Me and Joan and Gene

In Joan Rivers' memoir Enter Laughing she opens the book by describing standing on stage and depending on laughs. She speaks of the waiting, the hurting, the placing it all on the audience. Will they laugh? She says that it's crazy. Then she asks, do you want to hear what's even crazier? Even crazier, she explains is waiting and depending on those moments when they laugh because those moments of laughter are the moments of greatest happiness in your life.

Those lines have always been very meaningful to me. I'd have written them out verbatim, but the book is on my bookshelf in my classroom. I recently lent it to a student who I was talking with about his aspirations for being a stand up comedian.

But this excerpt came to my mind recently when I read some comments of Gene Wilder (Jerry Silberman's his given name.) While trying to fall asleep in the hospital his mind raced. Part of what he remembers thinking was:

"Actors are children. We're ll just babies. 'Look at me! Look at what I can do!'Why didn't we grow up like other kids? All we wanted was to be loved for ourselves, just as we were, our true selves - but it didn't seem to be good enough, and when we're six or seven, and Mama is sitting in the living room crying or reading a book or sewing, and we tell a joke that we saw in a cartoon, or we do a little dance or sing a song, and suddenly Mama gets up and says, "Oh, my G-d, honey-do that for Daddy." And we sing or dance or tell our joke again, and they applaud. Mama and Daddy applaud, and they hug and kiss us and we feel that they really love us, and we grow up longing for that exhilaration again, and we do get it, years later, from an audience that applauds and cheers us and we go home exhilarated and fall asleep feeling loved, but the next morning we wake up feeling lonely again, and we need another fix from another audience. I wish I could be a Catcher, like Holden, and save all those lonely children who become actors and grow up thinking that the applause is actually love for them and not for their performance. Maybe some of them will find real love...if they're lucky."
(Kiss Me Like A Stranger pgs 241-242)

Later he writes that unlike others he didn't learn from surviving cancer to appreciate life. He learned something else:
"After Gilda died I was already that person who walked by a rose and noticed the shades of red and orange and yellow and who could smell the rain and who could get a thrill at seeing two children holding hands...I know that stuff. What I didn't know was that I don't need to act...I've got something much better...I feel loved by the person I love."

Gene seems to have something so many actors and other human beings lack.

May G-d Bless us all to love and beloved and to not need to act.