scranton for the show. Regradless, I'm going. It's for the director and star of the show and they will, much to their chagrin I'm sure, be asking me to juggle for them.

ITEM:

It's cold here again, but I understand it will warm up considerably for the weekend. My health steadily impoves, though minor injuries from my exhuberance and our over-built jungle-gym of a set are steadily accumulating. I need a massage, some acupuncture and more money, so am in some ways living for Monday, our day off.

ITEM:

Bottlecap.

ITEM:

I miss my friends and family in New York and elsewhere, and am excited by the prospects for some of them to attend R&J. My bounty is as boundless as the sea...

Re Cap

Hwaet:
So I journeyed to my parent's place in Hagerstown, MD, on the world's crappiest "Chinatown bus" on the 23rd of last month. It was the 24th by the time I got there, jangling Chinese karaoke still resonant in my head. The next day Wife Megan drives up from her parents' in NoVa and we attend my mom's Christmas Eve service. That night we celebrate Christmas with my parents.
Christmas Day we drive down to NoVa to spend it with her family, and there is much present-opening and nephew-adoring.
The day after that I spend largely at Friend Mark's, with Friends Davey, Steve and Adam, pretending to slay things with our mighty weaponry, there being no mightier weapon that our imaginations.
The next day it was back to Maryland for me to get a little more time with the 'rents and help them with their open house, New Year's buffet the next day. Much food was made, quite a bit (not nearly enough) consumed, and I felt well-fed to return to New York.
Return to New York for a few days and New Year's proper, whereupon Megan and I stay out way too late with Friend Geoff, then have to leap into a cab (pre-packed) for JFK.
Wake in sunny San Juan, January 1, 2009. We burn as we wait to be able to check in to our hotel, cunningly soothed off our guard by the cool breezes and sound of the waves.
The next day, Megan's friends get married on the beach and we bear witness, and dance barefoot on a plywood stage.
In the days that follow we enjoy the luxury of our beachfront hotel, do some sightseeing, then move into our more bohemian quarters in Old San Juan. More sightseeing, more friends, some good alone time too. And then it's back to New York.
A couple of days there to acclimate, unpack, do laundry repack, and then I'm off to rather-less-than-sunny Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Where I have been ever since, working to bring to life an entirely new interpretation of Romeo & Juliet to life with commedia dell'arte, clown and classical work, using poetry, Italian, and improvised dialogue. But more on that anon, now that we're all caught up.

Tropic of Gemini

I unintentionally read the anti-Romeo&Juliet a little while ago: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer [link NquiteSFW]. It is putting it rather on the glass-half-full side of things to say that the book served as a cleansing of my cynical palette before I embark on one of the more profound studies of innocence. When I finished Tropic of Cancer, I put it down with a victorious sigh, relieved that I would never have to read it again. Friend Patrick is flummoxed by this behavior in me, my determination to finish any book I've started, no matter how awful the experience. (I did give up on this book last Spring, though, because it is just freaking shite.) I can hardly explain it myself, except to say that it is perhaps a deeply ingrained habit. Whatever the cause, I generally read only one book at a time, and when I start a book, I finish it, or it finishes me.

Tropic of Cancer very nearly finished me.

It's a little troubling to have so loathed a book that has come to be widely regarded a classic. It's supposed to be a work of considerable genius, and has been praised unequivocally by folks like Orwell, Mailer and Vonnegut -- all writers I greatly enjoy and admire. This isn't the first time I've not enjoyed a classic. I've often not enjoyed Dickens and Joyce. And by often, I mean just about every time I've curled up to give them another read. I do believe, however, that this is the first time in my adult life that I've taken such an active distaste for an accredited author's work. That is to say, it is unique in my experience to feel revulsion for something I've read, and perhaps this speaks more to Miller's genius as might any actual critical response I could make. It's not prudery, per se -- I love vicarious sex and violence, whether that's a good or bad thing. Love Anais Nin, so far loathe Miller. So what is it?

It is, I believe, the cynicism. The sheer, unrelenting, unapologetic cynicism. To hear Miller tell of it, I would not have made it out of 1930s Paris alive; there are suicides in this book, and they are all-too understandable to me. It seemed as though every character maintained his or her existence merely to progress to the next selfish experience, and after not too long I was utterly bogged down in the sense of hopeless, purposeless puppetry. I read Of Human Bondage not too long ago, and it was almost as if Miller had taken Carey's latter (also frustrating) selflessness and turned it on its ear so hard it went into coma. Miller's narrator (or voice, depending on the ratio of memoir to narrative at a given moment) is given to short sentences of profound and usually brutal imagery and metaphor that definitely would have appealed to me when I was sixteen. Now, they strike me as naive and self-centered and, as far as I was able to tell, the narrator undergoes no lasting change in the course of the story. Was there even joy in this story, really? Miller is famous for philosophically sucking the marrow from life, but this seemed more to me like continually jumping off a building for the three seconds of the sensation of flying.

