"Pottery Will Get You Nowhere" [12] and "Coda" [13]

“Pottery Will Get You Nowhere” is a great episode for Norma. She is stretching her wings and trying something different. In this case, a pottery class. Jack is at first perplexed, as are the kids. Then he begins to see it as a threat to domestic tranquility, and despite an attempt at casually disinterested disdain, his hostility can’t be contained. As the tension grows, Kevin finds himself alone in an unfamiliar no-man’s-land between his parents. As usual, Wayne is oblivious and Karen is too wrapped up in herself to be any kind of ally or sounding board. In the end, Norma and Jack have a huge blow-out and then come together a day later in a tearful, raw, emotional embrace. The whole thing leaves Kevin a little shaken.

Sometimes it takes something jarring to wake up to the fact that your parents are people, the same as you are. Except they’re older and have more responsibilities, and up to a certain point in life you are absolutely dependent on them for everything. I think people whose folks divorce generally learn this earlier because the emotional extremes attendant on the dissolution of a marriage make it hard to keep up any kind of pretenses, and a lot of the façade that parents maintain depends on the mutual reinforcement, support, and cover they provide each other. My folks met in freshman English class and have been married for 38 years, but I remember well when my mom spent weeks walking around the house practicing a cackling laugh in 1983 in anticipation of auditioning for the part of Gertie Cummings in a community theater production of Oklahoma! I didn’t know it then, but this was her return to performing after 15 years or so off to be married and start raising my brother and me. In contrast to Jack, my father sat his two boys down and explained that she was auditioning for a play and if she didn’t get in she’d be really disappointed and it would be up to us all to be kind and understanding. In the end, she was ecstatic to nab a part in the chorus. Which launched the family (sans my athlete brother) into a small-town community theatre scene that, in turn, set me on a course leading eventually to my current semi-professional life in the theatre.

At the time of all this, my mom would have been 35, just two years older than I am now. That’s a little sobering.

"Coda" resonates deeply with me as well… Ahem… It works on two levels – in the first place it is about piano lessons. Now, piano lessons are not strictly universal, even in America. But at the same time, though not everybody had to take piano, lots of people know somebody who had to take piano, so some other instrument and every kid can identify with those weekly obligations imposed from on high. One friend of mine had to take piano from 1^st to 5^th grade. It was always understood that at the end of that time he could choose to continue or not. He chose the not option, but to this day, any time I see him sit down at a piano he tickles the pearlies to produce a credible Hill Street Blues theme. I was more in the Kevin camp. My mother tried at two different junctures to get me to learn how to play the piano she’d bought to fill a spot on the wall in the living room. The first time must have been around 3^rd grade and it just didn’t take. A few years later she tried again, but after about six month the teacher told my parents the same thing Mrs. Carples says – there’s no sense coming every week if there’s no practice in between. There was none by me, so the lessons stopped.

On another level, "Coda" is concerned with talent versus hard work. There are basically two ways to be pretty good at something – work hard or have a knack for it, or some combination thereof. To be great at something, you have to have both. And to make it look effortless requires an incredible talent and a relentless drive to succeed. I once read that the most common characteristic shared by elite athletes is not natural ability, but a willingness to put in the hours in the pool, on the track, on the field, at the gym, or wherever. A lot of people (relatively speaking) might have the raw talent to achieve Olympic glory, but without that willingness, or even eagerness, to put in the hours of training, they’re doomed to be playground legends in their own minds.

Kevin’s interest in piqued when his teacher says he has talent and a feeling for the music that the diligent Ronald Hirschmuller will never have. But in the end he lacks both the commitment and the willingness to fail that will be demanded to develop his talents. No one ever told me I had talent for music, but I’ve always loved it. I’m a passable singer and there’s hardly a moment of the day I’m not singing something under my breath. On the other hand, I’ve got an out of tune guitar on a stand in the corner of bedroom that I can’t play bearing silent witness to the same lack of commitment that kept me from getting out my piano books for more than 30 minutes a week two decades ago.