10 from '10: Moments

These last two weeks of the year provide a multitude of opportunities for me to let my drooly sentimentality and migraine-inducing writerly energy run rampant and unchecked. No, this article isn't about the moviefilms, which will get some supreme lovin' next week, when I post my ANNUAL END OF DECEMBER CINEMA EXTRAVAGANZA THAT I EAGERLY AWAIT ALL YEAR INSTEAD OF DOING SOMETHING ATTRACTIVE, PRODUCTIVE, OR SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BYAAAAAAA!!!

However, this post is less about evaluating the merits of Jesse Eisenberg or discussing the budding career of that renaissance boi, Biebs. No pop culture here; this post is about ten moments, big and small that I was a part of this year. I do this mainly for myself, so that, when I'm 80, drooling, still unmarried, and coping with the knowledge that I did indeed outlive Barbra Streisand, I'll be able to recall the details of the madness that was my childhood. This one's also about gratitude. If I write six paragraphs thanking a man I've never met for a movie he doesn't even know I've seen (ohai, Woodmeister), the least I can do is throw some metaphorical roses to those who've impacted my life in a more immediate way. Here goes:

10 Misty Water-Colored Memories:
10. Dead And Alive: Playing the paterfamilias wouldn't seem to be my cup of tea, but I was nonetheless cast as a distinguished gray in my school's production of Frankenstein. As Papa Frankenstein, I outlived my son, so we blocked the entire show as a flashback through my old-fart eyes, with me ruffling through my kid's diaries, lab reports, baby books, etc. That was when I realized something; though the script didn't say the words "Herr Frankenstein dies", I did in fact spend the final scene unconscious. In a burning building. Alone. I went up to our director, and kindly informed him that, unless someone had called the fire brigade, I was, in fact, quite dead. He furrowed his brow, straightened his tie, and said; "Let me think....no, you're fine. NO. Wait. Yeah. You're dead. We need to adjust your blocking accordingly." Only in the theatre, kids.

9. Welcome to the War Room: Infuriated that Blockbuster didn't have a copy of Kick-Ass (later I found out this was because that film didn't hit shelves for another 8 weeks), I picked up this Kubrick masterpiece on a lark. I planned to watch a short snippet to see if I liked what I saw, then write an essay. Needless to say, the Microsoft Word cursor had to hold the phone for two glorious hours, while Merkin Muffley, Buck Turgidson, and the good Doctor himself (heil!) did a tap dance on my funny bone and a dizzying waltz around my psyche. An exhilarating experience that reminded me why I love the movies.

8. Shalom, Sayonara: Hanukkah's always been an odd holiday for me; we've never been able to convince our Baptist half of the family to sit around the Menorah, our brothers and sisters in Streisand have their own holiday plans, and the few temple-goers I keep in touch with are solid acquaintances, nothing more. This year, I made a radical decision; invite some Catholic school kids to a night of Dreidel spinning, Latke munching, and, apparently, shimmying and shaking to the early hits of the Beatles. I was initially ambivalent about the idea (as was Mama Walker), but I ultimately saw just how perfect it was; in a life that's been all about the mastery of blending beliefs (have you met my family?), exposing a couple Christmas-light hangers to my religious tradition was the perfect way to say goodbye to my Hanukkahs at home.

7. Caffeine Scene-I am at Cindi's. I am tired and delusional after a long day at school. On a whim, I order coffee for the first time in my life. An eternal love affair begins. Speaking of coffee shop nights...

6. A Special Kind of People...: At the risk of sounding conceited, I guess I should probably tell you that I was the first person in the state of Texas to play the role of Lt. Frank Cioffi, one of the most demanding ever penned for a Kander-and-Ebb musicals, in my school's production of Curtains. The part itself? Looking back, I cringe at the realization of how much I overplayed it all, though I am proud of certain individual moments (my last scene with Belling, that vein-popping, mile-a-minute final monologue that ties the show together), but there are still two things I'll value about this show forever. There's the boys dressing room, by far the most fun of any I've ever called home for two hours every night; in addition to the brolicious camaraderie, they was a genuine and overwhelming love for showbiz, summed up best by our ritualistic pre-show hoedown to the Chicago soundtrack each night. But for me, the real thrill of the show was that, because the chorus was onstage 98% of the time, and I was onstage 99%, in a roundabout way, I got to play opposite every single one of my castmates. It's a privilege I'll be eternally grateful for; "I miss the music", indeed.

