The Old Man – One Week Out

It’s not often that I add a second post, but so much has happened since my last rehearsal post for this character, I felt that it warranted some more, progressed and rehearsed thoughts.

My back story reveals someone that tried, but is – at the end – a loser: A Semi-pro rodeo cowboy that travelled widely to earn money and support his family, but who – in the end – is drinking alone in a cheap Motel room, suffering the ghosts that are the result of the wrong decisions made. If only he had the chance to make those decisions again. Would things have turned out any different? These thoughts haunt may in my age group, that feeling of only realizing when it is too late that your carefully thought-out decisions were all based on faulty logic. In the case of The Old Man, he made it through life for many years as a Bigamist, probably happy that he had ‘gotten away with it’, but comfortable because everyone appeared to have won: Both families, both wives, both sets of Children. But where are they now?

Prompted by Bourbon intake, the story of his life (according to his own perception) has turned out as well as possible. As the repercussions of his decisions begin to unspool, though, he realizes that the fallout from these decisions have caused pain. This may well be the beginning of his own true pain, too: the acceptance of what his actions did have made others’ lives a living hell. The understanding that he has caused this, coupled with the realization that he is now too old to earn much more money, to live, means that he has arrived at a point that he has always tried to avoid: Being alone.

If having the ability to look after others is important to everyone, he has done all that he could to achieve this and it has failed spectacularly. If decision making and the imposition of his Machismo are the most important ways a man can be called such, then the fact that it has all failed, and his life is a mess is a late middle aged nightmare that many understand and relate too. “If only…” is his only comfort. Along with the drink – the only escape he has left.

Would his son make the same mistakes? What he has learned about Eddie recently shows that he will be exactly the same as I was. But the thought that Eddie will no longer take after him means that he will be so alone for so long, he will – effectively – cease to exist.

For a character that – at first sight – doesn’t exist, that is a lot of pain (tinged with Macho certainty) to portray. Memories are the only way out, and they all teach him how wrong he has gotten his entire life.

I have to work more on the accent, too!

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