Check Mee and the American Myth

I just finished reading Chuck Mee's memoir, A Nearly Normal Life, which was, of course, amazing, fantastic, insightful, poetic, and powerful. You know, like anything Chuck Mee writes. (Obviously, I'm a fan. And it seems that with Chuck Mee, you're either a fan or your decidedly NOT a fan, with no in-between space).

I love this:

In truth, though I didn't know about it at the time, there were some real hardcore deviants in America in the fifties, whose lives and work, like those of my friends in Barrington, were going to make the world more accommodating for me and for others who suffered from some form of difference. (189)

And then this:

The fifties was not an undifferentiated era of conformity; a great change was already under way, one of the most fundamental transformations in America in my lifetime - not an advance in technology, nor a growth in productivity, nor a new strategic place for America in the world, but more fundamental than any of those: a change of mind. (190)

I think of all the mental and emotional labor it took to act as if there was conformity, a nice normal normalness - to act that in the face of the obvious difference: the difference of a friend struck by polio, or of the gay person(s) in the community, or of the people of color that were woven into real life but not the ideal life of television and film, or of the things that we each don't feel that we're told we are supposed to feel. Yet the myths, the stories that took so much effort to believe in, did give comfort.

Not by coincidence, this topic emerged during rehearsal last night (Mee memoir, Mee play, Mee-reading dramaturg). As we discussed Olympia, we came to the realization that she has her illusion - so beautiful, so comforting, even if a little odd - of love and marriage and happiness. And by god she is going to make reality fit that illusion. Until it simply cannot.

I suppose the disillusion is inevitable for all of us, as individuals and as a nation. It is necessary, and yet so painful (most painful for those who have invested all their time and labor and energy into it) to see it washed away, to come to accept reality for what it is and still fight to change it tangibly, and not in fantasy only.