A Modest Proposal

Books can be quite personal. 

In college, I was discussing my favorite book with a friend.  He expressed interest in reading it.  So I loaned it to him.  Not long after, I discovered his interest in my reading habits extended to an interest in me.  And while that was very kind---I just didn’t feel the same.  Sometimes that’s just how it is.  And nothing can be done about it. 

So naturally, he hated me.  And not just that uncomfortable feeling that sometimes occurs when affections aren’t returned----he HATED me.  Intense.  Vile.  Nasty.  Bitter. 

I was stunned.  I’d done nothing except apologize and try to be friends.  But he turned into Crazy Man.  This reassured me that my gut had been right.  I’ve never understood how some people move so quickly from love to hate.  And never will.

Needless to say, the book was never returned.  And after being screamed at in a club after I’d merely said “hello”---I decided it was best to let the friendship (and the book) go. 

To this day, I’ve yet to find another copy.

Which is why when I was assembling the books on my new bookshelves recently, I felt a horrible pang of guilt that’s haunted me for years when I found…….

Walden.  By Henry David Thoreau.

You see----this is not my book.  It belongs to my high school friend, Kat.  She loaned it to me when I was fifteen.  We became friends because of our mutual love of literature.  Both of us had read heaps of the classics before we even got to high school.  Each year, for English class, we would receive a list of “required reading”---Kat and I had already read about 90 percent of the books on the list.  But this did not mean we slacked off in the English department----we just kept reading.  While our classmates were encountering Romeo and Juliet----we were already up to King Lear.  While they discussed The Bronte Sisters----we explored Virginia Woolf.  And while they were reading Beowulf----well, I TRIED to read it for a second time…  But I just really hate Beowulf.  Don’t get me started on Beowulf.

At fifteen, I decided to start reading philosophy.  I had questions.  I heard philosophy had answers.  And I was particularly fond of insightful and happy little quotes that could make me smile when I was having a bad day.

So I picked up some Nietzsche.

Not the best choice.  Not the cheeriest guy on the block.  I used to enjoy using my free periods to read in the school chapel.  Yes.  I read The Antichrist in a chapel.  The misogyny was stunning.  Not just in Nietzsche, but all those guys.  Philosopher after philosopher seemed to hate (read fear) women.  Aristotle.  Plato.  Kant.  Schopenhauer.  Hume.  We should be obedient.  We were stupid.  We were worthless.  Nothing.  Hateful little creatures without a thought in our heads except to be enemies with other women.  I think Kant perhaps summed it up best:

"Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy and certain forms of artistic production... Women regulate their actions not by the demands universality, but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions.”

Of course, I understood the “context of the times”---but how is it that for thousands of years, none of them saw our potential?  These were Western Civilization’s “Great Minds”??? 

I was heartbroken and disgusted.

Kat suggested I might enjoy Thoreau.  So she loaned me her copy. 

And I did enjoy Thoreau.  He was a genuinely thoughtful and intelligent man.  Ran a stop on the Underground Railroad to help free the slaves, was an early proponent of women’s rights, met with leaders from the Native American community to help re-gain their land and freedom, and was possibly THE first environmentalist in the world. 

I loved the book.  I loved Thoreau.  From there, it all gets a little hazy. 

I don’t know exactly why one doesn’t return a borrowed book.  It’s not as if I had any intention of keeping it.  And Walden was in no danger of going out-of-print.  I could easily have purchased my own copy at the local mall’s B. Dalton bookstore for a few dollars.

And it’s not like I didn’t see her five days a week at school for several years after that.  Not like I had some massive Victorian library in my home and the book simply got misplaced under piles of lithographs and first editions.  It’s not as if she’d loaned me a set of encyclopedias and I didn’t have a car (or a driver’s license) to bring them back. 

Why don’t we return books?  It’s really not that all that hard. 

Perhaps, it’s like love---exciting to receive; more difficult to return. 

