Ras: The Uses of Cock-Ups

In its third and final season the marvelous Canadian TV show “Slings and Arrows” – a comedy about the travails of a Shakespearean theater festival modeled quite possibly on Ontario’s Stratford Festival – has an episode that touches a core truth about story telling.

The opening of King Lear has to be canceled because the ancient actor who plays Lear gets stuck in his bathtub. The glum troupe of actors then gathers in the local theater bar to drink and commiserate. Disconsolate, the young actress who was to have played Cordelia says, “This is the worst opening of all time. Is it not?”

“Oh God, no,” says Cyril, a longtime British actor in the company. “You remember that Troilus and Cressida in ’72.”

“Oh Christ. The one where we were all in drag?” says another veteran actor, his great and good friend Frank, chuckling.

CYRIL: “And the gang rape at the end. People fled.” (laughing )

FRANK: “Awful. Yes, but it opened.”

CORDELIA: “That doesn’t actually make me feel better.”

CYRIL (to Cordelia): “Love, don’t fret. You’ve got lots of talent. You’ll have lots of success and a very long career.”

FRANK: “At the end of it all, you’ve got to have some spectacular cock-ups.”

CYRIL: “Because then you’ll have stories.”

FRANK: “And then you’ve had a life. You’ve had a life.”

Think about it. The stories we tell are what we call our lives. Nobody wants to hear a story in which everything runs beautifully from the table reading of the play to the standing ovation on opening night. No, we need the real-life disasters to provide the drama, the conflicts, and the hurdles that fuel the stories.

A few posts back Kaze spun us the tale of his unfaithful thumb drive, a genuine kick in the teeth for him. And many responded in the comment chain with a lost-manuscript story of their own. No wacko thumb drive for Kaze equals no story and no little writers’ community huddled around the fireplace at 317am telling their own sad tales.

In the canceled-opening-night episode of “Slings and Arrows” (consider that title a moment), Anna, a rock of a character who does the thankless, behind-the-scenes work that holds the theater company together, mentions her prairie-born grandmother’s favorite saying: ”You turn lemons into lemonade.” Yes, that’s a Pollyannaish cliché, but it’s also what story telling is all about.

Cock-ups are comic – the word itself tells us that – but sometimes the disasters we live through are inescapably tragic. As a young man, William S. Burroughs, the author-to-be of such edge novels as Naked Lunch and Junky, was drinking with friends when he and his wife Joan decided to perform a party trick. He’d be William Tell, only with a pistol. Joan balanced a glass on her head, but Burroughs missed and she died.

Years later Burroughs said, “I am faced with the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death. It brought me in contact with the invader, the ugly spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice but to write my way out.” So there’s a story for you. Not the way most of us would choose to become a writer.

I’ve thought about Burroughs and cock-ups a lot this week as we live through the epic snow storms in the DC area. Things are not so bad for my wife and me, snug in our house in the suburbs with no need to go anywhere. Sure, the driveway shoveling has been intense and we’re getting maybe a little stir-crazy, but the power has stayed on, the food has held out, and we have all six episodes of that “Slings and Arrows”’ final season on DVD.

We’ll be telling stories of Snowmageddon 2010 in the years ahead, but it’s not as terrible as the great snowstorm of the 1950, called The Storm of the Century, so awful the Pennsylvania Turnpike had to be closed. Can’t say I remember that one all that well, but my grandmother told me about it me about it many times in the years afterward.

My parents were driving the turnpike, headed home from Philadelphia to my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving, when the drifts got so high that our family had to be put up for the night on cots in the basement of a house near an exit. In my grandmother’s version the family we stayed with was a childless couple, seemingly nice enough, but they kept eyeing the baby girl and the precocious little boy who belonged to my parents. My mother did not sleep that night for fear her children would be stolen by the pseudo-Samaritans.

But this turned out to be a comedy. Nothing happened.  The Good Samaritans did not steal the tyke, after all. The sun came out in a day or so, the snow plows ran, and I lived to tell the tale 60 winters later.

(Thanks to John Hasse for the wonderful icicle photo and to Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac for reminding me of Burroughs’s terrible tale.)