Little sweetheart, the second of the two tracks from Dream Together that are so very much in my mind today is its closer, "To The Other Half of The Sky".
From the moment I first found the chords and the words came tumbling forth in grief and longing for you, I've felt you lifting me toward you with love and protection.
My angel! My True Love! My little sweetheart! God bless your soul...
Little sweetheart, I'm going to listen back to Deux Anges in its entirety today but two songs from our earlier album Dream Together are so very much on my mind as I feel your beautiful spirit draw near to guide and comfort me, today.
The first of them is here: "Dream 3" - which literally came to me in a dream. The melody came wafting to me in sleep and I rushed to capture it in the dark, singing it wordlessly into my phone. The lyrics, too, particularly the bridge - which describes an actual dream I had of you, appearing to me within the waters of a fountain, beckoning me to join you, the cool mist about us as you kissed me.
How I love you! Forever!
Little sweetheart, when we first began working on Sometimes in Dreams, I knew that its centerpiece had to be based on something of those words I had written for you ten years ago.
The two previous albums, Electric Hymnal and Dream Together had both incorporated spoken word with underscoring but Sometimes was the work that most fully integrated it, finally, I think, and that marked that aspect of our sound going forward and to this very day.
The piece for Sometimes became "The Choral Text Passage", with the text itself a bit longer, adding a few other thoughts, underscored with guitars and spoken, as the title might suggest, with multiple voices sometimes joining in counterpoint or unison with the main narrative one. It's here, below.
Love you forever.
THE CHORAL TEXT PASSAGE (from Sometimes in Dreams)
Little sweetheart, today is my birthday. We were already forever twinned before, incredibly, your memorial was held on the very same day, ten years ago. I'll share more things here today, too, little sweetheart but begin by repeating below what I said to all those gathered, brokenhearted, to honor you that day. With all my love forever:
Michael's address for Summer, given April 25, 2011 - San Francisco, CA
SUMMERLOVE
I have a thousand things to say about Summer Lindsay Serafin. A thousand thousand. I’ll be saying them and thinking them and writing them down every day for the rest of my life no matter how brief or prolonged that may be. But today...Just for today...
She liked to sleep. That’s not what I wanna talk about but it has to be said. She loved sleeping. I’m listening to one her voicemails of late and she says she is so excited by the prospect of sleep. That “it is like (her) mouth is watering for sleep”. She says that. It’s good. I sometimes sleep now and just want to stay. I hope I might find her there.
It’s impossible, really. Impossible that I met her. That she “found me” she liked to say. I’m not from around here. It’s impossible that she lived in a place called “The Inner Sunset”. Impossible that she lit me up, this shining person, and held me, safely, in her orbit. Impossible. All of it. And today. Just impossible.
She was a terrible driver. Even Mike said so. I loved her battle-scared Blue Prius. The passenger side mirror in a kaleidoscope thousand pieces, dangling by a cable. A taillight busted. The bumper sagging. No, no she fixed that. The back seat full of boots and sunhats and coconut water. And tissues. She left a trail of tissues everywhere. Like Hansel & Gretel. You could follow it to its source and eventually find her.
She was – words, not for the first time, fail – an unearthly beauty. An ethereal beauty. And shockingly, entirely earthbound. Preternaturally present. She ate up life. With both tiny perfect fists. Ate it up. Actually, she ate quite beautifully. Do you remember that? Cutting and balancing petite bites, transferring them knife to fork with quiet elegance. Even bananas she ate like that. Seriously, I have a picture. I got her to try dark chocolate. She wasn’t a fan at first. She broke little bits off into tiny pieces. I looked over and she was sprinkling Equal onto them one at a time.
She was the dearest dearest girl. Nothing phony about her. If you got to know her at all, your heart just broke in two the moment you realized, the moment you saw her, really saw her and then surged with love. For her. This amazing girl.
She didn’t do anything to make it difficult, but I can understand how someone could think she was hard to get to know. She was friendly but never facile. She wasn’t frivolous. She was serious. She was fun, god, was she fun. She loved people – and this is what I wanna get it, at long last – she loved people and she took them seriously. Not everybody’s up for that. More fool they.
