That's Me in the Corner

Don't be such a snot bubble.

Dad, there's no such thing.

Of course there is. In fact, I majored in snot bubbles in college.

No . . . You didn't.

And he was right of course. I never majored in snot bubbles. What little college I did finish was devoted solely to the theater. Instead of Speech, I took Voice. Instead of PE, I took fencing and dance. Psychology was devoted to the scansion of plays, history was Henry V, mathematics was lighting design and four part harmony. Women studies remained the same, but Ophelia was my model and Katherine my muse. I walked away with a certificate of completion, a strong diaphragm, and an identity crisis.

Ten years later, having a pint with an old friend (Well, porter for me, a big tasty glass of water for Jon), I was asked if I ever had any desire to return to the stage.

Sometimes, maybe, not really.

Not sure if I would let a juicy part slip through my fingers, though. Maybe Hamlet or Iago. The Emcee in Cabaret, or Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. I would jump at the chance to see my own failed musical staged, and I would be hard pressed to say no to an invitation to participate in just about anything involving those long lost friends whose blood sweat and tears have mingled with my own. But the pursuit of stage is a singularly devoted one, and my life is too precariously balanced to invite that level of obsession.

After we finished our meal (pizza for me, salmon salad for Jon) we drove eleven blocks to a see a preview of a new play opening that weekend. The space was special to Jon in that he is a resident artist of the theatre group, and his fiance designed the set.

The set was pretty stunning. A center stair case spiraling into a stratospheric oak tree. Intricate levels of staging areas, lots of eye candy, compact enough to be intimate, grand enough to create distance. It's a shame that the play wasn't rewritten to make better use of it.

The play, a two actor mishmash of themes. Love, sex, poetry. Life, death, birth, sickness, rebirth, crazy talk, brief violence and mild nudity. Or is it mild violence and brief nudity? Poetry as dialogue, stage direction as dialogue, list upon list upon list as dialogue.

The story, a tale of boy meets girl, girl gets stabbed by an environmentalist, girl gets sick, girl turns into tree.

And herein lays the problem.

We have all read "The Giving Tree."

It is rooted in our soul.

Chuckle, chuckle.

However, as any agronomist will tell you, a tree isn't exactly the nurturing mother earth life giving creature its made out to be in transcendental poetry.

A tree,

is in fact,

a weed.

That's right. A big weed.

A water hoarding, nutrient zapping, soul sucking weed.

And had the writer taken a botany class, and possibly been blessed with a sense of humor, this play would have had a good guy, a bad guy, and a truly original metaphor that might have propelled it into one of those great nights of theatre.

Alas.

But I'm not a theatre critic. Nor should this influence anyone. And I haven't really gotten to the meat of this weeks tale.

In order to stay on track, we have to introduce a new character.

The female lead of the play.

And there is something not quite right about her.

She is pretty. But not second look pretty.

She is thin. But not athletic, or grotesque thin. The kind of thin a girl in her thirties gets when she works all day and all night, and doesn't see the sun light and doesn't eat enough food.

She smiles a hard smile, she moves with the elegance of a former dancer, and her eyes betray a frightful lack of confidence that I've seen so many times before in the nightmarish hallways of audition purgatory. There is no Bachelors from Brown or MFA from A.C.T., that could ever erase the wall she has built to keep the cruel real world at arms length.

It was her first line that gave her away.

After a painful emotional roller coaster monologue from the male actor, she has this one line:

"Shut up."

That's it.

"Shut up."

There are a million ways a wife can tell a husband to shut up, and even after a decade with my wife I am still learning new ones. There are tones and nuances of voice that speak volumes. Anywhere from "Shut up and kiss me." to "If you don't shut the fuck up right now I am going to stick this fork in your eye."

But the "Shut up" delivered by the female lead actor, wasn't any of those. And every subsequent line of dialogue and awkward physical seduction proved that this poor lady has never made the real human connection needed to deliver the line with the gravitas required.

For the actor's life is no life at all.

A fairy tale cocoon of comedy and tragedy.

Men have it much easier. For our identity is facade.

Woman is labyrinth.

Only for our female lead and the others who have trudged this trail of hopelessness, the labyrinth goes nowhere, for it has never been anywhere.

In a few years she'll start teaching. She'll attach herself to a community theater. She play as many of the roles as she can as she ages from Dorothy to the Wicked Witch.

She may have children, but most likely cats. She'll travel the world. She'll have friends. She'll know what good wine tastes like, but she'll always come home to the half filled bottle of the cheap stuff.

She'll never regret her decision to devote her life to the stage. But she'll never know how to tell a man to shut up the way my wife can. And her performances will forever lack the depth of the true human experience.

I chose differently.

Mostly cause I was hungry.

Which leads me to the climax of my story.

In a few short months, Taylor will begin making those kind of choices. Each path along the way is filled with broken hearts, broken dreams, devotion, obsession, tragedy, comedy, and a whole lotta farce. I don't understand him the way I do most people. I don't know how to empathize with him the way I can with someone I just met. Think of how eerie it is to be the central male figure in a boy's life for over a decade, and not have the faintest idea about what makes him tick.

So I don't know which kinds of choices he'll make or how to guide him through that process.

I tease him. But I have to stop because his facade is wearing thin.

Who knows which melting pot he'll find himself in.

Right now, he wants to be a Forensic Scientist. Which means his classes will take him through a myriad of chemistry, physics, biology. I can offer no support other than to eat well and get some rest. Go for a walk. Turn the headphones down a little bit.

