Yes, I was born during a blizzard, completely naked and crying like a baby 65 years ago today.
In that amount of time I have become a lot less naked, most of the time, even if I claim to be a nudist.
I am also a lot less cold, as I have spent only about a third of my life living in Iowa and the rest in sunny Texas where I have experienced temperatures of 104+ degrees Fahrenheit more often than -20 degrees below zero thanks to a generally warm climate in Texas and the raging fires of global warming.
I do, however, still cry like a baby regularly.
My name is Michael Beyer. My cartoonist name is Mickey. My professional name is one of the following’ Mr. Beyer, Mr. B, Mr. Batman, Mr. Gilligan, Mr. Monkey Michael, or That Damned English Teacher (used most often by parents and principals.).
This is not generally a secret to any of my former students. And now that I have written it on the internet, it is no secret to the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and Mrs. Nozee, school secretary (not her real name for reasons of protecting me from her omnipotent wrath now that I am retired and no longer her problem, though she still knows everything in my permanent records.)
I have been a school teacher of English, Reading, ESL, Creative Writing, Journalism, Speech, and Study Hall. I have been a Cowboy, a Bandit, a Wildcat, an Owl, and a Ranger (all school nicknames.)
I have been a substitute teacher, a farm worker, a childcare center janitor, and a beat reporter for a college radio station.
I have published cartoons several times and earned $0.00 for my efforts.
I have written and published 21 books and have reached an average of $5.00 a month in royalties. At that rate, I will reach millionaire-author status in only 16,667 years.
This post is supposed to be a self-reflection about who I think I have become in 65 years of life. The problem with that is, accessing all my experiences and supposedly resulting wisdom, I still have no idea who I am. The beginning of wisdom is recognizing that I am a fool. I actually only know a tiny, super-little fraction of everything there is to know of a super-little, tiny fraction of what human beings are capable of knowing. And that is above average for what the average person knows.
I hope you can tell by the general tenor of this post that I am trying to be funny and write good humor. I think I am funny (in my stupid, misguided head.) But I have gotten comments that I am not funny. My sisters tell me this blog is mostly depressing. I have even been told I don’t draw very well for a twelve-year-old, even though I was 12 + 46 when I was told that.
But the only thing that really matters is, I make myself laugh. Laughter makes life better, even if it is only laughing at your own dad jokes. That is basically all I really write about, all I really care about. It is my purpose in life (the purpose existentialists say we all must choose for ourselves anyway.)
I start today with nothing in my head to write about. I guess I can say that with regularity most days of the writing week. Sundays in particular are filled with no useful ideas of any kind. But I have a certain talent for spinning. As Rumpelstiltskin had a talent for spinning straw into gold, I take the simple threads of ideas leaking out of my ears and spin them into yarns that become whole stories-full of something to say. And it is not something out of mere nothing. There is magic in spinning wheels. They take something ordinary and incomplete, and turn it into substantial threads useful for further weaving.
Of course the spinning wheel is just a metaphor here for the craft of writing. And it is a craft, requiring definable skills that go well beyond merely knowing some words and how to spell them.
My own original illustration.
The first skill is, of course, idea generation. You have to come up with the central notion to concoct the potion. In this case today, that is, of course, the metaphor of using the writing process as a spinning wheel for turning straw into gold. But once that is wound onto the spindle, you begin to spin yarn only if you follow the correct procedure. Structuring the essay or story is the next critical skill.
Since this is a didactic essay about the writing process I opened it with a strong lead that defined the purpose of the essay and explained the central metaphor. Then I proceeded to break down the basic skills for writing an essay with orderly explanations of them, laced with distracting images to keep you from dying of boredom while reading this, a very real danger that may actually have killed a large number of the students in my writing classes over the years (although they still appeared to be alive on the outside).
My mother’s spinning wheel, used to make threads for use in porcelain doll-making, and as a prop for displaying dolls.
As I proceed through the essay, I am stopping constantly to revise and edit, makeing sure to correct errors and grammar, as well as spending fifteen minutes searching for the picture of my mother’s spinning wheel used directly above. Notice, too, I deliberately left the spelling-error typo of “making” to emphasize the idea that revising and proof-reading are two different things that often occur at the same time, though they are very different skills.
