The Pretender

Your name is Jarod and when you were a child you were deemed a genius and trained by a quasi-governmental agency known as the "Corporation." They've taken your remarkable mental abilities to train you to perform whatever tasks needed to obtain their own ends to their own political agenda. After a while you have begun to question your assistance to this organization and determine you need to spend the rest of your life rectifying the wrongs you have helped perpetuate. Problem is the Corporation has taken away your life, the life you knew before, your parents- and all that gives others their identity. So part of your search is the search for who you really are.

Your training and your remarkable mental skills give you the ability to become whatever you need to become to place yourself into the middle of any situation that helps you achieve your own goal: to right the many wrongs in this world. If the situation requires you to be a doctor, a policeman, a Vegas blackjack dealer, a scientist trained to handle highly infectious viruses, a jet pilot, you have the ability to use your skills to succeed. You are the pretender- the eternal misfit, who can pretend to fit into any situation yet never belong; perpetually peripheral, on the outside looking in.

Your name is Lyle Lovett and you are a fairly well known, and fairly well respected entertainer. You are best known for your music, a mixture of country, blues, swing and jazz. You are also known for your failed marriage to Julia Roberts, as well as your own acting career (with a notable performance in Robert Altman's excellent The Player). You performed a solid concert last Sunday night at Northrop Auditorium. Billed as Lyle Lovett with a Large Band (no, it's not a band of pumped up steroid filled ex-football players, but rather a band with numerous musicians), you showcase a wall of sound complete with gospel backing singers on some numbers, and local musician hero, Leo Kottke on a couple of others. Your songs are full of wit and humor, but often come across as a bit too clever, tender without revealing all that much about the man who wrote them. "I don't love you any less, but now I can't love you anymore..."

Because your songs are so eclectic, it is hard to categorize you and thus you probably will never get the notice and acclaim that you probably should in an industry full of predictability and blandness, where every song starts to sound like the one before, and every singer indistinguishable from whoever was hot two or three years ago.

You are the editor of a small, weekly newsletter. During the past week you fulfill a life long dream of sorts, by getting an article published in several local newspapers (one even being a daily). This sudden success is surprising, in that you didn't see it coming. The article that was published wasn't exactly one of your best, not even one you feel all that proud of; it was written quickly to fill up space, one of the many you have written recently that you threw together in an hour and away forever.

Thus you have mixed feelings. Part of you sees this latest triumph as another in a growing line of signs that suggest you might be doing all right for yourself. And any of which would have seemed highly improbable just a few years back. Another part begins to see something off track, that if someone somewhere thought that article was good, there were many others already written, and a few still left to write, and maybe what you once thought might be, still might be ahead somewhere. You are a bit disappointed that the people who saw the article tend to comment more on your picture rather than the words, and are disappointed you didn't mention "them in the article." But that was to be expected. You've seen that before. After all these years you still don't know, or at the very least still don't understand how your writing does and does not effect people.

There may be a connection between these three separate stories, as much as there ever is a connection between anything. All three of you are actors, playing roles of what is expected of you while at the same time somehow playing off of what is expected of you. Some somewhere out there might even suggest an overall theme many of us share, a commentary on today's society where there are many who are pretenders, searching for their roles, trying to understand past wrongs, hiding at times behind their own words, and constantly searching for that elusive comfort of the place others call home. Oh and one more thread ties together the three of you: you alls gots goofy hair.