Feel Freedom. Love your confidence. Be a joy bomb.
We’ve been using some of this quarantine time for coloring, paining, and play-doh with our two-year-old, so I joined the fun with my watercolors and an index card.
P.S. Trader Joe paper bags make really good dining room table artist blotters for toddlers.
From Tuesday, the coffee cup from a set my mom gave us for our anniversary:
And Wednesday, the peonies I got last Friday at Trader Joe’s:
The woman said, “Now sing something funny.”
“What’s funny?” I asked,
and started singing “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,”
Except the rhythm was wrong.
Is that funny?
Not to most. Gershwin is serious, y’all.
Or that time I tried to host a party,
But the toast fell flat,
And so did the Prosecco.
All the guests said,
“Maybe you shouldn’t try so hard,”
As they gathered their coats from the bed
and gathered the unopened bottles of cabernet.
I understand–wine’s not cheap.
So, how can I sing funny songs
When I can’t count Gershwin
and people abscond from my parties?
I’ll stick with slow, brooding ballads.
I have read articles recently about how Shakespeare wrote sonnets and King Lear during the plagues when the theaters were shuttered.
I applaud Mr. Shakespeare and thank him for his significant contributions to the canon.
When you hear these things in the midst of worldwide lockdown, does it inspire you to grasp pen and paper and set to work?
I feel uncomfortable pressure in the face of such encouragement. I’d better use this time wisely. After all, King Lear, ya know?
These last five days after Elon shut ‘er down for a good while, I’ve been celebrating the fact that my wife is awesome and makes it possible for me to take a nap in the afternoons.
After the first half of the spring semester my body is like, whaaaat?
This is a pattern—burst of academic energy and overwork followed by a break period in which my body understands there is an imminent series of dark days, my physiology turns on the ghost light.
I ask Melissa, “Why am I so tired?”
She answers, “This is what usually happens on your breaks.”
“Oh, yeah.” I forgot the last time.
We’ve done things like watch the Spenser movie on Netflix, make corned beef and cabbage for St. Patty’s, ask my Mama if she could procure some TP somewhere in Mt. Airy, NC. Thanks, Mama, and thank you Galaxy Grocery Store on Highway 89. What you gotta do these days for a roll.
While many of us need this body rest desperately, I’d venture to say that in these peculiar times many more of us need mind rest.
How many of us have sat in our residences still sporting hot and cold running water, electricity, and some kind of telephonic device that could be used to call someone we know for help if worse came to worse?
Yet we scroll headlines on same said telephonic devices crafted to get our fighty-flighty fingers to click to read how we are headed into cataclysmic Mad-Max-topia where all the TP and hand sanitizer has been hoarded in a Tennessee garage for sale only on the dark web.
Yesterday at dinner (corned beef leftovers :)), Melissa said, “This is like a bad movie.”
And I said, “Exactly, and we are all screening our own mental movies when we see all the Netflix-style mandatory trailers on our news feeds. (Netflix, still not a fan of the automatic, enforced preview. And music theatre nerds, insert your own joke or reference to the Miss Saigon tune here.)
If you are reading this on the interwebs, it is likely you have access to a living space where you are relatively safe and can hunker down and ride this thing out.
You may be in doubt about whether you can continue to pay for said living space or the commensurate utilities. I hear you. I have been there, and it was a product of my own choices, not a microbe-induced global shutdown.
I mean it, I’ve been there. As in…outside the check cashing store in North Hollywood where I had been denied a usurious loan, unsuccessfully holding back tears as I called my friend to please lend me $500 so I could pay bills. I know what skint feels like as my friends in the UK like to say. Bless you all. Stay inside.
Whatever your what-if scenarios may be, I invite you to let the thoughts come. Play them out to the very end.
In that movie’s ending, are you absolutely sure you won’t be all right if everything shakes down the way you fear? Even life and death–can you be certain that in the middle of the circumstance you fear the most you won’t look up and say, “You know what? I’m okay.”?
