Avocados For Breakfast

"Avocados for Breakfast" Art. Truth. Beauty.

It's a rare day when we are not asked for directions to the Hemingway House, located just around the corner. The path to Key West's number one tourist attraction is worn quite smooth.You would think the location of the town's most famous writer would be anything but a mystery, and yet, nearly every time I exit my home I am approached by people who ask in tentative tones, "Is this the way to the Hemingway House?"
   I was once hired to write a brochure for an English painter named Patricia Townsend who moonlighted as a tour guide at the Hemingway House. I invited her over for dinner, at which time I hoped to get to know her better.
    "Can you come at six?" I asked.
    "Yes, if the damned tourists don't keep me late asking ridiculous questions about the great Hemingway," she said scornfully.
    "What kinds of questions?" I asked.
    "Obnoxious ones. They want to know: 'Is this where he shot himself?' and 'Is this where he went to the bathroom?' They're disgusting! "
    "So we'll see you around six?" I asked.
    "Yes. All right. But tell me, what do you eat? No meat, I hope."
    "No," I assured her. "No meat. I'll fix pasta."
    "With tomato sauce?" she asked. (She pronounced it toe-maaa-toe.)
    "Yes, and lots of garlic," I said. "We love garlic. It discourages the mosquitoes."
    "Oh, I can't have garlic! It will carry on my breath when I give tours to the Hemingway fans," she said.
    "Fine. No garlic," I said.
    "You don't have any animals do you?" she asked.
    "No." I said.
    "Because I hate the way you Americans go on about your house pets. People go mad for those mangy Hemingway cats. They pick them up and kiss their little faces! I find it utterly appalling!"
     "No animals," I said. "But we do have a little boy. Do you like children?"
    "Ab-hooooooor them," she said, turning her head as if avoiding a bad smell.

Waiting for Hemingway.

    "Oh, I see. Well, perhaps we'd better postpone this visit until my son grows up and moves out," I said.
    In fact, I never did write that brochure. And Townsend, who'd hoped to find happiness and artistic success in Key West, was ultimately very disappointed. Her next move was to Indiana, and that's where she died.

The avocado tree next door.

   Townsend and her eccentric personality was much appreciated by my great friend, the late Richard Heyman, who owned the Gingerbread Square Gallery in those days. He was charmed by her painting, although, sadly, Richard's enthusiasm was not shared by people who bought art. Our wedding gift from Richard was a Townsend painting entitled "Avocados for Breakfast."
       The heavy bough of a particularly productive avocado tree hangs in our neighbor's yard. We imagine there was a time when Hemingway noshed on these beauties. Of course we do, too.

        At avocado time, which is now, we eat lots of avocados. We cut them in half. Remove the seed. Fill with oil and vinegar salad dressing. The Cubans make a salad with avocado chunks, onion slices, and oil and vinegar. Yum. And when we eat our avocados, we prop up Townsend's painting, which we love, on the table, before us. We display it in the kitchen, always, and in the 25 years it has been with us, I'm afraid it has suffered through more than a few splatters of one thing or another. Nonetheless, we feel it belongs in the kitchen.
     I'm sure Townsend would ab-hooooor that.

The Fine Art of Being Marion

Tennessee Williams' painting of Frank Merlo, his one true love.

Does anyone remember Marion Stevens, founder of the art gallery, “Artists Unlimited,” and heroine of a hundred crazy stories of old timey Key West? There’s a story of her chasing her naked husband, the artist Paul Stevens, down the middle of Duval Street, screaming and waving a knife over her head in the infamous wee hours on one otherwise quiet night. Marion, who arrived on the island in the late ‘50s, loved Haiti, Haitian art and Haitian men. She vacationed there often and chummed around this island, and Haiti, with the gruff and ever adventurous Margaret Foresman, editor of the Key West Citizen.  She sipped martinis at Delmonico’s on hot afternoons. She stormed the mayor’s office whenever her civic dander was up and addressed the Key West City Commission with such conviction she appeared to many to be mad. And maybe she was. She was very, very creative, using her body language, as much as her words, to get her sharp points across.

The also colorful Barbara Kellner (left) and Marion Stevens. This photo hung on the wall at the Square One Restaurant, a gift from Bill Divens to Square One owner Michael Stewart. They were absolutely not friends, Stewart says, which makes this photo rare indeed.