Upon my bookshelves, I count a few (less than ten, mind you) books I’ve never returned.  Three are from libraries.  My account was charged for these books.  I paid for them.  They are now mine.  Though I still feel a twinge of guilt thinking that some poor fellow in South St. Louis County will go a-hunting one day and discover that Frances Partridge’s memoirs on her days in the Bloomsbury Group will be mysteriously absent from the shelves.

Kat and I have been in-and-out of touch over the years.  She moved.  I moved.  She changed phone numbers.  I changed phone numbers.  She moved overseas.  I moved to New York.  About two years ago, we reconnected.  We even met up for drinks in St. Louis.  Grand time.  Picked up right where we left off.  I pulled out a reference to Iris Murdoch and we both agreed that The Sea, The Sea is a novel an author has to earn the right to write.

So why do I still have her copy of Walden?  It’s clearly hers.  She even wrote her name on the book. 

What is wrong with me?

That afternoon, I wrapped the book up, took it to the post office, and mailed it to her with a note inside.

“I believe I borrowed this from you maybe sophomore year.  Sorry it’s taken me so long to return.  And yes----I read the book.” 

A few days later, I got an email from Kat.  She said it was “…a much-needed day-brightener.  Not only to enjoy your honorable tendency to return a borrowed book, but also to see my juvenile underlinings and those of the book's previous, unknown owner. Thanks so much -- it was absolutely a wonderful gift from the universe in a gloomy time!”

YAY!  What a lovely note.  Friends who write beautifully are awesome!

I not only relieved years of guilt, I also managed to brighten someone’s day AND get a book back to its rightful owner.  Hooray!

 

THIS should be a holiday!

I think it would be the best holiday ever!  Not just about books.  It could be about anything.  A Returning Things Holiday.  You would just go about visiting people and returning things.  Visiting your neighbors.  Returning an hedge trimmer and perhaps having a bit of something to snack together.  Going to see an old friend to have a drinky-poo, catching up on who’s who and what’s what, and finally getting back that punch bowl you loaned them for their daughter’s graduation five years ago.  And you don’t have to buy ANYTHING!  No crass commercialization whatsoever.  You just return something that belongs to someone else, have a nice visit, and make them so happy to have their thing back.  What a wonderful holiday!

Who doesn’t have something they would like returned?  And who doesn’t have something lying around their house taking up space that they feel horrible about not having returned every time they see it?

It’s a win-win. 

You could also mail things back.  No Hallmark card needed.  You simply pop the thing in the mail with a hastily-written note, “This is yours.  Sorry it took so long to return.  Let’s get together soon!”  Of course, Hallmark would design a line of cards----but screw them.  We don’t need no stinking cards!

There are possibly people out there who are upset with you for things you haven’t returned.  And there are likely people you’ve avoided because you have something you haven’t returned to them.  But unlike the young man in love who absconded with my favorite book, we don’t have to let this denial of property intrude upon our relationships.  Love is not an object.  We can’t always return affections----but we can all return things.    

Perhaps, what we need is a day to celebrate friendship, sharing---and the return of things we’ve shared with friends.  They loaned their special thing to you because they cared.

I think it would be a lovely holiday! 

Let the petitions begin.

Return something to a friend today.  You’ll make them happy and you’ll feel good, too.

Nice Bugs and Nonsense

Yesterday was Limerick Day!

A day to honor the 198th birthday of English author and artist, Edward Lear; known primarily for his “literary nonsense” and for popularizing the limerick.

So…in honor of Lear and his nonsense, I wrote a limerick to mark the occasion of finding a bug upon my floor.

There once was a bug in my kitchen,
A nice bug, but had no permission;

Rather than kill,

I held very still,

My finger became his eviction.

If you were expecting something dirty...

Good Lord---it's a bug!

Geez.

Not ALL limericks are dirty---though literary anthropologists digging up the earliest limericks seem to concur that they do indeed have a smutty origin. You can probably lay the blame on that infamous man from Nantucket!

Actually, I found the bug a few days ago. A roly-poly---those little armadillo-looking bugs that curl up into a ball as their means of defense.

When I was little, I was informed that roly-polys belonged to the species of bugs known simply as “Nice Bugs”.