Reminds me of something I heard career coach and men(sch)tor Barbara Deutsch say to me back in LA–“It’s not fear. It’s discomfort. You can handle discomfort.”
Seriously, how much discomfort have you handled in your life? List it. See? You’ve got this.
One dis-ease that we can be vigilant about containing is the one we spread to ourselves by believing all the Chicken Little pronouncements our precious minds deliver to us in the hope of keeping the sky from falling on our brains.
Our minds are truly trying to be helpful–much like twenty-two-month-old Noah is trying to be helpful when he throws his used diaper into the dirty clothes hamper.
I invite us all to tread gently in these days with ourselves and therefore with each other. If I’m not kind with you, then I’m not kind with me in the same moment.
Our brains will want to throw a few wet diapers in the dirty clothes. So, what if we take that diaper out and put it where it goes with a smile on our face thanking our super cute brain for pitching in?
And speaking of super cute, I leave you with this sweet moment in case you just need some unfiltered love, joy, and connection today.
After dinner hugs, or as Noah likes to say, “Hooolld it.”
It’s all good until 0:53 when I block Noah’s intense tickle game.
They didn’t text you back, and it’s been three days.
You just texted him, and you see the three dots appearing and disappearing.
You read that text, and she used a period. A period!
This missive is brought to you by text, and the requisite stories that surround.
Brené Brown wrote in her book Rising Strong one of the most helpful phrases to ever enter my life: “The story I’m making up.”
The other day at the kitchen sink I got real hurt and pissy about something Melissa said.
Noticing the atmospheric shift, she inquired into my state.
My ego wanted to say, “You said this this way, and it meant that.”
But I remembered Dr. Brené’s words, and I said, “The story I just made up is….”
Inside of a second, I felt my ego experience this semi-dramatic micro-death–Wicked Witch of the West melting in fast-forward–and the next second, the the air opened right up, and Melissa said with a very open heart, “I’m sorry, sweetie, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
And the thing I understood in that moment is that Melissa did not, in fact, hurt my feelings. I hurt my feelings with the story I told myself.
Once my story dissolved like frost on a confused February day, I was sunny as a daffodil asking, “Is it okay for me to be out now? It’s February.”
Stories, y’all. They’re great. We know this. Until they’re terrible.
Our brains–capable survivalists that they are–make up a story inside of a nanosecond, and we don’t even know a story has been told to us until we’re filled with anxiety, fear, resentment, envy, and a side of outrage and indignation.
That asshole drives way too fast through the parking lot.
They stopped talking when you walked in the room.
An authority person asks to speak to you.
Adrenaline, right???
Immediate story.
I watch this in my boys all the time. Last Monday morning the older schmoopie pie, or Nugget Number One as we like to say, was looking out the front window at one of his latest obsessions: the garbage truck.
He pulled at the blinds to get a better view, and when I gently moved his hand away to pull up said window treatments, well you know what happened. He cried.
I held him up so he could see better out the window and pay proper homage to the truck collecting our trash–such a luxury, right?–and I could see the “oh-this-is-better-than-what-I-thought-was-happening” expression soften on his face.
I then queried God in my heart, “How often are you just pulling up the blinds for me so’s I can view the rubbish vehicle and I’m all like, ‘No! Hoooollllldd iiiitt!’?”
Often.
Now let’s transfer this storytelling mayhem over into the biz.
The casting director moves your resume to the side of the table while you sing.
The accompanist doesn’t respond when you smile and say hello. Nor when you collect your book and say, “thank you.”
The table people don’t give you an adjustment or ask for anything else.
Stories.
Yeah, there’s a small chance the CD is bored at a required call, the accompanist hates you, and the table people are indifferent about your work, but so are many other less jaw-clinching possibilities in the multiverse.
But you know where stories come in real handy for you?
In that song you were just singing when you were worrying about your surly piano collaborator and the table-folk who might have just received a snippy email from a boss or producer that they’re currently making up a story about.
