When I'm Sixty-four

I spoke today with a couple of good friends, with whom I was discussing life and work and how things are going, and the conversations turned to the whole topic of "Where did the time go?" You know, now that I'm beginning to think in terms of retirement and what that will mean for me in terms of income and work and... (ominous musical sting) The Future! (The other day I was thinking of the Beatles' song, "When I'm Sixty-four", realizing that when I first heard it 64 seemed eons away. And now... I'm 64!)

Who knows, as Judy Collins once sang, where the time goes? A couple of weeks ago I celebrated 29 years of sobriety and I was, as I usually am on these anniversaries, struck by how quickly the time has passed. It doesn't seem that long ago that I finally had that moment of clarity, the spiritual experience people talk about, that led to me putting down the drink for good. I had known for years that I had a problem with alcohol, as did most everyone I knew, family and friends. And as hard as I tried, I just couldn't stay sober. Then one night it just hit me like a ton of the proverbial bricks: I can't do this any more. I remember saying it out loud. I can't do this... So I polished off whatever it was I was drinking at the time (I think it was one of those Manhattans-in-a-can I was so fond of) and took myself to bed. There's no earthly reason it should have "stuck" that time, but it did. That was my last drink, January 12, 1984. Miracles do happen.

In the meantime I have: been through several courses of therapy, moved to Los Angeles, started a small business, starred in a no-budget independent movie, met and lost a partner to AIDS, traveled to Canada, London, Ireland and the Dominican Republic, moved back from Los Angeles, was reunited with someone I had a crush on who is now my partner of eleven-plus years, was diagnosed with clinical depression, got my Actors Equity card, got acting work and an agent, then wound up working at Drexel University, was diagnosed with bladder cancer, anemia and diverticulosis...oh, and I wrote, produced and directed two shows for the Philly Fringe Festival, went through some Landmark education courses, and got a couple of tattoos. And those are just the highlights.

It has been, as many friends can attest about all our lives, a roller coaster. And every time I think things have smoothed out, that I'm in for some smooth sailing and uneventful times, things change again -- for better or worse, in big ways and small. I've been privileged to know some remarkable people in these 29 years, many of whom I count as friends. And I've been fortunate to have been shown that it all fits together somehow. That as random as things may seem, it's all part of a pattern. The pieces of the puzzle all fall into place. The trouble is, we can't see that until after the fact. When we're in the midst of it all (whatever it all may be) it just seems like a maelstrom that makes no kind of sense, nohow. It's like thinking you've been on bumper cars, then looking back and realizing you've been on a straightaway four-lane highway the whole time.

Apart from the thousand physical "things" that seem to come with aging, my mental and emotional outlooks seem to change from year to year. (Or month to month or week to week, even.) Lately I've been having that vaguely OCD thing I recently wrote about, and this vague anxiousness (not really anxiety) that tends to keep me off-kilter. I guess it's due at least in part to the fact that things will be changing in ways big and small, and fairly soon if the amazingly fast passage of the last 29 years is anything to go by, and I wonder if I'm ready.

Well, maybe not right now. But I trust I will be. I trust that whatever's in store, I'll be taken care of. As my new, favorite philosophy says: Don't worry about tomorrow, God is already there.

Happy Obsessive Compulsive New Year!

Like many people these days, I've had my share of therapy -- on and off -- for years, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. From time to time issues come up for me that I can't shake off with positive thinking, gratitude lists, prayer or a diet of "super mood foods". Sometimes it takes sitting down with someone who's been trained to deal with what author John Cheever used to call his "depresh".

So I've not been particularly concerned about the tinge of anxiety that's crept into my consciousness in the last year or two, the occasional panic that something's wrong (particularly at work), or something will be going wrong very soon. Ask me exactly what I'm afraid will be going awry, the dreaded event (event horizon?) that will derail my life as I know it, and I have no answer. "I don't know," I'm likely to say, "but it's on its way and I can't stop it! Medicate me now!" 

I'm told that meditation helps too, regular, daily meditation. Focusing on the moment at hand, not living in the past or the future -- neither of which exists -- and paying attention to this moment, which is, of course, all we really have. So I've started meditating. I meditated yesterday morning for ten minutes. And this morning for ten minutes. I'd like to say everything has changed as a result, but I don't need to tell you that's not the way it works. Meditation doesn't work on "issues" the way ibuprofen works on a headache. It will take time. But enough people, whose opinions I trust, swear by the practice, people who (not to get too New Age-y about it) definitely have a different aura about them.

All that said, I've become aware of something new, a different wrinkle in all this that alternately amuses and concerns me: I think I'm developing a little late-onset OCD. Not possible, you say? I say, you're wrong.

