Where's (Doc) Waldo?

Obituaries - Obituary: Professor Paul R. Waldo, renaissance man of the theater - sacbee.com (free registration required)

I knew nothing about this...wow...they're just about all gone from my time now except for Tony Courkouros and Manuel Pickett.

Herb Klein (within a month or two of my starting at Sac State)
...Doc Larsen...
...Don Fibiger...
...Bob Smart...
...and now Doc Waldo...

When we were kids we marked the passage of time by our accomplishments. Is this what full adulthood means? To measure time by the passing of old friends and mentors? A dwindling of our past until all that is left is our own fading memories?

Ah, but there is but one last sip of wine left in my glass (a tasty and somewhat robust Meridian Pinot Noir). So I will raise it to Doc Waldo and the passage of an era fading in the dimming light.

Coming of age in a moment or a in a lifetime

I was going to edit my profile in Blogger and happened to notice the "most recently updated" blog list. One called David Duchovny caught my eye and off I clicked. That took me to Duchovny's blog. Hey, Hollywood types can blog, too, especially if it ties in with and promotes some project they're working on. (I remember reading Zack Braff's just before Garden State came out.) So there's this major ad to some film I've never heard of: The House of D. Apparently, Mr. Duchovny is writing and directing now. Must be nice. ANYway, the thing is the movie's site is a real cool Flash site and it got me interested in the movie. The story, according to the site is:

A comical and touching story of a man looking back at his childhood in 1970s Greenwich Village, Lions Gate Films' HOUSE OF D is the feature film writing and directing debut of actor David Duchovny, starring Duchovny, Anton Yelchin, Robin Williams, Téa Leoni, Frank Langella and Erykah Badu.

An American artist living a bohemian existence in Paris, Tom Warshaw (David Duchovny) is trying to make sense of his troubled adult life by reflecting upon his extraordinary childhood...The year is 1973, and thirteen-year-old Greenwich Village native Tommy Warshaw (Anton Yelchin) is on the brink of becoming a man. While his bereaved single mother (Téa Leoni) continues to mourn the death of his father, Tommy escapes his own grief by causing trouble at school and making afternoon meat deliveries with his best friend Pappas (Robin Williams), a mentally challenged janitor. Following the romantic advice offered by Lady (Erykah Badu) - incarcerated in the infamous Greenwich Village Women's House of Detention for shadowy reasons - Tommy even experiences his first taste of love. Yet when an unexpected tragedy radically alters his world, Tommy must make a life-defining choice - one that will compel the adult Tom Warshaw, thirty years later, to confront his unfinished past.

Vividly capturing the spirit of youth in all its joy and heartbreak, HOUSE OF D examines with humor and pathos a boy's harrowing coming of age and the manner in which it defines his adulthood. Sensitively directed by Duchovny and bolstered by affectionate portrayals from a talented cast, HOUSE OF D is a winning, hopeful story about overcoming loss and coming to terms with one's past.

Sounds interesting, right? Well the thing that got me is that this is yet another "coming of age" movie. How many books and films and songs have been written about some pivotal moment from someone's 13th year? Did everybody have some climatic "whoa!" moment in their youth that marks the moment that they knew they were no longer a child? Because I didn't. Man, I feel gypped!

My dad died when I was barely four so I don't even remember him really. Then, my mother had to work to support my bro and me. Now this was back in the late 60s so I'm sure that was quite a defining time for my mom but what did I know as a kid?

I turned 13 in the fall of 1975. The Beatles were done and the hippies had slipped off into irrelevance. Going to the moon had become boring and with my grandmother living with us (her income as a cafeteria worker helped my mom I guess as well as providing a live-in babysitter) there wasn't much discovering to be done. It was a boring yet contented life of a middle/lower-middle class suburban kid. How can anyone of significance come of age in that? It was precisely the kind of life that gets made fun of by all tragically hip. And while I, too, deride it for all it's Wonderbread blandness, still I feel I must defend it, too. No, I didn't have a "harrowing coming of age" moment. Mine, like many of you probably, was a process. And whenever I contemplate this I always return to a TV moment that kicked my butt.

Back in 1988, The Wonder Years debuted and in the first episode Winnie's brother is killed in Vietnam and Kevin follows her to their hang-out spot to console her. There they share their first kiss and the narrator speaks the words that resonated with me so deeply that they still move me now, over 15 years later.

It was the first kiss for both of us.
We never really talked about it afterward.
But I think about the events of that day
again and again,
and somehow I know that Winnie does too,
whenever some blowhard starts talking about
the anonymity of the suburbs
or the mindlessness of the TV generation,
because we know
that inside each one of those identical boxes,
with its Dodge parked out front
and its white bread on the table
and its TV set glowing blue in the falling dusk,
there were people with stories,
there were families bound together in the pain and
the struggle of love,
there where moments that made us cry with laughter,
and there were moments,
like that one,
of sorrow and
wonder.

We all have our own stories, valid and noble stories in their own right. Maybe not the stuff of art films and mini-series, but worthy contributions to the human tapestry.