The Dead Wood Stage.
I remember a bloke when I was growing up. I don't remember him well - I can't remember his name for instance but his face is vividly etched into my memory. He was going out with my friend Marie and he was old.
I didn't know how old he was because I was 16 or 17 and I was a very young 16 or 17 and he looked strikingly old to me. He was a lively, friendly man and the singer of what he would have called a rock 'n' roll band. He had collar length hair, wore a neckerchief and had - quelle horreur - chest hair. He was handsome and freckly but his teeth showed signs of neglect and were stained where they met. His eyes were worried and hard definite wrinkles cleaved his cheeks when he laughed which he did a lot, usually at his own jokes.
He seemed to be quite a nice man who knew a lot about certain kinds of music, knowledge which he was anxious to impart, and when he and Marie broke up it was all her doing. He seemed genuinely upset whereas she was very cool about it. I never heard of any wrong doing on his part though he was perhaps as much as a decade older than her. But I could never bring myself to like him. There was something about him that was tragic, something that I couldn't forgive. He was old. It was written on his face, on those stained teeth and the bestial body hair. He was other. I had a frisson of disgust as he tried to talk to me, to befriend me. Why was he talking to me? He was a grown man. Why was he dating a school-girl? Why was he attempting to be accepted by her friends? Why was he in a band and playing the same stages as my band, often lower on the bill, always with his eyes closed, meaning it? Why hadn't he stopped this nonsense? He was old and he had failed so why was he still doing this?
At this distance its impossible to know how old he actually was - the teen me is an unreliable witness filled with fears and social jockeying and strait-jacketed by notions of cool that were ultimately self-harming (I maintain that the reason that I still can't drive to this day is because I couldn't live with the idea of people seeing me learn something. Anything that I couldn't already do well by the time I was 16 I refused to learn. Except sex, of course, but that was a manageable and necessary series of fumbling disappointments with an audience of two, and luckily women never talk to their friends about that sort of thing!) He was probably in his mid-twenties, which is far too old to be dating school children, but at this distance seems very young.
Its the age of most of the people I work with now.
I often think of him, whatever his name was, as I turn up to apologise for myself in some new work related environment. I am a late bloomer. I didn't write anything for money until I was in my forties. I didn't write a play until my mid-forties. I'm not trained in it, I don't have a degree in the dramatic arts. I've never thesped in any way. Its a cliche but at school I really was third shepherd in the nativity. We didn't go to the theatre as a family or a school - I don't think I set foot inside a theatre until I saw The Woman in Black in the late 90's. Everyone else has been treading boards and doing limbering up exercises since they were toddlers. Their voices are all from the diaphragm - they all bounce off the back of the halls. And they're young. Full of promise and potential, potential that I have potentially spent like all passion.
I wonder if they look at me in the same way: the mistrust and the horror, the stench of failure steaming off me like sour pheromones. Why is he here? Why is he so old? Why is he talking to me? Why are there holes in his shoes at his age? It hasn't happened for you, mate - give it up. I expect I'm doing them a disservice. It takes all sorts in the whacky world of theatre; it should be a safe-space for itinerant wallies and emotionally incontinent oddballs: the needy and the needful, the naked and the damned and the damned unlucky. Its a cultural soup kitchen and we're all in the soup. I have meetings. I talk sensibly. No one laughs in my face or accuses me of having a senior moment or has to upbraid me for my archaic sexist and racist views. Yet. I've yet to spot an eye-roll.
Still, I can't help thinking of that guy. A twenty five year old hopelessly geriatric rock and roller. A dead force and a laughable proposition without a grey hair on his head. A grizzled bore in the key marketing demographic. He'd be in his early fifties now. There is no longer any difference between us.
Except I never hung around secondary schools looking to impress schoolgirls. There is that.
I didn't know how old he was because I was 16 or 17 and I was a very young 16 or 17 and he looked strikingly old to me. He was a lively, friendly man and the singer of what he would have called a rock 'n' roll band. He had collar length hair, wore a neckerchief and had - quelle horreur - chest hair. He was handsome and freckly but his teeth showed signs of neglect and were stained where they met. His eyes were worried and hard definite wrinkles cleaved his cheeks when he laughed which he did a lot, usually at his own jokes.
He seemed to be quite a nice man who knew a lot about certain kinds of music, knowledge which he was anxious to impart, and when he and Marie broke up it was all her doing. He seemed genuinely upset whereas she was very cool about it. I never heard of any wrong doing on his part though he was perhaps as much as a decade older than her. But I could never bring myself to like him. There was something about him that was tragic, something that I couldn't forgive. He was old. It was written on his face, on those stained teeth and the bestial body hair. He was other. I had a frisson of disgust as he tried to talk to me, to befriend me. Why was he talking to me? He was a grown man. Why was he dating a school-girl? Why was he attempting to be accepted by her friends? Why was he in a band and playing the same stages as my band, often lower on the bill, always with his eyes closed, meaning it? Why hadn't he stopped this nonsense? He was old and he had failed so why was he still doing this?
At this distance its impossible to know how old he actually was - the teen me is an unreliable witness filled with fears and social jockeying and strait-jacketed by notions of cool that were ultimately self-harming (I maintain that the reason that I still can't drive to this day is because I couldn't live with the idea of people seeing me learn something. Anything that I couldn't already do well by the time I was 16 I refused to learn. Except sex, of course, but that was a manageable and necessary series of fumbling disappointments with an audience of two, and luckily women never talk to their friends about that sort of thing!) He was probably in his mid-twenties, which is far too old to be dating school children, but at this distance seems very young.
Its the age of most of the people I work with now.
I often think of him, whatever his name was, as I turn up to apologise for myself in some new work related environment. I am a late bloomer. I didn't write anything for money until I was in my forties. I didn't write a play until my mid-forties. I'm not trained in it, I don't have a degree in the dramatic arts. I've never thesped in any way. Its a cliche but at school I really was third shepherd in the nativity. We didn't go to the theatre as a family or a school - I don't think I set foot inside a theatre until I saw The Woman in Black in the late 90's. Everyone else has been treading boards and doing limbering up exercises since they were toddlers. Their voices are all from the diaphragm - they all bounce off the back of the halls. And they're young. Full of promise and potential, potential that I have potentially spent like all passion.
I wonder if they look at me in the same way: the mistrust and the horror, the stench of failure steaming off me like sour pheromones. Why is he here? Why is he so old? Why is he talking to me? Why are there holes in his shoes at his age? It hasn't happened for you, mate - give it up. I expect I'm doing them a disservice. It takes all sorts in the whacky world of theatre; it should be a safe-space for itinerant wallies and emotionally incontinent oddballs: the needy and the needful, the naked and the damned and the damned unlucky. Its a cultural soup kitchen and we're all in the soup. I have meetings. I talk sensibly. No one laughs in my face or accuses me of having a senior moment or has to upbraid me for my archaic sexist and racist views. Yet. I've yet to spot an eye-roll.
Still, I can't help thinking of that guy. A twenty five year old hopelessly geriatric rock and roller. A dead force and a laughable proposition without a grey hair on his head. A grizzled bore in the key marketing demographic. He'd be in his early fifties now. There is no longer any difference between us.
Except I never hung around secondary schools looking to impress schoolgirls. There is that.
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