Love at First Star Wars Reference

            I fell in love with a clown at the Mall of America.

In the middle of the Mall there’s an amusement park. Rollercoasters, water rides, ferris wheels and costumed characters. Nowadays, it has a Nickelodeon theme – last time I was there I rode the Sponge Bob rollercoaster – but back in the day it was called Camp Snoopy and the characters that roamed the park were the Peanuts gang.

During the month of October, they liked to augment the cast as part of the Halloween Celebration: Camp Spooky. There were some ghoulish characters (a ghost, a scarecrow and a swamp creature), but they also added things like a princess, a knight and a jester.

This was during the brief stint in my life where I was flirting with the misguided notion that I might have an acting bone somewhere in my body, and I figured that any acting experience was going to be good experience. I tried out for the knight, and in the improvised part of the audition, I played it cowardly (not unlike Sir Andrew Aquecheek in Twelfth Night) I shivered at the mere mention of anything creepy or unpleasant and they ate it up. I got the job.

When I showed up to be fitted for my costume I ran into a girl outside of the Peanut Gallery Theater. She was tall with short brown hair and little eyes like Chinese Checkers.

There was nothing extraordinary about her physically. You encounter a lot of this in the Midwest: girls who seem plain at first glance, but have an air of absolute sensibility about them. They are healthy, happy, level-headed, and they have modest culinary ambitions. They make excellent charades partners, enjoy watching baseball, and they boast odd, unexpected skills (in this instance: clowning). These girls are the perfect elixir to the aimless romantic boy.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m the jester. Who are you?”

“I’m the cowardly knight,” I told her. And then simply because I’d been marveling at the fact that there were all sorts of real trees planted in the park I observed: “Isn’t it weird that they have real trees in Camp Snoopy? I thought they were fake up until now.”

Her checker eyes lit up. “You know what I heard about these trees? I heard that when Star Wars Episode One premiered, that a bunch of people hid up in them overnight so that they could be the first ones in line to buy tickets. Imagine all those nerds camping out in trees! Isn’t that awesome?”

My jaw dropped. My eyes glazed over with sugar and all the splendid lights around her head stretched into candy laser beams.

“Yeah...”

I went on to tell her that I had a long history with Star Wars here at the Mall of America. When they re-released the original trilogy in 1997, some friends of mine from college came down here and stood in line all day to get tickets and our friend Patrick even convinced the theater employees to let him help clean the theater before our show so that he could sneak in and save amazing seats for us (sixth row center). Patrick works in politics now.

She said she had worked as a professional clown, and had gone to college at St. Thomas. The St. Thomas Tommies are the hated rivals of my college, Macalester (the Fighting Scots), but I didn’t care. There was something very preppy and American about the Tommies, and I’d come to know several attractive St. Thomas students while I was doing my student teaching at the Museum Magnet School and Expo Elementary. I found them to be perfectly tolerable. Even if I hadn’t, all that history of conflict was just that: history. I adored my clown.

You see, sometimes it doesn’t take too much to fall in love.

 

ROMEO

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET

            Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

            Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

            For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

            And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

ROMEO

            Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET

            Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO

            O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!

            They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET

            Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

ROMEO

            Then move not, while my prayers’ effect I take. (1:5)

 

            And then they kiss.

            I think it’s essential in movies and plays, that the moment when two people fall in love be big and real and important. For Romeo and Juliet they have this moment, when they first see each other, they dance together and they share a sonnet.

            This may seem like a ridiculous thing to say, but the poetry is always Shakespeare’s strength. Nearly all of the stories he used for his plays come from other source material. R and J is based on a famous legend of sundered lovers who employ a sleeping draught to feign death and escape together that appears in many iterations going all the way back to the third century. Shakespeare takes these stories, he turns them around, he introduces new characters, he streamlines the action, fixes the endings and dresses the dialogue in perfect language.

Writing is re-writing as we say.

            There’s another tragic love story that comes to mind as I re-read Romeo and Juliet. Of course, I’m talking about Han Solo and Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back. I think the reason that Empire is widely regarded as the best of the Star Wars movies is due entirely to the escalating sexual tension between the scoundrel and the princess as they dart in and out of asteroids barely avoiding the clutches of Darth Vader. And the payoff is just too delicious and tragic to be ruined by prequels. Captured by Boba Fett, and in the Empire’s clutches, Han is being lowered into the carbon-freezing chamber when Leia realizes she might never have a chance to say it to him again, and she steps forward:

 

LEIA

            I love you.

HAN

            I know.

 

            Bad. Ass.

            Oh, how we boys dreamed of noble demise. The heroism and the sacrifice afforded those of us who would one day battle the forces of evil in intergalactic warfare.

            But there would be no room in the annals of chivalric wooing for a cowardly knight that October. Oh my clown, my jester. I wandered more than once to her section of the park and watched her juggle, and perform tiny magic tricks to the wonder of nine year-old park-goers on their way to inhale funnel cakes and plunge a hundred feet on the log ride. We rode the merry-go-round with a group of unsupervised youngsters, who comforted me as the up and down motion made me queasy and nervous, but they dragged me away from there to find the princess because as children they understood the cruel, controlling nature of destiny better than anyone.

