Stage Dad: The Art of Sacrifice

Being the parent of a child actor comes with a learning curve that has the potential to throw your life into chaos at any point. If you’re not willing to endure the ebbs and flows that come with your new role, don’t take it. There is no sense in making yourself, your child, or other family members miserable.

That said, you will never know if you can do it unless you try.

Three years ago this month, we were in New York, searching for an apartment and watching our son start rehearsals for the Broadway revival of “Ragtime.” My wife and I decided on a combination “what the heck/wait and see” approach to the entire endeavor, knowing that our lives would never be the same.

And they haven’t – not for a moment since.

The first year – as my wife and I readily tell anyone who will listen – was very tough, even as we wiped a number of things off of our parental bucket list in a very short time. We spent the time switching off between our girls in Northern Virginia and taking care of Ben in New York, in essence operating as single parents.

That worked for a time, and then we had to look for other options. When Ben moved into “Billy Elliot,” we hired someone to take care of him for a short time. Then we split time in New York with another family. Then someone lived in the apartment rent free in exchange for making sure Ben made it back and forth to school, rehearsal and the show.

When the tour started, we called on Ben’s cousin, who was looking for a job. Then Ginno, another friend who took care of our son in New York, came on board. Nicholas, my oldest, also has chipped in during his break this summer. Jill and I fly out every few weeks when we can.

The performer’s life, especially when that performer is a child on a national tour, is something of a strange existence for the caregivers. You stay in hotels, board buses and planes, and find a new set of grocery stores, laundromats, and eating establishments every one to three weeks. And all the while, you schlep the child back and forth to rehearsals and the show.

Constantly you find yourself weighing the benefits, the risks, and the costs. On one hand, you have an opportunity to do something for your child that few parents get, to give them the experience of a lifetime at a relatively young age. On the other, you and your child miss having the day to day to day connection that you get by being under the same roof. It takes a lot of trust, a lot of hope, and a lot of juggling.

But really, life is a juggling act. It just depends on how many balls you want to have in the air.

******

Over the past several weeks, while Ben has been in Boston, much of our family time was spent sitting around the television watching the Olympics. It was easy to get caught up in the drama of the games, and that night’s events became a point of conversation each evening.

In part, that’s intentional. Dick Ebersol, NBC’s Olympics guru for the past two decades, says the games are “one of the last events where a whole family can gather around a television set and spend the night together.” That’s one reason ratings were through the roof, even though most of the events were tape delayed.

What I found particularly interesting were the behind-the-scenes stories that focused on the athletes’ personal lives. Bookending each event, it seemed, was a story about parents making tremendous sacrifices for the athletes to pursue their passion. Gaby Douglass’ story, of moving from her home in Virginia Beach to train in Iowa, had particular resonance for us.

For some time, I’ve said that parents of top athletes and working actors have much in common. If anything, we have learned the art of sacrifice.

******

Last year, a friend of mine asked, “Is it wrong to want my child to have the fairytale?”

The reference was to the loss of her son’s team in the semifinals of the local Little League championship. The team had gone undefeated through the season and into the playoffs, only to lose to another squad that had less talent on paper but was peaking at the right time.

Sports and theatre, besides being inherently dramatic, have the fairytale factor in common.

Watching your child deal with a tough loss – either in a game or in an audition -- is heartbreaking because we want them to have that moment in the spotlight. More often than not, we rediscover over and over again that fairytales are just fiction, that “real life” rarely ends the way we would like.

Still, we try. That’s why we buy lottery tickets and compete in contests with little scraps of scratch off cardboard, hoping we’ll be the 1 in 8,373,722 that gets picked. It’s why parents twist and contort schedules and make them look like the intersections of the interstate highway system, just so our children can have opportunities we did not.

We’re very fortunate. Our son is living the fairytale in “Billy Elliot,” but it’s not due to a magic wand. Not by any means.

And we would never have known if we hadn’t tried.

The Saga of Moo-Moo

We’ve all heard the phrase, “You’ll be able to laugh about this someday,” usually in conjunction with “Laughing is better than crying.”

That brings me to “The Saga of Moo-Moo,” a family story that still makes my oldest son steam, my youngest son squirm, and the rest of us shake our heads in bemusement. In honor of the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death, the recent passing of the full moon, and an expensive visit from the travel ghosts/gods, Moo-Moo’s story brings a welcome dose of humor.

Morbid humor, perhaps. But humor nonetheless, with a twist for an ending.

