Be a Hero

When I was in high school, one of the first stories I wrote - the one that started the creative-writing ball for me in earnest, as a matter of fact - was one set in a not-too-distant future. Now-a-days the half-finished story would be an easy fit into the all-too popular "dystopian" niche, but at the time I wasn't thinking of it as such. I just imagined a world in which priorities had aligned a bit differently. It was about a reporter who goes to live amongst a secret leper colony, established on an island off the eastern seaboard, but the thing that sticks with me the most these years later was an idea I had about the culture of the city from which he came.

The idea was that everybody smoked.

Everybody

smoked, indoors and out, and they did so because the popular opinion was that air pollution had gotten so bad that it was safer to inhale through a cigarette's filter. Something like: the smoke conditioned one's lungs to handle the much-worse stuff in the air, and inhaling through the filter helped keep the majority of that worser stuff out. I justified it by suggesting the "doctor recommended" smoking ads of the '50s had won out, but it worked for me as the storyteller by making everyone a little distant, a little coarse and plenty short-sighted.

[Update 12/19/13: I was right! Kind of!]

Now occasionally I wonder if I just got the wrong orifice. Ray Bradbury, may he rest in peace, in 1953 imagined these far-fetched tiny "seashells" the folks wore in their ears to hear entertainment anywhere. These were all a part of an imagined, self-isolating technology that we were irresistibly drawn to, which included wall-sized television screens and self-prescribed medication, and I'm ashamed to admit that I willingly use so-called "ear-buds" as such every single day. Nothing's so good an excuse to avoid survey-takers and the homeless - heck, even normal people! - as those handy, dandy ear-buds. And just look at how pocket computers help with eye contact!

 I indulge in this side-effect willingly. I'm grateful for it. Thank God, say I, for my iDevice, and its music and pod-casts and games and even occasionally sometimes if I can be reminded of it connectivity to productive tasks. Furthermore, I'm not writing here to lament this turn in human interaction. True, there are plenty of trade-offs. Yes, I fantasize about a badminton racket reserved solely for knocking the device from the hand of anyone trying to walk and tweet simultaneously. Yes, I'm reading less and have a shorter attention span. And, yes, I want more people than just the local lunatics to hear me if I scream for help. But also: Music! Games! Blocking out the God-awful continuous hammering of street construction! I am fervently all-for the critical resource of my mobile device.

However. There is a finer point of urban etiquette for which I make exception to my electronic enthusiasm. It has to do with a naturally artificial social situation we call The Subway.

I am not going to tell you to turn down your salsa music. Blare it out of the vibrations of your skull! I am not going to tell you to stop hugging the pole to maintain balance while playing Draw Something. Get that palate enormous, and three coins for Gryffindor! I am not even going to tell you to start taking your seashells from out your ears. Leave your seashells in. You are a beautiful mer-maid/man, and you glisten with the rapture of this week's

Epic Meal Time

.

I am going to tell you this: Open your eyes. And one more thing: Especially if you are fortunate enough to have a seat.

The Subway is a miserable solution to a miserable problem. No one - apart from the aberrant tourist - is pleased to be there when they're on The Subway. The best solution, the only and final solution, is to zone right the heck on out. ZONE, SON. You can get miles away, especially if you have those magic ear-shells. And maybe you are on there at five in the morning, and your hour-long commute is going to make the napping difference between a good day and an impossible one. And maybe you are coming off a fourteen-hour nursing shift, and the only thing that makes sense is bending your legs, just for a few minutes. And maybe it's just the stress (God, the stress) that makes you want to hold yourself and rock during the one period of your day when no one expects anything from you. I get it, and I'm with you, and I'm in the ZONE.

But open your eyes. This isn't the zombie apocalypse, despite what you've heard on the news lately, and the dog-eat-dog world isn't applicable to mass, underground transportation. Here is where the humanity is needed most. Here is where you can toss a token (so much more poetic than a MetroCard) and it will be quickly caught by someone looking longingly at something about the bounty of your position. Because we're all lucky to have what we have, and we're all here for one another. It shouldn't take a catastrophe to remind us of that - just a little gratitude, held in your heart for these moments when you have a chance to help.

So, please: Keep your eyes open. For the nurse, if you're a napper. For the napper, if you're a caffeine addict like me. For the guy on crutches, who'll argue with you for a little while about it. For the lady in heels (maybe she

has

to wear them for some reason). For the elderly. For the family. That makes you a hero, for the littlest while. But who knows? It may also help you reconnect a bit before you go back to conquering the world on your cell phone.

And just one final and specific point I'd like to make in closing. Some might argue that it is the entire purpose of my meandering exposition, and some of those same may accuse me of out-dated modes of thinking, but I will have my point made regardless. If you are male, between the ages of 13 and 60, and of reasonable fitness, and have the benefit of a seat when a pregnant woman enters the subway car, give up your seat. Right. The fuck. Now.

Some questions.

For some reason, it terrifies me to state outright what I want. (Apart, of course, from

my Tumblr proclivities

.) I'm not sure why. Fear of failure? Need to please? Neurotic (for sure)? This aversion has even put my toes in the fire once or twice (including one especially memorable high school moment when my girlfriend yelled at me in the hall between classes, "You don't know what you want and that terrifies me!") yet I've not changed it significantly for the better. So when a career survey I was working through tossed a few questions at me, I thought it might be interesting - success or failure - to post the results.

Interesting to whom, I daren't contemplate.

1.) What do I want out of life?

