Saturday, February 17, 2018

DEAD INSIDE/Rob the Mob

The only upside of getting sick is movie watching.  I seldom read when I’m ill.  Although I love reading, somehow when I have the flu or whatever, I afford myself the luxury of binge watching.  It is something I never do because my television isn’t hooked up and because I like to do creative things with my free time, oh ya and I’m weird.

At any rate, I watched this movie about a tough guy.  Tough guy is different than Bad boy.  I grew up in the 80’s where “bad boy” meant a metal or a rock guy with fucked up hair who drank & drugged.  Not my type.  I had rough boyfriends who always had weapons tucked away in various locations and had dubious ways of making money and dangerous friends, but never did I date a guy who listened to Metal.

In the movie, the guy gets out of prison.  His girlfriend picks him up.  They’re young-ish.  They get drunk, they have sex.  Next, he hashes out a heist.  They’re in love.  They’re in Queens.  They smoke a lot.  He gets a gun and they drive their giant Chevy Impala and act out their plan of holding up mafia social clubs in the neighborhood because he figures out that they have a lot of cash lying around these joints.

In act three, he looks at her and says “Florida is nice.  We should go there.  Marry me.”  This is the point of the movie where a girl tears up.  Me=nothing.  Nothing happened.  No moisture developed in either eye socket.  Doesn’t matter if you’re a broad from Boston or not.  There’s nothing like when a man softens enough to say that.  And these were great actors.  I mean they nailed this scene.  He is brutally handsome and the camera loves his face.  She is unconventionally pretty in a down to earth way.  She said yes.  I should have been balling.

But, nothing.  Am I dead inside ?

I had this marriage that ended badly.  I’ve learned over time, you can’t hold on to how you wish things could be.  (I used to have a line in my act, “I just want to go to my gay boyfriend’s house, listen to Peggy Lee and cry over what could have been.”  These days I'm less fag hag, more John Goodman.

Now that I’m older I see how you can’t long for the you that was lost in that time period, that elusive "you" that you can’t get back.  BUT, I’m also stuck.  I’m not dating.  It’s like I’m blocked.  Like a giant black box is covering my heart completely. 
I can’t help feeling there is something missing.  As if there is some seed within me that hasn’t been cooked yet that needs time before I am ready, really ready, to address the black box.  I sort of hate personal growth, gurus and motivational speakers.  I hate shrinks, I hate mediation and I hate the notion that we all need “fixing.”  Shrinks I hate because at the end of a session you feel awful and then you go, “here’s a hundred bucks.” 
Maybe it’s exactly what I need though.  Life is nothing if it isn’t paradox.  

I used to cry at episodes of Mad About You.  That was the young me.  It was a really well written sitcom about a married couple where they respectively resolved all the dilemmas that plagued their lives in under twenty minutes.  Not really sure why that did it for me, but it did.  I didn’t even cry at Casablanca (because boo hoo he’s gonna die). <--- that makes me seem shallow and vacuous, but I think romance like that plain doesn’t exist.   

Maybe I’m not dead inside but the old self in me is dying.  Am I headed for a re-birth?


4 comments:

  1. This is the part of the movie where I get scared.

    First of all, I literally just watched the obscure "Rob the Mob" in the past few months. As research for my crime fiction book, about two young lovers/aspiring artists (she, a writer and singer, he a jazz tenor sax player) who get mixed up w/ the Mob.

    He (named Bill, though I may change it to something more Italian-sounding) is from Brooklyn. Bill works at the Mob-run Birdland jazz nightclub as a bar-back, & trying to gig around town.

    She (Diane) in my mind looks and acts a little like the actress from Rob the Mob (Nina Arianda, who's also great in "Goliath", Prime series mentioned by your pal Mandy Stadtmiller on Sam Lamott's "Hello Humans" podcast when she was starting her book promo)... [btw, Mandy's a Northwestern alum like me, and one who I'd vaguely been aware of prior to you mentioning Unwifeable in your above blog].

    But here's the kicker: Diane is from Brookline, MA (I shit you not!). She just moved to Manhattan to start at NYU. Before you go thinking I'm handing you a line to amuse you or bullshit you, she lived in Brookline since long *before* I knew who you were. Because it's 1959, her father owns the cop & lawyer bar across the street from the Suffolk county courthouse, and I needed my character to have a brief but important affair with Teddy Kennedy, since the Kennedy boys couldn't keep their peckers in their pants and Teddy's an easier way to catch a glimpse of John's 1960 campaign than going over the top to Diane blowing John in a back office and taking my whole story in the wrong direction (out of the nightclubs, mafia social clubs, recording studios, & shabby musicians' & beatniks' Village apartments). Plus Teddy's the right age. He was a newly-hired Suffolk County ADA while he was helping w/ JFK's campaign, and thus can be an occasional patron of Diane's father's bar, where she worked from time to time in high school and beyond. (So have you met any Kennedys? I'll have to shoot myself in the thigh if you have, but I *really* need to know.)

    Yes, she's fake, and you're real. I know that. I'm also assuring myself and you right now that I'm not nuts.
    Therefore my Diane's also based on other real historical figures from the era, especially Beat poet Diane DiPrima, Joni Mitchell (my favorite singer-songwriter, male or female), and jazz singer Anita O'Day (a little rougher around the edges than your gal, the aforementioned Peggy Lee, who's also great, tho). Oh, and the tragically lesbian Leslie Gore, lovingly treated (semi-fictionalized) in another obscure period-piece movie, Grace of My Heart, featuring the ever-awesome actress (and now good writer/podcaster) Illeana Douglas.

