Cyndi Lauper, Drag Queens, and My Dad

A Review of Kinky Boots

"It’s not just a factory. This is my family.
No one’s gonna shut us down.
Not  while Charlie Price is around."

I’m going to be completely honest: Kinky Boots was not the top of my list of must-see musicals.  In fact, it wasn’t on the list at all.  I had virtually no plans to see Kinky Boots, even after its Tony Award, and I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for my mother’s love of all things sparkly and pop-infused.  I didn’t really have a good reason to stick my nose up at the show.  I admit I was initially turned off by the weird name.  Then I was further turned off when I learned that the score was written by Cyndi Lauper. I have nothing against Lauper, but with all of the disastrous concert musicals on Broadway I was fearful that this would be another example of a pop icon’s music being turned into a horrible parody of itself.  (Rock of Ages?  Seriously?) I guess I just didn’t have enough faith in the iconic creator of pre-teen anthems such as Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.  But, as it turns out, girls no longer just want to have fun.  Girls (under which I am including all those who self-identify as women) want to have fun, own their identity, and run a successful small business.  All while looking great.  Men, understandably, want the same.  And this is what Kinky Boots is all about.

I’m obviously way behind the times when it comes to Kinky Boots.  The show has been out forever, and I’m certain a million reviews have been written celebrating what is probably the most queer-friendly Broadway musical since RENT. I 'm also very happy about this, but I’d like to discuss an aspect of this play that perhaps hasn’t been explored as in depth.  As my father gleefully proclaimed at intermission: “I can’t believe it.  They made a manufacturing musical!” And indeed they did. 

Kinky Boots is inspired by the true story of Steve Pateman’s shoe factory WJ Brooks, in Northampton, England. (In the play, the company is Price and Son and Steve Pateman is the young Charlie Price.) Pateman inherited the factory from his father in 1978, becoming the fourth generation in his family to run the company.  In 1990, WJ Brooks began to struggle and lose money as buyers opted for cheaper shoes imported from overseas.  Shoe factories in the surrounding area began to close, and Pateman was forced to let a majority of his workers go, cutting his employees from 80 to 30.   Fortunately, Patemen discovered that a nearby woman’s clothing store was looking for a company to manufacture a new type of shoe for drag queens.  Patemen took on the project, and managed to save the company and bring back the jobs, with the “kinky boots” line bringing in a full 50% of the company’s revenue.   Of course, in the musical, Charlie forms a close bond with a drag queen named Lola, learns about how everyone is really the same at heart, and takes the company’s new line of kinky boots to the Milan Fashion Week. Oh, and he falls in love with a cute blond. Fine.  But the essential manufacturing story is still there, and that’s what really tugged at my heartstrings.

The cast dancing on a conveyor belt.

My dad owns a small manufacturing business in Cincinnati, OH.  They make metal parts for metal things.  I wish I could be more specific but 1) I am ashamedly ignorant of that which has supported me my whole life and 2) what they make constantly changes.  What Dad has always taught, and what Charlie learns, is that if you want to have a successful business, you have to make what the customer is buying.  You have to be smart, innovative, creative, and you have to take risks.  If you’re a theater person reading this, you may think I’m a bit confused.  Creative?  Risk-taking?  Those are the traits required to be an artist, not a business person.  Business people play it safe and they only care about money.  I’ve heard it all before, and at the risk of outing myself as a panderer to The Man, I have to say this conception is completely and utterly false.  Creativity and the willingness to push the envelope and take risks are prerequisites to success in all fields, regardless of whether you're writing plays or making metal lids for trash cans. Artists like to think of ourselves as having a monopoly on emotional investment in our work, but I’ve witnessed the passion my father feels for running his company and it is in no way less valid, sincere, or honorable than my own passions.  Not to mention the fact that I’d never be able to pursue my passion if it wasn’t for his.

 Charlie took a huge risk when he agreed to manufacture a stiletto that could support the weight of a full grown man.  First of all, he didn’t know if it was possible, and if he failed he would lose all the money he spent trying.  Second, he ran the risk of looking ridiculous in front of the fashion industry and the shoe industry of Northampton.  Third, he felt the weight and responsibility of other people’s livelihoods depending on his making a good decision.  Faced with competition from foreign markets, a decline in demand, and a rise in their own costs, both Charlie and my father have had to make tough choices.  Both Charlie and my father have gone through times when they truly didn’t know if their little idea would work out or whether they would end up losing everything, both for themselves and for the people that work for them.