And as I reach the conclusion, it may be obvious that my spinning wheel of thought today spun out some pure gold. Or, more likely, it may have spun out useless and boring drehk. Or boring average stuff. But I used the spinning wheel correctly regardless of your opinion of the sparkle of my gold.
I hated having to lead the girl, Derfentwinkle I think her name was, on a leash like a fairy-dog or a June beetle. It was cruel. But I also wanted her to live even though we were supposed to kill her.
But the girl was quiet and never once tried to resist being led. We took her to the magic lab where the Harpy cage was kept.
Harpies are foul creatures, among the worst of the gobbulun hordes in the Unseely Court. The one we held as prisoner for a week, Queen Duurt was her name, spread bad smells all around the cage. She kept trying to get hold of Mickey every single time he was tasked with feeding her. I’m sure if he hadn’t been quick enough at dropping the food into the cage, she’d have caught him by a wererat paw and pulled him close enough to bite his head. I was glad when they executed her and put her in the cookpots. She didn’t even make good meat to feed to the fairy creatures we kept as pets.
“Eeuw! This place smells horrible,” the girl said as Master Eli prodded her to go into the cage.
“You probably won’t be in there very long,” Master Eli said. “If you are no smarter than I think you are and don’t know anything about the necromancer’s lair, then we’ll have you cut up and boiling in the cookpots before you have time to get used to the smell.”
She looked at him with a hard stare that gave me neck prickles like a good ghost story told by a creepy bard.
“Master? Are we allowed to take her out of the cage sometimes?” Mickey asked.
“Learning magical sex positions?” I asked Mickey.
“She’s a dark one’s plaything, Mickey. You let her out, she’ll probably eat you rather than make love to you.”
“So, does that mean I have permission?”
“Knock yourself out, kid.”
Of course, Master Eli didn’t really mean that. He just had that kind of sense of humor. He would expect me to stop Mickey from doing detestable things.
“And, Bob, since you will be the one cleaning the mess up when something goes wrong… Be sure they are both dead before you turn them into beetle chow.”
“Yes, sir.” That part he probably did mean.
Master Eli left the room before I had secured the lock on the cage. Mickey was looking at me with that pathetic beg-eye of his.
“No, Mickey. You can not take her out and do bad things to her.”
“Why not, Bob? We don’t get many chances to learn about sex.”
“Because she’s a Sylph just like us. And she has to be treated with the respect due to a young lady. Not used as your dirty plaything.”
“Bob, I’m sorry you’re not very smart. I know we have to make allowances for you not being old enough to understand about physical love.”
“Mickey, we can’t because…”
“Really?” she said through the bars. “If the mouse-man wants to kiss me, I’m okay with that.”
“Oh, wow!” cried Mickey as he lunged for the cage, puckered lips leading the way.
I quickly grabbed the Mickey-stick that Master Eli left in the lab for just this very reason, and I hit him as hard as I could in the back of the head, laying him out cold on the floor… out of reach from the cage by mere inches.
“What did you do that for, quiet boy.”
“For his own good. You were going to grab him and possibly kill him trying to get out of the cage.”
“Why do you let them tell you that you’re not smart? You are too smart for me. Take your clothes off and come over to the bars, and I will happily give you what the mouse wanted. No tricks, either. I need some of that before you all kill me.”
“I only do what the master tells me to do. He’s a powerful sorcerer, and he knows how to handle tricky prisoners like you.”
She looked down at the floor of the cage, and I thought I saw tears forming in the corners of her dark eyes.
“You know the Master won’t kill you if you tell him what he wants to know about the necromancer.”
“Oh, I intend to tell him everything and then some. I do not love the Lord who sent me here to die. But I have no confidence that you won’t kill me anyway.”’
“No, he wouldn’t do that. The master does not deal with others in any openly cruel manner. He wants you for some reason more than just what you can tell him about your evil master.”
“What happened to the last prisoner that was in this cage?”
I didn’t really want to tell her about Duurt. That was a five-inch-tall monster with no redeemable qualities.
