It’s been a bit over two weeks since my last post. A lot has happened in that fortnight and change.
I had an acting job that has me rethinking my life, yet again. We’ll talk about that in a soon, but later post. I wasted many many h̶o̶u̶r̶s̶ days trying to secure a particular work-from-home job. Again, that is for a later, but soon post.
Jennifer and I hosted a friendsgiving this year. There weren’t a ton of people, but we did use every chair we own, save the one with the broken foot. To clean and cook for this event was a several days long process. Jennifer and I both have raging attention problems, so it took far longer than it might have for normies. At least the mess in our house has once again been mostly banished to the downstairs.
I did the cooking this year. The food turned out mezzo-mezzo. I gently burned two dishes. I undercooked the dark meat. The white meat was perfect, though. I also undercooked half of the Brussels sprouts, because I forgot to turn them during the roasting. My attention issues were very much on display! The pies that my friends brought were excellent, though. Like I said the gestalt of the meal was mezzo-mezzo. We did all manage to choke down a few bites, as my Grandpa Noah used to say.
After dinner I ate three edibles (too many as it turned out) and caught the weirdness, and had to go cool off in the living room, away from the liveliness in the dining room. I then talked to my mom on the phone while high af, and felt like I was seventeen again. Very weird. Talking to my sisters was not nearly as weird, but they’ve seen me openly in various states of impairment before. I chatted with my dad about our holiday meals and how my half siblings are etc. on Facebook Messenger—I am pretty sure I could not have been as blazingly stoned as I was and maintained a spoken conversation with him. I am forty-six years old, by the way. I do what I want! I still don’t like interacting with my straight edge parents while in the spirit world.
Fairly abrubt tonal shift:
Over the weekend I went to a wake and memorial for an acting buddy that I was in a film and a few improv gigs with. He was a formidable talent and a kind man with a heart as big as his giant Irish head. He died after a four year battle with cancer. We were friendly, but not incredibly close. We liked each other and always had a good time in each other’s company, but we weren’t heart friends. That said, I do have close friends that are part of the theatre company that was his artistic home for more than a decade. They have lost a brother, a dear friend, and a formidable artistic talent that was an ensemble member from the very beginning. John Kelly Connolly, rest well, you were a goodun.
If you are religious, say a prayer for him, won’t you? If not, have a quiet thought for the man with the loudest voice—and LAUGH that I have ever known. Nobody even comes close. And I’ve known theatre folk my whole life!
If you like a drink, maybe have the one that John inexplicably loved, a Jameson mixed with Dr Pepper. I like Jameson a lot, and I love Dr Pepper as only a 4th generation Texan can. Not together. What a waste of good whiskey, and it makes your Dr Pepper actually taste like the NyQuil that the uncultured accuse unaltered DP of tasting like. Dr Pepper tastes like Robitussin, thankyouverymuch! You could also take a shot of Jameson, and chase it with a nice cold DP, which is what I did at the memorial. Or you could raise a glass of literally anything else in in John’s memory.
Not you, Malört; I saw you trying to sneak in there.
If you wish to honor John’s memory monetarily, I will have a link to a fund in his name that his estate has set up for The Gift Theatre. If you can spare a bit of green it will be appreciated, I am certain. But, please do not feel obligated.
The bar at John’s memorial service. I love that three of the five liquors available are Irish; two of them are whiskey, and that the fairly fancy bourbon is barely touched. There stands the Dr Pepper bottle that expected to end its days at a barbecue picnic in Lufkin, but ended up at a memorial in Chicago.
John’s death reminded me of other friends that I have lost in the past few years; all of them far too young and larger than life. People from whom their silence is deafening.
See you around, Buddy.
I’m not a big picture taker. I have very little self-created content to memorialize people with. I’m just not the guy to stop and take a picture when I am having a good time—we’ve already established that I have attention problems, yet I wish that I had a better record of my friends and family. This lack of personal relics is why I will probably never delete Facebook or my friends’ numbers from my phone.
On their social media platforms, my friends are preserved in digital amber.
Always smiling.
