Baby Daddy: a short film.

If necessity is the mother of invention, and real life the basis for much of art (pretty much all of mine) then my son Stanley put these two principles together several years back when he needed to get into the Emerson College comedy program. Now, whether or not comedy is something that can be learned is open for debate, but like anything else it can be studied and the boy wanted to get in there and study it.

Maybe he had seen me use all my troubles as the fodder for my art (owning one’s shadow to put it in more elegant Jungian terms) or maybe (probably) he had his own natural understanding of this artistic super power, but he titled his entrance essay "Holocaust With a Side of Heroin." Telling of his life, his survivor grandparents, and his addict mom and dad.

For his video presentation he decided to make a short film capsulizing the last few years of our relationship during which I had been so broke and unsettled that he would pay for pretty much everything we did using a stash of hundred dollar bills given to him one each Friday night by his grandmother Gogi, who, at age eleven, had hidden in the woods for two years with her parents and two younger sisters somehow staying one step ahead of the Nazis. Gogi loved Stanley with an intensity that was the energetic opposite of all the grief she had suffered, and had been handing him c-notes on Shabbos from the age of five! The evidence of this largesse was a mason jar stuffed with hundys on his dresser.

The relational takeaway of Stanley's prodigious lunch money, and my equally prodigious poverty was that he was the adult and I was the kid, at least when the check came around at Langer's deli. He decided to run with this premise, so we worked on a script, got our resident genius cameraman John de Menil on board and had Stanley's musician mother Karen (my ex-wife and deep comrade) do the music, help with the editing and produce.

I'm not sure if the short film got him into Emerson, (where he flourished taking courses with names like "Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?") but it sure didn't hurt.