To wit: I find I'm constantly checking to make sure I have my wallet. Several times a day I pat my butt to assure myself that the new, compact, skinny wallet I recently purchased with a Groupon, has not slipped out of my back pocket. Then, having made sure that the wallet is there I take it out of the pocket and open it to make sure my money and/or credit/debit cards haven't fallen out somewhere, to be used by unscrupulous people out to steal my identity. Okay? Several times a day. Is that OCD? And when I have the wallet out to pay for something, I take that opportunity to check its contents. 

The other new development is checking my keys: I received a new key ring for Christmas, a very nice one, engraved with my name. One of those key rings you can pull apart so as to hand only your car keys to the parking attendant or valet. Since I've started using it, I find I check three or four times before I leave the apartment to make sure I have it with me. It's in my hand, but I have to look -- to make sure I have the right key ring? Maybe.

But also to make sure all the keys are there. As though sometime when I wasn't looking, some of the keys (which have turned into little anthropomorphic, cartoon keys) jumped off the key ring and have been dancing around on the kitchen counter, then hiding behind the coffee maker as soon as I get ready to go out. I swear I'm not making this up, and I can't for the life of me figure out where this is all coming from. 

Only I do wonder if it isn't connected with the fact that, the older you get, the more things change and fall away. Having lost two siblings, both parents and a life partner so far, and more aware than ever that everything changes, maybe I just want to be sure of something, that I'm in some kind of control. Even just a little bit. Even if it means listening for those dancing keys, trying to catch them before they jump back on the key ring, giggling because they know they're driving me crazy.

Home Alone

For the first time ever, I spent Christmas by myself. Christmas Eve was spent with our little family at my niece's house. Christmas day, Chris worked, so I was on my own.

But I was alone, as opposed to isolating. And it wasn't bad.

I stayed in my jammies until around 2 p.m., at which point I decided to go to the movies. "Skyfall" was my final choice and I highly recommend it. I almost went for Chinese into the bargain, but there was a ton of leftovers back home, so I opted for that. And everyone knows holiday food is better the next day: ham, turkey, stuffing, gravy, sweet sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, baked apples, the works.

Then Chris came home from working and it was...just another evening at home. (Although the choices on TV were really wretched. I guess they figured everybody would be at the movies.)

In the weeks leading up to the holiday I was acutely aware that this year, for some reason, I was really missing my parents. It's not the first Christmas I've spent without them, but their absence seemed more noticeable for some reason. 

It's what happens when you get older, I guess: friends and family, especially, begin to fall away. You adjust. You miss them, you remember them.

But you also enjoy the moment, make the most of what is. You remember without living in the past. Look forward without living in the future.

The memories were inevitable: childhood Christmas eves with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, waiting for Santa. How long the season seemed back then. How different Christmas day felt compared to the rest of the year.

So now on to New Year's and my birthday and (God willing) celebrating 29 years sober. It wasn't so bad being home alone. At least no one had forgotten about me. And I didn't have housebreakers to thwart with ingenious booby traps. It was just me and Mr Kitty, snuggled under a new plush throw.

And it wasn't bad.

The Real Wizard of Oz

The Real Wizard of Oz

is not the one you know, the Hollywood,
the celluloid tradition,
poignant and familiar --
the moreso now because we know
what happened to that little girl.

That first witch? In the Real Wizard, a little old lady
with a dowager’s hump. Definitely not
that screwball comedy bubblehead,
floating through in a ball gown,
with her cartoon voice and her wand.

In The Real Wizard the slippers
are silver, did you know?
Made ruby for the screen since
red – ruby red – reads better in Technicolor.

There is death in The Real Wizard of Oz:
violent monsters
dashed to pieces on sharp rocks;
a pack of wolves hacked headless and bloody
by the weepy Woodsman who, we come to learn,
amputated his own limbs,
and split his own torso with his own enchanted axe;
while the lion – not so cowardly on the page it seems –
offers to slaughter a deer for dinner.

And what of the Witch,
sinuous, familiar, emerald-skinned hag,
her hat and dialogue iconic now
as Rick’s Café or Garbo’s laugh;
the nimble skywriter in billowing black,
appearing and vanishing
in clouds of poison green?

She shows up here three-quarters through,
her evil somehow pedestrian,
just going through the motions
and easily vanquished with a bucket of water
as tepid and dingy as her vaunted wickedness.

She reminds you
of that cranky widow in the grocery line,
or someone’s maiden aunt,
rocking on a sagging porch,
finding fault with everything.

Fred Andersen, September 2012

Ron Who?! (You can't make this stuff up...)

