Tag: acceptance

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Up on the Roof

Parts of my childhood forever echo with the voice of Chaim Topol. 

If the name doesn’t ring a bell with you, look up a friend who’s into great musicals. Ask them who this Topol guy is. And then prepare to be listening for a long, long time. 

“You mean you’ve never seen ‘Fiddler on the Roof’??” 

Many actors have inhabited “Fiddler’s”: lead role of Tevye, the Russian Jew whose traditional world is beginning to pull apart. Many of them have been fantastic. But if you saw the movie, if you owned the soundtrack album like my parents did (or played it a zillion times like I did), then Topol is almost certainly the Tevye that lives in your mind and heart. A measured pace. A wry humor. An unmistakable voice. 

And now, like so many other greats, what we have left are the memories. 

It’s easy to get pigeonholed in television and film. Adam West became Batman to such an extent that he spent much of his remaining career playing Adam West. Leonard Nimoy wound up writing a book “I Am Not Spock” … and then later a sequel that embraced the inevitable, “I Am Spock.” 

Topol lived in an unusual variation of that world. He got to spend a career doing many other things, some of them light years away from his small-town milkman. (Literally, in the case of his role in “Flash Gordon.”) But he always came back to Tevye, a role he played on stage again and again. By the time he made his last bow in 2009, he estimated he’d played the role over 3,500 times and still loved it. 

An unusual case indeed. But then, “Fiddler” is a very unusual show. 

Spoiler alert for the newcomers- it’s not a happy-ending musical, except in the broadest sense. At its heart, it’s a story about the struggle between identity and change, in times when “the way it’s always been done” has to find ways to adapt. Tevye’s own daughters make choices that force him to reexamine who he is and what’s important to him time and again. And after all the choices and heartbreak, a change that’s bigger than anyone ends up shattering the community, erasing the village that’s endured so much for so long and forcing its former inhabitants to start again in a hundred different places.

It’s powerful. Heartwrenching. And oh, so familiar.

Old expectations turned upside down? A world that looks less and less familiar every day? Families trying to adapt to each other, either strengthening or shattering in the attempt? All of it resonates pretty strongly these days, and these last few years especially. As the internet joke goes, it’s a time when “normal” is just a dryer setting.

But if our change-filled world resonates with Tevye’s mythical village of Anatevka, maybe some of the lessons do as well.

Tevye’s best choices are always the ones that take someone in instead of shut them out. The one time he closes the door on someone asking for acceptance, it tears his family apart. And when he finds a way to re-open that door just a crack, it adds the smallest bit of hope even as his world is scattered to the winds.

Maybe that’s what kept Topol coming back to the story. It certainly keeps drawing me. And if enough of us can reach out with love to each other, even while we’re still trying to figure out who we are and where we belong … maybe that can be enough.

“I do what I can,” Topol once said of the children’s charity work he did in his later life, “otherwise it is a waste of fame.”

Do what you can. With what you have. With all the love you have in you. There are worse ways to spend a life.

And if you can make a little time in it to watch “Fiddler” as well, so much the better.

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Looking From The Edge

It started with the rope.

Maybe you remember what I’m talking about, if you took grade-school PE in the 1970s and 1980s. The long floor-to-ceiling rope in the gymnasium, suspended over a safety mat. The one that students were expected to climb like Tarzan at some point in their elementary school careers.

Correction. The one that most students were expected to climb. I was given an exemption because, well, childhood epilepsy and dangling from a line like Spider-Man don’t mix really well.

Danger anticipated. Danger avoided.

Now fast-forward several years to junior high school. Specifically, to the various track-and-field games in gym. Unlike ropes, long jumps were perfectly safe for an epileptic and I tried over and over again with all the enthusiasm that a nerdy and awkward adolescent could manage.

Maybe a little too much enthusiasm. The sore feet I had after class didn’t go away. It turned out that between that, and maybe some after-school martial arts classes, I had managed to break the growth plates in both my feet.

Danger not even considered.

So what’s the point of all this rambling, besides setting the stage for the Totally-Not-Plagiarized-Diaries-of-a-Sorta-Wimpy-And-In-No-Way-Copyright-Infringing Kid? Well, to start with, it never hurts to remember the limits of our expectations – how, as the adage goes, we don’t know what we don’t know. For all that we plan and foresee and calculate, some things simply aren’t on the radar because we didn’t know to put them there.

But oh, do we try. Especially at the New Year.
The fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett had characters who were drawn to “edge places,”  points where two states of being come together, like doors, or masks, or mirrors, or even theatres. Similarly, something about the boundary between an old year and a new one draws us.  It’s a time when we look back and look forward, when writers everywhere compile their “10 best” and “10 worst” lists, when we try to anticipate what’s next – aside from freezing weather and drivers who shouldn’t be on the roads, of course.

I don’t want to make this sound too idealistic. Many years, the look back is on the level of “Thank heaven THAT’s over” and the look ahead is more like “Well, it can’t be as bad as what we just went through.” But we still like to think we have some sort of control over the outcome. That’s why we make resolutions, right?

We like to think that. Until we get sore feet.