“We cut her up and boiled her to make pet food. She was an evil Harpy, and she killed many fairies before we captured her.”
“How do you know I am not evil like that? Or maybe I killed lots of people too.”
“You are not. I can tell just by looking.”
She looked at me with those dark eyes. It made my neck hairs prickle again, ever so slightly.
“You are cute, quiet boy. I’d be willing to tell you anything you want to know.”
“Really? Why did you attack Cair Tellos, then?”
“No choice. Kronomarke forced me to.”
“Even though you knew it was a suicide mission?”
“There are others whose lives mean more to me than my own, and he has power over them.”
“And he won’t hurt them after you are dead?”
At that moment Mickey groaned and sat up, rubbing his sore head. “Why’d you do that, Bob?”
“I was hoping to convince you to help me save them. But that was before I knew that everyone was a court jester in Cair Tellos,” she said to me, ignoring Mickey.
Before I could reply to either of them, Master Eli came back into the lab with a plastic bottle, one that was a stolen piece from the doll house of the old lady who lived on the eastern edge of the Slow Ones’ town. The bottle was filled with smoke. And two reddish eyes peered at us through the smoke in the bottle.
Master Eli gave the bottle directly to the girl.
“What’s this?”
“That’s Kackenfurchtbar, turned into a bottle imp by alchemy. Did you know his name translates to “Horrible Poop?”
“Hmm, well, he is a demon. It would have to mean something pretty icky.”
“Why did you give that demon back to her?” I asked.
“Because I control it by his demon’s name now. And it is technically transformed into a lie-detector for the time being. As long as it is in the cage with her, she cannot tell us a lie without it telling us the truth of it.”
“Oh, crumbs!” she said softly, while still being emphatic enough to deserve an exclamation point when I wrote about it in my journal later.
See Sally…? Wait a minute! Why don’t I remember Sally?
Did Dick forget to feed Spot and Spot was forced to kill and eat Sally?
No… I had Dick and Jane books in Kiddy-garter and they did have Sally in them. And Spot never killed anyone. But with all the running she did, Sally did not do anything memorable. If my teacher, Miss Ketchum, had told the Spot eats Sally story, I’m sure I would’ve remembered Sally better and learned to read faster.
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But I actually did learn to read faster because there was a Cat in the Hat, and a Yertle the Turtle, and because Horton the elephant heard a Who, and a Grinch stole Christmas. Yes, humor is what always did it for me in the classroom. Dr. Seuss taught me to read. Miss Mennenga taught me to read out loud. And in seventh grade, Mr. Hickman taught me to appreciate really really terrible jokes. And those are the people who twisted my arm… er, actually my brain… enough to make me be a teacher who taught by making things funny. There were kids who really loved me, and principals who really hated me. But I had students come back to me years later and say… “I don’t remember anything at all from my classes in junior high except when you read The Outsiders out loud and did all those voices, and played the Greek myth game where we had to kill the giants with magic arrows, and the stupid jokes you told.” High praise indeed!
I think that teaching kids to laugh in the classroom was a big part of teaching them how to use the language and how to think critically. You find what’s funny in what you learn, and you have accidentally examined it carefully… and probably etched it on the stone part of your brain more memorably than any other way you could do it. And once it’s etched in stone, you’re not getting that out again any time soon.
Humor makes you look at things from another point of view, if for no other reason, then simply because you are trying to make somebody laugh. For instance, do you wonder like I do why the Cat in the Hat is trying to pluck the wig off of Yelling Yolanda who is perched on the back of yellow yawning yak? I bet you can’t look at those two pictures positioned like that and not see what I am talking about. Of course, I am not betting money on it. I am simply talking Iowegian… a totally different post.
But the point is, humor and learning go hand in hand. It takes intelligence to get the joke. Joking makes you smarter. And that is why the class clowns in the past… the good and funny ones… not the stupid and clueless ones… were always my favorite students.
Mickey was a bean-headed child, so he is the perfect person to nattate this essay.
Children don’t always hear and understand perfectly what grown-up people tell them. So it was with me and the term “human bean.” My parents were repeatedly saying that I was a “human being” like all other “human beings.” But I, of course. insisted on hearing that I was a “human bean.”