Calvin is easy. He wants to be a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.

If a certificate of completion from a now defunct acting program taught me anything at all, it was how to grow up to become a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.

But Taylor is going to be needing a graphing calculator. He's going to be reading books that have words I don't even know and couldn't put into a sentence. His whole world is flying beyond my intellectual grasp.

If I was the father of our female lead when she was eighteen, I would at least have some sense as to where her life was taking her, we could at least have casual conversations, I could be a help, I could be a support, I could offer my advice when needed, and keep my mouth shut when not, and I might even know the difference. But then again, maybe not.

He will be dissecting things.

Somewhere along the line, he could be extrapolating cause of death scenarios from the mucus membranes recently deceased cadavers. And he might be excellent at it.

He could enter a world where people are the masters of mucus membranes and what effect they have in life or death situations, where I would just have to stand quietly in a corner with my thumb up my ass, waiting for lunch time to come around.

Cause I'm hungry.

He could be so proficient in extrapolating cause of death scenarios from the mucus membranes recently deceased cadavers that he may . . .

in fact . . .

Major in Snot Bubbles.

And I couldn't be any prouder than if he actually grew to be a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.

Double Tap

That was how the execution was first described.

Tap.

You're most likely dead.

Tap.

You're hella dead.

To use my late eighties Californian vernacular.

I'm not gonna weigh in on the pros and cons, the right versus wrong, or raise my fist, or thumb my nose. But I will say this; the double tap, aside from being a well respected method of execution, is also a social convention we use every day.

Hi. How you doin?

As in, Hi, I want to let you know that you are now in my social circle. How you doin, it is important to me that since you are in my social circle I want you to feel loved.

Excuse me? Are you using that chair?

Can I get your attention and let you know that I too have needs. Needs that right now can only be met because you clearly have one more chair than you need, and I, have one less chair than I need, and even though I'm not evangelizing a socialist world order, it would be nice, just this once, if you would be so kind as to share the wealth.

Honey? When you pick up water, could you also get some soap?

This is my wife's double tap.

Because at no point had I considered picking up water today. In fact I had no real intention of doing anything today. But rather than asking me if I would go pick up water and soap, which might solicit a negative response, she used the passive aggressive voice, which made it seem as though I would be doing her the simple favor of picking up soap since I was going to the grocery store anyway to pick up water. The first tap is only implied.

Tap. Tap.

Knock. Knock.

Bang. Bang.

Vroom. Vroom.

Cough. Cough.

The list goes on and on.

On and On.

etc. etc.

To quote "The King and I"

This also leads me to think about how socially ingrained series of numbers can be.

Three, aside from being the magic number, is also the basic form of all list comedy. A form I use all the time. Its used in speaking to an audience. Its used for childhood discipline.

One! Get your clothes on.

Two! Get your clothes on.

Three! I am getting up off this couch and am gonna chase after you and when I catch you, you're gonna be sorry, and etc. etc. . . .

Three Blind Mice, Maids from School, Little Pigs, Amigos, Musketeers, Penny Opera, and the rate at which famous people or loved ones die.

Four is the basic stanza of lyricism. Five is a limerick. Six is two haikus (but that really brings us back to three).

Seven is lucky. But that's about all. And the rest of the numbered series stretching out into infinity are just too difficult to grasp. Unless you're a nerd, and if you are, can I use that chair?

One is pretty powerful too. As in this piece of advice I will be giving to my step son as he begins his college career:

Do not eat the second brownie.

I am sure that there are a lot more important pieces of wisdom I can impart. Plastics. Wear a condom. Don't drink and drive. (Which may seem like a double tap, but the usage of the word "and" implies that you can drink and you can drive, just don't do the two things together.)

Neither a lender nor a borrower be, be true to thine self. But Polonius gets stabbed to death while hiding behind a curtain, and I have much bigger plans for my future.

Besides, he was a bit of a fussbudget.

No, what Taylor really needs to understand is that one brownie is enough. Everyone I know can tell the tale of the second brownie and the very bad that follows. Cause we all thought the same thing:

"This one isn't working,

I should have another."

And it is always a bad decision. Always.

Yet, now with a more reflective voice, he is not likely to heed that advice. We all need to learn about the second brownie in our own pathetically personal way. We all need to be doing something when that second brownie hits. Something that will forever be etched into our psyche. We all need to lie on that dirty dorm room carpet, terrified that we are so stoned that every breath takes all of our concentration. Hopefully that room will be filled with sensitive art majors who only want to protect us in our time of need, and not the room where there is loud music and an abundance of permanent markers.

People have lost eyebrows because of the second brownie.

Taylor's gonna be an Aggie. That's right. Checks have been signed, credit cards charged, and tonight we get hoodies and pennants emblazoned with the UC Davis logo. He's going to be introduced to the whole wide world of college life splendor. And he's finally going to take ownership of the kind of social fuck-ups that separate boys from real men.

I'm proud. I'm jealous. I'm scared and I'm absolutely powerless to influence the choices he makes from this day forward.

For his life is the Titanic.

And I am the little rudder that couldn't.

So when I tell him not to eat the second brownie, it is possible that a single declaration will not suffice. Maybe a first year college student requires the same kind of force a world Super Power needs to send a terrorist icon into oblivion.

I think I'm gonna need the Double Tap.

Here goes.

Ready?

Taylor . . . Do not eat the second brownie.

Trust me.