My People

I wrote this a while ago, but I was home this weekend and I started thinking about it so I took it out to edit it and have a look see at it.  I’ve read it out loud for some of my theatre company before.  LAByrinth has this thing called “Open Project” where you can present whatever you’re working on at our monthly company meetings.  I’ve done a lot of choreography and dance for it and this was the only time I wrote something for it.  It was actually in a sort of response to a bunch of pieces I had seen.  See, LAByrinth Theater Company, we’re known for our multi-cultural story telling and almost everyone in the company has this amazing story of where their people come from.  So, like I said, I dusted it off and since I’m still formulating the stories about snow forts and the first and only massage my gramma Mary ever got, this is what’s coming in.

My People
My whole life, when I fill out school, federal and state forms and I get to the question of race, I always do the same thing.  I shuffle my feet, look behind me and sheepishly check Caucasian.  My people are a mix match.  My people are a Heinz 57 clusterfuck.  If were dogs at the pound we’d be called mutts.  We’d be overlooked for the cuter, pure bread French Poodles, Irish Setters and German Shepherds.  The only thing I know of my heritage is there’s a little Irish, a little British, a little German and a little adopted.  All that gives me is a tendency towards alcoholism, pasty skin in the winter and a sense of not belonging.

My people?  My People do not come from a warm land filled with fragrant flowers, salty air and spicy food.  We come from 8 months of snow where the chill runs so deep that it starts in your spleen and works it’s way out your insides to the tips of your hair and then crawls back in through your ass.  Our noses are not filled with the smells of lush flowers inviting you with open petals to insert your nostrils deeply and inhale; but of spiky, hard and statuesque pines that are too sticky and tall to climb but sway in the violent winds with the elitist knowledge that they are rooted too deep to be blown over.

My people do not have their own music like so many of my friends.  While not my immediate nuclear family, most of my people don’t even know how to dance so we’ve adopted music that you cannot dance to.  We’ve taken 70’s rock and made it a way of life.  It’s the only music that is played in the land of my people.   When I drive home I know I’m close when I turn on the radio and hear Carry on My Wayward Son.  We know where we will all be every single night of our lives at 7pm.  We will pay homage to the Hammer of the Gods at the Houses of the Holy.  7@7.  Every single night of my life there has always been at least one but usually more radio stations that Get the Led Out.  7 Led Zeppelin songs at 7pm.  I don’t know why really.  I just know that’s the way it’s always been.

 My people do not have their own fancy drink.  We do not have Grappa or Ouzo, Fernet Branca, Mojitos, Leu de Vie, Margaritas, Averna or Port.  Shit, we don’t even have White Russians.  My grandfather Avery once kicked a guy out of his bar for asking for one though.  My gramp said he was looking for trouble with a drink like that.  He served hard drinks for hard men who want to get drunk fast and we don’t need any characters like you to give the joint atmosphere.  He advertised 2 kinds of beer; Bud and Bud Light.  At his funeral my brother Mark and I pulled pints behind the bar for all my people while they mourned and shared stories of his greatness.  That afternoon, we discovered that both the taps were hooked up to Budweiser kegs.  There was no Light beer for my people.  At least not at the Oak Hill Tavern.  Beer is probably the drink of my people.  Genny, Genny Creamy, Utica Club, Molson, Molson Canadian, Molson Ice, Molson Golden, Molson Imported, Coors, Schlitz, Schooner, Labatts Blue, Pabst Blue Ribbon and the king of beers Bud.  Then there’s Saranac, Guinness and maybe an IPA for the snobs who think they’re better than their people.  All of it is kept out on the porch in the snow next to the wine that comes in a box…and by the way my people prefer cans.  I don’t  know if it’s the aluminum taste that reminds us of blood in our mouths from the first time we ever got a solid body check in our first game of pick up hockey, or is it the fact that we’re ushering in Alzheimer’s by quaffing out of the can and consequently forgetting any lack of culture or heritage.

 My people have no set traditions.  At weddings we do not stop on a glass, throw a plate or jump over a broom.  There is no traditional dance unless you count the arm swaying and whooping that will eventually happen by the end of a reception.  At holidays there is no secret special recipe that only Aunt Nancy knows how to make just right.  Unless you count the instant pudding and Jell-O recipes of my deceased ancestors known as Better Than Sex Cake and Dead Helen’s Red Dessert.  The person who carves the turkey is whoever happens to have their husband’s hunting knife at the ready.  There is a rumor in my family due to my grandfather’s adoption, misplaced records, lack of agoraphobia, skill with a hammer, alcoholic tendencies and dark skin that he came from a reservation near the land of my people.  This would make us Native American.  Oooooooohhhhhhh.  This would give us a culture, a history and a heritage all in one man.  Some of my people have embraced it, most of us haven’t.  Most of my people didn’t see any advantage to curling up with a small pox blanket to listen to olde timey times stories of genocide, casino woes, government corruption, and a trail of tears that may or may not be our family’s history.  Desperate for a people I could call my own I clung to the possibility of being one of the invisible minority.  In all my research on the tribes of Upstate NY I found a trait that seemed to be intrinsic to all of them across the board.  Long distance running.  In an effort to create a cultural standpoint I taught myself to run great lengths at a time.  26.2 miles and 600 years is the farthest I’ve gone so far.  As I trained in Queens, I pictured myself with long black hair clad only in animal skins running through the Adirondack mountains.  As I ran through the streets of NYC I was Hawkeye!  I was the Last of the Mohicans! 

