by Lee Kalcheim
HARRY
You’re negotiating.
BRIAN
Yes, yes, I am, but don’t take offense. My wife says I do it in my sleep.
As we watched, one boy on my lap, the other cuddled close, the play circled through them to me and around in an emotional arc I had never felt before. It’s thrilling enough to watch something you’ve written be exquisitely performed—watch it work, watch it and listen to the audience respond, laugh in all the right places, but the experience is magnified by having your children see what you do and see it done well. It is thrilling beyond belief, because they are thinking, “Oh, this is what Dadoo does alone in his study. He really does something. And not only that, he does it really well.”
There is no greater reason to write or create anything than for a moment like this. As I have said, I put off getting married and having children years beyond the normal expiration date so as not to interfere with my creative urges. And here, my children were showing me, with their rapt attention, with their pointed questions after the play, with their obvious thrill at the whole event that—we are the reason you do this.
The theater is a cruel business. There is nothing quite as humiliating as opening the newspaper to find a complete stranger savaging something you worked on for years. And then again, nothing as pleasing as another complete stranger delighting in what you’d done. A famous Jules Fieffer cartoon depicts a playwright, going through his history of productions saying, “The critics said of my first play, ‘Inept,’ ‘Drivel.’ Both reviews misunderstood my play. The critics said of my second play, ‘Pretentious,’ ‘Abhorrent.’ Both reviews totally misunderstood my play. The critics said of my third play, ‘A smash hit,’ ‘A triumph.’ Both reviews totally misunderstood my play. They are now misunderstanding to my advantage. In the arts, this is known as success.”
Bringing up our children we are constantly misunderstanding each other. But they teach us that we can’t panic when we are “panned” as parents by their misbehaviors or rude talk. We have to hang in. And hope, and believe that, if we write the scenario with love and understanding, sooner or later they will appreciate what we’ve done or, at least, misunderstand in our favor.
From L.A. on, we were not shy about bringing them when a play of mine was performed. No easy task, since the next two productions were in Tokyo!
Defiled was performed there in Japanese. An agent from Japan, Martyn Naylor, a British gentleman who still wore a monocle, happened to have seen the Geffen production and said in charmingly old-world manner, “Hmmm, yes … well … the Japanese will like this. It’s about something.” And so, a year and a half later, the Japanese Producer, Mr. Eguchi flew us out, the entire family, to see his production. We were given hotel rooms and wined and dined and treated like royalty. And best of all, the production was superb. It was in Japanese, we knew it was good. The boys and Julia sat in the theater with the play in their laps, keeping up with it in English, but even without knowing the language, a good production has an integrity that is projected beyond the words. Not something a playwright would readily admit. In another language it becomes something else. And can work just as well … in another way. The boys understood that, as we gathered after the play.
“I stopped looking at our script after awhile, Dadoo, and it was really good anyway.”
“And it was so different from Los Angeles. That’s really interesting.”
That summer we all saw an old play of mine Breakfast with Les and Bess in French, in a production in Montreal. Now they were becoming old-pro critics.
“I know it was in French, Dadoo, but don’t you think it was too jokey?”
“You mean, broad?” I replied, “Well they played it as farce. I liked it.”
“I don’t know.”
They were learning about interpretation. And about letting go. Once I’ve finished a play, after the first run, when someone wants to do it and I’m not there, they pretty much can do it as they please. Not necessarily the way I imagined it. It’s kind of fun to see if it still works. And good play will. I remember when I was a kid, seeing a summer stock production of Death Of A Salesman. An awful amateur production. But the play was so solid … it still worked. Sometimes, something you create will come out even better when it’s reinterpreted. Other people’s imaginations combined with yours can take it somewhere new. Attention must also be paid to this.
The boys were only ten, but I could see them soaking this all up. And already beginning to understand the tricky vicissitudes of creating anything.
And I began to understand that someday I would have to let them go. And they would develop in ways that I had not imagined, but that, hopefully, because Julia and I had infused them with the values of hard work and love of adventure and the sacred closeness of family, that they would use these as a grounding to become something different enough from us and from each other.
SCENE: THE LIVING ROOM OF THE NEW YORK APARTMENT.
(It is 2:00 a.m. on election night, 2000. Gabriel, ten, and Lee are up watching the returns on TV. Julia and Samuel have gone to bed.)
TV
It’s too close to call.
LEE
Come on, Gabey you have school tomorrow.
GABE
I’m staying up.
CUT TO: The living room, forty five minutes later. 2:45 a.m.
TV
… and George W. Bush has been declared the winner and will become the forty-third President of the United States.
(Lee hits the remote and turns off the television. He turns to Gabe to lead him to bed. Tears are rolling down Gabe’s face. Lee comes to him. Hugs him)
LEE
Oh, Gabey.
GABE
It’s not fair. He stole it. He stole Florida. The ballots are faulty. They stopped black people from voting. He stole it!
LEE
Maybe he did. Maybe not. We’ll find out more later.
GABE
It can’t happen here. It can’t happen, can it?
LEE
I hope not. Let’s … go to bed.