It made perfect sense to me. Mom was always saying to me at every meal, “Michael, eat your beans. Before you can leave the table you must clean your plate. So, eat ALL of your beans.”
Great Grandma always told me, “You are what you eat.”
And I believed her. That meant that more than fifty percent of me was made entirely of beans.
But Great Grandma told me that beans were protein and you needed protein to build muscles. And you also needed protein for your brain to think with.
So, I was a human bean.
And as a budding artist, I noticed things. I had visual proof.
.People like me who were bean-heads tended to be smarter people than those whose heads were flat-on top or flat in the back. It made sense. A bean-shaped head had more room in the back for brains. And that meant that bean-headed Mr. Greenjeans was actually smarter than round-headed Captain Kangaroo. And some bean-headed people were really good at basketball. John Havlicek and Wilt Chamberlin were better basketball players than the New York Knicks had, probably because they were smarter. with their bean brains.
And as a child with a bean-shaped body, I had proof that I wasn’t just “full of beans” as Great Grandma said, I was MADE of beans. That meant the fat parts of my bean-body were actually pure muscle.
One day I was out in a pasture at Uncle Larry’s farm flying my box kite, the one I made myself with only a little help from my dad.
As I was flying it high enough to be seen from far away, two girls I knew from school and lived nearby came up to me to admire my kite as it flew.
Coraline Bigsby was a couple months older than me and a grade ahead of me in school. Alicia Stewart was a couple months younger than me and in my second-grade class.
“Wow,” said Alicia. “I have never seen a kite like that fly so high. How did you get it up there?”
I was probably blushing as I answered, since I secretly had a crush on her, the prettiest girl in our school. “I know the magic secrets to get it to fly like that.”
“Could you let us try?” Coraline asked. She was blonder and plumper than Alicia, but still generally a nice girl.
I handed Coraline the kite string. Almost instantly the wind died down and the kite floated gently down to the pasture grass.
The two girls both were instantly sorry that they had been the cause of my kite coming down. But no matter which one held the kite and which one held the string, they couldn’t get it up in the air again.
“Okay, Mike, what’s the magic secret to getting it to fly?” said Coraline, frustrated.
I, of course, with my great bean-brain, decided it was the perfect time to tell an evil lie. “This kite will only go up if you reduce wind resistance by taking off all your clothes.”
“My parents would kill me, if I did that,” said Coraline. “It is a bad thing to do.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Alicia, “But I’m way too shy to take my clothes off in front of a boy.”
“You didn’t do that to get it up the first time, Mike. You’re lying to us.” Coraline was getting mad.
“Yes, I did. You two weren’t here then. I put my clothes back on before you got here.”
“There isn’t any reason to do it that way anyway. What’s the advantage of being naked?” Coraline growled.
“Your clothes block the wind that’s needed to make the box kite fly. That’s what’s different about box kites.”
“Why don’t you show us, Michael. That will prove you are telling the truth,” said Alicia.
My eight-year-old bean brain began to panic. I was putting my own foot into the evil trap I tried to set. Okay, maybe not precisely my foot. I had to let them uncover my lie, or I had to uncover everything else.
Coraline was glaring at me. Alicia was smiling.
Well, you made your own horrible situation come to pass, Mickey. What are you going to do?
When I first took them all off and put back on my shoes, Coraline covered her eyes and Alicia blushed, but smiled as she watched everything I did. I was worried what they would say when I couldn’t get the kite back up in the breeze. But it almost immediately caught the wind and went up even higher than before. They were both happy to hold the string for a short time. But when I asked them if they would use my magic method to get it back up, they both declined. They were perfectly happy to stand next to me while I flew the kite in my bean-body birthday suit. They giggled a lot and looked at me more than they looked at the kite. But they were both happy with how that day went.
People are not really vegetables… even though I have seen IQ scores as a teacher that might say otherwise. But I often use the pun of calling them Human Beans.
Your basic human bean.