What this is really about then, for me, is a struggle to process my experience in reading the book. How did, or will, the book change me? You could make the case that it won't . . . but that I feel it already has, and what remains is to understand that effect. It hasn't sapped my hope, at least. If anything, it makes me rail against its perspective, which seems so short-sighted and inconsequential that I want to grab the narrator by the neck and just shake him until he snaps out of it (or something else snaps). Why do none of these people believe in anything? What drives them to write, or do anything lasting, if it is all about survival and gratification? Maybe these are the questions Miller wanted us to ask, or maybe I'm just to narrow in my perspective on the era. If I had to say what effect the book has had on me, I'd guess at this point that it has strengthened my resolve to help and inspire others through my work. And I have to confess that I hope Henry Miller would've hated that.

Lest this read as some offended rant against a slice of literature history, I will say that at times I felt the raw power of Henry Miller's control of the language, and his willingness to savor words without making them self-important or inaccessible. Some of his ideas rang out, too, despite my prejudice against the perspective of his narrator. I wrote earlier in the month about the supposed virtue of beauty in art, and a strong argument could be made for there being a unique and important beauty in Miller's work. For me, however, I'm thrilled to go work on a love story very soon (and possibly even more thrilled to finally be on to reading it on the subway). The love story, for some people, and I'm going to do my damnedest to make it a guilty pleasure to begin, and full of consequence and beauty at the end. And maybe that's what Miller meant.

But I really have no idea.

Thanks

This year has had, for me, a lot to do with gratitude. That's not try to say that my life is oh-so great. There's plenty more that I would achieve, but I am awful happy with what I have, and I feel like it's all owed to something greater than me, whether that be God or simply a community of friends and family that love and support me. (Or both...?) Whatever the reason, I have a tremendous sense of gratitude that it's a little difficult to express properly. There are too many people to thank. There doesn't seem to be a personal enough way to accomplish that ample thanks.

"I'd like to start by thanking, well, the academy..."

{ thirty-seven minutes later... }

"...and you like me! You really, really, REALLY like me!!!"

It is very easy to mock someone for having a sense of gratitude, and I suppose it is a fine line between sincere gratitude and ingratiating praise, or an inflated sense of inner goodness. Truth be told, though, I think we're rather inclined to mock gratitude because it's an immensely vulnerable emotion, both for the one expressing it and the one it is being expressed to. The mockery (or sarcasm, a family favorite of mine) is a defensive action. I don't know if we're more afraid of having our egos inflated, or of being shot down by another's refusal of a heartfelt emotion, but either way thanks are often hard to give and to receive.

With all the feelings of gratitude I've had of late, I've felt a bit like a hippy. I was kind of raised by hippies. Not my parents (the professor and reverend Wills missed most of what we now think of as the 60s), but my church was a pretty peace-and-lovey place. We went on "retreats" out to the woods, and people brought acoustic guitars, and we'll leave it at that for now. (Perhaps my parents saw this as making up for lost time?) I don't believe all Unitarian Universalist congregations had quite the same flavor of far-out-itude as mine. Our first minister carried a walking staff during the children's services (he was pretty old, though [he is still my mental image of Gandalf {the Grey}]). UUs really are some of the most loving people in the world, but some of us take it to a degree of tenderness that makes me want to smack them around, just a little bit. Just to alert them to the possibility that not everything in the world today is beautiful and purposeful. Yet lately, I have been one such hippy. I worry that perhaps I'm coming across as someone newly in love, who can't help but be a bit obnoxious about it.

On the up-side, this has all reminded me of my religious feeling. Don't go -- I'm not about to proselytize! By "religious feeling," I mean something that goes by many names, none of which I generally use: the Holy Spirit, zen, transcendent awareness, etc. It's a feeling of connectedness to the world, a feeling of receptiveness, and holy crap but it is a difficult feeling to maintain in New York City. This feeling would come to me in nature a lot when I was young, occasionally in church, and almost always during holidays with my family. I feel as though I have lost contact with this feeling for a good portion of the past six years, actually, and maybe more, and that's a frightening thought. I'm glad I rediscovered it.

So that's one more thing to make me all hippy-dippy grateful in general. Dang it!

