Mercy Mild

Read at Story Salon, 20 DecemberThe Al Herschfeld cartoon of "My Favorite Year" as it appeared in The New York Times the week before the show opened in 1992.

Between 1988 and 1992 I worked with two incredibly talented people developing a stage musical version of the movie My Favorite Year. The two people are Lynn Ahrens, lyrics, and Stephen Flahrety, music, best known for Ragtime. Working with them remains the best creative experience I’ve ever had in my life and I’ve had a couple of good ones. Lincoln Center refurbished the Vivian Beaumont Theatre for us, poured in a ton of money. We opened on December 10, 1992 and we were critically keel-hauled.

I’m prejudiced, but I’m telling you we didn’t deserve the bad reviews which to this day I have not read, because critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done because they see it every night, but they still can’t do it themselves.

It was the worst reception anything I’d ever written received and it was the worst dismissal of me, personally, as a writer I’d ever experienced.

The day after we opened it was a rainy, cold, ugly day in New York and I walked from where I was living at the time on Fourth Street pretty much all the way up to Lincoln Center on Sixty-fifth. I couldn’t talk to anybody, not my family, not my friends, nobody. I went to the movies. I went to a theater across from Lincoln Center to see Federico Fellini’s Intervista. As I was buying my ticket they told me the movie would be shown, but that I should know that because of the rain the auditorium was slightly flooded. It seemed completely appropriate for me to sit with a handful of strangers on a cold December morning, my boots in three inches of standing rain water, watching a Fellini movie.

After the movie I went across to the Vivian Beaumont where I ran into the director of the play who was on his way to the airport. He was leaving the country.

I collected my opening night gifts, told the house manager I’d be back for the evening performance and went home.

I operated in a sort of traumatized trance for the next two weeks, finally breaking down in a hotel room in Syracuse, New York on Christmas morning. I was there to spend the holidays with my first set of in-laws. Ten o’clock Christmas morning and I turn on the television in the hotel room and somebody’s running my favorite Preston Sturges movie, Unfaithfully Yours. I love Sturges, I love this movie, I aspire to this movie, but sitting there in front of the television I realized something I’d always known on an intellectual level but had never experienced on an emotional one: that this was the movie that ended Sturges’s career. This beautiful picture failed so spectacularly when it was released, was so completely misunderstood and dismissed that Sturges never made another major picture. He died in the Algonquin Hotel nine years later, working on his autobiography. And for the first time I made the connection I’d been blind to: The work I was trying to do was the sort of work that gets you thrown out of town. And I just started to cry. I wept, sitting there on the foot of the bed, I just bawled like a baby.

Mind you, the musical of My Favorite Year has survived. It has been done with some regularity by regional and amateur theatre companies for more than a decade, and Lynn and Stephen and I just spent time in New York continuing to work on a revised version of the show with an eye toward a production in 2008.

But all of that was a long way from that Syracuse Hotel room on Christmas morning.

Two nights before flying to Syracuse I’d been at the last pre-Christmas performance of my musical which everybody knew would close on January 10. The house was full, people seemed to be enjoying themselves in spite of the notices.

During the Christmas season on Broadway, the casts of the different shows rush out to the lobbies of their respective theaters after curtain calls and carol to the audience members, soliciting funds for Broadway Cares. That’s what the twenty-five members of the My Favorite Year cast did that night, still in costume.

There is a gallery at the Vivian Beaumont that overlooks the lobby. That’s where I was standing when they started to sing Christmas carols.

They sang Silver Bells and Silent Night. And then they sang my favorite, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. There's a phrase in that one that slices through me every time I hear it: “Peace on earth and mercy mild/God and sinners reconciled.” Lyrics by Charles Wesley, music by Felix Mendelssohn.

I’d love to tell you I was uplifted in the moment, that I looked down at those people who a few minutes earlier had been telling my jokes and singing Lynn and Stephen’s songs and felt restored, washed clean of all the toxic criticism and judgment. But if I told you that, you’d know I was yanking you. If that was true, why-for the weeping in front of the Sturges movie a few days later?

