The Professor

Recently, one of my university theater professors passed away. I've been thinking about him, how amazing he was, how lucky I was to know and work with him.

Let's start with how I knew him. See, that description up above is a bit misleading; yes, he was "mine" as in someone that I studied under, and I enjoyed his company, very much. He was a university professor. But I was not a university student.

Auditions at the university are "open;" anyone can audition (but casting preference is given to students). One of my best friends convinced me to go with him the first time we auditioned; I'm forever grateful.

I got some of my best acting roles there from Dr. Bob Dillard, head of the theater department. He was elegant, slender, funny, acerbic, insanely talented, well read, better educated than I would ever be. He was great at keeping appropriate boundaries while still hanging out with teens and 20-somethings. I was 18 when I met him.

When I was 19, he cast me in "Evita." I was not confident about my singing. My mother had a beautiful voice, and I loved singing, but I was very insecure about letting anyone hear. I told people that I didn't sing, that "you don't want to hear me sing." My family and friends weren't big cheerleaders; the first time my high school did a musical, my father said to me, "What are you gonna do in a musical?" when I told him about the show. Stung, I said, "They need technicians!"

"Oh. I guess that makes sense," he said.

The only reason I tried out for "Evita" is that it had a huge chorus. I could "hide" my voice in the group.

During rehearsals, I learned to sing out, to project. I wasn't ready to play Eva, but I was then comfortable with being an actor who sings.

Later, I also joined my church choir. I can sing the "gloria" part of "Angels We Have Heard On High" in one breath, without sounding gaspy. (Unless my asthma is kicking my butt.)

"Evita" made possible every musical that I was in afterward, musicals where I had solos and a headset microphone. Years later, when I was in a large show, the vocal director pulled a large group over to me during rehearsal and said, "Listen to Sharon. Follow what she does."

I am a singer. That never would have happened without Bob Dillard.

Before I met him, one of his apparently standard admonitions had become legendary - in a musical, the cast was to "Sparkle, dammit, sparkle!" I adopted the phrase for non-theater use; my kids are familiar with it.

There are other phrases that so spoke to me that I still check my work, and my life, against them.

My taste in entertainment (and life) runs to squeaky clean. Still, I know that not everything will be G rated, and that's OK - in fact, it's desirable. I love crime shows, murder mystery books, serial killer trivia. So, I save my ire for things that I find unnecessary. For instance: Mel Gibson makes great historical pieces, but he loves gore too much for my taste; I usually watch his stuff after it's been "cut for TV." David Mamet is brilliant, but probably couldn't order breakfast without dropping four or five f-bombs. I don't mind most of the nudity in "Schindler's List," because I know what Spielberg is trying to say (even though I think that there are less revealing ways to do it). I do mind Amon Goeth's girlfriend being naked and throwing things at him so that we get to see her bounce. Put her in a negligee and the scene still works.

Sometimes, the university theater department would produce things that pushed certain boundaries. I rarely had to sit a show out because it pushed too far for me. And, since I think I'm pretty picky, I usually think that if I'm not bothered, no reasonable person should be.

I don't remember what show we were working on when someone asked Dr. Dillard if he was worried about offending people. While I don't remember the show, I remember the moment, the room we were in, and I remember the smile that spread across his face at the question. "No," he said. "I'm not."

"But what if they, like, complain to the university president? What if they write letters and stuff?"

Here's where he dropped that piece of wisdom that so spoke to me. "If we're not offending somebody, we're not doing our jobs," he said. Each of us has people we're willing to offend, and people we'd rather not offend, and it's not only impossible but dangerous to try to avoid offending anyone, ever. Draw your line in the sand, and stand by it. He encapsulated something I already believed in, in a compact sentence. It was brilliance.

I also remembering being giddily grateful to him on a personal level for the way he handled a conversation that had gotten uncomfortable for me.

There was a group of us sitting in the "green room," the lounge area under the stage where we hung out during rehearsals when we personally weren't working. We were going through the whole "getting to know you" thing of asking each other about our lives and backgrounds - where were we from, where we'd gone to high school, that sort of thing.

One girl said that she'd graduated from a local school. "Hey, me too!" I told her. That led to asking what year, who we both knew that had gone to high school with us, and so on. She'd graduated 5 or 6 years after I did.

"Who was your theater teacher?" she asked. It's a really ordinary question, especially under the circumstances, but I was unprepared for it, and I just froze. I'm a pretty open book, I lean toward TMI, but I just stared at her for an uncomfortable few seconds, then said, "I'm sorry. You've just hit on one of the very few areas of my life that I don't talk about."

"WHAT? What? Who was it?"

"Nope. Sorry."

"What happened? What did you do?" She kept asking, and I kept saying no. See, when you don't want to discuss things, people assume that there's a scandal. They want the dirt - they want to hear something salacious. This is just something that I discuss rarely, and I only discuss in detail with people who were there. I'm not hiding, I'm not embarrassed. It's just so uncomfortable that I'd rather not do it. My kids know this teacher as She Who Shall Not Be Named. They wouldn't recognize her name if they heard it.

But this poor girl was just convinced that there was a great story, a big scandal - and that I undoubtedly did something wrong - and she kept pushing. Finally, she looked at Dr. Dillard. "Do you know?" she demanded. I had no idea if he did or didn't. I'd certainly never discussed it with him.

He looked at me, right in my eyes. If he wanted to say, I couldn't stop him (and I wouldn't have). Then he looked at her and said, "Yes, I do. And I know why she doesn't talk about it."

Oh, the relief! The validation, that I didn't have to say if I didn't want to! I was just so overwhelmingly grateful.

I sincerely have no idea what he knew or didn't know. I never asked. It's entirely possible that he had heard some wildly inaccurate stories that cast me as a criminal mastermind or some such thing. I don't know if he actually even knew her name or not. All I knew in that moment was that he had my back. Even if there had been nothing else about him that I liked, this single incident would have assured that I thought of him fondly forever.

I wish that I could remember more about the last time that I worked with him. Unfortunately, something that still ranks as the worst thing that ever happened to me happened during that show. Trauma tends to stain everything, even unrelated things, so even though I actively tried not to associate the show, the people, the theater, plays in general, or anything else of the sort, with the trauma, it didn't work very well. It took 10 years for me to attend a show in that theater again; I have still never worked there since that show.

It's really a shame, because it was a great show, and a great part, the best part I'd ever had at the university. I always got the sense that Dr. D believed in me, and enjoyed my work. My husband assures me that I did a great job, and none of my friends ever told me that the performance stunk, so that's good. I assume that the show didn't suffer. Still, I'd like to have the memories back. Maybe they'll show up some day.

I saw Dr. Dillard occasionally after that. I sent him Christmas cards for years. Still, we never worked together again, and he eventually retired.

Last year, I was at a theater gathering, and had the chance to write something in a notebook for Dr. Dillard (who couldn't attend). Enough of my loved ones have passed away that I'm getting pretty effusive in expressing my feelings to people. You never know when they'll need to hear it, or when they'll be gone.

I don't remember what I wrote. It was probably inadequate and silly. It was only half a page or so. Still, I knew - I may never be in the same room with this friend again, and I need to let him know how amazing he is. He needs to know that I remember; the shows he cast me in, the things he taught me, how he backed me up when I wanted my personal life to remain personal.

He sparkled.

Now it's our turn. "Sparkle, dammit!"

Vandals

From my Facebook page:

Time for a story, boys and girls. Well, really, two related stories.

Once upon a time, many moons ago in the days of big hair and neon clothes, I was a high school theater student. During the rehearsal period for one of our shows, we came to rehearsal to find that the theater had been vandalized. The big double doors that led to the backstage area had the words, "GO AWAY" spray painted on them in black paint. Our set also had the words sprayed across it in black, along with a couple of weird symbols that we didn't recognize.

We had an uneasy relationship with the school administration ("uneasy" as in, the vice principal once said, in public, that he wished he could shut the department down "and be rid of all of you"), so we were sure we'd be blamed for the vandalism, even though it was clearly aimed at us. We repainted our set, but the teacher forbid us to paint the doors. We didn't have the right color, and, "The district will take care of it."

Three of us went back under the cover of night with paint and flashlights. Everyone who was in the department with us knows who The Instigator and the artist was. I held the flashlight. When we left, there were comedy/tragedy masks painted over the words. If we were going to get in trouble, we at least wanted it to be for something we did.

School started at 8 am; by 9 am, the masks had been painted over. None of us got in any kind of trouble (although the principal was unamused).

Plus, we seized on the phrase "go away" as our own, and used it as a greeting, farewell, and best wishes. When we went to the movies together (like the Monty Python film festival we attended as part of our "Thirteen Radical Days of Christmas"), we cheered every time a character said, "Go away!" I had Oscar the Grouch and his "go away" sign on my binder. To this day, if you say "go away" to a certain number of us, the response will be a cheery "Go away!" right back.

