Shorter of Breath and One Day Closer.

David Bowie died a few days ago. Didn't know him personally, and never saw him in concert. Liked a lot of his music.
 

Lou Reed passed away last year. Didn't know him personally, and never saw him in concert. Liked a lot of his music.

Both deaths made me stop and reflect significantly. Since my early teens I have recognized musicians and the releases of their singles and albums as life milestones. Music has always been important to me. It said things my heart knew but I couldn’t articulate. It sang about aches and dreams—and sometimes even the cheesiest of lyrics managed to sum up what I was feeling as a nascent adult. (In those days I was soooo melodramatic.)

In a previous blog I ran through how many rock concerts I've attended. Playing an album/cassette/CD/8-track over and over, bopping my head ceaselessly to the beat is one thing, but it's about as personal as . . . Okay, it’s not personal. Watching the real deal, the actual artist, perform live has always been the clincher. When you have played Aqualung about 73 kajillion times and you finally get to see Jethro Tull on stage, up close and for realsies, it is a totally different, mindblowing experience. And if this is repeated with Physical Graffiti, Dark Side of the Moon, Tapestries, Brain Salad Surgery, and about sixty other albums and the artists who made them, well, it starts to become your own personal game with life: Who else can I manage to see before it's too late?

I’m not talking about seeing Paul McCartney before he becomes living-challenged and joins the choir invisible (or I do). This is about watching our lifelong popular icons, one by one, cast off the Muu-Muu of Life and jump on the Jitney to Forever.

Keith Moon and John Bonham, both faves of mine, became room temperature waaaay back, when I was still but a lad of hormonally-crazed teenagement. Shockers both, indeed, but neither's too-early passing caused me any serious metaphysical reflection at the time. And likewise I was too young to be shaken by the deaths of Mama Cass, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, or Jim Morrison. Never even heard of Phil Ochs. I'd have to say the first “holy shit” moment was John Lennon.

My Dad, steady and loving though he was, was not exactly the most socially progressive guy in New York City. On more than one occasion in the late ’60s and early ’70s I'd heard words such as “long-haired faggots,” “pinkos,” and other such colorful Archie Bunkerisms escape his lips.

So when he put the paper down in front of me that December morning and I read “John Lennon Slain Here,” my heart skipped a beat. Almost as stunning was Dad’s concerned, “Are you okay? I know you were a fan of his.” I'd heard him disparage Lennon more than a few times for his “love-in,” hair, drug use, supposed lack of personal hygiene, etc, but this concern was unusual.

It was the first time I had the glimmer that beautiful things in life really do come to an end. Lennon? Fucking gone? At age 20, having been raised in the relative metaphysical and philosophical safety of a middle-class urban neighborhood, I still had the idea that Shit's Just Gonna Go On Forever. Party on, Wayne.

Those in the lawyering profession have some terms they like to use, among them “slippery slope” and “parade of horribles.” Let X happen and then A, B, G, V, and an endless and unpreventable parade of horrible things will follow. (Lawyers also show their briefs to each other in chambers, but that's just something my immature mind finds titter-worthy.)

How had my parents felt watching the icons they’d lived alongside for 50 years, the staples of their popular culture, check out of the Heartbeat Hotel and grab a seat on the Flatline Express? Probably a little more isolated, a little more aware that we're getting to the narrower end of the Christmas Tree of Life and This Grand Parade of Kodak Moments Most Definitely Rounds the Final Street Corner.

Bowie was only 69, a relatively young man. His creativity and boldness to go where no rock musician had gone before never waned. But, on the other hand, the Stones are all in their 70s and still pumping it out.

In the meantime we said goodbye to Cory Wells, John Entwistle, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Warren Zevon, Joe Strummer, Natalie Cole, Isaac Hayes, Lemmy, Chris Squire, B. B. King, Ben E. King, Joe Cocker, Joey Ramone, and myriad other music icons of my own era.

Who the hell is gonna go next? One gets a chill looking through the list of reunion tours featuring one-hit wonders with bad hair replacements Dodge Dart-ing their ways across the Great Plains over the past 20 years. Or even more remarkable: The Who, minus one half of the original lineup, still crabbily windmilling around stadiums everywhere. “I hope I die before I get old”? Screw that. Party on, Garth.

I'll tell you this: When Keith Richards, who’s outlived all the above mentioned plus Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Jerry Garcia, Johnny Winter, Ray Manzarek, Davy Jones and Frank Zappa finally goes, it will definitely all be over.

(Added note: as if this week wasn't morbid enough, we also mourn the passing of someone else way too young to have his too-solid flesh melted, thawed, and resolved into a dew: Alan Rickman. Not an album producing musician, but nonetheless a true rock star in his own profession.)

(Added note #2. January 18, 2016. As if all this wasn't enough... Glenn Frey of the Eagles moved on. Age 67.)

Its All Moot, Ya Know.

Okay, at the very first my reaction was “Really? What the hell is the point of asking, anyway?” Then I ruminated on it, cuddling the idea until it gained weight. Out of all the questions/subjects in human history, this is probably the thorniest. To wit: Do you think about death? And, if so, what are your thoughts? And how do you, as a playwright, treat your characters who die?