But in your song. That’s where your magical mind can have free rein and create something beautiful and captivating that might just bless that table-ninja.
It’s pretty nuts, right? The narratives our brains spin and we believe that cause us all kinds of suffering, and then when that very practice would serve us and the work we love, we shut it down.
“But there isn’t an imaginary person in the studio with me. Referring to that point on the wall is stupid.”
Guess what. That casting director you decided was bored with you? She isn’t real either. You made her up, too.
So what would happen if we took all that natural imagination energy and directed it toward specific, artful, spontaneous work? Would that feel something akin to satisfying? Sounds good to me.
Yep, sometimes Dad is just pulling up the blinds so you can see the garbage truck.
On January 14, I told you how life (and death) was showing me that life is too precious–too precious to waste on not enjoying breathing, eating, laughing, seeing, walking, smelling, thinking, feeling, loving.
Why do we waste our precious moments getting pissed off, taking things personally, worrying about someone’s perception of us? (They ain’t thinking about us.)
But there’s also this–getting pissed this morning at the asshole Camaro weaving through pokey Greensboro traffic is precious.
Getting equally pissed later at the blue Camry (do the cars have to start with C-A-M?) who diligently drove one tick under the speed limit through my favorite country roads (can’t we just drive a civilized 50?), and made me two minutes late for my morning meeting (I made me two minutes late)–also a privilege.
“Again! Again!” That’s what Noah says after I read “Clifford and His Pals” at bedtime.
I say, “Okay,” and I read the story again.
I tell myself I’m doing a long run of a show, and this time I’m going to find something new in the Big Red Dog’s tale.
Sure enough, there’s a different illustration or a story point the next time as I read and smell the top of our 21-month-old’s sweet head.
And that’s what the planet says every morning at different sunrise hours all the time–again!
Again! I’m being told again. Life is so precious, and the seconds hurtle by us like racehorses. Not to be reined or held, but for us to gasp at their power, speed, and beauty.
Since that January 14 post, so many souls in my immediate circle have left.
Life is saying this to me again, and so I say it to you again. “What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In the same poem, Mary Oliver writes
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Yes it does, Mary.
Maybe for you today there is something you want to step toward but for some reason you stop yourself–feeling like an imposter, fearing a life on the streets, admitting you love musicals.
Let my nudges be your nudges. Take one step in that direction today. I will bet you a fro yo that it will reveal another step you can take, and things will start to get clearer.
Thank you for reading this, and thank you for letting me share with you. It makes my hurtling seconds precious.
One thing we learn in music theatre literature class: the same story can have many different plots.
Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story have different plots, but they are the same story.
The original stage version of Cabaret varied greatly from the film version. Same story.
When I was twenty-eight years old, I made a drastic plot change in my choose-your-own-adventure tale. I decided to leave New York City and move to Los Angeles.
That decision proved to create a sizable tuition bill to the School of Life, and it also cleared the way for deep growth, healing, and miracles.
I still remember my agent telling me, “Don’t leave New York.” I did. And the following years saw me fighting morning traffic between mid-century stucco apartment buildings and strip malls in Van Nuys to get to my job at a mental health center–clearly an ironic plot flourish–and barely working as an actor.
I missed New York–the architecture, the seasons, public transportation (yes, even that), theatre auditions, and my friends.
After Melissa (whom I met in Los Angeles, thank you LA!) and I moved to North Carolina, I came home from work at Elon feeling ill.
I had just left a meeting where an alum several years my junior was sharing his experiences from Broadway shows and national tours.
Melissa held my shoulders and asked me what was wrong. As soon as her eyes met mine, I sobbed.
“I missed my window,” I cried. “I left New York right when I was getting callbacks for Broadway shows. I turned down a Broadway contract to stay in Los Angeles. I was so stupid. My ship’s sailed, and it’s my own damn fault.”
She hugged me and let me snot it out for a little while longer.
