Jessica Lange

A Meaning of Life

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1798866_10152304887902755_1072442248_nMy friend Michael and I were talking about the meaning of life today. He is the Sonja to my woeful uncle Vanya. We conjectured that friends and faith and spouses and children are all the pools we draw from to drink of life.

I took an Ambien type pill about an hour ago. It calmed me a bit immediately. I’ve had a big day, you could read about it if you want, and I must be honest with you, it would mean much for me for you to read the the things I write. A man who calls his blog easily crestfallen is not cavalier about his feelings when he sees no one is reading his epistles, though admittedly, sometimes my words are overlooked for good reasons.

I’ve gotten off track. I took a pill that I sometimes, but seldom take, a pill that is supposed to help me sleep. I watched Below Deck on Bravo sans side effects and then I started to watch Big Brother. And then I started hallucinating prisms coming out of the tv. It was cool, but I took that as a sign for me to go to bed. I passed by, in the hall, a valued gift, A Phyllis Diller print called Reclusive Star. Again, I thought I saw prisms coming from the painting and the mirror facing it on the other wall. I felt like Jessica Lange in the new season of American Horror Story. I tried, most unsuccessfully to take selfies with Phyllis’ picture.

My clumsiness deterred my goal, I found myself smiling and giggling, fearlessly playing with my phone when the possibility of it dropping was extremely high. And I paused and thought. I am so happy. Drug induced, no please let me call it drug enhanced, like summer highlights or a beer chaser. But this feeling is unmistakeable and I’m sure most of you have experienced it, whether it’s enhanced by a prescription drug, an illegal drug, alcohol, extreme yoga, swimming, a great sex session. An otherworldly bliss is what I’m experiencing right now and I’m grateful for it because I had an introspective, confusing day where I was forced to make a big, burdening decision. And now I feel lighter, lighter than I felt all summer, all year.

And tomorrow I will rise and I might be proud of my wisdom, my honesty. I might be ashamed, too. I just realized the pages I read this morning are putting me to bed tonight. I’m currently reading James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. There is a scene in a New Jersey pizza parlor with 4 men, two women. Three of the men are black, one man is Italian. Both women are actresses, one from Kentucky, the other from Texas. But they’ve met at this place and started drinking together. One of the black men compliments the actress from Kentucky, telling her she’s quite a lady.

“Oh!” said Barbara. “I just want to live!”

“Tell me,” said Matthew (the young sensitive soldier) quickly, “do you find it hard to live? I mean”~he was very earnest; Fowler watched him with a smile~”really to live? Not just”~he waved his big hands nervously~”not just to go to the job and come home and go to sleep and get up and eat and go back to the job~but~to live.” His hands reached out, his fingers clutched the table, flat, palms downward; and he looked, for a moment at his hands. Then he looked at Barbara. “You know?”

When I read this this morning, I understood this young man’s ache. I know that ache. I want to wave my arms, clutch the air, look at my tired hands and proclaim, “I want to live.”

And in a moment or two, I will tumble into my bed, my mind will wander fancifully, a conscious dream state before my soon descending unconscious one. And I’ll giggle like a drunken accountant living in the Russian countryside. “This is the meaning of life!”

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Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You?

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52757c19ca8b4226d18dc1939940ea5bThis is not a review of last week’s American Horror Story.  I will merely offer that the best moment of the episode was Stevie Nicks’ haunting ballad she sang at the end, just her by the piano singing to Jessica Lange’s character, Fiona Goode.  I did not remember hearing the song before, so I did a little Google search and I found this video of her singing it at one of the most, pardon my pun, magical concert venues I know of, Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside of Denver.  On Youtube, in the comments someone left the background about the song which I’d also never heard.  The man she is talking about is Joe Walsh, of The Eagles.

Apparently, the following was in the liner notes of her 1985 album, Rock a Little

“I guess in a very few rare cases, some people find someone that they fall in love with the very first time they see them… from across the room, from a million miles away. Some people call it love at first sight, and of course, I never believed in that until that night I walked into a party after a gig at the hotel, and from across the room, without my glasses, I saw this man and I walked straight to him. He held out his hands to me, and I walked straight into them. I remember thinking, I can never be far from this person again… he is my soul. He seemed to be in a lot of pain, though hid it well. But finally, a few days later, (we were in Denver), he rented a jeep and drove me up into the snow covered hills of Colorado… for about 2 hours. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but he did tell me a story of a little daughter that he had lost. To Joe, she was much more than a child. She was three and a half, and she could relate to him.

