Dreams, Prayers and Kevin Costner

My husband, Lindsay, and I watched TV "live" the other night - a rare event at our house due to the DVR ("Digital Video Recorder" – in case you ever wondered what those letters stand for) having died.  We were waiting for the replacement box to be delivered, and in the meantime, we were stuck with watching whatever happened to be on at the moment.  It's strange to think that, as kids, we watched live TV all the time - it was all there was.  You had to be home at a specific time to watch a specific show on one of three networks (four, if you counted PBS).   And you had to watch the commercials.

At any rate, scrolling through the on-screen TV guide, we looked for a movie that was about to start. (Another technical advancement since childhood days of reading the TV listings in the newspaper. Remember newspapers?  Gee, they were swell.)  And then we saw it:  "Field of Dreams."  Neither of us had seen the movie since it came out in 1989.  Selection made.

Having loved this movie 20 years ago, I was interested to see how it would hold up.  I remember seeing  "Shenandoah" with Jimmy Stewart on a Saturday afternoon re-run when I was a kid - I balled like a baby at the end.  When I insisted on watching it again with Lindsay because I wanted him to see this great film, I was surprised at how cheesy it was, and frankly, not very good.  My 10 year-old self liked cheese, I guess.

"Field of Dreams" certainly holds up (screenplay by Phil Alden Robinson and he directed, as well).  The clothing and hair-styles are classic 80s of course, but Kevin Costner is impossibly young and Burt Lancaster gives one of his last performances.  He's terrific, with his old-school speech that fits so perfectly for the Doctor from the past.  But what struck me most was how different the message of this film was for me, twenty years later.

The first time I saw this movie unfold, it seemed to be saying, "listen to your gut, follow your dreams, all will be well."  Kevin Costner's character plows over his cornfield because he hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field.  He listens to the voice, and without going into the entire plot, it all turns out pretty well.  

Yes, I still believe that can happen.  You work hard, you listen to God/Holy Spirit/your gut and you succeed.  But disappointments can take their toll on a person in this business over twenty plus years.   Heck, any business.  Life in general.  Everyone has their share of disappointments.  So the "baseball/apple pie/Iowa is heaven" tone of the film, while sweet, seemed too much like fiction to my older self.

But something else grabbed me as I watched.  I was struck by the character of Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, played by Mr. Lancaster.  A one-time baseball player, circumstances prevent him from pursuing his dream and he ends up becoming a doctor (not a bad "second" career).  In recalling his missed baseball opportunity, he says:  

"We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought, 'Well, there'll be other days.' I didn't realize that that was the only day."

As the movie continues, Moonlight Graham is given a chance to relive his baseball days as a young man (on the field that Kevin Costner built) and it's a wonderfully moving moment.  He finally gets to live his "field of dreams."  Unfortunately, Kevin Costner's little girl falls off the top of the bleachers and stops breathing.  Kevin looks to Moonlight Graham to heal her.  The old doctor does, but in doing so, gives up his second chance at baseball.  (Turns out, the little girl was choking on a hot dog.)  Watching this part of the story 20 years later, I found myself re-thinking what this movie was all about.

Instead of it being a story that validates our dreams coming true, maybe it was actually saying, sometimes our dreams don't come true in the way that we want them to - and we don't really understand why. Sometimes, you don't get the part, sometimes, you don't get the girl or boy, sometimes, people die before they should.  We can't understand it.   Life doesn't always add up to hard work ruling the day.

And that's okay.

Because along the way, if we are paying attention, we can still learn, we can still grow, we can still experience life with passion, with joy, with the little things like doggies, and good books, and a nice glass of wine, and for me, a wonderful part to play, even if it's just in my living room.  And of course, people in our lives who we love and who love us.

Garth Brooks wrote a song that says, "Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers."  I guess that's what I'm learning along the way.  Sometimes, things don't work out the way you want.  

Be grateful anyway.

Tennis, Anyone?

My husband Lindsay and I were fortunate enough to take a real vacation last year.  (A friend of mine defines "vacations" as destinations that do not involve visiting family.  Visits to family are called "trips.")  At any rate, we went on a vacation and stayed at a hotel with a tennis court.   I'm not a great player, but I try to get on the court once a week.  When the sound of the ball hits the sweet spot on my racket (and that happens sometimes) it's a pretty amazing feeling.   And I love the little skirts you get to wear.