I’m circling the runway here, I know, but there’s one more thing I gotta say before I bring it in – she was a breathtakingly gifted actor. I met her doing Edna O’Brien’s Tir na nOg, Chris Smith’s last play at The Magic. She played the central role, a country girl in the west of Ireland who grows to young adulthood and further adventures in Dublin. And she burned that stage to cinders every goddamn night. With three broken toes. If you live here and you go to the theatre and you did not see her in that, I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. A year later, right after she was in Rock n Roll at ACT, she went down to Carmel to do David Hare’s The Blue Room directed by Ken Kelleher.
She loved her work. And she was good at it. But she had a higher calling. To love. And, yes, that is what I want to talk about. Because she told me. She told me she knew why she was here and that was to love. She was filled with love. So much love. And she wanted more than anything to share her love with others. She told me that. And there is absolutely no doubting it because you could not have a better piece of luck in this world than to have been blessed enough to have been loved by her. She was like that device they use in open heart surgery that cracks your chest open and holds it gaping, wide, so you can be healed. That fragile little muscle, scarred and scared and on the verge of shutting down, giving out, giving up, held now tenderly in her expert hands, beneath her loving, healing gaze.
Her love was tenacious, vigilant. Unflinching. I met her three years ago and she quickly became the center of my life. She didn’t drop people. If you were in, she was in. Even if you faltered because nobody had ever shown up for you before like this, she was on you. Checking in. Reminding. Different this time. Not goin’ anywhere. She hated talking on the phone but we talked every day, often for hours. For three. She knew everything about me. Things I never tell became hers.
And she made sure I knew her as well. Her gratitude, her pride in a happy childhood. Loving, devoted, would-take-a-bolt-of-lightning-for parents. Her epic struggle from the age of 5 to live. Ryan’s gifting her a kidney and the double organ transplant that saved and changed her life. The unfathomable loss of Jesse. She carried every piece of her past with pride and love and honesty into every room, knowing exactly who she was, like no one I have ever known. Or ever will.
God, how I loved her! She’s right. She did find me. I clung to her. “Like a life raft” I told her she was, “to a drowning man.” She smiled and said, “you’re not drowning anymore.”
When my mom died last year, I was in London. I got the news in the middle of the night. I was alone. I called Summer, eight hours behind, here. When I told her, she burst into tears. And then told me to get on Skype. “I want to see you drink an entire glass of water”, she said. “And lie down. And try to sleep. I’ll be right here at my computer watching you. I will watch you while you sleep.” She watched over me like an angel, a cyber angel, and when I woke she was there with Linda getting me on a plane to New York and then on to Michigan. Then Summer flew herself to Detroit and waited in the airport all night to meet my plane. And was at my side every day for a week while I buried my mother. Who does that? Serafin love. Irrepressible, irreplaceable girl.
“When I met you”, she said “you were so wounded, so hurting, so sad – I just wanted to love you, to heal. But I never dreamed”, she added, “I would ever get so much love in return.” Who does that?
I need her. I am broken. That is as it should be. It’s supposed to be hard. She cracked my chest open. It’ll have to stay that way. Because who would go back? But it’s hard.
Summer, incredibly, had an answer for that, I think. All this is preface. She’d want to have the last word. So, I’d like to share that. It’s her Christmas card from a couple of years ago. She was in Boston doing Rock n Roll at The Huntington. It closed just before the holidays and she came to New York to exchange gifts with me. She made me promise to wait until December 25th to open it. So, I took it on the plane with me, waited til Christmas morning and opened it at my Mom’s. The gift was a beautiful blue and grey scarf she knitted. There was also a card. It’s to me but in a way it’s to us all. Everyone of us who she loved. Everyone of us who love her. And feel so lost. Because life is so lonely, the world so empty and wrong without her.
My Dearest Michael,
I’ve been working on this in the green room and backstage since we came to Boston. I’d drape it around my neck to keep warm while knitting in the dark of the freezing wings. The cast is decisively in favor of the striped color combination.