            I didn’t have a car at this time in my life. And I had to take the 84 bus from Grand Avenue and Snelling in St. Paul all the way to Bloomington to get to work those days. One night after the park closed, she saw me looking at the bus schedule and said, “You don’t want to take the bus do you?” I told her I didn’t. “Well, you should get a ride home with us.”

            “Us?”

            “My boyfriend is coming to pick me up. We live in St. Paul too.”

            Sigh.

            It never would have worked anyway. I don’t know. What do you think? A jester and a guy like me?

              

Love's Old-Fashioned Labour's

           Take Highway 33 west from Baraboo. Go over Wildcat Mountain, across the Kickapoo River and about a mile outside of Ontario, Wisconsin you’re going to see a tire swing and a horse with a little star on his forehead. Turn right. That’s where my brother lives. At the Buddhist retreat center.

            His neighbors are cows, Amish people and all the wild animals of western Wisconsin. Mostly coyotes, wild turkeys and deer, but in the past few years they’ve had some new neighbors: Cougars. Cougars haven’t lived in Wisconsin since 1910. In general they don’t share the same turf as wolves since the two large predators have the same diet. So it’s been important for residents and visitors of the wilderness to brush up on their wildcat safety.

            If you come across one, stand your ground. Cougars see the world in a pretty simple way. If something runs away from you, it is food. If it doesn't, it’s not food. The thing you want, makes you chase it.

            I had a friend who really liked going to rock shows. He was dating this girl, and she really liked going to rock shows. And they broke up. “It was too easy,” he said. 

            Easy only works for so long in love. There needs to be a pursuit. There has to be a labour, the more Herculean, the better.

            Love’s Labour’s Lost is about the King of Navarre, who decides that he and his three buddies are going to retire from the pleasures of the world and dedicate themselves to academic study for three years in order to achieve immortality. 

           This, of course, means they’re going to fast from romantic conquests as well. This pursuit lasts for about five minutes until the Princess of France and her three ladies in waiting show up and the gents all fall in love with the ladies and concoct a ridiculous plan to woo them, by sending them gifts and then pretending to be Russian visitors. The ladies are not fooled. They trick each of the boys into declaring their love to the wrong girl. The boys are embarrassed, but the ladies find their folly amusing and just when it looks like things might turn out all right, news comes that the king of France, the Princess’s father, has passed away. The sobering news forces the Princess’s hand:

 

We have received your letters full of love;

And in our maiden council rated them

At courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,

As bombast and as lining to the time. (5:2)

 

            Bombast! The Princess calls their love a merriment, insubstantial. She and her ladies will retire to France to mourn for a year, and they leave the boys with tasks to demonstrate their love is genuine. They must live in hermitage, and remain devoted to the women for a year, except for Berowne, who asks Rosaline for an assignment.

 

Mistress, look on me.

Behold the window of my heart, mine eye,

What humble suit attends thy answer there.

Impose some service on me for they love. (5:2)

 

            Rosaline imposes this:

 

You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day

Visit the speechless sick, and still converse

With groaning wretches; and your task shall be,

With all the fierce endeavor of your wit,

To enforce the pained impotent to smile. (5:2)

 

            Rosaline tells him to be like Patch Adams and bring joy and laughter to sick and dying people. If he can do it, she will know he’s worth loving. And if not, then she’s not interested.

            I like this about Rosaline – not the Patch Adams bit specifically – but that she challenges him to be compassionate, to experience life, and to think about her as his motivation for being good. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but I think a woman should expect her man to be better than he thought he could be.

            Ever since I was in kindergarten and I kissed Cori Jenkins in the tee pee during nap time, I’ve been pursuing girls. Like one of those lions, who acquires a taste for human flesh, I saw girls and was utterly fascinated. I wanted them to want me. Of course I was too terrified to do anything about it for decades, but all their feminine attributes were mysterious magnets to my imagination. Soft skin and pig tails, crystalline eyes and ever-moist lips. Their voices and the secret society they keep with each other, impenetrable and so much more mature than the desert island of boys in which I meander.

            I really loved that Kevin Costner Robin Hood Prince of Thieves movie that was out in 1991. (Wow. Seriously? 19 years ago that movie came out? Yikes.) I was in middle school, and occasionally given to watching MTV that summer, and I am unashamed to admit that the Oscar-winning Bryan Adam’s song “(Everything I Do) I Do it For You,” is still one of my favorite movie songs ever.

            Love doesn’t need to have specific labours or assignments imposed, but the general idea -- that a man should do everything better and always improve for women -- is a solid one. The cougar analogy is not good, because the prey/hunted thing is demeaning, and because the word cougar has a modern definition which negates all of the old-fashioned ideas I argued for today. But what do you want? I learned about cougars this week.

