I haven’t always been really good at publicizing the shows I’m in, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I’m not always convinced that I’ve got enough control over the show to believe that it will be really good. That sucks of me, I know, I really ought to push like crazy…

Except I’m not sure the pushing gets anything. I get a lot of invitations to shows in my inbox and, clearly, I’m not going to plays right now, I’ve got a baby and my life from about 6:15 to 8:45 is pretty complicated. I mean, I’m sure we could get a babysitter, but we just kinda don’t want to. We want to be here with him while we can. But, even before I had the built-in excuse, an email, especially from a stranger, never once convinced me to go see a play.

There are a bunch of different things that will get me there, including personal relationships, possible great writing, cool ideas, awesome production, possible hot people wearing next to nothing… that kind of thing. But I think the thing that gets me in more than anything else is being invested in the producers and actors of a play.

I mean, it’s weird. Sirius radio has a Sinatra Channel, but it doesn’t play songs written by Frank Sinatra. He never wrote anything. It’s songs that tell us something about who he was, and who the people were surrounding him. When you go see the new Harrison Ford movie… I think the point there is self-evident.

We don’t do this with plays at all. I mean, obviously, we do it once you get on the Broadway level, half of what goes on in midtown involves at least one little bit of stunt casting, but we don’t do it where we make theater. Not enough.

There’s a late night show with some dude hosting it, I think it’s called “Late Night With Byron Allen”, but that might be the wrong title and wrong host, and please forgive me if it is, but it is essentially a sycophantic bit of craziness where television and movie stars are interviewed and they come across as charming and good looking, and the hope is that if enough people see these little things, then when War Of The Worlds Part Two comes out, everyone will flock to the theaters.

How can we do that?

How can those of us making plays in tiny theaters in New York get people to be invested in the personalities of these people? I mean, the steady stream of theater professionals who move into film and TV is pretty purely about money, I have to imagine, because the taped jobs aren’t any easier and they’re way less rewarding, so how can we keep everyone here?

I don’t have an answer, but I wonder if it isn’t a several step process.

1) Online video marketing and graphic marketing. By which I mean, video, audio and pictures from rehearsal, from breaks in rehearsal, from the production meetings, from the venue meetings, etc. The magic of putting on a show is utterly infectious, every one of us fell in love with the *process* in high school as much or more than we fell in love with “Godspell” or “Annie Get Your Gun” or whatever.

There was a show that went up a little while ago called “The Adventures of Nervous Boy” and I absolutely loved this show. I adored it. And what’s more, I would have been THRILLED to watch the process of them putting this show together. The company is packed with awesome, smart, funny-as-hell, dedicated people who I would love to know better. Do I want more news about fucking Lindsey Lohan? I do not, I want an online video-blog that I can subscribe to that shows me what Nosedive Productions is doing.

2) Parties. Look, there’s a difference between the theater and TV/Movies, and that’s that theater people are more willing to be physically uncomfortable. If we want to fight with movies, we can either let people eat candy in big comfy chairs while they wait for Godot, or we can just accept that people who crave comfort are gonna watch TV first, and if the cultural tides carry them, they’ll go to a movie.

But people who like to stand around with a beer and crack wise? These are the asshole we want in our seats. What if there were three parties a year, big venue, open bar, not supporting anything except the small theater world in New York. Not a party for a *show*, but a party for the community. That way, if you liked Nervous Boy, you could hang out with James Comtois or if you liked Fitz and Wallows you can go up and talk to Micah Bucey.

Be forewarned, Micah is enchanting. He will steal your soul.

3) Post-show Community Continuity. Yes, we all love our castmates, we all hook up with our romantic leads, we all have dinner with the guy playing Falstaff, but when the show ends these relationships dissolve quickly. It’s impossible to maintain a personal connection because a) as actors we’re all busy all day and then we’re in rehearsal all night, and b) we’re now hooking up with the next romantic lead and having dinner with the guy playing Mercutio.

But blog-communities can hold people together. Reading and commenting on each other’s blogs can keep those groups together by giving them a common ground, and that ground can be theatrical musings. I don’t know how to have a clearing house for theater bloggers, but if there was a single site, hooked up with RSS feeds that covered blogs from small theater enthusiasts, and if this site allowed discussion and a way to rank the topics according to their importance and relevance…

It would be like Digg for the small theater world.

I should say, I keep saying “Small Theater” because downtown doesn’t mean anything, and I think there is also a real need to keep the community theaters in America in touch with one another. We’re producing under the radar in New York, and I know for a fact that places like the Iowa City Community Theater sells out a giant house for every run of the shows they do.

Small Theater should include everyone working on the fringes of the professional world. Whether they’re in New York or not even close. If one is to assume that cultural hegemony is a problem, then the best tool out there for respecting and dignifying the non-metropolitan point of view is this here series of tubes we call the internet.