Western style beans
Of course, being a Texan means having a healthy appreciation for beans as a staple food. Cowboys used to live off of beans and beef jerky, and if Louis L’Amour is to be believed, they even made tea from mesquite beans. That makes your average cowboy made up of over 50 per cent beans. Of course the rest of him is mostly gas caused by the beans in his diet, whether it comes out as a fart or as a Texas tall tale… And yes, I admit it, I get a lot of my writing ideas from eating beans.
A Boston baked bean
We must also be aware that Texas has no corner on the beans market. We all know Boston baked beans by reputation. They, like the ever-hapless Cubs, had a habit of never winning the World Series. And now, in the last two decades, it has actually been difficult for the other teams to keep them from winning it all. But we shouldn’t mix up beans with baseball metaphors. Baseball is like life. Full of long and boring parts punctuated by intense moments of hitting, scoring, committing errors, and player versus player individual drama. And concession stand food! Beans, however, can taste good in chili draped over the ballpark hot dogs which cost more than a restaurant meal at most reasonable restaurants. And I promise you, you will never hit a home run over the fence by hitting it with a bean.
A Mexican style re-fried bean
And I wish to point out that this last human bean is not a racist cartoon. Beans are not part of the human race. They only have legs in cartoons and would come in last even when racing a snail. And all beans are created equal in the sight of God. Kidney beans, butter beans, navy beans, string beans… all beans are just beans, no matter what the color of their skin is, and no matter how they add flavor to a casserole. All beans are just in it to live life the best they can, and if that’s not enough… they can be planted as seeds to raise the next generation of human beans.
Drawing is a matter of life-long practice and a honing of skills. Honing? I like that word. A hone is a fine-grained whetstone for sharpening knives or cutting edges. It can also mean sharpening the details, clarifying and making more accutate the process you are performing.
So, what’s wrong with this picture?
Well, the unicorn who posed for it had round glasses and didn’t stick his tongue out while posing.
Honing is needed.
And this one… if they were actually all playing the notes we see being played here, it would be cacophony. Why didn’t you get the sound right.in this drawing, Mickey?
And these duck eyes aren’t realistic because mallards are usually much angrier when they are looking at you in real life. Where’s the red blood vessels around the edges of the eye-whites that real ducks don’t even have?
And this evil smile is not supported by necessary details. Where’s the MAGA hat? And why does his left hand not contain the severed pigtails of the girl who sits in front of him in Science Class?
And this picture? Is this supposed to be Cupid? The tip of his arrow is not dripping with love-potion. And if you look closely, you can see the wrinkles in the paper it’s drawn on. Honing is needed, Mickey!
Here I am back to doing D&D and Traveller on Saturdays. All of the art in this post was once used in conjunction with RPGs played with former students, and my own kids. I was always the game master in the past, and I used drawings and illustrations to help the imaginary adventures come to life.
Zoran-Viktor was a Mirin Ice Wizard from the Talislanta D&D campaign. The player of this character was Victor, a gifted dancer and actor from the school’s theater department. The Lawgiver was a powerful Non-Player Character in both D&D and Talislanta. The character design came from a metal figure I painted myself. Zoric was a Talislantan Thaumaturge, the player character of a weird kid who told x-rated jokes better than any other high-school boy I ever met.
Harun the Charmer was only ever used as a player-character once. The boy whose character it was provided the face I modeled it after. He was an absolutely arresting boy that had such a winning personality that people fell in love with him almost instantly.
He spent way more time helping another teacher grade papers than he did playing Talislanta games with goofy old Mr. B.
And I promise, only one of the facts presented here about Harun is a lie, in attempt to protect this young gentleman’s identity. We unfortunately lost him back in the 1990’s.
Crane the Sorcerer was an NPC trapped inside his own crystal ball by his own evil familiar well before my kids met him in the D&D adventure.
Viktor, the Snow Wizard of Ice Keep, was the father of Zoran Viktor. Victor loved playing Talislanta.
In my short, sweet sixty years of life, I have probably seen more than my share of movies. I have seen classic movies, black-and-white movies, cartoon movies, Humphrey Bogart movies, epic movies, science fiction movies, PeeWee Herman movies, Disney movies, Oscar-winning movies, and endless box-office stinkers. But in all of that, one of the most undeniable threads of all is that movies make me cry. In fact they make me cry so often it is a miracle that even a drop of moisture remains in my body. I should be a dried-out husk by now.
