What Will People Think?

Heavily involved in my third play in 3o years (ha!  I first typed 330 years!) I've been thinking a lot about what other people think.

I know on stage you can really feel it but your audience doesn't get it and might have no idea what you're doing... and there will never be an actor or an audience that gets everything....

I know that speaking honesty to my family recently freaked them out.  (This was about my Mom and their enabling and about the worth of human life which they can't admit in a context that feels to them religious- as if life isn't a miracle, as if they can't even say the word miracle.)  Last night we prayed for our show and an atheist was included happily in the circle- no problem, no harm no foul, nobody died... nobody got hurt.)

My Mom's generation thinks everybody's looking at them in real life- so they're always on stage.

Everybody in Western society is couching what they say by thinking of its result on the person they're saying it to - and what they personally can get- before considering whether or not the words or true, useful or gasp! kind.

We really don't value truth anymore but we value truth more than kindness- which is really scary.


I'm wondering if in the past, people just didn't fill silence with words.  It would be easy to get to that point if in the right setting- and maybe children really were seen and not heard most of the time, and maybe people didn't figure they had much to say until they hit about eight years old.

How old was Einstein when he spoke?

And who cut his hair?



Grandma dressed for Quik Chek- but who was she speaking for?
Grandpa didn't say much.


I was listening to Erwin Lutzer and he was talking about how a good king could raise a bad one and I was thinking about how my Dad did a good job. 

He burned things when he was little. 

He hurt animals when he was little.

And he didn't do anything like that at all as an adult.  Those things were gone before he became a father.

Well, he did burn pipes and cigarettes and cigarellos and a couple cigars.

There's this picture of him holding me, with a pipe in his mouth.

And long before the cancer diagnosis and his death I was so mad at him for smoking around me; his premature 3 pound 13 ounce baby in 1967.  I'm in the picture as big as a regular baby so maybe I was older than I look... I don't know.

But now I realize Dad had the pipe in his mouth and there is a 3% chance that it was lit.

He had anxiety; which he never spoke of and so does everybody else ever born. 

He wanted to do things with his hands.  It's kind of like how Daniel gives us 47 props so that we have something to do with our hands on stage.  I don't like it,  but I understand it.



Dad's got some mess in his family tree so that means I do too.

Who doesn't?


At one point I told my parents that I didn't want to have kids because the crazy was so high on both sides that I didn't want to have a crazy kid.

But now that I know much more about their crazy, and know so much more about crazy in general and about my crazy, I can't wait to have a kid.

What a great wonderful crazy miracle that will be.