Poe-Dunk

Posted August 20th, 2011 by Sean Williams

As a kid, my three favorite writers were J.D. Salinger, Kafka and, maybe especially, Edgar Allan Poe. I stole five Poe books from our local library by throwing them out the fourth floor window into the bushes and then collecting them later that night, and I drank them in as deeply as I could.  I should also come clean and say that, among my peers, PlaylabNYC has consistently produced the kind of theater that I adore and simply don’t have the talent or fortitude to attempt myself.  It might go without saying, but this show was easily  the most anticipated production of the festival for me.

Even with the highest possible expectations, I was thrilled with the production. I had missed the first performance with a case of the ague or something, and was still so light-headed and stupid by the second show that I got off on the wrong stop and staggered my way down Irvington, convinced I was gonna be late, but the second I got to the door and saw Jennifer Wilcox (who’s title might be any number of things, but she does for Playlab roughly what I do for Gideon… except probably a lot better) I knew I was in good hands. We had to step over Edison, Jennifer and Kevin’s little boy (who played with Barnaby for a year in our neighborhood before any of us knew we were in the theater…) to get to our seats, and from the minute I crashlanded in the theater, everything got magical.

Kevin P. Hale comes wandering out, looking supremely uncomfortable in his pajamas, and begins to tell us… everything. It isn’t just Poe’s story, or his stories, it’s often stories about stuff that is happening around Poe, about perspectives that he had, and it even slides into some real literary criticism. And as he’s telling these stories, tiny little sets appear and even smaller puppets – so small that we have to watch the bulk of the show on a projected screen as it’s being captured on camera.

The loving detail and craftsmanship is enough for this show to be a must-see. Nothing is short changed, but some of the really amazing bits stand out. Kevin does an Ebert and Roeper take-off, with two tiny puppets sitting in chairs watching a matchbox screen, and on the screen Kevin has built scene after scene that scroll across. It goes without saying that the tiny, tiny movie they are watching is Poe, done by John Cusack and Ellen Page, and yes, that’s absolutely hilarious – but I had a hard time laughing for the awe.

I was at the back of the house, and it was as if the audience were all doctors in one of those rooms above an operating table. We were all trying to drink in every little detail, every little shift. But Kevin does more than just create a new tiny set and characters for each piece, he stays utterly loyal to the spirit of Poe, perhaps more than he even realizes.  Poe’s life was rife for tabloid fodder, he’s always seen as a drug addict or insane or whatever (almost none of this, according to what I know, can be substantiated, except that he was a drinker and stubborn as hell), but he was both difficult to embrace and easy to be inspired by.

This is exactly how Kevin himself comes across in the performance, relentlessly punning and sliding out at the end of stories instead of giving us big applause lines. He seemed to be 90% performing the show and 10% suffering through it, the way we imagine Poe himself might have tolerated such an occasion. And the way Poe’s life details slipped into the stories and the interstitial moments, it feels like having a moment with… well, not with Poe, but with another perfectionist, another awkward and brilliant man who is willing to sweat every tiny detail to make a moment sing.

I absolutely loved being in the audience for this show. Poe’s endless punning is embraced by Kevin, and there was a series of affectionate groans from the audience… that’s I saw a fire light in Kevin’s eyes, as if our groaning was what he was looking for. It’s not Poe if there isn’t a chance that the whole thing will turn on you, that it will get weird and dark and disjointed before our eyes. The source material is really meaningful to me, and the production is a celebration of commitment and craftsmanship, but more than that, the material matches the artist in a way that happens so rarely outside independent theater, when the people who are creating the stories are the one standing on stage telling them to us. It’s a perfect expression of why The Fringe Festival still, after all these years, allows for the opportunity of greatness.

The Legend of Julie Taymor

Posted August 17th, 2011 by Sean Williams

Standing outside 45 Bleecker Street, I could sort of feel my annoyance mounting. There was some concern that The Legend of Julie Taymor was going to sell out, and some of the slightly more vocal members of the waiting audience were flexing their various credentials with one another about how “inside” they were and how easy it would be to get in. There are just some shows at The Fringe that have the stink of an out-of-town tryout, here in town, and for a lot of us who feel there is a great brick wall that separates independent theater from the folks with 100+ seats, it can be a little off-putting.

This felt like one of those shows. See, they’re gonna be making fun of a whole bunch of things here, but ALL of it is gonna concern Broadway. And it’s going up at 45 Bleecker, one of the terrifyingly large percentage of small houses that have fallen apart because there’s so little commercial or institutional support for us. So I wasn’t really in any kind of a mood to listen to jokes about how 65 million dollars was wasted… for us that sting isn’t something to scoff at, it’s to cry over.

So, how did I end up, an hour and a half later, grinning like an idiot, laughing out loud – in some cases leading the laughter from the back seats, and feeling completely enriched when I left? Because these guys were as full of heart, as fully committed, and as wildly talented as the downtown freaks, and they won me over, despite my prejudice and mood.

The reason we’re so fascinated by the Spiderman debacle is because it asks a series of really important questions and offers no answers. If you say you hate Broadway, then why are you loathe to support something different? Is a piece of art better served by being the sole voice of one genius, or does absolute power automatically corrupt? What happens if you discover that what your audience wants is no better, morally or aesthetically, than what the Romans wanted with the lions? Do you give it to them?

Now, don’t get me wrong, this thing is dripping wet with nudge-nudgery, the entire thing is full of puns and allusions, all of which *work*, but only some are inspired. The main character is now “Julie Paymore”, which is great, but the music is by the lead singer of “U-Squared”, which is… fine. And it’s like that all the way through, but really, all of that is just the glaze on the cake. The show is really about a megalomaniacal theater practitioner, and her followers and detractors. In the end, the show within the show is a disaster, and the producers place the blame on Paymore’s shoulders… but all the way through, when the characters are half-heartedly trying to avert disaster, they aren’t offering any *alternative* to what Paymore is creating. There are jokes that she would rather have wood than foam core, that she wants the expensive paint regardless of color, that she doesn’t care about the safety of the actors…

But in all of those cases, everyone follows, and nobody takes any action. It was incredibly interesting to me – the Paymore character has a song, where she sings “I’m The Only Artist”, and although it’s meant to be a scene-chewing bad-guy song, the fact is… she’s right. The music that is written for the show within the show is crap. The actors are crap, the producers don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Her vision might be insane, and the show argues that it *is*, but ultimately you hire a director for the vision and the producers are responsible for sitting on her or reigning her in, or simply finding the money she needs.

In terms of the actual musical, the music is wonderful – smart, catchy and allusive, full of good Broadway in-jokes and even swinging into some recitative-driven sections of snippets moving back and forth. It has a touch of the young-show problems, namely 1) a lot of songs that are sung by one person *at* another person, 2) the scene will explain something and then the song will explain it more and 3) maybe a few too many forced rhymes, but honestly I didn’t get hung up on any of that, it has ten times more charm than it does limitations.

