Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome…

Posted January 27th, 2003 by Sean Williams

Knowing full well that another musical is seriously low on the priority scale of any thinking human being, my friend Mac and I have decided that we have something important to say and, really, a musical is the only way to say it.

The interesting thing about creating something is not necessarily coming up with good ideas, but throwing out most of your good ideas and keeping only the great ones. It’s hard to know what those are, often, but fortunately Mac has been produced fairly often in New York, and that serves as a constant reminder: There will be other plays for the other ideas.

Mac and I are both drawn to the politics of abuse, why people accept it, why aggressive men are more attractive to both sexes, why women constantly seek out men they shouldn’t want. Despite what you see in what Mac calls ‘Nerd Fantasy’ movies, the quiet, thinking, sweet guy doesn’t ever get the girl, unless he is also terribly handsome and just might erupt in violence. The red haired girl will end up with Charlie Sheen, and as soon as Winona Ryder realizes how hot she is, she’ll dump Lucas in a second, trust me.

And I am not one of those nice guys either, it should be said. I tend to be aggressive and loud and oafish, if anything, so this isn’t wish fulfillment on my part. But most of my friends are massively intelligent and they also tend to be somewhat shy. These are guys with incredible success waiting for them. My closest seven or eight friends, including the aforementioned Mac, are guys who are so intelligent and so diligent that success just waits for them like fruit on a tree, and yet they don’t have women all over them. I’ve always done fairly well in the girl department, and I am a goddam nightmare, prone to hysteria, loud as only a conductor’s son turned actor could be, and basically a failure at virtually everything I have tried. None of my friends made it to thirty without a high school diploma, having failed out of four colleges, and one divorce already out of the way, and yet a beautiful woman with an astronomical I.Q. seems really happy to live with me.

I hyperbolize a bit, but that leads to the question we are asking with this piece. Do people want that fear of failure or abuse in their lives? Why are we so drawn to the irrational and dangerous? Are we really that bored, that infatuated with drama, that we will find someone lousy or, as happens in our play, that we will turn a good person bad? If you learn to live without that passion for destruction, can you be happy or just content?

By the way, I’m not sure what this Blog is for, but I doubt seriously anyone cares what I do every day. Suffice it to say, I get up early, go to the gym, work on music, and do my best to amuse my friends. That’s it, every day. So, I guess, just assume that goes at the top of every blog unless I say different.