Meditation On Tony Curtis

The day Tony Curtis died, I heard Bob Mondello on NPR speak about him.  He talked about his talent, his struggle to be taken seriously despite his good looks (he was too spectacularly handsome for my taste), his abilities as a comic actor and a mimic, his many movies.  But, he said at the end, Tony Curtis never got the Oscar he craved.

I was driving to yoga down one of those Vermont roads that are so beautiful in this season you just want to die, when I heard this.  And it occurred to me that Tony Curtis, who was so famous that even I knew who he was, probably felt sad and frustrated during his life because he had never won an Oscar.  That he probably didn't think he was famous, or at least, not famous enough.

And in a pre-yoga moment of enlightenment I saw the futility of striving after fame, recognition, and admiration, because we humans are so made that the minute we get some, we want more.

Maybe it was the woods in their glory, maybe it was the wisps of cloud floating low among the trees as the road wound along the valley floor, but for once I felt--really felt instead of recognized or understood or intellectually grasped--the uselessness of wanting stuff.  And the importance of looking at the trees and the clouds and saying, "This is enough."

Then I said what my friend Indigo calls a "prayer equivalent" for Tony.