The beer garden behind Cabaret Abandon sits upon a knoll looking east. Over the city, one could see the sunrise in the distance, the bright yellow turned auburn through the city smog.
One could, if one bothered. Inside, of course, no hint of sunrise breaks through. A thoughtful woman just entering from the beer garden sips on her bloody Mary, occasionally stirring with her celery as her eyes continue to adjust to the darkness. She divides her attention between the band and myself.
And the band plays...
Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise
For the Passions that thrill love,
Lift you high to Heaven,
Are the passions that kill love
And lead you down to hell...
Same old Story...
“Throughout my adult life, I rarely watched the sun rise. If so, it was after being up all night. Mornings were not...well...a life in show business, and all that. Early mornings traded for late nights. Such was my life before I met this place. Before I let the demons drag me down to hell.”
“They call them the catacombs, but can they be anything but hell itself? A place where you are made to face your sins, like a puppy cruelly forced by its owner to rub its nose in its latest mess. As if a dog can understand such brutality. A human, however, that is something different entirely. In this place, they push your nose into your sins until you see them. Until you feel them. Until you repent. Only then, Only after you have rubbed your nose in the full force of your sins,will they dare receive your gift. they will take nothing except from a soul fully cleansed of its sins. Such was the case with me. Is it for all?”
She looked away from the band and toward the sunrise she could not see from inside the cabaret. Stirring her bloody Mary once again, she turned to me and said,
“I’m not sure I ever even walked down there, if you can believe it. I was in a dank basement below the light of day, lightbulbs overdue for replacement barely lighting the walls. Not this basement, though. Another basement from another life. A basement I spent far too much time in. Too much of my life. I shouldn’t have been there. I should have been home. Should have. Should have. What can it matter now? I should have been home, but I wasn’t. Instead, I was in my usual dank basement, rehearsing a play I didn’t care for with people I didn’t like, for barely more money than I needed for the week’s groceries. I should have been home, but what was there to do? The show must go on, and all that, yes?
“We rehearsed in that basement 6 days a week. One ten-minute break every hour, and an hour for dinner if we were lucky. Not a bad lot, compared to many. Heated in the winter and cool in the summer. Five shows a week once we opened, and a crowd that usually appreciated our hard work. Applause and accolades and standing ovations. Not a bad lot, but not a great one. When I came home for dinner breaks, my husband and kids would be waiting for me, and we’d figure out aquick dinner in what time I had to share. They were always generous about that. About how little time I had available to spend at home. Because, in the end, they knew that this was who I was. That I was lucky to have a job where I could pursue my passion. That, more than the pittance I made, I needed to make plays. That I needed to pour myself into a role, inhabit great characters, become someone else for the night and bring that some else into the world. That I was passionate about birthing characters and bringing them to life. That, for me, to do anything else was hardly imaginable, regardless of how impractical. It would be unfair to say I was born to be an actor, but I had been doing it so hard for so long, it became who I was. My passion was me and I was my passion. That the work interfered with my other life was merely an unfortunate condition of the job. I said that many times to my family, and they always understood.
“Until they didn’t. Until the lonely nights became one too many. Until building their lives around mine ceased to be viable. No. That’s not it. Their life with me was viable, but it finally became a life they didn’t care for very much. Because you can only give yourself to someone who gives themselves to someone else for so long. Because they could only stare at my empty chair around the dinner table so many times without wondering why they should continue to bother with me. Because if I cared more for the theater than I did for them, if I wouldn’t make space for them, why should they make space for me?”
“Beryl heard about this place at his office. He laughed it off with me as a fairy tale, the way he would laugh off the latest conspiracy some coworker might mention around the water cooler. Yet, the idea was planted, and it was enough. It dogged me day and night. I had always known I could leave the theater if I had to. That I could get a so-called normal job. But I also knew I could never be happy without it. That as much as I sometimes hated it, hated what it did to my life, that I needed it. It was my passion, and that was not something I could just abandon.
“Or was it?”
“The idea of this place kept me awake at nights; kept me distracted at rehearsals. Whenever I allowed myself to think of anything but the play I was working on, I daydreamed of a life without theater. A life without acting. A life without my passion for bringing characters to life, for exploring what it means to be human, for finding myself by becoming others. I dreamed of at last giving myself fully to my kids. To Beryl; Imagined evenings with them, talking about something beside my play, my work. Dreamed of being normal, of caring for real people instead of imaginary ones. I dreamed of never again kneeling before a cruel director, of giving up on the gossip backstage and self-absorbed co-stars.”
