Tag: Colin Dale

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Humor by Colin Dale

          Dying is easy, comedy is hard. This deathbed wisecrack has been attributed to a dozen different actors over the years; none of the attributions is provable. Nonetheless, the sentiment has something to say. Dying is unavoidable. But the living from which we harvest comedy—or humor—is sometimes very, very hard.

          I’ve been coming to Storytellers for 11 weeks. I’ve not made every Monday get-together, when I have been here it seems I’ve delivered one bit of silliness after another. I’m pretty sure I’ve convinced you that’s my stock-in-trade. From a lottery winner trying to buy happiness to my queerness measured against the fury of a tropical storm to Hamlet sweating in his pumpkin pants, I’ve probably gotten you to expect every Monday more of the same. Of course, many of your stories have played the humor card, and I’ve loved them.

          But I’ve sat here too most Mondays and listened to one or two stories that have not tried to be funny—stories that have pointed to times in the past when living was hard. These have been wonderful stories and I’ve been privileged to listen to them.

          No doubt, there is great humor in this room. It’s high on the list of the many things that keep me coming back. When I’m not in this room, I find myself too much in a world in which there’s a lot of room for humor. All day long I see people going about with shoulders slumped, mouths downturned, eyes cast to the ground. They may be boundlessly happy inside—although something tells me they’re not. They go about as if they’ve forgotten what a great thing it was to have been born in the first place.

          I come to this room, though, and find myself among people who don’t seem to have forgotten—people who are generally light-hearted, full of good-fellowship, people who are more likely to be merry than morose.

          That said, I have a feeling there’s a history of a good deal of pain in this room. It may not be true for each of us, but, considering the number of years we’ve lived, the common denominator that brings us together—for that matter, the very nature of building we’re sitting in—there’s a good chance a number of us have negotiated some white water in our lives.

          But it would be unfair of me to draw conclusions about humor and pain using your lives as a study group. The self-examined life is just that: an examination of self. The only fair study group is me—my experience of humor and pain.

          First, though, a Surgeon General’s Warning: Confessions by a funny guy of lots of pain in his past are usually boring, filled with clichés, just begging for rejoinders such as “Yeah, tell me about it,” or “You think you’re the only one?”

          But, so what? Here goes . . .

          I survived my childhood; not too much scar tissue to show for it. I’ve given you peeks at my growing up, in a working class section of The Bronx, parents whom I now understand but whom I saw, when I was a kid, as cold and uninspired, a brother 14 years older and already out of the house, making me for all practical purposes an only child, a child scared of his own shadow but still longing for high adventure, your classic stay-in-his-room bookworm who felt safe only in his imagination, puzzled, perplexed, unsure from the start of everything from his gender, later his sexual orientation, and finally and overshadowing it all even his chances of ever being really happy.

          In other words, a perfect hothouse for sprouting humor.

          Robin Williams, on Inside the Actors’ Studio, when asked what in his childhood made him the man he grew into, answered—with a line that drew some unintended laughs: “I just had myself to play with.”

          I laughed too when I heard Williams say that. But you know, when you think about it, having only yourself for a playmate—while it may be okay for some—for many of us—as it was for me—it meant lots of aloneness. In front of my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, I was the world’s happiest kid, the entertainer, the consummate clown. On holidays when relatives would come early and stay late, I’d maintain from morning until night, smiling throughout, growing more and more exhausted from having to pretend. And when finally the house would clear and I’d be excused from center stage, I’d go to my room, panting like I’d just run a race, and sit there listening to the sounds of The Bronx night: traffic going by on Crosby Avenue, late-night el trains squealing into Pelham Bay Station, planes flying unnervingly low on their approach to LaGuardia. I don’t remember crying on those nights in my room. I’m not crier. Never have been. I would just sit there, listening.

          Thank God we grow up. Of course, for most people, childhood is the foundry that shapes the adults we become. I learned in the foundry of my own childhood that humor made a perfect shield for keeping people at bay, for helping me conceal my true feelings, for lending the appearance of truth to all the lies I would tell about how happy I was, and for providing me with the wherewithal to get through each day. My shield of humor gave me an illusion of normalcy, of maturity, of being an okay guy who had it all figured out. With my shield of humor in place, I could pass myself off as intelligent, intuitive, insightful, your best friend, your concerned co-worker, creative, industrious, a guy who was on top of things, unquestionably masculine, grounded in his sexuality—even if that meant occasionally pretending (I’m sorry to say) to be straight—all-in-all, a healthy, happy, jolly good fellow.

           Relentless humor kept reality at bay. I used other techniques, too—alcohol chief among them. I don’t want to turn this into a story about my addiction—a “drunk-a-log,” as those who’ve been there, done that might call it—but for just a moment, it’s illuminating to know that, at least for me, humor and alcohol, for years, went hand-in-hand. The drunker I got, the funnier I got. Or so I thought. And if I’d start to bomb, lose my timing, I’d simply drink faster. If I ran out of jokes, I’d just drink. If the booze ran out, I’d go home.

          Humor, comedy, joking around is—as Gene Wilder said—a drug; it gives you an endorphin buzz, and with time, you need more and more. It’s a passport, as Wilder said, back to a land you once spent a lot of time in as a child: the unknown. And the unknown, you learned as a child, is where you could feel safe.

          It’s also the place where you could take risks you wouldn’t take otherwise.

          But this isn’t a story about alcohol. It’s a story about humor. So one last mention of the booze . . .

          When I quit drinking, 14 years ago, I found I was allowed to keep my sense of humor. In fact, when sober, much to my delight—and surprise—the humor, the comedy, the joking around got sharper, brighter, more incisive—less cruel, less trashy, less dumb. I found I didn’t need—out of my insecurity—to put down everyone and everything.

          Humor, as someone said—when you first wield your protective shield—is creating an optional universe in which your insecure self can feel at home. As you become more and more comfortable with yourself, you can ease off the humor, take brave steps out of your optional universe, test the air in the real world. Sober, I was, for the first time in my life, comfortable—or reasonably so—in the real world. At the same time, I hadn’t been asked to surrender my passport to my optional universe, the unknown, the place I’d discovered as a child and where I was—and continue to feel—completely safe—safer still, if I’m to be honest, than in the real world.