After high school - and the explanation is a long one - I wasn't sure I'd ever audition for anything again, even though the theater was where I most wanted to be. The Instigator dragged me half willingly to auditions at the local university; the university theater department became my home, for many years. I was in shows there while I was pregnant with three of my four children. He handed me back that part of my life, and there is no way to express my gratitude.

There's a tradition in theater of signing the back of the set, or the backstage walls, or leaving show related art there. At the university, one hallway between the theater and the art department has become a community art space. People paint or write, leaving quotes and images, without needing permission.

Recently, someone went into that hallway and painted some hateful words, as well as several symbols that everyone very much DOES recognize - symbols of a hate group, designed to elicit fear and promote oppression.

The university could have just quickly and quietly rolled white paint over the vandalism, and told no one what was there. They appear to have asked the Fine Arts faculty for input, though, because the decision was - invite current and former students, as well as any interested community members, to paint over the vandalism with something positive.

I'm now old enough that three of my children are college graduates. I had to miss church meetings to be there, but it was important to me to go. Even though I haven't been in the building for years, in a very real way it will always be my home. Even if I had no connection to the building, no student should show up Monday morning and see those images.

So, I dressed in my "don't care if I get paint on them" clothes, and went up.

Nobody thought it was odd that a person my age, wearing a shirt older than most of the kids there, had come. A kid young enough to be mine thanked me for being there. The hallway was full - really full - of people painting. Where the vandalism had been, there are now a portrait of Frederick Douglass, leaves blowing in the wind, a dove, a freehand sentiment - "DUDE, BE NICE" - and more. Everyone was polite, excited, trying to help. I overheard a young lady - who was painting blocks with the letters L-O-V-E on them - say, "I wish I had purple," and I offered, "I can go and buy some, if you'd like."

"No, that's OK. I'm fine. I don't even go here. I'm still in high school," she said.

Someone was handing out fresh fruit and cookies. Someone was providing stencils for those who wanted to help, but "can't paint." I bumped, literally, into two men with news cameras. "I'm sorry," the cameraman said. "No, you're fabulous," I said. "Well, you are too," was the reply.

I painted one thing - well, actually the same thing, twice. It's the symbol in this photo. It's The Golden Rule. Yes, that "Golden Rule" - the one that says to treat people the way you'd like to be treated. The symbol was created by someone dear to me. It is still on the ceiling of that high school theater.

It may not stay - it may already be painted over, and that's OK. It was the sentiment that was important to me, leaving that symbol at the site of a hate crime.

If you see this symbol there, or anywhere else, now you know.

The moral of the story, boys and girls: do not mess with the artists, the creators. They will take your bad behavior, and they will make it something beautiful. Every time.

Lady in Black

I was recently telling my son about the outfit I wore for my kindergarten school photos, and how I loved it, and the silver caps on my front teeth. "I thought those were so cool."

My son replied, "So, what I'm hearing here is that you've never had any fashion sense." Nope. Never. None.

I've finally figured out how not to be completely inappropriately dressed, I think. Not inappropriate as in revealing - I'm not an exhibitionist - but just a deep, inborn inability to figure out what goes with what, what looks good, and why.

Someone once asked me if I owned so much black because I thought it was slenderizing. (I am nobody's idea of goth, and never have been, so that option is out.) I thought that was very funny. First, it's hard to "slenderize" someone of my bulk. Second, I don't think that anyone needs to be slender in order to look good.

Third, and most important, I just can't summon much interest in looking fashionable, or shock value unfashionable; really, in wondering too terribly much what anyone thinks. I try not to be offensive or otherwise sabotage any chance of functioning smoothly in everyday life, but that's it. I had a baby at 20 and another at 21. When you're responsible for keeping another human being alive and safe, nothing else seems very important at all. All I had room for in my head and my day were things that directly affected my children's health or safety. I couldn't possibly spend that time wondering if my shoes "went" with my pants. I barely summoned up interest in whether something was flattering or not; comfort is king.

That's where black comes in. You can't mess it up. Everything matches it - darks, brights, pastels, patterns, florals, winter wear, summer wear; black is universal. It also doesn't show messes very readily - something that is important when you have small children in your life.

I also needed a lot of black, including maternity clothes, to work backstage on the theater productions on which I spent a great deal of time.

It's just not possible to go wrong with black.

Then, I discovered that there is a downside to black clothes.

I tend to assume that people mean what they say and say what they mean, so I don't spend a lot of time looking for subtext. (I know. Stop laughing.) When I'd be in all black in the dead of a Nevada summer and someone would ask, "Aren't you hot?" I would assume that they actually wanted to know if I was comfortable, and that being assured that I was was enough.

We have relatives, though, who are sure that any direct question, and any direct answer, are rude. I had no experience with this kind of thinking, and still find it difficult to navigate a landscape of hints. I spend my time giving literal answers, and they spend their time wondering why I'm clueless.

Years ago, my little family of four was at an extended family picnic in July, and I was oblivious to the fact that I looked out of place. I hate changing my clothes, and try to avoid it unless I'm very dirty or having to wear something uncomfortable. Otherwise, I put on what I'll need to wear at night first thing in the morning, and wear it all day. This was especially true when my kids were very young, and a lot of what I did, including any theater, meant a 45 minute one way drive. I was not about to pack basically an overnight bag just to go into town shopping or visiting relatives, then change for the show if I was tech crew. (Costumes, obviously, are in a different category; you don't want to take a chance ruining or staining them.) So, at this picnic, I wore a black top, black pants, black socks and black lace up canvas shoes. In July, in Nevada. It made sense to me, my husband and my kids, and I didn't really think about anyone else.

Most of the other women were dressed one of two ways - denim shorts and expensive athletic shoes, or floaty floral dresses and sandals. I knew that I didn't look like that, but I honestly didn't think anything of it. Then, after an hour or two, my five year old niece approached.

"What, are you going to a funeral?" she demanded, hands on hips, looking me up and down. I could sense her mother being horrified, but I was totally charmed by this. If you want to know, ask.

"No, I'm working backstage on a play later. We have to be in all black so the audience doesn't notice us moving things on and off stage."

She looked slightly puzzled - the concept of "play" may not have made sense to her - but she said, "Oh. OK." She waltzed away, and I became aware of a ripple going out through the rest of the relatives, starting with the ones at the table next to me. There were exclamations of, "Oh! "OH." "Oh!" rippling across the yard. Apparently, the fact that I was "inappropriately" dressed had been the subject of much speculation, but they all considered it more polite to discuss and theorize amongst themselves than to ask me outright. There was a great deal of relief that "there's a reason."

I was left thinking, thank heaven for my niece. Who knows what bizarre theories were being floated? Come on, folks, just ask!

I still didn't fully comprehend that I may occasionally look out of place.

A few years later, I was head of stage crew for a musical. I loved the show; it's still one of my favorites. I frequently wore the button with the name and logo of the show, with the dates and theater information in small print.

I was 26; you know how 20-somethings are frequently fashionistas? Yeah - not me.

My oldest daughter, in kindergarten at the time, had a Girl Scout activity in town, an hour away from home. I had a show that night, so, of course, I was in head to toe black. I had also put on a string of small multicolored beads, since my husband was always encouraging me to accessorize in colors to spice up the unrelenting blackness. They were small enough that I could keep them on during the show without them being distracting. I also wore the publicity button for the show, "Assassins."

Yeah; you probably already see where this was going. I didn't.

I stood there in my sunglasses - it would be another few years before I had prescription lenses that darkened outdoors - my black clothes and shoes, and my big red button that had the crosshairs of a gun sight and the word "Assassins" in bold letters, waiting for my daughter to be done. The room was full of adorable little cherubs in Scout uniforms, including mine in a bright blue Daisy smock. The other mothers formed those groups that everyone else seems to form so effortlessly, and chatted. No one chatted with me, which was fine, but a few of them kept throwing me wary, sidelong glances. I had no idea what that was about, but little inclination to figure out why. Humans are a mystery.

Finally, a woman I knew from church left her little group and walked over to me, I assumed to say hello. Instead, she said, "Assassins, Sharon?" in a tone of outrage.

Whoops. Yeah. Not sounding very child friendly, is it? And here I am in my sniper clothes.

"It's a show. At the university. I'm head of stage crew." She continued to look at me uncomprehendingly. I felt compelled to keep talking. "It's about people who have killed, or tried to kill, presidents of the United States." Still no real response. I kept talking. "It's really funny. It's a musical."

Finally, a reaction: "A musical?"

"Yeah. It's great. You should come see it."

I was not successfully selling the concept.

"We have a show tonight. These are my stagehand clothes."

"Oh. I wondered."

She went back to her little group, where I saw her mouth moving, and the O formed by the mouth of the woman next to her, as she received the explanation.

Yeah; not selling any tickets here. Whoops. Unsuccessful attempt at publicizing my show.

When the event got over, and my little cherub ran up to hug me and started to chatter about all the things she'd done, I saw some of the other moms look even more amazed. Come on, ladies; would you have liked it better if I and my "Assassins" button were hanging around this event without my having a child there?