(Lee takes Gabriel’s hand and leads him down the hall to bed, tears still in his eyes)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WAKE UP, MR. PRESIDENT
We were and are a very politically involved family. When the boys were two, they had their first election party. They watched the returns and cheered Clinton’s victory. And again in ’96. In 1998, we were driving to the house in Massachusetts when we had to turn the radio off, because the newscaster was reading the transcripts of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial and Samuel asked, “What’s fellatio?”
We watched Al Gore nominated, on a satellite television on a remote island on the Quebec river in Canada. We watched the debates, as George Bush grinned and preened and mispronounced the names of foreign leaders and Al Gore seemed to be talking to everyone as if he were reading them a chapter from The Cat in The Hat.
It was inconceivable that Bush could win. As bad a campaigner as was Gore, Bush’s oozed incompetence. And yet, he had “won.” The results were suspended for weeks. The recount started. And was stopped by the Supreme Court. And Bush v. Gore went before the Court.
Every day during the trial, Gabey came right home after school and sat in front of the TV and watched.
“Boise is not asking the right questions! He’s not tough enough.”
“He’s a top attorney Gabe. He teaches at Yale. Maybe this is his tactic.”
“Gore should have just asked to recount Brower County. Not the whole state. They’ve got to attack the fraud in that county, and then the validity of the whole state will collapse.”
Truth be told, I think Gabey would have done a better job than Boise. But ten-year-olds are not allowed to argue before the Supreme Court. Sam cynically dismissed the whole thing.
“The fix is in. The court has a republican majority, Gabey, why are you watching all this?”
But he did. Every day. Just as I had rushed home from school in 1954 to watch the Arm
y-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy was evil incarnate in our family, and even as a teenager I knew when Joseph Welch, the attorney for the Senate committee, intoned to the sweaty, stoic, jowly cheeked McCarthy, “Have you no decency, Senator? At long last have you no sense of decency?” that something important had happened. That something had turned. And I had seen it.
But I had seen something positive happen. Gabriel was watching the fabric of our democracy rip apart as the Court voted along party lines to prevent a Florida recount and elect George Bush, despite the fact that he’d lost the popular vote.
Gabey was disconsolate. For days.
“How could O’Connor do that? How can you vote along party lines at a time like this?”
“Maybe she felt it was best for the country to have the election settled. Not to drag it out.”
“That irresponsible. What’s good for the country is a fair election. That’s completely irresponsible!”
Gabriel was angry and bewildered and disconsolate for days. He just didn’t know how to absorb what had happened. It wasn’t supposed to happen here. In this country. We could get bad presidents. The wrong guy could win. That happened, but to have someone elected who didn’t win the popular vote, then win by possibly fraudulent tactics, threw him. Absolutely threw him. He walked on sea legs for weeks. His stomach was upset. He slept badly and was angry about everything.
“My civics class is silly.”
“Sam eats too loud.”
“Dadoo’s sandwiches are boring!”
“I hate my bed!”
“This country’s a joke. We’re a joke. The whole world is laughing at us. We’re a joke.”
Gabriel had faced a myriad of small disappointments in his young life, from not being good enough to play T-ball to missing his favorite float in the Macy’s parade. Small stuff. This was different. This floored him. Why? It wasn’t because his candidate lost. It was because it wasn’t fair. Fairness is everything to a child. There’s losing a game and there’s losing a game unfairly. There’s getting a bad grade and getting one unfairly. And for someone like Gabe, with rigorous standards for himself, when the standards for the our whole system of government fail, in a country built on the supreme fairness of its system, then he’s completely at sea. He was angry, and he just didn’t know what to do with his anger. And I didn’t know how to help him.
Samuel took his anger and turned it into a musical. Yes, he wrote a musical about George Bush. I had once told him the old joke about how the British were so egocentric, especially at the height of the empire, that they derided everything French. They would say, “You know of course, if you wake a Frenchmen up suddenly, in the middle of the night, he speaks perfect English.”
Samuel wrote a musical called Wake Up Mr. President. Here are some snippets:
TV MODERATOR
Hi, Welcome to the Wake Up Debates, where we wake up the candidates from a sound sleep to find out what they really think. We have moved the presidential candidates, Mr. Raymond Poodleneck and Governor Harvey Hardhat, and their beds to the studio, so we can wake them up and ask them questions. Wake up Harvey! Wake up Raymond!
(They wake up)
The first question from the audience goes to Mr. Poodleneck.
AUDIENCE MEMBER
What do you think should be done about health care?
RAYMOND
(Yawns) I can’t think. I’m tired. I wanna go back to bed. Where’s my Teddy bear?
MODERATOR
Mr. Hardhat, what’s your response?
RAYMOND
I’m for free health care.
MODERATOR
But you’re a republican. Who’s going to pay for it?
RAYMOND
The democrats!
Then after a controversial election, in which Florida would decide the winner, Katherine Harris, famous for her Bush v. Gore decision, is again called on to “help” Mr. Hardhat win. And the CNN moderator sings this song.
Oh, Katharine Harris is a mean one.
She is no fun.