          So where does this leave me today? It leaves me a citizen of those two best worlds—the real one, in which I’m marginally comfortable, and the unknown, in which my humor continues to germinate.

          But does saying that today I’m a happy citizen of those two best worlds, the real one and the unknown, mean I’ve got it licked? Hardly.

          I live my life now to get back at it all. I live my life now in spite of the past. And I don’t mean that to sound vindictive or combative. Humor is my weapon of choice. I try not to use it against my parents. They tried. They’d been dealt a bum hand and they played it as best they could. I try not to use it against the uninspired environment I did my best to conform to but eventually had to escape. That was the way it was—the roulette wheel of birth. Millions of others were a lot worse off. I’m just happy to have been born in the first place. I try not to use it against the confusion I felt over identity and orientation; the lack of good role models and the guts to speak up. Those were primitive times compared to today. All these things were only parts—parts of a whole, a sum total. It’s the sum total I push back against today, every conscious minute—not with vindictiveness or regret; not even with avoidance. I do it with humor. Humor is my soft revenge.

About the Author

Colin Dale couldn’t be happier to be involved again at the Center. Nearly three decades ago, Colin was both a volunteer and board member with the old Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Then and since he has been an actor and director in Colorado regional theatre. Old enough to report his many stage roles as “countless,” Colin lists among his favorite Sir Bonington in The Doctor’s Dilemma at Germinal Stage, George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Colonel Kincaid in The Oldest Living Graduate, both at RiverTree Theatre, Ralph Nickleby in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby with Compass Theatre, and most recently, Grandfather in Ragtime at the Arvada Center. For the past 17 years, Colin worked as an actor and administrator with Boulder’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Largely retired from acting, Colin has shifted his creative energies to writing–plays, travel, and memoir.

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Closet Case by Colin Dale

          I was helped out of the closet by a man who died in 1935—ten years before I was born—a man who never successfully got out of his own closet. In other words, this man who helped me out of the closet lived and died a closet case.

          I’m going to begin, though, in telling you how, in 1959, I became acquainted not with the man who helped me out of the closet but with his surviving brother, under totally unrelated circumstances—

          It’s 1959. I am 14 years old. I’m living with my mother, father, and older brother in a second floor walk-up apartment in the East Bronx. I know you’ve heard me talk about my growing-up years in The Bronx a number of times before. It helps though to visualize my working-class surroundings in order to understand the improbability of a kid in the East Bronx making the acquaintance of an Oxford professor of archaeology. In my growing up years, fathers, like my father, were laborers. Mothers, like my mother, were housewives. Fathers disappeared each morning to their factory jobs on the elevated subway—the “el.” Mothers led kids like me to public school. They shopped. And they cooked. I say with complete kindness my father and mother were not very well educated. They had come through the Great Depression, and in all things did the very best they could.

          I had an uncle though, a lion of a man, who, as a highly educated man, was an outlier in the family. He recognized in me a kindred bookworm. One day he delivered—to an apartment that could barely accommodate it—a 33-year-old set of the Britannica. The 1926 Britannica.

          Fourteen-year-old me wanted to be an archaeologist. I read in the Britannica every article I could find on archaeology. One article on Persian archaeology especially excited me. I decided to send the writer what today we would call a fan letter. The writer, the Britannica told me, was a “Arnold W. Lawrence, professor, Oxford.”

          I wrote my fan letter. In my innocence, I had addressed it to “Professor Arnold W. Lawrence, Oxford, England,” not knowing Oxford was a conglomerate of universities, and forgetting that the man who had written the article had written it more than three decades earlier.

          But months later I received a reply, from A.W. Lawrence, London. Professor Lawrence, 60, retired, was apparently stunned to get my fan letter. In 1926 for A.W. Lawrence, the Britannica article was an extraordinary credit. Professor Lawrence’s reply to my fan letter–a tissue-paper blue aerogram (which I have safely at home) was the beginning of a correspondence that lasted up and down, on and off for 31 years—although (and this is another story for another Monday), I met Professor Lawrence face-to-face only once, in 1990, two months before his death.

          Now, though, to bring the two brothers together—

          We move forward, from 1959 to 1962. I’m 17, studying architecture (so much for archaeology) at a vocational art school in Manhattan, and I’m corresponding every month or so from our second floor walk-up with this retired Oxford professor in London. And, I’m still closeted. A movie opens in Times Square, David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia. I go to see it. I’m blown away. I never make the connection though—Lawrence and Lawrence—why should I? Lawrence is not an uncommon name. I want to learn more about Lawrence of Arabia. I stop in a midtown bookstore and I find a ratted copy of the Penguin The Essential T.E. Lawrence (that’s Lawrence of Arabia: Thomas Edward Lawrence). On the subway to the Bronx I pop the book and read in the sketch biography: “Thomas Edward Lawrence . . . five brothers . . . the youngest, Arnold Walter Lawrence.” Could this be? I think, this man I’ve been corresponding with for three years, could he be Lawrence of Arabia’s youngest brother? I write and ask, and of course he is.

          Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in 1888. His story is generally known, thanks to David Lean’s movie. Briefly: Lawrence studied at Oxford to be an archaeologist, went on a British Museum sponsored dig to the Middle East; at the onset of the First World War, he was drawn into British Army intelligence. Lawrence locked in his legacy during the war as guerilla mastermind of the Arab Revolt. At the war’s end, now Colonel Lawrence returned to England, sought to influence the Paris peace talks on behalf of the Arabs–failing that, and deeply disillusioned, he spent his remaining years running from the spotlight. Finally, four months before his death, Lawrence retired to a small cottage in Southern England, to wonder, as many of us to at such junctures, What next?