This begs the question, "Where did it go?" Or, perhaps more to the point, "Why?" I mean literally begs the question, because I'm a little desperate to understand it so that it doesn't happen again, or at least for so long. This feeling is vital to my ethics, whatever role you may believe God does or doesn't play in it all. When I operate from a feeling of gratitude, I make better choices, I do more good, I feel better and more possibilities open up to me. I am a better actor, simply as a result of being a more receptive and comprehensive listener. So. With all this goodness, all this pay-off, why would such an outlook ever be dismantled, or lost?

I've been seeing an acupuncturist lately for my various difficulties related to my injury of about two years past. This has been an interesting experience for me. One of the challenges of this particular therapy is that it is, after all, meant to relax a fellow, to improve flow and movement in body and energy. Second to shouting "RELAX!" at me, embedding my muscles with dozens of needles is a uniquely counter-intuitive process for getting me to relax. I have no great fear of needles, mind; what I have is a natural tendency to resist pain through tension and sheer, torqued will. I also have a bit of a thing about being immobile, and immobility is a key component to the beneficial acupuncture experience, as I have recently (painfully) learned. So: challenges. When my acupuncturist embeds a needle in a particularly lively point, I must not tense, I must not tremble, I must not resist. I must accept the pain, I must release the resistance, I must, in other words, allow the pain to pass through me. It's the only way to move forward into healing.

I was going to write that pain is what makes maintaining a sense of gratitude so difficult, but it isn't; not really. It's our responses to pain that can make gratitude difficult. I have to acknowledge now that my years of disconnect from being "in the spirit" were largely a result of my reaction to being hurt. I closed some important parts off. It's not a reasonable response to pain, no matter how vital an act of self-preservation it may seem. It arrests life, and it causes such a narrow perspective that great opportunities can be lost, terribly harmful choices made. That's neither an excuse nor an apology -- I'm not sure I could have done things any differently had I known to. It is, however, an acknowledgement that I can improve. I have to improve. I will. Feeling grateful is stronger than a feeling of hurt, if we give it a chance.

I never would have realized any of this, never even have rediscovered my sense of gratitude, without everyone who's crossed my path since I lost it. From my parents right across the board to whatever as-yet anonymous readers here there may be. So: Thank you.

Yes, you. I mean it. Thank you.

Meet you out in the woods this weekend. Bring a guitar.

The Big Show

. . . My goodness. Has it been over a week? Yes; yes, it has. It feels almost strange to be writing here again, which just goes to show me that it's not so much how long one spends away from a project that disrupts its cycle, as how drastically one breaks its frequency and rhythm. Writing feels strange, but the thinking has been going on, full-fired pistons, the entire time. The past few days, in fact, have been spent trying to figure out with what exactly this here entry would concern itself. I mean, I had a title (titles are easy, I always have a title), and I knew the general content, but I couldn't find the words to express myself. I was searching for a format, a focus, a shtick . . . and therein lay my block, I think. Some things defy structure; some experiences are unique, if only for one or two of the people involved.

The Big Show did what it was supposed to do, what they've been doing for centuries of human history. You have months and months (and, in some cases, still more months) of build up to this single event, during which time everyone is saying to you in one way or another, "This is a big deal, and your life will not be the same." Okay, you think, but I've been around a few places and seen a few things and really this is just a public acknowledgement of something I've been working on for years. So what surprises can it really hold? I ought to have remembered that even Regular-Sized Shows have the potential to be life-altering experiences, sans pomp, circumstance and hors d'oeuvres. They generally accomplish this by catching you off or coaxing you out of your guard, then hitting you right in your gooey human center.

My personal gooey human center is a ganache of gratitude (yes, I know Heather -- not a filling), and from way back in the process of planning The Big Show, I have been set up for a gratitudinous (is SO a word) fall. My friends flocked to help me and, guys, if you're listening: You're a bunch of total jerks. Don't even try to pretend that the motivation behind your combined support and myriad selfless contributions was well intentioned. It is transparently clear that you rocked my socks off for the express and specific purpose of making me cry and, furthermore, feel like weeping cathartically every time I think of any one of you. What else can I say to you than: Mission accomplished. In spades. You bunch of total jerk-faces.

