Month: April 2015

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Laughter in the Shadows

The “Murder on the Nile” rehearsal had been going well. Plenty of threats, plenty of clues, the body being found just when it should. And then, as a character cracked a minor witticism, I heard a cackle from the audience.

Despite having to keep character, I almost smiled. There was no denying when Missy was in the house.

There are silent theater audiences in the world. Missy is not often one of them. When it comes to a performance, my wife’s physically and mentally disabled aunt often wears her emotions on her sleeve … and on her lips. A funny bit of business on stage may get a whoop of laughter. An injury to a character will suddenly get an “Ow!” from her sympathetic lips.

It’s not constant, like a “Mystery Science 3000” commentary track, but it’s not held back when she’s there, either. And because my wife Heather hasn’t been feeling well, Missy’s been there a lot, coming with me to practice after practice as the plot falls into place.

So, once in a while, we find ourselves with feedback from the darkness. I can’t really complain. In this, Missy truly is family.

I have never been what actors sometimes call a “smiler” – the sort of person who sits in the audience of a show, smiles and nods, and then ambles off to my car thinking how pleasant it all was. I laugh. Loudly. Strongly. Often infectiously. My actor friends have been accused of planting me in the audience just to get things moving, like a lighter held to a piece of kindling.

One memorable moment came when I took Heather to a long-ago performance of “The Mikado” at the Longmont Theatre Company. The show is GIlbert & Sullivan at its finest: beautiful music, a crackbrained plot and funny as heck. I laughed without hesitation or restraint several times, and I had plenty of company.

And then, at one point, a gentleman in front of me turned around. He whispered “Do you mind? Some of us are trying to enjoy the show!”

I didn’t say anything. I really didn’t. But at that moment, I was seriously tempted to respond with “I’m succeeding.”

Thinking back on that, and on Missy’s moments of shock or joy, the importance of that keeps coming back to me. How often do we show our appreciation? How often do we make it obvious?

An actor beneath the lights can’t hear smiles. That’s obvious. Most people we meet aren’t any more telepathic than that, yet we often ask them to be. Not necessarily with small compliments – as a people, Americans are pretty good at dropping those into a conversation – but with the real joys and worries that drop below the level of small talk and into true understanding.

I know, we’re reluctant to drop that mask of “I’m doing fine” with just any stranger. (Stranger? Missy’s never learned that word yet.) But many times we keep it up even around friends, reserving the true depth of what we feel. What if we didn’t?

I don’t mean striding the stage like a ham Shakespearean actor in mid-soliloquy. Heaven knows my own personality is on the quiet side many times. But loud or quiet, there’s a power to be had when we open ourselves up and lay our feelings bare. It’s why gatherings such as weddings or funerals can be so memorable and have such power; we’ve been given permission to open the gates, tear down the walls and show how we feel.

I don’t pretend it’s always comfortable. Or easy. But it can draw people together like nothing else. If you’ve ever had a friend you could say anything around, you know what I mean. Things come so much easier when the inner guard can relax at last.

It takes practice, of course. Maybe start with a safe, controlled environment. One designed to elicit broad emotions, where you can open up and react in a crowd of strangers, comfortable in your anonymity.

If only I knew somewhere like that ….

Oh. Wait a minute.

See you at the show. And maybe I’ll hear you, too.

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Taking His Best Shot

Lucas Hinch may have become a new international hero.

Granted, few of us have ever met the Colorado Springs man. But he managed to seize his 15 minutes of fame recently after his computer gave him one battle too many. Mr. Hinch, of course, dealt with his frustrations in a mature and responsible way.

Oh, who am I kidding? He took the computer into an alley, pulled a gun and put eight rounds into it.

I’ll wait a few moments for the cheering to die down.

Naturally, I’m not endorsing this as a method. Spontaneous gunfire is rarely a solution to anything, including the latest televised adventures of the Rockies’ bullpen. (Pillows are the traditional projectile for a television screen bearing bad sports news, at least in the case of my late grandfather-in-law.) But I think anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes staring at a Blue Screen of Death can sympathize entirely with Mr. Hinch.