I should say, the idea that New York disregards the rest of America seems strange to me because we, as small theater producers, don’t have the AUDIENCE to have a stranglehold on any culture. I’ve been producing plays for seven years now in New York, and the one show we set in New York (Fleet Week) did, in fact, make fun of southern racists, it’s true. But the show I’m most proud of (The Second String) is set in, ironically, North Carolina.

But you know what? Not that many people know either show. If you’re reading this, chances are you might know one of them, but only a handful of people know both. And that’s because we haven’t figured out how to make these small statements heard. We’ve got the internet, and we’ve got a lot of people in one place, but we haven’t made it happen yet.

We can’t really afford to “buy” stuff for each other very much, in fact this Christmas we just did away with the whole idea, but we still take birthdays VERY seriously. I made this for Jordana with software I found on my computer. I hope it doesn’t look like total shit.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjQMrb_OgYc]

I have changed in the following ways.

1) I don’t have the stomach for overt navel gazing. Everything I say in this blog is going to be read by Barnaby one day, and I can see myself shifting slightly, away from being a son and toward being a father. This is the actual change, but it manifests itself in all the other smaller changes.

2) I don’t care who’s right, I just want things fixed. If there’s a problem, and a possible solution to the problem is posited, then I just want the solution tried, I don’t give a shit who’s been wronged or who’s suffered more. People make mistakes, and sometimes they make them because they are malicious selfish assholes, but usually they make them because they are trying to do the right thing and they fuck up. I don’t care if the problem was created by the former or the latter, I just want it fixed.

What this means is that I’m less out for justice and I’m more out for peace. It seems illogical at this point to talk about how badly the Arabs and the Jews have treated each other, it seems illogical to wonder about who’s parents were more abusive when we were all kids, and it’s totally illogical to ponder the *reason* that the baby’s diaper is so full it’s leaking. I just want to change his diaper, change his clothes and move the fuck on.

3) I’m less patient. I haven’t written because the creation of content for this blog requires a certain amount of time, and that time is spent in the hopes that one day this will mean something to somebody. I just don’t have that sense of the long-view any more, and by “long-view” I mean, I just can’t write and hope that tomorrow someone will write to me and tell me that what I’ve written matters to them. I need to know that what I’m spending my time on has real-world value to it.

4) I’m infinitely more patient. Every moment I spend with Barnaby is useless, half the time he’s screaming nonsense syllables or chewing on a piece of public property, but I know that the sum total of those moments will end up being more useful than a college education or a high-paying job will be to him. When I punish him, and when he’s terrified of my anger, he’ll also know that my anger is at his actions, not at who he actually is. And he’ll know that because somewhere in his hindbrain, he’ll know that I love him more than I’ve ever loved anything.

5) I’m more private. At some point, the love that I discovered in being a father left me without any way of talking about it. It isn’t a romantic or passionate love, it is basically beyond description. Not only that, but I think we all love our kids in different ways. For some people, it is a rhapsody, it does come across in poems and sonnets. But I can’t describe it. And knowing that there is, in the world, something that is unexpressable, that is completely internal… that’s made me feel both lonely and satisfied and it’s made it much harder for me to be close to people outside my immediate family.

6) I waste less time. I don’t remember the last time I watched TV when it wasn’t appointment television. I’ve seen one movie in the theater over the last six months, and if it weren’t for a job opportunity, I would have stopped watching “House”. My mom or my in-laws take Barnaby and I hear a starter’s gun go off in my head. I have two hours, and minutes later, I have minutes less, to do the things I need to do followed by the things I want to do.

7) I’m more frugal. I think about money a lot, but in a totally different way. I had always wondered how I was gonna survive from month to month, but now I focus on how I can make the road ahead easier. When I get too old to make money, will my son have to take care of me? As the years go on, will I be a burden, or will I provide him with liberation?

8) I have a completely different understanding of discipline.

It has always seemed to me that discipline was enforced, that you set yourself a goal and a timeline and then you screwed your courage to your sticking place and willed your own success. And this has been a useful tool for me to continue to hate myself and to blame myself for my shortcomings and my failures.

I’ve now discovered that discipline is organic, that I always act from my list of priorities, starting at the top. I’m doing really well right now, I’m following through on the things that I need to get done and I’m staying ahead of schedule on most things, but that is entirely because my sense of duty and responsibility slid, through no effort on my part, to the top of my list of priorities.

My sense of responsibility to my friends has disappeared. I’m writing this blog right now because I haven’t written it for the last four days, but I know that it needs to be written for Barno and for Jordana. But I also know there are social engagements to set up and to follow through on, I need to call about eleven people, and I tell myself that I will do it as soon as this blog is completed… but the truth is, if the baby wakes up, or if I get some of the information I’m waiting on in order to take the next few steps for Gideon, then I’m not gonna call anybody. I’m gonna keep working.

