On the art we didn't make
Or: how to make peace with what may never be
Neil, I’m sorry, I’m taking your idea and I’m running away with it and I’m making it my own.
What do you do with the disappointment of all the Romeos you didn’t get to play?
This is the thought gifted to me by my friend Neil, who I saw recently in a two-hand play about life and art and family. He was pondering the lost artistic opportunities that we have to cope with as we get older — and as he teeters on the line between early- and mid-forties, the likelihood that he will get to play one of theatre’s most famously “only a teen would behave that way” characters becomes more remote. And while I think there’s much to ponder of the potentially heightened hilarity and pathos possible from seeing Romeo’s decisions made by someone who has no excuse not to know better, I sort of suspect I’m not going to get to see Neil’s interpretation.
How are we supposed to metabolize a fact like that, in all its vicious and inevitable unfairness?
My father had his own theatre company when I was a pre-teen — set it up himself, did all the programming himself, had a role in all of the shows, did a lot of the construction work required to turn an old church into a performing space, invested a lot of his own money in it (we’ll come back to that) — it was the realization of a dream. And one of the shows he put on was a music theatre revue called “Vienna to Broadway”, whose repertoire spanned from Kurt Weill through…well Sondheim, anyway. One of my favourite parts of that show was a trio of Porgy and Bess songs. You could argue that he and the other entirely white people in the cast had no business performing those songs. Which he acknowledged in his spoken introduction to that section of the show. This, too, was wish fulfillment. This was music he would never get to perform otherwise, never should perform otherwise, and it was perhaps the greatest music ever written for performance on Broadway. So he was gifting himself the chance to do it, just this once.
I wonder if I would have a different relationship to the concept of dream realization if the theatre company hadn’t gone bankrupt after a single glorious season.
I wonder what lessons that little 12-year-old Me was internalizing, watching first every performance she possibly could of each of the three shows he put on, and then feeling (not too intensely, and serious respect to my parents for how well they shielded us from this) the stress and the sadness that followed.
I wonder too how my parents felt when they watched me spend my whole university career not making any music. That was a shower thought from today that had never occurred to me before. Amazing that there could be more depth left to plumb on this topic. I’ve noted before (many times, I assume) that I had planned for my whole life to go to university for music. And then I got into two voice programs and journalism at Ryerson and somehow ended up at Ryerson.
But have I ever mentioned that my parents fully moved house so that I could go to the high school with the best music and choir program in the school district?
Not that we owned a home at that point (see: bankruptcy a couple of years prior). And not like we were terribly attached to the neigbourhood we were living in at the time. But we were in the wrong zone to get into the high school where Nancy Kidd reigned over a full-blown kingdom of choirs, and in the right one to get into a high school that I think might actually have had zero choirs. And we wrote letters and tried to get an exception made and when that didn’t work we simply moved. Packed everything and moved so that I could join the kingdom. And by the time I got to grade 12 I was in four choirs.
And then I entered that journalism program and I was in no choirs for about six years.
Now. Two things to say. The first is, four high school choirs and “way I currently spend pretty much all my leisure time” aside, I’ve never actually been a Choir Nerd. I know, because I am surrounded by them during the aforementioned most-of-my-leisure-time. I see where the bar is, and I’m not clearing it. I love music, and choral singing is the place where I have landed in terms of making it, but what I really still feel I’m supposed to be doing is my own version of “Vienna to Broadway”. So it’s not quite as big a deal that I had a gap in my choir career as it would be if a Ryan or a Spencer or an Alex or an Amelia had that gap. But I spent that time not making music at all, and that was a very wrong thing.
The second is that I did make some halfhearted attempts to find music making opportunities. I remember a couple of times looking into whether Ryerson had any choirs, or any music classes to take. If I recall correctly, the closest it came was a kind of history of world music class. Which I probably should have taken, but didn’t. And I felt, with those attempts, that I had done my best to find a way to bring forward something that had been a lot of my life in high school.
But - and again, this was a shower thought from today, somehow this had never occurred to me before - I lived in Toronto.
Do you know how riddled with choirs Toronto is?
It is teeming with choirs. Of all skill levels. And commitment levels.
And until I was a solid couple of years out of university, it did not even occur to me to look for one. Choirs came with one’s educational institution, and counted as some kind of extracurricular. You did not have to go looking for a choir.
What???
I’ve found my way back to choirs. I’ve stumbled into the best choirs in this province, in fact. But I lost a lot of skill-building years to simple lack of curiosity and follow through. Goodness knows how much further along I might be by now. I might understand half note triplets and be able to seamlessly switch between them and eighth note triplets.
I heard a story from another friend recently. A filmmaker friend who got into a script writing program that guided participants through the process of developing a feature-length film script. As part of that program, the group received two sessions with a high-level industry professional — lots of time spent on juries, you know the type. Funky glasses. Statement necklaces. Lines on her face falling in very unkind ways. Someone whose good opinion would be very useful to a developing artist. At her first session, she invited participants to pitch their ideas to her. My friend did, and she was very effusive about it - highly complimentary, congratulating him on it, and so on (is your skin already crawling a bit? Mine was at this point).