One of life’s great lessons is that we don’t always get the experiences we need in the order we think we need them. We have to collect seeming random events in an emotional junk drawer and put them together later, if we’re lucky.

Now I think the weeping made me ready for what I eventually understood as the meaning of the carols in the lobby. It was a slow, painful, organic process, like recovering from major surgery. And when you do recover, you’re life is different.

As Mr. Farren has said, and I have paraphrased in order to avoid legal action, “What doesn’t kill us, hurts for a long time.”

But do not be afraid. Because I bring you tidings of great joy that will be for all people: No one ever died from a bad review. And tis better to have written Unfaithfully Yours and die in the Algonquin Hotel than never to have written Unfaithfully Yours at all.

Ho-Ho-Ho.

Two Books

Read at Story Salon, 6 December, 2006
I have two books with me tonight. Both by Ray Bradbury. One is among the first hard-cover books I ever owned, a collection of his short stories. I got it when I joined the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club. It was in my room when I was in in high school, it went to college with me, it has been in several apartments and two houses. I always know where this book is.

The other is a copy of Farewell Summer, freshly published. Bradbury claims to have been working on it for about fifty years. It’s the sequel to Dandelion Wine but not really, it’s more like a continuation of the other book, an echo. A grace note.

This book is autographed. Mr. Bradbury signed it for me at a book store in Glendale a couple of weeks ago. He turned eighty-six this past August and the man who promised his friend he would grow old but never grow up, is diminished. He arrived at the shop in a wheelchair. He signed his name carefully. He has the hands of an old man, but not the eyes.

He signed this book and another copy of Dandelion Wine and I thanked him. I thanked him.

Bradbury’s one of the troublemakers from my youth. One of the writers who got in early, before I knew what they were really up to. They got in the blood and they’ve never left me. The older I get, the more I write, the clearer I see them threading through me and I’m grateful for the company.

You read Bradbury as a boy and then you go back to him as an adult and you know they’re the same books, the same words, but somehow they’re completely different. You’ve grown into them somehow and what you liked for the magic and the wonder as a kid, you cling to for the melancholy and the depth as a grown-up. The first reading leads to the second reading. Without the first, the second reading lacks resonance.

Bradbury is the great authorizer, especially of boys and the men they become. Men that contain the boys. He once told a friend of mine who was contemplating a big life change, “Jump off the cliff and grow your wings on the way down.” Suicidal as advice, but golden as a metaphor. Advice you can get from anybody, but a good metaphor, that’s rare.

Bradbury was also a way into a denser language. He was willing to pile metaphor on top of simile on top of reference, like a juggler piling chairs. Some of the constructs are awkward, but you’re impressed how high he can stack. He once wrote, “It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness.” I don’t know what the hell that means, but you encounter a sentence like that, you know you can lean on it in a high wind. “A fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness.” You have to be pretty damn fearless to try a sentence like that.

Like most timeless things Bradbury is out of fashion at the moment, replaced by the current hot style in writing, which is illiteracy laced with plagiarism.

There’s a story in this book, written in 1956, about a man walking along a beach in Biarritz at sunset and seeing a man on his hands and knees drawing in the wet sand with an ice-cream stick. Remarkable stuff this guy’s carving into the beach, beautiful. The man gets close to the beach bum doing the drawing and that’s when the artist looks up and the man realizes it’s Picasso. Picasso doodling in the sand with an ice cream stick. A unique work of art and he’s the only one there. He thinks about running for a camera, but the sun’s almost gone. So, he walks back and forth, trying to remember everything drawn in the sand. The story ends with him having dinner back at his beach front hotel, listening to the tide coming in.

These are the stories that whack you as an adolescent, long before you really know what they mean. You know you’re reading the real stuff. And you struggle to retain it, even though the tides going to come in eventually.

So Bradbury wrote in my book. He signed his name not with an ice cream stick, but with a Sharpie. And somewhere there’s the sound of waves on sand.

There are forty-years between these two books. In one hand, I can hold myself as a kid and a grown-up and you can’t see any light between them. What do you suppose that means?