As some of you know, this last year for me has gone beyond unpredictable. It’s had some amazing joys and some crushing blows, and my regular readers have experienced many of them with me. And one of the most challenging lessons I’ve had to take from all of it is that there is only so much I can do.

That’s not the same as saying “There’s nothing I can do.” That’s a trap. Saying “I can’t do everything” isn’t the same as saying “I can’t do anything.” Hope demands effort, otherwise it’s nothing more than an optimistic dream.

But we do have to accept that we’re not the ones in the driver’s seat.

And that’s hard.

We can prepare. We can anticipate. We can make the most of our chances. We can set ourselves up really, really well. But some things will always be out of our control.

In an odd way, though, that can be kind of hopeful.

It means that we don’t have to blame ourselves for every catastrophe in life. Not as much as we want to.

It means that totally unexpected blessings can find us in life. However undeserving of them we may feel personally.

It means we can let ourselves heal. And wonder. And grow.

And that we can reach out to each other as we do so.

Keep reaching. Keep growing. Take the pains and the wonders of this new year as they come. And where you can act, do it with hope.

After all, it never hurts to know the ropes.

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Oooh, Shiny!

I may have finally found my sport.

Mind you, I’m not without competitive talent. If someone announces a punning decathlon, I’ll be right at the starting line. The 100-meter deadline-anxiety dash has my name written all over it. And my skill at the Orchestra Pit Diving Invitational has become legend among Longmont actors, and at least one surprised musical director. (Hey, I didn’t miss my cue!)

But no, those are warmups. My new ideal venue is a Japanese tug-of-war. This one doesn’t require you to be Hercules – but Curly Howard would have a field day.

“Members of (Tsuruta City’s) Bald Men Club took turns competing in a unique game of tug-of-war by sticking a suction cup, which is attached to a single red rope, to each of their heads,” Megumi Lim of Reuters reported recently. “Both sides then attempt to pull the cup off of their opponent’s head.”

That’s right. This is a sport where you really use your head.

It’s true that I haven’t parted ways with my comb yet. But my hairline left on an expedition to the North Pole long ago and has begun sending back detailed reports of the Arctic Circle. As the old comics used to put it, I have wavy hair – it’s just that it’s mostly waving good-bye.

I come by my natural highlights honestly. The Rochat men typically wear their foreheads high enough for me to see my future in the reflection. My Dad likes to say, “They don’t put marble tops on cheap furniture,” and I know my place in the department store is coming.

“But wait,” someone’s bound to ask, “doesn’t baldness come from the mother’s side of the family?” Well, maybe – but Granddad Bill made the rest of us look like Rapunzel, so there’s not a lot of help there.

Bothered? Not as much as I used to be, and not just because I still have enough to need a trim. (“Short back and sides” is now a description as well as a haircut.) Yes, I know there is a difference between “balding” and “bald” and I don’t mind that I haven’t crossed over to the Mr. Clean side yet. But it’ll come.

And when it does, I hope I can celebrate it.

There are a lot of things to worry about  in this world – hate and prejudice, surveillance and privacy, factions breaking the human race into a jigsaw puzzle gone wild. But for most of us, the truly primal fear is aging and dying. A lot of money gets made off the difference between what we expect and what we see in the mirror, convincing us that our bodies are betraying us rather than doing what comes naturally.

Some of it’s understandable. Things wear out or wear down; repairs do become necessary, aches and pains never become welcome. Offer me a back that’s never been thrown out and I’d jump at the chance. But some is an attempt to freeze a moment or to hide from one.

I want to trust what I am and what I’m becoming.

Things will always change and some of it we’ll have to live with, from the minor to the major. But we need to be able to gauge which is which. We need to trust that our selves are more than our packaging, that there can still be joy despite change – or even in change.

And when we trust ourselves, maybe we can build a more trusting world.

Or at least one with plenty of ointment for those head-mounted suction cups.

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A Long, Strange Trek

On the day he died, I heard NPR replay an interview with Leonard Nimoy about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. In it, he mentioned that he wanted to try something different for a science-fiction film: that he wanted to have a story with no real villain to defeat.

“We had done two pictures in a row with black-hat heavies and I didn’t want a bad guy anywhere,” he explained in an interview elsewhere for the magazine Monsterland. “Circumstances would cause the problem. Lack of awareness, lack of concern, ignorance…these would be the problems. Not a person.”

That clicked with me. And it may be the best epitaph for the man in the pointed ears that I’ve ever heard.

I came late to Star Trek. No real surprise there. I grew up a huge Star Wars fan at a time when the fan bases didn’t overlap much and were often perversely proud of it. One was a swashbuckling space opera that found instant mainstream success; the other, an odd mix of conflict and exploration that built its following over years.

Silly, of course. To anyone on the outside, after all, a geek was a geek. But to many, the lines mattered.

But even Star Wars kids thought Mr. Spock was cool.

How could he not be? He was the intelligent outsider, the alien among humans, cool and detached without being heartless. He had an answer for everything, often accompanied by a wry remark and an arched eyebrow. To him, the universe was “fascinating” but never totally inexplicable.

