Pass the Tissues

I’m a weeper.

I admit it. The older I get the easier it is for me to burst into tears. My father was the same way, and he once told me that his father was also. I think one of the reasons that I’m semi-reclusive is because the less I interact with other people the less chance there is that I’ll inappropriately start crying. On the other hand I like nothing more than indulging my sentimentality by holing up and watching a movie that pushes my “Cry” button.

I think we all build up so many barriers; we wear so many masks, to insulate ourselves from genuine emotion. Kids these days (and by kids I mean 20-somethings) effect a snide, sarcastic, jaded demeanor. I think it is the right of passage from child to adult in the 21^st century. One ceases to be a child when one becomes a sneering asshole incapable of recognizing or giving in to emotive feelings. The other kids will laugh at me!

For the past couple of years I’ve been actively trying to shed my masks and barriers and present myself to the world exactly as I’ve always really been. And you know the old saying: “Every year I become more like myself.” OK – that isn’t an old saying except in that I’ve been saying it for years.

So these days I’m a lot friendlier than I used to be. I’m a lot more open with my feelings when something touches me. I’ve let old grudges and resentments slip away. I rarely get angry anymore. When anger or resentment or other negatives bubble up from my soul I just let those emotions roll off me. I give in to people and things that spark good feelings in me. Sometimes I feel like I’m coming out of a decades-long bout of depression. Whoa – nice world out there! Good people, too. I watch people more and more (and I’ve always been a people-watcher). Sometimes I’ll watch little private moments that people, singly or together, are experiencing and I will become them – I’ll inhabit them and feel what they are feeling. I just let the emotions wash over me and take me away. And beauty in any form takes my breath away and I get a lump in my throat and the water works in my eyes cut loose.

The last scene in The Lost Colony is called Final March. The Colonists, starving and forsaken and under a threat from the Spanish, abandon their settlement. Carrying everything that they own they march out in to the wilderness.

It gets me every time. I haven’t been part of Final March since 1997 when I played Old Tom. Other characters I’ve played are out before the end. Most years I’ve watched it as an audience member. It gets me every time; even in years when it is indifferently staged or performed it gets me. The ragged band staggering up the hill, the touching moment of redemption as the treasonous Runner helps the incapacitated Father Martin up the hill, pulling the audience’s focus to stalwart John Borden with Eleanor Dare and her child – he pointing with his rifle at the ragged flag fluttering over the Chapel. It gets me every time – jeez, I was weeping on my keyboard just writing this paragraph.

And now I’m in Final March again. I am the incapacitated Father Martin desperately trying to keep up with his fellows in the march; failing, falling, carried up the ramp. You know I have a tendency to become unstuck in time at the Colony and this is a major time traveling event for me. I become Jimmy Darmo and Eric Green and others – no, WE become Father Martin and we are all there and eternal. Lisa, Max and Alice are there every night. If you’ve ever been in it you are there every night and I see you. I see you.

I start to lose my shit when the flag bearer (T.J. Pass) starts the song in his lonely quavering pure-toned voice. I’m leaning on my crutch in front of the Chapel and slowly hobble to join the end of the line as we shuffle through the sand. I pass behind the Runner who is sullenly sitting alone by the fire, pause, gesture to him, “My son?” Negative. He is the lost lamb, the Father’s failure. That’s when the water works really start. Turn, stagger, go face first into the sand, try to drag myself, fail. And there is the Runner to help me up, to be my crutch. We become each other’s redemption as we stagger sobbing together up the ramp. The Runner this year is Travis Clark. He and I haven’t ever talked about the moment. The moment just is. He is a soul mate for those few seconds every night.

And I’m not acting – whatever the hell that means. I’m just there, in the moment, letting the pure emotion of the sequence carry me along as firmly as Travis’s arm carries me.

There are other weepers in Final March. When we go into the dark by the light tower we hear each other sniffling. We make our way quickly down the back path to line up for curtain call, trying to get our shit together.

Early on one of the kids asked me: “Why are you crying?”

Why aren’t you?