Staging

I was born blind. A fact that terrified my mother. 

A good deal of my time before kindergarten was spent in hospitals with my eyes bandaged, waiting for someone to visit me. My earliest memories are of the blue tiled walls of an operating room and the smell of ether. During one stay I was given a toy car. I remember tilting my head back to peer out from under my bandages in order to see what I was holding. Another visit brought a plastic deer which I would trot, stiff-legged across my bed. I’m certain that at some point the car must have hit the deer. Those sorts of mishaps are unavoidable. Through no fault of my own I was simultaneously pathetic and adorable. Eventually the operations would stop and I would be fitted with a pair of extremely thick glasses. Pictures of myself from those days made me think that Dianne Arbus might have been our family photographer.

Much later in my life my mother admitted to me that she didn’t know if  she could handle raising a blind child. She told me that she was always afraid that I was going to die. I’ve come to find that she was right. I knew it then. I know it more now.

I came to understand the randomness of birth. The randomness of everything. Life is play without a script and with far too many directors and an even greater number of critics. In childhood the lines are new and the orchestration is lively. Every part is a good part. The bandaged child in the hospital room doesn’t know that the audience pities him. He has a car and a deer and a room and a meal. From behind the bandages every color is vibrant. Slowly though the scene starts to change. There is a re-write and the new language is less magical. Less optimistic. Adults. Why do they write like that? Why is there so much rain? It’s a wonder that we all don’t make umbrellas for a living.

You move on. The new sets are more muted and the lead is a considerably older woman. You can smell the stench of rigor. It smells like ether. Fucking adults, always trying to convince you that order comes with some reward. It doesn’t. Life is just slow death. In-between acts we catch on. Everyone has a script. Some are trying to sell them to the studio, some are reading ahead to see if they’re killed off and some just cut to the chase and they’ve already begun casting. Ten bucks says the blonde gets the part. Ten more says that this show won’t be around next year.

Onward into the void, your vision blurs. You keep telling yourself that you’ll give it one more year. You’ve told yourself that twenty times already and that’s not counting the years when you forgot to say it. You think, “Maybe someday I should write a script.” But why? There are already so many out there and it’s so much easier to act out someone else’s dream.

You’re a little long in the tooth to start being ambitious.

Then it happens. Your year. Your decade. You’re center stage, blinded by the footlights. The house is full. It’s a party scene. You’re in Paris. Everyone is costumed in ball gowns and tuxedos. The music swells. This part was custom made for you. You’re glib and fancy. The audience loves you. They laugh at all the right parts. They cry at all the right parts. They listened. Nothing is better than that.

The after parties are legendary. Pure Page Six stuff. You glide through rooms and lives. You pause occasionally to play a tune on the piano, chat up a socialite or befriend a diplomat and then it’s right back to the spotlight. You’re drunk on you and the champagne is free. 

In a fog one day you forget a line and it occurs to you that you’ve been doing this for a very long time. What does any of it mean anymore? What did any of it ever mean? Where did the time go? Where did the parties go? Where did your family go? The houses are smaller now. Never mind. The laughs are perfunctory. Never mind. It all feels over rehearsed. Never mind. You stand stage right in a small spotlight. You’re alone on the stage leaning toward the wings and hoping that the prompter notices your awkward pause, but the prompter has gone. “Line?” You whisper. Nothing. “LINE?” Nothing. The light begins to dim and half panicked you peer out into the darkness to see that most of the audience has left.

You think, “Maybe someday I should write a script.” But why?