He was, in short, what every young geek and nerd like me wanted to be. Apart, but still a part. Not surrendering an identity to be part of the crew, but embracing it and being valued because of it – even if it still meant we were weird.

I was grown before I found out that Nimoy spent years resenting the character. Understandable, in retrospect. Few actors like to be typecast, to become so strongly identified with a role that they can never really be seen as anyone else. For someone as versatile as Mr. Nimoy – actor, poet, photographer and more – it must have been doubly frustrating.

But over time, he came to embrace Mr. Spock. The Vulcan came to be “one of my best friends,” as he told Starlog magazine.

“When I put on those ears, it’s not like just another day,” Nimoy said. “When I become Spock, that day becomes something special.”

It did for a lot of us, too.

Today, we live in a world where the geeks won. “Game of Thrones” and “Doctor Who” are hit TV shows. “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” commanded huge film audiences; superheroes by the dozen still do. Even roleplaying became mainstream somewhere along the way – with proponents such as Stephen Colbert and the late Robin Williams – and computer gaming is so common a hobby as to barely be worth mentioning.

But saying “the geeks won” doesn’t really capture it. It’s more like the lines got erased. Maybe not entirely (there’s still some discouraging tales about how “geek girls” get treated by a small but noxious crew of self-appointed critics) but enough that the distinction no longer has the same meaning. The geeks became the cool kids, and vice versa. It’s even OK to talk about Jedi and Vulcans in the same breath.

There really isn’t a bad guy anymore.

Leonard Nimoy was a big part of that. And while it might seem like an odd part of his legacy to emphasize– “he helped make it OK to be a nerd” – there are far worse ones to have. Anything that brings people together instead of setting them apart should be celebrated; anyone who builds bridges instead of walls should be cherished … even if the bridge is that of the starship Enterprise.

Thank you, sir. You lived long. You prospered. And you helped many of us do the same.

In an often-dark world, you truly lit a Spock.

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In The Blink of an Eye

Pay no attention to the eye doctor, Scott.

Yes, he is going to be holding a needle in his hand. Yes, it will be approaching your eyelid. But we’re not going to think about that, right? We’re just going to lie back and breathe and get nice and relaxed and cozy …

“Aaaah!”

You thought about it. Didn’t you?

One more try. Deep breath. No, steady breath. A deep breath warns your body that something’s wrong, that you’re about to plunge into shark-infested waters. No, we’re calm. We’re calm. See how calm we are? Nothing out of the ordinary, doot-do-doo, oh, look, here comes the nice doctor reaching for my right eye…

Oh, look, there I go making the Olympic high jump team.

“And we’re done,” the doctor said, setting up an appointment for a second try to remove my eyelid cyst – this time, with medication.

And the patented Scott Rochat Whole-Body Eye Defense triumphs again.

Darn it.

Some people have a blink reflex. I am a blink reflex. Ever since the age of 15, I’ve known that my body will intercept threats to the eye faster than Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris and Mr. Miyagi combined. No conscious thought required: the jumps, squirms and jerks of Eye Fu are completely instinctive, a true union with the Tao … or at least with the “Ow.”

As you might guess, this presents a few problems.

I’ve never worn contact lenses, for obvious reasons.

Theatrical makeup takes three times as long to put on as it should, and sometimes requires a second person to hold me steady.

Even giving me eye drops require catching me off guard – at which point, the chances of success rise to 50-50.

So when I had a head-to-head collision last summer with Blake, the Dog of Steel – well, can you blame me for thinking/hoping/praying that the bump on my eyelid was a bruise? Or at worst, scar tissue?

No such look. I mean, luck.

Sigh.

I suspect most of us have similar weak spots, that one fear or reflex we can’t master, no matter how important it may be. My wife Heather can face the prospect of major surgery with firm resolution, but the approach of a tongue depressor will send her running to the nearest wastebasket as her gag reflex goes into overdrive. A former Denver Post columnist, Mark Obmascik, once wrote about a hiking partner who had such an aversion to needles that the man blacked out during an interjection – and came to in the parking lot, learning that he had punched the nurse and fought his way out of the hospital.

The mind may know better. But it’s not in the driver’s seat anymore.

There’s an irony to writing this so soon after New Year’s. After all, this is the time for grand resolutions, for the conviction that life can be changed for the better and that we’re the ones to do it. That we can control ourselves, take charge of our circumstances, make ourselves into the people we want to be.

That’s not a bad attitude. And it can lead to some great things. But even the best will in the world can hit limits. The spirit is willing, and all that.

And in a weird way, that’s reassuring.

It’s good to be reminded sometimes that I don’t control everything. It’s good to be reminded that I have to make allowances for others, to account for a world with its own drives and imperatives, even to – hardest of all – ask for help. I need to remember that “what I want” isn’t the most important thing in the world, that even my own body is a gift for today that might not answer the wheel tomorrow.

It’s called humility. Not the most common attitude in America these days, I know. But vital.

If it means some frustration at times, so be it. I’ll get through it. My reflexes are real and they have to be accommodated, but accommodation doesn’t mean surrender. This can be done.

Am I sure?

Eye-eye, sir.