          But here I am in 1962, and for me Thomas Edward Lawrence is a movie. Not expecting the life affirming discovery I would make, I read everything I can find of T.E. Lawrence’s, chief being his massive, magnificent war memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom; also, his thousands upon thousands of letters—letters to such notables as Winston Churchill, Edward Elgar, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Ezra Pound, and George Bernard Shaw. My discovery, sometimes on the surface of Lawrence’s writing but more often between the lines, was that this man Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia, warrior, author, scholar–was a deeply conflicted man, almost certainly over his sexuality, and possibly, if you comb carefully enough, over questions of gender. I sat in my bedroom in The Bronx reading this stuff and thought, Holy shit, this is me!

            At that time I was at a point familiar to many of us—sensing a difference in me, fearing that difference made me a lesser person, somehow sure I couldn’t talk to others about my difference, and resigned to living a life of reduced accomplishment because of this difference. But here was Lawrence of Arabia . . .

          Was Lawrence homosexual? (I’ll use “homosexual.” It seems more fitting for an Edwardian man.) No one knows for sure. In certain of his letters, Lawrence denied any sexual experience. Yet he was certainly (what we would call today) gay-friendly. Among his closest friends were men like E.M. Forster. Cited often is a suspicious friendship with a teenage Arab boy when Lawrence was a twenty-something archaeologist. The boy, Selim Ahmed—initials S.A.—is possibly the person to whom Lawrence dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom, with its introductory poem, S.A., which opens: I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars. In Seven Pillars Lawrence, seeing the intimacy enjoyed by some of his young fighters, tells us here is “the openness and honesty of perfect love.” In another chapter he describes “friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace.” (There were few such “intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace” in David Lean’s movie.) Then, too, in a letter to George Bernard Shaw’s wife, Lawrence wrote “I’ve seen lots of man-and-man loves: very lovely and fortunate some of them were.”

          Can you imagine what effect this sort of thing had on closeted me? No one—me included—can say with certainty that T.E. Lawrence was homosexual. But for me, reading his man’s books and letters in my Bronx bedroom all those many years ago, T.E. Lawrence was homosexual enough, enough for me to open my own closet door. My God, I thought, here’s a man troubled as I’m troubled, and he’s written his will across the sky in stars!

           I will regret, though, Lawrence himself never got out of his own closet. This, for me, remains a note of sustained sadness. Having retreated to his cottage—alone—Lawrence wrote to a friend—and I have often felt this to be one of the most melancholy snapshots of a life not fully realized—Lawrence wrote: “I’m sitting in my cottage rather puzzled to find out what has happened to me. At present the feeling is mere bewilderment. I imagine leaves must feel like this after they have fallen yet alive from their tree, now on the ground, looking up, and until they die, wondering.”

          A week later Lawrence, in a motorcycle crash, suffered fatal head injuries. He died six days later, never having recovered consciousness. He was 46. Lawrence was buried in a country cemetery not far from his cottage. A.W. Lawrence, his youngest brother, my correspondent, was the senior pallbearer.

_______

          Fifty-six years later, in February of 1990, I meet A.W. Lawrence face-to-face for the first time. The meeting was arranged by a mutual acquaintance. I am at Lawrence’s bedside. He’s 90 years of age. We reminisce about our lifetime correspondence. I show A.W. the aerogram he sent in 1959. He reads it very, very slowly, and at the end says, “Well, quite a good letter, that.”

          I leave with a promise to return in the summer. But I return home one day in April to my Capitol Hill apartment to find on my answering machine a message from our mutual acquaintance: “We’ve lost our dear friend, Ray. A.W. passed quietly last Sunday. That’s it then, Ray, isn’t it, the end of an era.”

          I telephoned the acquaintance to hear him say that my friendship with A.W. Lawrence—a friendship that was founded on A.W. himself and not on his famous brother—my friendship, particularly in his last years, had given back to A.W. his own identity.

______

          Although I consider myself successfully un-closeted, there does remain a pocket of silence, one that will always be there—

          What I was never able to say to A.W. Lawrence in 31 years was how grateful I was to his older brother—how this older brother, T.E. Lawrence, who had written his name “across the sky in stars” but who seems never to have made peace with his identity—how this older brother had managed to give a boy in the Bronx the gift of his own identity.

______

          A footnote in closing:

          If Lawrence of Arabia helped me out of the closet, and I considered myself fully out (the exception being the one pocket of silence I just mentioned), why then have I contributed my stories to our website under the name Colin Dale? Why not under my own name? Believe me, this is not another pocket of silence. Twenty-some years ago I and a friend were riding the London underground. We got off at a station stop called Colindale. Colindale: one word, no space. My friend said, “That’s not too shabby a name, Colindale. It would make a good alter-ego.” And so ever since if I write something that I send to my friend, I write it as Colin Dale: two words.

          If you were to look at a map of the London underground, you’d see that if my friend and I had gotten off one stop sooner, today I’d be Hendon Central. One stop later, I’d be Burnt Oak.

About the Author

Colin Dale couldn’t be happier to be involved again at the Center. Nearly three decades ago, Colin was both a volunteer and board member with the old Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Then and since he has been an actor and director in Colorado regional theatre. Old enough to report his many stage roles as “countless,” Colin lists among his favorite Sir Bonington in The Doctor’s Dilemma at Germinal Stage, George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Colonel Kincaid in The Oldest Living Graduate, both at RiverTree Theatre, Ralph Nickleby in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby with Compass Theatre, and most recently, Grandfather in Ragtime at the Arvada Center. For the past 17 years, Colin worked as an actor and administrator with Boulder’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Largely retired from acting, Colin has shifted his creative energies to writing–plays, travel, and memoir.