It’s Christmas day, and I’m wearing my pajamas. I’m in my P.J.’s even if you’re reading this when the sun has set. Ryan is making another bourbon and coke even if you’re reading this as the sun rises. My Dad is reading aloud shocking statistics about religion or politics, my Mom is spraying perfume on the dog, and me...? I am missing you. Maybe one day we’ll spend Christmas together.
Coy says “You are where you’re meant to be”, and while I like that idea, I know, far too well, what it feels like to be in a world where everything feels wrong – where everything is wrong. You have also been to that place. And as the world spins on its own axis, people are lost in their own needs and trials. We falter blindly, and strive endlessly. But no matter where you are, whether you should be there or not, and no matter who is present... know that you are a treasure in your own right. If the chest is buried, the key is lost, or the map stolen, it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t change the fact that it’s inside you. I just see what’s there. You carry it with you. What’s hidden can always be found.
I love you.
Your Gingersnap,
Summer
I love you, too. Love you forever. Goodnight, little sweetheart.
Little sweetheart, I’ve been seeing cardinals more and more!
There are two especial places where I seem to find them. One is about midway along the serpentine in Riverside Park just below the 91st Street Gardens and the other is along the “quad” - the green space between four high-rise apartment buildings in the upper W60’s.
Often they seem to like to perch at the highest point they can find, so I’ll have to look straight up when I think I hear one. And that’s the other thing, I’ve begun to recognize their song! Or perhaps I should say songs. Plural. Cardinals make an exceptional variety of calls. It’s like a symphony of sounds. I wish I could describe it for you. There are trills and melodies and almost little morse code type dash dot chirpings.
The legend, as ever, is when one sees a cardinal it means a loved one from the beyond has come to visit, so more than ever, I think of and am grateful for you.
One more thing, one more place I’ve seen a pair - at Lincoln Center. Just the other side of the fountain in that big expanse before the band shell I heard a cardinal’s call. It was the female. She flew from one tree to another, then grabbed something out of it, like a twig, with her beak and flew back. She was making a nest. I watched her do this several times. Then she flew all the way down toward the band shell and I could see another cardinal, a male, keeping watch.
I'm watching, too, listen sweetheart. And listening closely for you. With all my love forever.
In a wonderful dream you came to me last night, little sweetheart. You’d been gone but you remembered me when you saw me and then you kissed me! You kissed me just the way that I remember and I know that you were coming to me in sleep to tell me you are near and to just hang on - we’ll be together soon!
In the dream, we were all living in some big place. Not sure if it was a house or a hotel and we all had different rooms. Come nightfall, like the middle of the night, I went out into the hall quietly to come to you, to look for your room. Suddenly I thought I should go back and brush my teeth first. Ha! Isn’t that perfect, little sweetheart?!
I love you so much.
It’s funny how the time just passes, little sweetheart, adding up to weeks and months and years but some things, however distant in what we think of as time now, merely mortal, remain so close we can nearly touch them and only go to prove there’s so much we don’t yet know. That I don’t yet know but that I know you do know. After all, one of your favorite songs was Sandy Denny’s, a song that expressed that very thought.
And I was thinking today of how I always used to say to you, even if you were just going into the next room or only shifting your body a bit over in our bed - “don’t go too far away”.
I know you haven’t. I know you will find me soon, again, forever.
With all my love.
Little sweetheart, there was a wonderful movie a couple of years ago directed by Wes Anderson called “Moonrise Kingdom”. I remember that Sean liked his work so very much but it wasn’t until I saw this film at the time of its release in the cinema that I became so enchanted.
One of the things that’s most moving about this film is Anderson’s use of the British composer Benjamin Britten’s work. Specially, "Friday Afternoons" - the collection that he wrote for his pupils at the Clive House School.
One song is used twice to great effect in the film and indeed closes it. As I heard it and with you so very much on my mind, I sat in my sat there in the dark and wept.
The tune is Britten’s, the words are from a poem by Jane Taylor and the recording he used is sung by a boy soprano in a high, pure, wistful voice. The lyrics make me long just to fly to you, as know I will someday. There are here:
In April, I open my bill
In May, I sing night and day
In June, I change my tune
In July, far, far I fly
In August, away I must.
