We Were Young Once, and Beautiful

I’ve written before on these pages about my aversion to nostalgia. I have a tough time looking at old photos, old videos, old anything. Nostalgia means something like “acute homesickness,” which is a lovely way to describe the bittersweet pain of looking backwards. While on tour with The State these last couple weeks, I have heard the word used again and again to describe our show. It makes sense. After all, we’re a thirtysomething-year-old sketch group doing a reunion show. For me, though, my time with The State has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with correcting old mistakes, having fun, and being with people I love. While I do not feel homesick for my friends in The State when we are apart, there’s no denying the feeling of home I have when we’re together.

That’s not always good, of course. Home is the place where we most belong but just because it’s home doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. That’s true for us, too. We have fights. We bicker about stupid shit. There is no situation in which we will forgo a three-hour discussion when a ten minute one will do. We are impossible and I love us when I do not want to murder us with a hammer.

Look at these old fucks.

I imagine everybody has a friend group like that. Maybe they were your high school or college friends. Maybe they were the people you hung out with in your twenties. Maybe they moved away or grew apart or broke up. Maybe you’re still in touch with them or maybe not. But I bet you have a group like that. The friends who are both your greatest source of comfort and your greatest source of pain. That’s The State for me. Being on the road with them for the first time in decades has rekindled all of the good and bad, but mostly the good. We are older and gentler now. We’re parents. Our priorities have shifted from figuring out how to get maximally fucked up after a show to figuring out how, after a show, to get maximal sleep.

Kerri Kenney-Silver put together a great photo montage of us that we play before each show. It shows us through the years, from the time we met as teenagers to how we are now, graying and puckering around the eyes and mouth. Surprisingly, I’ve enjoyed looking at those photos each night. I’m not sure why. Maybe enough time has passed between the time most of them were taken and now that I don’t quite feel so connected to the people I see in them. There we are, but it’s not us. Or, maybe it is us but sort of the unevolved Pokemon versions of us. We are cuter and thinner but so much dumber.

God, we were dumb.

Nostalgia implies a moment trapped in amber. That doesn’t interest me. I don’t want to live like that, trying to recapture or re-experience something long gone. Instead, if I’m going to revisit the past, I want it to be with purpose. I want to use these shows to measure our progress as people and performers, and to look ahead. What can we gather from the past to take forward with us into the future.

It's unrelated, of course, but the death of Matthew Perry this past week made me stop to appreciate our own group a little bit more. Thankfully – and surprisingly – we’re all still alive. I wonder how the Friends cast is handling the double whammy of grieving for their former castmate and having to deal with the public nature of that grief. I didn’t know Matthew, but I recognize on a much, much smaller scale the challenge of confronting nuanced, complicated relationships in public.

Probably like most of you, I’ve spent the last several days looking at photos of Matthew Perry as a young dude on top of the world, alongside the shaggier, humbled version of Perry, the one sharing his demons with the world in the hope of making a positive difference for others even if he was ultimately unable to make that difference for himself. One of our guys, Tom, starred on The Odd Couple with Matthew and I received the news of Perry’s death moments before he was about to go onstage wearing googly Styrofoam eyes and a green froggy unitard. I couldn’t decide whether to let him know before he went out or not. In the end, I tried telling him by showing him the headline on my Twitter feed but he couldn’t read it because he didn’t have his cheaters on. Old and all.

We were young once, and beautiful. All of us. You, too. Maybe you are still young and beautiful. Maybe you’re young but don’t feel beautiful. I know I didn’t when I was young. I felt unattractive and unsure and unable to articulate my own pain. Whatever your current station in life, I hope you know you were beautiful then. You are beautiful now, too, albeit in a different way. One of the joys of getting older is recognizing so much more beauty than I did as a young man. I see it everywhere, on every face. As a young man, I understood beauty as a means to an end: what can beauty help me get? Now I see beauty as something we give. When we express ourselves well, when we offer something of value to another, when we smile at a stranger on the street. All of those are manifestations of the innate human desire to create beauty, to organize the world into something pleasing for ourselves and others.

That’s what this tour is all about for me, I guess. We’re out there busting our dusty balls (and one set of shriveled ovaries) to make something, hopefully something beautiful. We don’t look as good doing it as we used to but we’re holding up ok. Nobody broke a hip during a show. Nobody even broke wind. If you know David Wain, you know that’s a miracle. So while I recognize that, for most of our audience, nostalgia is a prime motivator to get their asses into seats but for me, it’s about something else. Gratitude. I’m so grateful to have these people in my life and grateful that other people care enough about what we do to come to our shows. I hope to see some of you at our upcoming dates in Chicago and Seattle. Maybe you’ll bring some old friends. I hope you do.