Bees would sting you.
Spiders were scary.
Roaches were nasty.
Flies were a nuisance.
And mosquitoes would suck your blood and make you all itchy.

Ewww.

But roly-polys were our friends. They were kind and innocent bugs that weren’t scary and you could hold in your hand. Also in this scientific category were butterflies, ladybugs, worms and my personal favorite---lightening bugs! We never tired of catching them in our hands in the summer and watching them glow inside our palms.

Despite knowing all of this, when I was very, very young, I picked up a roly-poly in my grandma’s sprawling backyard. I examined him for a few moments, and then, for some unknown reason (perhaps simple curiosity) I dropped him into a nearby spider web. Within a split second, a GIGANTIC pointy black spider LEAPT out of nowhere and pounced upon the prey. I was terrified of the black widow-looking spider---too terrified to save my roly-poly. And watched in horror as the spider injected its venom and began to suck the life out of the sweet little bug I had held in my tiny hands just a moment before.

I burst into tears.

I hid under a tree in my grandmother’s rock garden, inconsolable, for hours.

To this day, I think it is possibly the worst thing I have ever done.

Not vicious, but wanton.

Like a child with a gun.

When I first began to seriously write, one of the first things I wrote was a short story loosely-based on this traumatic moment.

To begin the short story, I quoted from a poem by D.H. Lawrence---“The Snake”:

"And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness."

To make up for this horrible sin, I have always protected the roly-poly.

Oh you may laugh, but I will go WAY out of my way to catch and release a roly-poly. And other “Nice Bugs” as well---but the roly-poly has always been my particular cause. Like Elton John with AIDS. George Clooney with Darfour. Or Paris Hilton with herself.

When I picked up this particular roly-poly, I was astonished to discover that he did not curl up into a ball.
 

He seemingly had no defense.

So, amongst all the other things-to-do in my life, I immediately went to Wikipedia in search of an answer.

Apparently, these “Nice Bugs” belong to a subspecies known as the “common woodlouse”.

While louse may sound very much like lice---a genus I would NOT refer to as “Nice Bugs”---they’re actually pretty helpful little critters. They help with decomposition, which is why they’re often found under old logs or dead trees.

Unfortunately, there were no dead trees in my kitchen, so I have no idea what this little guy was looking for.

And unlike other roly-polys---these particular “woodlouses” (for semantics, I’ll avoid the standard plural of “lice”) have no ability to either “roll” or “pol”. In fact, their only defense seems to be to remain perfectly still and perhaps you won’t even know that they’re there…

Oh my god.

NEVER have I had so much in common with a bug.

If I were a bug---that would be me.

It was late at night, and I had no desire to change out of my pajamas and go to the park across the street with a flashlight looking for a safe, new home for the little guy.

So, I did what any common sense person would do---I grabbed a pinch of soil from one of my houseplants and put the soil (and him) in a salt shaker.
 

The holes would give him air, and the moist soil would give him food and water till I could get him to a safe haven.
 

But everyday, I either forget him before I leave the house, or something comes up where I don’t have time for that “Born Free” moment.

So instead, I’ve become his caregiver.

Everyday, I replace the soil with new (though old and mulchy) soil. And I take him out to play.

I really HAVE to.

How much exercise can you get in a salt shaker?

He likes to come out and immediately starts walking around my kitchen table.

At first, he was wary of my hand, but now he seems to recognize my smell.

We play everyday. I’ve learned so much about him.
 

And he’s QUITE photogenic!
 

Of course, I know the time will come when I have to let him go and be with other roly-poly friends. Maybe make some baby woodlouses of his own.

Maybe that’s why I’ve resisted giving him a name. I don’t want to get too attached.

But for now, we’re quite happy together. And he’s inspired me to write a blog and even a silly little poem.

Poem-worthy? A common woodlouse?

Absolutely.

That’s the wonder of both life and art.

Finding joy in the minutiae.

And transforming it into something that shows us all why we should never drop the nice bugs into a spider’s web.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear...

I have a fear of clowns.

