I wonder if your memories store in post cards too? Let me explain…looking back seems to me there are a handful of key moments when bits of life wisdom have been delivered to me in phrases, usually seared into memory with a postcard like image of the very moment the phrase was spoken. More often than not, I did not fully understand or appreciate the phrase but my gut knew enough to store it. Over time some have fallen away but many, scrapbook like, linger. Here are a few of them…
I was with my mother, seated in her dressing room both of us half dressed, preparing for a wedding. Mine. I asked her what to do when the hurdles came? She got uncustomarily still. Then, even more so. She looked to the floor as if to pull wisdom up through the floor boards. Speaking from the experience of having lived it, she said Well honey, when the hurdles come…keep hurdling. She did just that all her life. I don’t recall one incidence in which she gave up. Until cancer got hold of her and even then, she embraced the adventure of dying with gusto. Not to say she always got what she wanted but she’d fight for it then adjust as needed and plough ever forward. It served her well and when the hurdles come, I hurdle as best I can.
Name dropping but I’m privileged to have called the great Rosemary Clooney a friend. She hosted annual and epic, open house Christmas Eve parties at her Roxbury house. It was a grand tradition to which all in her and her children’s village were welcomed and we all came in droves. By the time I had arrived at that particular holiday season, my life had fallen apart. Divorce, a very young son to create a happy childhood for, finances securely in an ever-flushing toilet. I could go on but you get the picture.
It was Christmas though and by golly I was going to be merry, if for no other reason than for my precious little boy. On went the red lipstick, the holiday garb and a smile. After church we went round the corner to Rosie’s. Her home was customarily filled with multiple generations of merriment, camaraderie, and an endless buffet. I was doing well, or so I thought, until I passed by Rosie who was seated in her well-worn and comfy sitting room chair. She grabbed my hand, looked through me and said, Keep singing baby, the music will never let you down. She lodged those words somewhere in the marrow of my bones…but what did they mean?
Decades now since she issued that directive and over the last few years I’ve begun to understand. First of all, she had a hard life. If you’ve not read it, pick up her autobiography Girl Singer and you’ll see what I mean. Those are words she lived by. Time and again she went back to her singing and it indeed never let her down. Lucky us. So, she was speaking from experience, sharing what had emphatically worked for her. Music has its own infectious momentum. Its physicality of breath alone lifts the spirit. It delivers challenges and in meeting them you experience small victories and wonders which in turn cultivate courage and joy. At this point too I whole heartedly believe that being involved, literally, with harmony…our cells are realigned to a, dare I say THE life giving and beneficent force. It is for instance impossible to scat and be sad. Try it. So..singing, I think, creates new possibilities, new avenues in life. It has for me.
I worked for several summers at Williamstown Theatre Festival. It was a very wonderful place to be. They had a spectacular Apprentice Program for all the theatre disciplines, one of which was stage management. This particular year the production I was involved with was assigned. From the program, an assistant stage manager by the name of Lily.
Lily was older than the rest of the apprentices and a recent immigrant from China starting her life anew in America, building a resume. Her father had been Artistic Director of the Beijing Theatre, her mother the lead actress there. Because the Sino-Soviet relationship had been in full bloom through the late 20th, early 21st century the two nations had enjoyed a robust cultural exchange…hence Stanislavski’s method was well entrenched right from the souce in the methodology of her parents’ artistry. In other words, Lily had absorbed into her DNA more about so called modern acting than any of us could ever hope to.
At the onset of China’s Cultural Revolution, her father had been put into a closet in his own theatre for two years in solitary confinement and her mother was sent to suffer hard manual labour in a factory in the hinterlands. (Some years after this I happened to be attending a rehearsal in the Beijing Theatre building and actually saw the closet in which Lily’s father had been imprisoned. It was very small.)
Lily and twelve of her friends managed to escape a similar fate by walking to outer Mongolia and scraping out a living in the high plains there for thirteen years. At the end of the revolution, they walked back. There she had met some kindly American do good-ers who recognized her brilliance, saw to it that she learned English and brought her to America where she had made her way to being with us.
Our play was a distinctly American piece and involved many props all of which fell to Lily to root out. How would anybody of her background know what a pez holder, or Budweiser, or pack of camels were? She fearlessly set out to find them and when she came back with her version of this collection our…have to say it…idiot Stage Manager raked her, publicly, over the coals. We were mortified. Lily took the verbal punches with no reaction whatsoever. We were stunned by her grace. She also in short order correctly sourced all the needed props.
Sitting on the grass together the next day, I asked her how she had managed to meet that awful moment with such poise? She laughed and said, When I was in outer Mongolia in the freezing winters working as a shepherd, I learned that if I stooped very low to the ground and looked up, I could see the stars more clearly.
A dear dancer pal of mine, has achieved eight decades. Movement has always been the central and informative universe of his journey. He has also had, however, a gift for translating his findings into words in much the same way a brilliant scientist every now and then can put enormously complex concepts into laymen’s terms. We were sitting at his kitchen table one morning, I was blathering on about some sourpuss feeling or other, complaining that I couldn’t get ‘unstuck.’ All I could see was the dead end of whatever it was. No light, no air. Change the energy, he suddenly said. Brilliant! He didn’t fall down the rabbit hole with me of trying to solve whatever the dilemma was. He unstuck me, broke the mesmerism of the moment by admonishing me to be something, anything but what I was. I was free to get a glass of water, not mentally repeat the error, take a walk, look at the sky, breathe and above all, be free to shift my perspective. Magic.
I started a not for profit a number of years ago in Colorado. I had two partners, one of whom turned out to be a con artist. Silly me…I had not done my research. I liked her, I believed her. The effort lasted 7 years then folded as a result. Long story not worth telling. Along the way though, as you might imagine, there were some incredibly uncomfortable discussions borne of revelations, ultimately revelations that needed to come to light in board meetings. Heading into the first of these I was in a state of knee knocking overwhelm. I was at a loss of where to begin, of how not to get lost in the awful weeds of it all, how not to get swallowed up in the betrayal. A fellow board member, in whom I had confided, took me aside just before the meeting, and in the hallway outside took my hands and said the perfect words. Keep it simple. It was the ideal directive to stick to the facts, to not get tossed by the roiling emotions of it and oh boy have I used that time and again. In far less stressful situations, I’ll hasten to add…but it has proved a very useful and very quick reset button, a profoundly restorative provision for a rational path forward.
There are more but for today I’ll, well…keep it simple, keep on hurdling and singing and change the energy and look up at the stars.
Blue Pearl 