Tuesday, March 8, 2022

The Play's The Thing





WS wasn't kidding when he proclaimed "All The World's A Stage".  Life's a night at the theater, alright.  But you don't get to keep your seat.

You start out with the best seats in the house, front and center in the orchestra section.  Then, you move back one.  You do this annually, and sometimes the view gets even better.  Later on though, as you're settling into row 54, you begin to wonder just what it is that keeps you coming back to this show, despite the seating.

Sometimes, the show's just not that great.  But if you're going to have a night out at the theater, you're going to enjoy it no matter what.  And truthfully, there's plenty to enjoy in attending the theater, well beyond what's on the stage.  I would doubt that the theater district would be the Stonehenge that it is to this day, after milleniums of theater, were it not for that capability on the part of the patron.

The same principle applies quite applicably to life.  If it didn't suck in a litany of ways predictable and unexpected, it wouldn't be a genuine life.  But it's the great in-between that's going to dress it up to livable ends.  My own theater has long excelled in design.  

I was not a friend-maker as a child.  Fairly withdrawn, I was not much one to "put myself out there", as some were.  As you turn a few years older, that quiet withdrawal goes from peaceful asset to dangerous deficit, as classmates and kids around you are stunted and maybe offended by what seems like your dismissive behavior.  Then you're an outcast.  Like I was.  At a very formidable age, I discovered a recipe to make it work.

Imagination is not a foreign tool to children.  In my tool box, it was critical.  Fantasy depictions of semi-realism decorated my dull days.  I would sit in my second-grade grammar school class during a math lesson picturing three or four classmates I knew, along with myself, in a comedy sketch much like ones on The Carol Burnett Show, played on our auditorium stage, to thunderous applause.  In reality of course, these were only classmates I saw each day, and did not personally know.

When I finally did get around to making some friends amongst them, interacting with them daily was not nearly as fulfilling as the embellishments my imagination would add.  Craig was this kid who asked me to hold his notebook once while he got up at the plate for softball.  I ran with that as a great show-business anecdote about an excited actor who worked in a movie I was producing.  He asked me to hold his bag while he went up and shot the scene, and though I really had no patience for this, I knew how badly we needed this scene shot, so I complied. What a great show-biz industry story for my fantasy memoir...!   Anyway, it took the grim out of the school day.

If something works this well for free, you're not going to give up on it.  Walter Mitty certainly didn't.  A grownup employing a childhood-strength imagination was apparently weird enough for James Thurber to become poetic about.   It sure worked for me.  My internal reflex had it's winning recipe. 

In my youngest childhood, I was oft paired up with my younger cousin for play.  He was usually not nearly as amenable as I was and his behavior toward me could swerve badly for any reason at any time.   I was used to it, but as much as it would upset me on the spot, I was usually not about to bear enemy intent.  For one thing, practical matters wouldn't allow it.  I just had to suck it up.  Meanwhile, he was my only social contemporary.  But I could not afford to allow my one weekly retreat on my precious Saturdays off from P.S. 203 to go south on that account.  As miserable as visit's end could well become, I turned the trip to my cousin's house (or his to mine) into the best movie on Hollywood's Finest  I could conjure.  Our play adventures in the backyards of the adjoined garden apartments I viewed in black-&-white noir, directed by Richard Lester.  I don't know what my cousin was imagining, but it didn't matter.

Before arrival even, I'd envision the talk we'd have, myself as demanding director, he as temperamental actor, and the technical discussion we'd be locked into.  Once I was there of course, none of this was possible.  He shared no concept of mine.  I certainly couldn't have expected him to.

In a way, despite my mental and ideological distance, I somehow preferred it that way.  To have him take up residence in my own dream sequence would have been too invasive somehow.  Some thoughts are better left simply thought.  And sometimes, elaborately.