I wept horribly during this scene. Did you?
And the thing is, people make fun of you when you cry at movies. Especially cartoon movies like Scooby Doo on Zombie Island. (But I claim I was laughing so hard it brought tears to my eyes. That’s the truth, dear sister. So stop laughing at me.) But I would like to put forth another “Why do you think that?” notion. People who cry while watching a movie are stronger and more powerful than the people who laugh at them for crying. A self-serving thesis if ever there was one.
Movies can make you cry if you have the ability to feel empathy. We all know this. Old Yelleris the story of a dog who endears himself to a prairie farm family, saves Travis’s life at one point, and then gets infected with rabies and has to be put down. Dang! No dry eyes at the end of that one. Because everyone has encountered a dog and loyal dog-love somewhere along the line. And a ten-year-old dog is an old dog. The dogs you knew as a child helped you deal with mortality because invariably, no matter how much you loved them, dogs demonstrate what it means to die. Trixie and Scamper were both hit by cars. Queenie, Grampa’s collie, died of old age. Jiggs the Boston Terrier died of heat stroke one summer. You remember the pain of loss, and the story brings it all back.
Only psychopaths don’t feel empathy to some degree. Think about how you would feel if you were watching Old Yeller and somebody you were watching with started laughing when Travis pulls the trigger on the shotgun. Now, there’s a Stephen King sort of character.
But I think I can defend having lots of empathy as a reason for crying a river of tears during Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You see, identifying with Quasimodo as the main character, hoping for what he hopes for, feeling like a monster and completely unloved, and fearing what he fears connect you to the story in ways that completely immerses you in the experience. This is basically a monster movie.
But the film puts you inside the head of the malformed man, and you realize that he is not the monster. Righteous Judge Frollo and the people who mistreat Quasimodo for his deformity of outward appearance are the real monsters. If you don’t cry a river of tears because of this story, then you have not learned the essential truth of Quasimodo. When we judge others harshly, we are really judging ourselves. In order to stop being monstrous, and be truly human, you must look inside the ugliness as Esmeralda does to see the heroic beauty inside others. Sometimes the ideas themselves are so powerful they make me weep. That’s when my sister and my wife look at me and shake their heads because tears are shooting out of me like a fountain, raining wetness two or three seats in every direction. But I believe I am a wiser man, a more resolved man, and ultimately a better man because I was not afraid to let a movie make me cry.
The music also helps to tell the story in ways that move my very soul to tears. Notice how the heroine walks the opposite way to the rest of the crowd. As they sing of what they desire, what they ask God to grant, she asks for nothing for herself. She shows empathy in every verse, asking only for help for others. And she alone walks to the light from the stained glass window. She alone is talking to God.
Yes, I am not embarrassed by the fact that movies make me cry. In fact, I should probably be proud that movies and stories and connections to other people, which they bring me, makes me feel it so deeply I cry. Maybe I am a sissy and a wimp. Maybe I deserved to be laughed at all those times for crying during the movie. But, hey, I’ll take the laughter. I am not above it. I am trying to be a humorist after all.
Once I was finally able to scan pictures again, I did some scanning of old pictures that only got the camera treatment before on my blog.
But why stop a drawing at just the pen and ink, when there is potential for so much more?
So, I took the Microsoft generic paint program and my generic photo editor to not only this pen and ink of the Jungle Princess, but a few other pictures as well.
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This is what she looks like after being attacked with color by my arthritic old hands. (There was a day when I could have handled intricate details more cleverly, but that was many, many days ago.
Anyway, I have added new dimensions to Leopard Girrrl with color.
Now I need to add more complications to the basic story of the picture.
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Here is an older pen and ink.
This is Dorin Dobbs, one of the dueling plotlines’ protagonists from the novel Catch a Falling Star.
But, of course, Dorin is a more complex character than this old black and white.
So, color needs to be added.
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I had this one actually already painted in…
But in order to use it in this project, I needed to enlarge it to make it fit into the other picture.