The show is fictionalized… sorta. Most of it is true, except where it isn’t, and it gets to be a little messy. When Paymore *murders* a theater owner, you can feel the unrest in the audience because… I mean, are we saying she sucks, or that she’s a sociopath? But the really brilliant turn at the end justifies it, they bring back the geek chorus (one of the most popularly mocked aspects of  Taymor’s Spiderman) to say, essentially, that the legend is what we’re talking about here, that the lessons are more important than the facts. And I totally agreed.

AND, I really liked that it got so dark, so effortlessly. The injured actor becomes Paymore’s puppet, literally, with a hint of “Heaven On Their Minds” from Superstar in the score, the puppet-actor defends Paymore’s vision and artistry, and the only point where the supporting players drop Paymore is when she insists that the play is finished, that her vision has been realized, and nobody understands it. The theater owner actually says, “It sucks”, and we all laugh, but GOD, what a dark moment, to find out you’ve just paid for and produced a play you can’t like. (And believe me, I’ve done it, it’s a horrible, horrible feeling).

Before I get to the one unfortunate mistake, I have to point out that the most searing, powerful and maybe funniest moment is the song performed at the actual opening of the show within the show. Mirroring actual events, the audience are delighted in their own misery, the revel in their own hatred. They tweet, constantly, with iPhones out, and the actual song is not a song of despair – it’s of celebration. The audience can not wait to read a review, they can NOT wait to get home… they have to trash it. Themselves. NOW. It really is one of the most perfect expressions of what is wrong with Broadway today. It could have been Joe Brooks “In My Life” that they were watching, if only they had had Twitter then…

There is one glaring mistake that I have to point out, mostly for my friends who are making their own musicals. One of the characters is the slimy columnist for a hack newspaper, played BRILLIANTLY by Christopher Davis Carlisle, and he has a song that explains his backstory and anger at the Paymore character. It is a fantastic song, the accompaniment was rich, and the staging was absolutely inspired. It became a puppet nightmare, a perfect stab at the woman who made The Lion King, and it couldn’t have been performed better.

But. It was absolutely useless in the show, it undermined all of the feelings of possible righteous indignation we might have towards a megalomaniac like Paymore, and it lowered the IQ of the entire production.

Look, I’ve done it. I’ve done it countless times, I’ve held on to something because it was just too good to throw away, and it’s almost worth knocking the rest of the show out of the way for this performance. It certainly was for the actor, it was a marvelous five minutes for him. But this is why we call it “killing the babies”, if it was killing cockroaches, it would be easy. It is so hard to trust yourself that you will write something just as good some other time. But every musical theater team has a trunk, and in that trunk are a thousand pieces of gold that the producers and the director and maybe even the writers themselves realized weren’t right for that moment.

This weasel, who nitpicks and niggles at Paymore for the entire show, we celebrate him for doing it because there are no checks on her ambition or ego, she needs to be stopped. She wasted 65 million dollars and an entire year of hundreds of people’s lives, the journalist who brings this story to light is, in a way, a hero – a spokesman for what is best in Broadway, maybe, or maybe he’s another All That Chat obnoxious know-it-all… why do we need a backstory about a failed romance between her and the columnist? We don’t, and it shouldn’t be there.

It could be that it was difficult for them to edit in this way because they weren’t exactly clear on who’s story it is. I said before that it’s the story of a director and her fans/detractors, but is there really an antagonist? Who is fighting against what here? There is a young broadway actor who gets hurt, there is the megalomaniac director, there’s the rockstar musician, there’s the columnist, and any one of them has a powerful point of view and an interesting answer to the questions that the show was asking, but in the end… I guess in the end, I’m not convinced, fully, that the show was as interested in these questions as it was in putting on a really funny show. And they did that, they succeeded wildly in doing that. I hung out and talked to a bunch of people after the show, and the place was all smiles. Even the Fringe crowd that I normally hang out with, which are mostly guys well into their 60s, all loved it and were smiling ear to ear.

I’m going to say the very thing that I simply hated hearing when I was younger, but… I’d be really interested in whatever the *next* thing is that these guys are doing. I hope they all keep working together, there’s enormous promise here.

On Reviews In General

Posted August 16th, 2011 by Sean Williams

My last post explained where I was coming from so that anyone reading this blog would know my bias up front, but I didn’t really explain what I do, as an audience member, to feel entitled to review a piece, so here’s a step-by-step of what a reviewer ought to do. It works for an audience member as well.

1) Take It All In–

Start reviewing the second you walk in the door. A smart company has considered the venue when they read the piece, and they designed the front of the house to be a part of the show. And almost certainly, for the independent theater world, you just met the producer, the director or the playwright when you bought your ticket, so they’re a part of the show. Take in the pre-show music, take a look at the audience, get a sense where everyone is coming from. It’s not a book, it’s a play, you’re in a room and all of that has been considered by the company, so let it be an active part of your experience.

2) Bring Your Prejudices With You–

Don’t lie. You’ve seen six other shows they’ve done, 0r you’ve seen nothing. You hate one person shows, or you love drag queens. Own it. Make sure you are fully aware of your excitement, or your disdain, when you sit down because it’s a LIVING THING, and as an audience member, you are going to affect it. And you will be affected by those around you. If you love an idea, then watching it with an audience who loves it will make you love it more, but if you hate an idea, then watching it with an audience who LOVES it will make you hate it twice as much. So be aware of that – hating a show because the people around you loved it too much is just unfair.

3) Let Go Of Your Prejudices And Focus On What They’re Trying To Do–

Spend the first half hour without trying to adjudicate. Just try to figure out what the company is trying to say or do. It could be as simple as “they want me to laugh”, but it’s gonna take a while for you to figure that out. You have to be there, you have to stop being you, you’ve got to spend as much time as you can trying to be us – the production. Are we trying to upset you? Are we trying to turn you on? Are we trying to make you identify with someone we normally would write off? Are we just trying to crack you up? IT’S SO IMPORTANT – because if you don’t spend any time considering what we’re trying to do, there’s no point in reviewing the play. If you don’t know what we’re *trying* to do, then you won’t know if we *did* it. It seems so obvious, but it’s one of the biggest holes in theatrical criticism.

4) Decide If It’s Working–

Sometimes you can’t do this until later, but this is an immediate return world, the play is happening now and if you wait a week to let it sink in, the play will close. You need to post your review tonight, I get this, so start thinking about whether or not it worked. The third and fourth part of this advice is the only really important part, if you have three paragraphs to review a show, then you should have Plot and Names Of People shoved in there somewhere, but basically all your readers want to know is a) what were they trying to do and b) did it work.

This is where it’s important to have a complete knowledge of how a theatrical piece is put together, because if it’s working, you can then know WHY, and give credit where it is due. Too many reviewers think that “pace” is the one thing that a director is responsible for, and “truth” is the only thing an actor can give us. You have to know what the sound designer *does* and what the lights can do, you have to know how much a set can be responsible for the mood of a piece. You have to do your work on “What Are They Doing” and then almost your entire job is explaining to your audience how and why it either worked or didn’t, explaining what the artists have done to create this.