They probably still feel bad for my daughter and her tragic upbringing.

And I still wear a lot of black clothes. But not because they're slenderizing.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

"Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again..."
- "The Sound of Silence," Simon & Garfunkel

This feeling is familiar, and yet new. I've been struggling to categorize and catalog it for months, with no luck.

Mostly, it's exhaustion.

I have to finally come to terms with the fact that these last years are kicking my butt.

Part of the problem is that I'm very good in an actual crisis. Calm, clear headed, efficient, helpful, unflagging - you want me around when there's trouble. It's after the trouble itself has passed and the danger is gone, or the trauma is past, that I come undone.

Part of it is that there's nothing tragic going on. This is just normal stuff, a normal life. But, objectively, I have to admit that things are adding up.

Arbitrarily, let's pick the mark of three years ago. I've had three major surgeries in three years. They all went well. I recovered nicely. Still, I'm in residual pain, and fundamental things - for instance, how I walk - are forever altered. My endocrine system is shot, and my body chemistry has been forcibly altered. Those things are tiring, in and of themselves.

I have ongoing health issues, and I'm developing a deep, unwanted hostility and hatred for insurance companies. Not helpful.

My mother is gone. We'll soon come up on the second anniversary of her death. I have been unable to attend church on Mother's Day since she passed. So often, I want to call her, want to visit her, and I can't.

My childhood best friend passed away; he was 48. If you want to know how tightly someone is woven into your life, pull that thread loose. Sometimes it feels like everything will unravel. He touched everything in my life, from the time that I was 14.

My son left for college hundreds of miles away. It was easier than sending his sisters, because he's the third child, and we've Been There, Done That. It was also harder, because his older sisters attended public school and left the house at 6:30 am, often not returning until 10 pm or later. My son was homeschooled, so even when he worked 5 or 6 hours a day, he was home with us for hours a day. His absence is more noticeable.

Part of it is that I've been down the rabbit hole, and I'm together enough to recognize that I'm not there. I remember that a bit too vividly. Twice in my life I've had breakdowns so complete that they blackened the sky, choked the air with ash, just consumed everything in their path. This is not one of those times. (And for this, I thank God.)

There are times of great joy and deep contentment, and lots of normalcy, and I honestly think that I've handled everything well, but do you know how I can tell that I haven't? Or, maybe I have, but that hyper competent period is wearing off. Stuff I should be able to shrug off doesn't shrug. It gnaws at my extremities like some annoying, rabid animal.

"Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains."

The other day, I was thrown into mourning for the fact that my two closest girlfriends moved away after high school. I mean, I handled this clear back in 1984, and suddenly my middle aged self is in tears. What gives?

OK, maybe that's easy to diagnose. I keep seeing in my head two absolutely beautiful smiling brunet high school boys, and all the memories shared with them, and they're both dead now. As time goes on, there will be fewer of Us left, the ragtag community, the family we created for ourselves, the group of former kids who were my life in high school, who still populate my life now. We'll all leave each other sometime. I've become (probably annoyingly) effusive, reminding them how much I have always adored them. I fear becoming clingy and syrupy and maudlin.

Circumstances are preventing me from doing a lot of otherwise normal stuff, like auditioning. I was in a show, had just started rehearsals, when my mom passed away. I had the presence of mind to step down from a major role to a chorus role, but I had no business being in a show. My head was not in the game. I need solitude when I'm hurt - I'm like a canine who needs to find a den and lick my wounds. I stayed because I've never dropped out of a show, and I also hoped that doing normal things would help. During times of stress, I crave normalcy. I hoped that it would feel normal. I didn't even tell anyone that my mom had passed away until we were performing, and then I told all of four people in a cast and crew of dozens.

It never did feel normal. Months of rehearsal, and it never felt right. It felt empty. And good heavens, let's not even talk about the work I did. The work stunk. I also, for the first time in my lifetime, since I started acting at 12 years old, missed an entrance - missed an entire scene - during a performance. That's just unacceptable. That's more humiliating than being naked in public. It's horrifying to even admit. And yet, I think that maybe three people even noticed. I was only in two freakin' scenes - crowd scenes. I was so unnecessary and expendable, yet knocking myself out trying to do a decent job. Yet I was not thinking clearly enough to see that I should have bowed out entirely.

I hear that being intoxicated is like that - you honestly can't tell whether or not you're functional.

I recently looked back at the photos I shot of the show, and I was pleased to discover that they were good. That part of me continued to function quite well. That was nice to know.

I'm finally reaching the point that maybe I could handle a show. But, months of being wheelchair bound, and more time with my feet in casts, means that it's not an option. If I can't even drive, I sure as heck can't rehearse or perform.

Since I can't work on anything, I'm even less inclined to watch anything, because it's painful. So, I don't even see most of my friends' shows, which means that I'm missing out in all kinds of ways.

Maybe I'm not ready for a show yet. Ordinary human behavior is too difficult for me right now. People will be inconsiderate, annoying, self centered - you know, human - and it's just too much. I finally understand about "the straw that broke the camel's back." You just can't handle one more freaking thing. Any rudeness or nastiness or even just annoyingness pushes past the breaking point. And, you know and I know, life is FULL of rudeness and self centeredness.

I've always been very Greta Garbo, but I need to be alone even more now. It's exhausting to be with people. EXHAUSTING. Not depressing or unfulfilling, just so tiring.

It's not that I don't like you. Chances are, I do. I like people in general. I deeply love many people, personally. I just like them at a distance. Don't take it personally.

I'm perfectly OK with being flawed. (I mean, have you seen my housekeeping? Please.) But here's what I'm going to do, what will preserve my sanity and keep me from unleashing the dogs of war on random passers by, or people in my family who simply chose the wrong moment to be insensitive. Sometimes, I am not going to cope well. I'm just not.

I will burst into tears when the radio is on - some days, not at all, and some days, with virtually every song. And here's the thing - I'm going to stop being embarrassed or upset by it.

I don't want you to comfort me and tell me it'll be OK. I really, truly, don't. I don't want you to get manic in your efforts to cheer me up, trying to get me to laugh. It will just annoy me.

Most of the time, I am fine. Everything is great. Even things that hurt are small potatoes. I sit here in a climate controlled house that I own, eating every day, sleeping in a bed, showering - life is luxurious. I have family. I have friends. I love what I do, and I pretty much set my own hours.

And yet. Sometimes, life will shatter at a moment's notice. That's as normal and predictable as the sun rising. Sometimes, I will break.

Sometimes, I will also sleep too much or eat too much sugar. And you know what? I will not feel guilty.

And sometimes, I will regret having said all of this, because people still won't understand, and I'll feel exposed, and everyone will be awkward, and good grief, can I just live on a deserted island?

Sometimes, I just need quiet.

"And the sign said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered
In the sound of silence."

Loving Tony

I recently lost a man I have loved since we were both children. He was 48 when he passed away - much too young for us to be prepared to lose him. Still, as they say, "It's not the years; it's the mileage," and he'd lived more than most people.

He wrote a published book in his 20s. In his 40s, he started working on an autobiography. It would tell details of his life, like how, at 25, he owned the second largest company of its kind in the world, printing backstage passes for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Madonna, and Billy Joel. He was making, we often said, more money than God.

Nothing in his life was of ordinary size and scope. Years later, he lost the company, and eventually, his family. He developed a drug problem that should have killed him. He consumed alcohol like it was water.

And, he lived to get clean and sober, religiously attending his meetings for AA, NA, and CA.

He asked me to write the foreward to his book. This is it.

*******************

Tony Perry is my brother. Most people gain siblings through some action taken by their parents, and are linked by biology, marriage, adoption, or in some other legal and definable way. This is not true for us; our parents might not immediately recognize each other if they passed on the street. There is no legal document defining our relationship. He is my brother because of decisions he and I have made, and because something in his soul speaks to something in mine. If you have people like this in your life – and I am fortunate to have many – you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't, there are no words that will adequately explain it to you.

I remember the first time I saw Tony. I was a 14 year old high school freshman. He was a 14 year old sophomore, wearing a jacket that said, "Italian Stallion" on the back. He wore that jacket everywhere. He was loud, abrasive, charismatic and funny. I was quiet and unsure. At the first audition of the year, he made a hash out of the cold reading, and obviously delighted in doing so. The teacher sighed and said, "Never ask a techie to read lines." My attention sharpened – I was one of the few kids from my junior high theater department to actually have tech experience. It soon became apparent that not only was Tony a techie, he was THE techie in our school.

I also remember the first time Tony met my mother. So does Tony – she impressed him immediately. The school boundaries for our school were odd and elongated, so that a large number of my schoolmates came from the neighboring city, and rode the bus for half an hour to get to and from school. Tony was one of those kids. One day he missed the bus, and asked if my mom could drive him home. My mom always had a car full of kids, no matter where we went. "It's pretty far, clear out in Hidden Valley," I told her, but she was willing to take him. Tony climbed into the back of the car with an armload of books, far too many to be just his homework. "Hi," he said, "I'm Tony. I steal textbooks." Mom didn't bat an eye.

