Awake and Sing!

My mother feared

Exactly two things:

That I would get married

And that I would become an actress

I did both before I was nineteen

Some good advice?

Don’t tell your kids what you’re afraid of

Because they’ll do it

Whether they mean to or not

I didn’t mean to get married

And I really didn’t mean to become an actress

But both just sort of happened

When the Orpheus Theater sent one of their shows to New York

There was a big gap in the acting company

So they had to hire some local people

I went and auditioned for their production of Awake and Sing!

And I got in, and so did this woman

That would end up becoming my wife

I knew a writer once

Who called what I just did

The Drop

Casually mention something shocking

Drop it

And pretend like it’s not a big deal

Maybe it isn’t a big deal anymore

But it was when I was alive

And it certainly was when I met the love of my life

Even though it was 1977

I was her understudy

Isn’t that funny?

It was my job to be there

In case anything happened to her

And that really never stopped being my job

She was what my mother would call a handful

Always running around

Always coming back to me

After she’d made a mess

Or led on some boy

Or ticked off one of the other actors

Halfway through the production

She got kicked out of the show

For doing…uh, well

For doing thing she shouldn’t have been doing backstage

They kicked her out of the theater

And she screamed and kicked

And they had to call security

And it was a big mess

And so I went on

But I was terrible

Because the whole time

I was worried about her

Out there on the streets

Angry and hurt

When the show was over

I went right to her apartment

And found her sitting outside her door

Crying, because she couldn’t find her keys

They were in the pocket

She didn’t usually put them in

That’s how out of it she was

After that, I stopped doing theater

But I kept making it possible for her to do it

I kept her straight, so to speak

And she…

Well, she kept me alive

Even though some people might say

It was the other way around

I felt like I was living when I was with her

I was just a girl from a poor house

With nothing holding it together

But a lot of love

And so I tried to give that to her

That love that feels like glue

And most of the time it worked

And some of the time it didn’t

But we still had a good run

A good long run

They even let her back onstage again

And she acted at the Orpheus

Until the late eighties

What I like to call

The Era of Consequences

Oh well…

That’s all history now

You know, if I’m being honest

I’d have to say it wasn’t all me that held her together

The theater had a hand in it too

Maybe even moreso than I did

Who can say?

Who can say anything right?

Who has time to think about all the things

That can’t be changed