Flashback to five years ago today: The entire family – all six of us – is flying home from my dad’s memorial service. It was a special time, the only opportunity all nine of my parents’ grandchildren have been together, and an exhausting (as you might expect) experience.

At this point, Nicholas is 14, Kate is 10, and the twins are 9. All handled themselves very well throughout the trip, so I should have expected the wheels to fall off at some point. And they did.

••••••

I’ve nicknamed my kids Hansel and Gretel, because everywhere they go they leave a trail. I realize it’s genetic. They get this trait from their father, and I got it from my father, along with his humor. Ben and Nicholas get their sense of humor from me as well.

What follows next wasn’t funny, at least at the time.

We got off the plane at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport and, as usual, did the inventory a little too late. Nicholas realized he’d left his sketchbook on the plane and, more important/catastrophic, a small stuffed red cow he had named “Moo-Moo.”

“Moo-Moo” was one of those last throwbacks to childhood bedtime, the stuffed animal/blanket that you’re never really ready to part with despite your desire to be an adult. In Nicholas’ hormonal teenage eyes, he couldn’t deal with the loss of his grandfather and “Moo-Moo,” too.

So we went to the ticket counter and pled our case to the Southwest attendant, a very nice woman who promised to do whatever she could to help. (Fortunately, this was five years ago, and it was not captured for A&E’s reality show, “Airline.”) She sent someone to look for the stuffed animal.

We waited, and waited. The plane’s takeoff was delayed. Nicholas quickly sketched a “Lost” poster for “Moo-Moo.” The very nice woman patiently took the “Unchecked Article Loss Report.”

At some point in this process, “Moo-Moo” mysteriously appeared. As it turns out, Ben had picked it up and hidden it as we got off the plane. Only after the plane was stopped from taking off did the then 9-year-old realize the joke had gone horribly awry.

We slinked out of the airport, making profuse apologies to the nice (though understandably pissed off) attendant and pointing visual daggers at our youngest son. It was a long, quiet ride home. I thought, in some way, it was my father’s ghost messing with me.

Moo-Moo’s fate would not be mentioned again – until we received a mysterious box almost four years later.

••••••

The box arrived at our home on April 8, 2011 with Nicholas’ sketchbook, the “Lost” poster, the original incident report, and an unsigned letter. Cue the “Dragnet” theme.

“This book was found at BWI Airport by one of my cleaners a few years ago – I put it in a box intending to mail it to you. The address was in the article loss report but the box was inadvertently placed in our storage area. I saw the box and realized it was never mailed – sorry for the mistake. The book has tremendous sentimental value… Thanks.”

Then the P.S.: “I cannot vouch for the cow. Seems like it was never located.”

Jill and I had to smile and shake our heads. We called Nicholas, who was glad to hear about the sketchbook but still seemed to have PTSD from the experience. Later, we told Ben, who remembered the cold ride home and the withering looks from his older brother on that sad night 32 months before.

“Stop! I don’t want to hear about it,” he said.

And then he muttered: “I still have dreams about that cow.”

I thought about the Moo-Moo story again after an almost comical anniversary weekend of travel mishaps. Kate missed her train from North Carolina and took a bus. Nicholas missed a plane from Boston due to weather and had to take another plane the next day to Virginia. Emma left her pillow and blanket at home when she went to a dance camp.

That was all within the space of 72 hours.

Ben was spared somewhat in this travel saga, although being on the road means he has more than his share of stories to tell. And things to leave behind, I’m sure…

Stage Dad: Father & Son

I became a better father when my dad died.

It was five years ago this past week – a lifetime in many respects. Dad had been ill for some time, thanks to a slightly toxic gene pool that forced him to fight a variety of physical maladies for years. My mom spent most of my childhood and a large chunk of my adult life caring for my dad, with a level of devotion that still amazes me.

Watching mom and dad deal with everything was one reason I never thought I would be a parent, let alone one with four children. I saw their sacrifices – even though in my self-centered youth, they may not have seemed like much at the time – and never believed I could do the same.

Of course, growing up in Texas, I didn’t think I would live in the Washington, D.C., area or that I would have a job that would take me to the corners of the U.S. and parts in between. I wistfully dreamed of going to parts unknown – before the reality of business travel kicked in – and never thought it would happen.

I never would have thought it, but it happened.

That brings me back to my dad and to his lasting effect, both in life, but especially in death.

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This column is about being a stage parent, about the schlepping, trailing, and trolling my wife and I do to keep our traveling troupe of performers, artists, and athletes afloat. But, as I mentioned in my first column, “stage dad” is not what this is about, despite the tight verbiage that appeals to my inner editor.