    So there's that. She's not you. Plus Diane's Irish, and I've been going back-and-forth about whether to instead make her half Italian. Except now YOU, goddamn it!, have me wondering if I should make her half Albanian! (not really, I don't know shit about Albania, and wouldn't want to fake it...)

    [continued in 2nd comment]

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  2. ...Diane ain't Albanian... wouldn't want to fake it... See Part 1 Comment above or below)

    Nevertheless, after watching your online sets and the Half Hour Happy Hour interview & hearing the "where's the grief" pod, *you* are fast becoming a model for this character. Such as her growing stage presence (goes from waitressing to getting singing gigs & a record deal) and life skills, like one-of-the-boys toughness, intelligence, charm, confident enough to be also self-deprecating, ball-busting & funny, and sticks up for herself in a relationship, ...also occasionally hard-partying, but with a "good girl" off-switch.
    Oh, and she was always going to be a Daddy's girl, same as you.

    And she's into Vonnegut, like you... in fact she meets him when he is/was (IRL) living on Cape Cod in the late Fifties, teaching English, plus working as dramaturg & actor etc at The Barnstable Comedy Club, a community theater thing. But I digress (as always...)

    Finally... (finally? Should I go away & stop bugging you? Is that what you'd prefer? Cuz I will if you want...), I was waaaaay into Mad About You when it was on. Lot of little parallels to my life then. And now they're back on tv, if you havent heard. Streaming somewhere, new episodes also featuring their now-grown daughter, but I think I can't get the show, or not willing to pay for that "channel". Whatever. The point is, between Rob the Mob, Brookline, Vonnegut & all the above weird coincidences (plus others I've yet to mention, and my own private life which is a bit messy now but not rudiculous), I now have no idea what to do. I mean about you. Or Diane.

    As I mentioned on Twitter, I'd like to at least perhaps have you as a creative consultant on my project(s). (and pay you, but who knows how all that works?, i'm new at a lot of this, esp. podcast, despite being 54 and having previously worked in other media [PBS style documentary mostly, but also taught writing/production at a small college a bit, and a jazz deejay in college for 3 years, late Eighties in Chicago while at NU.]) One spot where your eyes, your voice and/or your writing might help: with so much research material in-hand, I'm also developing the podcast idea about the era, '59-63, esp. the interwoven entertainment biz/ crime / politics of the time, esp. in Greenwich Village and Boston, and esp. in jazz/pop/comedy nightclubs and Village coffeehouses/ poetry slam/ folk music venues. For a slightly comparable podcast, check out "Mob Queens", about mob kingpin Vito Genovese's wife Anna, who ran a major gay bar/drag show venue in the Village for years. I started my thing eight or more years ago, so *before* Mad Men, Mrs. Maisle, Green Book or The Irishman and other hot creative projects. Not sure if those help or hurt my chances. Hopefully a rising tide (i.e. revival of interest in the late 50s/early 60s, not seen since "Happy Days") raises all boats, including mine.


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  3. [Jeez. Part 3 here. Too big for your comment field at Blogger.. Sorry so longwinded & complicated... ]

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  4. I'm not even sure you're reading any of this! Nor my milder Twitter effort to initiate a discussion w/ you about it. Not to mention how I'm probably coming across: needy, nutty, a little A.D.D. (which I actually am), or even just wildly unrealistic. But Sam Lamott's beautiful mother Anne Lamott, whose readings I've attended twice, plus reading most of her books, said it never hurts to ask. I love Anne's stuff, and her spirit, both fiction and non, both spiritual and secular (I'm a very liberal Christian like her, plus she formerly collaborated w/ one of my main mentors, Franciscan monk & author Richard Rohr, with whom I've attended and even collaborated on some big events and workshops. Anne said in Bird by Bird (hope your writer's group has exolored that one!) that people like to be asked. So I am asking. Can I help your career, and if so, how? And/or help heal your heart? And/or enlist your help in my own creative/personal process. Figure it out as we go? (and less publicly perhaps... Blog & twitter comments are probably awful contexts to try initiating a collaboration!)

    So if any of this makes ANY sense to you, most likely an email would be best, to put the ball firmly in your court and stop my ridiculous full-court press. (Go Celtics! Go Bulls! ...Yankees Suck! [hadda get that last one in there! You get it...] )

    So, ... I'm at mnielsen34 (at) gmail.com. Please contact me... If you dare!
    (ha, sorry, getting weird & clowny again... But seriously, write me, even if it's simply to say "bug off", tho I suspect you'd be nicer than that, your real style isnt likely as tough and cutting as your writing and stage persona)

    I promise on our late fathers' honor, *I'm not punking you*. Trying to be as genuine and yet ambitious and hopeful as I can. Honestly, I wonder if it's a "God thing", it's been so weird. But I won't presume that, nor will I presume to ACTUALLY know what you're all about, either personally or professionally. I'm just the first one willing to take a risk.

    Whadya say? Wanna "Rob the Mob" in an entirely new way?

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