“I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things going on on the road, and he decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were if they were compared to worse sorrows. So he told me that he had taken his little girl to this magic park whenever he could, and the only thing she EVER complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain. As we drove up to this beautiful park, (it was snowing a little bit), he came around to open my door and help me down, and when I looked up, I saw the park… his baby’s park, and I burst into tears saying, ‘You built a drinking fountain here for her, didn’t you?’ I was right, under a huge beautiful hanging tree, was a tiny silver drinking fountain. I left Joe to get to it, and on it, it said, dedicated to HER and all the others who were too small to get a drink.

“So he wrote a song for her, and I wrote a song for him… ‘This is your song, ‘ I said to the people, but it was Joe’s song. Thank you, Joe, for the most committed song I ever wrote. But more than that, thank you for inspiring me in so may ways. Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore, since we took that drive.”

These Are the People

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tenneseeI’m reading Costly Performances right now, an account of the last few years of playwright Tennessee Williams’ life, written by his friend, Bruce Smith.  It is a funny, sad, informative, salacious read.  Last night, I read a passage about the opening of his last Broadway premiere, Clothes for Summer Hotel.  It did not look likely that the reviews or following box office would be good, but after the show, as they stepped into the alley, Tennessee and Bruce were met by a group of fans.  One man, in particular, held out a stack of books and said, “Happy Birthday, Mr. Williams, would you be kind enough to autograph these for me?”  Bruce Smith, who was there, thought that the fan was imposing too much by asking Williams to stand there in the rain and sign 12 books.  Williams graciously signed each one and then moved on to every person standing in this line, people who probably not had even been inside the show for financial or booking reasons.

When Smith asked him about his graciousness in what was a trying time.  (His play did open to poor reviews and the show only lasted a few days on Broadway.  Furthermore, the opening date had been decided to coincide with his 69th birthday, so they were en route to a less than festive birthday party/opening night party.)  Tennessee only said, “These are my people, I know these are my readers, people whom I’ve communicated in some quite human and genuine manner.  That man who wanted me to sign all those books, I know he’ll have to sell them, probabbly to pay his rent.  These are the people I relate to and for.  They’re all so far removed from the group inside the theatre.  And to think that some one critic in there is going to decide against their being able to see one last big play of mine.  I could feel it as we sat there during the performance of the play.  They’re warming for the kill, baby, they’re warming for the kill.”

I can’t stop thinking about the image of Tennessee standing in the rain, signing autographs and making connections to people like, well, people like me.  Around that time, I was a 12 year old boy who spent every Saturday at my local library.  About 12 was when I discovered, and discovered would be the word, the play section in the upstairs aisles at the Independence Public Library.  I would sit for hours and read plays and leaf through the pictures in “The Best Plays” series.  It was my window into a world that I dreamed I’d be a part of.  It was the beginning of a life-long love affair.  So, when I read this, it affirms what I always believed when I read Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, or saw Jessica Lange do A Streetcar Named Desire or watched Night of the Iguana and Summer and Smoke and Suddenly, Last Summer on TCM.  I know what Tom was trying to leave behind when he told Laura to blow out her candles because all of these characters and stories had been written for me and about me and to me, like a love letter.

Pretty, Funny Ladies

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Mary

Mary

I have always been a sucker for a pretty lady who could make me laugh.  If you are reading this and you are my friend and you are female, the odds are 100% that you are a pretty lady that makes me laugh.  I am very blessed in the pretty, funny friend department, so I thought I’d post a few pictures of the pretty, funny ladies who’ve made me laugh since I was little.  I know it’s an incomplete list, I’ll probably go back and add pictures for the next few days because someone will occur to me and I’ll return here and make an addition.  Some of these women are known for their beauty, some of these women are known for their comedy, and some are known for both.  If you think of someone I HAVE to add, please tell me, there’s always room for one more pretty, funny lady!