She got my gaze again, and with compassion in her voice she said, “Sweetheart, you did not miss your window. If you want to move to New York tomorrow, we can go. You can always dream a new dream.”
We did not move to New York the next day, but something loosened up inside me, and over the years I’ve come to see something–
Your plot is not your story.
The fine details of how you landed from points A to double-K are all workable and moldable–subject to the most miraculous of plot twists. The question we must ask is–what will my story be?
I want my story to be that of a man who loves well, kicks serious ass as a husband, and models for my sons how to honor the fire that God’s put in my heart to tell stories, to share music, and to add beauty and meaning to the world.
That’s what I’m working on.
How about you?
Please remember–there may be plot points you’d like to go back and rework. Me, too.
But your story–the theme of who you are–that happens when the shit piles we’ve stepped in and left behind get miraculously transmuted to gold. I know because I’m living the gold-from-shit reality right now.
And I’m praying the same grace that’s changed my life will fill yours, too.
Let’s determine today of all days to let grace in and to shed a little light:
I read somewhere that asking for a hug
From someone wearing casts on both their arms
Was much like asking cats to bark. A drug
Or magic potion (smartphones?) wields its charms
On unsuspecting minds, and we, the broken-
Appendaged think we’re Bolshoi-ready. Have
You ever found your sweet self there? Woken
To find that you were needing gauze and salve
And stitches stat? My hand is raised. A friend
Once asked, “What is it that you want?” Bemused,
I answered, “Hell if I know. Maybe lend
Me half your working wanter? I’m confused.”
He reached out his uncasted arms and squeezed.
And something in my chest and shoulders eased.
Just after Christmas, a forty-eight-year-old friend and colleague died.
In the past week, another dear friend and fellow actor in Los Angeles, recently turned fifty, entered home hospice care after bravely battling colon cancer for several years.
Alarms all around me sound that life is so precious.
Last night my wife and I fought. When I’m angry, I function at the cognitive level of a below-average eleven-year-old. I said things I needed to apologize for. I woke up this morning sore and sad.
Then I remembered what Father José told us in our pre-marital counseling, recounting his own marriage mistakes–don’t waste one second of your precious life together staying angry.
I said I was sorry. I didn’t want to waste our precious time.
I look at our two boys. After miscarriages, invasive treatments, procedures, more shots than you can count, and two failed IVF cycles, we finally came to the very spiritual place of, “F*#% it, let’s drink.”
That’s when we found out we were pregnant with our first–whom we were sure would be our only. I look at both of them every day and quietly ask them, “Are you real?”
Life is precious. We are blessed, gifted, entrusted with being here in this moment, now, today. We’re blessed to be breathing. We’re blessed to be in reasonably good health.
Reading this on an electronic device connected to the interwebs means there are miracles in our lives that hold us up and allow us to worry about things like our art. Miracles like clean running water, roofs, beds, friends.
These weeks shocked and shook me. I just turned forty-two, and I am not guaranteed tomorrow.
I’m going to cultivate and share what God put me on this earth to nurture and give away.
And I ask you the same thing. What burns in your heart? What are you jealous that others get to do? What one thing have you been putting off until the stars align and you feel like you’re ready?
Write that down.
Now write down one thing you can do today to start moving one step in that direction. Something real small–a phone call, a Google search, a text message.
In the musical I’m writing, the protagonist sings in Act 2, “Life’s filled with weakness-filled power.” We’re so vulnerable and so resilient. Like the voice. And like the voice, we can allow the breath through and create something beautiful.
Go to it, y’all. Someone is looking at you and needs you to show them what to do with “(their) one wild and precious life.”
Do you ever ask yourself questions that begin with the phrase, “Wouldn’t it be cool if….”?
Like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could rent a castle in Ireland and our family and friends could come join us periodically during our extended adventure-cation?”
Or, “Wouldn’t it be cool if brownie brittle and vanilla bean ice cream with salted caramel was a superfood?”
Or, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I were thriving as a creative?–working on exciting projects with terrific people and making very good money?”