And then, once you have done this, a sprinkling of you –

5) Tell Me How You Feel About It–

Yeah, you should do this. I’ll come out right now and say, as gay as I’ve been, as many gay guys as I’m in love with, and as much as I love outrageous and over-the-top theater, I walk away from Drag always feeling a little crappy. Drag shows make me feel bad, and that’s the opposite of what they’re supposed to do, and the opposite of how almost 100% of my friends feel about it. *Women* dressed as drag queens make me just as sad as *men* dressed as drag queens, it’s not a queer thing at all. So, if I’m ever talking about a drag show, at some point I’ve got to say, “it made me feel sad”. Unless it didn’t! But, although the personal affect is an important *flavor* to a review, it isn’t your job. If you are offended by a show, then I hope you’ve done parts 3 and 4, and you’ve investigated whether or not that was the point.

I’m writing this not in response to any one review (although I’m sure my close friends will think it is so) but rather a response to what I hear so many lay-people say. A play is not what the playwright put down on paper, that’s the script, and most of what you’re responding to is the 18 other people that had a hand in the creation of this piece. There’s no *information* in the phrase “ably-directed” or “rounded out with wonderful performances by the ensemble”… these are the kinds of phrases we use when we talk about role players on basketball teams. There aren’t any winners or losers, we aren’t trying to figure out whether anyone did these things “right”, which is the implication when we describe actors as “stealing the show” or whatever. I’ve seen  a hundred productions where the static characters were played with perfect restraint in order for the scene-chewers to do their work, and when I see that I credit the actor out front, the actor in back, the director for knowing how to block it and knowing how to keep the background active without being distracting, and the playwright for understanding the balance she has to achieve to keep her story clear. I also credit the set designer for understanding the space, the sound designer for creating a vacuum for the actor out front to fill, and the lighting designer for keeping the actor in focus.

I know, there’s no way to write the reviews I want to read in the small publications who cover our productions. But what I hope is that WE, at least, don’t resort to the short hand of the reviewers, who have to sum up our shows in 250 words. When we see each others’ work, and when we talk to one another, let’s not fall into the easy trap of What’s Gonna Move and Who’s Selling Great or Who’s Selling Out. Ultimately, we’re the audience, and the production doesn’t get to come out and defend itself – their part of the dialogue was the show itself and our part is the discussion. But we don’t have to discuss our shows as thumbs up or down, or even in shorthand. We need to commit to a higher conversation… it’s the only way we’re gonna continue to achieve anything.

My Reviews

Posted August 15th, 2011 by Sean Williams

It’s really important that I state here, clearly and for posterity, that any reviews I write of theater contain giant bags of my own prejudice, friendships, jealousies, personal animosity and mutual admiration. I would claim some kind of distance, but I have none. The fact of the matter is that every single person has the same thing, there’s no way around it, but these are not “reviews” in the sense that they are a certain number of words and contain a specific exigesis of a theatrical happening – they are far more the ramblings of an excitable fanboy. I’m sure that it will be perfectly clear when you read them, but it’s important to me that any reader knows that I am NOT impartial, I have *NOT* been offered this position based on my clarity of thought or education, and I do NOT write these reviews in the hopes that they will be quoted, either in promotional or fund-raising material. I am publishing these, they are out there and any google search will lead you to these random musings,  I can’t pretend that they will only be read by the people within my community who know me, and who know the theater people I’m talking about. But in case they aren’t, I would like to offer a bouquet of disclaimers. 1) I probably know these people. 2) I’ve probably helped them with marketing or money or just by hanging out and joking around with them and 3) Even if I haven’t, I’m deeply personally invested in the successes and the failures of the people that I go to see.

So.

Do with all that what you will.

Selling

Posted August 10th, 2011 by Sean Williams

I suppose the last blog requires a bit of explanation, now that I’m mostly a producer and not as much an actor or composer. Yes, we are doing art for art’s sake, and yes, we’ve left the profit motive of the larger arts industries behind… BUT, we still want to work within a reasonable budget, and we’re still desperate to perform our stories in front of the largest possible crowds. So, we should talk about how we go about doing that.

In all questions, either business or moral, I turn to the most consistent source of good information, Kermit The Frog. In most situations, I look at my WWKD bracelet and have to conjure up ideas, or work through koans to get a good answer, but when it comes to marketing, Kermit, as Phillip Fill in Muppets Take Manhattan, gives us very specific advice. He wanders in to a marketing meeting for “Ocean Breeze Soap” where they have put forth such great ideas as “It’s like taking an ocean cruise, only there’s no boat. And you don’t actually go anywhere,” only to realize they don’t work.

           Kermit says, “Have you tried ‘Ocean Breeze Soap will get you clean.’?”

The incredibly brilliant Tammy Oler once sat down with me to talk about branding and the use of social media, and it was actually thrilling, so most of what I’m going to say I have learned at her knee and then changed for my own uses (to follow the jazz metaphor from my last post). Basically, the two most effective ways to get people to show up to something are to let people know how awesome the *show* is, or to let people know how awesome the *people* are who are making the show. This is true for every artistic endeavor, including TV and movies and Banksy and everything. If Oceans 11 had 11 people with limited appeal involved, there would not have been a 12 or 13, but those people were so incredibly fun and charming that they were able to make several movies that simply DON’T MAKE ANY SENSE. And you still liked them. I mean.. I LOVE THEM, and they seem to have been written by undergrads…

So, wait – let me split this into two sections.

Section One – Showing people how awesome the show is.

We have a built-in appeal as independent theater. Sure, the shows themselves don’t exist yet, so there’s no way to let people know what they’re gonna see when they walk in – but they already know what it’s gonna feel like. The roar of the greasepaint and all that, people KNOW that being in a theater, being 18 feet from people who are spraying each other with blood, sweat and tears, is utterly exhilarating. But more often than not, they’ve forgotten, and they need to be reminded.

So, here’s how you start. As you try to tell the story of the play that people will see, make sure you include how you want people to feel as they walk into the room, and how you want them to feel as they walk out of the room. When you put up your list of cast and crew, all those credits and stuff are great, but they do nothing to give people a sense of what the show will be. If you publish an interview with the lighting designer, or the fight choreographer, on your blog – suddenly people get ants in their pants. Is there something about the venue, a sense of history? Is there *anything* about the venue? I mean, honestly, if you’re materials include the sentence “you have to walk down two flights of concrete stairs and past the bar to get to our venue, but the back room has three couches, so get there early!” then you have, just for a moment, taken me there.

Check out this video from the upcoming Fringe production of “Lipshtick”

There’s very little about this show that makes me want to see it… EXCEPT THAT I TOTALLY WANT TO SEE IT. I feel like I will walk away from that show feeling really good, feeling like I had a ton of fun.

Did you know that there is a show in this year’s festival, Poe-Dunk – A Matchbox Entertainment, that is being done with tiny matches as puppets, and sets you could fit in a small bag? The whole thing is being done on a desk, with a screen behind it showing the whole show. That is insanely cool – I keep picturing myself in a classroom (in my head, it’s my driver’s ed classroom from Ridge High School, where we watched all the “Blood on the Asphalt” movies) sitting with forty other people, having our minds blown as E.A.Poe walks around on the end of a matchstick.