What leaders in all fields have in common is a certain feeling of isolation.  Whether you're the President of the United States, the owner of a shoe factory, or the director of your high school theater club’s fall play, the buck stops with you.  Sure, if you’re successful you get the most credit, but if you’re unsuccessful you take all the blame.  And with good enough reason: that’s your job.  You’re the guy who's responsible if things don’t work out.  Personally, I could never cope with this sort of pressure.  But if we didn’t have people who could, we wouldn’t have jobs or an economy at all.

Only a few days before the company’s pivotal trip to Milan, Charlie realizes that his assistant has miscalculated the price of travel.  They can no longer afford the flight, they are behind on hiring models and, worst of all, the boots are not being made correctly.  Although someone else had done the miscalculation and the workers are the ones messing up the boots, it's Charlie’s responsibility to solve these problems, and time is short.  Added to all this is the fact that, as 8:00 pm rolls around, the workers throw in the towel and head home.  Charlie is left completely alone, hopeless, and faced with the impending threat of moral and financial failure.  This moment is a given for anyone who owns a company.  It’s the standard existential crisis when a man or woman looks in the mirror and asks “Seriously?  What was I thinking?  Who am I to run a small business?”

Charlie sums up the feeling perfectly in Soul of a  Man when he sings “Stupid Hubris, no excuses/ I blew my fuses, I guess I'm just a ruse in my father’s shoes/ Not amusing, no confusing this streak of losing/ Totally brutal and useless too.”  At the end of the number my dad simply turned to me and said “I feel bad for the guy.”  Of course, almost immediately after, Charlie’s employees return to the factory, full of support and passion for kinky boots.  What a nice ending for a musical, I thought. 

But, as often happens, I was wrong.

After the show, Dad told me this story: 

A couple years ago, one of his major customers told him they needed an entire shipment of a product by the end of the day.  Dad’s company hadn’t even ordered the parts they needed to make the project.  They ordered the materials immediately, and they came in around 5:00 pm.  Well, not surprisingly, it was time for the guys in the shop to go home.  And they did.  So my dad, with a customer breathing down his neck, went out into the plant, turned on the laser, and starting making the parts himself. Gradually, employees started trickling back in of their own free will and working alongside him.  They got the product delivered on time.  Now, I’ll admit to being biased, but I’m willing to wager that strong yet humble leadership is what pulled the company through on this day.  So it doesn’t just happen in musicals.

Now, I’m in no way trying to undermine or ignore the importance that sexual politics and gender diversity had in this story.  And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the best song of the show by far was Lola’s heart-wrenching “I’m Not My Father’s Son.”  The heart of Kinky Boots is a story about embracing one’s true identity, accepting others for who they are, and rocking out to 80’s-style pop music.  But it touched my family in a slightly different way.  For my dad, it validated his experience as a small business owner.  It’s a difficult, emotional, labor of love that requires the willingness to make tough decisions, be creative, risky, and persevere.  After seeing Kinky Boots, I think he finally felt like those theater people get him.  And I guess that’s why he loved the show so much.

Love and Friendship: Just an Opinion

To a Dear Friend.

I tried to respond to your comment in the reply box, but I quickly realized that I had so much to say that my comment was going to be about as long as a blog post.  So I may as well go ahead and give you a full answer, because insightful comments deserve full answers.  As do friends who take the time to read my little blog as many times as you have.  I want to start off by saying, that I’m no expert on the subject of love and relationships, obviously.  But anxiety has prompted me to become a bit of an obsessive, so over the past six months I've been reading everything I can get my hands on, talking extensively with a rather well-known therapist who specializes in the subject, and maniacally interviewing happily married couples, such as my parents and grandparents.  So what I can give you now is only an opinion.  The opinion of an anxious 23-year-old who has never been married.  And of course this opinion is filtered through the lens of my religion (because of course I had to talk to priests), my life in theater (grilling married classmates until they avoided me in the halls) and all my personal isms.  But I’ll go ahead and share it, for what it’s worth.

“There was something kind of unsettling to me about what you wrote here when I first read it.”

First of all, I'm glad this post unsettled you a bit.  What I mean is, it’s often unsettling when our unconscious beliefs and expectations are challenged, as you've so rightly observed.   And what is anxiety if it’s not a deep sense of being unsettled, a sort of perpetual state of “I’m not sure if this is right”?