This is making me more and more isolated, and lonely, I’m sure. It’s been years since I’ve been able to maintain a night-life, but I did spend a number of years with my night-life at the top of my list, so I let myself off the hook. I tell myself that this is a productive, if lonely, time, and that every minute of every day, I’m essentially doing exactly what I want to, the same as I always have.

Anyway. The list.

9) I have more pride. I need less affirmation from the rest of the world because that same sense of the inexplicable has shown me that there is also no compliment large enough, no credit deep enough and no accolade loud enough that will fill that gaping maw inside me. The only thing that will stop me from feeling unloved is a sense of accomplishment. This translates into far less email written to my friends, far fewer blog posts, and far fewer social engagements. I am no satisfied with being a father, but I am utterly unsatisfied with praise for the things I do outside being a father. I still wish I could stop feeling so needy, but at least now I feel like the need is only going to be met by something inside me.

10) I want more artistic success. I just want Barnaby to be able to look at what we’ve done and discover that one can make their own way in the world if one chooses to. I want him to know that if he seeks happiness, if he seeks success, it is possible for him. When presented with a choice, I want him to choose based on how hard it is, and how much success he thinks he can attain, I don’t want him to feel like the harder path is guaranteed to fail.

11) I miss my family. My brothers, my sisters. I miss them all the time. I think about them all the time, and I really wish we could all live close enough to be in regular contact.

I’m curled up in my studio, hiding from my six month old.

I know I haven’t written in over a month, and I promised I would write on the 15th of every month to leave some sort of record of how insane all of this is. I’m already going back and looking at pictures from three or four months ago and breaking out in a sweat to remember the little boy who could barely meet my eye or hold up his head, and I know that in front of me are the terrible twos, the terrible Junior High years, the terrible teens and the terrible prospect of wondering where he is and why he never calls…

But right now he’s amazing. This is the golden time, what Hi called the Salad Days. His love for me is ridiculous, his love for the world is ridiculous, and his enthusiasm is matched only by his ability to self-preserve.

I should probably just try to tell you who he is now that he’s somebody, but it’s pretty hard to line up all his attributes like a myspace profile or something. I’ll give it a shot.

He doesn’t seem to mind crowds and finds safety in more than just his mom and dad, which is good. It probably helps that he’s been raised by all his grandparents together, but he understands who family is and who isn’t, although those that aren’t don’t get excluded too much. As long as he’s got one of us in his sight line, he’s pretty much fine.

In fact, “pretty much fine” describes him really well. He’s got a lot of personality, filling the house with these screams of delight when I munch on his feet or underarms. He loves feeling mischievous – if you whisper to him it drives him nuts with giggles and he will usually start whispering back – but he also loves to be the center of attention and he loves singing as high and as loud as he can.

But the truth is, he’s actually very mellow. There are a lot of mornings and afternoons that I spend with him where we don’t really play with toys. He just sits on me and walks on my chest and plays with my hands. If I turn him around so he lies back on me, he’ll spend five or ten minutes just looking around the room, making zerbert noises or little coos. And if he feels overwhelmed or over tired, he just stops taking in any more crap. I’ve heard that babies and little kids burn out at the end of the day, but he just fades out until his bath, getting quieter and quieter and staring more intently at the trees or the posters or the lights.

His bath turns everything around at lightning speed. As I get him undressed, he loses his shit with joy. Nothing in the world, besides maybe his mom, makes him as happy as being naked. I think he likes getting naked almost as much as being naked, but being naked is definitely his favorite state.

His bath is just pure mellow. He sits there, one hand in his mouth, the other on his jock staring off and powering down from the day. It’s all good, it’s all warm, and he’s gonna go straight from this to nursing… it’s like everything from here on out is great.

The days are great. Barnaby is really good at telling me what he needs when he needs it, I know pretty quickly if he’s hungry, if he’s tired, if he’s bored. It’s so weird that he communicates so simply to me and to Dana, and when other people see his faces and ask what he’s saying, we’re always confused about how they could not know.

Because he’s just not a kid who throws a fit. If he gets upset, he settles down by locking on my eyes and staring at me until his bad feelings go away. And this usually makes me laugh, which makes him laugh. And, I shit you not, this is a twenty second ordeal. A horrible noise or a nasty woman screams in his face about how GORgeous he is, and he looks at me with his lip sticking out and I tell him he’s okay, and he believes me and it’s all fixed.

He’s really masculine, very male-looking and very physical and very EARTHly, but he’s not at all cool. He’s a complete dork, completely excited about stuff, completely curious. If I walk him outside at a fast pace, he sits with his legs up on the crossbar of the stroller and lets the trees swim by, but if I carry him and walk slow, he goes with his arms straight out in front of him, touching bricks, touching leaves and twigs.

