Wading in the Velvet Sea

The best most of us can hope for (read: the non-trust fund baby set) is to figure out what makes us the happiest in this short time on earth and hopefully figure it out before it’s too late to really do anything about it. For example, if my life’s happiness is derived from competitive gymnastics, well, it wouldn’t do me a lot of good at this stage of my life. Some people, like a lot of my friends in NYC, figured out that the theatrical life is for them, and while they don’t fall under the Harvard Alumni Association’s definition of ‘success’, they do fall under mine. And since the world revolves around me, this is all well and good.

It took a few years for me to realize that theatre in and of itself was not the thing that made me happy: it was the people I did theatre with. My goal in all theatrical endeavors was ever and only to make the people I worked with happy: the directors, designers, actors, ie, my friends. Which was how I thought about it. As the years went on, I would automatically label people I worked with as ‘friends’, which of course was a mistake and has been discussed as such on here before.

I vacillate between my ‘propulsive apathy’ (a phrase I coined last night over dinner as a way to describe my recent ‘f#ck it all, but in a good way’ attitude) and today’s more somber ‘yea, that just doesn’t work for me’ attitude because of the way I was raised. I don’t talk much about my parents here, because it’s not nice to talk about people in rehab. OK, that’s a joke. My mother has always taught me to open up to people, to treat them as nice as you want to be treated, and to never give up on other people. My father is there to point out that my mother is consistently f#cked over by her friends on an almost weekly basis, reducing the nicest woman I know to a bitter, sad person.

Most of my ‘adult’ life has been dedicated to finding a middle ground between completely opening myself up and utter indifference. The former leaves you inevitably and consistently wounded; the latter leaves you playing DVD extras alone in your apartment on a nightly basis.

The trick, lately, is that I find myself surrounded by a lot of Dickie Greenleafs’people who can make you feel like the center of their world one minute/hour/party/day/week, and then seemingly, in a flash, be gone. We, as fallible people who desire to, well, be desired, fall for the Dickie Greenleafs almost every time because it feels right, it feels good, it in some way validates the worth we assign to ourselves on our good days. And their absence thereby confirms the inadequacies we place upon ourselves when no one’s looking.

Now, the problem of course lies in the fact that these everyday Greenleafs are not bad people. Most of them are pretty great. We (I include myself in this category since I imagine in some capacity am a Greenleaf as well) don’t even know when we’re treating people this way; we only know when we’re on the other end of it. We’re not doing it on purpose. Most of the time we’re not doing anything.

In college, I staged a play by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin called ‘Savage/Love’. One scene was staged as a circle of people, each professing love to another, while ignorant of the simultaneous pleas coming from another part of the circle. We’re too busy with our own frequencies to tune into another station; it’s all white noise. Many things in these relationships are said, but very little is actually expressed. Therein lies the difference.

What to do? What to do. Nothing to be done. Very Didi and Gogo. We rinse, lather, and repeat every aspect of our lives. Didi and Gogo are just doing what they think is best, as do most of us. The futility at the end of their day is one that Vonnegut would laugh at. So it goes, Vonnegut would say. He’d laugh at their efforts to position themselves for a message that isn’t ever coming. It’s not about an external message, though, for me. It is about a subtle but consistent repositioning of our lives, whether it is financial, spiritual, or interpersonal in nature. Moi? I’m still working through the latter. Probably will until the day I die. It’s work worth doing, however. And the Greenleafs...well, they'll always be there, but it doesn't mean they are the only ones out there. All in good time.

All in good time.