Over the years, this fear has extended to pretty much any masked character.

Halloween is difficult.

I don’t know where the whole clown thing started. As a child, I remember being terrified of my Jack-in-the-Box. To this day, just hearing “Pop Goes the Weasel” makes me a little queasy.

When I was living in Minneapolis, one of my best friends worked for Mystery Science Theatre, based in the Twin Cities. One night, she and her sister invited me to an MST Party. The party was hosted by Joel Hodgson at a bowling alley. I was promised beer, bowling, and lots of cute guys in flannel shirts.

As my friend parked the car, she and her sister gave each other that Sisterly Look, and then turned their heads towards me in the backseat.

“Okay,” her sister Kathleen said with dead seriousness. “I think you should know that there is going to be a clown there.”

“What???”

“I’m sorry. But we knew you wouldn’t come if we told you before…”

“It’s was Joel’s idea,” her sister Ellie explained. “He thought it would be funny.”

“Clowns are not funny,” I tried to explain. “Clowns are scary.”

“Well…just…you know…” Kathleen stammered. “You might want to avoid the clown.”

This seemed like my best bet. After all, I was now stranded at a bowling alley in Chaska with no way back home.

And then it got worse.

“Joel told his friend to dress like a clown, get really drunk, and accost women. His name is Fondles. Fondles the Clown. Just stay away from Fondles.”

As I crept carefully into the wood-paneled bar of the bowling alley, my eyes immediately spotted Fondles.

He was the creepiest clown I’d ever seen.

Luckily, by the time we got there, he had already downed about six Leinie Bock longnecks and was currently slumped over the cigarette machine, making sexually inappropriate comments to women as they walked by.

A few minutes later, he lost his grip on the cigarette machine and slid down the side to the floor. One of the writers propped him back up---just in time to grab some woman’s ass. And then, he fell again. He drunkenly pulled himself back up onto the cigarette machine and ordered another beer. A few sips later, he tumbled to the sawdust floor.

Kathleen (who had also grown up Catholic) turned to me and said, “Fondles Falls For the Third Time.”

I immediately cracked up.

Stations of the Cross references always slay me.

Two years later, I attempted to get over my fear of clowns by writing and shooting a short film on the subject---a comedy that also tackled my completely irrational fear of John Davidson.

It was titled “Fear, Loathing, and John Davidson.”

For one particular scene, I needed a real clown who could make animal balloons. One of the photographers at my day job suggested the perfect clown.

“She’s nice. You’ll like her. She does children’s parties. I did some headshots for her and she’s not scary at all.”

Steve, the photographer, slipped me her number and I gave her a call.

Right away, I explained my fear.

It should be noted that this was the SECOND time I’d explained my fear of clowns…to a clown.

But she was the first clown that understood.

“They warned us about this in clown school. That some children---even adults---will be afraid of you. And the instructor told us, ‘Don’t think that YOU’RE going to be the clown who gets them over the fear of clowns.’”

She understood me! The clown understood me!!!

My only request was that she not show up for the shoot in costume.

“I think,” I explained over the phone, “that if I meet you and talk to you before you put on the make-up, I’ll be okay.”

I’m sure she thought I was completely batshit. But she agreed to the stipulation.

The night before the shoot, she left a message on my machine.

“I’m SO sorry! But I booked a children’s party for tomorrow afternoon and I’ll be going straight from your shoot to the party so I have to show up with my make-up and costume. I know it’s going to be hard for you, but really…I promise, I’m not scary. You won’t be scared. And we can talk tomorrow morning over the phone, if it makes you feel better…”

You know---you hear those stories about what Scorsese went thru in the desert shooting The Last Temptation of Christ… Or Herzog pulling a ship over an Amazon mountain in Fitzcarraldo… Or Francis Ford Coppola wrangling natives, the Vietnam War, and a fat Marlon Brando for Apocalypse Now…

But NOTHING can compare with what I went thru that morning as I prepared to meet Sneaky the Clown.

I tried to act normal. Whatever normal is when you roll out of bed on a Saturday morning and meet A CLOWN!!!