You can’t reveal how awesome the show will be because, frankly, you don’t know. TRUST ME. I did a show a few years back where I produced it and wrote the music for it and we got an A-List cast of Broadway level performers (all of whom have gone on to great things) and we controlled every single facet of it, and at tech we all just looked at each other and went, “whoops.” You don’t know what you have, even if you’ve got the same cast, same script and same director as the last time – we all change every six weeks and this time it will be different. But what you CAN count on is that the experience of being in the theater, that communal experience, is so natural, so base, so good and so HUMAN  that people willingly show up to church once a week in small towns, just so they can sit with their friends and listen to stories.

I’m not gonna tell you to feature celebrities and to talk-up interesting storylines in the plot and to play up awesome titles or great stage combat or whatever, that’s all a given. Of course you’re gonna tell everyone who’s in it and what it’s all about. This advice is IN ADDITION to that. Remind your audience how much they love being in the theater, how much they love watching real live actors do real live things. Tell them it’s 3-D if you have to. Just remember, we’re all storytellers – you’ve written this story, or you’ve directed it, or you’ve created an entirely ancillary story because you’re acting in it – so tell the story of the show as well.

Section Two – Showing People How Awesome The People Are.

Okay, again, this is in addition to everything you already think you’re supposed to do. Except, I’m gonna maybe steer you in the wrong direction here, because I have a bad knee-jerk dislike of trying to sell indy theater using non-indy theater celebrity.

Follow Kermit’s advice. Tell us who you actually are, because I guarantee you this is not TV. We don’t expect everyone in your show to be fantastic looking, we don’t need our stories to be linear and fulfilling, we don’t want to be told that your show is as good as what we might be doing if we aren’t going to the theater. Don’t bring up movies, don’t bring up TV. It totally deflates everything. Your show costs me $18, plus the two hours, plus the time it takes for me to get there and get back, plus whatever I’m paying the babysitter to do, plus whatever it costs me in lost sleep. Will I be able to eat twizzlers during your show? Can I drink 68 ounces of Mountain Dew, and are the chairs gigantic, upholstered and feature drink holders? And, honestly, is it easier to see your show than to watch Project Runway on my couch, eating twizzlers and drinking 68 ounces of Mountain Dew?

So, don’t do it. Don’t do a Reservoir Dogs shot of your cast, because I know damn well, it’s a live show, you simply can’t do what Tarantino did in Reservoir Dogs. And you’re just reminding me, I have Reservoir Dogs on Blu Ray at home.

Watch this video from Yeast Nation, a new show going up at The Fringe Festival

Everything about this show is insider-ey. The guys who wrote Urinetown, who produced “Silence” (which is moving Off Broadway – another huge Fringe success story), and a cast of people who obviously could be doing daytime TV or better. But they blow all the air out of the thing, they’re basically just saying, “everything you think we want- we don’t. That’s all bullshit. This play is *retarded*, and we love it that way.” They go so far as to have Elena, the head of the festival, take a look at their application and lose heart. It’s awesome. What they are saying is this – “We wrote Urinetown. But before we wrote Urinetown, we had a thousand ideas. We got lucky, but we’re still here, and we’re still insane, and sure, it’s easier now, but still – we’re all in this together. We are yet another group of assholes at the Fringe Festival looking for the next Urinetown. We are lottery winners, and we keep buying lottery tickets.”

Is any of this true? I don’t care. I am now desperately fond of everyone in this video, and everyone associated with this show.

In 2005, we produced a musical at the Fringe festival that featured an actress who had been nominated for a Tony. Every single thing we put out led with the phrase “featuring Tony Nominee…” It turns out that people liked her in the show because she was very ,very good, they didn’t give a single shit that she’d been nominated for a Tony. I know this because another show featured an actress who was a lead on a very well known TV show… and it did not do as well. Not at all.

So be honest. And be loud about it. If you are a group of grad students from Sarah Lawrence and you’ve lived in New York for two years, then I would lead with, “We’re well-intentioned asshats. We all went to Sarah Lawrence – what? YOU WANT SOME?” It’s so much better than releasing a grand unified theory of all of theater and deciding that it’s your private school birth rite to be taken seriously by New York. And if you’ve done something awesome, tell us about that too, but don’t try to make a long resume seem awesome. Believe me, to get a long resume, all you have to do is keep getting old. My resume is about a mile long, it doesn’t mean I’ve done anything, it just means I’m old.

Section Three – Tell Everyone

1) Where did you go to school? Do you have an alumni organization? What’s their email address

2) Where did everyone else go to school? I mean EVERYONE. E – V’RY – ONE.

3) Look at everyone’s special skills. Someone knows Ballroom dancing. Where do they take lessons? Who has the email address?

4) Who else has performed in the space? Who is about to perform in the space?

5) How many restaurants are close by? How about bars? Do any of them want to offer drink specials for your audience? Do they want a stack of postcards? DO THEY HAVE A FANPAGE ON FACEBOOK?

6) What other shows has everyone (see above) done? Who was the producer? Do they have a page on Facebook? What is everyone’s NEXT show? Do they have a facebook page?

7) Did you write to me and offer me a ticket? How about Isaac Butler and J. Holtham and Matthew Freeman and Adam Szymkowicz and Byrne Harrison and Shawn Harris and, oh, EVERYONE on this page.

Eight) Did you invite every playwright you love? Every actor? Every other producer?

(Has anyone else noticed that the eight followed by the parenthesis makes a smiley face? Do they think I’m an asshole?)

There are no kingmakers, and no single thing you do will work. Jimmy Comtois and I were talking, and he said, “It feels like 90% of the stuff I do is totally useless…” and I was like, “Yeah, it’s a mess.” and then Jimmy said, “I think, actually, it’s that 90% of every different thing you do doesn’t work, but you have to do all 100% to get that 10% to work” … and I totally agree with that. If you invite your entire Stage Manager’s alumni organization, you might sell five tickets. But if you have 20 people involved in the show, that’s 100 people. That’s two shows sold out. And that’s totally worth it.

Why.

Posted August 8th, 2011 by Sean Williams

Here’s what I’d like to say.

About forty thousand years ago, some dude was drawing with charcoal on a wall, and his friend came up behind him.

His friend said, “What’s that?” and the dude said, “Oh! Uh… This is me and you and the girls and the other guys, and we’ve got a fire going.”

His friend said, “Holy shit, that’s awesome! How did you do that?” and the dude said, “I’m not really… It’s just the end of a burnt stick, if you rub it on the wall…” and the friend said, “No, man, I mean – how did you figure out how to make this look *exactly* like the way we look, or… not even that, it just – It looks like the way we FEEL when we’re all sitting around a fire…” and the dude said, “I don’t know. Seriously. I just kinda… saw it. In my mind.”

They didn’t say anything for a minute and the friend said, “Well, it’s awesome.” And the dude said, “All right, I’m gonna finish it later, we’ve gotta go hunt,” and the friend said, “NO WAY! Man, I’ll get you some bison jerky, just finish the painting. Seriously, finish it, everyone’s gonna freak out.”

And that was that. Here we are fifty thousand years later, and art is unchanged. Artists are unchanged and jerky is really not that much different. But what has changed is commerce, because now there are people lined up with machines and lawyers and ideas about copywright and a thousand other things, all designed to provide the artist with the means to get jerky. Because jerky is delicious, and is perfect for my low-carb diet.