She helped Bush win the Sunshine State
When he was not the rightful winner.
That was not very great.
Now I wanna skin her.
Oh, that evil stare,
We better beware,
So I Declare.
Oh, Katharine Harris, how could you
Have Bush win,
When it wasn’t true?
Samuel went on to write many more songs. A whole musical, in fact, that was performed in high school, with the sophisticated lyrics of a seventeen-year-old. But this scene, written by a ten-year-old equally upset as his brother at the outcome of the election, was his way of directing the anger and disappointment he felt. For him, it was absurd. Sam had taken his fury and redirected it into a creative burst.
Gabe couldn’t do that. And we couldn’t help. Gabe felt the disappointment personally and could not compute it in what had been the safe, ordered world of his life. There is only so much you can do as a parent. You cannot prepare your children for certain major disappointments. It’s been said that you are only as happy as your least happy child, but I think also that you’re only as good a parent as you are to your neediest child.
Gabe taught us that you can’t solve every hurt. And frankly, I don’t think they expect you to. They just want you to be their constant. The thing that does work when other things fail. The thing that loves them no matter what. And allows them in the comfort of their family to come to terms, at their own speed, with the inconsistencies of the real world. The little things you do to create this safe world—the nightly kiss in bed, the staying up all night to help with their homework, the letting them pick the Christmas tree, the very one they want, as long as it takes—these things are what get them through the tough times. Not your advice. Especially when you don’t have any.
SCENE: THE KITCHEN IN THE NEW YORK APARTMENT.
(Samuel and Gabriel are putting the Chanukah candles in the menorah.)
SAM
Daddo, we celebrate Chanukah and Christmas, and Passover and Easter… Is it okay to celebrate every holiday?
DADOO
Sure. Celebrations are good.
GABE
Are there any holidays we don’t celebrate?
DADOO
Chinese New Year.
GABE
Why?
DADOO
We’re not Chinese.
SAM
We’re not anything. We’re just half of everything.
DADOO
You don’t have to be something to celebrate a holiday. The celebration itself is a reason to celebrate it.
SAM
So we can celebrate Chinese New Year.
DADOO
Sure! Look up the date. And when it comes, we’ll go to Chinatown.
JULIA
We’re going to Chinatown? We’re having Chinese food for Chanukah?
(The boys giggle uncontrollably)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
YES, THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS
In September of 2001, the boys has just started Middle School in New York when the World Trade Center disaster occurred. I was at the YMCA at Twenty-Third Street when I saw the planes hit on television. Walking home down Sixth Avenue, I saw the burning towers. Crowds filled the street. I felt it ghoulish to just stand there and watch, so I went into the market near my corner to shop. A few minutes inside, I heard a loud shriek from the crowd. I ran outside to see the first tower collapse. My stomach turned over. I went home. I called Julia. She was watching at work. We called the boys’ school. There was a lock-down at school. Julia and I went up to Twenty-First Street to pick the boys up. We explained to them what had happened and kept them from watching it over and over again on TV. That night the restaurants and cafés in the Village were jammed. No one wanted to be alone.
The next day, September 12 was our anniversary. We went to our favorite Italian restaurant to celebrate and to distract ourselves. After dinner, walking home, I sniffed the air
. It was acrid. I could smell smoke. People on the street were wearing masks. The wind had shifted. For the previous thirty-six hours it had blown the burning Trade Center rubble east, toward Brooklyn. Now it was blowing north, up the island. We had no idea what toxic stuff was in that wind. I turned to Julia and the boys, “We’re getting out of here—now.”
We were lucky. We could leave. We packed and carried our stuff to our car on Twenty-Fourth Street and drove to the mountains in Massachusetts, and spent the rest of the week, numbed, but safe, in the clear Berkshire air.
Over the next two months, Gabriel had night terrors. He would wake up in the middle of the night wailing, and we would rush into his room and find him perched on the edge of his elevated bed about to jump or fall. We’d help him down and walk him down the hall as he thumped his feet and shouted incoherent phrases. We sat him down in the living room and talked to him quietly, trying to ease him up, rather than wake him suddenly, which was the prescribed cure. Once awake, I’d often calm him down by having him recite the starting Yankees lineup, which took his mind off his nightmares and began to relax him. Sometimes we’d turn on the TV and find a movie, hopefully a musical that would take him to a happier world. One night, we turned on the TV at two a.m. and came in on the Howard Stern show. He had three strippers on and was holding a quiz show. Why we didn’t change the channel, I don’t know, but we watched as Howard asked a frizzy blonde in sequined pasties, “How many states are there in the USA?” She bit her lip, thought for a moment and then said, “Um … fifty six?”
Gabe was awake. He howled with laughter. He has a very contagious laugh. It rises up the scale as he giggles uncontrollably. We all laughed, as much at Gabey laughing as at the show. And all the fears that engendered his nightmare vanished in the silliness of the moment.
Gabe couldn’t wait till morning to tell Sam about the strippers.
“She didn’t even know how many states there were.” And he laughed again at the memory of it. Sam spun to us at the breakfast table.
“Hey, can I watch it tonight?”