When I learned the the hotel offered a free hour with their tennis pro, I jumped at the chance to try to improve on my weekend game - and maybe even undo one or two bad habits I had learned over the years. As it turned out, I was the only hotel guest to show up for the free hour, so it became my own private lesson.

What a gift. We worked forehand and back hands and serves, of course. He ran me around the court, and I was actually starting to feel like I was learning something that my weekend tennis partner would notice in our Saturday rallies. But with each stroke we focused on, the instructor repeated the same phrase over and over again: "You aren't following through."  Even my double-handed back hand - a more often than not sure-fire winner - garnered the same lackluster remark: "You aren't following through."  Huh?  How is that possible?  "I feel like I am," I defended.  And then he showed me where my racket stopped, and boy was he right. I wasn't following through.  To correct this, I started to bring the racket all the way back and then all the way across my body until my arm crossed my face and was near my opposite shoulder.  The power was amazing.

What a metaphor for my life.  Follow-through.  Kind of a scary concept.  Following through requires courage - a mentality that says, even when you don't feel like it, even when you think it doesn't matter, even when you feel discouraged and think it's pointless, follow-through.  It's a mental game.

This certainly applies to acting.  Working on your mentality is just as important as working on the story.    My acting coach, Diana Castle, teaches this brilliantly.  She talks about being the master of our mind.  And implores us to take Rilke's first "Letter to a Young Poet" to heart:

"This before all:  ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night:  must I [write]?  Dig down into yourself for a deep answer.  And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple "I must", then build your life according to this necessity. . ."

To me, this "I must" burns in every champion.  The U.S. Open is in full-swing right now (pardon the pun) and I recently watched a series of interviews with some of the tennis greats:  Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Serena Williams.  They all have their different strengths and weaknesses.  But mentality is the linch-pin.   When asked how much of his success was about the mentality and the will, Connors agreed emphatically, "That's it.  Every body plays good tennis; it's what you bring over and above that."  That's the common denominator in terms of winning and losing.  Follow-through.

With fall around the corner, I'm determined to follow-through, to see where it takes me, to take on a champion's mentality.  I  doubt I'll be playing in Wimbledon next July.  But who knows what other doors may open?  Maybe that's where the fear comes from.  What if one's dreams really did come true?

Can cleaning the bathroom create art?

In our house, chores are divided up very evenly.  My husband does all the laundry and takes care of the floors (vacuuming every other day, now that we have a doggy).  I somehow became the person in charge of cleaning the bathrooms.  While it's not my favorite thing in the world, there are some pretty nifty (and probably non-eco friendly) products that make cleaning it a much simpler affair than in my mother's day.  But no matter the product, there's still a degree of scrubbing.

I realized a couple of years ago while directing a musical that this scrubbing time in the bathroom was actually pretty productive - creatively.  I would get out my sponge to scour the grout in the shower.  And my mind would begin the game of "Just do a quick wipe of the tile walls and be done with it" vs. "Spend some time scrubbing that stubborn dirt in the grout, get the step ladder out to wipe the ceiling down, scrub the floor with comet."  As I began to fight these two points of view, I realized how, similarly, there can be two conflicting schools of thoughts when working as an actor on a story (whether it's a large, luxurious part in an O'Neill Play, or a relatively non-descript part on a television show).

One can do the detail work, creating a specific world by using the language provided by the writer, living in that world in your imagination until it is impact-ful and specific.  This kind of work takes a long time - sort of like taking a toothbrush to the grout.  But the rewards are great.  It's what Diana Castle, my mentor and acting coach teaches.  And it's what I imagine Daniel Day-Lewis and Meryl do when they tackle a role.

Or one can just do a quick wipe of the shower walls - memorize the lines, understand the story with one's left brain, getting a sense of what the part should be, saying it out loud until it sounds like what "they" might want.

As I have been contemplating this kind of artistic work ethic, I started to think about my parents.  When I was a kid, my Mom wanted our help cleaning the house on Saturday mornings.  I wasn't exactly excited to help her - Saturday mornings were all about the cartoons on TV.  The chore she handed out that I just didn't understand was cleaning the baseboards.  The process involved getting on my hands and knees with an old rag (usually one of my brother's old t-shirts that had been cut up), lightly wetting the rag with water and wiping the dust off that little piece of wood on the floor all the way around the living room.  Groan.  Who sees that piece of wood?  Who cares if there is a little dust on it?  But, I couldn't convince my Mom.  So, we had clean baseboards.  That's just who she is - a very detail-oriented woman.

