i coulda been somebody

S1* & I went to see a conversation between Tony Kushner and Steven Deitz (a UT professor and playwright in his own right) tonight. The audience was mostly gay men and old ladies. When I got there, S1 was the first one in line behind a gaggle of blue hairs! It felt like home.

During the conversation between these two men -- I'm not sure exactly when it happened, perhaps when the "young writers" were asking their questions -- I got this pain in my sternum, a feeling of great disappointment, or something. I'm not sure what it was. I brought it up to S1 afterward, as we walked to our favorite standby restaurant Madam Mam's on the Strip.

It was just a feeling of having got to a point in my life where I know this is never gonna happen for me. I'll never be up on a stage talking about my career, the things I've done; no one will be all that interested in my opinion about anything in that way. I don't think it was a feeling of jealousy, just a different viewpoint, sort of a painful thing, a regret, like the feeling you get 30 minutes after eating a stuffed pepper.

S1 says he has those feelings too, and the antidote for him is thinking about the work we did for ten years in our Act. He says it probably doesn't work for me in the same way because I am so at odds with the Act and all that we did, the "difference" we made in the world. (Still, we're not up on any stage talking about it. Not that I want that!)

We spent the walk to Madam Mam's, his meal of green curry, mine of coconut soup, and the walk home talking about these things. I want to figure this shit out. Why do I have disappointment about our Act?

I think I feel a sense of letdown about what happened to us, what happened to me -- the things we were aware of and, perhaps even more importantly, the things we didn't learn about until late in the game or after it was all over.

S1 and I brought different things to the table. He says that conflict was our creative strength. Perhaps, but I feel a sense of betrayal because I thought we were in on it together and come to find out sometime later, he was doing things in the beginning because he was "afraid" of me (in some sense; I think it has to do with his shyness, but that's the word he used), and later he expressed that he was and had been angry at me for some time. It wasn't something he was harboring for the most part; I think he just finally realized it. But still, these things do their damage.

Before we came together and started the Act, I was a writer, a behind the scenes kind of artist. I didn't know I wanted to do it any other way. S1, too. He was a songwriter for theater. It just kinda worked out that what we each did worked well together, except that we were the ones who had to do it. And so we did.

Okay, I got way distracted somewhere in the middle of that last paragraph by a phone call from C3 in Kansas City. And I've had a beer in the meantime, and I'm not sure what I'm trying to say anymore. So, I'll have to visit this conversation with myself later.