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The Strangest Person I Ever Met by Colin Dale

I’m going to introduce you
to a villain.  I thought of a bunch of good strange people I’ve known, but none
tells you much about me, and telling you about me is what I strive for in
storytelling.  So I’m going to introduce
a villain—but first . . .
I sat there, as we all did,
probably, trying to think of the strangest person I ever met.  Imagining we’ve all lived good, full, rich
lives, and been open to all sorts of experiences, we each can think of, as I
could, dozens and dozens of strange characters we’ve crossed paths with.  Sometimes they were brief encounters, like
the man I met on a broken-down Trailways bus in the Poconos when I was a teen,
the man who was dressed in full 19th century British military garb, the man who
turned to me and said his experience of being on a broken-down bus reminded him
of the Crimean War. Sometimes our brushes with strange people are more prolonged,
like the homeless man—and Donald may remember this man—who, when Donald and I
were in visual merchandising at the Denver Dry, would stare fixedly all day
long into the big display windows, rocking from side to side, taking a break
every so often only to place small balled-up bits of aluminum foil under his
upper eyelids.  He was a sad case.  Nothing funny about  him. 
Then, too, there are strange people who are part our lives from
childhood–oddball aunts and uncles—and others who enter our lives—neighbors,
coworkers, even lovers sometimes—strange people we then spend weeks, months,
and even years trying to get back out of our lives.  I once had just such a lover, Lyndon (I’ll
call him), obsessive-compulsive to a fault, who was impatient with my
normal-guy’s sense of order, who one day thought signposts might help: I
arrived home one night, switched on the lights, to find our apartment a
snowstorm of white rectangles, hundreds and hundreds of them, white adhesive
mailing labels stuck to everything: on the tableware drawer, Forks only this compartment, tongs facing
north; on the floor lamps, Sixty-watt
bulbs only; on the glass-top coffee table, Current magazines go on top; on the toilet tissue dispenser, Paper unfurls from bottom-rear.   That was 30 years ago.  I still have a old bureau in a spare room
that today holds odds & ends; on the top drawer, now faded: Paired socks to the left, folded underpants
to the right. 
Too many strange people to
pick from.  Certainly too many from which
to pick the strangest.  As many of us do
when stuck in neutral, we pop open the dictionary.  Or the thesaurus.  That’s what I did, and I found, among
synonyms for strangest: weirdest, oddest, most peculiar, most uncommon,
most off, most irregular, most unaccountable.  I was happy to see that my thesaurus popping
was leading me away from the merely weird and more toward the disturbing.  That opened up all sorts of fresh possibilities
for title of Strangest.
The first guy I thought of
was Bill Reese.  I nominate Bill Reese
for the Strangest Person I Ever Met.  No,
wait, I don’t nominate him—after all, each of us is running his own contest—I
award Bill Reese the crown.  Not just as
the Strangest Person I Ever Met, but also the Meanest, Most Upsetting, Most Damaging.  Bill Reese—or Dr. William Reese—was my
English Department advisor at City College in New York. Advisors were usually
the youngest among the professors, a chore dumped on them by their
seniors.  Reese was maybe 30, but maybe
not even that.  He had the face of a
cherub, but the voice of high rpm machine long overdue for oiling.  Cocky and aloof, his head pitched to one
side, his eyes never on you, Reese’s delivery was a rapid-fire stream of
“The truth of the matter is . . . ” and “You’d be well advised
to . . . ” and “Among your shortcomings are . . . “.  To my eyes, a kid from a working class family
who had serious doubts about whether he even belonged in college, Reese was
Authority.  He was Judge.   He was Erudition.  Reese was Gatekeeper to a life I wanted but for
which I wasn’t sure I was qualified.
In awarding the title of
Strangest, Meanest, Most Damaging to Reese, I’m doing it not as Ray of 2012,
Ray who’s tested, tried, and pretty much worldly wise, but as Ray of 1962 who
was nervous and naive.  Ray of Today
finds it difficult to believe that Ray of 1962 couldn’t figure out what was
going on when Bill Reese would say at the close of one of our advising sessions,
after he’d turned me into a dishrag of insecurities, “What do you say we
have dinner this Saturday and I’ll explain more of what I’ve just told
you?”, or “I’m sure I can get Dr. Hitchings to up your grade to an
A-minus.  What say we have a drink and
talk about it?  I’m done a 5.”  Ray of 1962: dumb, dumb, dumb!  Needless to say, I failed to see the
obvious.  I never took Reese up on his
dinner offer.  Or drink offer.  I took my honestly earned B-plus and let it
go at that.
Before I finish my story of
Bill Reese, I want to award another crown; this one to One of the Most Understanding
Persons I Ever Met: another professor, this time one of the “elders,”
Dr. Frank Teige, also of the English Department. Dr. Teige was nearing his retirement.  Short, round, with an explosion of white hair
and a beard to match: if you were to phone and ask Central Casting to send over
a Santa, they’d send Frank Teige. There are countless reasons why I would award
the crown of One of the Most Understanding to Dr. Teige; one was the day after
class when, for a reason I can’t explain, I let it all pour out, how I’d had my
fill—nine months’ worth—of Bill Reese’s arrogance and strange behavior.  I remember Dr. Teige letting me vent, then,
after a theatrical pause, saying, “Ray, let me tell you what’s going on
here. . . “
My final meeting with Bill
Reese—I imagine I was pretty rigid, eager to get the year over with so I could
move on to another adviser—Reese leaned back, his head cocked to one side (I
remember this very clearly), saying, “It’s been a year.  A rough year, but you made it through.  I feel it’s my responsibility, at this our
last session, to give you the best possible advice I can.  Advice, not just for next year, but for the
long haul.  (I remember him saying ‘long
haul.’)  If I were you, Ray, in life, I
wouldn’t aim too high.”
I
wouldn’t aim too high.  Had
Reese used a chisel to channel those words into my flesh, he couldn’t have made
a more lasting impression.  That was
1963.  I’ve lived 49 years since, and not
one day have I not remembered Reese’s words. 
And struggled against them. 
Another time and place—in answer to a different storytellers’ prompt—I
could tell you what that struggle was like, but I’ve said enough to explain why—using
strangest in the sense of peculiar, irregular, and unaccountable—I’m
awarding Bill Reese the crown of the Strangest Person I Ever Met.
By the way, the names are
real.  Frank Teige’s name is real because
I care.  Bill Reese’s name is real
because I don’t.   
Finishing up, this has been
an interesting prompt, remembering the strange characters I’ve met in my
life.  Returning briefly to the stage of
my memory: being in a broken-down bus in the Pennsylvania mountains with a
seatmate who was reminded of the Crimean War, seeing again the homeless man I
saw most every day outside the Denver Dry—the deplorable man who placed
aluminum foil under his upper eyelids, and Lyndon, my short-term lover, who
thought mailing labels would prevent me from putting my socks in with the
knives, forks, and spoons. I also met again the damaging, the disturbing.
 What’s odd about this prompt, too: it’s a
one-way prompt: me, looking at all of
them. 
But what about me?  Am I not
strange in some ways?  I’m sure I am.

