And the Wind Calls My Name

I could have written in the hot spot, the very moment I sent my cast off to the wrap party, leaving me behind to sit in the theater alone. I could have written sometime during the foggy-headed weekend, something about milestones and never regretting the decisions we make in life. I could have, but I didn't. It took the wind a few days to clear my head and start shaking the trees outside to grab my attention. This is where I am. I'm listening to the howling sound of change.

Sometimes I give a list of random questions to friends I lunch with at work. Yesterday's set included the question: "What two things did you learn last weekend?" Number one for me was that 40 is old if you haven't done anything with your life (and in some respects, I haven't). The second revelation was that going into and coming out of anything, be it a career, relationship, or life-changing experience, you have to do your best to know who you are. In the end, you may be alone, on the ground covered in dirt and blood, and everyone might judge you for falling or looking unattractive, but if you know who you are and value that, then this is all you need. I repeat, this is all you need, this intimate knowledge of and belief in the best things you have to offer. You may be fortgotten, you may be ridiculed, but you know where you stand. This is where I am. I'm listening to the reaffirming sound of my own conscience.

I won't go down for being the nice guy.
I won't go down for holding on to my principles.
I won't allow myself any longer to interpret rejection as a fair evaluation.

If there's no love where I am, then I simply have to keep looking for it. I have to have faith that it is out there, maybe in another group of friends, another place of work, and on another stage. It's out there, and that's where I need to be.

Say/Do Masochism

I'm going to break a major rule of my blog writing style, and I'm a little disappointed in myself, because I came up with a title for this entry that captures the idea but unfortunately uses key words I need to use in the body. If you haven't noticed already - and I'm betting you haven't - I have a rule about blogging that I do everything I can to maintain: I can't use any of the words from the title in the body of the blog. It was never like this with my journal because nobody ever read that, but this is a different medium. Nevertheless, rules were meant to be broken, but only once, or else the novelty wears thin.

The things people say and the things people do are in two different worlds. I've seen a lot of the two contrasting lately, and in the wake of after effect, I'm wondering what the words mean when the action betrays them. I wonder if people are just not aware of what it is they say, and beyond that, I wonder if I should place more importance on the things people don't say. Actually, my theater training tells me the truth: Place more importance on the things that people do or don't do.

I also have to trust my instincts. There are friends I have absolutely no doubt about, and I've been accused of a resistance to new things and new people, but that's why you establish close friends and everyone else is friendly. It doesn't mean that I love people less, and it doesn't mean that I lose a little faith in people. I just have to embrace this individuality I've practiced for so many years and...most importantly, I have to know myself. I can't take perpetul rejection from a few people to heart. To do so would be insanity, and especially now when I'm redefining so much in my life, I really need as much belief in myself as I can find. This is the project of Stewart 4.0 in the making, and there's more in the balance than you may be aware of.

There's an old saying...oh God, I might have mentioned it two three times before in this blog, so you might wonder who exactly I'm trying to convince...anyway, there's an old saying that goes, "We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are." Oh holy shit yes, there is truth in that. "What we are" is the part that's difficult to define, because it's not what we think we are, it's a matter of who people want us to be. A friend of mine recently reappeared and seems to be stuck in that hole. Another mysterious friend from my past wrestled with the question, defining it in her email address with the demand "need to be me". But who is "me"? Who am I?

Okay, I keep bringing up in various entries that idea of "we are what we do", but that's the fight. That's the struggle to leave the labels and definitions placed on us by other people and realize our potential. That's when you start looking for the people who love and accept you, and I've been on both sides of that. I've been very lucky to be the one theat some people have turned to when they needed to recenter themselves. Tonight, right after work, I reached out to two people - one of whom has always been unconditional with me and leaves me feeling great about myself, and the other has had a crappy answering machine for as long as I've known her. They have a piece of me intact, and suddenly the others...the ones who can't make up their minds....

Well, the things we say and the things we do are two completely different things. If they match, it's a unique convergence and the truth behind them go straight to the soul. You've given yourself sincerely to another person. That's where my weakness is. Since I practice this, it's easy for me to feel let down, a little bewildered, wondering what it was in any given moment that I did wrong, and why I fell short of a person's expectations. I see that blank stare from my boss sometimes and I know everything there is to know about how much longer I should stay at my job. I get blown off repeatedly by the friend who wants to keep the tight circle of friends together, and I scold myself for lowering my guard around her. I carefully navigate the changes with my theater home, always keeping my anxiety about it in mind, and I take shallow breaths of self-esteem to keep my eyes focused and my heart intact.

And what touched all of this off? The guilt of complacency. The idea that if I tried less, believed a little less in myself, and simply accepted where the people who are physically closest to me want me to be, scares me. It upsets me. I've always had a fear of mediocrity, of letting time slip by me unnoticed without anything to show for it. Many years ago I started letting go of the people and places that never knew me because I wanted to do more, I wanted to be more, I just wanted to have more fun with life. Today, an instant of being cut off in mid-sentence after being held at a repelling distance took me from strange wonder to a stinging cloud of rejection.

I can't let it get to me. I have to keep in mind all of the great things I want to do. Better than that, I have to remember the people who believe in me, the ones who extend themselves to knowing me. The tragedy would come from the acceptance of rejection, and that is something I'm not inclined to do. No, that's not the legacy I will live up to.

And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough, when I say what things are like
Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.
That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.
~ Bertolt Brecht
(a poem given to me by Christine Cavanaugh, one of the truest, most direct people I've ever known)

St. Hat Tricks Day

I just stubbed my toe. Walking barefoot to the kitchen barefoot after having gotten home from the theater at about 12:30am, I accidentally kicked the edge of...oh, never mind. I'm in pain.

