2/17/21: Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) — Things Change, What’s Next? #poetry
Francis Ford Coppola did a sequel to his pal George Lucas’ American Graffiti
From high school graduation to the high school reunion
and time travel
to the past
Peggy Sue Got Married ,
the past
Memory
even for the bitter
or confused,
is in Technicolor
with a Golden Oldie Soundtrack
written as a literary short story in the idiom of a sitcom
With a future All -Star cast
Coppola doesn’t have a directorial style
He creates a style to match his material
Coppola made The Godfather about an alien family blocked from full participation in the American Dream
That movie is darkly lit, tragic and operatic
Peggy Sue is about people who feel entitled to all this country has to offer and get disappointed
a serious story told in a light-hearted way
The Godfather is Italian – American
Peggy Sue Got Married is just American
The American myth that even us outsiders claim in some part of our soul
The pain of the Corleone family was that they were told not dream that dream
So they murdered and stole for the right
to be disappointed
The American Dream never works out for anyone
(it also always works out)
Because the dream is a young person’s dream
and we get old and die
The Chicago Tribune says that the Second City was sold recently for $50 million
To a video game manufacturer
Video games?
Second City has done shows on cruise ships in recent years
Cruise ships?
When I was an actor at Second City
in the 1980s
around the time of Peggy Sue Got Married
I thought I was part of the most influential theater of the 20th Century
A revolution in acting and writing
Bringing art to popular culture
It was thrilling
I thought my mentors were the greatest American artists of the 20th Century
and I was doing something brilliant and meaningful
None of it was true
except the dream
art was part of the chaotic mess that was Second City
Art, the minority owner who was eventually bought out
Commerce muddied every Second City palette
The shows weren’t that good
They were steps toward video games and cruise ships
not Eugene O’Neill
Second City was art in the beginning
And those founders who did the art were still around
But they were semi – retired
The real thing was in their workshops
time travel
not in the present performances
that were compromised by the crass audiences and agents and TV casting directors and advertising executives
who wanted sales technique on the stage where I pursued art
It was a ridiculous mistake on my part
a romantic, young, innocent deluded mistake
The right heart at the wrong place and time …
Oddly, I feel no regret
Life is lived through a strainer
the runoff and detritus disappear down the drain
The gold remains.
The Tribune article also mentions that the teachers in Second City’s Training Centers are going to unionize
The American Association of Comedy Instructors
A Union
for that shit
those awful classes
that have nothing to do with the workshops with the founding artists of my dreamy memory
those present day classes are playing party games on a cruise ship
Eugene O”Neill?
Are you kidding?
Charades and shuffle board is more like it.
The current Second City has nothing to do with me
strained and down my drain.
I drift away from my fellow Second City alumni who post photos on Facebook from decades -old shows that they were in at Second City
All that nostalgia
Unprocessed dreams?
Maybe
or maybe the other alums never had my dream
that’s closer to the truth, I reckon.
A mystery of life is our fate to spend at least some time with people with whom we don’t belong
We belong where we don’t belong
No one understands a country better than a foreigner.
The alumni hold onto one dream or another
or just don’t want to think about it at all
and attach their dream or indifference to the corpse of Second City
the alumni delude themselves
They tell themselves they are doing the Dream
or having an easy good time
while they play video games on a cruise ship
I guess it’s OK if all you want out of time is a pleasant day
A few want something more
but the others get in their way
Social clubs are fine
but they’re not for me.
I called myself an improvisor when I was at Second City and for years after
A large part of my identity was “improvisor”
Not any more
I now identify as “writer”
Change is an assembly of gears
the individual soul and the world mesh
People and things are never fully revealed
until their obituary is written.
Second City’s obituary is done
On the same day that part of my past is processed
Where does the dream go now?
What’s next?
Peggy Sue Got Married is about a woman who processes her past
The real person is revealed in youthful innocence
Outer frustration and regret brings her inner reality
to life
A PBS producer, a nice guy
told me somewhere in the 1980s that I was
“too sincere to be an actor”
That memory hurts at first and then is liberating
when I recall it in this context
Peggy Sue gives insight similar to that of the PBS producer to the other lead characters in her story
as she struggles to understand herself,
Just like writers do.
Peggy Sue is a story of a conscious mind coaxing the unconscious mind into the waking day
Our lives are dream interpretations
We “dream the future” as Peggy Sue says
She mines the past to retrieve what has value
Our lives have a constant
That never dies
What is real is our love
What is real is our aspiration
when things don’t work out
when our best efforts fall short
when we are betrayed
by ourselves
and others
when we got it all wrong
naively seeing greatness in something mediocre
the constant remains
We are the constant
the false steps and starts are just process
you are just working things out
It is the poetry in your heart that is your life story
not the whorehouses that you thought were Cinderella’s Ball
What’s next is what always was
you were right all along
Life is a process of learning how to make yourself congruent with the specific place in the world where you are meant to be
That’s home
and that’s
What’s Next.
Copyright 2021 Richard Thomas