"Hello, Tony," she said.

Down the street from our school, there was a convenience store. Tony seemed to live on apple juice sold in little round, apple shaped, single serving bottles. He leaned over the back of the seat and said, "I feel like an apple juice. Can we stop and get one?" Mom slowed down and pulled into the parking lot.

Tony was beside himself. "She's stopping! You're stopping! You're actually gonna stop?"

"Sure," she said. "You have money, right?"

Tony talked about that for years. "I couldn't believe she actually stopped so I could get an apple juice!"

We had little in common, really, but it didn't matter.

Tony was the sun around which the theater revolved. He designed our drama guild T-shirts and our black satin jackets. He was our official technical director and our unofficial social director. Tony created our own holidays, The Thirteen Radical Days of Christmas, and as a group we designed a different activity every day for the thirteen days leading up to Christmas break. One day, we went to a Monty Python film festival; one day we bought our lunch from the generics aisle of Albertson's. (Remember generics? Remember when they took up an entire aisle?) He planned our group vacations to Disneyland.

On our first Disneyland trip, we had 9 or 10 of us, of both sexes, crammed into a single hotel room. My mother slept in the armchair; Tony slept in the bed next to me.

He'd started out across the room, on the floor, but two of the girls kept flicking Skittles candy at him after lights out. "Hey!" he yelled loudly, into the dark, "she hit my wiener with a Skittle!"

"Tony. Don't use that word," my mother chastised.

"Fine. She hit me in the penis with a Skittle." A few minutes later, he declared loudly, "She did it again!"

"Find somewhere else to sleep, then," Mom told him.

"There is nowhere else!"

"You can find someplace."

He walked around the room, stopping at the side of the double bed I was in. "I," he declared dramatically, pointing down at the bed, "am sleeping here." Then he looked down at me. "That OK with you?"

"Fine with me."

He checked with my mom. "OK?"

"OK. Now settle down."

I was notoriously chaste. For years, Tony took great delight in announcing to people, sometimes upon first meeting them, "I was the first man ever to sleep with Sharon Smith."

When Tony was arrested during my junior year, it absolutely undid me. I had not lived a life of unrelenting sunshine and rainbows, but this was, absolutely and undeniably, the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

One of the things we had in common back then was sobriety, a relatively uncommon trait in our group. When Tony arrived back at the school after being processed and released at the juvenile facility, I saw him climb out of the car and I went to meet him. I had never seen that look on his face, never seen him walk with that heaviness. He looked at me and said quietly, "They strip searched me for drugs, Sharon." My heart broke.

We were in the middle of rehearsing for our spring play, the largest show of the year. When Tony was suspended and then expelled and forced to complete the year at another school, I was a mess. Barred from even attending the show, Tony arranged for a bouquet of blue balloons to be delivered to the cast onstage during curtain call closing night. I wrote a sappy poem about it that was published in our school literary magazine, and saved one of the blue ribbons and wove it into my hair the next year when I went to the prom.

Tony was the only person I danced with at my prom. He was there with his fiancee, Jeanette. I was there hoping to see my best friend be crowned Prom Queen. Someone else won, and Tony barked to our table, "Nobody clap!" I clapped anyway – it was only courteous. I stepped on his feet twice during the dance; I am dance impaired.

Tony quite literally handed me back my life once. I'd been acting since I was 12, loved tech almost as much, and intended to continue doing both forever. But, I spent three of my four high school years with a teacher assigned to the theater classes simply because she had low seniority and no one else wanted the job; she'd never even seen a play before being assigned to us. I left high school having learned anything new, for three quarters of my time there, from the other students or on my own. I felt woefully inadequate to pursue anything theater related, even for fun. Oh, well, I thought, those are the breaks. Things happen. I'll get over it. Then Tony phoned one day shortly after my graduation.

The local university was having open auditions for "Chicago." Their auditions were always open to the public, so it didn't matter that neither of us were students - Tony wanted me to go try for a tech job with him. I dragged my feet.

"You don't sound excited about this!" he barked at me.

"I don't think I'm qualified to do anything."

"I'm not qualified either! Let's just go." Tony'd owned his own stage lighting company since he was 13; if he wasn't qualified, who was? I went with him. I spent the next ten years exclusively with the university theater department, then found I was also at home in other theater companies. As I write this, I'm preparing for the final dress rehearsal of a show, one I'm in with my husband and two of my kids. There are no words adequate to thank someone for handing you your identity back.

Most of the time, girls Tony was dating, and girls who wanted to date him, didn't worry about me at all, since I was obviously not a romantic rival. Sometimes, though, someone resented me. After Tony and Jeanette broke up, a girl working on a show with Tony and me took the opportunity to ask him out. He was taking the breakup pretty hard, and told her, "I just can hardly stand to even look at anyone female right now. I don't even want to be in the same room with any females." She was disappointed; in a few minutes, she became angry – at me.

Tony asked me, in the course of conversation, if I wanted to go to a movie the next night. Incensed, the girl said, "I thought you couldn't even look at anything female right now!" Tony looked at me, back at the girl, and expressed his puzzlement.

"That's not a female! That's Sharon."

The poor girl was fairly lukewarm to me after that, even years later.

When I got married, Tony stood beside my husband. When my first child was born, he brought a tiny T-shirt to the hospital that was a replica of our high school drama guild shirts. My children have called him "Uncle Tony" all of their lives. When he got married on New Year's Eve, I bought a black and gold formal to wear. When he broke his back, I drove him on errands and prayed for his recovery.

For years, he had the Midas touch. Nothing he tried failed, or turned out badly, or lost money. Since he never does anything in a small way, when it all went to hell it was really, truly hell.

Tony probably doesn't remember this, but when things got really ugly, with the cocaine, the booze and the craziness, I told him that he could only screw up badly in front of my kids once, and then he wouldn't see them again until they were 25. I meant it, too. He may not remember it, but somewhere he internalized it. He may have been absent from our lives for months at a time, but he never made me question whether he could be around my kids. He came close only once. The few horror stories they've heard, they've heard now that he's sober. They never had to watch him spiral out of control. That's a gift, too, to me and to them.

"Can you imagine me on cocaine?" he asked at one of our theater reunions. (Yes, we organize our own high school reunions, just for those of us from the theater department.) We all said the same things. "I don't have to – I saw it!" "It was ugly." "You're so lucky you never really saw it, Tony." "God help me, it was awful."

When Tony decided to get sober, he was a mess. His hands shook. His memory was dreadful. More than once, we'd be somewhere in public and someone would approach, saying, "Hey, man, it's been a long time. How are you?" Tony would have an entire conversation, then ask me after they'd gone, "Who was that, and how do I know them?"

His life sounds more like melodramatic fiction than a real life. It's not, I promise you. You will find yourself disbelieving what he has to say, but it all happened.

Tony is exasperating, clueless, infuriating, loving, amazing, talented beyond belief and his own worst enemy. I love him with all my heart.

Love him or hate him, you'll never forget him.

******************

I'm not sure what it will be like to be here on Earth without him.

I wish him peace in the next life.

I am so glad that those of us who knew him have each other to lean on right now.

I miss you, my brother. I always will.

Turn the Page

"On a long and lonesome highway..."

The American West is filled with "lonely" highways, stretches of asphalt ribbon stretching to the horizon across sparsely populated, sagebrush studded land. I spent my childhood in the family car or pickup truck, driving for hours between small towns, mountains, lakes and other isolated places.

Some of my favorite memories from those roads, though, come not from my childhood, but my adult years before I was a wife and mother. They includes lots of time on the highway, spending hours en route between small towns, on tour with the local university theater company.

"You can listen to the engine moaning out its one note song..."

There were two dozen or so of us packed into vans and a single large truck, hauling scenery, costumes and the like to places with names like Winnemucca and Tonopah. I was 19, but not a full, or even part, time student. The university theater company was open to the community. Members like me, unenrolled at the U, were exempt from some of the requirements the students had - for instance, always having to stay after a show closed to "strike," or tear down and put away, the set, props, costumes and everything else. I held myself to the higher standard, though, expecting from myself everything required if I was being graded. It was important to me to be a "real" member of the company.

I'd spent almost two seasons with the company by the time I went on tour. I'd already watched the group go on an international USO tour and another state tour, and I was so deeply jealous of those who got to go. But, I was living on my own, working for minimum wage, and I couldn't afford the time off work or the expense of travel. I'd juggled a lot to make sure I could spend two weeks on tour before I applied to go, and I wanted it so badly I could taste it.

The show was "The Passion of Dracula," and I was crew. We'd already had a great run in the university theater. Having worked the show already didn't guarantee me a spot on tour. I had to apply and wait. When my name showed up on the list tacked to the "call board," the theater bulletin board, my best friend and I shrieked so loudly, jumping up and down and hugging, that a professor had to come out of his office and shush us.

"But your thoughts will soon be wandering, the way they always do..."