          This week’s prompt has been—at least for me—the
kettle calling the pot strange.  It’s possible
when I’m toting up my life, when all of the actors will have had their
entrances and exits, if on that day I try to think of the strangest person I
ever met, I may after all decide it was me. 

About the Author

Colin
Dale couldn’t be happier to be involved again at the Center.  Nearly three decades ago, Colin was both a
volunteer and board member with the old Gay and Lesbian Community Center.  Then and since he has been an actor and
director in Colorado regional theatre. 
Old enough to report his many stage roles as “countless,” Colin
lists among his favorite Sir Bonington in The
Doctor’s Dilemma at Germinal Stage, George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Colonel Kincaid in The Oldest Living Graduate, both at
RiverTree Theatre, Ralph Nickleby in The
Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby with Compass Theatre, and most
recently, Grandfather in Ragtime at
the Arvada Center.  For the past 17
years, Colin worked as an actor and administrator with Boulder’s Colorado
Shakespeare Festival.  Largely retired
from acting, Colin has shifted his creative energies to writing–plays, travel,
and memoir.
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Mother Goose by Colin Dale

Train whistle blowing, makes a sleepy
noise,
Underneath their blankets go all the girls and boys.
Heading from the station, out along the bay,
All bound for Morningtown, many miles away.
You may recognize those
lyrics, from the ‘50’s folksong Morningtown
Ride.  What does Morningtown Ride have to do with Mother Goose?  Well, I had a rough time with this week’s
prompt.  I had to really reach.   Mother Goose had nothing to do with my
childhood.  She was just not a presence
in my earliest years.  When I talk about
“earliest years,” I’m talking about really
earliest years: one, two, and three.  As
best I can remember—and who can really remember those years?—there was no
Mother Goose, no nursery rhymes, no bedtime stories.  I’m not saying my parents were remote or
ungiving, like “Let the kid lie in his crib and stare at the
ceiling.”  Not at all.  It’s just that storytelling wasn’t my
parents’ “thing.”
Early childhood memories are
notoriously uncertain.  I’ve tried many
times to reach back and remember my earliest true, verifiable, trustworthy
memory, not looking for Mother Goose but for the first flicker of
self-awareness, like a movie screen coming to life.  We’ve all done this.  It’s tough.
The best I’ve been able to
do is light up a day when I was four.  My
fourth birthday, as best I can tell.  I remember
a gift, and it seems it was a birthday gift: a toy truck, yellow and blue plastic,
and I remember playing with this truck on the living room carpet of our
second-floor apartment in the East Bronx.  I remember the room being filled with
sunlight.  Mine happens to be a February
birthday, so I’m guessing if this is a true memory, and it was my fourth
birthday, and if I had I looked out the window I’d have seen The Bronx in deep snow–the
way winters were back then.
I’m reasonably sure there
were no bedtime stories around the time of this fourth birthday.  There was certainly no Mother Goose.  But what about the years before: Years One,
Two, and Three?  Might my parents have
slipped in a little Baa, Baa, Black Sheep or I’m a Little Teapot during those
earliest veiled years?  Who’s to say?  Those years are forever irretrievable, unknowable.  Annus
incognita, the old maps would have said. 
  
The best I can do is
introduce circumstantial evidence.  My
parents were not big readers.   It’s
highly unlikely they would have been storytellers.  Anecdotes and jokes among adults, yes, but
bedtime storytelling?  Highly
unlikely.  My father went straight to the
back pages of the New York Daily News to see how he might best place a few
bucks on horses at Aqueduct and Belmont. 
My mother read the supermarket magazine, Woman’s Day.  Throw in a once-over of the Sunday church
bulletin.  That was it around my house.  More circumstantial evidence?  When I was old enough to be prowling about
and looking for stuff to read, I found no Golden Books of children’s literature,
no Beatrix Potter, no Brothers Grimm.
Slipping the time machine
into Forward gear, let’s hop ahead ten years, to when I’m fourteen, to when Morningtown Ride is just about to enter
the picture . . .
In spite of not having been
read to, I filled those ten years with books. 
I was a self-made reader.  Where
the inclination came from, I have no idea. 
Ours was a family of four.  My
father and mother, as I’ve already said, were limited readers.  My brother, fourteen years older than me, was
an athlete, and his athleticism was all consuming.  He was even less of a reader than my parents.
Me, the reader, was also me,
the shut-away loner.  My kingdom was my
bedroom.  How it came to be that I
dreaded being made to play outdoors with the boys in the street, I don’t know.  But that’s how it was.  That’s how I was.  I’d come home from P.S. 71 and shut my
door.  Weekends, too, except for meals,
I’d stay in my room.  I had a beat-up
Smith Corona typewriter I was using to pound out my first great novel–although
I never made much headway: I kept typing Page 1 over and over.  I did have a treasure in travel books
(wrangled from a favorite uncle, but that’s another story): Richard
Haliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels,
Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, Heinrich
Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet, Charles
Doughty’s Travels In Arabia Desert and
so on.  I was happy in my room.  My second-floor cave.  Through double-pane windows I would hear the
shouts of the boys in the street, but I didn’t care.  I was safe. 
Apart.  Unthreatened.
But–and this is the odd
part–I was also unhappy.  Although I
kept my unhappiness a secret, I had arrived at the point where I didn’t want this
loner existence to be the sum total of my life–the be all and end all.
Cue: Morningtown Ride . . . 
Slipping in to join the
books and the Smith Corona–thanks to a favorite aunt, wife of the favorite
uncle–came a Phonola High Fidelity Record Player, breadbox-size, portable, tan
& cream, a second speaker in the detachable lid; on the face of it the only
three knobs you would ever really need: base, treble, and loudness.
Along with the Phonola came
an assortment of records, mostly singles, 45 rpm.  One of the singles happened to be by a
singer/songwriter Malvina Reynolds: Morningtown
Ride.  I listened to it.  It was definitely juvenile stuff.  I listened to it again.  And again. 
And again, until it took up (I later realized) permanent residence in my
brain.
Train whistle blowing, makes a sleepy
noise,
Underneath their blankets go all the girls and boys.
Heading from the station, out along the bay,
All bound for Morningtown, many miles away.
Sarah’s at the engine, Tony rings the
bell,
John swings the lantern to show that all is well.
Rocking, rolling, riding, out along the bay,
All bound for Morningtown, many miles away.
Maybe it is raining where our train will
ride,
But all the little travelers are snug and warm inside.
Somewhere there is sunshine, somewhere there is day,
Somewhere there is Morningtown, many miles away.
Years later I heard Malvina
Reynolds on the radio, when Morningtown
Ride recorded by the Australian group The Seekers had become a surprise
hit.  Reynolds said, “I know youngsters
hate to go to bed at night because it seems like, as far as they’re concerned,
it is the end of the world. Going to sleep means you are going to be cut off
from everything, and I wanted to help them understand that they were heading
somewhere, when they got into bed, that they were heading for morning.”
At fourteen, naturally, I didn’t
think going to bed meant the end of the world. 
I wanted to travel, to get out of my room, and not to be “cut off
from everything.”  I didn’t want the
alternative to be having to join the boys in the street.  I wanted an alternative that was right for me,
something that was me, something that told me I was “heading
somewhere.”  Until it appeared, I’d hang
on to my apartness, to remain “snug and warm inside.”
   