“Parent” comes first.

Not that it always did. I’m a workaholic in a 12-step program, and to this day it is difficult to resist the temptation to put the job – or the task – first. For the longest time, I wanted to be a success at what I did for a living. I wanted to hit the home run and move as far from my hometown as I could.

And I did. But there were costs. I missed a lot of time with my children – all of them – when they were younger because I was working. I saw my parents less and less when I moved from home.

Until the last two to three years of his life, I did not realize how frail my father was. He had been in poor health for so long that I started to take it for granted. Dad felt bad – all the time.

You could see glimpses of his talent. A visual artist, he could draw anything, although his physical ailments made it tough to measure up to his perfectionist standards. So after an 18-month burst of creativity between my third and fourth grade year, he largely stopped, only picking up a pencil or pen to do a project for my mom or when the muse hit so strongly that he couldn’t resist.

To this day, I live in fear that the creative muse will leave and not return. For me, creativity is a way of focusing the chaos that’s inside my head.

So what happens when you need to give writer’s block an angioplasty?

******

Just in case you’re wondering, it’s been almost three weeks since the last “Stage Dad” column appeared and a month since my son opened in “Billy Elliot” in Louisville, Ky. I’ve had material, but even more, I’ve had convenient excuses.

Thanks to the fine coverage this website gave to the Fringe Festival, for two weeks there really wasn’t much space for a parent’s meanderings about raising a family of performers. And who would read this when they can watch NBC’s tape delays of the Olympics?

I jotted down thoughts, and started writing. And started. And started. I’ve started 10 essays over the past month and finished none. I worried that I had left the muse in Louisville, even after spending a few days with the tour in Madison, Wis., and making plans to visit Ben with our family in Boston.

For several days, I walked around with the lead to this column in my head – pondering what it meant. Is it true that I became a better parent when my dad died?

I think so. If anything, my father’s passing forced me to focus on the time I have with my own children, who are growing up all too quickly and soon will be in positions where calling their parents is not always high on the list (sorry, mom). The time I lost with Nicholas, my oldest son, due to a divorce forced me to realize that missed opportunities result in lifelong regrets.

It’s coincidence, perhaps, that my journey as a stage parent began the fall after my father died, when Ben got his first professional role. During a terribly difficult time, the late night car rides presented an opportunity to spend time with my son while mourning my father. Two years later, when Ben moved to New York for “Ragtime,” Jill or I went with him, essentially becoming single parents for almost a year until a new caregiver arrangement could be established. That forced me to focus on having quality time with all of my kids, because I was no longer in a position to be in the office 12 hours a day.

******

I realized last week that I could not finish this column until after our Boston trip. My mom, who still lives in Texas, decided to come see her grandson, who would be performing on the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death.

It became evident that Boston represented a chance to honor my dad’s memory, because my parents had a great two week trip up there more than a decade ago. My mom, a trouper, constantly recalled the places they had seen and the things they had done.

Several weeks ago, a friend who also lost his father and I talked about childhood memories and their effects on our parenting today. He had returned from a trip back to a place where he had lived when he was 11 or 12, and seemed perplexed that he did not feel the loss of his father more. I mentioned that it’s the same for me.

I miss my dad at times like this past Sunday, when my family saw Ben perform on stage, completely in his element and in total control. I miss him at gatherings, at holidays, at events where I should be able to turn and to see him.

But then, when I think about it, I see my dad every time I look in the mirror, and every time I look at one of my own children. And I know that he’s smiling from his seat in the balcony.

“With me, it’s all or nuthin’…”

Sometimes writing is just torture.  I sit at the computer and watch the cursor blink, type a few words to ensure that my hands still work, then put my finger on the delete button and erase what I’ve just put on the screen.

How can a person go from needing verbal Immodium to having a clogged mind?

What you are reading here is an attempt to belch something out in the hopes that it will clean out the brain drain, so to speak. I’m hoping that writing out my frustrations about writing (sorry for the same word twice in a sentence) will help me return to it sooner rather than later.

One reason I became a writer was I found pleasure in creating something out of nothing. The reason I became an editor was because I never could make any money writing. And my self-editor has taught my inner writer not to publish anything until it’s done.

Remember this: The editor always wins.

Although I have little to no interest in science, I wish I knew how my brain worked, so that I could figure out how to be productive on a more consistent basis. I wish I knew why ideas and fragments of pieces rattle around in my brain. I wish I knew how to get them from mind to paper.

And that’s part of the conundrum. I do know how, except when I don’t. But I can still try, and hope the words come.