Well, (I love thinking-pauses in text) I want a storied experience. Preferably those stories involve overcoming adversity and making things a little better than they have been, but even failure and disappointment can make for good stories. My personal definition of success has changed repeatedly over time, but coming out of it with stories has always been redeeming. To me that means taking as little for granted as possible, and saying yes to any opportunity I possibly can. I want to create stories, and for my personal story, I want to create a family. That's a part of my story I've known I've wanted for a long time.

2.) What do I want to give to this life?

Everything? I don't want to leave anything undone, or have regrets about the efforts not attempted. There's balance in how much one gives and keeps but in terms of anything related to my life, I see no reason not to give my all: time, effort, aspiration. If there's something to keep, I'd say perspective, or at least sanity. And even sanity is overrated in a number of situations. If I'm going to be as specific as possible in responding to this question, I'd say I want to give love. (Lately I keep thinking of that amazing line from the film

Adaptation

: "You are what you love, not what loves you.")  Sorry to take it down a bit of a golden-brick road, but anything done with love really does come out fantastic, and there's all different kinds of love. I think love is a decent legacy in terms of what one gives to the life they want.

3.) What is it about the world that I dislike, am most bothered by, or hate the most; and would most love to correct, fix, or eradicate if I could?

When it comes to little things, this list is pretty endless. When it comes to big things, I get overwhelmed before the list can become endless. From petty annoyances like people who

rush into the subway without letting people off

, to, you know, War, there's plenty to change. In most of the work I've done for myself, I've aspired to break people out of windows. I see our world as one in which people have become too comfortable with the idea of personal distance and routine, experiencing stories on a cold plastic screen (as though through a window) and ignoring anything around them that isn't a practical part of getting through a day. I hate - in myself most of all - that sort of appetite- and survival-driven zombie-ism. I'd eradicate it if I could. As it stands, I try to create experiences of perception and gratitude to counteract it.

4.) What product or service does my community or the world really, really need?

I'm going to try to answer both of these, to see where it leads.

A service is the easiest for me to conceive of, since that's essentially the role I perceive my theatre work to have been. Theatre creates a communal, personal experience that transports people through an idiom with which they are generally comfortable (audience/performer relationship) into personal connection, imagination and discussion. But if I were to name a new service that my world badly needs, it would be a conduit to this sort of experience - be it theatre or some other live art, church or a wicked karaoke scene. In other words, a service that connects audiences with genuinely new experiences they really want to have. What it means to be a "community" has been rapidly changing, and needs a service that is a new connective tissue.

All of that invariably leads me to my notions for a product. I'm drawn toward technology, naturally, as it fascinates me as much as anyone else within my demographic. Yet I also value artifacts - physical objects that are unique and tactile. We need a product that really exists, without being divorced from computer-based application. An "app" is not enough. It would be very nice to figure out some new and appealing social-networking software, but our miraculous "phones" are still windows, barriers of glass, illuminations of connectivity, and not the community itself. My product would be some kind of compass to community, but one that opens your eyes rather than keeps you staring into your palm.

5.) What is it that I would love to do more than anything else in the world?

Absolutes are tricky, but I most often pass satisfaction into the precious world of fulfillment by way of creating or improving things with rigor and attention to detail, as well as broader implications and effects. This activity most often takes the form of inventing comedies and characters, but also applies to writing in just about any form and other things, such as marketing and entrepreneurship. More than anything in the world, today, I'd love to write and critique and teach . . . with perhaps the occasional opportunity to perform.

6.) What is it that most energizes me? What work most exhausts me?

You know, I think exhaustion has a place. Working on shows usually does both of these, and I think that's part of what's so appealing about it. I believe I'm exhilarated by the innovation and collaboration, and exhausted by the chaos and collaboration. I'm energized by projects and newness, be it work at a computer terminal or bouncing around outside, and I'm exhausted by disorganized, maintenance work. What tires me out is a hopelessness that comes from a lack of direction.

7.) What turns me on the most?

Heh-heh.

Beginnings, effective communication and emotional content. I crave an audience at all times (probably especially when I least wish to) and so working in a group is as wonderful for me as a solo project, so long as what's taking place involves listening and caring - caring about what we're aiming for and caring about how we get there. I'm excited by things that transform people's perspectives, and offer challenge and reward in some kind of accessible balance. Great words and great movement turn me on, and a sense of rhythm (kind of like a sound procedure or protocol) will carry that excitement forward indefinitely. I like ideas. Scratch that. I

love

ideas; I adore them. Amongst people who enjoy thinking creatively, challenging themselves, is hands-down the best place to be for me.

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!

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.

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

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

...

The Puppeteers: Simulcra & Pareidolia

As I mentioned back in September (see 9/20/10), I'm writing more and more on the development 'blog for the next Zuppa show.  If you want to follow along, feel free!  Right now the ideas are big and broad.  They will narrow from discussions of theme to tiny details of fart gags, just you wait and see.  My latest entry discusses ideas of creation and recognition.  A snippet to whet:

Many [human] instincts apply to our tendency toward seeing faces in things with whose creation we had little or nothing to do - pareidolia.  We see faces in woodgrain, water stains, toast.  You name it.  Of course we're inclined toward this for a variety of reasons, but what interests me about it are a few possibilities outside the realm of anything logical:

• Maybe we're more inclined to pareidolia when we're lonely, or feel great need of some kind.

• What if, instead of seeing faces because of a need, we're seeing them because we in some way recognize an object in front of us in some personal way?

• What if pareidolia leads to a relationship, the way the supposed recognition involved in "love at first sight" can?

 Read the rest here: Simulacra & Pareidolia.