I can't even bring myself to single persons out for the amazing contributions each of them made. It would belittle it, in a way, because my experience was bigger than can be expressed with my usual pithy, long-winded syntax, even if I used extra-distended vocabulary choices. I've been searching for these last days for some poem to post that will encapsulate it for me. I was swept away. I was not steering the wheel (in spite of multiple U-turns executed in the interests of not accidentally driving my groomsmen to West Virginia). I was completely subject to the experience. It was comparable to a drunkenness, but with intention and clarity. In fact, at times I felt I was drunk on the clarity of each moment -- each lively, open and honest moment. I look back and worry a little that I neglected people in the rush of my experience. Relatives I see once in a blue moon were there, and I said all of ten words to them, and I definitely felt gypped on time spent with friends who travelled from afar to be a part of my wedding. Yet I think of the surprise party thrown by everyone at the day job I've held for nine months, I think of seeing my New York friends against the autumnal Virginia scene, I think of turning around and seeing my best friends from age five on all there at my back . . .

You BUNCH of TOTAL JERKS!

Brecht thought the best work a piece of theatre could accomplish was to present arguments and hold the audience enough at bay that afterward they'd be able to discuss the arguments somewhat objectively. Fighting the complacency that profound catharsis encourages, he wanted theatre to educate. Epic theatre may not necessarily alienate the audience throughout the play; in fact, I find it most effective when it draws us in emotionally at moments, then reminds us that it is a play, and that we have a life separate from it. This preference is part of why I don't actively pursue epic theatre work, but what affinity I have for Brecht is evident in my affection for direct-address of the audience. I like to learn from experiences, to experience the kind of intellectual catharsis that comes of new ideas instead of unexpected or inevitable emotions. Can I be objective at all about my experience of being wed?

One of my favorite pieces of advice leading up to La Grande Mostra was this: Be sure to be there. Practically speaking, very helpful. Also helpful as a reminder that it can be easy in profound moments to feel both outside oneself and caught up in the current, said feelings being possible concurrently, consecutively or all of the above, all at once. So I took that advice to heart, and tried to allow myself moments of observation and moments of sheer, unthinking response. This at times meant wandering around my own reception, perhaps being less receptive to people than they expected, the which I hope they can forgive me. Weddings are supposed to make you feel something, and just maybe they're supposed to make the participants feel something overwhelming, something profound to think (feel) back on when in times of doubt or struggle. Are they also good for learning something? Are there lessons to be had about life in general, and oneself in particular? I believe so. I believe this is the hidden agenda of weddings. Most major rituals and rites of passage involve wrapping something quietly necessary inside of something showy and big.

In the life-in-general category, I'd say the big lesson for me had something to do with learning that some of life's most exciting, dangerous and rewarding adventures can be found in its most widely accepted and "mundane" aspects. The trick is in taking absolutely nothing for granted. Nothing. Easier said than done, I recognize, but then again, why should a wedding lend us a sense of appreciation and not, say, a regular phone call to someone we barely know? Or eating a hot dog (delicious hot dog...) as opposed to wedding cake? So many people have shared with us personal insights that they had as a direct result of experiencing our wedding. I believe such insights are there for us all the time, and that events such as weddings and shows and concerts, etc., serve not as the only conduits to those insights, but rather as reminders that these insights are there to be had at every moment of every given day. I used to view marriage as settling down. What could be more exciting, dangerous and rewarding, than stepping into one's future with that kind of intention and appreciation?

Speaking of personal lessons, mine was simply huge. The hugest I've had since those that led me to propose marriage to Wife Megan. Part of that decision to propose was motivated by an insight I had about how each day needs to be lived as if it could be your last, though not as though it definitely is your last. It's a fine distinction, but once I felt the difference, I could see how important it was that Megan and I commence to weddin'. I could go on and on about the personal intricacies of this realization for me and its relationship to my psyche, but I'd rather not alienate the dozen remaining readers and, besides, I bring it up to emphasize how profound a lesson was mine on the actual day of marriage.

Last Saturday, and in the days since, I have felt such an emotion of gratitude for everyone in my life that it's like my heart is singing. I'm embarrassingly double-wrapping my jacket on the subway to try and mute it a little in consideration of my fellow passengers. I'm disrupting telephone lines with pure sonic vibration. It's ridiculous and self-perpetuating -- the feeling itself inspires more gratitude. I have not the hands I need to write all the deeply felt thank-you letters to everyone, including those we couldn't invite or who couldn't make it. I owe something to everyone, and all I have to give is myself. The lesson, I think, is to give as if each day could be my last. Marriage isn't forming a private partnership, but creating a synergy, a collaboration, in order to offer more to the family at large. I said in my fatally brief speech (I hate public speaking) at the end of the reception that everyone there was family to me now, and I meant it. The best I have and am is only a result of the people I have known and loved.

. . .

. . . Dang it! Again?! Really? Again with the weepiness?

You bunch of total jerks . . .