Making this unlikely pair work together in a story is one of the challenges of doing surrealist stories. They have to be grounded in realism, but also bring jarringly different things together. Like the Jungle Princess going on an adventure with Norwall’s Lying King.
But, putting these two together is still not enough. Let’s try some other things.
The Jungle Princess together with Tomboy Dilsey Murphy is an unusual pairing.
Or what about the blue faun from Laughing Blue?
Or even Annette Funicello?
Ridiculous, I know. But don’t they look like satin sofa paintings?
Catch a Falling Star 
Why Do You Think That? (Part Two)
In my short, sweet sixty years of life, I have probably seen more than my share of movies. I have seen classic movies, black-and-white movies, cartoon movies, Humphrey Bogart movies, epic movies, science fiction movies, PeeWee Herman movies, Disney movies, Oscar-winning movies, and endless box-office stinkers. But in all of that, one of the most undeniable threads of all is that movies make me cry. In fact they make me cry so often it is a miracle that even a drop of moisture remains in my body. I should be a dried-out husk by now.
I wept horribly during this scene. Did you?
And the thing is, people make fun of you when you cry at movies. Especially cartoon movies like Scooby Doo on Zombie Island. (But I claim I was laughing so hard it brought tears to my eyes. That’s the truth, dear sister. So stop laughing at me.) But I would like to put forth another “Why do you think that?” notion. People who cry while watching a movie are stronger and more powerful than the people who laugh at them for crying. A self-serving thesis if ever there was one.
Movies can make you cry if you have the ability to feel empathy. We all know this. Old Yeller is the story of a dog who endears himself to a prairie farm family, saves Travis’s life at one point, and then gets infected with rabies and has to be put down. Dang! No dry eyes at the end of that one. Because everyone has encountered a dog and loyal dog-love somewhere along the line. And a ten-year-old dog is an old dog. The dogs you knew as a child helped you deal with mortality because invariably, no matter how much you loved them, dogs demonstrate what it means to die. Trixie and Scamper were both hit by cars. Queenie, Grampa’s collie, died of old age. Jiggs the Boston Terrier died of heat stroke one summer. You remember the pain of loss, and the story brings it all back.
Only psychopaths don’t feel empathy to some degree. Think about how you would feel if you were watching Old Yeller and somebody you were watching with started laughing when Travis pulls the trigger on the shotgun. Now, there’s a Stephen King sort of character.
But I think I can defend having lots of empathy as a reason for crying a river of tears during Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You see, identifying with Quasimodo as the main character, hoping for what he hopes for, feeling like a monster and completely unloved, and fearing what he fears connect you to the story in ways that completely immerses you in the experience. This is basically a monster movie.
But the film puts you inside the head of the malformed man, and you realize that he is not the monster. Righteous Judge Frollo and the people who mistreat Quasimodo for his deformity of outward appearance are the real monsters. If you don’t cry a river of tears because of this story, then you have not learned the essential truth of Quasimodo. When we judge others harshly, we are really judging ourselves. In order to stop being monstrous, and be truly human, you must look inside the ugliness as Esmeralda does to see the heroic beauty inside others. Sometimes the ideas themselves are so powerful they make me weep. That’s when my sister and my wife look at me and shake their heads because tears are shooting out of me like a fountain, raining wetness two or three seats in every direction. But I believe I am a wiser man, a more resolved man, and ultimately a better man because I was not afraid to let a movie make me cry.
The music also helps to tell the story in ways that move my very soul to tears. Notice how the heroine walks the opposite way to the rest of the crowd. As they sing of what they desire, what they ask God to grant, she asks for nothing for herself. She shows empathy in every verse, asking only for help for others. And she alone walks to the light from the stained glass window. She alone is talking to God.
Yes, I am not embarrassed by the fact that movies make me cry. In fact, I should probably be proud that movies and stories and connections to other people, which they bring me, makes me feel it so deeply I cry. Maybe I am a sissy and a wimp. Maybe I deserved to be laughed at all those times for crying during the movie. But, hey, I’ll take the laughter. I am not above it. I am trying to be a humorist after all.
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Tagged as empathy, movies that make me cry, Old Yeller, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Toy Story 3