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JOB SECURITY Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others! William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830) Table Talk (1821 - 1822) From the time I was in diapers and could barely walk; when I was still a lone child, the question was asked of me by my parents, What do you want to be when you grow up?... (they still ask this of me today, although in a different tone). When my siblings arrived every other year, and they, too, were in my toddling position, they were also required to answer the same question. It was the older of my two sisters who first gave her answer to my mother as wanting to be a nurse, and throughout my growing up years, all I could hear was my mother’s mantra, Your sister knew what she wanted to be since the age of two, to which my sister would give me the kind of smile that you just wanted to smack off her face. My brother, when he could talk and form sentences, proudly proclaim that he wanted to be a professional baseball player. This announcement wasn’t so forthcoming in public praise as was my sister’s choice in vocation, but at least it was a choice, and he was at least thinking in the right direction. I can never recall what my baby sister wanted to be when she grew up. Perhaps, after nearly 40 years of walking this earth, she’s still trying to figure it all out... Although I was actually working at my chosen profession by the age of three, I didn’t really give a job occupation any serious thought. What I was doing was fun; playtime on the stage by creating all these imaginative characters, and from the tones of my parents, it sounded as though a job was suppose to be dull and boring; something you were chained to for life until you died. My other career choices were to be an astronaut (those moon landings were so cool to see on TV), or an archeologist, (I was a big buff on Egypt), or an astronomer (since I liked to stay up all night and sleep all day, which I still like to do). I couldn’t seem to get past the A’s for my future career, and every few months; quarterly, I believe, were my mother’s words haunting me... Do you know what you want to be when you grow up? Your sister already knew when she was two... Salvation came to me in the Summer of 1970, when at the age of 10, I was watching the Saturday afternoon movie titled, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which I think back now as being kind of funny, seeing as how, Paul Newman was one of my teachers at The Actor’s Studio a dozen years later), and during the commercial, I casually went up to my mother who was preparing the evening meal in the pantry, and nonchalantly said, I know what I want to be when I grow up... to which she casually replied while slicing the vegetables, Really, and what’s that?... I paused... An actor. I vaguely remember my mother nearly cutting her finger, muttering, That’s nice, dear, as I walked back to the livingroom to continue with the film. In my child like mind, being an actor made perfect sense. Since I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to be, why not become an actor, and then I could be all the characters in all sorts of different jobs that I ever wanted to be. My father threw a fit, telling (or was it screaming?) my mother that HER SON needed psychiatric help; that no son of his was going to become an actor, to which my mother in her calm and rational way told my father that perhaps in time, I would grow out of it, but that at least I was thinking in the right direction of what I wanted to be; it was a start. My father didn’t like this at all, as he had his own ideas of what I was going to do with my life... taking over his accounting business, and come January to April, had me promptly seated at a desk after school to add up the columns of numbers in the large ledgers, with a calculator I wasn’t allowed to look at (because it slowed down the pace). I continued to work in school plays and community theatre; advancing in bigger parts and learning as I went along. The bi-centennial year of our country, 1976, turned out to be a turning point in my life for many reasons. Just before my 16th birthday, my parents were officially divorced, leaving me free once and for all from my father to pursue my own interests (my mother bing weak-willed couldn’t handle me and generally left me to do what I wanted), I was finally able to drive a car on my own, and shortly thereafter, was discovered in a community play by the director of one of our area’s largest, and most renowned Summer stock theatres in the State of Connecticut, The Southbury Playhouse. He thought I had talent, but was wild like a stallion, and needed to be broken, so that the power I had on stage could be commanded to capture the audience’s attention and not having it run all over the place. Of course mother’s permission was needed, as I was the youngest member at the Playhouse, and she finally had to come clean with me why she didn’t want me to become an actor... because as far as she knew, all actors were gay and she didn’t want a homosexual for a son (as opposed to my father who told me that all actors were bums and he didn’t want a bum for a son, so if you look at it from their points of view, they now have a homosexual bum for a son... and I sometimes wonder how I was ever born into the family that I received, and am so sure that I was adopted, if not for the fact that I look too much like my father to lay to that claim). I asked my mother if she thought all actors were homosexual, then how could she possibly be in love with Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, and Gregory Peck? To which she replied, They’re not merely actors, but legends, and therefore are not in the category as other lesser knowns... I momentarily listened to her whines, then calmly told her that if she didn’t give the permission needed to work and train at the Playhouse (which was only a 20-minute drive from our house), I would divorce her (and I don’t think she wanted to go through two of them within a matter of months). She reluctantly gave the permission, which altered the course of my life to this day. As I fast forward now, some 30 years later, I am sometimes amazed at the events that have taken place in my family’s lives, as I scan the news and catch three items this past week that make me take notice and confirm what I have always known... there’s just no such thing as job security when you now have China on it’s way to becoming a capitalist county on par with the United States (which will soon make us a third world nation) as they just announced their first manufactured automobile for under $10,000 ready for sale in our country (of course they can charge this much and make a wonderful profit since they pay their non-union, no benefit auto workers a staggering $3.50 per hour as opposed to our unionized, benefit up the ying-yang, minimum wage auto workers $64.00 per hour, and we wonder why our auto makers are going broke and closing many of their plants); Alcoa, one of the biggest companies in the USA, stating that from now on there will be no more pension plans for their employees (with other corporations soon to follow); and the Enron executives finally going to trial for bilking billions of dollars from their shareholders (and I personally know a few of those shareholders who lost a minimum of $1 million each in company stock) for their own personal accounts that they hid off shore somewhere, as they spend upwards of $30 million in lawyers fees (when you’re now worth several billion dollars, what’s a few million?), so they won’t have to die in jail, unable to spend all that money they stole. From my mother, who worked meaningless jobs after divorcing my father (who remains an accountant with his own business that he could never interest any of his children to take over) until the day she could joyfully retire and collect her pithy monthly social security check, I hear that my sister who once wanted to be a nurse, is in jeopardy of losing her job with the airlines that she’s worked at for 17 years; my baseball fanatic brother who dreamed of playing for the Yankees, is now training for his second career (his first, in electronics, didn’t work out) as a pharmacist, and my baby sister is still trying to figure out what to do with her life, as she toils away at some cosmetics counter in some forgotten mall shop, while picking up bartending jobs and walk on parts in movies for the price of a free lunch. This is what job security has to offer? If it is, I’d rather be the bum my family thinks I am. All I know is that if anyone wants to make something of their lives, they’re not going to do it by working for someone else. God bless those that can work, day in-day out, 50 weeks a year with a two-week vacation thrown in and all the benefits they can wrangle from their employer, until the day they can retire (for where would dreamers like me be if we didn’t have those that toiled in their labor, dreaming of the life we lead?). And God bless those that can dare to dream big and pursue those daring dreams, as they lead adventurous lives, and hopefully be able to make a positive difference in the world than when they first arrived. In my youth, and in my poverty, I was called crazy for not only daring to dream the dreams that I dared to dream, but to boldly proclaim them to the world in return for their laughter. Today, with many of those dreams now placed on the shelf of reality, I am known as an eccentric. When I am filthy rich (I’ve had enough fame to last several lifetimes), people will say I’m a genius. In closing, my hope is that I can reach out to those that have never really pursued a dream they’ve perhaps been wanting to do since childhood. To those, I say, go after your dream, whatever it may be, before it’s too late when you wake up tomorrow and discover that you can no longer do that which has burned so long in your heart. There’s no such thing as reincarnation. You only get one chance at the merry-go-round of life. Make the most of it before it makes the most of you. I mean, what could you lose?... your job?... Until Next Month, Kevin |