5. Lessons to Be Learned: So we're at Jew-party (oxymoron much?), and a few of my parents friends decide to ride the pretension horse, culminating in a lengthy discussion about Marxist philosophy and legal mumbo-jumbo that wasn't exactly welcome territory for an insurance-man-turned-photographer and florist-turned-schoolteacher. I felt awful for both my parents, who were basically put out to sea while a bunch of lawyers and doctors talked shop. Does all that bother you?, I asked Papa Walker on the way home. 'They know more than I do when it comes to those topics", he said. "I know more than they do about, say, how to light someone or airbrush a blemish. That's just how it goes." Yet another reminder of the thing I admire most about my father, a quality I hope to imbibe by proximity; his ability to marry unshakable confidence with refreshing unpretentiousness.

4. State Fail: Another parental memory. We're in rural Ohio, mid-CollegeQuest 2010. My appointment with the Oberlin admissions staff is it 9:15. It is 9:10. The rickety rental Oldsmobile is galumphing down the asphalt. My dad is eating a banana while steering with one hand, his go-to late-for-an-important-date food choice. He's giving the gas pedal some pretty generous love. My mom is huffing while slapping him on the shoulder repeatedly, my personal favorite of her many nervous habits. Somewhere in this Dante's Inferno of a morning, a cop pulled us over for doing 80 in a 60. "Let me see your license", he asks. My dad pulls it out. The cop looks it over. "Oh. From Texas, I see?" "Yes." "Ya'll drive like idiots down there. You don't know no better. Keep driving, but drive like the rest of America does, 'kay?" Truth=stranger than fiction.

3. The Magic Schoolbus: I can't describe this bus ride, nor do I remember much of it-you'd think I'd been drinking heavily or something. What I can say is that in the 4 hours it took a small group of my theatre friends and I to get from our competition in Austin back to Dallas, something happened. Something besides faux-sexting competition, Queen sing-offs, heart-to-hearts, and sight-seeing ("adult video store on the left!"). The quiet, crucial realization that we'd never get tired of each other. Nothing terribly important happened externally on that bus. But I think, in the time it took us to sail from the Capital City to Le Big D, we all realized that we'd formed bonds that'd last well beyond graduation day.

2. The Good, The Bad, and the Prop Guns: Ah, Seven Keys to Baldpate. Dickens sums it up: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It was a nightmarish rehearsal process and demanding run, filled with prop malfunctions (murders are hard to commit with faulty guns), offstage catfighting, and almost supernaturally difficult blocking. It was a hugely gratifying show when we got it right, and the last couple of shows, we really got it right. It provided me with a role in which I never felt entirely comfortable. It provided me with a set of requirements that uncorked a slimier, more sinister side of me that I didn't know I could convey onstage. It seriously swayed my opinions of some. It was a merciless maelstrom of a piece that did something miraculous; it took an indescribably close group of people and made them even closer. From people I already considered my best friends, I found new reserves of compassion, integrity, and energy as we faced seemingly insurmountable odds. One of life's unique pleasures, and one this show provided in spades, is getting to know people better and, instead of uncovering flaws, finding even more to like.

1. The Jew's Speech: All false modesty aside, I honestly didn't think my senior retreat speech would go over very well. I mean, I wrote it in three hours on Yom Kippur Eve after listening to a sermon about Yehuda Amichai and feeling a faint lightbulb go off in the outskirts of my manbrain. I knew I'd hit something with that final line ("Boy Meets World" never goes out of style), but the rest looked like motivational mush to me. Imagine my surprise at the standing ovation(s). I won an award in front of the entire school earlier this year, but someone, this outpouring of love felt a hundred times more organic and a thousand times more enthusiastic. I hope I vomited a little love back, and that that vomit reached further than the front row. I'd laid a lot bare-my initial transfer-kid discomfort, my crazed religious heritage, and, potentially worst of all, my tear-stained gratitude to all those who inhabit the square footage known as the arts hallway. It's not hyperbole when I say that these people saved me, and I wanted to let that entire room know. For all of this unmanly mess to be greeted with resounding applause turbocharged my confidence as a writer, student, and human being. I am who I am. And apparently that's not such a bad thing. Building a speech around quotes was a willfully wacky idea, a rhetorical stone's throw. The ripples from that stone's throw resound to this day-I've formed at least eight major friendships as a result of comments I received about The Speech. Yet another quote sums it up best;
"Only connect."-EM Forster.
QUOTE OF THE YEAR:
"I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love."-Dave Eggers