My Dad had a similar sensibility.  He passed away a few months and in writing his eulogy with my brother Tom, I was reminded of the kind of detail that he put into a project.  Every project he undertook, whether it was building a model airplane or constructing a sailboat or working on our brother Rick's cabin, he applied the precision of an accomplished engineer – with fully detailed drawings.

While neither of my parents was an actor (although my Dad was quite a tap dancer in his youth), I love knowing and seeing that a part of their work ethic is in me - the "detail" muscle so necessary in my acting comes from them both.

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Mr. Jobs tells of a lesson he learned from his father.  “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it.  You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.  For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality has to be carried all the way through.”  Mr. Jobs certainly carried this over into his work at that little company called Apple.

What about you?  What are the traits you carry with you that come from one of your parents?

Some day, I would love to relinquish my bathroom chores to a nice housekeeper.  But in the meantime, I'll keep scrubbing the grout one tile at a time, thinking of my Mom and Dad, and remembering to keep up the detail work, when I clean the bathroom and in my work as an actor.

Up and Out

I love watching Charlie Rose on my DVR (usually while working out on the stair master).  His program is such an education in all things:  film, TV, theatre, literature, politics.  (I admit to more often than not deleting the segments on politics.)  Recently, I watched him interview Julie Taymor, a director most often associated with creating "The Lion King," as well as "Spider-man:  Turn Off the Dark" for Broadway.  She's created and directed many other wonderful films, opera, theatre, puppets.  Suffice to say, she is an amazing story-teller, with some of the most creative visual images you can imagine.  So, it's no surprise that Apple would want to hire her.

Ms. Taymor told a story on Mr. Rose's program about Apple asking her if she would be interested in designing an App for the iPad.  Her response was no.  No to Apple?  Who does that?  Charlie Rose asked why and Ms. Taymor responded (and I'm paraphrasing), "Why would I want to create something where you are looking down into a little box.  I want to create something that forces you to look up and out."

Up and out.

Hearing this quote, I was instantly brought back to December 4, 1999, the day I gave the eulogy for my dear friend Elaine Welton Hill.  Elaine was a wonderful actress and director who died too young of ovarian cancer.  I met Elaine shortly after I moved to Los Angeles.  I was pretty green.  She directed me in a monologue at a theatre workshop in Studio City.  The thing I remember most about that first encounter with her as an artist (aside from being afraid of her) was that she kept telling me not to look at the stage floor, that there was nothing on the floor, to look up and out so everyone could see my eyes.  When I look back at her life, that was how she lived it:  looking up and out, dealing with things head on, moving forward, never wallowing.

Up and out.

Of course, we all love to look back, right?  Looking back can indeed be helpful.   "Those who ignore history are condemned to relive it."  But, how much looking back should one do in one's own life?  For myself, have I been looking back too much of late?  Perhaps.  Part of it has been focused on career, feeling like the days pass and I haven't accomplished nearly what I would like.  I'm not getting any younger and that's not a phrase you want to hear in Hollywood.  And then there's always the question of why haven't I booked/auditioned for "fill in the blank."  Another part of the looking back is focused on goals I set at the beginning of the year to put better habits in place - habits that still haven't become muscles yet:  Put in that yoga DVD, drink less wine, spend more time in prayer, keep your desk clean.

And a big part of my looking back has been the death of my father.  He passed away on December 16, 2012.   I look back on his death and wish there was a way I could have seen him one last time.  I look back and wish I had called him more.  I look back and wish we had more to say to each other.  I look way back and wish that my father and mother had never divorced.  I look back and remember his laugh.  I look back and remember that wonderful day in October - just two months before he passed - when my sisters and brothers and my mom and dad were all together.  Yes, that's a wonderful memory.  

My father knew he was dying.  My sister tells me in his final days, he did a lot of looking back.  And I think he had some regrets that haunted him.  That hurts to think about.  But, I know he doesn't have any regrets now.

So, where does this all lead?  I believe there should be some looking up, some looking out and some looking back - but not in equal percentages.  My brother says he always knows a person is lying if they say "I have no regrets."  I think he's right.  We will all look back and have regrets.  But, if we can keep reminding ourselves to look up and out, to keep pushing ourselves forward, that will encourage growth.  As an actress, that is vital to the craft.  As a person, it's vital to being alive.

I should add that looking down from time to time can also important.

That way, you won't trip.