We all got a small per diem allowance from the university, designed to cover our food and other travel expenses. The professors and other faculty, of course, got paid wages as well. The other students were typical college kids whose parents footed most of their bills. Most of them lived with their parents or in dorms that their parents paid for. For them, the per diem was just a nice perk. For me, it was my only income for half a month. I had to save enough out of it to pay my rent and my half of the living expenses at the place I shared with a roommate. I'd done the math; I watched every cent like a hawk. A couple of the casinos gave us coupon books, $2 in nickels, or both, when we checked into their rooms. I hoarded them like a miser. I skipped some of the things the rest of the company did, like the night everyone else ate at a renowned Basque restaurant. Then and now, it was considered a "must do" in some of the towns we visited. I had the ham and eggs special ($1.99) in the coffee shop at the hotel/casino where we were staying. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I had to have somewhere to live when we were done.

"And you don't feel much like riding; you just wish the trip was through..."

We had no "spare" time. We'd roll into a town before lunch, put on a show of various fairy tales at the local elementary school, then go to wherever the play would be that night - usually the local high school - and set up, then eat dinner, do the show, tear it all down, pack it up, fall into bed and be up early the next morning to do it again in a different town. There was no pool time, and no nap time unless you slept in the van. It was hard work. I loved it all.

"Here I am, on the road again
There I am, up on the stage
Here I go, playing the star again
There I go, turn the page..."

I played characters like Jack's Mother in Jack and the Beanstalk in the children's show. We changed wherever there was room; once all of us packed into a broom closet to dress and undress. We performed in lunch rooms, mostly. The kids and teachers seemed to love it. These shows were freebies, designed to spread both goodwill and word of mouth. We ended every show by passing out flyers for that night's performance. The kids weren't our target "Dracula" audience, but their parents were.

We also did scenes from "Dracula" at the high schools, because they were our target audience. One scene involved our Lucy, under the vampire's spell, biting our Dracula's chest and licking up the blood while she made, well, "yummy noises" - noises indicating pleasure. It was my job to fill the squeeze bulb on the back of Dracula's brooch with stage blood, so that he could bleed on cue. Yeah, pretty racy stuff for us big city folk to be presenting to rural teens. Our Lucy and our Dracula had very different takes on this scene. He saw it as pulling her over to the Dark Side, whereas she saw it as being deeply suggestive of sex. Nobody polled the kids, but they gasped, every time.

"Well, you walk into a restaurant, strung out from the road
And you feel the eyes upon you, as you're shaking off the cold
You pretend it doesn't bother you, but you just want to explode..."

After every show, we'd have people say things like, "Thank you so much for coming to our town! We never get the opportunity to see productions like this!" They didn't just tell the actors, they'd tell all of us. Those, of course, were the folks who sought us out deliberately. Walking into a restaurant, gas station or casino could elicit a different response. We piled out of our vans, many of us in head to toe black, with shirts with the word "Passion" in large letters, and graphics of a vampire, long before they were mainstream. We felt conspicuous.

"Most times you can't hear them talk
Other times, you can
All the same old cliches
'Is that a woman or a man?'"

It was the mid 80s; popular looks included long, curled hair on men, shorn or shaved hair on women, and mullets on everyone. I don't think that any of us looked outlandish; no guyliner, no animal print leggings that I recall. I thought that we looked pretty normal. Our Dracula looked downright Mr. Rogers, wearing a sweater vest and a bow tie every day. Still, we were theater people in a town full of ranchers and cowboys. We stood out.

"And you always seem outnumbered
You don't dare make a stand..."

I remember hearing about a couple of times that minor words were exchanged, maybe when one of us physically bumped into a guy our age in flannel and boots, but we had a very strict conduct code, a tight schedule and a short leash. I only remember one particular time when I felt unwelcome. We swept into a restaurant that had offered us a discount on their buffet; they apparently did this every time the group toured. Cheap food and young people - yes, please! I remember a few horrified looks and pointed comments about how "crowded" and "noisy" we made the place. I tried to smile sweetly, hoping to demonstrate how harmless and fun we were.

"Out there in the spotlight you're a million miles away..."

There's a reason that people "talk shop" with others of their profession or hobby or vocation. No one else really understands. As an actor, you're both acutely aware of the audience, and oblivious to their presence. As a stage technician, you're a cog in a complicated machine, both independent and interconnected. Either way, you live for the work itself, but also for the reaction it elicits. Trying to describe how you feel sounds self absorbed. Others like you, though, "get" it. You don't have to explain.

"Every ounce of energy you try to give away..."

Our set was gorgeous. All the carved wood elements were actually made of styrofoam, so they were light enough to haul around. The Victorian "wallpaper" was painted on. The costumes were equally stunning. We had staircases, fancy furniture, crates and boxes of things to transform the high schools into an English mansion, and our actors into characters.

Besides the stage blood, my favorite jobs involved the wind and fog machines and flash paper.

Our wind machine was low tech, my preferred method of doing things. It was a wooden cylinder with slats attached to the round end units. Over that was stretched heavy canvas. A hand crank came out of one end of the cylinder. Turning it made a remarkably realistic wind noise. It was my job to create everything from low moaning wind to shrieking gusts.

The fog was higher tech, produced by a small machine into which I poured chemical fog juice. At certain points, I'd slide the machine close to the edge of the set and turn it on. Its motor made only a whisper, and the fog would pump out of one end. It was glorious stuff, reflecting the lights, swirling when the actors walked, filling the familiar drawing room with an otherwordly air. By the end of one scene, the air would be thick with fog. Turn off the machine, and it dissipated, like magic.

We had several large and small wooden crosses. At one point, our Van Helsing held up a dramatic, ornate cross about 2 1/2 feet long. Our Dracula would grab the cross, and it would burst into flame - truly, actual flame. Both of them would then drop the cross, and the fire would die. It was visually spectacular.

The crosses were painted to look like metal, but they were all wood - lighter, easier to fabricate, easier to rig. The large cross had a hollowed out portion on the back where we fastened a cigarette lighter, right at the junction of the beams. My job, every night, was to wind flash paper across the back of both beams, wound into a spiral and stapled. When Dracula grabbed it, Van Helsing flicked the lighter on. The flame would race along the paper, providing a fantastic, but brief, flash of real fire. It was another moment that always elicited gasps, and it made me smile, every night.

I learned to make stage blood when we opened our trunk one day and discovered that the entire gallon container had leaked, coating the inside of the packing crate, and leaving us with no blood for a fairly bloody show.

I panicked a bit, but our Lucy said, "No problem. Come with me." She whisked me off to the grocery store, where we bought light corn syrup, red food coloring, and blue dish detergent. I still make "blood" the same way, whether I'm using it onstage, for Halloween, or, as I did once, for a zombie themed promo video.

"Later in the evening, as you lie awake in bed
With the echoes from the amplifiers ringing in your head..."

I didn't know it at the time, but within a year I'd be a pregnant newlywed, living in one of the small towns where we'd performed.

The tour is such a fond memory that the smell of chemical fog, or hearing Bob Seger sing "Turn the Page," makes me instantly nostalgic.

I think that everyone who works in entertainment, whether they're a slam poet, concert violinist or lighting tech, should get the chance to tour with a show; even if it's just for two weeks, through the Nevada desert.

"Here I am, on the road again
There I am, up on the stage
Here I go, playing the star again
There I go
There I go."

Apology Accepted

There are very few people in the world that I actively dislike. I tend to genuinely like, and get along well with, all kinds of people, including people who are very different from myself.

Sometimes, though, people dislike me, or I dislike them. It's an ordinary fact of life, and I don't usually get too bothered.

Partly because of my personality, and partly because teachers tend to like good students, I usually got along well with my teachers, even teachers that the other kids disliked. It was always a surprise when there was serious personality clash.

The year I was a sophomore in high school, there was serious personality clash with my math teacher. For starters, he did not understand, or like, people who didn't like math. On the twice yearly standardized tests that the district administered, I'd been scoring at "grade 12, month 9" (or high school graduate) since 7th or 8th grade in most subjects, but in math I scored "only" two years above grade level. For me, that was struggling. Math gave me a headache.

My teacher expressed the opinion - not just privately, in conferences or on my papers, but publicly, out loud in class - that I struggled with math because, "Math is a logical, precise science. You do not have a logical mind. You have an undisciplined, chaotic mind." Way to motivate, Mr. B.

He loved to tell us that, "Everything is math. Music, sports, architecture, art - it's all math. If you can't do math, you can't do anything." My strong suit, language, was apparently an undesirable gift. In English classes, I got As without even trying. In math, I knocked myself out for Bs. My teacher was unamused.

The fact that I was a theater student opened me up to more ridicule. It was particularly fierce when my drama teacher decided to produce "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The first day I walked into class with my script, without referencing me in particular - or, for that matter referencing math, the subject of the class - our math teacher delivered a lecture about the pointlessness of studying any work by an author who'd been dead for centuries.