    And when she was older, and no longer running a gallery, or chasing her lovers through the streets, she rode her bike around and around the streets of Old Town. She wore elegant white shirts, capris, huge sunglasses, and sandals, her head high, like the dancer she’d once been.
    So who was Marion Stevens and how does she fit into Key West’s history, legend and lore? Finding the answers to those questions, and turning that information into a stageable narrative, is the job these days of playwright Toby Armour. Armour has been commissioned to pull together all the stories and fables and create a play for the purpose — according to the grant underwriting the project — of “capturing the heroic and colorful people who made Key West the unique place that it is.” Armour, a playwright of considerable insight, has had many of her works performed. (I Googled her. She’s the real thing.)
   Through research and conversations with people who have known, in one way or another, the eccentric gallery mistress Marion Stevens, Armour is fashioning a character based on a person she never met. There are quite a few of us left on the island who did know Marion, apparently, and the project has become both monumental and fascinating to the handsome and articulate playwright.

From Key West Arts Review, 1977

   Armour told me she’d learned that Stevens studied dance in Germany in the 1930’s with the renowned Mary Wigman, the mother of expressive dance. Among Wigman’s students were Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan. Armour is frustrated that the trail of Stevens in Germany has gone cold. All Stevens ever said about Germany, and this to her sole surviving niece, is, “I got out.” Provocative, eh?

Le Solitaire, by Tennesee Williams. According to Key West Arts Review, Stevens was the sole agent for Williams' paintings in Key West.

    The Key West Fringe, formerly called the People’s Theater of Key West, has as their motto: “Key West is our theatre.” Their presentations go on at the Key West Women’s Club, 319 Duval Street, just a block south of Steven’s Artist’s Unlimited Gallery, which stood at 221 Duval. Their next production, "Dinner," by Moira Buffini, opens February 24. Go to keystix.org for tickets. The play, "Tennessee Williams @100," scheduled for August, 2012, is already sold out. No date has yet been set for the premiere of the play about Marion Stevens, still under construction.
    If you have something to contribute to the Marion Stevens saga, Toby Armour would like to hear from you. Her address: tobyarmour@msn.com. In the meantime, stay true, stay real, be memorable. One day the play being staged by the Key West Fringe may be all about you.

The Eye of the Beholder

The famous Rainbow Flag doing the infamous Duval Crawl. Summer, 2003.

According to CoedMagazine.com, Key West is at the top of the list of trashiest Spring Break destinations. This certainly doesn’t sit well with people like Andy Newman, spokesman for the Florida Keys Tourism Bureau. Trashy is not a nice way to describe a paradise on earth like Key West.  Key West, with its exorbitant hotel rates and many pristine and romantic hideaways is anything but trashy, Andy says. Turns out, Andy misunderstood. No insult intended! Trashy is a good thing!
     “This is a double thumbs up,” said editor Neal Lynch, of CoEd.com. “It’s definitely a seal of approval....Our goal is to redefine the word trashy.”
    Did you hear that? Redefine the word trashy? This is not gonzo journalism. This is journalism gone. I would go wherever this guy tells me not to go.

Beautiful Sushi's annual New Year's descent from the top of Bourbon St. Pub puts Key West at the top of anyone's list of best places to party on New Year's Eve.

    Last month another journalist somewhere created a list of America’s Gayest Cities. Of 15 cities selected, Salt Lake City was number one. Key West was not even mentioned.  A guy at work, seeing the story on the front page of the Citizen that day, took offense.
    “Hey!” he said. “How can Key West not be on this list?  This is wrong!”

Anybody can sit in Sushi's shoe, as long as it's not New Year's Eve . . .

    The guy questioning the story is not gay, as far as I know. It really doesn't matter. He was thinking of our many gay friends and coworkers, our fellow Key Westers. How would they feel to be left out of this story?    I’ve noticed in Key West it’s like that trailer park tee shirt warning: “F--- with me and you F--- with this whole trailer park.” One of us has the power of all of us. United we stand. Divided we go to tea dance. 
    Ultimately I see that it’s a good thing not to be on this list. I mean think about it: would you rather be gay in Key West or in Salt Lake City?

The Sweet Spot: Key West, Fla.

