News
One of my heroes here at Shakespeare & Company, Kevin Coleman, has cast me as Yasha in a production of The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov. Coleman has a long-standing relationship with a local mental hospital, Austen Riggs, and directs plays there that incorporate patients from the hospital alongside local actors. I think most actors would think “I’m excited to do Chekhov, but I don’t want to do theatre in a mental hospital,” whereas I think “I’m excited to do theatre in a mental hospital, but I don’t want to do Chekhov.”
Guess what? I’m still not done with Brief Candle 9. So if you have an idea for an article, there’s still time to submit.
Flashback Friday
When I told Stephen Welch that I was planning to re-edit and migrate some of my old blog entries to Substack, he suggested that rather than publish them with antedated timestamps which would quietly push them back into the archives, that I do a “Flashback” series to actually make use of the old content. So, until I run out of vintage posts, I’ll be doing semi-regular trips down memory lane where I re-edit and republish entries from my old blog.
Here is another “Flashback Friday” post originally written in December of 2009. This is another one of my “essay” posts which are generally not as good as my story posts. You can honestly just skip any of these kinds of posts.
North South East West
Masculinity beats the living hell out of me is one of my favorite lyrics ever. I am no closer to knowing what it takes to be a man, much less a “good man” now than I was in 2009 when I originally wrote this post.
For years after my father's death, I based most of my life decisions on what I thought he would do. Over time I realized this just wasn't pertinent to my life. I was trying so hard to be my dad that I'm surprised that I didn't start smoking a pack a day and start wearing work boots.
Boys look to their fathers for what it means to be a man, and so manhood is often defined by ways that boys perceived that their fathers are different from other men. So for me as I grew I began to realize that one of my father's most distinguishing characteristics was that he always knew how to get places. His sense of direction was impeccable. My father had been a cab driver for a few years so he always knew how to get places without having to look at a map. I didn't get my driver's license until after my father's death but after 18 years of driving it still strikes me how effortlessly he navigated places before the advent of GPS and Google Maps.
When I recall memories of my father, so many of them involve him pointing and naming streets and cardinal directions.
NPR ran a story about environmental issues the other day and the correspondent made what at first seemed like an idiotic point: that a downside to reducing vehicle emissions was lessening people’s emotional attachment to their cars. As someone who prides himself on being practical instead of sentimental, I hated the idea that someone liking their car could even enter a conversation about important issues like the environment. But the more I thought about it the more I thought that my dad's sense of direction and affinity to his truck are two of my strongest recollections of him and I realized that I am not immune to that particular brand of sentimentality.
I bought my first car at 36 and even then I was reluctant to do it even though I bought it to live in, and even I am vulnerable to having my heart strings plucked a little bit by the thought of a beat up old chevy. My dad's relationship to his truck was such a powerful part of his persona and nearly all my memories of him come back to his sense of direction, his unloading of his tools every night from his truck and putting them in the shed, or him lying on his back in the street underneath the truck working on some part or another.
I felt the most kinship with my dad when I had a job delivering paint for Benjamin Moore. I got to drive a truck, work manual labor, hang around on job sites, and driving around all day everyday gave me the best sense of direction I've ever had. It's no coincidence that it was my favorite job I've ever had. I worry on a daily basis that I don't know what kind of man I'll be. I'm almost two decades into adulthood but I don't feel any more like a man than I did at 17.
I can drive a stick shift, but I know I can’t be my father. And if I can’t be my father, what kind of man can I be?
Because I am a practical person, I stay away from ineffable, unquantifiable ideas about manhood like "strength," "honor," or "heroism" 'cause what do those things really mean?
But the problem is that when I take away all the things that I can't explain, and when I strip away the fairy tales, and I abandon the irrational and the sentimental, the only things I have left to define manhood are a road map, four cardinal directions, and a beat up old truck.