So, where are we? The world of the professional artist is so enervating, with so many different disciplines at play on every front. A writer can’t simply write, she has to create protections for herself, she has to write for different audiences and to different specifications depending on what kind of money she intends to make. A screenplay is very different from a TV spec script, a half hour three camera comedy is totally different from a half hour one camera comedy, and there are advanced degrees available to people who want help charting those waters. An actor can’t simply act, he has to develop the relationships necessary to get invited to auditions, he has to read every casting director and director and display his technical prowess to create a sense of artistic symmetry, and he has to have several different headshots, updated every six months or every haircut.

It’s insane.

It was always this way, right? I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m sure there are times it’s easier and times it’s harder.

But the independent theater world is populated by people who, for one reason or another, just aren’t doing most of that crap. For some of us, we just can’t, but for many of us, we’re just not going to. And, because of that, we’re in a completely insulated world. We’ve given up on the profit motive, and we know we’ve lost the battle for the hearts and minds of an industry that only once in a blue moon spends its time watching something we’ve done – and then it’s usually not with good intention. We fly so utterly under the radar that we have had to create our own publications, our own journalists, just to have a conversation about our art. And most of us are buying our jerky with found money, or money earned elsewhere.

My GOD, it’s fantastic. It’s so fantastic.

Let me tell you who we ARE, just so we’re clear. We run shows for three weeks, and we perform in venues with fewer than 99 seats. Almost all of our work is written by playwrights without a national reputation, and almost all are directed and acted by the same, and the productions are financed hand-to-mouth. When you see one of our shows, as you sit, you will be able, most likely, to move the chair you’re sitting in. You will be able to hear the costume changes off stage. You will feel the lights, hanging on the grid eight feet over your head. The producer, most likely, gave you  your program, and told you that it doubled as your ticket. And you paid less than $20.

It’s $20, not fifty cents, so in that way, we’re not the underground nightclubs in Harlem in 1938. But in every other way, what we’re doing now mirrors the jazz movement of the 20s and 30s. Our venues are small and shitty, and usually sweaty and packed. And they are far away from the 40s and Broadway. Our artists lead shifty but thrifty lives, hanging on to day jobs no matter how late they were up the night before, sleeping on couches when shit falls apart, and burning with the desire to tell our stories. And it is The Depression right now, nobody has any money, and everyone is looking for something to take their minds off the feeling of despair and separation. And even if that thing is desperately sad and alone – you can be in the room with less-than-99-other people and know that you’re sharing this moment with these people. And the sense of improv is there, even when you’re not in an improv theater, the sense of history is there, even with an immature and grating play done by recent college grads, and the sense of “expanding the instrument’s range” is there, even if it’s a theater or a body and not Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet.

Why wouldn’t I be here? If I can, and I can, then why would I be anywhere else? And I don’t mean New York, this is happening in Austin, in Chicago, in Atlanta – anywhere you pay less than $20 for a ticket and you sit in a folding chair. Just like jazz in Kansas City and New Orleans and Chicago – this isn’t a fad, it isn’t a place. It’s global, it’s a new Chautauqua, it’s happening like the ocean’s waters rise. We are standing tall as popular entertainment, but we’ve left behind all delusions of financial security. We are moving forward because of the scratching on the wall, knowing that we have no hope that the jerky will one day be rib-eyes.

We also have the same spirit of competition and improvisation that was here in the 20s and 30s, and the same motion from one discipline to another. Actors become playwrights, playwrights become directors, and everyone’s a producer. We feed off each other, we watch what everyone else is doing and avoid the mistakes and drool over the successes. We want to steal, and to be stolen from. We want to be as good as the best, we want the crappy to catch up, and we want the extraordinary to throw away their desire for a businessman’s success. We want, the entire culture is starving, we’re all leaning forward trying to see what everyone else is doing, trying to drink deeply from every well.

And yeah, half the time we spit it back out, more than half probably. I mean, how many sax players were getting beat down by Charlie Parker. THE BAD IS WHAT IS SO GOOD. It’s earnest, it’s stupid, it’s sloppy or it’s too polished. But it isn’t bad because it thinks it’s gonna get you. It’s not bad because of shitty product placement, or stunt casting, or some delusion that this little story is gonna make anyone rich or famous. It’s bad the way that an awkward kid tells a joke, or an Ivy League college plays basketball, or the way a four year old paints the bathroom. It’s bad, but when you watch it, in the indy theater world, you ALMOST ALWAYS get the sense that they could make it better. Or that you could. And you do – and they do – the next piece is always better. And if it isn’t, they usually leave – and often for great soap opera or sitcom success.

And maybe the worst way that we’re jazz and this is the depression is this – we’re inviting you, but you have to go, you have to listen and you have to care. We always want you there, we’re never gonna tell you that you don’t get an opinion, we’re never gonna tell you that you don’t get to watch – I mean, Jesus, we’re here to tell you that you should make your own play, for chrissakes. It costs 50 million dollars to make a movie, it costs 5 million to make a TV show, it costs 500 thousand to make an off Broadway play, and we’re saying here that if you can scrape together about 5 grand and an email address with a facebook group, then you’ve got your own MOVEMENT. You have your own company with your own identity, you’re in the conversation, and you get to tell everyone how full of shit they are, or how beautiful they are, it’s up to you.

I was a working actor for fifteen years until I retired six years ago. I’ve acted almost as much since I quit, since I put all my resources into being a member of this community. My headshot doesn’t have gray hair, my acting resume still has tap-dancing leads on it, and I’m a salt-n-pepper stay-at-home dad in his forties. But since I’ve quit, I’ve gotten to tell stories, I’ve been a part of countless nights of insane one-acts, I’ve sat and talked shit on the roof outside the Battle Ranch and across from The Brick, I’ve watched my friends crawl around the small hot storysheds that cover downtown and the outer boroughs, and I can’t count the number of times I sat holding my breathe, the number of times I realized I was dizzy in my chair, simply because I didn’t want to breathe.

I look at my friends, I look at their companies, and when one actor moves to direct someone else’s piece, I’m never surprised. When the venue manager becomes a playwright, it never shocks me. When the playwright steps in and acts, in someone else’s play, with someone else directing, and kills it, I know why. Because we all think we can, because we all have the chance to fail, because the entire thing is built above a trampoline and you can fall as low as you want, you *will be bounced back up*. And so we are all free to follow our heart’s content.

It is not all good. It is more bad than good. More misunderstanding than statement. More bad jokes than funny ones, more melodrama than storylines. But Charlie Parker discovered one night that he could play any note- any note at all, and resolve it back to the melody line, or to a counter-melody line, or to an inversion of the accompaniment chord, and he did it in a shitty club. Also in that club, probably, playing with him were Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke and Charlie Christian. I say “probably” because there are no recordings of this time. It was a shitty little club, and there were no recordings, and this kid was strung out on heroin and working for nine dollars a week washing dishes (so he could hear Art Tatum play), but if you wanted to, you could have heard the entire future of music shift in a single moment. But there are no recordings. You had to care, and you had to be there, you had to GO.