The Survivors Who Lunch

Clark modeling the Miami J Collar

Are you a survivor? Survivors are the people who stay heartily engaged in living, no matter what fortune, good or bad, throws their way. They are people who remain valid. They count. They function in a way that enhances far more than detracts from the world in which they live.
    In the last two days I’ve been out to lunch. Twice I’ve dined on fish sandwiches in busy restaurants with some very impressive people, survivors all, who still sparkle with vitality and glow with love and enthusiasm for life. First, with the girls. Then, with Clark and Barb.
    The cancer survivors — my group — are perhaps the most obviously thankful to be breathing and dining and laughing and hugging. Cancer, just the word, plunges our imaginations into a very dark place. We survivors have been to that place, and climbed out of the blackness and back into the light. Today we can tell stories about our adventures, and laugh at them. Cancer and heart disease are our most constant calamities.

Clark's Key West album. It's a good one.

    Our friend Clark had a tumor on his spine. The surgery to remove it was long and torturous and painful. Then he needed to wear a Miami J Collar. You’ve seen them; they hold your spine utterly still while you attempt to live your life in spite of it.  Clark wore his to the restaurant where he works. For three months! One of his customers said “Oh, I see you’re wearing the Miami J Collar. I did time in one of those things, too,” the lady said. “Ugh!” 
    “Why did you have to wear it?” Clark asked. “What happened to you?”
    “Rough sex,” she replied, while the man behind her shrugged and grinned.
    In the grocery store Clark and his wife, my great friend Barb, were approached by an old timer who recognized the Miami J  and commented on it. “How long you been wearing it?” he asked.
    “A month or so, but I’m supposed to wear it for three months,” Clark said.
    “Well do like the doctor tells you,” the old guy said. “I took mine off too soon and I still can’t swaller right.” Then he grimaced and demonstrated his bizarre swallowing technique.
    The occasion of the lunch was to celebrate Clark’s recent PET scan. The news is good. No evidence of cancer.
    The funniest story I have about my cancer is remembering the day Barb, who is a nurse, removed a drain tube from my throat, after my lymphectomy surgery. I was very happy to be having the nuisance tube, that threaded around and about within my neck, and exited beneath my chin, removed. At last! With easy confidence Barb cut through the stitches holding the tube in place, grasped it firmly, and pulled. And pulled. That sucker was a foot long, and as it continued to emerge, like a trail of scarves pulled from a magician's sleeve, Barb’s eyes grew bigger and bigger. I was watching them. Finally her face relaxed again. The tube was out. At last!

A fuzzy photo of survivors June, Barb and Natale

    Our friend Natale was at lunch, too. Natale is a beauty, attracting the eyes of everyone in the room wherever she goes. She looks like an angel. She is an angel. But she’s been to hell, too. She grew up in Siberia. Her parents died in a car crash when she was 16 years old. She lost her husband to heart disease while she was still very young.  She raised a son, alone. She has worked hard just about every day of her life. And still, she smiles her Mona Lisa smile and maintains her sweet grace.
    Also at lunch the other day, Barb’s friend Jane. In the course of our conversation, the drug Synthroid came up.
    “Why do you take Synthroid?” is the question that inevitably follows.
    “I had cancer. The radiation treatment destroyed my thyroid,” I explained to Jane. “What about you?”
    “I was struck by lightning,” she said, popping a French fry into her mouth.
    OMG!!  Really?  Really.

June and Barb with Electro-Girl

    I demanded to know everything, every little detail, of this event — Jane being the first person I’ve ever known to be struck by lightning.  It happened on a clear, sunny day in Tuckahoe, New York. Jane walked out of her office and into the street and remembers nothing until she awakened in the hospital a week later. Her doctors weren’t quite clear on what had happened to burn her, paralyze her, and knock her consciousness right out of her head. She is just below 5 feet tall. A very tiny target! To see her you wouldn’t guess she’d had a problem in the world. Then you notice the medallion she wears on a chain around her neck to alert paramedics that she has seizures as a result of scars on her brain from that lightning strike.
    Barb told me that when Jane told her the story of being hit by lightning she said “Well, you don’t have to worry about that happening again. Lightning never strikes in the same place twice.”
    Turns out, it does. Some people simply attract lightning strikes. And Jane is very cautious about venturing out of the house, no matter what the weather report says.
    Barb’s brother David, seven years her junior, is battling pancreatic cancer back in her native Kentucky. The good news is that he’s doing very well on chemo. But there’s more. The brother she never knew very well has become very close to her. The two talk on the phone, or text each other, multiple times each day. They talk about the tiny dramas of daily life — the dinner menu, the progress of the neighborhood's new kittens, their mom, their families. They are just getting around to making solid a bond they never quite got around to before. It is very sweet indeed.
    My husband Michael has survived two cancers, but he rarely refers to them. It happened long ago and far away and he’s happy to distance himself from the memories. Nonetheless, cancer has changed our lives. We appreciate our days so much more than before. We work on keeping difficulties in perspective.
    Barb told me that at the end of each day she and Clark review the day and talk about the highs and lows of its course. Michael and I do that, too.
    The other day, as Barb and I posed for Natale’s camera, and Natale showed Jane how it worked, the sun was high in the sky but not too hot, and the breeze was balmy and just right. We had a moment together and I said to her “This is it, Barb. This is our life.”
    “I know it is, June,” she said. “And it’s just fine.”
    And then we smiled for the camera.

