1DANCING WITH DEATH
Today the name means something different. People remember Woody Allen as a joke, a criminal. One more dirty old man who beat the rap. But to me he was a hero, just like my father. Woody Allen and William B. Rogers both grew up in the Depression. They both survived the streets of New York City. Neither one was an Ivy League type, but they admired great ideas and great books and worked hard to educate themselves. My dad was crazy about jazz. He played the clarinet, just like Woody Allen. Watching Woody's movies with my dad was always special.
I saw Love and Death in 1976. In the movie Woody is a Russian nobleman who tries to be a hero, but everything goes wrong. He gets laughed at, he loses his girl, and then he's executed for trying to kill Napoleon. At the end he's alone in a field with Death standing behind him. Woody tells everyone that life is hard but to keep on trying. And then this strange, happy music starts up, and instead of looking sad Woody Allen starts dancing with Death, and the two of them go dancing down the road together. The End.
"Is that what life is really like?" I asked my dad, when it was over.
"Yes," said Professor William B. Rogers. "Life is a joke."
My father made me so mad when he talked that way. Like he didn't see how special he was. Or how much it hurt me to see him give up on life. Bill Rogers was a good seventy or eighty pounds overweight, and he smoked all the time, and he drank too much on top of that. Long before he killed himself he was broadcasting how much he wanted to die. And I began to blame him. I felt like it was all his fault. I made up my mind I would never smoke and never become an alcoholic. I also made up my mind to exercise and stay in shape. I was going to be strong and healthy all my life.
Now my father killed himself in 1986 at the age of 58. I turned 59 in 2022, and I'm sorry to say that my health is not so great. I've had a painful skin infection all summer, and I have to take antibiotics to keep ugly red sores from popping out all over. On top of that, something is wrong with the vision in my right eye. The doctors said it was just a hole in my retina, and they did a laser surgery to correct it. I thought that was great! But then last week they found a couple of little slits and they did more laser surgery to correct that. What if this keeps happening? What if I lose the vision in my right eye? I'm really scared!
At the end of Love and Death, Woody sums it up. "The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter." Well, I'm bitter. I spent my whole life trying not to be my father, trying to stay healthy and care about people and not give up. But I really don't know what's going to happen to me next. Why do I have to have these health worries now? I'm not my father. I didn't do anything wrong!
There's a part of me that thinks my father was right all along. He said life was a joke, and this is exactly what he meant. Do what's right, or do what's wrong, it doesn't really matter. In the end you lose everything. But maybe that isn't what Woody was trying to say. Maybe what he meant at the end of the movie was that you don't meet up with Death because you're bad or weak, but just because you're human. So don't be bitter. Forgive your father, forgive yourself. Dance with Death.