 I want to respond to your comment about love verses in-love, because this idea has given me so much anxiety over the past months.   And when I say anxiety I mean literally calling my partner up in the middle of the night because “my heart is beating so fast I can’t sleep, I’m so scared, how do I know we’re meant to be.” To which my good man would sleepily respond that he loved me and I loved him so would I please go back to bed and stop calling for the love of God.  Easy for him to say.  And yet for a while the question lingered, and with this question came a lot of shame, which triggered more panic.  And while I've been doing a lot better, even your comment was enough to trigger me.  But then I took a deep breath and thought… actually I can respond to this.  I've been there before.  I know the answer I've come to for myself, which possibly will help you.  (But I’m not sure.)  And underneath it, I think I hear a more universal question that so many people ask, which is “what has been keeping me from finding something that works?” 

“I think there's a difference between just love and being in-love... the difference between how I feel towards my friends and how I would feel toward the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Not necessarily something perfect, but definitely something deeper.”

I want to share with you a beautiful quote from Jungian analyst Robert Johnson’s book We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.    Johnson writes “When two people are ‘in-love’ people commonly say that they are ‘more than just friends.’ But in the long run, they seem to treat each other as less than friends.  Most people think that being ‘in-love’ is a much more intimate, much more meaningful relationship than ‘mere’ friendship.  Why then do couples refuse each other the selfless love, the kindness, the good will, that they readily give to their friends?  People can’t ask their friends to carry all their projections, be scapegoats for their moods, keep them feeling happy, and make life complete for them.  Why do couples impose these demands on each other?”

So in a sense, you’re certainly right, but on the other hand there are certain aspects of friendship that we would do so well to integrate into our romantic relationships.  I’ll list a few here.

1)      Friendships grow over time.  We don’t expect to be best friends with someone the moment we meet them.  We don’t expect to just see them and “know” they are our friend.  Sure, sometimes this does happen, which is awesome, but more often than not it’s a gradual thing, and that doesn't make the friendship any less strong.  But with our partner, we expect the connection to be instant.  We want to know right away, and if it’s not there that second, why even bother trying? 

2)      We go out and make friends.  We actively seek out friendships, because they are necessary to our lives.  There is no shame involved in trying to make friends, in fact if a person doesn't try to make friends its pretty darn strange.  In contrast, actively seeking out a partner is seen as desperate or just pathetic.  If it’s meant to be it will “just happen,” right?  Logically, though, if we’re searching for something deeper than friendship, and it’s universally accepted that friendship takes some work to form, we may want to reconsider the idea that love relationships are ready-made.  If anything, deeper connection should require an even deeper effort.

3)     We forgive AND forget.  If your roommate pisses you off, you’re over it by the next morning, because ultimately you know he’s a good guy and… whatever you can’t stay mad at him for long.  But if it’s your girlfriend, well, you have to reconsider the whole relationship, right?  Because whatever it is she did could be a sign that deep down she’s not even the person you thought she was, and maybe you shouldn't be together, because you can’t be with someone who does that, right?  Right?  Well, actually… the loving thing to do would be to treat her like your friend in this case.

4)      We don’t expect them to solve our problems, just listen.  This is so essential to the myth of romance in our culture, I almost didn't list it, for fear of turning you off to my opinion. But I'd rather you deeply disagree with me than not give you my full thoughts, because this is so important.  We expect our relationships to complete us, to make us happy.  To fulfill us.  But the truth is, if you admit that no matter how great your partner is, she is still a human being, we basically have to admit that she can’t save our soul.  So to speak.  We are still responsible for our own happiness.  A partner can half your sorrow and double your joy, but she can’t eliminate your sorrow and create your joy.  She just can’t.  So if you’re in a relationship and you’re dissatisfied with life, it doesn't automatically mean the relationship is wrong.  There are a million things that could be wrong, and ending the relationship will help your work struggles about as much as ending a friendship would.  That is, not at all.

5)      We go through periods where we don’t hang out as much.  Sometimes we get busy, we don’t have the same classes, or we just get sick of each other and need a break.  But this is okay, because we know the person is our friend and when the time comes, we’ll be two peas in a pod again.  When it comes to relationships, we expect a great deal more consistency.  And this makes sense, because we’re talking partnership here.  But relationships, like friendships, do ebb and flow.  You’re not always going to feel as passionate towards your partner.  But unlike friendships, we too often take the natural ebb and flow of relationships as a sign that they are over.  We don’t realize that, with trust and time, our feelings will reappear.  Like the moon which goes through cycles of fullness and eclipse, or the tide of the ocean, feelings move in and out, but we trust in their return.  Feelings come with love, but they are not identical to love.  Love, like the moon, is always there.