Henry Flagler's Doomed Wives

The magnificent Whitehall in Palm Beach. You should see it for yourself.

The ballroom in Whitehall.

This week in Paradise we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first train arriving in Key West, via Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad. Some called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. It was also called Flagler’s Folly. Both names were accurate. Yes, it was a wonder that one man, Henry Flagler, had the vision of a train reaching from the mainland to Key West, and that the same man had the $25 million to finance the project. But it was a foolish and costly endeavor, and that makes it a folly, too. The railroad never turned a profit, ended up in bankruptcy, and was ultimately irreparably damaged by a hurricane.
    Stories, legends and myths surrounding the building of the railroad abound. The history that most intrigues me is Flagler’s marriages, and, via his wives, the disbursement of his fantastic fortune. 

Henry, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and wife #1, the sickly Mary Harkness.

    Flagler was 51 years old, and already a millionaire, when he became a widower. Soon after the first Mrs. Flagler died, he took a second wife. She was Alice Ida Shrouds, who’d been employed by Henry to nurse the sickly first Mrs. Flagler. Mr. and Mrs. Flagler honeymooned in St. Augustine, Florida. Shortly after the wedding, Alice Ida began communicating with other worlds via a Ouija board. She confided to her husband that she’d learned that it was her fate to marry the czar of Russia. In fact, Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, was then just 20 years away from his own strange fate, which was to be murdered, along with his wife and children, by the Bolsheviks in 1918. But who knows? Perhaps Alice Ida was right. Maybe she and Nicholas II were destined to meet and to unite in some other realm, at some other time. But to Henry Flagler, she just sounded nuts. He got a physician friend to agree that Alice Ida was mentally incompetent and had her committed to a sanitarium.    

Easy Mary Lily . . . he's an old man!

   Meanwhile, Flagler, a natural born entrepreneur, began exploring business opportunities in Florida. He was well aware of the area’s great potential and set his sights on creating what he called a new “American Riviera.”  As his mentally ill wife languished in a New York institution, Flagler completed the 1,100-room Royal Poinciana Hotel on the shores of Lake Worth in Palm Beach. The Royal Poinciana Hotel was at the time the largest wooden structure in the world. Two years later, Flagler built the Palm Beach Inn (renamed Breakers Hotel Complex in 1901) overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach.

Whoever labeled this photo spelled Mary Lily's name wrong.

    Florida welcomed Henry Flagler, his money and his grand ideas for creating jobs and making more money. Somewhere along the way he was introduced to a Mary Lily Kenan, a singer and pianist. She was 24; Flagler was 70, and still a married man. Flagler took his problem in front of the the Florida legislature and they passed a bill that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce. Flagler divorced Ida and married Mary. Mary’s wedding gift was the luxurious Whitehall, a 60,000 square foot, 55-room mansion in Palm Beach that is today a museum with a fascinating story. What I recall as being the most remarkable room in Whitehall is the ballroom. Utterly fantastic. Our guide showed us the chairs upon which the Flagler’s would host many events. There was a piano, upon which Mary played. And there was a barely visible door, which lead to a secret stair that the aging Flagler would use to inconspicuously disappear to the comfort of his bedroom while young Mary and their guests partied till the wee hours. It was on that stairway that Flagler took the fall that led to his death at the age of 83. Flagler’s will left his wife Mary $108 million.

Flagler was a rambling man. Here is his own personal train car, the Rambler. See it for yourself at Whitehall in Palm Beach.

    Mary Lily Flagler next married Robert Bingham, a Kentucky politician. Before the wedding Bingham signed a prenuptial agreement, giving up claim to the Flagler fortune should his wife die before him. Eight months later, she died. One month before her death there had been a codicil added to her will, stating that upon her death her husband would receive $5 million.

Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine where you can see the graves of Henry and his first wife Mary Harkness.

    Mary Lily’s family was outraged, suspecting foul play. They arranged to have her body exhumed and autopsied at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. They promised the media that the results of the autopsy would be made public. But that never happened. The results remained a secret giving rise to wild speculation that she had been a user of laudanum (a form of opium) and had accidentally overdosed. There was also a rumor that Bingham was so furious at Mary Lily’s family for their interfering in the matter of his inheritance that he threatened to release a story to the press that she had died of syphilis if the family didn’t back off.
    Bingham’s fortune financed his purchase of the Louisville Courier newspaper, which survives to this day. The paper has also had an infamous history related to family and inherited money. But that’s another story, for another day. 
    Henry Flagler left $2 million in his will for his second wife, Crazy Alice Ida. She outlived him by 17 years, dying at the age of 82, and claiming, till the day she died, that her next husband would be a Russian czar.

Once He Built A Railroad

This bridge, the Long Key Viaduct, is now part of the US 1 Overseas Highway.

On the centennial anniversary of the completion of the Flagler’s famous folly, the Florida Keys Overseas Railroad, the man behind the monumental undertaking, that irascible old millionaire Henry Flagler, is once again in the news. Were it not for his trailblazing tenacity, the Overseas Highway, our well-worn thoroughfare to the mainland, most certainly would not exist. That’s the news. But there’s so much more to the story.

Flagler's folly, the East Coast Railroad, arriving in Key West for the very first time, January 22, 1912.

    Flagler’s railroad cost him $25 million. He’d made his vast fortune in Standard Oil, the company he founded with John D. Rockefeller. Flagler was told that his idea was insane. But he persisted.
    Key West was the very last in a chain of coral rock islands, overgrown by subtropical jungle, mostly untouched by civilization, and separated by varying spans of ten to thirty-feet-deep ocean water. More than half of the planned railroad would have to traverse water. When asked about his crazy plan, Flagler said “It is perfectly simple. All you have to do is build one concrete arch, and then another, and pretty soon you will find yourself in Key West.”
    Five hundred men lost their lives before the job was done. The work was backbreaking and fraught with sub-tropics sun, humidity, mosquitos and disease. Alcohol was strictly forbidden to the men, and so a cutthroat bootlegging industry bustled just outside the worker's camps.

Pineapple harvesting. Rough work.

    Meanwhile, the pineapple growers of the Florida Keys, watched and waited with high hopes for the future, when the railroad would provide them with a trade route for their pineapples to the busy markets of the east coast. 
    The Overseas Railroad chugged into Key West for the first time on January 22, 1912. Soon the train simply drove right onto a ferry that carried it to Havana, where it was loaded down with passengers and . . . pineapples. It was cheaper to ship the Cuban pineapples north than to stop at the Keys stations for their more expensive fruit. Between the cheaper trade from Cuba and the hurricanes, the pineapple growers of the Keys were wiped out. Forever.
     From the very start, the train business was besieged with problems. The train never ran on time, mostly due to weather. The tradewinds made bridge crossings dangerous and slow. Passengers were scarce. The train never began to turn a profit to pay for its construction. It didn’t even make enough profit to pay for its upkeep. Twenty years after its grand completion, in 1932, the railroad went into bankruptcy.

Flagler knew the Panama Canal was coming in 1914. Key West had the closest U.S. deep water harbor.

    Still, the train ran, and those who rode it recall it as one of the most memorable experiences of their lives. Wilhelmina Harvey, onetime Monroe County Mayor and Key West native, once described to me the experience of taking the train to New York. She was a little girl and recalled climbing aboard the train and watching out the windows as the train rode up the Keys. On the bridges, she said, it seemed that the train rode on water, the train and passengers spectacularly suspended between the sky and sea. She would be put into her little berth bed in the Keys, she said, and would awaken to an entirely new vista outside, of oak and fir trees, the train having arrived on the mainland during the night.
    Other frequent passengers on the railroad were the Hemingways, who lived in Key West during the 1930s and traveled often to the mainland.    

This is the end, my friend. September, 1935.