For my wife Heather, it’s a no-brainer. More than once, she has intoned the magic words “Scotty, I’m throwing this thing out the window!” after our machine of the moment ate a college research paper due in an hour … or dropped a connection in the middle of an online game … or simply got its power button stuck, requiring fingernails worthy of Dolly Parton to pry back into operation.

She never did commit that act of electronic defenestration, by the way. But I think that had less to do with sweet reason, and more to do with chronic illness and the annoyance of putting up new storm windows.

How do so many of us reach that point?

That may seem as obvious as asking whether I-25 will be a pain in the neck tomorrow. But it’s a valid question. Certainly, computers have become vital to our day-to-day life. But not every critical aspect of our life tempts a 9mm sonata.

The answer, I think, comes down to communication.

The other day, I saw a bumper sticker in the grocery store parking lot: “If animals could speak, we would all be vegetarian.” Whether you agree or not, it underlines a larger philosophical point – it’s harder to hate something that has become real to you, that has a face and a voice and a genuine response. It’s why prejudices sometimes wither when an “other” is met personally, or why a famous personality may seem to be so much nicer when met face-to-face.

And, on the flip side, it’s why our blood pressure goes through the roof when communication is hopeless.

The best example may be road rage. If someone accidentally walks into your path on the sidewalk, the most likely response is a quick apology, maybe even an embarrassed laugh. Come just a little close while driving and the results are screams and angry horns. It’s not just the higher speeds and masses of metal, it’s the fact that we no longer have another person in our midst – just a metal box that’s impervious to our hard feelings.

I don’t know how to solve PC rage, short of giving the machine actual reasoning abilities – and that way lies Skynet, or at least a future where humanity never wins at Jeopardy! again. But it does suggest a way to lower the pressure in so many other areas of our lives. Talk. Listen. See the faces around you, not just their positions on the landscape.

We don’t have to agree. But if we can at least see each other as human beings worthy of attention, the rest can follow. Maybe we can even find some common interests to share.

And if those interests include a recalcitrant laptop and a pair of sledgehammers, I’ll be over in five minutes.

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April Love

As I write this, the Colorado Rockies are sitting on top of the National League West. King of the hill. Top of the heap. Masters of all they survey.

Or, more realistically, the lords of April.

I can see some of the longtime Rockheads nodding in agreement. For the newer fans, excited by the fast start of the boys in purple, let me give you some real-world comparisons for perspective:

“What a beautiful wedding! Oh, that marriage will surely last forever.”

“4-0 in the preseason! I’m telling you, the Broncos are going to crush the Super Bowl this year.”

“He won Iowa hands down. You know it’s just a matter of time before we all start calling him Mr. President.”

“Man, this Colorado spring is gorgeous. Aren’t you glad to finally say goodbye to ice and snow?”

You get the picture?

Yes, our hometown baseball crew is doing well in April. I’m pleased but not terribly shocked. The Rockies always do well in April. They last just long enough to get everyone excited and then a) the first three injuries happen, b) the wheels fall off our pitching rotation and/or c) Dinger the Dinosaur attracts the wrath of the baseball gods merely for existing.

How bad an indicator is it? In 2007, the year the Rockies actually made the World Series, they managed a 10-16 record in April. Mediocre with a side order of painful.

Until, suddenly, they weren’t.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I love the grand old game.

If ever there was a sport where the cream rises to the top, it’s baseball. Sure, there are bizarre flukes and bad calls, just like any other sport. But a 162-game regular season acts as one heck of a filter. When you hit a five-game winning streak in football, you’re playoff-bound for sure. When you hit a five-game winning streak in baseball, it’s … Wednesday.

Well, unless you’re the Marlins. Then it’s more of a miracle. But I digress.

I’ve had friends complain that baseball is too slow a game, that nothing seems to happen. They’re missing the point. Baseball, at its heart, is a game of patience.

There’s no clock. Any moment could be the one that wins or loses it all, however lopsided the score. (Especially with our bullpen.)

There’s a long season. You build the foundation of your season slowly and carefully, to where an unusual two weeks may mean nothing – or it may be the capstone of everything you’ve been working toward.

