Life is Funny (the Story I Didn’t Get to Tell Alan Cumming)

When I was 24 years old, I was in an awful place during graduate school, and I came home for the summer to mentally regroup and decide whether I wanted to finish my degree.  I had finished all of my course work, so it was literally down to the thesis.  I was that close to being done, but I didn’t know if I had the emotional reserves to go back.

I spent the first month home breaking up with my boyfriend, crying, and staring at my bedroom wall.  I had a job teaching creative writing at a camp, but it hadn’t started yet.  So I mostly did nothing.

One night, my mother coaxed me downstairs to see clips from the Tony Awards.  I’m not a fan of award shows and, at that point, had never been to a Broadway show.  But she was desperate to get me out of my room.  I moped downstairs and sat on the sofa as she ran through all the musical numbers on the VHS tape.

I sat up when she got to Alan Cumming singing from Cabaret, completely mesmerized.  I was spending 24 hours a day being not happy, but the performance held the unhappiness at bay for three whole minutes.

I started watching the clip once a day, giving myself three minutes of happiness.  After a while, I was able to hold onto the happiness for three minutes after the clip, too.  Then ten minutes.  Then I could be happy for a whole hour after watching it.  I could see it before camp and get through the whole day.

Finally, it was August and I felt like I could take the tape back to school and watch it once a day to get through my last year.  It was really scary going back.  But I did it.  And as a treat, I saved up all of my money and bought tickets with my cousin to see Alan Cumming in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club in New York.  Being there, in that room, seeing the whole play made my heart explode.  And I started saving and buying tickets to the show as frequently as possible, watching Alan several more times.

That performance made me interested in other performances, and I started to buy theater tickets as frequently as possible.  We did a lot of same-day tickets for both plays and musicals.  We bought a lot of cast recordings.  I started seeking out theater whenever I traveled.  Finally, I fell in love with a playwright, and, Reader, I married him.

Our lives are filled with a lot of theater performances.

When I was turning 40, Alan Cumming did a revival of Cabaret, and my brother offered to buy us tickets since he had been one of the people I dragged along in the late 90s to the original Broadway performance.  But I decided not to go, feeling like I couldn’t recapture how special that show was to me.  It got me out of a deep well of sadness and gave me the emotional strength to finish my degree.  I felt like I needed to let it rest.

But last week, Alan Cumming was doing a last performance of Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs at a theater gala, and Josh and I went with my cousin.  I felt such a tenderness, seeing this stranger who meant so much to me during this really hard time in life, and being there with my cousin who started the journey out of the sadness with me and the husband who was at the end of that theater-loving beginning.

Afterward, Alan mingled with the crowd, and he took this selfie for us (because my arms are too short to take a proper selfie).  I was going to do the lunge, but there was no possible way to fulfill my lunge fantasy, so we opted to stand and smile.

I hope my huge grin conveyed how much it means to your heart to stand with your arm around a person who unknowingly brought you out of your sadness while at the same time stand with your cousin who knowingly supported you as you climbed out of your sadness and your husband nearby who came into your life because you were finally going back out into the world again after your sadness and your parents (who showed you the tape that got you out of your sadness) with your kids so you could hear a man sing sappy songs.  It was a huge for me.

So thank you to my mum, dad, Josh, my cousin, and Alan Cumming.  A long story for a brief encounter, so I hope the smile conveyed what there wasn’t time to say.