The glorious Life…
As a director, a singer, an entertainer, a dreamer...

Every time I get close to leaving the city I was hired to share my genius, my talent, my knowledge, my every day banality or my mediocrity, I experience the same images, the same ideas, the same thoughts taking over.

Here I am, ready to go…tomorrow, I am leaving, I am getting the hell out of here, I am clearing out of Dodge, I am going to blow this joint, I am going to make like a tree and leave…

I AM LEAVING....

Last night I packed and I realized, I don't know why but it happens each time, that my suitcase was almost empty when it was overflowing when I arrived, how much stuff can I lose or misplace in three weeks????

I emptied the little fridge in the hallway of the hotel room, and I threw out the leftovers of the cheap food I had accumulated in the past days and made some marvelous discoveries.
-A yogurt oozing all over.
-A bunch of red radishes turned black.
-An intact unopened jar of Moutarde de Dijon.
-A can of tuna and a can of salmon…Every time I am away in a hotel I buy these two cans of fish and never even open the can.
-An old cheese ready to walk by itself.
-Three lemons which were yellow when I bought them and were now grey.
-One celery, alone, still green, and blinking at me.

Did I really buy all of this abomination?

YES, YES, I DID.!!!!!

Tomorrow at 5 am a cab will take me to the airport and I'll jump on my flight back home at 7 am.....
I leave with my soul at peace, my heart intact, my creative forces diminished by a worthless task, and three weeks of more of this or less of that or…
I am getting out of here leaving behind me …I can't remember
I am getting out of here like I was never there.

But during my stay I smiled at everybody… every day.
I made jokes, I told stories, I was funny, I knew what to do, I made new friends that I probably will never see again, I created new myths about me and others, and life will go on…

I am leaving in peace, I did my job...

The day of departure started very, very early in the morning…
The genius at the hotel woke me up at 4 am instead of 4 30 am as I asked, a little mistake on his shitty machine. I told him 4 times the night before, wake up at 4 30 am!

On my way to the airport I am thinking of the past few weeks spent making a living, doing what I like to do or more exactly what I know how to do.
I am thinking about all these years spent to defend senseless causes and fighting battles without any possible victories.
Years spent in the fog of knowledge, in the antechamber of erudition, in the vestibule of wisdom.
A lot of people looked at me as if I were a sorcerer while I am only a sorcerer’s apprentice.

Chekhov wrote a wonderful short play called “The morning of a man of letters”, all my life I tried to be this man or at least a man who functions as a man whose life is full of sensible decisions, and a man whose life is a perpetual search for the truth thru literature and art….
And I am still searching for the right moment, the right experience, the fulfilling adventure…did I fail or do I still have time to find it? Or it did happen but I was not able to see it?

So, I arrive at the airport 2 hours early, I buy myself a coffee, probably brewed the night before that tasted like ink. I don't like coffee anyway but I am civilized and I follow the rules, so I have to walk with a cup of coffee in my hand to belong to our great society.

I sit in a corner with the satisfaction of someone who fulfilled his duty as an artist after a great production and as a man of my time since I am holding a cup of coffee...

An old lady all dressed in black like a Sicilian from Palermo (she is older than me, really old) leans towards me to scream in my ear something I do not understand and by doing that she pours her burning tea on my pants.
Those were the pants I had kept clean for my return home, a freshly ironed pair, pants I had kept beautiful to give my wife the impression that when I am away, I am on top of the way I look.
The old lady repeats 5 times that she is sorry and doing that floods my face with a sputum of the color of the tea she was drinking with the feeling it was a nectar given to her by the gods of Sicily.

Finally we are called for boarding…

I enter the plane, and after a few steps inside I reach my seat, somebody is sitting in my reserved seat…I apologize profusely, but the five hundred pound giant sitting in my seat, fails to answer me, doesn't even turn his head in my direction ….
Since I am a polite and good natured man, I scream at his face that he is in my seat, but the giant just yawns loudly…
The flight attendant arrives like a cannon ball, asks me to cool my temper, and to stop screaming, she checks the tickets and declares very calmly that there is a mistake, but I should not worry, she will find me another seat.

Fifteen minutes LATER….I am still standing in front of the giant, who fell asleep.

Everybody is now sitting, and I am still waiting… the well-mannered flight attendant has found a seat for me in the last row near the bathrooms but there is no room above for my luggage, so she will register it and give it to be put in the hold, she gives me a ticket.

I sit exhausted, sweating, and pissed off…
My pants are now a wreck, my hair is worse than ever, I must look like Curly of the three stooges in a bad day, and I only think that finally I will be able to close my eyes for 3 hours and recuperate by falling asleep…

I begin my journey to another world and my mind starts to navigate…
It seems that the world we are living is out of control, too many professions have people in charge who really have no idea what they are doing. Much too often in the arts I meet little pricks with so much personal ambition that it reminds me of the careerists, the social climbers, the go-getters of the Bourgeois class in 19 century Paris, straight out of a novel by Balzac......
Even I wouldn't dare behave like them, but do people have no shame? The most surprising thing is that I am still asking this question. I had the answer a very long time ago...Shame is an invention of religion, it is not part of our basic psyche, we don’t know shame, some of us are just afraid to be caught or exposed or shown up, so they are ashamed....

Makes me laugh or grin...

One thing I was never able to do...Convince people that I know what I am talking about...Some of us have the great talent to become a reference of their own truth...They don’t know more than anybody but they are succeeding in making believe that they KNOW...they speak so well, they are full of self-importance, they pontificate about the most commonplace things, they turn the obvious into a vision, and since we live in a culture with no culture, others seek out their opinion and they suddenly become Gurus, Advisers, Specialists of whatever.

Suddenly the voice of a screaming and crying child wakes me up and raises my blood pressure to 230… I discover sitting in front of me a three year old kid who believes he is Pavarotti acting his own death in a bad opera.
He would go on screaming for the three hours of the trip…

I navigate again….I want to forget trying to distinguish what is true, the meaning of the word truth, or the non-meaning of everyday life…I try to grasp lost moments which cannot be found again, and I feel my creative strength fading and wilting lost, in the fascinating daily routine.
But why do we believe that everything can or must last forever? ... Hours, days, years pass by being the same and yet having nothing in common. I fall asleep, almost, and I am walking again in the streets of Paris, or Tunis or New York or Boston…
I want to be the great I don't know what and I succeed in being only an image of my desire, an approximation of my mirage.

I arrive in New York, totally ravaged, I am now 80 years old, I drag my body to the carousel to grab my suitcase and wait for more than an hour… NOTHING…
I learned from an attendant full of good intentions that my luggage will arrive during the day, so I can wait or have it delivered to my apartment, but for that I have to give proof that it is mine, and I cannot find the ticket given to me when I boarded the plane.
After filling a ton of papers, they believe me when I tell them that my name is on the bag.

I get home with no luggage, exhausted, looking like a homeless person, and only thinking of my bed….

THE MORNING OF A MAN OF LETTERS? Or the three weeks as a hard working plowman of Theater?

Vive les voyages et vive les professions artistiques.