Swiss Family Soylent Green

When I was a kid I wanted to be Swiss, the youngest son of John Mills and Dorothy McGuire (not to mention being the kid brother of yummy James MacArthur) who, with my make-believe family, was stranded on a desert island in the South Pacific.

Oh yeah, and I wanted to live in a treehouse. Not just any treehouse, but the most fabulous treehouse (water powered) in the world. Built by the Imagineers (before they were called that) at Disney. I loved "Swiss Family Robinson." They were nice people and life on the island was idyllic.

Unlike real life.

In real life I lived with a bunch of crazy alcoholics until it was time to move out and try to figure out what normal was (I failed and became a crazy drunk just like the ones who had raised me).

But throughout the crazy childhood and the even crazier drinking adulthood, there was always this sort of Pollyanna (yes, another Disney reference) deep down inside of me, who thought that somehow or other, magically, life would "turn out okay" or that somehow I'd crash-land on an idyllic desert island with a picture-perfect family.

Then I got sober. I've succumbed to the reality that life doesn't often turn out okay unless you put a lot of grunt-work into it.

I don't think that we Americans have been putting in enough grunt work for the last 50 years or so since World War II ended. Oh, we worked like sons-of-bitches during the war. But then we got cocky. And entitled. And downright lazy.

I have a theory that we're all going to be in for a very rude awakening and not in the too distant future, either.

I think that within 20 years we're going to see a horrifying spike in the suicide rate in this country as more and more boomers (like me) hit the old-age/lack of financing wall.

Longevity, dramatically diminished means of support and an increasing reliance upon an already overworked and overpriced medical system are going to be the straws that broke the camel's back. People will simply run out of options, until they're faced with the only practical solution -- self-extermination.

Government won't have to "fix" Social Security. It'll simply need to wait it out -- until enough old farts do themselves in to automatically make SSA solvent again (which will also fix Medicare).

I think that we've raised a generation or two of hedonists who, frankly, will be relieved to see millions of us head off to early graves. That way there'll be more for them!

I realize it's dark thinking. Even "stinking thinking" in recovery parlance. But it's also an idea that keeps popping up in my head.

Things are going to get real ugly. And soon.

I just hope that when the time comes the survivors willl remember to NOT eat the Soylent Green.

Fairy Tales Can Come True - They can Happen to You...

if you're young at heart..... (I'm partial to the Jimmy Durante version of this song).

Jimmy doesn't really have anything to do with what I want to talk about today except that he, too, never let anything get in the way of his dream of becoming a great entertainer (let's face it -- he was no Caruso).

I went to the theater Saturday night here in Manhattan. It was at one of those little theaters all in one building on West 42nd street, between Dyer and 9th Avenues.

Beforehand a bunch of us had dinner at Chez Josephine, next door.

The occasion was the New York premiere of the musical version of Albert Innaurato's "Gemini" which had been a hit B'way comedy in the late 70's-early 80's.

Albert, unbeknownst to a lot of us, had met up with my former college roommate, Charlie Gilbert, somwhere along the way and the two of them began to think of ways to musicalize the show.

Charlie is a world-class composer/musician and is on the faculty of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Charlie was a prodigy when I met him. He was a college junior at the age of 18 and I was an old man of 24 (and a freshman). We shared digs at a house in blue-collar suburbia for a year before he finished his undergrad degree and went off to Carnegie-Mellon to garner a masters. We nicknamed the place "Toad Hall" because the yard was lousy with all these little tree toads.

Charlie knew more about more different kinds of music than anyone I'd ever met. During the two years I lived in Toad Hall I was exposed to classical, jazz, opera, operetta, musical theater, rock and R&B. About the only kind of music none of us had a taste for was country, but I think that was simply because none of us had ever been exposed to it.

Anyway, we all went our ways, keeping in touch now and then, over the years. Charlie married a lovely woman he'd met in grad school whom we all adored. They produced two beautiful kids, now both fully grown and striking out on their own.

But the real point is that Charlie never lost sight of what he wanted out of life.

I could never compete with Charlie in terms of talent. The man has it, in spades. But he also had a vision... a dream. And those are two things I should've had, that I never learned how to get.

I never cease to be amazed at people who can make plans and then carry through with them. People who have a vision. People who have a dream.

I spent a part of yesterday feeling a little sorry for myself over what I perceive to be all my lost opportunities in life.

I don't begrudge anything to Charlie. God knows, he's worked hard over the years ... and to the best of my knowledge, he's enjoyed every minute of it (I worked hard too, and was miserable most of the time).

One of the gifts of being an ACOA is that life often seems like a slog rather than an adventure, and more a source of annoyance than of joy.

P.S. The show was wonderful, and I know a thing or two about musical theater. I would love to see it come back to Broadway in a full-blown production that runs for years.

Let No One Sleep

Watch, or better yet, listen, to this. It's Paul Potts singing "Nessun Dorma" from Puccini's "Turandot" on the show "Britain's Got Talent". Yes, that's Simon Cowell on the panel. He plays both sides of the Atlantic.

Paul's performance took my breath away. The aria itself is painfully beautiful no matter who sings it and always makes me cry. But it's especially poignant here because Mr. Potts is a Team Leader at Cellphone City (or something like that) in England.

By the way, he won. He's going to use some of the money to get his teeth fixed. It just goes to show you, don't ever give up on your dreams.

Happy Monday, everyone!