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Wild freedom as a foregone conclusionThe Column: 04.05.23
I lead a small life. I got a big thrill last week from a headline in the Times (‘We’re Going Away’: A State’s Choice to Forgo Medicaid Funds Is Killing Hospitals), thinking I’d found a typo in the Newspaper of Record, like the Holy Father saying saecula saeculórus instead of saecula saeculorum, and I imagined calling New York and being invited down to Times Square to watch a young editorial assistant getting his or their or its fanny paddled, but no. Even though I, an English major, held the foregone conclusion that the correct word is “forego,” and that “forgo” is a forgery, it is there in the Merriam-Webster. Had I forgotten? Or am I losing my mind and will I need to fly to Fargo and forge a new career fogging fig trees. So I did what one does in a moment of crisis: I called a friend and she feigned surprise at the “forgo.” “Oh my goodness,” she said. Well, I know when I’m being humored, I know the condescension of women very very well. I am 80. It says so on my ID. The mistake shook me badly. I thought maybe I should start keeping a daily checklist: brush teeth, shave, trim eyebrows, etc. I thought maybe I should avoid crossing busy streets. But I recovered last week, on the road in Colorado. I am one of America’s dwindling supply of octogenarian stand-ups, and it’s working out nicely, people applaud when I say I’m 80 (as if this were an accomplishment of mine rather than American medical research that gave us blood thinner and the porcine heart valve) and from that point they don’t expect me to make sense as I was taught in English Comp to do, one idea threading into another in a harmonious way, but as a man on stage with a microphone it works very well for me to talk like a lunatic, changing the subject from my old girlfriend Julie Christiansen to Christmas to Miss America, Erica Rhodes, the highway department, the apartment I took Julie to in St. Paul, his epistle to the Romans, rigatoni, Tony Bennett, and the Binet test of intelligence. Get my drift? People appreciate this. It’s a relief for them. They’ve been hitched to a computer screen engineering paragraphs of literal prose within narrow boundaries and here is this old coot hurling paint at a canvas. I throw away Ethos, Pathos, Logos, everything Aristotle tried to sell us as the art of persuasion, and I just float along with the man who walked into the bar and met the penguin on the ice floe that came from Nantucket with the man from Schenectady who was very well connected he made a great study of everybody, their problems and the inequity. I am liable to burst into song — I draw a mature crowd and they know “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the Republicans know “How Great Thou Art,” and they sing with enthusiasm, and I segue into, art and Manet and Monet, Bizet, ballet, Broadway, Beaujolais, Lady Day, the English essay, and all in a sincere but scattered way, and the crowd is fascinated, wondering, “When Gramps collapses, which one of us is going to rush onstage and attempt mouth-to-mouth?” It’s beautiful to look at a crowd of people who are laughing but are also trying to remember the rules of resuscitation. It’s a beautiful time of life, to be 80. When I was young and ambitious, I tried to figure out the rules and design a nice tight monologue, and now I just walk back and forth on stage (at my age, mobility impresses people) and I keep changing the subject, interrupting a story to say something else, sort of like James Joyce does in Finnegans Wake or the prophet Jeremiah in the book named for him. When I was young and ambitious, I felt that inebriation was a badge of authenticity for a writer and in homage to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Dylan Thomas, I learned how to handle goodly amounts of whiskey. The beauty of being 80 is knowing I will never be that dumb again. I put away alcohol because I dreaded the prospect of AA and now I have found drunken euphoria in performance, standing onstage for 90 minutes, rambling, reminiscing, tossing out jokes and poems, singing sonnets, and crowds of respectable people look at me with amusement, a good mind gone to pieces. I am creating a path for others. Where one goes, four will follow, where four go, soon there will be fifty. The best answer to today’s chaos is wild cheerfulness. NEXT UPThursday, April 27th Lexington, MA Saturday, April 29th Jaffrey, NH Sunday, April 30th Peekskill, NY ***ALSO, pre-order information for CHEERFULNESS is coming soon***You’re on the free list for Garrison Keillor and Friends. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Questions: [email protected] |
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