SCOTT GARSON

A MAN OF THE STAGE
 

Last night I received a telephone call from a man who said he was my mother. I was

drunk. "My mother lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana," I explained. "She just got a labrador

mutt who keeps pissing in a corner of the screened porch." Into my end of the line came

the long human silence, all fissure and distance. I began to feel sorry for the man who

wanted to say he was my mother, so I told him a truth about me – that I'd once been a

man of the stage. Riding a swell of the goodness in me, I offered him help with his lines.