            I look around me and I see that girls are better than boys, and I want to be better to win their affection. This is why I never became a Buddhist. My older siblings are both Buddhists, and I used to think about practicing because the Buddhists were always happy and they throw great parties. Also, it's a terrific way to travel across Eastern Europe, going from Buddhist Center to Buddhist Center. But when I asked Ian and Katie about it, they said one of the things you need to do is let go of your ego.

           "Hmm." I thought, "No thanks." 

          I was gonna need that ego to impress the ladies.

Ian and I at the Buddhist Retreat Center in western Wisconsin.

We just finished chopping down some trees for firewood.

(The trees were already dead).

My little sister Cassie soaks up the many enlightening splendors of America's Dairyland

A Comedy of Suspended Disbelief

One of my favorite Hollywood stories is about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The screenwriter, David Seltzer, was on vacation, and got a call from set. It was the director. Mel Stuart. He was shooting the last scene of the movie, and they needed something for Willy Wonka to say to Charlie while they’re flying away in the great glass elevator. Seltzer -- who hadn’t thought about the script in months, who was not going to be credited because he’d been called in to doctor Roald Dahl’s script (and Roald Dahl was so angry that he never saw the movie) -- Seltzer came up with this: “Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted… he lived happily ever after.”

Classic.

When confronted by a dream, it’s best to go with it.

A Comedy of Errors is a play of incredible coincidence. Citizens of Ephesus are not permitted to travel to Syracuse and vice versa. A merchant from Syracuse comes to Ephesus and is going to be put to death unless someone pays a ransom of 1000 francs. Also come to the town that day are Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio of Syracuse. Little do they know that they each have twin brothers (precisely the people that the merchant has come to find) who live in Ephesus and who are also named Dromio and Antipholus. Naturally, Antipholus of Ephesus’s wife gets very confused when she runs into his Syracusan counterpart. There’s a courtesan, a mix up regarding a gold chain, and a rotund cook who is in love with Dromio. All essential elements of comic acceleration.

When Antipholus of Syracuse meets Adriana (his twin brother’s wife) he makes this decision in an aside:

To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme.

What, was I married to her in my dream?

Or sleep I now and think I hear all this?

What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?

Until I know this sure uncertainty,

I’ll entertain the offered fallacy. (2:2)

He decides to suspend his disbelief. It’s the same thing asked of any theater-going audience: to “entertain the offered fallacy.” He doesn’t know it at the time, but it’s his decision to stick around, to lose himself and sink deeper into the confusion of the mad Ephesians that saves his father’s life, identifies his mother (the local Abbess), and reveals his sundered twin brother.

My brother (not twin) is a Buddhist. Buddhists don’t believe in coincidence. This has to do with the interconnectedness of life and how enlightenment is being able to have a universal perspective and junk. All events are related by cause and effect. Nothing happens without some previous happening prompting it and all future events are linked to the events of this moment.

It’s true that two sets of identical twins is very convenient for comic storytelling. Shakespeare’s employment of the mistaken identity device matures with his later comedies, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and maybe it’s unfair for me to call it coincidental (an abhorred adjective in all modern story construction), since it’s part of the set-up. You suspend your disbelief at the opening of the play and accept the established relationships of the world and your prize for doing so is hilarity and entertainment.

There is always a prize for believing in things.

I fell in love one night. I kissed a beautiful girl and she kissed me. It was May in Minnesota and after leaving her -- before I could go into my crappy basement apartment that night -- I had to run away for a while. Falling in love is too big for a basement. It’s too big for brick walls or any man-made architecture. So I ran down the street. I started slow, and then went faster and faster.

Soon I was jumping off of ledges, and vaulting over fire hydrants. I grabbed tree branches, swung like Tarzan and landed in stride. For blocks, then miles, deep into the residential jungle between the Mississippi River and St. Paul’s Cathedral, until I collapsed in exhaustion on someone’s lawn.

That’s when I heard a small flittering noise. Like ant footsteps or tiny drops of rain. I looked closer at the blades of deep green grass around me. It had been a humid spring, and the color was rich, even at nighttime. The blades were flickering. I noticed the same thing on a nearby bush. The leaves twitched in little jerky movements.

It wasn’t raining.

It wasn’t windy. But everything was moving.

And then I realized… the leaves were unfurling.

I looked again at the grass. It was growing.

Down the entire silent street. The air was still and moist, and every flower flowered, every tree bloomed. Everything was waking up. And I was there to see it.

I was time-lapse photography. I was the fastest man alive.

There are periods of great wonder in life and you will know them by miraculous bookends. They present as fallacies. But when offered, it’s best to go with them.

It only took a headfirst dive into the dream that someone so beautiful could feel feelings for me. All the best things that have happened in my life grew out of that night’s confession and a warm spring kiss. Like Antipholus, there was mischief and fallout, and great piles of misery in the proceeding chain of effects. But I believe it will turn out happily once I get to the ever after.