My people scream and cry and come to fisticuffs over the drop of a hat but we cannot blame our temper on a culture.  We know where it comes from.  It comes from eight fucking months of cold and dark and snow.  My brother Mark puts it like this:  “It just doesn’t stop snowing….It’s been snowing for 35 fucking days in a row Lex.  Every night when we go to bed, it’s fucking snowing, every morning when we wake up???  Yeah! You guessed it!  It’s snowing!  I feel like Jack in The Shining Lex, I keep seeing those creepy ass twins on tricycles.  I keep praying that Scatman Crothers is gonna show up in a Sno-Cat and drive us all to safety.  In the last 3 months there was 5 fucking minutes of recorded sunlight!!  5 FUCKING MINUTES LEX!!!  And we were all inside at work during those five god-forsaken moments.  Who the fuck decided to settle here anyway?  Who suffered through the first fucking winter and said….mehh….that wasn’t so bad really.”

My people mock me in the winter.  They say I live in the South.  I get daily reports on visibility, shoveling, plow-age, lake effect, squalls, flurries, ice and driving conditions.  And they are sooooo superior about it as if to say:  You know nothing of hell!  NOTHING!!  But speaking of hell let me just clear up the religion topic of my people.  Many of my people go to a Roman Catholic Church; even more of my people have adapted and adopted other major religious doctrines as well as philosophies.  And while we all agree that JC was a forward thinker for his time with some great ideas there is another man who holds our faith.  My people believe in Herb Brooks.  My people believe in the Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Winter Olympics.  We all sat glued to the TV as Hal Dryden, like a prophet, gave us the play by play.  My people sit enrapt listening to my father tell the story of how he was there.  He was in the State Police and was stationed at Lake Placid and saw the game in person.  Tears fill our eyes as we recount the last 45 seconds of the game.  My people believe in it so much we make a yearly pilgrimage to Lake Placid .  My people have played on the same ice as Jimmy Craig, Jack O’Callahan and Mike Eruzione.  Just names to some, but to my people, they were gods.

The work of my people is the only thing resembling a tradition.  We work with our hands, we are carpenters and construction workers, nurses and chiropractors, mechanics and potters.  We’ve built our own houses, we’ve put additions on yours, we’ve fixed your cars, we’re the only ones you’ll call when there’s a leak in the roof from the weight of the snow or you need a jump or you need to be plowed out of your driveway.  Another thing about my people; we drive pick up trucks and we carry guns.  We all have vegetable gardens.   We hunt in the Fall and we eat what we kill throughout the year.  The first round is on us, we get to 3rd base on the first date and we truly believe it all comes out in the wash.

I’ve pushed needles through my skin and permanently marked it trying to create a history on my physical being.  When I look at my people and people look at us we confuse the shit out of everyone.  In a town filled with mostly full blooded Irish, Polish, Italian, German and French Canadians we were pretty much mocked continually for looking less than white.  Our lips are full (I was called Fish Lips until 6th grade) all three of my brothers have tight, curly hair that grows out instead of down and if left in the sun for longer then 5 minutes our skin turns a dark mahogany.   Compared to Kate Nicholson, Jami Losurdo, and Gretchen Slosek whose butts were flat I was an alien, a freak, my ass is high and sticks out, just begging to be spanked in my plaid catholic school skirt.  Non of the Mitchell boys wanted to date me but all those Callahan sluts wanted a piece of my brothers.

 My people are easy.  Easy Peasy One Two Threesy.  Easy like Sunday Morning.  Easy like Summer reading.  Consider us a John Grisham novel.  A Michael Crichton page turner.  Fast and entertaining but we’re not gonna devastate your system of beliefs.  We’ll keep you in stitches quoting Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, Caddyshack and The Princess Bride.  In fact most of our conversations are filled with footnotes and annotations of movie quotes, song lyrics, lines from plays and references to books we’ve read.  We call it talking shit.  We are professionals at it and will embellish and steal to make the story more entertaining for you the listener and we will never admit what is true and what is just good old fashioned shit talk.