Midlife Meditation

Of course young me can't just take the advice of old me lying down. Even though at 22 my tendency was to be far more respectful of authority than most young adults I meet, by the time I reached my early 30s, that had worn off. When it comes to insolence, I was a late bloomer, but bloom I did. And when I talked back, I did so with all the rhetorical powers I had honed as a preacher, taking on whomever I was pissed at point by point, not stopping until I had immersed every argument a would-be mentor might make in a bath of boiling logical scorn. So now, without further ado, I project myself back nineteen years. Young Mark holds in his hands a letter from the future filled with the typical platitudinous valedictory advice middle-aged men cannot help dishing out to adults young enough to be their sons and daughters. He pores over it, highlights flimsy arguments, feels his blood boiling at the Hallmark Graduation Book quality of the thing. He sets it beside his keyboard--it...

Stew tries to get through to his youthful self. Passing Strange  was only on stage for a few months in 2008. I heard about it on NPR, as composer/author/narrator/lead singer Stew talked with Terry Gross and and Kurt Andersen about his autobiographical brainchild, a two hour coming-of-age rock opera filled with humor, angst, and gorgeous music. The snippets I heard on Fresh Air  and Studio 360  were enough to make me want to see it or, barring that, to listen to the soundtrack; and yet somehow I never did. It faded from my memory until, scrolling through the Comcast menu (we just switched), I discovered it had been filmed by Spike Lee and was going to play on Showtime. Amy and I watched it Sunday, and it was riveting. Stew is on stage for the entire show, singing the story of his youth with such power that we could not believe he could sustain it for a single performance, let alone a three-month run of nightly shows. All the performances were of that caliber. Th...