Stand Up and Live

By:

Phil Marnell

(ATLANTA, MAY2010) So, you have this one experience called your life. And what you don't do, doesn't get done. It isn't that someone else will do it. In fact, they can't. Because you happen to be unique.

Everyone is unique, too. But we're talking about this one experience for you, called, "your life".

It's easy to slip silently into accepting the list of setbacks and failures in life as normal and also as insurmountable. At the same time, we manage to somehow conveniently overlook our successes and happy moments most of the time, making things seem even less bright. The result of this equation brushes up against that small voice within us that provides inner-affirming ideas that ring true for us, such as having the nerve to try new things like acting or standup comedy or public speaking.

"Oh, I know I can't do that," the mis-trained ego says, "What if I fail? There was this time..."

But if we listen closely enough, there's almost always someone or some thing telling us not to believe that message. They'll say, in their own way, that there's something bigger: that this is YOUR life. "Don't take your song to the grave with you. Sing it while you're here!"

Examples abound, of individuals, men and women, who decide one day that, in the words of Billy Joel, "I don't care what you say anymore - this is my life."

There was this bright young sports writer in Hoboken, New Jersey with a promising future in the newspaper business. After an altercation with the editor over who was going to fill the vacant sports editor position, he walked out and into his new career. His name was Frank Sinatra.

Decades later, and across the river in NYC, a bright young stock broker was married to the daughter of a principal in a prestigious firm. There was only one way: UP! Except he just could not see it. His music called, and he pursued it, playing in the band for a young rising star named Bette Midler. So, Barry Manilow changed his life.

And Sam Clemens! A map of his early years would appear to be a string of failures and missteps. But, eventually he evolved into Mark Twain the American icon.

On a given day, millions of "normal" people get up and go about their day in automatic mode. They know there's something more- at least they have an uneasy, unspeakable feeling of it. Occasionally, they actually entertain the notion of this higher version of themselves.

A kid named "Jack Roy" worked for nine years at the comedy trade and finally gave up and quit. But he just couldn't stay gone. In 1962, he got back into the game, got a gig at a club and decided he needed a new name. The club owner remembered a character from an episode of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" from the 50s and suggested it to Jack: "How about Rodney Dangerfield?"

Many people stay in the state of being only vaguely aware of a higher calling. And then one day they wake up - and they're dead.

Rodney Dangerfield - all of him - made his transition in 2004. Along the way he sang and laughed and cried and wondered and worried and failed and succeeded more than we'll know. He was choosing and living while we were all laughing at him. He was living his life his way.

Almost everyone comes upon the day when we make our decision. For some, it might be every single day. It might see a mighty flare-up at our job that leads to a security guard-escorted trip to the parking lot. Or it might be a quiet letter of resignation at just the right time. It could be, too, that we find our peace right where we are in the moment, and in the next, and the next.

People equate celebrity and public image with an illusion of blissful success that resembles an entitlement only available to a few. But, to a person, those individuals whom we anoint as 'successful' will relate a hard and sometimes harrowing journey through the jungle of their own doubt. That's at least partly why we shouldn't be so judgmental when they implode so spectacularly: they are only too human, after all.

Along any path are moments of illumination and darkness, and all of it a kind of eternal pronouncement of who we are and what we're actually here for. And the moment won't be permanently denied. If we offer up a vernier of a response, life will out - and things will find some other way to bubble to the surface. It's unavoidable.

"I'm losing." Those were Frank Sinatra's final words as doctors and nurses worked to keep his 82-year old body functioning a while longer. This from someone who did it his way.

This thing called your life is your one experience. Why not stand up and live it as fully as you can, and slide across home plate grinning ear-to-ear, and saying confidently, "I won!"

Footnote: And then there was Ben Kubelski. In 1949, Ben (also known an Jack Benny) a personal friend of President Harry Truman, arrived to serve as Master of Ceremonies for Truman's Inaugural Ball. At the door a guard stopped him, pointed to his violin case and asked, "Mr. Benny, what do you have in there?" Jack Benny answered, "It's a Thompson sub-machine gun." The guard said,"Oh, that's a relief. I was afraid it was your violin"