He always called us up to see our grades on the Friday before report cards came out. It was my last required semester of math, and I didn't care too much about the grade. Still, it was painful to see a C. I had never gotten a C, in anything. I couldn't recall more than a couple of assignments that I'd gotten Cs on. I must have really tanked the final, I decided, for it to negate all the Bs and the few As I'd gotten. So, I gritted my teeth, thanked my lucky stars that I was done with math, and sat back down.

Monday came; report cards were handed out. I had an F in math.

AN F. I had never gotten an F on even a single assignment, in my entire life. I was stunned.

I went up to him after school to question it. "On Friday, you showed me your book, and it said I had a C."

I will never forget his answer. "That's what you earned, but this is what I thought you deserved."

Wow.

My mother was even more furious than I was. A brilliant woman, she was also, deeply, a pacifist. She tried not to make waves, rock the boat, upset the apple cart - whatever your stock cliche for stirring up trouble is. She believed in making nice and smoothing over and turning the other cheek. And yet, she made an appointment for herself and me with the school principal.

She explained the problem. "So, what do you want me to do?" the principal asked.

"Require him to give her the grade that she earned."

He was aghast. "I can't get involved in the grading process! I can't tell teachers what grades they can and can't give!"

Mom demanded to know what the official school, or district, policies were. She wanted to know if it was possible to get my grades from the gradebook, or my assignments, and recalculate. The only answer she got was, "Grading is up to the individual teacher. I can't get involved."

"So, there's no oversight? What are the assignments for? Why have tests? Are you telling me that a child can earn As all year, then be handed a F on a report card, just because the teacher feels like it?"

"Well, yes. I can't get involved in the grading process."

We left angrier than we were when we arrived. Mom vetoed my suggestion of complaining to someone at the district level - "It'll just be more of the same." The next year, I took a semester of one of the easiest math classes offered, just to fill my credit requirement. I thought, and said, very uncomplimentary things about both the teacher and the (now retired) principal.

My senior year, I was asked to be on the tech crew for the school's first faculty play. It's now a pretty standard practice in our area, but at the time, it was a brand new idea: have the faculty act in a play to raise money for scholarships. The students would be the crew, since we already know what to do.

My old math teacher, Mr. B, was in the play.

I could not get over the irony. After all the hours I'd had to listen to him say things like, "I don't know why the school even has a fine arts department. We're supposed to be in the business of education," now he was acting?

Still, I'm polite. I treated him as though there was no bad blood between us. Actually, I treated him as if I'd never met him before. I was polite, I was informative and helpful when I needed to be, but I was not friendly. I was one of those kids who got along well with teachers, so with some, there was joking and laughter, almost as if they were my peers. Not with Mr. B. If you didn't know either of us, I don't think you would have noticed anything amiss. (Maybe I'm kidding myself, and I was glaring daggers, but I don't think so.) He never brought up the fact that he knew me before we were introduced at rehearsals. The distant-but-cordial thing worked for me.

One day, as we neared the performance dates, he walked up and stood next to me as I watched the action onstage. He didn't look at me; he looked straight ahead at the show. I wondered why he'd chosen that spot to stand in, but I said nothing. It's a free country; the man could stand wherever he chose.

We never made small talk - anything we'd said to each other had been show related. Now, after standing there for a few minutes, he said, while still staring straight ahead, "I can see why you like this - this sort of thing."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I briefly considered snapping something like, "About darned time," but I didn't. Also looking straight ahead, I said, in a conversational tone, "It's a lot of fun, isn't it?"

"Yes. It is." He stayed there for another few seconds, then nodded, still looking out at the stage, and walked away.

Message received. I knew that had been an apology. I also knew that it must have been agonizing for him to say anything. He didn't have to. It must have been a very difficult thing to do. From his nod, it seemed that the corresponding answer had also been received - apology accepted.

When I told one of my best friends (one who knew the backstory), she was furious. "That's not good enough! If he wants to apologize, he needs to look you in the eye and actually apologize!"

"No, he doesn't. He didn't have to say anything." Two years' worth of my anger was erased.

As I got older, and learned more about psychology and gender differences, I learned that most women are not OK with typically male communication like that - no eye contact, no mention of the actual subject at hand - but I knew what it must have cost him, dignity-wise, to even attempt to say such a thing, and to a student, no less. It was as good as it was ever going to get, and it was good enough for me.

I did hope that, maybe, he'd be a little less harsh the next time a linguistically competent, number challenged student landed in his class. Maybe, now, he'd be less scathing. I sincerely hoped that he'd never again fail a student because of a personality clash. I have no way of knowing if he did or not, but I like to think that he changed a bit. Even teachers are in school to learn.

After that, he got the same smiles, the same "break a leg," even some of the joking that I gave the other teachers in the cast. I could be wrong, but it seemed to make him happy.

Even a little sincere apology goes a long way.

Out of the Dark

I always figured that I'd pretty much breeze through the physical signs of aging. When a friend despaired to me that, "Heads don't automatically turn when I walk into a room anymore," it was all I could do not to snort. I did say, "Welcome to the real world!" Heads have never turned when I walk into a room. Not only do 99% of my male friends not see me as female, a good portion of my female friends don't, either. I am gender neutral. This is totally OK with me. It weeds out the shallow men who don't want to talk to you unless they're hoping to have sex with you, as well as the catty, plastic looking Barbie women who are afraid that ordinariness is contagious.

Gray hair and wrinkles? Pfffttt. I earned these. Besides, I have NO desire to look ridiculously artificial.

Weight gain terrified me at 15, annoyed me at 25, and has since dropped totally off my radar. (Save the comments about how, "I can tell." It is not my job to impress anyone.) I have never been on a diet or purchased a weight loss product. This makes me a distinct minority (and horrifies some folks); I can live with that.

Not being fashionable? Please! First, you don't generally miss what you never had. Second, trends are short lived, superficial, contradictory and driven by the need to 1. make somebody money and 2. feel superior. Being fashionable now means being out of fashion in the future; it's a never ending cycle. If you're me, you're still happily wearing pants you bought 10 years ago, and you have no 1980s MC Hammer pants in your past.

I watched my mother breeze through menopause like it was a total non event, and was glad I'd inherited her genes. I'm hoping I'll have the same luck.

I found myself in my teens and already planning for what I would do if arthritis hit. So far, it hasn't; so much for being prepared.

I was prepared for night blindness, I thought. I'd watched my mother and my older friends first stop driving distances at night, then stop driving after dark, period. I expected it to come on gradually, though, and probably after 50.

It hit without warning, in my late 30s, in the middle of a nighttime drive down a two lane highway in the middle of nowhere. I could not quite figure out what was happening. I had a sinus headache, the kind that pushes on the backs of your eyeballs, so I wondered if the congestion was bad enough to pinch off the optic nerves. I had never noticed any kind of trouble, strain or squinting, and suddenly I was unable to see, at 75 MPH.

If you've ever driven between Reno and Las Vegas on Highway 95, you know how much space is out there. You can go for hours between one stoplight towns. We'd left Reno when my husband left work, about 3:00 in the afternoon, hoping to make Vegas before we stopped for the night, on our way to Phoenix. We had a loooong way to go, and I couldn't see.

My husband was coming off seven days straight of 12 hour shifts, and had told us at 3 that he didn't feel up to driving. My oldest daughter was with us, but she hated driving our Suburban in town, in broad daylight. I couldn't imagine her tackling hours in the dark.

I kept slowing down until I was going about 45 MPH.  My husband would snap at me, "You can't go that slow! Someone will come up behind us and smash into us! You're going to kill us!" I'd snap back, "I can only see about 5 or 10 feet in front of me!"

Maddeningly, he'd say, "That's all you need to see!"

"At 75 miles an hour?"

"What's most important is what's directly in front of you. Do you think the road is going to disappear?" he asked. He never quite "got" my thought process until a couple of years later, after many similar conversations, when I asked, "When you walk into a familiar dark room, like our living room, do you run full speed through it, assuming that you'll know where everything is?" Then, it finally made some sense to him, but is still at odds with one of his firmest convictions, the idea that slowing down on a freeway or highway is unacceptable under all but the rarest and most extreme of circumstances. He's also sure that any kind of hesitation, or being unsure of anything while behind the wheel, is a perilous thing.

Making things worse was the constant stream of oncoming traffic, mostly semis. Cars passing in the opposite direction were aggravating, with their headlights starbursting in my field of vision, but in my Suburban, I am at almost the exact height of the headlights of semi trucks. Their lights were right in my eyes and obliterated my vision for about a full second, even when I kept my eyes fixed on the opposite side of the road, toward the shoulder on my side. A second doesn't sound like a very long time, until you count it out, saying, "one one thousand." Imagine that at highway speed, and you'll understand why it freaked me out.

Needless to say, my husband and I were both at our wits end on this particular drive.

When we hit the next town, we stopped for dinner and got a hotel room as well. None of the adults in the car felt capable of driving, and no one wanted to end up as roadkill.

