What Am I Doing Here?

Okay, I am going to take a deep breath, and try to get this out in the appropriate way. Not sure if it makes any difference, I am not sure who still reads this blog.

It has been a humbling year. Maybe that doesn't make any sense. Personally, things are great. The kids are big and healthy. There were lots of children in the yard this summer, neighborhood kids and friends. So much to be grateful for, all the pain faded into the general background of our lives.

Professionally, again, who could complain? The summer spent on-stage in the repertory company of Great Lakes Theater Festival. Things are swimming for the residency program. My "new" play The Vampyres did very well at Big Box and has a short run beginning this week. And then there are all those appearances as "Mr. Shakespeare" for GLTF, on the marquee on Euclid, and now, on the cover of NO Live because GLTF won their "Award of Achievement."

And what about I Hate This? A dizzying performance last May, within forty-eight hours of Orson's birth - and three shows this week alone: Wednesday and Friday at MetroHealth, and Thursday at Akron City Hospital.

But after two years, I finally find myself in the place where I am questioning my continuing to perform it. Does it still mean as much as it did - to me? Is the WCPN version going to sound all right? Is it a story I have told too many times, at least like this? There are so many ways to remember Calvin, has this one lost its importance to me?

To put it another way, has I Hate This become a commodity? Or a party trick?

The sad fact is, I wanted this show to get the nod from NO Live, to get a nomination. It got great recognition in New York, it's an important show. I can't take anything away from those who did get recognized - especially Sarah Morton, whose 4 Minutes To Happy is another deeply personal show about an all-too little discussed issue. Not to mention the fact that Sarah is a dizzyingly talented writer of whom I have always been in awe. And a uniquely stunning performer.

And so the Fates said, oh, I get it. You just want your picture in the magazine. NY Times not good enough for you, Sherrod Brown not good enough for you, you need some more validation, you want to be in a magazine now, too. Well that's fine, here, put on this silly costume, we'll put you on the cover of the magazine, if that's all you want.

Shame.

There is a song. It is my song, mine and Calvin's. I first heard it while receiving massotherapy, in April, 2001. It's on one of those "world music" compilations you find at Starbucks. I won't say what it is.

I have listened to it, I think, a dozen times in the past four and a half years. I can't hear it without going back, without being there, in that imaginary summer. This morning while I was in the bathroom there was a traffic report, and, well, it wasn't that song being played under it, but it must have been that artist, from another album. Close, but not it. I sat there on the toilet and closed my eyes. Something new. Something different. I won't call it a "sign" - but if I can imagine "fates" messing me around one way, I am entitled to imagine this.

And then I received an email, seemingly out of nowhere, from someone I met once a long time ago. Not just a long time ago, but then. She brought a young man from Akron to audition for Bad Epitaph's The Alchemist. He got cast, by the way, he was a very talented young man. The auditions were about a week before we learned Calvin had died.

This woman lost a child a few months later, in July. I did not know this. She came to see the Big Box perfs in February, 2003 - and dragged her husband along, who did not like theater, let alone theater that might, you know, hurt.

She wrote:

I too, found out in an ultrasound. That image is still and will forever be in my mind. I too, after finding out through autopsy that he had died many days before, stood there with my mouth open thinking "but I felt him move just the other day...he couldn't have been dead". I too spent many evenings crying in his 1/2 painted nursery. Right down to the divine flight of a sparrow (that's my fav too), I felt like for the first time somebody had a clue of what I was feeling.

So many of your experiences are frighteningly similar, so much so that after the show I became appalled that so many people go through such similar circumstances and nothing is done about it. I'm proud that you are not one of those people. I am so glad you are making change. Many of the most insensitive things I heard during that time were from medical professionals, and my closest family members. Exception given to Scholastic who kept telling me they wanted to send me free books to read to my son - a**holes. We got a lot of Gerber coupons too - a**holes. I couldn't be happier to see you perforating for medical professionals who deal with this kind of thing everyday, and yet, don't seem to notice that we are here.

I still to this day want to know why I needed to be ushered past the nursery filled with warm babies and happy mothers every time I wanted something to drink. Why did I have to wait in triage with mommies having contractions as I sat thinking I would never feel mine move again? Why do they press so hard for you to be medicated into delirium to give birth? What is with family forcing you to eat? And doctors giving you sleeping pills? And people wondering when you will get "over it"? Not him, it. Oh the many important and dumb questions we ask when our babies die. But they are important, and I couldn't see than being asked more eloquently than your show.

Yes. That's right. Thank you for that. I can feel sorry for myself and get wrapped up in all that other nonsense I get so neurotic about. But I have three shows to do this week, and those are important. I have medical health professionals to smack around. I have friends in grief who are coming to see the show for the first time. And I have friends who have lost children recently to remember while I am doing it.

So excuse me. I need to rehearse.