Dan Lalande's Blog

Posted by Dan Lalande

She remained the stuff of total male devotion. The waiter, in fact, was around her like a bee on a blossom.

Eventually, he pulled himself away to scout my wife and I a table.

His walk cleared a path that put the object of his ardor fully in my sight, and my mind turned the object of our initial introduction: Barbra Streisand.

I was not a fan but there Barbra was, gracing the cover of a movie magazine I regularly purchased.

A few days later, in class, I overheard her - the woman now before me in the restaurant - talking about Barbra's latest romantic entanglements.

Using knowledge gleaned from my magazine, I weighed in, and was soon enveloped in small talk with the Goddess of Grade Nine. I even had , I informed her, the latest publication on Miss S.

The next day, I brought the magazine to school, and handed it over like Sir Francis Drake offering his cape.

Out of nowhere, a beehive of girls showed up, completely enveloping the magazine, the drop-dead gorgeous creature holding it, and the entire area between myself and her. They swept her away to an area I knew not where, leaving me in the manner of the time's hit song: alone again, naturally.

This time, however - wife and waiter occupied with one another - I had her all to myself.

"Hi," I began. "I'm -"

Her head turned violently away, into a world of walls, plants and uninteresting wall hangings.

After lunch that day back in junior high, she shyly returned the magazine.

Barbra's likeness was scarred and torn. She was nothing special now, robbed of anything that made her attention-worthy.

It was her intelligence, I now knew after all these years, that had kept Barbra, then and now, off my list of favorites.

What's so lucky about people needing people?

Posted by Dan Lalande

He was the greatest romantic singer of the twentieth century.

Small wonder, then, that my wife and I had our biggest fight to his music.

One rainy afternoon, back when we were just dating, I entered the car she was driving and informed her that it was all over. It wasn't of course but I desperately wanted a specific reaction, namely, a "don't do this to me...I love you...I can't bear to be without you."

I was looking for her to violate her stalwart character in the most dramatic and inconceivable way possible.

This was something she had never done - not when her parents brought her to the brink of vulnerability with the Greek drama familiar to so many families, not when her troubled sibling had asked her to serve as his human shield, not when school or work tried to cripple her with dire commitment.

So if she did it for me, just me, I would truly know that she loved me.

Surely Frank Sinatra, egging her on through the stereo, would inspire her to action. Frank, half tough guy, half sentimentalist, like her. He had overcome the fickleness of show business, had built palaces in the desert, had elected a president. A man of such milestones, of such persuasion, could move one even such as she.

'"Fine," she replied fliply. "It's over."

I don't know which it was that was filling the sudden silence: the singular pounding of the rain against the windshield or the pounding of my disappointed heart against my chest. Where had Frank disappeared to? Where was his emphatic purr, not long ago filling the entire car?

The tape, like our relationship, had ended unexpectedly.

Frank could sing like he did because he was no stranger to heartache. He had company now, another fallen romantic made hard by reality.

Posted by Dan Lalande

I hit him over the head with a carrot.

That was our introduction, the squeaky bonk the plastic carrot with the smiley face made the first words, in effect, I ever said to him. The first he ever said to me came in the form of a long, loud wail, enough to rattle the windows of every home in the neighborhood. We all laughed at this - myself and the slightly older kids I managed to impress with my half hearted torture of the little newcomer - as we watched him peddle off, still crying, down the street on his tricycle.

Later on, as we aged, there were other forms of torture - worse ones, like being excluded from the experience of the movies. Not that we went that often but we knew that it was harder for him; that, being younger, it would take a lot more begging to see things with guns and car chases and girls.

Then there was that legendary late afternoon in his garage where his father attacked his mother, and his mother implored him to grab a mop and to hit his father repeatedly so that he'd stop hitting her repeatedly.

I'm sure it created a long, dark hole inside him, one he went on feeling for a long, long time. I'd like to think that as he grew, he flirted with replicating his father's behavior, realized he had a problem, and sought help. I'd also like to think that he is now a model human being, kind and appreciative towards all.

And that whenever he hears of a movie that he'd like to see, he goes.

Or, if he remains full of hurt and rage, that he goes anyway, and that it is his one form of escape and triumph over those armed with carrots, mops, and denial.

Posted by Dan Lalande

I had no idea what to expect.

Only that in a few short moments, my mother and I would stop rifling through these racks of brightly colored dresses and head off to a movie theatre - an environment I had yet to investigate.

We left he store and entred the theatre. I felt both suffocated and comforted by the daunting-soothing darkness. The film rolled. Great swathes of color danced funnily before me, in time, music and logic that soon formed a story - the tale of Snow White and her seven dwarves.

I began to wonder whether this was a glimpse into a viable alternate reality, one my parents simply hadn't informed me of yet; that there were other kinds of people, fun-loving cherubs with rosy noses, who lived somewhere on the same planet as I, only on some outer edge.

When the Wicked Queen converted herself into a decrepit old crone, I knew, somehow, that I had been mistaken; that such a world was not possible, that whatever I was seeing was something that existed entirely for its own sake; not a reflection of a real world but something that enhanced reality, something that we all, for whatever reasons, needed periodically, with the same sense of need that Snow White had for the love and support of the dwarves or for the magic kiss of the prince.

We emerged into the sunlight, and I realized that the rules of the world from which I had taken temporary leave by way of this adventure remained firmly in place.

I was sorry that I would not be able to go off and play among dwarves, but happy, too, as I nestled my little hand against my mother's, that I lived in a world without witches.

Posted by Dan Lalande

It was made of thin, shiny plastic, and was certain to crack if I attempted any of the manual acrobatics he pulled off with such panache.

Atop my head, then, it would remain, as precious to me as a gold crown. As long as that bowler sat atop my head, we were spiritual brothers he and I, identical in our smallness, our sense of being at odds with the world, our funniness.

We were one, too, when it came to women; what heights he would have to reach, what physical tricks he would have to perform to win them over.

The one that eluded me was no 1920s beauty but the logic of first crushes is as difficult to explain as one of his great slapstick tricks.

When, after all of my physical vulnerability, facial gesticulating, and clever improvisation, she informed me that she was warming up to me, my twelve year old heart soared.

A few days later, I returned from school to find my crying mother sitting in a car. "Get in!," she ordered. "Where are we going?", I asked. "In!!!", she reiterated.

I did as I was told. As the car rolled past the brown towers in which we lived, I shot a look at the balcony of the girl. I knew, somehow, that I was never coming back to her, that my mother's most recent marriage had suffered a serious severance, and that we were on our way, possessions be damned, to a new life God knew where.

I knew then all that he, Chaplin, had known: life at the hands of an emotionally unbalanced mother, an unwitting kinship with the road, the inability to form lasting connections.

But I was worse off, even, than he - not even able to take my hat along as life's companion.