He’s enthusiastic about the outside world, but he’s also really relaxed about letting it come to him. He’ll be sitting in my lap in the park and I’ll realize he has stretched and bent back and rested his head on my arm so he can watch the leaves move against the sky.

He likes the leaves because he likes anything that sparkles. He could be surrounded by his colored toys and he will fixate on a glass of water or an empty Ziploc bag. He loves an empty diet coke bottle, crumpled up a little so he can get his mouth around it. And he LOVES running an empty bottle on his gums, making a little windshield wiper noise.

He doesn’t like food. At all. And I really shouldn’t laugh as hard as I do, because he doesn’t complain. He’s okay with tolerating a tiny bit of yogurt with some bananas mushed up in it, but he hates the rice cereal, hates the banana or yogurt alone, hates anything that isn’t warm breast milk. But he doesn’t cry, really. He just makes the most amazing faces of abject hatred. I’ll post some as soon as I’ve taken them.

He’s just a fantastic kid. He’s even stopped throwing up as much, and he’s started talking all the time in sentences that don’t make sense to anybody but him. He’s so lovely, he’s just so, so, so lovely.

So why am I hiding?

Last night we started sleep training. We’re doing the Ferber method, as best we can. Tonight was a little better than last night. The basic idea is that he’s got to learn to put himself back to sleep when he wakes up in the middle of the night, and he’ll never learn to do that unless you, y’know, don’t actually PUT him to sleep.

Which means he cries.

This is not a kid who cries, I now realize. He bitches and he whinges and he moans and he kvetches, but he’s barely cried until yesterday. When he was born, a couple of times in the car when he’s over-tired… and last night.

And tonight.

The crying where he starts coughing and sputtering, where his hands are shaking like Wallace asking for cheese. Crying like he’s a newborn. Like an abandoned newborn. In Gethsemane.

Jordana was so worried about him that she didn’t sleep last night, so tonight she took a tylenol PM, which is the equivalent of burying her under a foot of rubble. I sorta started the sleep training, so I’m kinda taking the lead on it, although I wouldn’t know what the hell to do without Jordana’s knowledge of the Ferber book and her neurotic need to re-read chapters that I, frankly, only read once (three months ago) (while the TV was on). Plus, when Barno smells his mom, he has the same thought I always have when I smell her, that she has lovely boobs.

So, we’re avoiding that whole thing.

He’s doing great getting back down. He went down in about half an hour tonight, and so far only woke up once and went down in fifteen minutes.

I can’t apologize for now writing, I’m pretty sure I’m my only reader left. This is just for posterity at this point. I’m sorry, I really want to start a Gideon blog with a little daddy day care for good measure. I just seem to only have the time at 1:15 when my baby’s not crying.

Our dishwasher quit working. I blame it on that.

I mean, I should say, it works, it just doesn’t drain, and it doesn’t drain because it was installed by an undereducated idiot… me. The hose they sent with the dishwasher isn’t long enough for where I want the dishwasher to be, so I replaced it with a rubber hose that is the right thickness and length. It didn’t occur to me that a rubber hose might very easily trap gook on the inside where a plastic hose wouldn’t.

I know this is pretty mundane but the truth is that all the miracles and big moments in your life have, at their root, all of these mundane moments. My actual life seems to be filling in the quarter notes more than it is hearing the music, if that makes any sense.

So, I spent several hours over the last two days trying to clean out the various traps and trying to get the dishwasher functioning. It’s at about 80%, so, naturally, we did a load of dishes. Our house is a goddam mess, a complete goddam mess… it feels like I’m walking home from the store with a month’s worth of groceries and no bags, I just keep moving armload after armload up a block and then go back for the rest. In any case, we did a load of dishes and they came out clean, I just have to keep working on the trap and the hose.

What it led me to was a slow bad feeling in my back. I’ve never had a bad back, my knees are for shit and my stomach always hurts but I’ve got a really strong back, always have. So it’s weird and rare that I get this bad feeling in my spine, but last night it started feeling kinda, y’know, *bad*.

My poor kid is teething. This morning at 2:15, he woke up in pain. I went in as I always do and tried to get him to settle down, but he was really unhappy. Because it was the middle of the night, I had forgotten that it could be his teeth. Jordana popped her head in and said, “You can give him some baby tylenol…” and I was like, “Crap, why don’t I ever *think* of these things…”

I spent the next 52 minutes rocking him and swinging him. At 3:07, when he lost his shit again, I whined into the monitor, “Jordana… can you come in here?” My back was locking up, I couldn’t move and Barno was inconsolable.

So, that’s a great little pity party, isn’t it? Sucks for me, up all night, back hurting. My life is extremely hard.

