Come to visit
me and one of the first things you see, if you’re visually astute, might be an
archival photograph of the Promenade des Anglais winding its way along the Nice
waterfront. It has a place of prominence at my entrance.
I first visited
Nice in 1968 and was smitten. I returned for academic year 1974/75 and the preceding
and ensuing summers and I’ve returned many times. I explored my adopted second
city and l’arrière pays thoroughly on my mobylette and on foot when I lived
there.
I came out in
Nice because I met the first person I had ever trusted there. She was
Marie-Claude, my colleague at the faculté des lettres and the warmth of our
friendship brought me out of the closet. I am so proud of my choice of
confident.
That year was
the best year of my life. Nice is paradise. I had a garden apartment five
blocks from one of the more famous beaches of the world and I discovered the
unforgettable and unparalleled Mediterranean diet.
The carnage of
yesterday was like a punch to the gut. Marie-Claude wrote to tell me no one we
know was hurt. Right on the heels of Orlando, these symptoms of malaise say
that the human race is very sick.
•
I walked the
seawall on Thursday. It’s the third time since D(isaster) Day, April 9th. In
three months I’ve walked the wall as often as I used to walk it a week.
Slogress is what I call it.
I’m really
happy I go out and I love the smells in the air and the sun on my skin when I’m
out, but coming home feels like crossing a moat when I traverse the lobby and
raising the drawbridge as I take the elevator up to my floor to unmitigated
bliss.
I’m a homebody,
a homeboy, I’m cloistered and I’m super fine with it.
And I’m writing
differently than ever before because that’s what I do: I love trying things I’m
not trained to do. I love experiential learning. That’s why making my paper
costumes was one of the best things I have ever done—when you succeed at
something you’ve never done before or trained for, you feel matchless pride and
joy.
I’m writing a
play that is entirely fictional and I love
it. It feels like building a crossword puzzle: There’s a lot of planning and
trying and rejecting and tweaking and cutting and pasting in order to get to an
order that’s concealed and alluded to in coded language — clues in a crossword
and imagery and actions in dialogue. And finding that order—through what is
seen and heard on stage—is a process that must be captivating to the
reader/audience.
This, for me,
is true creation. When I write autobiographically or technically, it feels like
reporting. It may be well written and engaging, but it feels interpretive
whereas fictional writing fiction is invented. It’s exhilarating to create
imaginary people and nothing beats writing dialogue. I am addicted.
There’s no
action and no antagonist in this nameless piece. This is my Seinfeld moment; I
am writing something about nothing, aiming to capture your attention as is done
in the European movies I love, with character and smooth natural dialogue.
My plan is,
first, to see if I can write something entirely fictional that I am proud of.
Then, if I do, I’ll ask a couple of actor friends I respect to read it and if
they see merit in it, I may produce it.
And here I
thought I was done with long-form writing.
When I was
diagnosed with AIDS, I thought my life was over. When the cocktail erased my death
sentence I was reborn with an appreciation for life that hasn’t left me.
C-PTSD, similarly, is a blessing.
PTSD feels a
little like being bipolar (if you’ll excuse my saying so with no experience of
bipolarity). On the one hand, I have seizures and fits of extreme stuttering, anxiety
and I experience a complete loss of voice at times. Those are the lows. But the
highs are incredible: Those whom I trust, for example, trigger a deep exquisite
love that I have never before felt and the beauty of flowers regularly moves me
to tears.
But best of
all, when I can speak and now that I am writing again, I'm far better at both
forms of communicating.
 |
| My mother, Françoise Berd, co-starred in a movie called Un Jour Special with Sophia and Marcello Mastroianni. |
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