January 2004: The Five-Day Cider War

I’ve just about decided that there’s nothing that karaoke can’t fix. 

If it can train a Sicilian and a Southerner to live together, in harmony, then at the next G8, or G12, G+number, Summit…we need to hire Disco Dan, or Happy Butch to grab their mic stands and their CDs.

I resisted this, what to me, was merely a bar-room, nocturnal, alcohol-fueled passtime, for many years. I felt that I couldn’t possibly degrade myself, a real singer, I thought to myself, to such a ridiculously low-level thirst for spotlight attention.

Ah, but what a little spotlight can do.

With my brief second tenure in Indiana, I found out. This is when I truly found my own life, my whole other saving life, and I found it with the Bruce sisters, Danielle and Nicole. My sisters, now, I should say. (I promise, in a later blog, to clarify my rather large and confusing family tree. I promise).

Living with the Bruce sisters, half-Irish/half-Sicilian, and a whole lot of explosive and exciting day-to-day moments, taught me far more than I’ll ever be able to live through. They came from artists, actor-parents, brilliant people full of shimmer and glamour and raw talent…and standards. What those two learned at the footlights of their mother and father, I only wish could be taught in acting schools today. They reminded me that the immersion of anything is always the best teacher. But what they taught me, a soft-spoken, genteel, Old Southern bred young man, bitterly but thoroughly Victorian, with Cicero on his shoulder, is a HOTS lesson in interpersonal communication. (HOTS, in teacher-speak, refers to Higher Order Thinking Skills).

They were a How-Not-To-By-How-To-Not-To Manual. (And yes…it’s meant to confuse you).

I didn’t care for confrontation, which, in retrospect, I think is one of the vital tools an actor needs to succeed at his/her craft. Danielle, much more than Nicole, had absolutely no issues with confrontation, at all. Until she met me…we were about to educate each other in a grand way.

Here’s how: there was this large, yellow boiler, old with care and worn, that hung in the kitchen, on the pot rack. I’d returned from Mississippi, this was in December, and GamVa had given me her orange cider recipe…one of the many holiday beverages that is Home for me. I smell it, and I’m seven again. The Bruce sisters were not cooks; I was, in my mind, and I was very excited to share this old cider recipe with them.

I was in the house, alone; Nicole was at the theater, I believe; Danielle was at work. I put the boiler on the stove, added my ingredients, which would need to steep tied up in a piece of cheesecloth, and off I went to the bathroom.  I had, inadvertently, turned the stove on too high and while I was in the bathroom, probably singing aloud to Tony Bennett, as I was want to do, among other things, it scalded. 

I came out of the bathroom, instantly enveloped in a horrible burnt odor, ran to the kitchen, and smoke was everywhere, clouds of it hung from the chandelier, above the refrigerator, but that awful, awful metallic burn in the odor was what was most overwhelming. I immediately took the boiler off the eye, threw it into the sink, ran cold water everywhere, and opened every window in the kitchen.

I’m not sure how often you’ve burned things in the kitchen, I’m certainly no stranger to it – last week, I ruined a vegetable steamer, this is how one learns, right? - but there is no smell that rests on an even kill with that of burned metal. I like to think of the odor has having suctionlike-octopus-talon-claws because aside from wet dog, and cigarettes, I don’t think there’s anything else that attaches itself to every available surface the way burnt metal does. 

The boiler was ruined. Unsalvageable.

I was shocked at how quickly things can be destroyed. How easily the house could have burned down. I wasn’t really gone that long, but that’s beside the point. I was terribly upset, at myself, and at what I’d done to the boiler. It was at this point that I truly got a look at it, in the sink. It had crisped into flakes. Layers of this age-old pot were now reduced to a strata of flakes. I bet that if I stood there long enough, over the sink, I could eventually peel the entire bottom of the pot away.

And then it hit me: Oh god, Danielle will be livid; she might even throw a bowl at me, or a sack of oranges, or whatever it is Sicilians did when angered.  My only experience with them, prior to living with the Bruce sisters, was Sophia, from the Golden Girls, and all I could recall from that show was an episode in which she’d threatened Blanche’s grandson with a melon baller.

That didn’t sound particularly pleasant, either. I called U.L., laid the scene out for him, hoping he’d have words of wisdom.

No. He did not. A boiler ruined is a boiler done, was his Poor Richard’s remark.

But I wasn’t going to give up. I washed, I soaped, I dried, I rinsed, I repeated, time and time again, to no avail. Nicole came home, knew something was wrong because by now the odor had gone everywhere but through the open windows. I explained the situation to her and her non-response was very telling.

I was in trouble.

I left the pot to soak, U.L. had suggested this as a last resort, having remembered some former pot, gone the way of the scald, back in his eary days that had been somewhat rescued, pulled from the brink, with a “lethal” combination of epsom salt, molasses, baking soda and elbow grease, or something like that, or maybe that was a croup remedy, I can’t remember now and it didn’t matter then. The pot was not going to be saved. It had already given up, and died. Still, I let it soak, after an initial scrubbing. Hoping.

Danielle came home from a bad day at work, like most of them were, and she too, could smell that all was not well in the House de Bruce. I had gone to my room, to write, probably a type of Dear John Letter of some sort, unneccessarily dramatic in all the right places, I’m sure, when she made it to the kitchen.

Now, you should know, up until this point, I’d never had any argument with Danielle.  We’d known each other for a couple of years, and all had been Happy Times at Happy Town. She knew that I wasn’t “like she was.” In other words, I wasn’t brought up with coin-laden socks and fists, when the occasion called for it; in my family, we use silence – and silence tucked under the right size of lip is far and away sharper than any Ginsu, and digs deeper into skin than any fist.

For five aching, interminable days, we were strangers in our house.

No “hellos,” no breakfasts, nothing. What made it even odder, is that we were in a show together, and had to spend each weekday evening in rehearsals, on stage, side by side, delivering lines but nothing else. It was torture. I realized then and there, that though being southern was wonderful on many levels, and better, I knew in my heart, it was still not the best, when all was said and done…not the only best, at any rate, and especially not where confrontation was concerned.

Some things need to be thrown out and into the open. Some things need a fight. That’s one thing I’ve learned. 

It ate away at me; my silent treatment wasn’t working at all. I broke down and went to her office, one afternoon. She was an Interior Designer, and that’s where I cried: there among the swags and swatches, among the paint samples and wood selections. That’s where we became family. For real.

It was a quiet thing. (Until we got home, that evening)…but, it never felt so good to yell, to fight, to establish the rights of the pecking order as it did that night. To ensure that things were truly good, we decided to re-start life post the Five-Day Cider War, by retreating to neutral territory.

In my past, that’d always been a bar. 

But she had other things in mind: bar + karaoke. And so, before I knew it, I was on a stage, lemon-drop martini in one hand, microphone in the other, sharing the stage with my sisters, blasting out slurred lyrics to “Summer Nights.” Thunderous applause, another round, another song selected, and all pots and pans forgotten, hanging on the rack where they belonged:

Over the stove, not on it.

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