But those 52 minutes were partially awful, but partially amazing. I put some teething tablets in his mouth and waited for them to melt, and then I rubbed them on his gums. I don’t know if it’s the tablets or the rubbing, but he just completely relaxed as I rubbed his gums. I got to the back of his teeth and he started biting down on my finger making this little “gaaaah” sound of satisfaction, the same sound I make when I get some good pot roast…

And I was swinging him and he’d relax, but then he’d start to whine like a rusty door swinging, and I’d pick him up to my face and nibble on his chest and belly and arms and he’d stop whining completely. When I pulled him down from my face, I could just see him, smiling, with fingers in his mouth, eyes looking to the side.

It’s hard for me to talk about my life with Barnaby, because it’s all inside me. He has some problems, his sleeping sucks and he’s a hilarious pain in the ass when it comes to eating, and then all of the nice stuff, the smiling and the talking and the staring into my eyes, that’s all so obvious.

You never really change, I think. You don’t change or have something happen to you and then you’re changed. It’s never as simple as it is in the movies, where you can say, “my father fought in Vietnam, so now I’m scared of pineapples” or whatever. People claim this all the time, like the so totally misunderstand psychiatry that they say, “my father was mean to me, so now subconsciously I mistrust men.” As if you can make an announcement about your own subconscious, and as if knowing the source of an irrational feeling wouldn’t make it basically go away.

The changes that happen tend to be the kind of thing where you look back and you realize that years ago something shifted your point of view, and you’ve been behaving accordingly ever since. You listen to someone talk and you don’t believe them, and you realize it’s because of something three or four years ago, plus something from last year, plus something from high school.

But when you have a baby, your learning curve, your maturity and your shifting nature starts to pace his. He’s a different person, entirely, every day, and you find yourself changing your head and your heart every day.

There aren’t any goods and bads anymore. Everything is painted in different colors. It’s the same painting, it’s all the same life, but now, the colors are different, like blowing out the tint knob on an old TV.

I can barely move my back. But I had Barno this morning for 45 minutes, and the exquisite pain of carrying him was a different kind of pain. When I pick him up and he puts his hand out and pulls my glasses off and then drops his forehead into my neck, my back freezes, but it’s just so lovely.

Those 52 minutes I was up with him are different than you might think. It was terrible, and I fell asleep in horrible pain at minute 54, but the color of the pain was just not the same as it was five months ago today.

Obviously, five months ago today, all of the pain was Jordana’s.

But five months and a day ago, I wouldn’t have known how beautiful a hurt back can be. I didn’t know how much you could be loved by someone you barely know. The colors were all different.

Somehow, the feeling of “broken dishwasher” is still pretty frickin’ similar…

We have been accepted by the NYFringe Festival this year, which is a real thrill for us. Never before, ever, have we entered into a production schedule with so much already in our proverbial backpacks, ready to make the trip.

The script is “Hail Satan”, which we did as a workshop production of a year and a half ago. I am a big believer not only in Mac as a playwright, and I think this might be his tightest script ever. Jordana, Mac and I do share a similar ability to disappear into whatever is expected of us, we can parody things nice and broad or we can parody them so thin that it’s almost unrecognizable, but this piece is one in which I completely hear “Mac”.

We’ve got the acceptance, we’ve basically got the script (Mac is doing some second act revisions that everyone except me seems to think are necessary) and we’ve got a director. We have all worked together so much in the past that we’ve got a shorthand for making the thing work, and I have to tell you, this is the dream I’ve had since I was a kid.

I always wanted *this*, I just didn’t know what it was. I’ve always wanted an audience for our shows, I’ve always wanted to be one of the people that helped say something really lovely. That’s the thing about acting, you get to be a part of storytelling and if you get really lucky, you get to be one of a group of people that are telling stories you want to tell in the way you want to tell them.

My acting life has been really terrible. I should say, I’ve been really lucky in love, I’ve been really lucky when it comes to money, and I feel like I SUPER lucked out with my kid, so I can’t really complain. But it really sucks being an actor. I’ll tell you why…

1) Other actors. It takes a special kind of abuse as a child that makes you crave being an actor. This particular career attracts only the most ravenously needy. There are a lot of people clawing their way to downstage center, leaning in to the follow spot the way an herb garden grows toward the window. Most of the time, these people get a little older, a little less desperate and slowly become okay-to-normal people, but not always. And even the mature, settled, considerate and kind actors, who are one in a million, still have that horrible eating need to be *watched while they do stuff*. It isn’t healthy.

2) Scripts. You fight like crazy, calling casting directors, buying writers and stage managers drinks, sending out your resume cold, calling agencies cold, all so you can get on the list where *someone* will consider you for a role on the Breakdowns. Not just a “Backstage” role, the one where you’ll get a metrocard and wear your own clothes in the show, but a “Breakdown” role. With residuals. A costumer. Who gives you a pair of shoes to wear, and then you give them back.

The thing is, you get one of these gigs, and then you start reading. I left an audition for a children’s show because reading the script made me start feeling physically ill. In a Home Depot commercial audition, I let the other guy go first and then I just sighed and walked out. Have you ever watched an Olive Garden commercial? Stop your DVR and watch it, it’s just… it’s torture. It’s inhuman.

