Mame, Maine, and the Banquet of Life
If I listed the characters who have most influenced my life, I’d need to include the fictional Mame Dennis Burnside, known to most people as “Auntie Mame,” portrayed with brilliance by Rosalind Russell in the hilarious 1958 film by the same name. I would be willing to bet that most gay men of my generation were equally inspired by her undaunted embrace of the unknown and her complete surrender to every new opportunity to play.
Were she to see us moping, feeling angry and depressed about the elimination of our marriage rights in Maine, Mrs. Burnside would lovingly pull us into her arms, gently pat our heads, tenderly kiss our cheeks, and soothingly say, “I know. I know. But don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing you down. We’ll have our day. You just wait and see. Now let’s get up, get dressed in something fun and fabulous, and show the bastards what real love looks like.”
“Life is a banquet,” she advised her young nephew Patrick, “and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
Auntie Mame was bigger than life but loathed pretense and snobbery. She embraced every aspect of human nature except for judgment. Her mind was ever-inquisitive, her décor ever-changing, and her friends ever-loyal. She feasted on the beauty of being.
Ray and I recently introduced two thirty-year-old gay men who had never heard of her, and their reaction of complete charm underscored how Mame’s message of “Live! Live! Live!” transcends time.
“It’s the best movie I’ve ever seen,” gushed Milton, a 36-year-old from Brazil. “It’s now my favorite.”
Mame and her philosophy of turning every situation into a party have popped up several times since we sat with her a week ago. One friend, for instance, sent me a YouTube clip that showed how people in Stockholm decided to start taking the stairs rather than the escalator when the steps were transformed into piano keys. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN0eabGb-vI&NR=1 Unless they were physically incapable of walking up or down the stairs, I would hope that everyone would let go of their schedules and patterns of behavior in that situation and make going from one level to another a fun feast at the banquet of life.
Another friend sent me a YouTube clip of a group of late-night Halloween partiers in Provincetown, MA who performed Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance number on Commercial Street. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdctoLz5ADc It was brilliant, but had I been in town instead of back in Ft. Lauderdale, I suspect that I would have starved rather than feasted because I wouldn’t have wanted to stay up late and be among some people on the streets who might have had too much to drink. My fear of the unknown and of inconvenience would have been a disappointment to Auntie Mame and to me when I heard from others what I had missed. Despite our life goals, sometimes we fail to live up to our images or expectations of ourselves.
Two other friends shared stories this week of choosing to starve themselves of life’s joys, but theirs are in an ongoing pattern of choosing suffering. One friend spoke of how the most recent significant other in his life is taking advantage of him as has every romantic interest he has ever courted. He is so afraid of being alone that he puts up with the person’s lack of physical interest in him, his compulsive drinking and smoking, and his complete financial dependence.
“What are you getting out of it?” I asked. “You deserve to be happy.”
“I know. I know,” he replied.
“You have to make choices to be happy,” I said. “You know that I love you but I can’t be a part of this repeated drama any longer. It’s too depressing. You’ve got a lot of healthy people waiting for you to decide to be happy.”
To another friend, hooked on drugs and alcohol, and in complete denial of his life patterns of irresponsibility, I wrote, “We create our own happiness and we create our own suffering. It doesn’t matter one bit what happened to you or to me in our childhood. Some people with our experiences are rotting in prison and no one cares because they have caused so much heartache in other people’s lives. Some people like us live really happy lives and are surrounded by people whose lives they have positively impacted. It’s our choice where we end up – no one else’s.
“The only one who can save you from a miserable, shitty life of addiction and failure is you. The only one who can turn your life around is you. You are fully capable of doing it. I don’t think you have a chance of doing it without going to 30 AA or NA meetings in 30 days and getting a sponsor. You’re in the crapper right now. I love you but I can’t do a thing for you except point the way. Go to NA and avoid at all costs anyone who activates your disease.
“Underneath all of the shit that you’ve rolled in, is a gem of a man. You are a diamond in the rough. Patiently but persistently make decisions that allow yourself to shine before you die and no one has a clue who you really were. Had I not made the decisions I have made, I’d be a closeted, alcoholic, frustrated failure.
“I’m in your corner. I can’t get too close because your disease can activate my own. Choose life. Do what needs to be done.”
Auntie Mame never said “shitty” in the movie, (my mom hated the word) but I suspect Mame was most capable of using it when necessary, and I feared that simply telling my young friend that life is a banquet and that he was starving himself wouldn’t effectively get his attention. Regrettably, neither did my e-mail. His boyfriend wrote to say that the drinking and drugging had gotten worse and that he was kicking him out of the house.
We can’t make other people be happy but we can teach ourselves how to feast on the beauty of being. Instead of choosing attitudes and behaviors that will make them grow joyfully, some people around us will adopt the mantra of “Die! Die! Die!” It’s horrible to watch someone you love, and even someone you don’t know, starve in front of you. But there’s nothing we can do except be happy ourselves and introduce others to the option of being open to life. We can show them how to do it just as Auntie Mame thankfully did to me and continues to do for others.
So, we must pick ourselves up after the defeat of our civil rights in Maine, keep our eye on the horizon, and “Live! Live! Live!”
