by Alex

We all remember what weekend this is, right? I got a kick out of seeing the woman at the counter at my gym yesterday – slyly wishing all the men who stopped by a Happy Mother’s Day weekend and watching fully a third of them stop in their tracks with an “Oh shit!” look. That woman knows how to have her fun, let me tell you.

I am sort of thinking that Toni will have a great Mother’s Day post because she both has and is a mother, so I will sort of work around the topic in a different way, because this has come up for me lately.

I often find myself being confided in by young aspiring authors that their parents don’t approve of their aspirations. Well, we all know that feeling, don’t we? Certainly there are some parents who do encourage art as a living (and some of them are scary, see “stage mothers”). Nepotism is a fact of life in Hollywood, and successful film actors, producers, writers, directors, have no qualms about encouraging their offspring toward the family business.

But that’s pretty much the size of it – “the family business.” That’s one aspect of the arts as a profession that makes other, non-artistic parents quail at the idea of little Johnny or Janey trying to write, or act, or paint for a living. For centuries, millennia, children were taught the trade their parents were in, and that’s the way it was, and largely still is.

There’s much more resistance than that going on, usually. And I try to tell these young writers that they’re not alone – no parents in their right minds really want their kids to go into the arts, because it’s so hard, and unstable, and financially shaky. I think parents just know that on a genetic level, and because they love us, they gently or not so gently try to steer us away.

And then on another level, some parents might not approve because, well, we’re all gypsies, tramps and thieves, not to mention homosexuals.

And then maybe on another level, some parents might resist the idea because deep down, they always had some aspiration… but adults just don’t DO that kind of thing, so they didn’t, and neither should you.

So there’s all kinds of STUFF going on that might make parents not so very supportive of the young artist.

So what do you tell these young aspirants whose parents are less than supportive?

Well, I tell them what I did, with my parents. I just didn’t make a point of telling them what I was doing. I didn’t lie, exactly, but let’s just say I left out a lot. I didn’t declare my major until I was a senior in college and I didn’t let on how much theater I was doing.

I think those of us who are driven to do this THING that we do figure out how to work the angles pretty early on. And just as I get confided in by young, aspiring authors, I get confided in by people in mid-life who say that they always wanted to write, but their parents were not supportive (sometimes that’s to say the least), and they’re now in a morass of regret that they didn’t pursue the dream. For those people I write down this Bernard Malamud quote: “We have two lives – the one we learn with and the life we live after that.”

And then I tell them that a lot of authors I know didn’t write their first book until after they were 40.

But I keep their stories in mind when I talk to the younger ones and tell them – “You don’t want to end up regretting anything because you were afraid to try.”

I know there’s a lot of pain involved for artists who aren’t encouraged and supported in their passion by their parents – but it’s the evolutionary imperative not only to separate from our parents, but to transcend them. That IS evolution.

And there’s a lot of joy when your parents finally realize: My God, she really is making a living at this, we’re not going to have to support her for the rest of our lives.

And let’s face it – that’s a pretty legitimate fear – I don’t blame parents a bit for THAT one.

And you know what? As a writer I use lessons my parents taught me every single day of my life. They taught me to love work, and do the work I love (even though they weren’t exactly intending it be THIS work) – because, they said, work is what most of your life is. They took me and my sister and brother to about a million museums and concerts and plays and taught us to love art, and along with loving it, they taught us to analyze it. Mom will talk to ANYONE – I grew up seeing her start conversations on the street, in a restaurant, on a pier – with anyone and everyone, and you better believe I use that skill every day of my life as a writer. And they both just assumed that I could do anything a boy could, only better, and so despite all the messages girls get from the world about what they can and can’t or should and shouldn’t do, I had my parents’ faith that yes, I damn well could.

My point is, if you’re an artist, your parents are preparing you for a life and career as an artist, whether or not it looks that way on the surface. They give you gifts that will MAKE you the artist you are. It’s up to you to find those gifts, and use them.

Here’s my most treasured gift from my mother. Remember all those art museums I told you she dragged me to (yes, at the time, it was dragging…)? She told me very early on – “I want you to be able to see artistically – not just art, but the whole world around you. Because if you can see the world around you aesthetically, you will always find pleasure, wherever you are, whatever your circumstances.”

Now that – is beyond rubies.

This is the weekend to think about it, so what are some of the gifts you got from your parents? Were they supportive of your artistic aspirations? Did it matter? As a parent, how do you feel about the idea of your child going into this godforsaken business? 😉

And Happy Mother’s Day and THANK YOU to all the mothers.

by Alex

There was a great post by Nancy Martin and a whole slew of accompanying stories over at The Lipstick Chronicles this week about disastrous wedding experiences. Well, actually, humorous disastrous wedding experiences, which is why I decided not to contribute my own most bizarre wedding memory – it was just too dark. Maybe it’s the stuff I write (you think?) but out of the multitudes of weddings I’ve attended and participated in (I had EIGHT good friends get married within a year, egad – one of the reasons I keep putting that wedding thing off myself), all with lovely and funny and heartwarming stories galore, it’s this one particular incident that, well, haunts me, so much so that I didn’t want to invoke it and cast a pall over that happy thread.