But the very worst thing is the “Backstage” role, the one you have to wear your own clothes in, the one with six weeks of rehearsal being directed by the playwright’s college buddy, these are the scrips that are the absolute worst.

((( Please let me provide the caveat that the very best theater I’ve seen in New York has been showcase code, crazy ass scripts being directed by the playwright’s college buddy. There are a lot of off-off guys that are doing it right. But I’ve gotten just gun-shy of being cast in one of these things. I’d rather do one that my best friend wrote, directed by his college buddy…)))

3) The Director. If you find yourself with a really lovely script, don’t think for a moment it can’t be utterly destroyed by the director. I had always thought that the worst possible director is the one who walks in and really wants to save a script from itself. In one instance, I played the antagonist, a lovely young actress played the protagonist, and the director’s college friends were the supporting characters, which meant the entire play was designed around the ancillary characters doing distracting shit.

I had always thought “The Savior” was the worst, but I was proven wrong at some point. There are in fact directors who are directors because they wanted to be actors and couldn’t, and ran the box office at their college or something, and hung around, and hung around, and found a way to raise enough money to kinda get a group of people around them to produce and direct their own stuff. (if you look at reason #1, it’s not hard to see why these kind of people can actually get wonderful actors to work with them), but then when they actually have a script and a cast and a rehearsal room… they do nothing.

They run scenes.

And, at the end of the run, they say, “Questions? Comments? Concerns?” Or they say, “Let’s try it again, and really focus on *what* you’re saying. Y’know? Think about WHY…”

4) My Own Brain. I have problems with authority, linked in a lot of ways to the fact that I was desperately unhappy the whole time I was in school. I was the kid who got suspended for getting beat up. I was the kid who was put on probation when my gym clothes were found in the urinal. I was the kid who did well on standardized tests, but failed my classes. My teachers hated me as much as…. well, I guess, as much as most of the directors who’ve worked with me have hated me.

But, I failed school because I had an undiagnosed learning disorder that I have since come to terms with. This disorder made it difficult for me to *recall* lines, it didn’t make it hard to memorize them, and there is a difference. It isn’t that there would be a passage or two (or ten) in a play that wouldn’t stick, it’s that every night, every show, there would be something else that would leak out.

It’s a perfect storm, really. I had enough talent to get cast, but as soon as I did, I would hate the script, I would fight with the director and make her or him look like a dick in front of the rest of the cast, all the while I was showing flashes of brilliance and a constant sense that I might lose my concentration at any moment.

SO, WHAT NOW.

Two years ago, I retired from acting. I didn’t do it in any kind of a showy way, I just quit sending out my heashots, I quit accepting invitations to audition for stuff, and I quit pushing to be in the things we were producing.

My time away from acting has been extremely fulfilling. I love writing music, I love working on my house and there is nothing that could have prepared me for how much I love being a husband and a father. Over the last two years, I’ve found that my dream, where I accept the Tony, has disappeared, replaced with the dream of playing piano along with my son who’s playing violin. I got on medication that sobered me up quite a bit, and let me find the center of my mind. I no longer wander.

There is a part for me in the production we have in the Fringe this summer, and I initially suggested that we leave the part open, but both Mac and Jordana had artistic and non-artistic reasons for me to act in the show, so the last two days I’ve been steeling myself for the months ahead.

This morning, I find that I’m pretty clear and optimistic.

I think we can change our outlook on things. I think you can. I think if you’re in a bad marriage, if you get into therapy, you can pretty easily remember what it was that was good, the things you loved that got you into the marriage, and you can work them out with your partner. Acting was a bad marriage for me, but I don’t think it’s bad any more.

I love the character. I know this guy. I’m avoiding the bad director and bad script by going back into this in the safest possible way, with two of the
most talented and hard-working people I’ve ever known, in a setting that is as familiar as could possible be expected.

Maybe this will be the actual start. Maybe this will be the beginning of the rest of my career, the real career, the one where I’m not angry any more and I’m not looking to each play to finish me and fulfill me. Maybe this is where my wife and my son and my music keep me fulfilled, my love for my brothers and sister and in-laws and parents and friends replaces that horrible ache for attention, and I can just *do my job* without worrying about the rest.

I have to say, I feel like it can be. I feel really optimistic.

***
It’s strange, when we asked our doctor about Barnaby’s drool, he gave a half smile and said, “put a bib on him”. For almost all the problems that a baby can have, the solutions are pretty much that simple. There’s no way to expect more, and you just have to treat the symptoms because the problems just take growth to go away.