The question was asked by a playwright. God knows what spurred him on to dump this onto Facebook, but he did. And, of course, it being Facebook, folks responded. Mostly serious, nearly all earnest. I think there was one who responded with tongue mischievously planted within cheek.

I sound dismissive. I, like most self-aware, sentient beings, understand death to be inevitable. (It's actually the very last thing on my bucket list.) It's gonna happen. Only questions are when and how.

Having come pretty close to sharing a hot fudge sundae with Death on several occasions, I think I have a passing familiarity. When I was a kid, I had asthma bad enough to close my airways down far enough keep me in an oxygen tent for two weeks. The doctor who did my tonsils when I was five fucked it up big time and I was ambulanced back in to Lenox Hill Hospital toot-fucking-sweet to stem some kind of out of control infection. (Because of my childhood proclivity to contract all sorts of stupid medical ailments, Lenox Hill became my home away from home and I knew all of the nurses in pediatrics by name.)

I had five concussions by the time I was eleven. (And NO, it was not from physical abuse. I was a first-class klutz. I once fell off the damn doctor's exam table when I was five and landed square on the noggin. These are the days before litigation became as commonplace as therapy.)

Three bouts of pneumonia by the time I was eight. When I was nine I contracted viral meningitis. I was in hospitals so much I came to think of them as normal places for any kid to be. To this day I find them soothing and safe. My parents heard from doctors more than once not to plan on keeping the college fund open. Nurses, who kept me from being frightened, who stayed up with me and played games with me and made sure I was okay and sat with me when my Mom and Dad weren't there . . . they are the noblest humans on the planet; they are my goddesses of goddesses.

Moving on. I was almost decapitated on the number one train. My appendix burst right before the surgery. A giggling four year old girl tossed a live mortar at me one sunny day in Baghdad. My wife and I were hit by lightning in Quebec.

Any one of these could have led to a greasy end. How do I feel about death? Like I've cheated it a few times. Like there's a big bill accruing. Like whoever is eventually gonna collect is deliberately fucking with me.

So when someone asks how I feel about killing off my characters, I respond with curiosity. I mean, how should I feel?

I've expounded to those within earshot any number of times about being a playwright and playing God by creating virtual life forms on the page. Characters with feelings, pasts, motivations, fears, loves, etc, whatever resembles real soul-possessing humanity as closely as possible. Because that's what we do: we create viable souls. To me, in my head, my characters are real. They exist. In reality, they do not. Thank you, Dr. Phil, but I know the difference.

And should I have occasion to end their literary corporeal existence, I do so with what I hope is good reason. Death is, simply, a truthful functionality. They die because that is what is supposed to happen. All things die. They die because they are meant to. I can only hope they die at the right time and for the right reason.

To me, Death is not a convenient device, it is a logical end to a character. It is not used to be efficient, to remove a body from a stage, to lean down a production. It is used because that device of death for that character-soul is an integral part of the whole (plot). That death, as every death should, resonates throughout the work and creates ripples in the plot that others now have to deal with.

Again I come back to a topic all too familiar when dramaturging a work: what, as opposed to the playwright's own particular desires and wishes, serves the play itself? More than a few times I have had to seriously reflect on what I'm scribbling down: is it my wish as “a playwright with desire and ideas” that it should happen THIS WAY or is it the play itself's dictation that X should bite the big one? Most of the time I know, deep down, behind the initial surprise, that it's right because I have that feeling of logical completion. Only once have I been perturbed by the play telling me of the need for a character to shuffle off this mortal coil, and it took this path:

Discovery: Oh fuck. Really?

Denial: Oh, fuck no. Not you. Dude. I like you.

Anger: Fuck this shit!

Bargaining: Oh fuck, can I rewrite . . .?

Depression: Oh fuck. The rewrite's bullshit. I hate this writing thing. I'm no good. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!!!

Acceptance: Ohhhh . . . fuck!! Wait a minute . . . this works!!!

So I guess my answer to the question of how I think about my characters who are no more, who have ceased to be, whose metabolic processes are now yeah yeah yeah is simply:

This is your job. You are dead. Since you are dead in one of my plays, you'll probably still have lines. You'll have a really creepy makeup job. This is theatre, remember. Dead people on stage are pretty cool. Think about it: from Hamlet senior to the Woman in Black, you're the character who most likely lucked out, cuz you get to provide the spine chills and the bad dreams. You're dead, yes, but you're lucky.

The author Terry Pratchett passed away last week. I'd read all of his books at least twice each. His characterization of Death was the personification of the Grim Reaper: cloak, hood, skeleton, scythe. SPOKE IN ALL CAPS. Classic freaky anthropomorphication a la Dickens and many others. And yet this Death had a large part of humanity within him, although he didn't quite know it. He did his job ruthlessly and efficiently, yes. He took whomever was next on his list and cut them loose from life as we know it with dutiful precision. He was, for the vehicle that moved you on, rather non-threatening. He had a sense of humor. And a profound sense of sympathy.

What do I think about Death? I hope Pratchett was right.