10:17 p.m. - 2007-02-19
Advances, None Miraculous
There is a certain kind of movie that never gets put on a list of favorites but is nevertheless a movie that you love. In other words, you have that list of movies in your head that you bring up whenever someone asks you what your favorite movies are, and they're usually movies that, in addition to being good, have a personal connection, a movie that you've watched with friends or family or partners again and again. I have my list: Muriel's Wedding, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Monsoon Wedding, Mean Girls, Queen Margot, The Lion in Winter, and usually after that point I start having to think about my DVD collection, meaning that the secondary list begins typically begins with All About My Mother and ends with Zoolander. But even besides those are the movies that you would never think of buying, that you would never want to have around, but that when someone brings them up you say, "Oh, I love that movie!" You'd forgotten about that movie, and you'll forget about it again, because it's usually not a major classic or one of those movies that you and your friends incessantly quote. It still lodges in your brain, though, and lines and moments bubble up on occassion, to fit your life.
Postcards from the Edge is one of those movies, for me. For those who haven't seen it, the film came out in the late 80s or early 90s and was based on the life of Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds (if I have to explain who these people are . . . yeah, you shouldn't be online, small child, or psychopath living under a rock, so please go away). Meryl Streep plays the Carrie Fisher, a drugged out actress who ODs and is put in the care of her mom, played by Shirley MacLaine, whom I cannot mention without doing a shout-out to St. Caroline of the Nickel Slots. It's a federal regulation. Anyway, they bicker, and Meryl/Carrie's drug habits are juxtaposed against Shirley/Debbie's alcoholism, and much hilarity ensues. Eventually, however, Meryl/Carrie finds herself having to go back to the movie that she was working on when she ODed, to do a voice over for the parts where she was too fucked up to deliver the lines properly. Her director is played by Gene Hackman, in one of like three roles in his epic career where he doesn't play a douchebag. There are two parts of this scene that have been in my head of late.
The first one I am not proud of. The director says to Meryl/Carrie, "You know, you're not going to get a lot of sympathy. Do you know how many people would give their right arm to live your life?" and she responds, "But that's the problem. I can't feel my life." There are many, many times when I think about the few hundred people who did NOT get in to Berkeley. Hell, I have met these people. I even knew some of them from way back. Yeah, I'm not a movie star, but I do feel a bit of an asshole in contemplating giving up what a lot of people really wish they had.
The other part is somewhat comforting, and unlike the last bit, I was not able to pull it off IMDB, so I may not be totally accurate. The director (and isn't amazing what founts of wisdom directors can be) says, "You think you have some big revelation your whole life changes? It doesn't work like that in real life. In real life you have the revelation and your life changes a month or so later." Or maybe he says three months. Or six. If it's three, then I am sort of ahead of schedule, maybe. Well, at least things are changing.
For one thing, and I feel slightly chagrined about leading off with this, I look REALLY good. For me. It is quite nice, particularly since this time I am looking good without having to subsist solely on chicken breasts, brown rice, and black beans from Whole Foods, not to mention carrot sticks for lunch every day. I eat fried things, particularly lately, although I will say that I have tried to eat mostly fried vegetables. That way at least I can say, "No, no, this is vitamins. This breaded, deep fried broccoli is jam packed full of vitamins. And so is this ranch dressing I am dipping it in. I don't know how, it just is. Shut up. And pass me my fish and chips." Even with fried things, as well as breakfast tacos (I try to make sure they're done with egg beaters, dammit!) and the occasional eggs florentine, the salsa dancing ab video and the weight lifting and the walking and the dancing around like a freak on occassion (always my favorite form of exercise have produced results.
The results are embarrassing, and some of them are things that only someone who has struggles with weight can understand. I mean, it's one thing to notice that your shoulders are broader and your arms are bigger. It's quite another to call your best friend to say things like "Dude, I think I may have seen the edge of a rib. I, yeah, I'm stretching way, way back, and I think I'm about to slip a disk, but it's there, dammit! It's under the fat, but it's there!" And that's not EVEN what I really wanted to tell you about.
Okay, look, there are certain things that men are particularly sensitive about, and when you lose weight you discover that certain things you may have been concerned about were more a problem of proportion. And again, I am partially ashamed to admit this, but, well, THAT was a confidence booster.
Although confidence, as I said, has been boosted, I have yet to take myself out on the town. I don't think I want to have my confidence de-boosted for a bit, particularly because I don't want to get into the mindset of "Okay, so if I'm looking this good and still eating what I want, how good will I look if I NEVER EAT ANYTHING! I'll look FANTASTIC!" It's a slippery slope.
For example, I'm sick right now. I have a cold. And with my immune system on overload and my inability to get a lot of oxygen, I was hungry. Famished. I stuffed myself today. Buttered toast, breakfast tacos, friend fish, mashed potatoes, cornbread, and carrot salad at Luby's (it's a Texas thing), kung pao tofu and edamame, oranges and bananas and bites of birthday cake from my roomie's birthday. All the time, I kept asking myself, "Why am I eating so much? Why am I so hungry?" And every time I could say, "Well, because you're sick, because your body is saying it needs more fuel to fight off a disease. Of course you're hungry!" Yet the "Why am I so hungry?" voice kept coming back, as though it was wrong of me to want to eat.