That’s why I go. That’s why Indy Theater. I believe it’s happening, it’s happening here and now, and I’ll be damned if I miss it.

If You Have Five Seconds To Spare, Part One

Posted May 11th, 2011 by Sean Williams

I have some catching up to do. Theater and otherwise. But let me just tell you about Barnaby and Marlena.

Barnaby is four. He is an enthusiast and a poet, but not much of a worker bee. The world that spins in front of him is a giant connected tapestry, a mosaic tile picture made of smaller mosaic tile pictures, and his obsession isn’t to stand back and look at the whole, or to zoom in and look at the detail, but rather to move from one point of view to the other as quickly as possible, as many times as possible. And this can be lovely, it can be wonderful to watch – particularly when his point of view matches yours. When you need him to see the big picture, and he happens to be looking at the big picture, it’s like sitting next to a bodhisattva, and when you need him to see the details, and he happens to be looking for details, it’s like having Sherlock Holmes as your running buddy.

But he can’t choose, and he has no desire to try. His mind isn’t exactly a leaf in a windstorm, because there’s the possibility of the wind ripping it apart, having some kind of effect – it’s more like a piece of sand in a roiling ocean. When everything aligns, his smallest thought is pure poetry, but more often than not he’s doing something insane that makes it difficult for him to respond to the most basic question or request.

His body, the entire physical world, seems slightly foreign to him. He doesn’t like to be dirty, doesn’t like the feel of his clothes, hates having a runny nose… but he’s also curious about the way he interacts with the rest of the world. He will explore the smallest thing as if he’s an alien picking up information. He exists so out of this world that he still hasn’t got a dominant hand, he just reaches with either hand, or an elbow, or his foot, and manipulates the stuff around him. I’m surprised, now that I’m describing it, that he’s never tried coloring with a crayon in his toes, I’m sure he would have no problem with it. His imagination and internal life are filling up all the holes around him, so that when he sees me he often asks me who I am, if I’m a dinosaur or a superhero or even, sometimes, his daddy.

His teachers say that he’s the politest stubborn kid they’ve ever had. Most kids throw tantrums, but Barnaby very politely says “no, thank you!” when asked to do something. In his mind, if all the kids in class are doing an assignment, then it’s probably being taken care of, he doesn’t have to do it as well. That politeness extends into his friendships as well, he’s not terribly warm with other kids, but he’s always accessible. He introduces himself to strangers and asks them questions, he’s not remotely shy. Which makes sense, he’s apparently on our planet to investigate, and these people aren’t that different from his imagination anyway, he might as well be pleasant.

He’s a really wonderful companion. He’s deeply interested in almost everything – there’s nothing you can’t explain to him that he won’t understand and ask more questions about. Today a truck drove by gunning its engine, and Barnaby asked if the man driving was a grown-up who didn’t stop being scared, something that I told him about loud motorcycle riders when he was less than two. He’s incredibly intelligent and he’s constantly equating vastly different things, as if the whole world were geometry and once you get enough assumptions put together, you can start defending your proofs. The very best way to interact with him is one-on-one, and letting HIM do the conversational driving. Every day now, between projects and videos and other self-improvement nonsense, I set aside time for him to talk to me, and even though most of what he says are flights of fancy, there’s always, ALWAYS something substantial.

It’s one of the best parts of my life, if I’m being honest.

He’s been in speech and occupational therapy for four months, and I think we’re getting pretty close to not needing the ST any more. He’s very clear, and our last family trip we didn’t have to translate for anyone. His hand-eye stuff is still pretty rough, so we’re sticking that out with him. His kindergarten teachers wanted to put him into the general ed class, but they agreed that the integrated classroom, with 40% kids who get special therapy, would be fine, so we’ll have someone watching him next year as well. Our concern is that he’d end up in special ed, but as they told us, “it’s ALL special ed now, things have changed…”

I have a feeling that there won’t be any way to control his wandering mind, so I’m not worried about anyone hammering down his artistic temperament. To be honest, I’m not worried about his attention span or his lack of work ethic either. More often than not, when I can’t seem to get his point of view to match mine, I wonder if maybe I should just give up for a minute and try to see the thing HE’S looking at, and when I do, I never regret it. I’m pretty sure that makes me an awful father, and it’s why he isn’t reading and writing with the other painfully bright kids in his class, but I do think he’s reading and writing *enough*, and… honestly, if there’s any one thing I’ve learned about being a parent, it’s that you can’t follow an inorganic parenting method. You are who you are, your kid is who your kid is, and there isn’t a whole lot you can do about the latter without a radical change in the former.

Tomorrow, I’ll tackle Marlena. She’s only eleven months old, but I think we’re starting to get to know her.

Under Penalty of Death

Posted May 4th, 2011 by Sean Williams

I feel insane, coming out of the woods for this particular thing. I’ve seen 12 amazing plays, I’ve got two amazing kids, and we’ve had a Christmas and birthdays and all sorts of shit, but I’m jumping out to talk about the death of Osama bin Laden.

I will make this short.

I, like many, many other people, have a feeling of ambivalence about the celebration of this man’s death. I don’t have any feelings of ambivalence about the death itself, I believe it is a good thing, I am glad that he’s been removed from the equation as a person of enormous influence and financial power. but the celebrations surrounding his death have given me pause and I want to explain why.

When we discovered the news, Jordana and I shrugged and nodded. It was late, we had meant to go to bed, and the news meant we were missing a couple of hours of sleep that we both needed. We were here, in New York, on September 11th, and we’ve been here ever since. We were here for the plane landing in the river, for the Republican Convention, for nine more double shafts of light in the sky, for the insane roller coaster of governors and senators, for Spider Man Turn Off the Dark and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. We’re New Yorkers, the attack was huge, but we’ve lived big lives, all of us, ever since and that one action and this one man don’t define who we are.

So much has been done, so many questionable actions taken, in response to this one man, and now he’s dead. But his death isn’t gonna stop one side or the other from using him in the worst way. His followers will martyr him and re-visit him in a way that he hasn’t been in years – the fact that we are all sitting around talking about his crimes to our children also means that other children are hearing the same stories told with hero-worship. And those who rally against him, blindly and with fury, are still able to justify things like torture and the curtailing of civil liberties and building an empire of foreign police states because his death doesn’t change what he masterminded.

So, I guess I don’t want people celebrating because I don’t want him to be important again. I hated the ideas of his followers only slightly less than I hated the terror he inspired in our own people. Terrorists, by definition, are trying to inspire terror, so the more scared we are, the more they win. And I’m sickened by how scared we’ve been. The celebrations over his death just feel too much like the nightlight being turned on in the closet, a small child’s exhalation that the boogeyman is now gone.

But, the reason for this blog is to talk for just a second about how this relates to the death penalty. I’ve been against the death penalty in a very muted way for about twenty years, ever since my brother Ian and I had a long conversation about it in 1991. There were a lot of reasons given, the fallibility of our government, the message it sends to our citizens about the existence of justifiable murder, the cost of keeping an inmate in prison for life vs. the cost of guaranteeing he won’t be killed without due process, etc.