I couldn't make up my mind on that trip whether this was a temporary or permanent thing. It seemed so sudden and so complete - I'd expected age related night blindness to sneak up on me.

It soon became clear, though, that this was my new reality. I can drive all right in town, where everything is lit, but forget highway driving after dark. My depth perception is also completely unreliable in the dark. I can't reliably recognize curbs, for instance. Pushing my elderly mother in a wheelchair at Disneyland, I ran the chair off the curb and dumped my mother out onto the ground, where the wheelchair fell on top of her. My middle daughter stepped in - "Give Grandma to me! Just give her to me!" I was relieved of further wheelchair duty as soon as dusk approached every day for the rest of the trip.

Mostly, I function without falling or wreaking havoc. I run my hands along a lot of walls, though.

I didn't think much about how I would cope backstage; it never really occurred to me that it might take some adjusting. I've spent pretty much my whole life onstage or backstage - it feels as comfortable as my own home. Then I found myself backstage in the dark on the world's largest indoor stage.

I was playing a chorus part in the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast." I'd wanted to be Mrs. Potts, but hey, so had every other actress too old to play Belle. Anymore, I only take chorus parts if it's a show that I'm really passionate about, and this one fit the bill.

It was performed in the Grand Theater at Reno's Grand Sierra Resort. The stage was built back when the building was the MGM Grand, and it's impossible to describe how enormous it is if you haven't been on it. Normally, everyone has to whisper in dressing rooms, but these are so far back that you can hold normal conversations, and even laugh, and not be heard onstage. There's usually several rows of thick velvet drapes across the backstage area between the dressing area and the performance area. A 727 airplane, left over from the first show produced in the space ("Hello, Hollywood, Hello!") sits permanently backstage, along with a sweeping staircase, huge columns and other set pieces.

At several points, I had to cross behind the set, which has never been a big deal before. Suddenly, it was. I had to follow someone else, or creep along with my hands out in front of me like a ridiculous cartoon.

During one performance, I was making my way from stage right to stage left, headed eventually to the dressing room. I thought I knew where I was going, and I blundered into some of the ropes used to secure the drapes. This is a huge, huge no-no. I wasn't hurt, and I didn't goof anything up, but it underscored for me how much I could screw up by wandering around blind.

I put my hands out in front of me and crept along with tiny steps. The show had a huge cast, with performers as young as 8, and I nearly ran into one of the children in the cast. I apologized for my clumsiness. "I just ran into the ropes too," I whispered. "I can't see in the dark."

A tiny voice came out of the dark at about my chest level. "That's OK. You know me. Take my hand."

I couldn't see the offered hand, but I held mine out. A small hand grasped it, and led me gently through the dark. As soon as I could see the lights of the dressing area, my guide said, "I've gotta go," and scurried off back into the dark behind me.

I was almost absurdly grateful. Unfortunately, I couldn't find my benefactor and say, "Thank you," since I couldn't even be sure of the child's gender or age, much less identity. It was a kindness I couldn't repay in any way. We had a cast of over 100, many of them children or teens - it could have been any one of dozens of pint sized actors. It's a delight to work with responsible kids, just as it's a headache to deal with the opposite.

I'm usually pretty good at admitting when I'm out of my depth. Unfortunately, I'm more comfortable continuing to blunder along than I am asking for help. I don't feel I have anything to prove; I just dislike having to count on anyone else. "If you want something done right..." and all that jazz. (Yes, it is entirely possible that I have trust issues.)

Sometimes, the universe sends you unmistakable messages. This one reminded me that there are times when someone, even someone unlikely, will have my back. It reminded me that there are times when I'd be an idiot not to ask for help. It also reminded me that, occasionally, even if you don't ask for help, it will appear out of the dark and guide you through.

Sometimes, we all hear the equivalent of that small voice in the darkness, and we can take comfort knowing that we'll be well cared for (even if we really aren't sure by whom or how). As I get older, there will undoubtedly be many more of those moments, both literal and figurative. At those times, I'll think back to the gratitude I felt at that moment.

"It's OK. You know me. Take my hand."

Death of a Friendship

I still feel that it's my fault that my high school endured nine years with a teaching assistant in the theater department who couldn't brace a flat and once set the lighting board on fire. It's not displaced guilt; it actually is my fault.

The longtime theater teacher left just before my freshman year. The school asked one of the English teachers to take the department in his wake, with the understanding that it would only be for a year. Then, they gave the job to a brand new teacher, barely out of college. She'd never even seen a live production, and was extremely intimidated. Still, during her first year with us I was a constant cheerleader, sure she'd read some books, loosen up, do something to make it all work. At the very least, she'd turn us loose and let us do it without her. Her first year, it worked that way. She opened and closed the doors and was the required adult presence. By my junior year, things had gone south in a dramatic and awful way.

Ariane and I had worked on a summer school production with an alumnus from our school. I'd reminded him that he'd known my sister, and we struck up a friendship. We'd invited him to see our shows, and he had. We, in turn, went to shows he was working on. He was in the final stages of earning his master's degree in theater. The lure of having an adult at our school who knew what they were doing was strong. We'd described to him some of the fiascos we faced.

Our teacher, coming across the stage direction "(beat)" was baffled. We explained to her that it was a short pause. Think of it like a beat in music, we said. You take a pause indicated by the way the dialogue is flowing – one beat, just like a beat of music. She refused to believe this explanation.

"If it meant 'pause,' it would say 'pause!' I've read scripts before. They always say, 'pause' when they want you to pause!" As if this wasn't ridiculous and alienating enough, she added, "I'm not stupid, you know." Her explanation? Everyone onstage was to simultaneously clap once. Really. It was just beyond painful to try to work with her.

She was intimidated by the kids who knew more about theater than she did; and really, that wasn't hard to do. Personal conflicts got out of hand and loomed so large they jeopardized the entire department. We were desperate for anything that would help.

"Please, K," we said to the grad student, "please come student teach at our school!" He'd been appalled by some of the stories he'd heard, and agreed with us wholeheartedly that something should be done. So, he showed up at our school. At first, I think, he was considered a community volunteer, like a parent who stuffs envelopes, but shortly he was approved by the administration to have all sorts of authority. I don't know if they ever paid him; it doesn't matter.

During the summer school production where we met, during the summer between my sophomore and junior years, K had puzzled me with some of his behavior. Theater people are, by and large, rather physically affectionate, but K seemed to constantly be in my personal space with no clear reason to be. He frequently said things like, "Want me to show you all the good make-out places in here?" He often walked with his arm around me. Every once in a while, he'd make some remark about "getting together" away from the theater. I'm fairly dense about these things, and could never quite figure out how serious he was. It was flattering and creepy at the same time. He seemed OK with the answer "no," so that was enough for me.

Occasionally I'd feel taken aback. When he came to see me play Abby and Ariane play Martha in "Arsenic and Old Lace," the first thing he said to me after the show, as he was hugging me, was, "You'd slap me if I told you what I can see through that dress." The dress in question was my Abby costume, a floor length, high necked number. I looked down self consciously.

"You can't really see through this, can you?"

"Oh, put it up under the lights and you'd be surprised," he said. I was more worried about the costume than I was in ferreting out his reason for bringing it up. If my costume, under which I wore a slip, was see through, surely someone would have noticed and told me, I decided. Nobody would want an elderly murderess character to be flashing her underwear, however demure. (And they were; I wore very plain, staid underthings.)

He'd come for our closing performance, and hung around afterward while we all cleaned and packed up. It's common knowledge that there will be some sort of party after closing night, so I figured that he might want to come to ours.

Instead, he invited me out. Just me. I turned him down, but he persisted.

"I'm going to the party at Joe's house. You're welcome to come, too. It's just a couple of blocks that way."

"Oh, come on. Half of them won't even be there." This was true. Three or four carloads of kids had already left, headed to Disneyland. That was the official cast party. My mother hadn't wanted to drive all night, even though the temperature was better, so she and I were flying down in the morning. Tony was picking us up at LAX.

"I really want to go to the party. It's our last show this year." I was nervous and talking too much, so I added, "Even though most of them are mad at me because I get to go to Disneyland tomorrow."

He pounced on that. "It'll be much more fun with me, especially since they're mad at you already."

We argued a bit back and forth as all the rest of the kids left for the party. Now K and I were the only ones in the parking lot, and the isolation was making me nervous. I wanted to be in my car, to put the car door between us. He was standing much closer than I thought was strictly necessary.

He finally, grudgingly accepted my answer, but insisted that he at least needed a good night kiss. The kiss was within acceptable bounds; he didn't push too hard. I was relieved as I watched him walk to his car. I was also worried that I'd protested too hard and hurt his feelings.

I didn't say much about it. I probably only told Ariane and Lana. Months later, I made a passing reference to Joe about having kissed K. He looked rather shocked but sensed, correctly, that I didn't want to discuss it further.

I undoubtedly should have been reluctant to have him to come to work at the school, but I wasn't. I was actually sure that it would mean he'd have to tone it all down; after all, it was a high school, he was 25 and about to be faculty and I was 17 and a student.