Okay, in case some of you still don’t quite understand, let me explain.

First off, I will do anything to avoid running into a clown. I have been known to walk several blocks out of my way to avoid a clown passing out flyers on the corner. If I DO have to walk past a clown, I avoid eye contact. I keep my eyes on the ground, focus on my breathing, and try to move past as quickly as possible. I live by the hope that if I don’t bother the clown, the clown won’t bother me.

These few Clown Rules are usually enough to keep Bozo away.

But if I do encounter a clown, what happens is something along the lines of the “flight-or-fight-or freeze response”. I’m like a deer-in-the-headlights. Then my heart starts pounding like it’s about to burst out of my chest. I hyperventilate. Indecipherable sounds resembling a moose-cry emerge from my throat. My hands shake. My whole body shakes.

At best, I chatter in non-sequitors and back-away.

At worst, I’m in the fetal position with my head between my legs breathing into a paper bag.

Once, I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned around, and it was a clown.

What happened after that, I have no idea. I seem to have blacked it out.

But clowns are not my only fear.

In the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, Charlie Brown visits Lucy’s Psychiatrist booth:

Lucy Van Pelt: Are you afraid of staircases? If you are, then you have climacaphobia. Maybe you have thalassophobia. This is fear of the ocean, or gephyrobia, which is the fear of crossing bridges. Or maybe you have pantophobia. Do you think you have pantophobia?
Charlie Brown: What's pantophobia?
Lucy Van Pelt: The fear of everything.
Charlie Brown: THAT'S IT!

Over the past few years, I’ve developed a case of pantophobia.

I wake up afraid.

Yesterday morning, I was afraid of the questionable date on the Half & Half, the pile of tax papers sitting on my desk, the new deodorant I bought, my computer printer, the fancy boots my Mom bought me for Christmas that I haven’t worn for fear they might pinch---but most of all, that unknown thing that could jump out at you at anytime and yell “Boo!”

The Jack-in-the-Box that is Life.

Oddly, to get me thru my fears, I’m not afraid to smoke.

It’s all completely irrational. My computer printer is not cursed. If it doesn’t want to print the designated pages, it’s because the hp company simply wants me to buy a new one every three years.

And yesterday, I said Damn the Torpedoes!---and I wore my boots.

No, they’re not the best boots to wear while walking across sheets of ice… But my gay friends thought I looked like a dominatrix and the older Hindu guy at the drugstore asked me to marry him.

AND---they didn’t pinch my toes! They were perfectly comfortable boots.

What’s my point?

Over the course of the past 24 hours, I’ve begun to examine some of my fears. And today, I conquered one. The wearing of the boots.

Well, actually---two. I took a chance on the Half & Half. It smelled okay, so I went for it.

A friend of mine once suggested that I had a fear of success.

THAT is completely untrue. What I have, is a fear of everything.

Pantophobia is a real word. According to Wikipedia:

Panphobia, from the Greek 'pan' and 'phobos', also called omniphobia, Pantophobia or Panophobia, is a medical condition known as a "non-specific fear" or "the fear of everything" and is described as "a vague and persistent dread of some unknown evil".

In my family, we simply call this “Being Eastern-European”.

I remember reading John Lukacs Budapest, where he describes it so tersely:

"Temetni tudunk - a terse Magyar phrase whose translation requires as many as ten English words to give it proper (and even then, not wholly exact) sense: 'How to bury people - that is one thing we know.’"

Trust me, the Polish version is even worse.

It’s a vague sense of dread that is not related to depression in any way. It’s an acknowledgement of the sadness in life. A respect. Like the respect that must be given a wild animal.

Life is wild.

Today, I put on my boots, and set off into the wild brush.

Crackheads, Confidence and Cat Hair

Let me begin this by saying that I’m not a Crazy Cat Lady.

I have one cat. One.

And the only Crazy Cat Lady-type thing I do is that, once a year, on Halloween, I dress my cat up in a costume and I take a picture of her looking really pissed off.