She came back at the last session once all the scripts were written. She hadn’t read any of the scripts. And she - with no reference to the conversations she’d had last time, or any acknowledgement of the praise she had already been free with - wanted to be pitched to again. He told her that telling them to pitch again without her having cared enough to read what they had made was asking them to perform for her - to be theatrical and fake, and to raise her higher on the already very high pedestal she was placing herself atop of. And he refused to do it. Refused, with vehemence and a middle finger that I’m not entirely sure was metaphorical.
And if you have any experience - certainly in the arts but really just in life - with being a relatively new person being “mentored” by an “authority” you know the particular rage when that mentorship is really just being told to genuflect at their feet and gratefully receive whatever pittance of attention and praise they’re willing to parcel out. It’s a really specific stomach churn. I think he was right to refuse to play along.
But oh dear me how my heart does ache for the film that might have been more easily made with her support. And for the lesson given to that group of writers of what they could expect in terms of respect for their time, their work, their art.
You know those lists? Those “30 under 30” lists? Where those publications — almost always extremely industry-specific — aggregate a collection of shining stars united by their youth?
Another friend has just become too old for one of them.
And a couple of times he’s mentioned to me a small wistfulness about never having been even considered for placement on one such list that pertains to his industry. He would have been a very worthy addition to it. An easy selection, I would say. He’s one of the most brilliant people I know, and very good at what he does, and has been very good at what he does since he was very young. And had achieved by 29 — the age he was when we first had this conversation — a truly impressive list of credentials. Made a serious impact on his field and his community. He would have been a completely natural addition to the most recent version of that list that has been published — the last he would have been eligible for.
Now, I’m not saying he thinks the list matters. No one actually thinks those lists matter. They are at a level of irrelevant ego stroking that is really only exceeded by the Oscars. But every so often, this friend will bring up someone not-so-impressive who made it on the most recent list and speak gently disparagingly of them, in a, “Why them? Why not me?” way.
I told him the reason why “them and not him” the first time he brought it up, and I have told him the reason every time since, and I suspect I will go on telling him the reason for at least the next decade. Because those lists are a PR stunt, not a measure of merit, you just need someone to send your name along to the selection committee. And to write you up in a way that makes you sound really exciting. And he had never asked anyone to do that for him. I can’t imagine he thought that there was some employee somewhere whose job was to keep their finger on the pulse of the under-30s in his field and tap all the truly great ones for inclusion, but I really don’t think — even at this stage — he’s grasping that it’s like any job application, any grant application, any other ask for recognition. He needed someone to nominate him. He could have been on that list. I’d lay money he would have been on that list.
And I don’t see him being held back too much by it — he’s a pretty unstoppable force — but sometimes, when I write a grant application with him, I do think, “What if you had applied the same vigorous belief to yourself and your worthiness that you are applying to this project?”
When my sister was in the fourth grade she started teaching herself how to juggle - and she was fully equipped with both the scarves (for the true beginner, much easier to learn with because they take a famously long time to fall after being tossed into the air) and the balls (for the intermediate juggler, though I believe they are still in someway calibrated to be friendly to the process). She’d been working away at her juggling abilities for a while when it came time for the auditions for that year’s talent show.
Now, my sister had yet to miss performing in a talent show. She was a tiny fearless ball of energy and noise, and she knew she had high entertainment value. Every other year, she had sung a song. But this year she had something different to show. This year, she kinda knew how to juggle. So she brought along three scarves and two balls (she could only do two at that point) and positioned herself in the loose lineup waiting to be seen. And she was near a cluster of kids who were all waiting their turns, and warming up their skills - which were all pretty notably more impressive than juggling two balls. And the teacher called her name. And she had Baby’s First Anxiety Moment, started crying, and ran away.
And for the first time in her life, she didn’t participate in the talent show. Her first moment of serious self doubt ruined her perfect streak. And she never tried to juggle again.
We all know, because cliches never lie, that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. But more than that, it seems you do actually miss them — you go through life with a little hole in your heart where a memory of an accomplishment should live. And I’m sure that film will still get made, and those lists are bullshit, and honestly I’m relieved to not have a professional juggler as a sister. And those heart holes can serve a powerful purpose of showing us — even in retrospect — that the thing really mattered, and the desire is a lesson there to teach us more about ourselves and how we want to move through the world. But — and I don’t mean to come at you with anything too Inspirational here — I think when you know you should play Romeo, you gotta work to try to find a way to play Romeo.
And truly, Neil. Age bent Romeo and Juliet. He's been playing the field his whole life, but his shtick has been getting less cute as the silver has started to appear in his beard. Not being able to land Rosaline is a wakeup call. She's been focused on nothing but her career and is starting to wonder if there's something more to life than the buzz of the office. They're drawn to each other not from youthful exuberance but from aging-induced panic. There's something there. I think there’s still time.