So, this silly little song,
perhaps in the shock of my being exposed for the first time to the innocence–and
wisdom–of a nursery rhyme, assured me . . .
. . . somewhere there is sunshine,
somewhere there is day . . .
A silly little song that
was–and remains–my foster Mother Goose.

About the Author

Colin
Dale couldn’t be happier to be involved again at the Center.  Nearly three decades ago, Colin was both a
volunteer and board member with the old Gay and Lesbian Community Center.  Then and since he has been an actor and
director in Colorado regional theatre. 
Old enough to report his many stage roles as “countless,” Colin
lists among his favorite Sir Bonington in The
Doctor’s Dilemma at Germinal Stage, George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Colonel Kincaid in The Oldest Living Graduate, both at
RiverTree Theatre, Ralph Nickleby in The
Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby with Compass Theatre, and most
recently, Grandfather in Ragtime at
the Arvada Center.  For the past 17
years, Colin worked as an actor and administrator with Boulder’s Colorado
Shakespeare Festival.  Largely retired
from acting, Colin has shifted his creative energies to writing–plays, travel,
and memoir.
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Epiphany by Colin Dale

Epiphany, in my American Heritage College Dictionary, has three possible meanings.  I’m interested in only the third of the three.  The first, the Christian holiday tied to the arrival of the Wise Men in Bethlehem.  The second, any revelatory manifestation of God, much like the roadside conversion of St. Paul.  The third–my kind of epiphany–a comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.   One and two are not for me.  I’ve never been visited by any wandering Wise Men.  Nor have I ever been knocked off my ass on the road to Damascus, or heading anywhere, for that matter.  No, my epiphany–or epiphanies, because we’ve all had many–have been of the mundane kind: no gods, no midday starbursts, no basso voices from aloft.  In fact, as I sorted through my epiphanies, the one I’ll tell you about involves only an ordinary park bench in an ordinary town park near an ordinary mountain stream on an ordinary–although absolutely beautiful–sunny day.

I chose this particular epiphany because it’s somewhat topical and reasonably recent.  I could have gone back to some of my earlier epiphanies, back to my gullible college days when I sought the meaning of life, over and over again, and found it, over and over again, back to the days of The Teachings of Don Juan and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, back to when I’d write “How true!” in the margins every time I’d find the meaning of life, over and over again–when, if “How true!” were underlined several times, with maybe three exclamation points, it meant I’d found the Mother of All Meanings of Life.  Instead I’m going to tell you about an epiphany that’s more workaday, more down-to-earth, one that many of us, possibly, will relate to.  Why relate to?  Well, besides a park bench and a mountain stream, it also involves a computer.

I should warn you before going any further what follows contains a fairly graphic depiction of the death of a computer, a MacBook laptop.  If you’ve a queasy stomach, you may want excuse yourself.  If you’ve chosen to stay–and trusting you’re all over 18–here goes . . .

Two years ago I was involved in a readers’ theater production of Twelfth Night.  We had rehearsed the play amply and performed it several times in Boulder, so when invited to do a short week’s worth of performances in Breckenridge we didn’t feel the need to do more than one rehearsal in the Breckenridge theater, plus the performances.  That meant lots of free time.  That amounted to a mountain “vacation:” a few hours’ work evenings, but our days completely free.  Cast and crew were offered group lodging, but me–a tenacious loner–I opted for a single room in a downtown hotel.  I had packed as per usual: socks, underwear, toothbrush and paste, too many books–and my Mac laptop.  Now, truth in storytelling requires I say that at this time I was your typical all-American computer user: I traveled knowing in advance I’d have Internet access, and, before checking the HBO lineup or looking for bedbugs, I’d confirm my Internet access.

I found the hotel’s guest network, signed on, and . . . and here’s where it gets graphic . . . my MacBook began to consume itself.  I knew it felt unusually hot only minutes after startup, like a lasagna dish just out of the microwave.  And then the screen–remember going to movies years ago, before film was digitized? how the cellulose, so-called “safety” stock would catch in the projector’s film gate and look like it had caught fire? instead of Cary Grant clinging to the roof’s edge, suddenly this almost pretty mosaic of cinnamon brown and honey yellow, the whole screen a wiggling mosaic of melting film?  Well, that was the MacBook screen.  I did what all quick-thinking Mac jockeys do in a situation like that: I rebooted.  Nothing.  Dead screen.  John Cleese would have said my MacBook was now an ex-computer, it had ceased to be, it was bereft of life, it had joined the choir invisible.