If you’re worried about your baby crying too much or drooling or not sleeping, you may as well complain about her height or weight, this stuff will only change with time. And it’s a terrible and wonderful realization. When you say to yourself, “I am supposed to shape this mountain, and all I have is a water gun” it can be awful, but when you look at the rivers slicing through mountains, it’s breath-taking to comprehend how much can be accomplished with tiny steps and perseverance.

When you have a child, that dichotomy is always right in front of your mind. You look at your baby and know that you’re holding the water gun and he’s the mountain, but then you look at yourself and you know that you’re the river, already having made your mark on the mountain. You carry with you the giant divot of your life, the depression in the stone where you’ve been dragging yourself for thousands of miles.

****

When I think back to three years ago, I don’t feel like I was a lot younger then, and I don’t feel older or wiser now. I feel like the guy I am now was already pretty deeply in the works by then, and the difference between me now and me then is that now I’ve sluffed off a lot of the crappy stuff. I’m a lot simpler now than I was then, and that’s weird because my life is certainly a lot more complicated.

I should say that three years ago, I spent a lot of time being breathlessly thankful that I was not who I was five years before that. Even after Jordana and I got married, there was this sense I had that this could all be taken away from me at any moment, or even that I could walk away, disappear, and nobody would be too deeply distraught.

Combined with this was a pathological regret. I would spend time basically every day wondering how I would have done it differently, reworking the moments of every intersection of my life. I kept trying to figure out where I would steer my life if I could go back, what moment would be the perfect moment to stop the litany of mistakes and missteps, which fork in the road would have changed everything.

And always, it was about her. Every daydream was focused on how to get back to her, to these moments. Every fork would take me off in one direction, knowing that, when she got back from Cincinatti, I had to be there to lay down my plot.

In these fantasies, I focused more on my career and far less on fucking the vapid. My sister always teased me about the “blowing skirts of ladies who promise to gather you to their breast”, and she was totally right. I always hungered for the disgusting fruit of poisoned trees, and I don’t know why. Y’know how over-ripe fruit is basically all sugar? It took me forever to figure out it would make you sick.

In these fantasies, I showed up in New York, on the crest of a brilliant career wave, with tons of money, so I could just be like, “Come on, come with me, don’t worry about anything.” I mean, the little changes and switches were infinite, depending on how far back I could go. Sometimes, I would go all the way back to high school, and bide my time working until I could go to Carolina, alone, and when I saw her there I’d just be *awesome*.

I’d show up with “Atlas Shrugged” memorized. I’d have converted to Judaism…

It was insane, the permutations. Always about her, always about finding a way of being the better man once I met her. And always about showing up to offer her a man who wasn’t mostly destroyed, but rather a man who could lift her up on my shoulders, who could be for her what she has always been for me.

It’s only when I look back that I realize that I no longer do this. It didn’t go away with a bang, it faded like a whimper, like the friendships I had had with those people who weren’t worth being friends with. The regret I had, the obsession with what points I could have gone back to in order to save the time I wasted… this wasn’t a casual thing, this was a *daily* thing. Sometimes I would sit in the dark for hours, not sleeping, fantasizing about pulling a “Somewhere In Time”, only I’d make sure to empty my pockets of change.

Now I know why I didn’t meet her as a whole man. I know why I couldn’t put her on my shoulders. It’s because I was never going to be the man who could carry her without her. I couldn’t show up to save her because she is my salvation.

She’s the river, and I’m the mountain.

So, now we have this baby, this little mountain, and suddenly I know who I am, and I think with terror of how I tried to hard to go back and change things. If one little thing had been different, would we be here now? Would that sweet baby boy be here? With her eyes and her smile set on my cheeks and my chest?

If I went back now… I’d try so hard to remember to do everything *exactly* the same. Maybe I’d invest in a couple of stocks, bet on some basketball game long shots (I bet Houston in ’95 would have gotten you a pretty good return) but I’d do everything I could to make sure I ended up right here, right now, waiting for Jordana to get home from work, watching Barnaby play with his toys. Every mistake, every painful awful moment was worth getting to someday be married to her. To live in New York, married to Jordana and to have little Barnaby… it’s more than I could have ever hoped for.

At the time, when I asked her to marry me, I think I paraphrased Chaim Potok and said something to the effect of “this is a thing about which one should either say a lot or very little, and I’m going with the latter”. Now that I’ve written this, I feel like I’ve said way too much for a public blog, but… I mean, that’s never stopped me before.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roSoSh_8U0s]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6w8sIj5_CE]

According to some of my friends, the last blog was damn near a cry for help. In a way, it’s fortunate that those who know me pretty closely know not to take this blog too terribly seriously, that if I was actually crying for help I’d probably, y’know, use the phone or something. On the other hand, I was actually a lot unhappier than the blog shows for the three or four days before the blog was written, so I do suffer from the Boy Who Cries Suck syndrome. While it’s nice to know that I’m not gonna send loved ones into a panic, it is a shame that I’m such a drama queen that I can’t cry out without a fair amount of private snickering.