It’s my annual revenge for a year of hairballs, meowing in the middle of the night, and the piles of cat hair that appear mysteriously on all of my clothes.

This year, she was a skunk.

I laughed. Bessie didn’t.

Tonight, the Yankees won the World Series. I went out to the theatre. Not that I don’t like baseball, I just have a hard time with rabid sports fans. Particularly on a World Series night. They’re like twelve year-old girls who just discovered boys---they talk of NOTHING ELSE. And they’re drunk. Drunk, screaming, twelve year-old girls one Jagermeister away from throwing up.

I decided to pass on the sports bar invites.

The event I attended this evening was a show in Brooklyn at a hip art space in DUMBO called Galapagos. Coming straight from work, I didn’t have time to get all dolled up for a hip art space theatre event. But it’s not like I was walking the red carpet. Just a fun evening of theatre written by one of the fellows from my weekly writer’s group.

I thought I looked nice. Not glamorous. But not too shabby, either. Sure, a bit of cat hair on my jacket, but it was a dark theatre. Who would notice?

I hopped on the A Train with directions in my pocket and confidence in my soul.

At the next stop, a scary old black man (yes, that’s the Politically Correct term for this guy) got on the train and sat down next to me. For some reason, crazies and crackheads always seem to find an open seat near me. This guy was both. Even before the train pulled out of Penn Station, he began talking to himself in a constant stream of angry non sequiturs that involved the U.S. education system, a roast beef sandwich and eighteen hundred dollars. He concluded his ranting every so often by yelling out, “Fuck the White Man! AND his women!”

None of this seemed to be directed at anyone on the train in particular. Though he did occasionally refer to the group sitting across from me of four lovely, middle-aged African-American women on a shopping spree as “my niggas”.

The ladies did not look pleased.

All in all, he just yammered away discussing how the roast beef sandwich didn’t have “no nothin’---just roast beef” and bragged about this mythical eighteen hundred dollars he was carrying around…when suddenly, I felt his head turn in my direction.

And then, somewhere around Canal St., I heard a cackle. A cackle which turned into a guffaw, which was followed by a spit-take so violent that, had he decided to use that eighteen hundred dollars to purchase a pair of much-needed false teeth---those pearly whites would have shot across the train as he yelled out:

“DAMN, white girl! How many cats do you have?!?!”

All eyes on the train shifted to me. The white girl covered in cat hair. Information pointed out, quite loudly---by a crackhead.

How the Crackhead Killed My Confidence. A chapter in my new book. A playful turn on Rudyard Kipling: “The Just So-So Stories”

Yes, I have thousands of these confidence-killing stories. Like the time I was about to break-up with my boyfriend and felt lousy and was at my waitress job on New Year’s Eve. The Broadway theatre next-door was doing a show. I stepped out the side door to have a cigarette, take a mental break from work and try to internally put myself back together again for a lonely New Year’s Eve when suddenly, a middle-aged couple standing in line for the theatre next-door slowed down to check me out . The wife, after careful inspection of my person, leaned into her husband and said audibly, “No. She’s nobody.”

I requested to go home early that night.

Or the time I was eleven and was in my second year of piano studies at The St. Louis Conservatory. I was performing in the mandatory monthly recital.

Bach’s Invention # 8 in F Major.

My first time performing Bach in public. I was nervous, but I knew the piece. I sat down at the piano, started strong, then fumbled about twenty measures in. According to protocol, if one couldn’t recover, one was supposed to take their hands off the keys and start again.

I did this. I fumbled again.

I took my hands off the keys and forced myself to take a really deep breath. I closed my eyes. Thought about the piece. Knew I could get thru it. Took another breath, and then put my hands to the keys with confidence.

Just as I started to play, someone’s father in the front row “whispered” to his spouse, “She’ll never make it.”

I heard it. And I didn’t.

Only after the Conservatory Director (who’d also likely heard the remark) paused my performance and gave a little speech about how newcomers to Bach often get nervous and this causes them to increase the speed of the tempo to the point where the performer can’t keep up with their own hands…

Yes, I did get thru the piece on the next try. But let’s just say that it took me at least a year before I was willing to give Bach another whirl.