The Cookie Whore

Yesterday after work I took part in a First Person Arts storytelling event. First Person is a local arts group now in its second decade and is dedicated to the storytellers, artists who tell their own stories, comic, tragic and in-between. The sharing can be as familiar as stand-up comedy, it can be musical, it can be one actor playing multiple parts. Political, satirical, complex or simple story-telling. However it's done, it's compelling and deeply affecting, as you begin to see and hear the similarities between yours and someone else's story, someone who may be your polar opposite.

The First Person Market was a venue for artists and craftspeople to sell their wares, hopefully raising some money for First Person, I imagine. There were four storytellers (myself among them) who charged a dollar apiece to tell one of three personal stories to whoever sat down at the table opposite them. Among mine was one I called "The Cookie Whore" (for reasons which will be obvious). It was quite popular -- so I thought I'd share it with you here:

No, not me... Suzanne Pleshette

Back in the late 80's and early 90's I was living in Los Angeles, whence I'd moved to be a screen writer. I even went so far as to take a class in screenwriting at the American Film Institute. I finally came to the conclusion that my real passion was acting, so I set out on a years-long search for parts, an agent, a Screen Actor's Guild card. In between, of course, I had to earn a living, so I did temp work. I sold crafts. 

And I became a cater waiter, working for a staffing outfit that sent only the best waiters to only the best events. I wound up working often for a client in Beverly Hills, a woman who worked tirelessly year-round for a major charity, and who threw numerous parties, dinners, banquets and bashes, all culminating in a yearly event so big it took several days and involved the proverbial Who's Who of Hollywood royalty. Her husband had been head of a major studio and now was just a billionaire. In their fabulous (and I don't use the word lightly) Beverly Hill mansion I served the likes of Sean Connery and Michael Caine, passed shrimp puffs to Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra, heard Streisand sing and... met The Cookie Whore.

It was a luncheon for fashion designer Arnold Scaasi (whose archives and 100 of whose designs were acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Art), attended by a bevy of big-name Hollywood ladies, among them one of my favorites, Suzanne Pleshette. She had starred in "The Bob Newhart Show", got pecked to death in Hitchcock's "The Birds" and was romanced in "Rome Adventiure" by Troy Donahue who was, frankly, prettier than she was. Most recently, before her death a few years ago, she brought her smoke-and-whiskey voice to "Will and Grace" as Karen's mother.

So I was cleaning up in the dining room after the luncheon. Everyone else had moved into another part of the house and I was in the dining room, clearing up the remaining odd dishes, napkins and platters of food, among which were about a dozen cookies, left on a large silver tray. There were chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin and they looked really, really good. As I picked up the tray and started for the kitchen I heard that unmistakable voice behind me: "Can I have another cookie?"

I turned and it was Suzanne, looking gorgeous in a summer-weight suit and heels. I said (to myself) "Of course, Suzanne Pleshette, you can have anything you want." "Sure," I said -- to her --and proffered the tray. She took one, then two, then a third. She looked at me and without blinking said "I'm such a cookie whore!" Then she thanked me and walked away.

Nor surprisingly I've never forgotten that. And even now, almost two decades later, I can still hear that voice: "I'm such a cookie whore..." And whenever I bite into an especially good oatmeal-raisin cookie, I hold it up in a kind of toast and say "This is for you, Suzanne Pleshette!"

Terra Incognita

I recently had the experience of driving through a small town and catching a glimpse of a house I would swear I had been in years ago. I knew I hadn't, but just for a second I was reminded in a very visceral way of a place I remembered from decades ago.

In any case, I've started writing poetry again because... well, because I need some sort of creative outlet and the job takes an awful lot out of me -- enough that I can't do more than think about writing a whole play or starting a new painting. (Which I fully intend to do... after I finish the painting I already have started.) So here's my latest effort. I thought I'd share, in case this has happened to you, too.

Terra Incognita

You are in a town you don’t know,
driving through, terra incognita:
Here be monsters --
yet familiar somehow,
when you see it: a house.
A house you somehow know.

You know its architecture, the bones of it,
the geography of its rooms,
the way the floors slant, and where
there is need of paint.

You’ve spent time there: weekends,
late nights drinking, smoking,
long, hilarious talks with friends
whose children are now married.
You went to the weddings.
People, too, who have forgotten you by now,
and people who have died.

It smells of wine and simmering soup,
also the salt air of a coastal town,
though landlocked and forbidden to you now.

You want to go in,
to see if you are right
about the rooms, the rugs, the water stains…
But suppose you do:

All those people will be there too,
the voices and the shades,
drinking, murmuring, staring at you.
It would only upset them
to see you again so suddenly.
And what would be the point of that?