A Monday, lunchtime, in a crowded Scottsdale café. I am people-watching.
An older man walks by, trying repeatedly and unsuccessfully to hoist his pants higher on his waistline. A 30-ish couple down the way are glaring at each other, waiting for their check and silently, furiously plotting what they’ll yell at each other once they get to the car. Another elderly gentleman wanders past, wide-eyed and gaping at the clatter, chatter, and laughter around him.
Across the aisle from me sit a young teenage boy and his mother. He is hard at work on the meal before him. Pancakes, drenched in maple syrup. And … salad. Awash in ranch dressing. His mom is quietly watching.
The pancakes and salad are an arresting, if not especially appetizing, combination. But the boy is happily absorbed in his culinary activity, and the woman is focused on the boy.
I wonder what she’s thinking. The boy has Down syndrome. Whether his mealtime tastes are related to that or not, I don’t know. More likely, he just likes pancakes. Maybe his mother, seeing that he’s a little bit chubby, is urging him to give equal time to the lettuce.
Her face would take home the pot in any poker game. Is she tickled? Proud? Tired? Is she facing, yet again, the hard reality that she will probably be caring for this boy for the rest of her life? Or is she imagining other possibilities – a group home, some limited independence? Is her mind on what might have been? On what’s still to be? On who will care for him after she’s gone?
One thing she doesn’t seem to be thinking about is what anyone else is thinking. She hasn’t so much as a glance for the people crowding the tables around her. Her world, for this moment – maybe in every moment – is the boy.
He mops up the last of the maple syrup, and leans back, smiling at what he sees in her eyes. And she smiles back, at what she sees in his.
The evening before. I’m flipping channels, looking for something to watch. I pause at the Tony awards, in time to hear breathless people announcing with studied awe the name of the icon about to sing in tribute to the Broadway brights who have died in the past year.
He is tall and black, wearing heavy makeup and a woman’s glimmering pantsuit, dreadlocks wrapped above his head in a way Carmen Miranda might particularly have appreciated. He sings his tribute, and the audience weeps and melts and explodes into rapturous applause.
He is, I learn, a busy man: a singer / actor / director / composer / exotic fashion stylist, who has himself won a Tony, and Emmy, and a Grammy. He is described, by his peers and by an enthralled interviewer, as “a talent extraordinaire,” but equally celebrated for his outspoken support for abortion and his enthusiasm for same-sex unions, including his own.
He is praised for having “a passion for radical honesty.” He refers to himself, though, as a “black, queer man,” proudly “sitting inside my authenticity, and setting that free, and living that publicly,” which “allows for others to do the same.”
But he’s also tired, he admits. His whole life long, “there has never been a moment that I’ve not been in trauma.”
That just sounds sad, for a man in his 50s. Talented, he may well be. Radical, he certainly means to be. But it’s hard to attribute this vaunted “honesty” to a man determined to present himself as a woman. Or to locate the “authenticity” in a man so thoroughly bent on being something he is not and can never be.
Watching him sing earnestly to the camera, I can’t help but wonder what he wants from the people he’s singing to. Art, he says, has been his “savior.” But the price for that is being, always, “on” – in costume, in character, in sexual confusion and transgender chic, in … trauma.
The thundering applause and genuflecting fans are the mirror in which he sees himself. They persuade him of his artistry; they convince him that he’s saved. But staring out of those eyes is a soul that – when the music stops and the footlights fade – must ache for reality, and the truth.
The night before his show, my wife and I stood in a hotel room in beautiful downtown Ely, Nevada, watching our dog, Archie, steal glances at himself in a different mirror.
Archie seems persuaded, like Socrates, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” So he examines his – or, if not his life, his countenance – at some length. And apparently decides that he reflects fairly well on himself, if the wagging tail and happy trot that carry him away from the mirror are any indication.
What, exactly, does a dog see, gazing on himself? Just another TV screen, with an especially fetching hero? A long-lost brother, looking in through this curious portal from some room next door?
Or, like the rest of us, does he mostly see a stranger … familiar in form and expression, but behind those eyes, a mystery?
We have coming – each of us – a reckoning with our reflection. The image we have settled on, in the mirror of our choosing.
"For now, we see in a mirror, dimly,” the Apostle Paul writes in one famous passage, “but then, face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” I have no idea whether Archie’s consciousness will one day be expanded. But someday, a boy with a passion for pancakes and salad will know himself at least as well his mother does.
And a certain artist of some acclaim will leave all his glory behind to stand before a Father who knows him better than he knows his own hungry soul. In the presence of his Creator, he’ll need – like the rest of us – something more than his art to save him.
May God, in His infinite mercy, help him find that Authenticity.
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