Not sick.
Not dying alone in pain.
One of my friends—Marialla, has been gone for over nine years, but not a week goes by that I don’t reach for my phone to text her to see what she’s up to, or start to send her something funny I saw on Facebook Messenger. I know I could delete her number, and unfriend her on Facebook, but even seeing this typed out makes my heart hurt and my eyes fill with tears. I miss my friend, dammit, and I don’t want to ever forget her. Sometimes I need to see her as she was, so full of life and spirit. Remember her for being the second loudest person I have ever known. As long as she and my other lost friends are on Facebook, I will stay there. Here is the only picture I have of Mari that I took:
Of course Mari pushed the button. That was who she was. Rest in power, my dear one.
Another tonal shift:
Spending time with all of the theatre family of John made me wistful for the days when two of my best friends and I started a theatre in Texas. We fooled some other good friends into helping us, and we also got complete strangers to act and crew for free and become our friends. They in turn brought other people to join our little group. It was like the world’s least successful multi-level marketing scheme. We all worked hard for no money, some acclaim, some measured appreciation, and one review so scathing that many other theatre companies reached out to commiserate with us. These companies, some of them fairly major ones, let us borrow props and costumes for years to show their solidarity with us and to expiate the darkest of magicks that that review spake unto the world lest it touch them.
Though none of us ever got rich or famous off of the work we did at The Box Theatre of Fort Worth née Euless, Texas, some of my most treasured memories are of that time we played together. We had some frustrating and unbelievably dark times, but I miss my theatre family. We have all scattered. Some like myself, across the country or world, and some only a mile away. Many of us still act, write, or direct, stage manage and crew in theatre. Many professionally. Some of us still work together. There have been web series, podcasts, short films, and plays written and performed that all have genetic material from our little theatre. Some are working actors in visual media, more of us (like me) are still trying to be. Other former members are artists in other fields—painters, musicians, singers, improvisers; at least a couple of stand up comedians number among us. I can count at least three high school theatre teachers, but there are probably more. Most of the group who have kids are training them up in theatre, music, and dance. Creating Broadway’s future triple threats. Or at least inculcating a love of the performing arts. I think of how broken and sad I have been in most of my adult life, and I shudder to think what my life in my mid twenties and early thirties would have been like without that theatre and the beautiful people that I came to love during that period. I would not have survived.
That is not hyperbole.
Thank you for indulging my trip to the past.
Another tonal change:
The next post will be a check-in with you all about my project and how it’s going or not going. I will also unveil a couple of tweaks to the challenges that I think will make them go better. I will post about all of this tomorrow.
I still have a few days left on my 21 days to write a screenplay. I am not sure that I will get there, because I took a few days off of from writing. If I could cross-stitch or embroidery, I would make myself a framed copy of the quote below to hang above my desk:
“You can't say, 'I won't write today' because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then...you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.”
Dorothy C. Fontana
1939 - 2019
Ms. Fontana was a tv writer of many series, but is best known for her work on Star Trek. She died on Monday. My friend, the writer and editor, Jason Davis put this quote on his Facebook wall and Twitter feed, and it really resonated with me. I’ve got a couple of links to Jason’s work and his Twitter feed.
Thank you, as always, for reading. I will see all of y’all tomorrow.
Drop me a line: jeremydnichols@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter: @jeremydnichols
Follow me on Instagram: @germynickels
The nice obituary for John in the Tribune: Obituary for John Kelly Connolly:
To make a memoriam to The Gift Theatre in John’s Name: Donation Page
To follow Jason Davis on Twitter: @TheJasonDavis
Where to buy his original works: Amazon Page for Jason Davis
He was also the late Harlan Ellison’s last editor, and he made an incredibly audacious project to ‘To create definitive versions of all Harlan Ellison’s writings, fiction and non-fiction, to preserve in print for posterity’.
Here is a link to that Kickstarter page: The Harlan Ellison Preservation Project
Having (mostly) finished that Herculean task, he has moved on to doing a similar project for Babylon 5. Here is that link: The Babylon 5 Preservation Project