But the argument (which will not include any mention of Hitler, as my brother’s blog also avoids) that most affected me is Jeffrey Dahmer. The man was indescribable. His insanity, and his actions, everything about him had the stink of someone that needed to be removed from human society. But while in prison, he spent a huge amount of time meeting with doctors and clergy. An enormous amount of information was gleaned by studying his brain and his behavior. He eventually became a born-again Christian and was baptized, becoming a staunch supporter of Christianity, until he was finally murdered by a fellow inmate coming out of the chapel.

So, I guess, the question is this – What if bin Laden had been arrested, tried, convicted, and forced to live out his life in prison? What if he had met daily with doctors and imams and priests and clerics? He lived the sheltered life of the unbelievably wealthy, what if he had had a chance to live simply, under the constant threat of humiliation, but also cut off and forced to look at his own existence?

It’s virtually impossible that any good would come from any of this, I know. I’m not naive. But the important distinction is understanding that death is the end of hope. Osama bin Laden would have spent the rest of his life sowing hate and murder throughout the Arab world, distorting Islam and creating terror, I know that. But there is a chance he could have been a force for peace.

When I was a teenager, there was no hope that any member of the Republican White House would be pro-choice or pro-gay marriage. None. And now, it’s a small step, but Laura Bush is openly pro-choice, and she and the entire Cheney family are pro-gay marriage. Time has passed, and there seems to be a shuffling, staggering walk toward progressive ideals (which is why, I suppose, we call it ‘progressive’). There is an infinitesimal chance that bin Laden could have been a voice for peace. And had he been, he would have been one of the most powerful voices in history.

I am not such a fool that I think it could have happened. His death is completely good, there was almost no chance of him ever doing anything with his life that would help the world or humanity. But if you want an answer as to how you can be anti-death penalty and still pro-bin Laden’s death, it’s this – the hope that he might use his power to make the world better is now done. His death is the end of hope.

And though his death is good, fomenting nationalism is not. Being happy about the end of this terrible life is good, but re-igniting the horrible feelings of the last decade, no matter what country you live in, is bad. He’s dead, but everything he wanted, from the attack on the WTC to the war between America and Islam, is still happening, and until we can find a way to stop that, I don’t feel like celebrating.

Some Chaw for your Nukah

Posted December 1st, 2010 by Sean Williams

So, we wrote a little show some year’s back. We wrote it in about the exact amount of time it takes to perform it. It’s ridiculous.

And I think… I mean, it’s hard to say, you never can say you have a *favorite* show because they’re all different. Like snowflakes. But the thing is, now that I have two kids, I can tell you – what your parents said about not having a favorite? That’s bullshit. They do. And if you think it’s you, it probably is, if you’re not sure, then you aren’t it.

So, yeah, I think The First Annual St. Ignatius Chanukah Pageant is my favorite of our shows – *in a way*. It definitely has had the biggest pay off for the least sweat. Everything we did seemed funny to us, and almost all of it was funny to an audience, and now, years later, it all still seems funny as hell.

The basic idea is that Cricket Creek, North Dakota has a Christmas Pageant, put on by the local community theater every year, but this year the completely batshit insane woman who runs the troupe has discovered that the new dentist and his family, the Rosenblums, are actually Jewish. Caught up in a mad desire to make them feel included, she writes a Chanukah pageant, playing for one night only, the night before the Christmas pageant opens. Using the same cast. Including the youngest Rosenblum.

Ah, this show cracks me up. I was responsible for the most depressing aspect, the rip-off tunes, inartfully crafted by Arlene, the woman who runs the community theater, and also the terrible computer accompaniments that she created on her iMac. But the actual story, the utter misunderstanding of Chanukah, the effortless anti-semitism, the bizarre middle-America conservative Christian overtones (at one point, Arlene sings a duet comparing the Iraq war with the Greco-Hebrew conflict without realizing that, in her parallel, the Jews are the counter-insurgency…)

Anyway, it’s Chanukah, so I wanted to include a couple of pieces from the show. The show opens with the Maccabee brothers farming in the field. The only thing Jordana, our resident jew, could remember about Chanukah was the father’s name, Matithias, and his five sons, Eliezer, Simon, John, Johnathan and Judah. Yes, John and Johnathan. Mac and I nearly lost our shit when she told us that. So, we made one of the actors obsessed with puppetry, and gave the puppet some solos as Johnathan. In this first song, the puppet – THE PUPPET – has a lasso solo. (Also, the actor playing Simon, a girl, was obviously wearing the Tiny Tim costume from A Christmas Carol. Everything about this show slays me)

Maccabeat

Second piece is is Judah Macabee and his love interest Tracy (Oh my god, I’m cracking up as I write this. It goes without saying, there’s no love interest “Tracy” in the Torah) (And Jordana came up with the brilliant idea of having the character named “Tracy” and the girl playing the part named “Rebecca”…) are singing about the conflict they are experiencing. Except, of course, that Arlene is such a god-awful playwright that she has forgotten to include any conflict, so their love song is called “What Could Possibly Go Wrong”…

What Could Go Wrong_

Of course, at the end of the song, King Antiocus comes in, set to savage the temple. This is the conversation I had with Rob Hoyt, the guy we wanted to cast as Antiocus.

Me: Hey, Dude. Can you sing a high B?

Rob: Who is this?

Me: It’s Sean. Can you sing a high B?

Rob: Yes, I can. Sean Who?

Me: Sean Me! Sean! Are you free this coming December?

Rob: You mean, like, in three days?

Me: That’s the one!

Rob: Better make it a B flat…

And this might be some of my favorite lyrical work by Jordana. The backing vocals make me want to crap myself. “He really means it. He’s anti-semitic…” If nobody, not a single person, ever laughed at this show, it wouldn’t have mattered to me. I’m on cloud nine just remembering these guys.

Antiocus

I’m not gonna do the whole show for you. I’m not gonna include the gospel number “Burn Eight Times”. I’m not gonna actually play the incredible “Chome for Chanukah” about Iraq and Israel. I’ll just include the rallying cry, the moment that the Jews decide that they will fight on, here in the 2nd Century BC, apparently inspired by Matt Lauer and Ira Gershwin.

Jews Fight Back

Okay. There’s no way anyone read this far, or listened to the songs, but it’s Chanukah, so I figured I’d do my part. Merry Chanukah, and have a happy fifth night, when you get socks and pencils. At least, according to my friend Seth.

Hair Leaves

Posted November 18th, 2010 by Sean Williams

It’s always interesting to me to read a blog, where you scan down and each entry, some weeks or months apart, begins with an apology. As if there are countless fans hanging on every word, and when you don’t drop some wit and wisdom on them, they wander aimlessly through other blogs, clicking back two or three times a day, breathless with agitation, just to see if maybe you’ve posted your take on the midterm elections or your recipe for pumpkin muffins. I suffer no such delusions, but my apology is more to my kids. Should this record survive, and I’m pretty sure it won’t, but if it does, it’s a shame to have missed so much of what happened after Marlena was born, before Barnaby turned four.

But I can’t summarize, I’m just terrible at it. So, I can’t tell you “how it’s going” or anything. Also, I know that right now, my life, everything that is said to me or that I experience, is being filtered through fog colored glasses, and any summary I could do right now would probably include things that are about 20% true, that I have blown completely out of proportion. So, no apologies to any current readers, and no summation. I’ll just tell you a story.