The groundwork was now laid for my epiphany.  My MacBook was dead.  And this was Day 1 of a full week away from home.  I’m sure I didn’t notice at first, but soon, stretched out on the hotel bed, my rapidly cooling laptop sitting useless on my lap, I noticed I was having a physical response.  Not just an emotional response: I’m cut off for a week!  Not just an intellectual response: How will I keep up with what’s going on?  But a physical response: My heartbeat quickened.  My breathing was staccato.  My stomach felt like its bottom trap had sprung open.  I knew it was nuts to have felt this way, but all I could think was, What am I going to do now?

Cue the town park.  Cue the mountain stream.  Enter the park bench.

I did what, had I a living MacBook, would have been unimaginable: I went for a walk.  Outside the hotel I found a serpentine path, the Breckenridge Riverwalk.   A mile or so’s stroll led me to the town park and an empty bench.  I sat there looking around, watching the river, watching the passersby.  I was having a good time.  If I’d been paying attention there might have been a basso voice, not from the sky, but from inside: Hey, Ray, isn’t this better?  Had it been a Bible moment, it might have been: Hey, Ray, why persecuteth thyself?

By now you all know where this is going, but what the heck.

My epiphany on the park bench did not change me overnight.  A week later, back in Denver, I bought a new MacBook.  And I did set out pretty quick to keep its use in proportion.  Nor did the park bench turn me into a Luddite, sneering at all technology.  Far from it.  My MacBook today–which is I the one I bought after Breckenridge–is first and foremost my typewriter.  Yes, it connects me to the Internet and is my link to email, but I use these features sparingly.  Email, for instance–I limit myself to one hour each morning.  As for web browsing, I try to restrict it to real research, and even then I gang my searches for what usually amounts to an hour’s browsing late in the day.  I did, for a time, subscribe to Freedom.com, the lockout service that blocks the Internet, email, the works, for the number of minutes you specify.  I’ve now weaned myself from Freedom.com.  Now when I’m typing, I just don’t look anywhere else.

I realize there’s a danger in this tale.  It makes me seem holier than thou.   I don’t mean it to sound that way, because that’s not how I feel.  I’m not a better person for my laptop epiphany.  I’m not even sure I’m a better person than the me before Breckenridge.  I think I am a happier person.  A more patient person.  A more relaxed person.   And I seem to get a lot more done than the old me ever did.  In a funny way, I feel more free.  I feel freer since Breckenridge to say yes to things as they come along.  I have more focus.  I’m a hell of a lot better at following through on things.  Best of all, I’ve learned the unbeatable joy of mono-tasking.

So, to wrap it up, we’ve all had many epiphanies.  Here an epiphany, there an epiphany.  This was a snapshot of one of mine.  It’s been fun to go back over this particular epiphany, to see again my MacBook liquefying before my eyes, to re-feel the What-do-I-do-now? panic, to remember the jittery walk to the Breckenridge park, to re-experience the uninstallation of anxiety and to celebrate the reinstallation of a peace of heart, mind, and spirit I’d forgotten was my birthright.

Metaphorically speaking, the Riverwalk was my road to Damascus.  And, metaphorically speaking, I certainly was knocked off my ass.

About the Author

Colin Dale couldn’t be happier to be involved again at the Center.  Nearly three decades ago, Colin was both a volunteer and board member with the old Gay and Lesbian Community Center.  Then and since he has been an actor and director in Colorado regional theatre.  Old enough to report his many stage roles as “countless,” Colin lists among his favorite Sir Bonington in The Doctor’s Dilemma at Germinal Stage, George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Colonel Kincaid in The Oldest Living Graduate, both at RiverTree Theatre, Ralph Nickleby in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby with Compass Theatre, and most recently, Grandfather in Ragtime at the Arvada Center.  For the past 17 years, Colin worked as an actor and administrator with Boulder’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival.  Largely retired from acting, Colin has shifted his creative energies to writing–plays, travel, and memoir.
Posted on

If I Won the Lottery by Colin Dale

If I
won the lottery.   What
do you mean “if”?  I did win the lottery, in 2004.  I was visiting my brother in West Milford,
New Jersey.  I’d gone back there to run
in the New York City marathon.  While there,
I bought a New Jersey Pick Six lottery ticket. 
I won.  The prize was $19,500,000.
 I didn’t take home $19,500,00.  Taxes amounted to $6,825,000.  I ended up with $12,675,000.

The marathon was a bust.  I felt like crap from the start, and dropped
out at Mile 18.  I knew what the problem
was.  It wasn’t lack of training.  The problem was I was getting older.  But I was now a multi-millionaire.  My thought–with aging in one hand and wealth
in the other–how much YOUTH could I buy? 
I’d read a story in Runners’ World about a procedure at the Huntington
Memorial Hospital in Glendale, Wisconsin–not a surgery where you get artificial
parts but a procedure called tissue
transference where you get whole new parts, real parts, in a sense, the body of someone 20, 30 years
younger.  The procedure cost me $188,000;
then, $22,280 for the hospital stay, $3,350 for post-op rehab, $970 for
medication, $450 for hotel & meals, and $16 for cab fare.  The total cost of YOUTH: $215,066.  Not bad.

My after-tax prize, if you
recall, was $12,675,000.  $12,675,000
minus $215,066 for YOUTH — I was left with $12,459,934.

Unfortunately, the new,
youthful me needed some new, youthful FRIENDS. 
It would hurt to part with my old old
friends, but what the hell.  I’d seen an
infomercial on TV: “Tired of your old do-nothing friends?” it
said.  “Buy new FRIENDS, fun-loving FRIENDS,
high-energy FRIENDS able to keep up with your high-energy lifestyle.  Buy one FRIEND, two FRIENDS, buy a dozen FRIENDS.  Call for prices.  You’ll be surprised how affordable.  Operators are standing by.”  And so I called.  The cost: $15,134 per FRIEND.  I bought a dozen for $181,608.  I wanted these FRIENDS close by, so I had them
moved to Denver: add shipping & handling at $4,700 per FRIEND, and
resettling costs of $234,000 — the grand total for a dozen new, high-energy,
close-by FRIENDS: $472,008.

