The Gig

It always begins with pop-up story figures. Like the books young children love. As you open the covers, a two-dimensional scene unfolds.

The first time it happened I was in an airport, surrounded by hundreds of people as I walked toward my gate. Suddenly these were not people. They were figures fixed in time, two-dimensional paper cut-outs. I was completely alone among them. The sensation passed and I boarded the plane. As I looked down the aisles, there it was again — the seats were filled with cardboard passengers. I thought I was going crazy.

A friend assured me this was a spiritual vision — a realization that all is illusion — and I was relieved. Then the depression hit. I felt as if I'd been given a part in a play without script or rehearsal. And no other actors; only stand-up figures to represent other players in my life. I dreamed of death, of nothing following nothing. And wondered how I could be so afraid of nothing.

Strangely, this play was backwards. At 4 pm on a Monday afternoon in June, while sipping tea and chatting with a friend in her living room, the curtain descended as if the sun had suddenly disappeared. I excused myself and went home, already sorting through remedies for depression: hot fudge sundae, long nap, meditation, journaling.

But every force of will was puny against this blanket of melancholy. It felled me for ten days until the curtain lifted at 8 pm on a Thursday night, as unexpectedly as it had dropped. I was again on the stage of my life.

This has happened frequently enough that I no longer question my sanity. But each time, I experience the sense of disorientation, though somewhat attenuated as the years pass.

When I heard Steve Martin read his autobiography, Born Standing Up, I laughed aloud at his closing to one show:

Okay, folks! I think that about does it. We've had a good time tonight, considering we're all going to die.