We were so glad he'd decided to come help us out. We had high hopes for the next year, glad that we finally had someone in authority who'd actually studied theater.

The high hopes were short lived. We found K to be picky and controlling, and we were astonished that the master's degree, which he'd now earned, hadn't given him the skills to do something simple like brace a flat. Flats are the wood and muslin constructions used to make walls onstage. He couldn't seem to get the edges lined up, or stop the wall from wobbling. The tops of the flats would tilt toward the audience, making the bottoms tilt in toward the backstage. Yet nobody was allowed to question him or redo the work; he pulled rank. We had to try and cover up the gaps with wheatpaste – the papier mache type substance used to cover the seams in the flats. We also learned not to walk too close to the walls while onstage or backstage. If we walked too close or even too fast, they swayed.

He had new procedures he wanted implemented, and we all grew increasingly tired of hearing his mantra, "Safety first!" It wasn't as if we were juggling saws. I resented hearing that our lofts, our storage, virtually everything about the theater, was a fire hazard. When I heard, after I'd graduated, that K had overloaded the lighting board and it had literally burst into flames, I was sure that the irony was lost on few of us. He was soon universally disliked, and it was a source of anxiety for me that I'd actually been the one to ask him to come.

He and the teacher were soon engaged. It was amazing how quickly he went from feeling she was incompetent and we needed rescued to feeling that we were all snotty ingrates who needed to buckle down. At least, I figured, if he's sleeping with the teacher he won't be bugging me about scoping out make-out spots.

And he wasn't. But he was still far too touchy feely. I wondered if I was reading too much into it; maybe, I thought, I'm misinterpreting things. Maybe it actually was a mistake when he brushed across my chest when picking things up.

I gave that idea up when I noticed how carefully choreographed any physical contact with me was. Almost all of it took place out of the line of sight of anyone else. Most of it was such that if I made a fuss, he could claim innocence. Back in the days before zero tolerance and Mary Kay Letorneau, even hugging or rubbing my back could have been argued to be innocent, and he didn't venture into clearly forbidden behavior. Mostly he rubbed my arm, back or neck, or gave me a hug. He still stood too close to me too frequently. I was sure, and I was sure he was sure, that if I complained I'd sound like a petulant toddler having to share the back seat with a sibling. "He's touching me! He's on my side!"

By this time, I was no longer speaking directly to the teacher, or she to me, unless it was absolutely unavoidable. There was no way I was going to tell her that her fiance couldn't keep his hands to himself. So strong was the animosity that even teachers who normally supported me were sure that I just had a blind spot or overreacted when I had a complaint about anything in the theater department. I regularly marched myself in and demanded an audience with the principal about things that bothered me – "What do you mean, the school can't afford a lousy gallon of paint? How are we supposed to paint the set?" – but I was sure he would think I was making it all up to get attention or to upset the teacher if I complained about K. More than twenty years later, I still think so.

I didn't even say too much to the other students, outside of my closest friends. Ariane heard most of the complaining. "I wish he would just keep his hands to himself!" "He's engaged, for crying out loud!" She knew, too, that it was useless to complain to the adults, so she commiserated with me. I didn't mention it to my parents. My dad would have become dangerous, and my mother hated conflict. The one time she'd been angry enough to go to the school and complain about a teacher's behavior, the principal had told her he could not interfere. She wasn't likely to make any more complaints.

That spring, I was asked to work tech on the school's first faculty play. I was almost always in charge of props and set decorating for our department. K was the technical director, and an English teacher, Mrs. B, was asked to co-direct with the theater teacher.

All was not well in paradise. I clashed often with Mrs. B. For one scene, an actor was supposed to carry on covered trays of food and set them on the table; immediately the scene ended and the set went dark. The trays were onstage for a total of ten seconds. Mrs. B was adamant that we cook an entire turkey dinner for the scene.

"We don't need anything on the trays! They can be perfectly empty!" I told her.

She sniffed, "The audience will be able to tell."

"No, they won't. Nobody ever opens the trays!" If they need to be weighted, I told her, you stack them with books. Then the actor carries them as if they're heavy, because they are.

Mrs. B did not like being contradicted, or having her direction questioned, by a student. She treated me to a loud, ringing lecture about "shortchanging the audience" by "trying to cut corners." By golly, we would cook a turkey dinner, we would put it on china, and we would put the whole thing onto the trays that never opened. We would do all of this despite the fact that we had no refrigeration backstage for the food. "They don't have to actually eat it," she rationalized when I pointed out the spoilage factor.

Meanwhile, K and I tangled about whose job it was to hang the paintings and such. It had always been my job, and more often than not influenced by flaws or holes in the flats that we needed to hide. K was sure that he was to make all the decisions about the dressings and props, and I should just put them where he dictated – after he approved them in the first place.

The teacher in charge and I assiduously avoided any contact with one another.

I realized that in the real world, the teachers were in charge and the students aren't, but that assumed that they actually, you know, taught. Years of experience had taught us that if you wanted it done right, you did it yourself. Things ran smoother when the inmates ran the asylum.

My blood pressure hovered in the danger range, I'm sure. I spent most of my time arguing or angry. It didn't help that the administration had vetoed a student production in favor of the faculty show. The students bickered amongst themselves, too. I found myself snapping at Joe and being snapped at by Ariane.

One day during construction, I was roughly center stage saying something to K, arguing about hanging artwork. For a moment, everyone else disappeared backstage, into the rafters or out into the halls. No one could see us. K cuddled up, put his arm around my waist and started rubbing my back. He snuggled close and crooned very quietly in my ear, "I know you've been upset…"

I had one of those moments of blinding clarity. This stops, my brain hissed, right now.

I bellowed at the top of my lungs, "DON'T TOUCH ME! DON'T YOU EVER TOUCH ME AGAIN!" He leapt back, farther than he would have if I'd struck him, and stared at me. I was not even remotely finished.

"I'm assuming that you asked me to work on this show because I'm good at what I do. If you want me to leave and someone else to do it, tell me now. I'll be out of here. But if you want me to work on this show, then you and everyone else need to get out of my way and let me do my job!" Heads were popping around corners to stare at us. Several kids had emerged back onto the stage. We were now surrounded, and anyone who couldn't see me could hear me. I stood center stage, using an actor's voice trained to reach the back row of the theater without amplification, and I was on a roll.

I carried on for only a minute or two, pausing only to snap questions like, "Do you want me to work on this show or not?" K stared at me, clearly wishing the floor would open and swallow me. He answered me only in monosyllables. I barked one more instruction to leave me alone and never, ever touch me, and I was done. There. I'd put it out there, in front of everyone.

"I should have thought of this months ago!" I exulted to Ariane. K not only never touched me again, he started giving me a wide berth. He started avoiding eye contact. I no longer felt micromanaged. I don't know if it occurred to him that I was now 18, and unwanted advances were no longer criminal. I wondered how he could be worried about what I might say to his fiancee when we were not speaking. I was not, though, about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

And, while I still had to make the stupid turkey dinner, when it turned green and fuzzy we got to throw it out and weight the trays with books.

By the time I graduated K and I rarely spoke to one another, either. I went to work that summer at the huge hotel/casino where he worked. I'd forgotten that he worked there until I saw him in the employee lunch room one day. Then I remembered that he worked backstage at the huge, splashy show in the main showroom.

Back when we'd been friends, he'd told me that he'd wanted to perform in the show, but the producers didn't allow him to audition. At 5'7", he was an inch under the male height requirement. I'd gleefully ribbed him about being 5'8" myself.

After avoiding him the first time I saw him, I decided to be a bit more proactive and a lot more irritating. From then on, if I saw him in the employee hallways, I'd walk along side him and ooze saccharine sweetness. "Hi, K! How are you?" I no longer worried that I'd offend him. The sole purpose of this exercise was to revel in the fact that he clearly hated it. He avoided looking at me and answered in little more than grunts.

That same year, the year after our graduation, Ariane and I went back to the high school to see our friends perform, "Butterflies Are Free." K was the technical director again – sigh. He sat directly in front of us during the show and ignored us pointedly.

During the show, an actor went through an onstage door and shut it. Not slammed it dramatically, just shut it. The entire wall containing the door groaned and fell over. Not flat onto the ground, mind you, the way it would in a cheesy sitcom, but at a 45 degree angle, just hanging there. We could not contain ourselves and began to snicker and guffaw. Even in the dark, we could see K's ears turn red. We could almost see cartoon-style steam coming out of the top of his head. He got up and stormed out of the theater, which made us laugh even harder. We apologized to our friends afterward, in case our laughter had disturbed them, but their take was, "He deserved it."

I swore I'd send him and his fiancee a sympathy card and contraceptives for their wedding, but I didn't.

I moved away a year later and lost all track of K. Many years later I found out the he stayed at the school for nine years. I felt there was some sort of horrible penance I had to perform to make up for that. All I could think was, good heavens, this is all my fault. But then again, maybe I was being too hard on myself.