Uncle Ian was coming to visit and he stays up at Gramma Linda’s apartment when he comes. Gramma Linda has two settings, she’s either completely calm and reassuring, or her hair is on fire, and Ian’s visit had inspired a moment of the latter. What I understood from her monologue, about how she was much older than we knew, and that she was on the precipice of suicide, was that her apartment was uncomfortably cluttered. So Barnaby and I spent an hour or so helping her clean the place out, and I vacuumed, and suddenly she was back to telling me that everything was gonna be fine and I shouldn’t get so worried.

It’s late fall, and there are leaves everywhere, so I asked Barnaby if he wanted to go kick some leaves. He said, “Oh! Sure! That’s a good idea, and, except, FIRST! I need to play some DRUMS!” and we went in his room to his little drum kit. He’s not a prodigy or anything, I don’t believe that you can pass on musical talent to your kids any more than I believe that such a thing as “talent” even exists, but there is a way that his body behaves when he’s playing drums that is surprising.

He does subdivisions and fills with uncanny precision. He will just bang away with his foot on the bass drum while he plays eighth notes on the toms and snare and high hat. There’s a particular rhythm he likes to play – straight quarter notes on the bass and then snare on two and four, and the tom playing eighth notes starting on the upbeat of two, ending on the upbeat of four. It’s kinda hip-hop. But the really cool thing is that his wrists are loose, not locked, and he hits the drums right in the center, using the bounce back to time his next hit.

And sometimes, he plays cymbal fills for three minutes.

We got to the end of the drum session and he wanted to go kick leaves, so we made sure Marlena was okay with Gramma Linda (“Of course she is, Sean! Don’t even worry about it, go have fun!”) and we went out in the front yard. Everything here is cement, of course, but Barnaby and I started kicking all of the leaves from the sidewalk into the street. I grabbed a broom and started wooshing all the leaves out into the gutter.

Barnaby was running up and down the street, and I heard him yell out. He had jumped on the leaves on the sidewalk and slipped and skinned his knee, and he was really howling, screaming, “PICK ME UP PICK ME UP!!!” I grabbed him and we went back inside. I put a band-aid on his knee, and he started saying, “I want to stay here, I don’t want to go back outside.”

So, I said, “Sweetie, the most important thing, when you fall down or get bumped or bruised… the most important thing is that you get back up and you go back out again. If you hit a wall, just take a step back and keep going at it.” He sat for about five seconds before saying, “Okay, daddy. Let’s go back outside.”

This time we went to the park because I knew he could play in the leaves and not fall on the cement there. We’d been there about five minutes when he stepped over a hidden branch and then caught it with his back leg, which hit the branch into the back of his other knee and he went face first into the dirt. Again, sobbing. He wanted to go home and get a band-aid and watch videos, and I figured we might as well.

See, everything I read about parenting is the story up to the part where you say, “You gotta get back out there”, and then everyone writes and comments on what a great parent you are. But one skinned knee is never what happens, I’ve learned. Not just in parenting, but in life. You think you have reserves, but you have no idea, you panic and you despair when something truly dreadful happens, and then, as if God wants to teach you a lesson, a whole new series of gobsmackingly awful things happen, to make your earlier despair look like the mewlings of the pathetic coward.

He had skinned his second knee. He had TWO skinned knees. Do I stick to it? Do I tell him that you gotta get back up not when it’s hard, but also when it’s… harder? Really hard? When I’m not here, when you no longer want to, when it’s not skinned, it’s broken? When it’s broken, and the ground is frozen, when it’s broken, and the ground is frozen, and you no longer know why you’re even going, when it’s broken, the ground is frozen, you no longer know why, and there are people tormenting and mocking you for being in pain?

No. I said, “let’s go home.” I figured we could watch a video. We sat down on a bench for a second while he was crying, and I *didn’t* sit down because I was hoping he would change his mind, I sat down because he was too heavy for me to carry. It wasn’t *parenting* that led me to that bench, it was *physical weakness*.

But, I did say, “Maybe we can go to the deli and get one of those little flashlights you play with.” And he was sorta sobbing and said, “okay. We’ll go to the deli and see what they have for us…” And he sat there. And, through no miracle of my own parenting, he calmed for a minute and started just watching the wind blow the leaves around.

And we sat in silence for about five minutes. I didn’t ask him what he was thinking about, but I was grateful that we were outside, after months and months of one illness after another, of sleepless nights – not because of a newborn but because of my own inability to sleep – of Barnaby being in the hospital just after Jordana was in the hospital, just before Barnaby would be in the hospital AGAIN, I was just happy  to be sitting on a bench wearing a jacket, watching the leaves blow.

The sun was setting under the HellGate Bridge, and it was catching the red leaves in the trees, turning that part of the sky a thousand colors of gold and auburn and brown. I broke the silence by saying, “Do you see the trees, Barnaby? They look like your hair. Look at all the colors.” In an almost whisper, he said, “They are beautiful. Do they look like me?”

We sat silently for another five minutes. I thought, as I was sitting there, that I found myself in the middle of an unexpressable moment, for me. That I was here now, and even as I thought about what I could say about it later, I realized I had nobody to share it with. Not really. Because I wouldn’t be able to re-create it.

He had fallen once, and I was a good father, and he fell a second time, and I gave up, but somehow, I had lucked out. I was willing to coddle him and let him eat snacks and watch a video, and I was willing to buy him out, replace his pain with a toy. But, just sheer dumb fucking luck, we ended up on a bench, in a pause. We had a time-out from the nightmare. Every day is forcing a smile and getting a forced smile back, every minute is like the fourth minute on a fast treadmill that you will be on for HOURS, and every move is a neurotic second-guess about what is best for you, for others, for the kids, and what price you will have to pay when you guess wrong – and guessing wrong is the only option, ever, always.

And here we were, in the eye of a storm. An eye so large that, for a few minutes, I totally forgot there was a storm. But, of course, I immediately thought of what email list would be interested in this story (“none”, being the right answer) and how to tweet this (“can’t”) or if it could be made into a Facebook update (“sigh”) or if maybe I could share it with my closest friends and family (who have already tolerated months, years, decades of my whinging and navel-gazing and Dramatic Queenie Seanrants and who are no longer affected by it in any meaningful way) and I realized I really wouldn’t be able to share it with anyone.

But I was there. Sometimes, the mistakes aren’t my fault, they’re just mistakes. And part of being a grownup is that when shit happens on your watch, even if you didn’t mean to fuck it up, you still have to be responsible and take your licks. But part of being a grownup is that sometimes a celestial moment will flash on you and no, you don’t deserve it, but you can take whatever tiny joy is there and call it your own.

I heard a voice, which only after I heard it did I recognize it as mine, say, “Barnaby, I think I’m never gonna forget this moment.”

He said, “Why?”

I said, “Because, I’m here with you now. This is great, and I’m really happy right now.”

“Good,” he said. That was it.

We said nothing else until we got up and went to the deli. I bought him a flashlight and some colored goldfish crackers.