    In 1935 the infamous Labor Day Hurricane, the gargantuan storm that killed hundreds of people, and tore a naked swath through the jungle-like Florida Keys, also destroyed over 40 miles of the roadbed. The Overseas Railroad’s receivers decided that rather than spending several million dollars to repair the damage, they would sell it to the highest bidder. The State of Florida paid $640,000 for all of the railroad property, including the rail bed and its remarkable bridges. One bridge alone cost Flagler over $640,000 to build. There are forty-two of them. Upon the path blazed by Flagler and many millions of dollars, and his workers' gallons of sweat, blood and tears, a highway was constructed and completed in 1938.
    When you drive to Key West, and cross the mighty bridges that have miraculously withstood the test of time, you can thank Henry Flagler for making it possible. And then, you might ask yourself, who was this Henry Flagler who amassed such a fortune in the days before income taxes and had the audacity, at the very end of his long life, to demand the building of a railroad doomed to fail?
    For that information you’ll need to come here next week, when I will tell you the fascinating story of Flagler’s three wives, and the divvying up his great fortune after his death in 1913. 
    See you Thursday!

The Provocative Art of the Tear Jerk

What's going on in your back seat?

 Yesterday Michael and I saw the The Descendants, now playing at the incredibly cool Tropic Cinema, located just a short hike away from our house. As always Michael examined reviews of the movie before agreeing to see it. The reviews were good, he reported. And so we went. In the bustle of people leaving the theater, as we waited on line to buy tickets, I heard a woman say: “I used every Kleenex in my purse!” and assumed she had seen the Marilyn Monroe film, Marilyn’s being one of the most heartbreakingly poignant stories imaginable.

Key West's Tropic Theater: a treasure

    The Descendants is set in Hawaii, and features scenes of not only downtown Honolulu, and the bustling tourist center of Waikiki, but also sweeping and magnificent images of pristine areas on other, less frequented Hawaiian islands. George Clooney very artfully plays the husband of a mortally wounded woman, comatose on her deathbed, as the drama of her demise plays out. It is sad. And funny. And authentic, but for the fact that the husband is a multimillionaire. In the very beginning of the film, he narrates that when people know you live in a place like Hawaii, a paradise, they don’t think you experience life’s darker truths. But it is true, he assures us, that people in Hawaii suffer deadly cancers and addictions and boat accidents just like they do everywhere else on the planet.

Inside the Tropic, voted the best movie theater in Florida!

    Where can this go? Just where you think it will of course. The story plays out. We learn terrible secrets about the wife and about her husband’s regrets. We see children losing their mother. Elderly parents losing their adult child. As the story spooled toward it’s inevitable end, the sound of tearful sighs, nose-blowing and sniffling came from every corner of the theater. I saw Michael’s eyes shining with brimming tears. But I wasn’t buying it. I don’t like being played like a violin.  
    Later Michael said that the experience reminded him of seeing the movie Love Story, in a packed to the brim New York City theater, full of hard-bitten New Yorkers, who sniffled and sobbed every time the heroine or the hero spoke the immortal words: “love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  If only!
    I was reminded of seeing the film West Side Story, which came around when I was 10 years old. I saw it with my cousin, who was older, wiser, and, in my mind’s eye, cooler than me in every way imaginable. Everyone seemed to be sniveling, but not her. She didn’t cry. So I wouldn’t cry. I think I sprained something deep in my throat, and perhaps my soul, with the effort.
    This morning I talked with son Miguel. I told him about the film. He said he believes that people like sob stories; they appeal to the voyeuristic instinct in all of us. We know of life’s inevitable truths — loss and death — but when, as children, we watch Bambi, or Old Yeller, or Charlotte’s Web, we witness someone else's tragedy. Not our own. We get to leave the theater, go home, unscathed, our Kleenex used and tossed into the trash along with our temporary heartache.

Where do I begin?

    When I slogged through cancer treatments, radiation and chemotherapy, I felt pretty awful, but I never imagined that I would die. Chemo takes you right to the brink of death, hopefully without killing you along with the cancer cells. It’s pathetic indeed. I felt truly sorry for those who love me having to bear witness to my suffering. But I survived. We all did. And when it was all over, when I went back to work and rejoined the human race, people had many questions about my cancer, my prognosis, and my feelings about it.
    I soon realized that I wasn’t the only one in denial of my destiny. We all are. No matter how green your paradise, no matter how many millions in your bank account, no matter how wonderful or horrible you are, you will die. So I say live creatively, love lavishly, create irony, so that when the tragedy of your death occurs, perhaps the drama of your story will be fodder for a Golden Globe-winning, tear-jerking film. The world will cry for you. And you will go down in cinematic history.