i never made promises lightly
Mixing physical and mental exhaustion with Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 is a recipe for very strange half-awake dreams at five in the morning. I can’t quite figure out how I’m feeling about these dreams, which is making them more upsetting than the actual dreams themselves. I feel like I should be upset or sad or angry or happy, but instead I’m feeling all of them at once. I can’t sort it in my head, so I need to sort it on paper… er, screen.
THE BACKGROUND: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was a show created by Aaron Sorkin on NBC for one whole season right after The West Wing ended. Good, bad or otherwise, I love Aaron Sorkin’s work. I know less about him personally and to some extent don’t care. He’s a phenomenal playwright and I love his work – the good, the bad and the ugly. This is the only show of his that did not get a second season, but I still love it. And I recently bought it, so I’ve been watching it in the evenings. Last evening was the first evening I’ve had open to be home and sit and watch a few episodes. I ended up watching over eight episodes and staying awake until four am when I passed out on the couch. I love Sorkin and was reveling in the show, enjoying every moment and soaking it all up.
THE SHOW: The show itself is set behind the scenes of a late night comedy sketch show – a fictional type of Saturday Night Live – called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. As much as it is about the writing and planning of such a show, what Sorkin excels at is ensemble casts and character storylines that weave in and out of each other without feeling over-planned or predictable. There are producers and TV executives and writers and actors and crew and everything in between. One of the main threads in the show follows the relationship of Matt Albie, head writer for Studio 60, and Harriett Hayes, an actor for Studio 60. They had dated on and off for a number of years and the season premieres with them having recently broken up. Matt was hired onto the show as a writer instead of going off to make a movie. (There’s a lot more to that story, but its not relevant to this so I’m skipping over it.) So rather than being apart and away from each other after having broken up only two weeks earlier, Harriett and Matt are working together every single day. Their relationship reminds me quite a bit of me and Manny. No one knows Matt better than Harriett, and vice versa. The only exception might be Matt’s best friend Danny who tries to help Matt move on. He’s seen the devastation their relationship can bring and tries to keep it from repeating yet again. Still its a volatile relationship. Since they know each other so well, they are able to produce amazing comedy sketches together. One of the sticking point of their relationship comes back to their differences in religion. Harriett is a Christian (still rather liberal but pretty conservative by Sorkin’s standards) and Matt is not. He does not understand how or why she believes what she believes, while Harriett tries to walk this amazing balance of being a Christian on a late night comedy sketch show. She’s never against mocking the hypocrisy found in Christianity, but she will do a sketch Friday night mocking them and then endorse and perform for them on Monday. It drives Matt crazy, among other things. They go back and forth, laughing over this and fighting over that, kissing one moment then ripping off the other’s head. Its volatile, and makes for excellent stories.
THE EPISODE: The episode that always really gets to me is actually a two-part mini series where Harriett is being presented an award from the Christian right and auctions off the honor of being her date to raise money for abstinence education. Its a long story (and I’m again skipping the unimportant parts), but Matt ends up bidding and going as her date. They have one of the most painful fights to watch, which to some degree starts even before Matt shows up as her date. They dissect their entire relationship and pick apart everything that went wrong and just keep whacking away at each other. It goes all the way through the salad and dinner and the after dinner entertainment and right up to the moment when Matt has to go on stage and introduce her. It is brutal, but at the same time, its slowly clear that this fight is one of those make or break it fights. Either they will be able to move forward from this and have a relationship of some kind (romantic or platonic) or else everything is over. Right before Matt goes out on stage, Harriett admits she’s been thinking about sleeping with someone else and Matt’s world basically shatters. You can see it in his face. She crossed that line into deep, painful truth and destroyed him with just those words. And you can see she knows it too, but she didn’t know what else to do. She didn’t want to keep going how they were going and nothing else was snapping them out of it.
MY LIFE: Matt and Harriett’s relationship is eerily parallel to Manny and me. It is not the same by any means, but very parallel. Over the years, we’ve had that make or break fight a few times. Except I’ve never crossed that line. He’s very sensitive when it comes to religion, being raised by a lapsed Jewish mother and a lapsed Catholic father. The few times we’ve talked about it he gets incredibly upset and defensive and pretty much unable to hear anything else. Much like Matt once Harriett tells him about her new almost-boyfriend, but not entirely over that line. I don’t know what would happen if I told him the deep, dark, ugly truth of it all. But I always feel like we are just a step away from… yet another eruption. Like Matt and Harriett, its never fully over; there’s no feeling of complete closure. There’s always something… hanging over our heads, except thats not really the right way to put it either. I’m really not sure how to explain it. We are certainly less volatile than we were in the past, but there’s still this pull that draws us back to each other. No one knows me as well as he does, with the exception of Megan. Megan is my Danny and he’s my Harriett. Except I’m not quite as crazy as Matt, regardless of what this entry seems. Watching this set of episodes always draws me back to Manny, understanding what both the characters are feeling and feeling it echoes against my heart.
MY DREAM: Does not make sense. In any way possible. And its now the afternoon, so I’m remembering even less. My brain has been trying to fill in the holes to make sense of the whole ordeal, making up stories to make the pieces fit. And I don’t care about those made-up bits. I want to remember only the original dream. We were fighting, just like Matt and Harriett, at a fancy dinner but it wasn’t the awards dinner from the show. It was a wedding, a friend of ours or something. Manny had invited me and there were other people around that we both knew. I think. That was not the show. Butthen we were fighting about the same things that Matt and Harriett were fighting about, the inability to really move on and let go. His desire not to be with me, but also not to let me be with anyone else while pretending to be supportive. And then it shifted and I was trying to get him to say what I couldn’t – that our differences in religious beliefs were at the core of all of this. (The fight/discussion/arguement that Matt and Harriett have about religion is the fight I honestly wish I could have with Manny. But I don’t know if we’d make it through the other side.) In my dream, we were still skirting the issue and I kept trying to get him to say it. He kept saying that he just needed real closure; he needed…. control. I know it sounds macho and egotistical and trust me, he can be all of those things. But this wasn’t that way. He was spinning out of control and just wanted to become grounded again. Then we were backstage or in the basement of Studio 60, but trapped in a small space just me and Manny. People kept telling us to just let it all go. I kept trying to get up or walk away, but I was trapped in a box or small room. Manny was talking to Russ and Brian (his best friends) and Megan was… I don’t know where but nearby. She kept telling me just to wait and let it happen. People were yelling and there was a lot of commotion and excitment. There were more people in the space and there was pushing and lots of movement. Suddenly Manny grabbed my waist, pulled me around, cupped my face and kissed me. It sounds like he forced himself on me, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was just fast and gently controlling. He was in control, taking control. The kiss was powerful and long and sweet and kind… and goodbye. I knew it was goodbye, our last kiss, the last moment of "Us". It was a long, lasting kiss. We both knew it was the last kiss and we didn’t want it to end. If we could just keep kissing, we could stay together; things would be okay and we could ignore all the reasons we don’t work. But we did pull away and just looked at each other, knowing without words.
Then I woke up. Sad and happy and upset but not, all at the same time.
This song, the live lute version was playing during all of the dream….
You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in fields of gold
So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold
Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in fields of gold
See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold
I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I’ve broken
But I swear in the days still left
We’ll walk in fields of gold
We’ll walk in fields of gold
Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
Fields of Gold ~ Sting