Blog Entry #10 Happy Eat-Your-Weight-in-Chinese-Food
With Your Mother Day!
Here's the deal - yesterday was the ever-dreaded... Valentines Day..
Or as I affectionately call it NOBODY-BUT-MY-MOTHER-REALLY-LOVES-ME DAY!! So, the way I see it, I had 2 choices: #1 Drink everything in the liquor cabinet (a caloric nightmare) and then drunk-dial all of my old lovers (while eating cold pasta and raw cookie dough 'cause all that drinking made me ravenous!) to ask "Whhhhhhy?! WHHHHY DIN YOU LUBME?!! *hick* I WUZ BOODIFUL! I WUZ SWEET! I....I....I godda throw up! I HATE YOU! CALL ME?" *barf* Yep, that's prettay, prettay darned close to how that would've gone. Or #2 I could coach one of my favorite young actors, Allison Cirner, and then buy Chinese food for me and my mom so that we feel loved by each other and full from one of our favorite foods. These lines are often blurred.
Don't believe me? Just ask my mother...
On the one hand it's wonderful that my mother is that aware of something that most people take years of therapy to dig out of their subconscious. But on the other hand, it breaks my heart because I know just how important food is to her happiness. She was very poor as a child, with so few happy moments that it's hard to imagine - both of my parents were that poor.
My father, his 4 brothers and only sister were on "relief" when they were kids. That's what it was called in the 30's - Relief. Now it's called Welfare. I doubt that those handouts gave any of them much relief. They were still piss poor and living right at the razors edge of the American Dream.
When my dad was just a kid, he witnessed his father getting hit and killed by a truck...or a trolley...I can't remember exactly. Even before that happened, he was a "dead end kid". If you don't know what that is, look it up. There were great films made about those kids in the 30's, starring Bing Crosby as a protective, hard nosed priest that kept those kids on the straight and narrow. And that's exactly my dad's story. A priest named Father Moran kept my dad in line when he could have easily gone down the wrong road. He was one of those kids who got by on their street wise, hand to mouth survival instincts.
So, as with all very poor people, the most important factor in both my parents survival was food. My dad loved to cook, he loved to eat and see other people eat his cooking. My mother isn't quite as into cooking, but she loves to go out to dinner. When she grocery shops, she always buys WAY too much food - enough food to fill the refrigerators of several people - she does it so that she can give my brother David and I bags full of food whenever we visit her. (those Green Monsters you saw in an earlier post)
The other day she told me that she was so unaccustomed to receiving gifts, or even the essentials when she was a kid, that she still isn't comfortable receiving gifts. She feels much more comfortable giving.
And so, that's what she does...because food is love. At least it is in my family. And as long as my mom is still here, I'll have an ongoing struggle appreciating the love while keeping the food and my relationship to it, healthy.
I owe all of this healthy insight and sudden good attitude about Valentines Day to the coaching session I had with Allison earlier in the day. Allison is applying to college theater programs. I recommended that we work on young Emily's "Goodby World" speech from Our Town. She loves the piece and I'm so glad because it's one of my all time favorite plays, and the speech is so beautiful and tender.
This monologue allows a young actress to show great range in her ability to go from a very young girl to a young woman who shows a very mature appreciation for her family and all that comes with it - of every aspect of being alive.
In the play, 26 year old Emily has died giving birth and comes back to earth in spirit form in order to see the people she loves, one last time. In an effort to help Allison deliver the most honest interpretation of the speech, I asked her to paraphrase it, using her own life in place of Emily's. I asked her to look around her own living room, and to think of her parents, her brother, her dog and all of the other, more mundane aspects of her real life that she would miss.
When Allison did that, we were both brought to tears. It worked and she got it. She got what she needed for the monologue to ring true!
So it's this speech that reminded me that I don't need a man or any other source of love to appreciate Valentines Day. I have plenty of love to appreciate, right now.
Here is the end of Emily's speech.
Emily: Goodbye to clocks ticking — and my butternut tree! And Mama's sunflowers — and food and coffee — and new-ironed dresses and hot baths — and sleeping and waking up!
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you!
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every,
every minute?
every minute?
Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some.
From Jim's Facebook page: I'm just the cute little Irish kid your grandmother warned you about. I am the incredibly fortunate husband of Beth, the very blessed father of Heather, Aidan and David with the burden of son-in-law Richard.
I love music (can't imagine life without music), performing live--onstage or in any impromptu setting (pretty much I'm always "on"), generally anything Arts-related, reading, baseball (GO INDIANS), seeing live theater, being part of the collaborative creative process that is live theater, doing voice-overs, hugging trees, hiking, driving or traveling to someplace new, doing photography and just enjoying being alive... January 24, 1950-February 14, 2013
For the rest of us still here, trying to sort it all out, my wish is that...
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