My cousin and I drifted apart quite naturally on the horizon of pre-adolescence.  We were too ensconced in our own lives at that point, and nature took it's course. We would maintain little if any immediate contact subsequently.  But I thought of him distinctly nearly thirty years later.  Strictly in character, in a role I conjured up in my fantasy machine one day.  It was a story again of producer and actor, where he was offered a sum of money to write a screenplay, which he did brilliantly in no time flat, but refused to sign off on the rights.  It was quite a potboiler.  At age thirty-eight, I marched off to work one afternoon, raptured by the nostalgia of our harmless, imagination-filled play dates, in the form of some advance story of two completely fictional grownups.   Dorothy Gale had to get whacked into a near coma during a tornado to invent a technicolor romp featuring her life's cast members as a dancing scarecrow and a singing lion.  More than twice her age, I did this fully conscious.  I certainly could not relate this oblique, pleasant departure to my co-star.  I hadn't spoken to him in a good many years, and as I'd been made to understand from family members in more recent times, he'd been having his own bad mental struggles.  No point.

But as far as the well-being of my mind went, still, it effectively "paid the rent and kept the lights on", as it had in many other prosceniums.

I hadn't visited my friend Cray in quite some time.   He lived boroughs away, and although we were once a lot closer, and practically neighbors as young men of twenty, we had not been for long since.  Our earliest kinship was our greatest asset, to each of us, respectively.  But yet not in precisely the same way.   

Much as I knew this very entertaining, budding young singer-songwriter, despite the laughter and friendship he'd share with me in my toughest times, I came soon to know him as someone just slightly impaired.  Psychologically, or behaviorally perhaps.   Something that might keep him from common, effective, self-sufficient interaction with others.  Disturbingly, I was not wrong.  Unremarkably, over a long and gradual span of time, many years, our separation as "best friends" would come.  Sad though, it was a valuable friendship that took me through very many years.  Not through a generous amount of "face time" necessarily.  Mostly, as I'd later recognize, it was through my own "Wizard Of Oz" imagination.  Me as producer, him as comic artist-partner in our own syndicated radio endeavor, one powerfully successful as we dodged corporate executives over content and won no end of faithful sponsors and listeners to massive broadcast legend success.  Those corporate meetings and studio sessions made for some of the best daydreams of the 1990s, on the way to the laundromat.  Spin cycles were never shorter.

It remains to say that a life daydreamed will always be just that.  Regret in the hindsight of decades later bears no value.  Rather, my resourceful inclination becomes that of at least appreciating the artful design instincts of my own life-long inertia.   If you can't have a life of success, maybe you read enough about others and about history to simply dream up your own.  And live in it.   As a safe, free coping mechanism over much of my life, it seems to have worked.  And if I threw away the best parts, they couldn't have been all that good.

There are of course side effects.  There's that "Altered States" experience of suddenly coming to, realizing that your actual life is just you going back and forth to work and the convenience store for over twenty years, doing nothing but dreaming your life virtually.   That was me and my so-called nervous breakdown about ten years before social media graduated to the point of being able to nearly step into a virtual existence of one's distinct choice.  The takeaway is that such isolation is not only in fact too common, but too ready for the escape such technology promises to bring.  Has COVID been a factor..?   For some, very possibly, a divinely convenient permission slip.

I would ultimately choose to seek that to which I best related. My imagination went full force in enjoyable fashion once I'd begun dating a charming young woman I'd met.  Date nights are always a time for dreaming one's best self.  We were who we were, and had stellar times.  But until marriage, I'd yet to learn of my wife's incredible and graceful gift of imagination.  As an avid doll collector, her immediate solace and joy is the appreciation of her collection of beautiful characters, the imagination that turns our living room into a Shari Lewis or Mister Rogers showcase, with riotous inter-character discussions, sub-plots and stories.  gorgeously wardrobed and scenery co-created by a spouse cherishing this gift just as much.  Her characters are as real to her and often now to myself as maybe King Friday or Daniel The Tiger was to Fred Rogers in Pittsburgh long ago.  And from the fifty-fourth row up, somehow the show on stage doesn't even really matter anymore.  It's just a great one.

I'm still plagued by some of my imaginary tendencies.   Late one night, a pop song from my radio-eared childhood reached my ears.  it was "Fernando" by ABBA.  Suddenly, I'm in the fourth-grade schoolyard with that vibrant, friendly girl classmate I knew who chose one day to include me in some make-believe skit of hers.  From there, my mind's got it.  I'm a talk-show host inviting this beloved actress onto my show for a hilarious Letterman-esque discussion.  The song faded, I returned to now, gathered my items and headed for the checkout.

No, it's far from real.  But it's my life.  I'll take it.

Noah F.





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