I suppose I could have come back with a snappy comeback on the train tonight. Something like, “Yeah---I might have some cat hair going on here. But at least I’m not a crackhead!”

And then, while I was being stabbed, people on the train would forget all about my cat hair.

Or maybe not.

Headlines in The Post the next day would read, “Crackhead Stabs Lippy Cat Lady”.

The New York Post would hack into my Facebook page.

Bessie in her skunk costume on the cover of The Post.

Nothing I had ever written would be acknowledged in my obituary. My Mom (keeper of my meager archives) would laminate the “Lippy Cat Lady” front page article and spend the next fifteen years going from South County Mall to South County Mall searching for the perfect frame at Frames Or Us---never realizing that it’s a chain and they all have THE SAME FUCKING FRAMES!

But I digress.

Confidence Killers, like serial killers, can be anywhere and anyone. They can be a crackhead on the train or somebody’s dad. And, like serial killers, they seem to have no conscience about their actions. The middle-aged woman who looked at me standing outside the restaurant door with my tea and cigarette certainly must have realized that I heard her say that I was “nobody”.

She just didn’t care.

As I went thru my mail today, I opened another rejection letter. Well, not exactly a rejection. More like an “only accepting queries thru a WGA signatory agent or lawyer at this time” letter from a certain unnamed production company.

A few years ago, I would have seen this letter as a Confidence Killer.

But today, after having survived SO many Confidence Killers (including an imaginary stabbing on the A Train)---I see it for what it is…

A call to work harder. To keep working and not give up. To brush off that cat hair, laugh at the silly crackhead---You so silly! And move forward.

They say that what doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger.

Okay, that’s a lot of bullshit.

It may not kill you, but you’re going to be laid up in a crappy hospital with basic cable for about a week and then they’ll shuttle you out as fast as they can do the paperwork because your insurance is lousy and then you’ll pick up your own prescriptions and stumble home to your meowing cat, a hairball and a mailbox full of bills and Netflix picks…

But you survive.

Weaker.

But alive.

I believe the saying should be more like, “What doesn’t kill you… Well…hey!---it don’t kill ya…”

That’s pretty much it.

And if you were hoping for some words of wisdom from a writer who has been clearly identified by a Broadway TKTS ticketholder as “nobody”…

Damn. I’m sorry.

My bad.

All I have for you is this…

By the time I hit college, I discovered a deep appreciation for Bach.

My compositorial enemy, had become my closest friend.

I was determined to conquer my fear. I added a minor to my curriculum---harpsichord studies. Unfortunately, the sole harpsichord professor at my university was a bit of a letch, to say the least. I’d been forewarned by a friend of mine who ran the classical division at the University Library. “He was having an affair with one of his young Asian students. Watch out for that guy…”

A week later, I showed up at his campus office for an audition and interview. Photos of him with his arm around a young Chinese woman papered the place. But I refused to believe the hype and believed only in Bach.

By the end of the first semester, I’d suffered thru enough uncomfortable comments on my personal life and invites to “after class” sessions from a man who was the spitting image of Burl Ives to practically kill my love for the Baroque quicker than an A Express to Washington Heights.

Over the years, I’ve forgotten about this professor and his Confidence Killer moves---like grabbing my hand and caressing it over the harpsichord keys as he told me I’d never appreciate Couperin until I learned the proper touch…

My point is, nothing anyone has ever said or done to me has killed my love of Bach.

Tonight, I did something I occasionally do when I feel those Confidence Killers knocking at my door…

I dug into my sheet music cabinet (yes, I actually have a sheet music cabinet) and pulled out Bach’s Invention No. 8.

Within a few measures, I focus solely on my hands, let the comments of a crackhead go…and I interpret Bach for my sleeping (yet, still shedding) cat.

She looks up from my pillow and squints. A piece of grey cat hair drifts across the keys.

I simply blow it off.

The piece that slayed me when I was eleven years old---played by a seven year-old...

Bach's Invention No. 8