I can tell you that the night after I wrote that blog, the baby went down at 8 something and at 3:15, I woke up Jordana in a panic, asking her is she’d fed him. She hadn’t, he had slept the entire time.

What had changed? You kinda have to keep asking yourself that question with a baby. When the right set of stimuli have produced the right outcome, you have in front of you only the outcome and it’s really difficult to go back through and try to figure out what bit of parenting is responsible for the successes.

(This is also true of any creative endeavor. When you’ve written a great song or produced a great play, you try to make sure the follow the same set of principles you followed that one good time, and even eliminate some stuff you think didn’t work. You almost always eliminate something that *did* work, and keep some of the crap that actually was working against you. Life is Frustrating.)

It’s taken me a couple of days, but I think I know what worked the other day to make it possible for Barnaby to sleep so well. Like all things, it was a combination.

When I wrote that last blog, I had enough emotional fortitude to look back on the days I had just had… but I hadn’t yet had a decent night’s sleep. I know that when we put Barnaby down that night, we were flush with confidence and a sense of well-being, and this had to rub off on Barnaby. Jordana and I laughed at stuff and joked about the upcoming disaster of a night and fell asleep talking in our bed.

Three things had happened.

One, we got on the same page in terms of sleep training. We’re gonna follow the Ferber method, which is not really, as you may have heard, about letting the baby cry it out. Yes, there is some crying. But, honestly, there’s already crying. Babies cry. I mean, everyone cries, the difference is, adults have the english language, qwerty keyboards and high speed internet to broadcast their bitchings, babies just cry.

Jordana read the book cover to cover and marked important passages for me to read, since I’m retarded and if I read the book cover to cover I would basically just get lost. I read the 11% of the book she marked up for me, then asked her questions about it that I would have known if I had actually absorbed the 11% of the book she marked for me, she explained and we got on the same page.

I should say, we’re not sleep training yet. We just put Barnaby down with the knowledge that in a month or so, we know what we’re both doing. People have said, “read the Ferber book and your baby will sleep so much better”. Well, we read it and he did. Weird.

The second thing is that Jordana and I have had two deadlines hanging over our heads. We wanted to get this writing gig, but to get it we had to work with the editors at the magazine and we had to work fast… but there was no template. We had to invent a whole hip and funny way of looking at a specific pop culture phenomenon, we had to do it on a deadline and all we could do was write something, send it in and wait for the editor to say, “This isn’t it yet” and try again.

Also, we wanted to enter a song in for possible use at the end of American Idol this season. We had the right ideas, we had the tunes and the lyrical constructs… but there are a lot of quarter notes to enter. Fortunately, I’m really goddam fast at Finale and I pumped out the song as fast as I could. Jordana wrote lyrics for it as fast as she could, and we were still re-writing the bastard at 6 o’clock at night the day the song was supposed to be submitted.

By the time we put Barnaby down that night, we had the writing gig and we had the song done and submitted. Neither of these things will change our lives, but both of them are work. There is something so debilitating about a lack of achievement, and something so exhilarating about *finishing a job*, that we were just so much more at peace when we put Barno down.

The third thing was simply that my mom was back. She went to LA and was expecting to be home by Sunday or Monday, and when that got pushed back into the week, I went into a decline. I know that other people raise children with less help than we have, I know I’m a weak-ass punk for needing the people in my life that I need… but my mom just evens everything out.

It isn’t just that she’s here to take the baby for half an hour when I need to take a shower. It’s that her being here, just talking to us about our day and making jokes and drinking in the baby, is so calming to us. When we put the baby down, we *know* that if he doesn’t sleep at all from 8 pm to 6 am, we can give him to my mom at 6 am and at least get two hours of sleep. We also know that she wants to watch Keith Olbermann with us and talk shit about Gonzalez, that she wants to watch American Idol and celebrate the funny looking girl with the great voice.

She’s just here to spread a little maternal butter on our scones of anxiety.

So, I think Barno read all of that. Plus, he’s a day older, and every day older he gets is one more day that he has his shit together even better.

This weekend… I don’t know if I can describe it. We went to the zoo with our friends Dan and Alia and their little girl Lyra. We had dinner with two couples that we adore more than anything. Then last night, we had about thirteen or fourteen friends over to our house because every other bar in Queens was full and we all sat in our back yard and drank beer and made bad jokes. Today, right now, Jordana sleeps next to me (I’m typing as quietly as I can) and Barnaby’s asleep in his room, and my mom is upstairs writing a cantata for seven bassoons or something.

I told my shrink that the days are starting to switch, that now, it feels like I’m looking at a 4 to 1 ratio of good to bad, and he told me I was really lucky. Most people don’t get that when they’re raising kids.

I don’t know, but I really, really feel lucky. I feel love and loved, and after the last few months, this is just such a good day.