“I worried, of course, about giving up the accolades, the applause, the standing ovations. I wondered if I had become addicted to those things, but I knew it was never that. If I was addicted to anything, it was to giving my full self to my characters. “And as I worked through rehearsals, I dared to imagine abandoning my passion for that work altogether.”
“When I allowed myself to believe in this cursed place, that such a miracle might be possible, I became sure that along with my passion for acting, they would steal my passion for my friends and family, that I would be left with no passion at all. “Would it were so. “They took only what I asked them to. “Yet, I knew so l little of how much a part of me it really was. “Not until I was back in the rehearsal hall, that dank basement downtown, did I realize what that my family was all I really wanted. That I was ready to give up anything for them, to abandon my passion for my work altogether.”
“My director was a piece of work, more interested in himself than any of us. “I’m sure he thought his cruel tactics, his way of berating everyone around him, of treating us all like servants, like children in need of teachable moments, a tough love football coach reminding us that we were never good enough in a misguided attempt to push us into greatness, was in our best, or at least his, best interest. To say that rehearsal process was challenging would be an extreme understatement. Each day, I would wet the taxi seat with my tears of exhaustion, trying my best to put the day behind me before getting home. “On one particular day, a few hours into rehearsal,I was at close to my limit and desperate for our overdue break. “Naturally, I was crushed when he demanded to speak with me over the ten – union rules be damned. “I asked him for some patience. He told me if I didn’t care enough to push myself a little harder, I was a fool. “He raised his voice almost to shouting, and told me I would never amount to anything. “That not only was I not good enough, that I didn’t care enough to ever be.
“I told him I did care and begged again for him to give me a break. “I told him that a person could only care so much, could only give so much of themselves without breaking altogether.
“He went on without pity. “Even as I crumpled into a ball of fear and anxiety on the damp basement floor, he continued to berate me, remind me of how a person could never rise to the level of working with so talented an artist as himself without giving their full selves.
“I begged for mercy, my tears falling and mixing with the slime on the stone floor. “I told him I could do better; that I just needed a chance; that I did care; that he just needed to let me try again. That I was ready to give my full self.
“He told me to get out. To leave. To leave his rehearsal room and never come back; that he was done wasting his time with a half-hearted wannabe. “That if I needed a break so bad, I should just get up and take it, and not bother to return.
“I was devastated, but exhausted. “I lay there on the floor wondering what the hell I was doing with my life; thought of my family getting ready for another dinner without me, and I just gave up. I got up, told the director to go to hell, and walked out. “I dragged myself to the stairs so I could leave that rehearsal building forever, and finally go home to my family for good.”
“I imagine you know the next part of the story. “When I got to the top of the stairs, I found myself here. I had never seen this place, did not know where I was, and stumbled around in confusion. “Instead of being in the makeshift green room where we usually took our breaks, I found myself in this crowded bar with a live band playing and more customers than a Saturday night sold out show. I wandered about, looking for an exit, feeling strangely empty. I felt humiliated by my director, of course, but this was more than that. “It was the sort of empty feeling you get after vomiting. An emptiness of relief. The way the glass feels, I suppose, when the last remnants of the cocktail are gone. “I found the street and hailed a taxi for home. “I had just lost my job, I was sure, but I was more relieved than sad about it. “As the taxi pulled away, taking me toward home, I smiled, shocked at my courage in finally walking away, and just as shocked at my lack of regret.”
“I imagine you know how the rest of the story goes as well. “At first my family was thrilled to see me really listening to them at the dinner table, and not just thinking about my work. To have me back both in body and in spirit; Not just for dinner, but for good. To have my whole self, living in the moment with the people I cared for the most. To no longer have but one foot in with them while the other waited in another room caring about things they could never understand. “To have me back at last.”
“And it was good.
“Until it wasn’t. “For the person my husband had fallen in love with, the only mom my kids had ever known, was now a stranger. “The person who had been defined by their passion had been replaced. They loved someone else. The original. Someone with passion. Not only because of my passion, but it soon became clear that passion had made me who I was. Without it, I wasn’t a bad person, not even a boring one, but I was, without question, a different one. That passion for my work had been such an important part of me for so long that without it I no longer knew who I was, and they didn’t either.
“Then, once my passion for my work was gone for good, The passion itself came back and started looking for other things to satisfy it. I had abandoned my passion for my work, for acting, for bringing characters to life, but my need for passion itself, passion for anything, anything at all, lingered, unsatisfied.
Soon enough I wasn’t only gone for dinners.
And now…
“…Now, I miss them every day.”