Soon. To you forever and soon. Cuckoo.
Did I ever tell you, little sweetheart, that when I was still doing theatre there were a handful of experiences that had been most meaningful to me? As a playwright I think the London productions of District of Columbia, Seven Pages Unsigned and Detail - at RADA, The Finborough and The Gielgud - were all especially fulfilling. And as an actor (aside from TV and film work, just theater now I’m mentioning), I think playing the lead in John Byrne’s Slab Boys Trilogy in its US premiere in DC and my very first job (at 18!) playing Jesus in Godspell in summer stock were the most important.
Even if theaters and especially acting wasn’t something I wanted to do to the end of my days, all of these experiences helped me become an artist by giving me a vessel that I could pour truthful expression into. I think a life in the arts, if truthfully pursued (not nakedly ambitious), leads one to to a purer and purer distillation of one’s artistic expression, little sweetheart. Without rejecting the past, we can see how it helped us continue to refine and evolve and increasingly make art that is truly one’s own deepest expression.
Everything I do is for you, little sweetheart. That’s what guides me. That’s why I say you are my conscience. So writing and composing and recording, releasing albums and publishing works has a purity of mission. Do you know? I know you do.
A year or two ago, it struck me how much Godspell had meant to me, coming so early in my life, and yesterday, on Easter Monday, little sweetheart, I watched the film adaptation (1973). Much of the cast is from the original off-Broadway production at The Cherry Lane, with a few notable members from the very famous Toronto production.
One of the actors, also from New York but not in the original production is the late Lynne Thigpen. She’s absolutely wonderful (they all are) and I can’t help thinking about her because I got to meet her once, little sweetheart, and she was incredibly kind to me.
My friend, the late Curt Dempster, who founded the Ensemble Studio Theatre had asked me to speak on behalf of the company at a luncheon for the American Theater Wing - kind of New York’s main theatre institution, they give charitable grants to artists and are mostly known for being behind the Tony Awards. I wrote and gave a speech very much about creativity and the importance of being allowed to fail. It was something I believed EST was committed to - giving artists a home where they could attempt things and grow without commercial pressure. EST was part of the non-commercial side of New York theater. Off-Broadway was originally a response to the commerciality of Broadway itself.
Needless to say, The Theatre Wing wasn’t all non-commercial. So, the speech was somewhat coolly received. Except by Lynne who had introduced me before and shook my hand after looking me in the eye intently and empathetically. It was the year District of Columbia was first produced in New York, that’s why Curt asked me to speak and that production was also rather coolly received until year’s end when TimeOut famously called it "overlooked" and first Boston’s Huntington and then London’s RADA staged productions.
Tragically, Lynne died just three years later. I never got to see her again to thank her.
All this must seem very rambling, little sweetheart, but I wanted to tell you. It’s all on my mind tonight, at the end of Holy Week, and thinking so very much of you. With all my love.
Little sweetheart, today is Good Friday.
I have a lot to tell you about Holy Week and I will within these pages but right now I'd just like to re-share the remarks I compised and gave a couple of years ago at New York's historic West End Collegiate Church for you on Good Friday.
You're in my every thought, my little sweetheart, and every prayer. With all my love forever.
All through Holy Week, little sweetheart, I’ve been setting out something to watch or listen to.
Tenebrae is on Holy Thursday and I’d never been to a service until about ten years ago. It’s intensely meaningful.
There are readings and songs and a single candle from a candelabra is extinguished after each other until the sanctuary is in darkness and everyone leaves silently. This year and last there hasn’t been an opportunity to attend one because of the pandemic but a couple of years ago Grace Church downtown. Even before the pandemic, they filmed and broadcast online many of their services and this Tenebrae in particular is lovely and moving. I watched it last year and again tonight.
Holy Thursday is an especially poignant time in Holy Week and all of it just helps me quiet down and think of you, bringing me closer to you, leaving distractions aside, focusing. I listen for you voice and I hear you call.
With all my love forever.