And there are players behind the players, always building to the promise of tomorrow. Baseball has perhaps the best-developed minor league system of any sport, a farm ground that allows you to watch not just today’s stars but the potential for years down the road. (Assuming they don’t get swiped by a richer club, of course, but that’s an argument for another day.)

It’s a life lesson turned into a sport, that you don’t have to win every at-bat, or even every game. But if you do the small things right enough, often enough, over time the small things become the big things.

It isn’t all staked on one April.

Sure, I’ll sit back and enjoy the Rockies’ wins. For today, they’re good. For tomorrow, there are no promises. Such is baseball. Such is life. A good beginning has to have follow-through if it’s to be more than a memory.

Maybe it’ll be there. Maybe not. We’ll see. Patience now, patience always.

Yes, the Rockies are truly towering. But only time can tell if they’ve peaked too soon.

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Cracking the Case

There’s something very soothing about being in an Agatha Christie play.

I admit that sounds a bit odd. After all, Dame Agatha delighted in mayhem. Over dozens of books, she never found a cause of death she didn’t like, from the prosaic knife or pistol to the ever-threatening digitalis in the teacup. And the danger could come from anywhere, including a previous victim, the detective, or even the narrator.

But at its heart, Agatha Christie’s world is a sensible place. Order is disturbed and then put right. No problem is impossible to solve. Consider the information at hand, discard preconceptions and the answer – never an answer, always the answer – can always be reached.

It’s a nice place to visit. And starting May 1 with the Longmont Theatre Company’s “Murder on the Nile,” I get to do just that.

I just wish I could live there.

Oh, we’ve got our own set of mysteries at Chez Rochat. Most of them, at any given time, tend to revolve around the health of my wife Heather. Heather is to chronic illness what Mozart was to composition: a natural talent, with new and surprising directions emerging at every turn.

She’s dealt with Crohn’s disease. With multiple rounds of endometriosis. With a condition I’ve mentioned here before called ankylosing spondylitis, a disorder as painful as its name is musical.

And now … now we’ve got a newcomer in the deck.

We’ve been trying to track the source of what Heather calls her “mystery pain” for a while. The clues haven’t been as prosaic as a pistol, a scarf and a three-day-old bottle of nail polish. Instead it’s keeping track of pain here, numbness there, fatigue lasting this long, and so on. What’s happening in the limbs? The face? The spine? What’s new and what’s overlapping with the old conditions?

It’s enough to make you wish that Hercule Poirot had a grandson in the medical field.

With patience, time and a recent ER visit, we’ve teased out one piece of the jigsaw: trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve pain that can be unexpectedly triggered by a simple touch to the face. Or not. Like every other villain in this detective series, it’s come-and-go, though over time, “come” can be more frequent.

Even if we have that to stand on, though, there’s still so much more puzzle to solve. The initial clue gives us some possibilities for the bigger picture – some of them quite disturbing – but until a doctor locks down an answer, we can’t be sure.

An answer. Not necessarily the answer.

And no guarantee that order can be restored.

I won’t lie. It’s hard. Sometimes we get long windows where things go well. Sometimes she can barely move from the bed without help. It’s a guessing game, one that even Miss Marple’s shrewd sense of the human condition couldn’t outfox.

It’s tiring. Painful. Frightening, even. And yet … and yet, that’s not the most important story.

Because through it all, and sometimes to her own disbelief, Heather has still held on to what’s important.

She still cares.

Sometimes that’s frustrating for her, especially when there are things she wants to do and can’t at the moment. But so many times, Heather’s found a way. She’s been a guardian and “mom” to her disabled aunt Missy, a comfort to the world’s craziest dogs, a tease to her sisters, a “weird aunty” to the family infants and toddlers. She’s been a loving – and loved – partner to me.

And in the midst of so much pain and uncertainty, that’s pretty near miraculous.

We don’t have all the information, or a flawless set of gray cells to solve it with. Some days, we barely seem to have sanity or patience or sleep. But we’ve got each other. And through the stress, that’s enough.

Some mysteries defy detectives. And the biggest ones are never quite finished.

But so long as the clues can carry us to tomorrow, that will do for now.