I am on a stage. I am playing guitar and doing my one-man show. The same show that critics often hail as a remarkably powerful sleep aid.
I see a redheaded man in the audience, sitting in the balcony. I almost lose track of what I’m talking about on the microphone. The redheaded man is grinning at me. He reminds me of someone I once knew. Someone from long ago.
The very first time I was ever on a stage I was six years old. My father was the reason. I don’t know why he had such a bee in his bonnet about getting me in front of people, but he was hellbent on it.
He practically begged the preacher to let me sing in front of church, even though I REALLY didn’t want to do this. My father could be relentless. Soon I was standing before everybody and their mother’s house cat singing “Precious Lord Take My Hand.”
Something I’ll never forget: Just before I took the church stage, the old
preacher introduced me by calling me a forty-year-old man trapped in a six-year-old's body.
Everyone chuckled. But I didn’t see what was so funny. I sang the best I could, but I was godawful. People applauded. My redheaded father, who was in the balcony, whistled with his fingers.
After that, I started doing some singing in public. I was shy and I hated it. But my father said the only way to get over stage fright was to simply get over it. He kept making me audition for local plays. I couldn’t understand why he found this so important. All I wanted was to go back to making mud pies in the backyard.
I got a role in one play where I had to memorize nearly a hundred lines. My mother and I worked on these lines every day after school. She’d read the script while standing at…