I don’t want to over-share in regards to my own relationship.  As you know, we are unmarried and have no immediate plans to be married, so we’re not the best example of real lovingness.  (And if we never end up married, everything I’m saying still holds true for me.) But I will say that the fact that he is my best friend is one of the essential things that makes our relationship romantic.  Once, in one of my highest anxiety states, I called my mother in tears saying “But we’re best friends.  Do I need to break up with someone because we’re best friends? What about love?”  My mother basically laughed in my face and said, “Being best friends is the best case scenario.  You can always get back to loving someone if at the core he is your best friend.”  This is coming from someone who has been happily married for almost thirty years.  And I will say that my parents have a highly romantic relationship, nothing like those platonic-friends-pretending-to-be-in-love sort of couples that give me so much fear and you’re probably imagining on some level.

The last thing I will say relates to that something deeper that we all yearn for.  I’m going to make a bold statement and say that that something deeper has nothing to do with the initial spark that our culture holds as tantamount in relationships.  That initial spark fades and is no indication of whether or not that something deeper will arrive.  There is a beautiful quote about soul-mates that I heard somewhere along the mess of my frantic research.  I’m going to paraphrase and probably butcher it, but let me go ahead.

“Anyone who says they will know their soul-mate right when they see them has no idea what they are talking about.  You only become soul-mates by becoming.  By struggling, and learning, and living together over time, that is how you become soul-mates.”

Of course, being an anxious person, as soon as I learned that friendship was an essential aspect of love, I began to obsess that my mate and I weren't good enough friends.  I said to my mother “But we don’t like the same things!  We can’t even agree on a movie to see.  He doesn't even like sushi.  Oh my god, he doesn't like sushi!” 

To which my mother replied, “Well Emily, that’s what your friends are for…”

Blue Jasmine and Living With Anxiety

I hesitated when setting up to write this, because it would be so easy not to get personal with this blog.  I could write a pretty sharp essay about the similarities between this film and A Streetcar Named Desire.  A huge part of my psyche is screaming "For God's sake, Emily, don't talk about anxiety.  No one wants to read about anxiety.  This is a blog for reviews, so you can show people how much potential you have as a playwright."  But of course, the primary job of a playwright is to reveal herself on a personal level. 

So I'm going to write about anxiety.

In Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett plays the title character, the former trophy wife of a brilliantly wealthy financial genius - who turns out to be a brilliantly wealthy financial criminal.  And a cheat.

 After the FBI confiscates all her money, Jasmine finds herself heartbroken, broke, disillusioned, and on the verge of a mental breakdown.  As she explains, “There’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.” She returns, out of necessity, to the dilapidated home of her sister, Ginger, played by the delightfully sunny Sally Hawkins. (Happy-Go-Lucky, Made in Dagenham).  The two sisters, despite each having gone through their share of difficulties, have utterly divergent outlooks on life. 

Ginger, who worked bagging groceries while her wealthy sister ignored her for years, is generous enough to open her home to Jasmine, despite the fact that this prevents her fiance from moving in with her. Jasmine cannot stop comparing the run-down house to the mansion she lived in before.   Ginger, who also went through a nasty divorce, has opened her heart to a new man and is ready to move on.  Jasmine sees no one wealthy enough, successful enough, classy enough, educated enough, good looking enough… you get it.  She is constantly criticizing Ginger’s admittedly imperfect fiance, even to the point where Ginger starts to have her own doubts.

But Jasmine isn't really a nasty person.  Jasmine is living with acute anxiety.  Living with anxiety feels like the layer of skin just below the surface is constantly vibrating.  You wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning with your heart pounding and a million frightening thoughts running through your mind.  “Is my neighborhood safe enough?  Do my friends really like me?  Am I doing well enough at my job/school? Is my relationship on stable grounds?” And then there are the really frightening thoughts.  “Is the world around me one great lie?  Am I lying to myself?  Am I really happy?  Do my loved ones really love me, or are they just pretending?  Am I just pretending to love them?”

We live in an unstable world.  As Blue Jasmine portrays, we’re in an economic crisis caused, in part, by unethical business practices.  Politicians, financial institutions, and other powers we trusted have deceived us on numerous occasions.  Our climate is changing, and no one really knows what to do about it. On the personal level, the people we love sometimes don’t love us back.    To top it all off, our culture’s expectations for quality of life are going up and up, to the point where many find it difficult to be satisfied with what earlier generations would have deemed enough.