All of which is to say that although I look and feel better than I have in years, I am in no way free from the body image issues. I am a long way off from being the self-confident gay lothario (Joyce reference! Yay!) that I hope to be, or at least the kind of guy who can start a conversation with a hottie at a bar.
Speaking of gay lotharios, since the Valentine's Day incident, I am noticing that I am getting over the Boy. This is . . . strange. We actually almost spoke the other day. Saturday was the memorial for a professor of his who passed away, and so I sent him a quick email telling him to take care of himself. Later that morning, I was in rehearsal with an actress, going over the scene in which Emma Goldman meets Sasha Berkman, a man who was to become the love of their life even though he spent decades in prison and the two of them were never monogamous. As part of my process, I was asking her about how she met the man she's been with for a few years now, trying to find ways of connecting her to the character. That's when I got a text message from the Boy saying he would call me later. Punch in the gut. I really, really didn't need him to call me. I texted him that I would be busy until 6ish his time. My actress observed "You really like this guy."
I was thinking about him, kinda freaked, until my second rehearsal of the day. Both rehearsals were amazing. I had forgotten how much I loved the process of an actor and a director coming to know a character, excavating themselves and the script, playing therapist and literary scholar and all the other careers that I thought I'd be kinda good at rolled together, and with one another. My actress said she could tell I was trying to break down her artifices, trying to have her be raw and real. I didn't quite know that was what I was doing, but it sounded right. It was intense and emotional and we talked deeply about our experiences with love and loss, and by the end of it I felt so alive I was practically on fire. I had the thought: if the boy had made me feel even half this good, even a quarter this alive, NOTHING would have stopped me from loving him. Nothing. Not even him. Not even me."
But he didn't. And he called while I was working out, and left a message that he was on his way to the city, and it sucked that he only cared enough to drop me a line while waiting for the subway and it sucked to know he was having himself a time in San Francisco without me, but then I remembered that I never really had a great time in San Francisco, whereas the past few weeks in Austin have been full of fun, and love, and stress, and all these things that I'd missed. If someone had asked me whether I'd want to trade places, I would have laughed.
My friends are, for the most part, thrilled about this, that I am finally coming to understand that this guy wasn't worth my time and my energy. Me, I'm still ambivalent. There's a tremendous satisfaction in getting back all the songs that I had, in my head, dedicated to him, enjoying songs like "Fight Test" by The Flaming Lips and "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" by Fats Waller for their own merits rather than because they match my feelings at the moment. At the same time, he's still the Default Guy, to use Dan Fishback's term, and I still think about whether or not there's some move I can make, or could have made, to make things different. Even typing that helps me figure how pointless that is, but it takes the heart a long time to catch up on what the head got on the first reading. Not to mention the fact that I really, REALLY want to send him a picture so he can see how cute I look, both because we WERE friends and I want the whole BFF moment of "OMG, you TOTALLY look super hot OMG!!!" and because I want him to think about what he's not enjoying at the moment.
The sad truth is, of course, that he's not thinking about me, and he probably never will. The happy truth is that every time I hang out with my actors, I care less and less.
Not that the show is going perfectly. Today, for instance, was something of a disaster. I was sick, two of my actresses were too sick to rehearse, and one had gone on a last minute trip to San Antonio because a friend lost her father. It is also unlikely that we will manage a rehearsal tomorrow. I am starting to get a little freaked out. We go up next week, and there is a shitload to do, not to mention the reading that I am not doing because I am doing this. Then there are the moments when the actresses get it, when I see them falling in love with the words, and opening themselves up, and I don't even care if the show is a huge success on its first run. These are women who will do this show more than once. It's going to be fantastic, whether or not it's exactly on time.
This doesn't mean my heart isn't trembling with panic. Just that it's way better than sinking into my chest like it had been doing.
So I'm starting to feel my life again. I'm getting back to the point where I can look up at the Texas night sky, which is always so huge and, on clear nights, packed with stars (there's a song about it, and we'll do a bar or two in the Emma Goldman show, just because we can), and just say "Thank you" in the cheesiest way possible.
I know that this present tense is going to have to end soon, though. I need to figure out the next step. I met up with an old high school buddy who recommended I apply to Tisch, and I am pretty sure I will. As much as I love Austin, I also love New York. Then there's applying to a cheap UT program and working on getting a theatre space and funding to do everything right here. It can wait a couple of weeks, though. Right now, I want to enjoy feeling things. Feeling so happy to be alive again.
I was with Kim in San Antonio in front of Barnes and Noble, drinking Starbucks while Kim smoked. It is the exact same thing that we have been doing for nearly ten years, ten years this summer, as a matter of fact. She still lives in San Antonio, and I live less than a hundred miles away. As we sat chatting, two teenagers came in, a heavyset gay boy and his heavyset female best friend. We didn't even need to look at each other. Kim just said, "Oh my God, that was us, wasn't it?" "It was totally us" I replied, and then started laughing. It was scary. It was scary that we'd been there long enough for a new generation to replace us. I said, though, that I wouldn't trade any of it, although I had to admit afterwards that there were, in fact, a number of times I would have gladly traded.
Yet there we were, in the same place, a little thinner but mostly a lot older. Eventually, we left, she to see her boyfriend, me to have drinks with the adorementioned high school buddy. She had work the next day, and I had theatre. As lives go, ours were basic and simple. But they were our own, and I hope I am not just speaking for me when I say that they are changing, and that we can feel it.