After buying YOUTH & FRIENDS,
I still had $11,987,926 left.

What frustrated me next was
my stalled career.  An actor, I was at a
dead-end.  I wondered if I could buy some
TALENT somewhere.  That’s when I happened
to catch Kevin Costner on The View.  He
was saying how after Dances With Wolves
every movie he made got panned.  He was
introduced to an acting coach who knew the secrets of real TALENT.  And now Costner was offering these same
secrets to anyone who wanted to buy them. 
The next day I was on a plane to Costner’s ranch in Twentynine
Palms.  Six weeks later I was winging my
way back to Denver, the new owner of TALENT. 
The cost (itemizing it): $388 in phone calls to Costner, $1,267 for a
roundtrip ticket to California, $6,200 for car rental, etc., $770,000 for The
Intensive (that’s the learning of the secrets), $4,250 for new headshots, and
$45 for a thank you gift for Mr. Costner. 
Total cost of TALENT: $782,150.

I now had renewed YOUTH, new
FRIENDS, and real TALENT — and I still had $11,205,776 in the bank.  

But there I was, in the
summer of ’05, with YOUTH, FRIENDS, TALENT, and money, and no matter how hard I
tried, I still couldn’t seem to earn the RESPECT of people who mattered.  What the hell could I do to earn RESPECT?  That’s when I heard on the radio: “Don’t
earn respect.  Buy it!  Silvan Life Systems
will equip you with the RESPECT you deserve. 
Arrange an in-service with a Silvan life coach today.”  I called Silvan and contracted with the best:
Baron Baptiste, senior mentor.  I flew
Mr. Baptiste to Denver and he stayed with me for a full month.  When he left, I had RESPECT.  The cost: Baron Baptiste’s fee, $937,400.  His per diem, at $420 a day, $12,600.  His CD’s (the full set): $112.  The grand total for a little genuine RESPECT:
$950,112.

***

Now this is getting
long-winded, so I’ll abbreviate the rest. 
I toted it up in the fall of 2005: I was YOUNG, surrounded by FRIENDS,
super TALENTED, and deeply RESPECTED. 
And the amazing part: I still had $10,255,664 in the bank.

Unfortunately, though, the
things I still wanted, when I checked the prices, were a lot more expensive.  For example . . .

I bought CHARACTER.  I found CHARACTER through goodcharacter.com.  They offered a variable-length retreat
depending upon how much CHARACTER you wanted. 
I took the whole enchilada: Kindness, Fairness, Courage, Honesty,
Diligence, and Integrity.  The grand
total, including the prefrontal cortex implants: $1,290,022.

Next I bought LOVE, from the
Yabyummy Institute.  My personal Love
Master David Deidra’s fee, $75,800, his per diem, $3,000; my Joy Buddy Rex
Winter’s fee, $58,000, Rex’s per diem, $2,000; the Sacred Loving Program to
include Tantric Love for the Soul, Body Heat, Heart & Soul, and What a
Difference a Touch Makes, $876,549; plus the Sacred Loving Pleasure Kit, marked
down to $484,650.  Total cost for LOVE:
$1,499,999.

Next came PEACE: PEACE of
mind.  An easy one–expensive, but easy:
eight potions, given by Lakshmi Ganesh Punjam at the Peaceable Dragon Lodge in
Kaski, Nepal.  Each potion gave me a
piece of PEACE:

1) Do not be jealous

2) Do not crave recognition

3) Forgive & forget

4) Do not interfere

5) Endure what cannot be
cured

6) Do not procrastinate

7) Never leave the mind
vacant

8) Never regret

Cost?  The potions, $250,000 each–$2,000,000
total.   Travel: $125,142.  So, PEACE: $2,125,142.

Next-to-last: IMMORTALITY.  This was a weird one.   A guy by the name of Gerald came to my door.  He said he’d give me IMMORTALITY for $4,500,000.  I knew from Angie’s List that he was on the
up & up.  Gerald stayed with me while
he taught me IMMORTALITY.  Total cost:
$4,500,000 for the IMMORTALITY itself; I gave Gerald a $675,555 tip — that’s
15% (seemed fair); and incidentals during his stay (food, beverage, and DVD
rentals): $125,142.  Total for
IMMORTALITY: $5,340,500.

That left me with only one
thing I wanted to buy, but before we get to that . . .

If you’ve been adding this
up as we went along . . .

YOUTH

FRIENDS

TALENT

RESPECT

CHARACTER

LOVE

PEACE, and

IMMORTALITY

. . . you’ll know I’d spent
$12,459,933.  I’d won (after taxes)12,459,934.  I had $1 left.  Well . . .

The last thing I wanted was
HAPPINESS.  How lucky then I found a shop
around the corner where, with my senior discount, I could buy HAPPINESS for
only a buck.

But when I tried to buy it,
the shopkeeper said, that’s going to be a buck seventy-five.

“But I’m a
senior,” I said.

“Don’t try it, friend,”
the shopkeeper said.  “I know you
from around here.  You’re YOUNG, got young
FRIENDS, your TALENTED, RESPECTED by everybody, got great CHARACTER, obviously
in LOVE, blessed with PEACE of mind, and, for all I know, you’re IMMORTAL.  No way you’re a senior.  HAPPINESS’ll be a buck seventy-five.”

“Shit,” I said,
and went home.

About the Author

Colin Dale couldn’t
be happier to be involved again at the Center. 
Nearly three decades ago, Colin was both a volunteer and board member with
the old Gay and Lesbian Community Center. 
Then and since he has been an actor and director in Colorado regional
theatre.  Old enough to report his many stage
roles as “countless,” Colin lists among his favorite Sir Bonington in
The Doctor’s Dilemma at Germinal
Stage, George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? and Colonel Kincaid in The
Oldest Living Graduate, both at RiverTree Theatre, Ralph Nickleby in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
with Compass Theatre, and most recently, Grandfather in Ragtime at the Arvada Center.  For the past 17 years, Colin worked as an
actor and administrator with Boulder’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival.  Largely retired from acting, Colin has
shifted his creative energies to writing–plays, travel, and memoir.