I don’t know about you, but I see this especially played out in our relationships.   This is where my anxiety has recently settled.  (It hasn't always settled there.)  My grandparents, both sets, married very young by today’s standards. They were not necessarily financially stable by today’s standards.  I can’t say for certain, but I’m guessing they probably weren't Hollywood good-looking at the time. I’m also guessing - and this is just a guess so please correct me if you happen to be my grandparent reading this - that they weren't passionately “in-love” by today’s standards.  What I mean by that is they probably weren't running-through-an-airport-quoting- the-Notebook-never-had-a-doubt-you’re-my-soulmate-you’re-perfect-no-work-involved-the-end “in love.” I’m certain they don’t feel that way now.  But my grandparents, both sets, still seem like each other’s best friends.  They still seem to like each other a lot.  They still seem to love each other in a quiet way, which is more than I can say for most other couples I've seen.  So how does this relate to Blue Jasmine? 

At the top of the film, we hear Jasmine describing to a stranger on a flight the way she felt when she first met her husband, Hal. (Played by the ever-more-impressive Alec Baldwin.) Hal, she describes “swept her off her feet.”  They have a song together.  She just knew.  He was The One.  To top it off, he also happened to be filthy rich and good looking.  He buys her all kinds of crazy presents.  He is the perfect guy.  Except that it turns out he never stopped cheating on her and most of his money was stolen.  So it would seem that all of Jasmine’s initial instincts were, maybe, wrong.  She picked the wrong guy.  She made a mistake. 

Or did she? 

Is the problem actually not the man at all, but the criteria by which she judged him?  For myself, I feel a great pressure to judge my mates by Hollywood standards.  I feel like we should have a song.  I feel like I should look across the room and “just know.”  This pressure comes partly from society, but I also largely from myself.  I find myself looking at perfectly good relationships my friends have and thinking “oh he is so quiet/loud/skinny/fat/whatever.  She could totally do better.”  This is the root of anxiety.  Good is never enough.  Reasonable advice such as “don’t settle for someone who doesn't treat you well or who you don’t love,” has morphed into “don’t settle for anyone that isn't perfect in every way and who you’re not so in love with that you will chase them through an airport to keep them from leaving.”  Note that I am contrasting love and “in-love” in this statement.  Feel free to disagree with me in the comments.

The modern, anxious, mind, has a tough time being happy.  It has a tough time knowing when it truly loves another person.  It just has a tough time connecting with people.  What makes Blue Jasmine a great film, in my opinion, is that is challenges society’s deeply help value of “never enough.”  The movie isn't about how Jasmine fell for the wrong guy and moved on until she found the “right” guy.  It’s about how her conception of right and wrong so drastically contrasts with that of her sister.

In one of the most telling lines of the movie, Jasmine  shouts at Ginger “You choose losers because that’s what you think you deserve and that’s why you’ll never have a better life.”  This sounds reasonable, but what do we consider a “loser” by today’s standards?  Flawed human being?  Average job?  Average looking?  Not the guy from The Notebook? (Or the original fiance from The Notebook, who actually was a pretty good guy, right?)

 SPOILER ALERT (not major)

 Ginger doesn't choose losers because she doesn't think she can do better, she chooses the best of the average guys that come her way and make her happy.  As Ginger describes, the better guys just aren't beating down her door.  And when a guy does come along that seems like a step up, he turns out to be a liar as well.  Rather than wallowing in self-pity, Ginger returns to her fiance, happier again to have him back.

Hal may be highly romantic, and he may have made Jasmine feel madly in-love, but he ultimately did not care about her or any of the people he came in contact with.  In contrast, the most romantic thing Chili says in the entire film is probably “Some of the stuff she said made me really mad, but I kept it on the inside.”  It might not seem like much, but this means he cares enough about Ginger to try to improve himself and his temper.  So I’ll take it.  And she seems comfortable enough with herself to realize that a mate isn't a status symbol and how much you laugh with someone may be just as important, if not more, than how many butterflies he gives you. 

I get Jasmine.  I've spend a lot of time in high anxiety worried about whether I have the perfect relationship.  It’s hard not to, looking at the divorce rate in our society.  Look at what Hollywood teaches us about love.  (They are probably connected.) But then I look at my grandparents and I look at Ginger, and I think...

I’m so lucky that my guy took me to see Blue Jasmine.

It’s probably okay if I don’t marry that dude from The Notebook.