FOCUS CROCUS!!!

I Missed Steve Martin Playing the Banjo: New Songs for the Five-Stage Bereaver

Good evening and it's mid-afternoon.

I am mourning the loss of Steve Martin. Don't be alarmed, Steve Martin is of course very much still with us. I'm mourning a personal loss resulting from the cancellation of a Steve Martin banjo concert, which was to take place this very evening in Montclair, New Jersey.

Last week, I learned too late that Steve Martin was commencing a bluegrass banjo tour to promote his new album The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo with a performance at Carnegie Hall. I learned this too late because the last time I went to SteveMartin.com was the day he posted a notice announcing an undetermined hiatus from updating his Web site. What's the secret to comedy? Timing. Discouraged, I failed to check back frequently, so unfortunately the first I heard of the concert was from someone already seated inside the venue.

Alas! (Eheu! for all you Latin scholars out there, by which I mean Simon and my brother.) Woe was me, plummeting instantly from perfectly unaware to I-cannot-live-another-day-without-seeing-Steve-Martin-play-the-banjo. Carnegie Hall was indeed lost, but seeing a glimmer of hope on the horizon, I raced urgently to SteveMartin.com, called Jesse, and shamelessly begged him to take me to the next closest show because, well, I don't have any money.

And so it happened that, having cashed in my Christmas present early this year, I spent one glorious day reveling in the fantasy that in exactly one week I would sit in the same building as Steve Martin and he would delight me with whimsical bluegrass banjo. Whimsical? Whimsical. That's my adjective and I'm sticking to it.

Whimsical indeed were my hopes, however, (see? I managed to bring that back around) for like a fleeting flight of fancy, they were fragile and not founded in fact. "Fuuuuuuck!" I exclaimed, on learning just one day later that the show had been canceled. No explanation, no apologies, no word at all except a voicemail from the ticket company saying Jesse's card would be credited.

Heartbroken, I combed the internet trying to make sense of the madness, slipping into the first of the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial.

No! What? NO! I wailed into the phone, prompting Jesse to remind me that he would never joke about something so serious as a Steve Martin banjo concert. Pouring over SteveMartin.com, I found that someone had already struck the date from the tour calendar. Where Montclair, New Jersey had once been, now Washington DC sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Ontario, as if nothing had ever happened, including the invention of geography. Had it all been just a dream?

As Google search after Google search turned up nothing, I lashed out at the man whose comedy records I listened to incessantly in my youth and whose autobiography lay a few feet away on my bookshelf, demonstrating the second stage of bereavement: anger. How dare he cancel a show -- a show that people had been waiting ONE DAY to see. Well EXCUUUUUUUSE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Bargaining came next. The date of cancellation being Friday the 9th, the only dates left on the East Coast were Monday the 12th in Washington, D.C. and three or four hours upstate in Troy, New York on Oct 20th. I begged him to take me to the impending show in D.C., trying to swap it in for the canceled one. We'll take the dollar bus. We'll find a couch to stay on. You have work? We can still make an 8 pm show! When that failed, I turned to Troy. We don't have a car, but I'm sure we can borrow one? Spend the night at our alma mater in Saratoga? We can sleep on the student center couches, just like old times!

Having mostly aborted those attempts, except for a pathetic, Troy? every time Jesse schedules something into his iCal, I'm left with the fourth stage of grief: depression. The sinking feeling I felt when I first heard the news is now completely submerged. I've complained to everyone within earshot to no comfort and many replies of "Steve Martin? Like, the actor?" I've bemoaned and begrudged and bewatched innumerable YouTube clips, listened to bluegrass, rambled and gotten small, but none of it has changed the fact that tonight, I'm not going to see Steve Martin play the banjo.

Which brings us to the last in the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief: acceptance.

This past weekend, Jesse pointed to "steve martin!!!!!!" screaming in blue letters from my iCal and asked, "Don't you want to take that off there? You're just making yourself sad." All week "steve martin!!!!!!" has remained, innocuous if futile, propped up like Tiny Tim on the wobbly crutches of hope and what might have been. But tomorrow it will be a lie, and I have to delete it soon before that happens. And so I say to you universe, I accept! I lay down my sword, my cellphone and my laptop and surrender to your ultimate and unpredictable will. Unless...

Troy?