So I thought I’d tell it here, where you all are, you know, used to me.

It was a gorgeous wedding at a club by the ocean. Rich father plus highly artistic bride and groom and highly artistic friends helping so everything was stunningly lovely with no expense spared. Great dance band, entertainment by friends, the bride in a gasp-inducing princess gown. Lovely, lovely, lovely, perfect in every way.

And then came the toasts. All touching, funny… until the FOB. Okay, he was drunk, but that’s not unsual in itself. But when he started to speak, an uneasy hush fell over the crowd. He was telling a story about the bride, and it was just – wrong, the whole sense of it. He said that when she was born, they thought she was autistic and the way he said it made it sound like there was no hope, so they’d never expected much from her anyway. (She is not impaired in any way, by the way – quite the opposite – beautiful, brilliant, talented, charming) We kept waiting for an upturn, a happy ending, even something remotely mitigating, but no. It was horrifying. More than just disturbing in the moment – it felt like – the moment in Sleeping Beauty when the evil fairy shows up at Princess Aurora’s christening and curses her. It felt – prescient.

I wish, really now I’ve wished a thousand times since then, that all of us, the couple’s friends, had stepped in like the good fairy to cast some kind of counter-spell, right there on the spot, wedding protocol be damned. But what? We were all too stunned to even move.

The couple’s first child was diagnosed with autism a few years after birth.

Now of course that story gnaws at me as a writer because of the fairy tale curse aspect of it – I’m completely obsessed with the theme. But it wasn’t just me – all of us who knew the couple knew that something large was going on there – something more than ordinary – a foretelling. It was a moment that ordinary reality seemed to stop and you got a glimpse into the future, or at least a possible future (which is why I so wish one of us at the time had been an experienced witch or yogi to perform some kind of counter-ritual or blessing).

And because of the book I’m writing (yes, STILL writing…@#$%^&) I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently – the moments when we get a glimpse into a bigger, deeper reality. You read enough about psychic events experienced by ordinary people, as I’ve been doing, and they’re all so very similar.

– The crisis apparitions, where a loved one is hurt or dying and appears in some way to a relative or mate at the moment of death, either as a full-fledged apparition or a signal, like a mirror shattering.

– The precognitive dreams: A young mother has a nightmare that her new baby is crushed to death when the light fixture above the crib falls – she wakes up screaming and runs in to the nursery where she finds the baby perfectly fine, sleeping soundly, but she takes the baby into bed with her and her husband – and two hours later they’re awakened by a crash from inside the nursery.

– The visitations from dead loved ones who have something to say about where your mother’s bracelet is or where the new will was filed.

– And of course the ordinary psychic things that happen all the time – the wife who dreams that there is another woman in bed with her and her husband – and discovers that he is, indeed, having an affair. The teenager who decides at the last second to take the left turn instead of the right, even though it will mean an extra five minutes getting to his friend’s house – and as he makes the turn he hears the screeching of brakes and a grinding of metal back there at that very corner.

Yes, yes – all these things can be explained as simple, ordinary perception. The young mother noticed subconsciously that the plaster around the light fixture was cracked and her dream warned her about a very real danger. The woman whose dead husband visits her in a dream to tell her where the bonds is remembering that her husband made that stop at a certain bank one day and her dream makes it her dead husband telling her so so that she’ll pay attention. The teenager registered that a car was driving too fast on that side street out of the corner of his eye. (I can’t as blithely explain how people see their loved ones at the EXACT moment of death, but I’m sure there’s someone out there who can debunk that one, too.)

But I think – reality is a lot more mutable than skeptics want to admit. And I’m not just talking about our perceptions and instincts and intuitions. I mean the whole of the universe gives us signs all the time.

The morning my grandmother died, I woke up and walked outside and the sunrise was just – surreal. The whole sky was flaming orange and red and pink – much more like deep sunset than the pallid pink of LA sunrises. The pecan tree in my back yard towered against that sky, and in the tree were hundreds, hundreds of cawing birds. It was earsplitting, mindblowing.

A half hour later I got the call.

When I look back at those moments that I knew something more than I realistically should have known, there is a heaviness to them, an import, a hyper-clarity – even a time-slowing-down quality. And so it seems to me – and it’s said by spiritual teachers – that if we all paid more attention all the time to these insights, synchronicities, we’d be able to see the signs all the time.

So that’s my spring resolution, since it’s such a lush and pretty day today that it seems like a resolution is called for.

I’m going to pay more attention to the signs – the dark and the light.

So I know all of you have stories to tell about visitations, prescience, telepathy, dream signs, and those just larger-than-life moments. (Yes, all of you – even the people who don’t believe always have stories about friends…)