Okay, I'm over it now.

I just talked for a while with my lead actor after a decent performance of my play, and looking back at my history at Playhouse, I'm so glad that this was my last conversation with an actor in that theater. There has almost always been one actor who stays late, the one most eager to learn. Over the years it's been people like Vito (the absolute opposite of the word "lazy"), Suzy (the most talented actor I've ever worked with), and tonight it was Amalia, the person who goes beyond the word actor and achieves that definition that is beyond most actors' reach: she's an artist. That's everything I aspire to be, from my first conscious breath in the morning to the moment I close my eyes at night. It comes as no surprise that these three people are the ones whom I attribute my experience to, the ones who made everything worth the trip I've taken.

I guess this is about the magic number of three. At the beginning of this weekend, there were three performances left. When I was done (for the most part) as director tonight, I sent three of my actors home, or to a bar, or to wherever they were going on this holiday. I even had three crew members tonight. The real questions is, as I write on the third Saturday of the third month of the year, is this play the way I want to finish a career at Playhouse West? Is this the best I've ever done?

I have to say...that the answer lies with the audiences. I will never feel like it's the best thing, because I always want more. As my distant friend Iulia says, "more and more, always". I work my actors hard until closing night, and then I will, as I've learned how to do through repetition and experience, be satisfied with the outcome. It is what it was always meant to be.

I love the process. I love the moments of clarity, of pure bonding with artists and that understanding of what we're doing. Whether or not the audience gets it is kind of irrelevant. In this chapter of my life that's closing, I committed myself completely to the actor, to making sure that they are different on closing night than they were when I first saw them rehearse. I know I haven't reached all of them, but I worked my butt off through each and every performance. Back in my college days, I gave extensive notes to my two actors in a black box theater when I made my directing debut with "Two and Twenty". Tonight, with two performances left, I gave my final notes at Playhouse in a black box theater to two of my actors, and then one.

That actor is a musician an an artist. Those are three of my favorite words.

The Law of Proximity

I have been trying, over the past week or so and especially last night, to write a new blog entry, and to do it in a way that's a little more than just narrative, a recap of what I ate for breakfast, what I ate for dinner, and what happened in between. Always, I ran out of steam, lost the next thought in a cloud of distraction, and whatever I wrote is immediately deleted. I've done that many times in my life, written pages of a script, short stories, songs, and deleted them without a second thought. I guess I've done the same thing with people. That, unfortunately, is a little too easy for me.

Sometimes the lyrics of a song haunt me and call me back to writing, which helps me cleanse my cluttered mind. Lately I've been hearing the following from the song "Crumbs", which I used for "The Shape of Things":

I can tell, by the way you're pushing crumbs around the table
You're not listening to me
And you say, that you have come as far as you are able
But you're not far from the tree
And you say, you're OK, but you live your life like it's over
And you say, you're OK, but you live your life like it's over

So I stop, many times a week, to look at the world around me and see the people who are near and far away. And there lies an idea I have about people whom you just can't connect with, and the people whom you do. It is those names, those faces, that can define us...that attempt to define us, but that's not right. The distance between us defines us.

I once wrote about a girl I knew for over a decade, a friend whom I used to write to nearly every day. She was the single most consistent and important friendship for years until she moved out here. Gradually, I started recognizing her less and less, and soon I realized that when she lived on another coast, she was still sharing the same space with me, living in that mailbox. When she moved to my town, her life existed in her zip code, and suddenly our friendship stopped being relevant. It didn't live inside the mailbox any more, the emails were saturated with appointments, schedules, dinners, inconvenient invitations, and the strange expectation that she could put forth less effort than writing email, because we were in the same city. The people who grew closer were the people who were physicallycloser. That's the way it always was.

Earlier this week, my company had what it calls a RIF (a Reduction in Force), laying off some 130 people, assassinating them from an odd family of people who have been driven to work and overwork for the past four years, stuck inside two buildings within a song from the packed Ventura freeway. While they were being informed that they were being let go, all of their access was being revoked. Most of them didn't get the chance to say goodbye, and I don't know who's better off, those of us who are staying or those who are going. We know each other, we've grown on each other because we are near. When the depth of friendship can be affected by a floor or two, the attention paid to distance is a greater thing.

In two weeks, I will be ending a 10 year relationship with my theater company with the final performance of "the Shape of Things". Aside from everything else I've written, I know that my relevance in a whole group of people will suddenly disappear, even darken in Playhouse's habit of slandering the people who leave. I keep getting assurances from those close to me that they wouldn't dare say a bitter word about me, but I know better. I'm making the jump into a void, into complete uncertainty, but I do know who will be in that void with me. The comfort of knowing the few people near me definitely outweighs the idea of not knowing everyone where I've been for the past few years.

The song finishes with:

And all the things you ever tried to tell me,
Somehow don't apply to you
You're the one evading hope, side-stepping every inkling
That the good guy, the early bird, the one who tries, the one who tries again wins

So despite the rejections from the girl, the company, the difficulties with career and direction in my life...I'm still in it. I pull in closer and focus on myself, keep myself strong and keep trying. Every last person might be off in their own zip code, but I will reach out to the people who have made an impression on me, and if they have no reaction to that or to me, then all I can do is keep moving. I can't be afraid to try again.

If I give up, stay in one place and everyone else keeps moving around me, my whole life will be a series of deleted pages. Hey, forget about this whole distance between people defining us. What defines us is what we do, and how we react to things. That is who we are.