Too much? That last one? The brownie brittle with the sugar-fat dairy deliciousness seems a little more feasible?
Ya know, you’re not alone here. Confession time.
Sometimes I will sit at the kitchen table and share my wouldn’t-it-be-cools with Melissa, and in the next breath, a chorus of several well-meaning, reasonable, and loving relatives who moved to heaven several years past will say something like, “Why ain’t you just grateful for what you have?”
And I have a lot. My life is stupid blessed. Like, miracle crazy full. So, these voices in concert seem to have a point; and I feel a little ashamed.
The committee will then collaborate with my imagination and paint a scenario in which my selfish dreams send me careening down a path of folly and destruction for my family, and all the time, the well-meaning fear guides are shaking their heads saying, “See? If you’d’ve just been content with what the Lord’s already blessed you with, you wouldn’t be paying the price for all your greedy grabbin’.”
I actually deal with a particular voice that says to me if I reach too far, I will lose all the wonderful things I already have because, clearly, I didn’t appreciate them enough.
This one’s tough, y’all. And even as I write it I’m having one of those, “Oh, I haven’t come as far on that one as I thought I had.”
I’m convinced I get to be a teacher because I need the lessons I teach.
One student of mine is brilliant, and he regularly hides. He makes his energy small, and he looks down. I tell him how I got the note, “Dan, stop looking down at the stage,” well into my mid-thirties. It’s still something I have to be very vigilant about.
I tell this student, “Who are you to decide that you can’t be brilliant? You didn’t make you. You arrived on this planet with these aptitudes and a passion to cultivate them. When you hide, you are cheating all of us out of the one and only you!”
When I turn these words to myself, I feel a challenge in my guts, and I see the places where I’ve decided to hide.
When we expand, the territory is unfamiliar. Read: discomfort. We become trustees of more. Read: responsibility. Then we can give more. Read: generosity.
When we appreciate what we have, we build a foundation to support more and therefore contribute more. And that is humble and kind.
We acknowledge that the things we already have are precious gifts. Who are we to cut ourselves off from more?
Tomorrow it’s December. Let’s commit to open our hearts and minds to all kinds of delightful possibilities in the final month before we say hello to 2020.
And let’s commit to breaking down big dreams into small, manageable chunks. And let’s commit to showing up every day and doing the small things with appreciation and care.
And let’s say to ourselves, “Who do I think I am not to let all the good stuff come to and through me?”
People need your story, your song, your dance, your words. Our privilege is to share them.
What are you going to bring into the world this year?
I’ll go first. I’m going to produce the first developmental reading of the musical I’ve written, Across.
And I’m going to put my body back in the audition room this year.
I want to hear from you. Please share a dream or two that you’re going to start letting through in the comments below.
Or email me what you’re heart-ing about—dan@dancallaway.com–and tell me about what your personal committee says when you dare to say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if….”
Because yes, it would be so cool.
When I played the Padre in Man of La Mancha with Triad Stage last spring I went full Uta Hagen and asked stage management for a lil Moleskin that I could write in.
Our version was set in a detention center on the US/Mexico border in the near future.
Here’s the vibe:
Great cast, terrific production.
We had a pre-show in which we were living that detention center life, and I decided to fill much of it like any rogue Franciscan: writing poems.
It was a needed exercise in point of view, and Padre preached to me to examine my own cozy life in relation to what so many experience.
I’ll share one of his poems here:
I’m sitting on a wooden bench inside
A prison on the border where I came
To help the stranger and the cast-aside–
But helping is unlawful now–the same
As feeling empathy–code for weak.
Compassion stands for failure these days. God
Forbid we have to suffer so the meek
Might come to own a portion of the sod
We suffocate with asphalt, demarcate
With walls graffitied forty layers deep
With spray-can prayers–acrid incense–late
Laments to test God’s ears, while Christ’s eyes weep.
Inside these painted walls we wait and pray
That more Thy-Kindgom-come would rule the day.
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