Living In a Movie

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My brother sometimes calls me out and accuses me of “performing” when I am out somewhere with him – maybe at work at the smoke shop or at gigs or what have you – when other people are around.

I take this to mean that I am exaggerated and always playing to an audience.

He’s not wrong.

I never thought this was normal, but I have allowed this to happen unchecked (except by Chris) for the bulk of my life.

Also – since I was little, it seemed like I was living in a movie or a television show.

I remember when I was in the first grade in Coconut Grove in the late 1960s, sitting alone on a swing in our back yard on Tigertail Court – lost in some sort of “montage,” with the Paul Mauriat instrumental hit, “Love Is Blue” on some sort of loop in my consciousness.

I was lost in the tranquility. I already knew every nuance of the song’s arrangement because I heard it constantly. I didn’t know what a montage was, but the images and music  “playing” in my head were cinematic. This was all about “The Boy from ‘Love Is Blue.”

That boy was me. I was the main character. I was the only character.

Flash forward (whoops, another cinema phrase): I have been noticing something lately in my feeds about something called Main Character Syndrome.

Main Character Syndrome is close to what my brother has been calling me out on. It’s something that manifests itself when there are others around. But I think my solitary time on the swing plays into it as well.

The Cleveland Clinic sums up Main Character Syndrome like this:

“When you know someone is watching you, you tend to act in a very different way than you would if you were alone,” clarifies [Psychologist Susan Albers, PsyD]. “If you’re being authentic, you’re dressing, acting and saying things that truly represent who you are. But with main character syndrome, you’re often putting on a wardrobe or a mask to present in a different way.”

Holy shit.

I put on a show even if nobody is watching.

The article asserts that these behaviors “often go unnoticed until they’re called out by others around you [thanks, Chris] largely because the negative aspects are often derived from how your behaviors affect those you interact with negatively.”

I don’t think I’m that far gone, though. I care about others and would like to think I am compassionate and emotionally intelligent. And yet – I know that I am self-conscious with a tendency to feel socially awkward. 

But because I am a high-functioning introvert, it’s these mind-movie performances that help me cope. My brother and I talked about this on our PODCAST.

At home, I’m a different animal. I am quiet if you disregard the random blurting out of song lyrics. After gigs or a shift at work – both eminently public-facing, I am kind of tapped out.

Sure enough, it’s in the Cleveland Clinic piece also – with more from Albers:

“At home, you may drop the facade because it can be really exhausting to feel as if you’re always putting on a show.”

I am glad to have stumbled on to this information. Something else to explore. Therapy, anybody?

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You’re Different, Kid

I’m not an Army brat, but I moved around like one.

Bouncing back and forth from Miami to California for much of my young life, I suffered the indignity of being the “new kid” in school much of the time. Thankfully, I had a twin brother to share this burden with me. It was much better when we were in the same classrooms together. Sometimes, though, we got separated. Looking back, I assume this might have been a benevolent action in the part of the respective schools, offering a chance for identical twins to grow into separate identities.

But maybe I am being generous about that. Maybe they didn’t give a shit.

When it came to sports, I didn’t give a shit.

This likely didn’t stand me in good stead with some of the other boys, but they weren’t overt in their disapproval and for the most part didn’t bully me. Some picked on me, but by some fluke I managed to avoid the level of derision bestowed on many other kids.

I made friends easily. This helped.

I was a bookish kid. Shy.

When it came to English, I was a natural. I probably started writing when I was something like six, and there was always a typewriter in the house. My father was a writer, churning out screenplays after a moderately successful career as a songwriter and performer in South Africa and later the U.K.

Don’t ask me to diagram sentences, though.

The fact that my dad never sold a script was not the point. I read his screenplays and co-opted his style and learned how to format my own screenplays.

Mom tried her hand at writing, too. She submitted the occasional story and was the first person to introduce me to the possibility of freelancing.

I had a cool script called Kid Cops, and when I was in fifth grade, recorded some of this on my father’s old Roberts reel-to-reel. I cast Chris in the leading role and invited my chum Richie Imus to the session.

I wish I had that tape. Hell, it might be in a box in storage – but I bet it’s lost to time.

The point? My friends knew I was different and must have enjoyed my company.

In seventh grade, my brother and I hatched plans for a rock band with our friends Ramon and Matt in Miami. This came about after Ramon turned us on to KISS, especially the Rock and Rock and Roll Over album.

At the end of eighth grade, we determined that we’d come back for ninth grade after persuading our parents to buy us instruments.

But that summer, Chris and I convinced our father to let us live with him permanently in Hollywood, and the plans for that band were scotched.

But Dad got us those instruments, and our lives would never be the same.

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Growing Up Grove

I spent my early childhood in Coconut Grove, the oldest permanent settlement in the greater Miami area.

Born in 1963, my earliest recollections of The Grove are idyllic but spotty: Our low-slung mid-century modern house at the dead end of Tigertail Court, indigenous vegetation creating a canopy over it. The length of the home seemed to go on forever.

I’ll always remember our friend Jorge exclaiming “you have a long house” when he visited for the first time.

We met Jorge at Silver Bluff Elementary School in Coral Gables, along with a group of kids I can’t forget, some of whom we reacquainted with at St. Hugh Catholic School after we returned from Los Angeles for seventh and eighth grade.

I remember walks across Bayshore Drive to the area my dad called “The Bay” – long before it became David T. Kennedy Park. We threw pebbles into the water and explored this “wilderness” with abandon and for what seemed like hours.

It probably wasn’t hours.

The people on Tigertail Court: Mrs. Tobin next door, the Hensley kids on the other side – Mark, Jay, Johnny, Dougie. Somebody down at the corner of Tigertail Court and Kirk Street I only knew as “Mister ‘O’” because I heard my older brother Paul call him that once.

The crab holes in our backyard always scared the shit out of me – and the crabs themselves with their creepy sideways walk.

There was a weird sinkhole-looking thing back there too – you could look down that hole and its darkness implied that the chasm went on forever.

The collection of plastic plants in a rectangular planter as you got down the hall from the bedrooms at the precipice of the sunken living room. The rarely used dining room on the far side of the living room, with elegant and sleek table, chairs, china cabinet and a heavy liquor cart on wheels that I once pushed off the step into the living room…

I don’t remember who saw this debacle first, but I hid under the dining room table and repeated – “It wasn’t me. It was somebody who looked like me.”

I might have meant my twin brother, but it could have been that I wasn’t referring to him at all.

Just somebody that looked like me.

I remember the plaster shark spinning around in an enclosure just before heading onto the Rickenbacker Causeway on the way to Key Biscayne

I remember Pinocchio’s Pizza in the Grove, in the same complex as a convenience store called The Cold Spot. Walking barefoot inside the old A&P and coming home with filthy feet.

Royal Castle’s little square hamburgers…

The Five-and Ten.

The Florida Pharmacy in the Engle Building and a barber on that side of the street named Joe who used to cut our hair…

The old Texaco station.

I’m priming the pump, and the memories are coming.

If you grew up in The Grove, what memories stand out for you?

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