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[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: This is Tonya Pinkins, and you're listening to You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:06] Tonya Pinkins: Welcome back to part two of my conversation on grief and contemplation with Harry Kelly.

[0:17] Harry Kelly: Um in meditation, you sit and you breathe or you do whatever you do, and then your thoughts get in your head and they come. And mine for years was like, I'd try to be all peaceful, and then I'd go like, what did he say to me? Whoa, when I can't I've got to tell him that he can't talk to me that and then go like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm supposed to be peaceful. And so you're supposed to name the thing, judgment. And you get peaceful for about two seconds, and that judgment comes back. And uh Pama Chodron, the great Buddhist teacher says that judgment will come back and it will come back, and then one day it will start to seem funny. Then it will become your friend, and then it will stop.

And it was about three years for me noticing that judgment. I'm still judgmental, but nothing like I was, and it doesn't really come up in my meditation anymore. What comes up now is honesty, how honest them are in. It's interesting that you talk about judgment because when I was in Peru, uh, I I was I was in Peru over the new year and came back January 8th. And uh one of the things that kept coming up during ceremony for me was my judgment. And I remember in the midst of a ceremony going, now wait a minute, now your judgment is where your sense of humor comes from. Yeah. We need to keep you around. We're not banishing you.

[1:50] Harry Kelly: Yeah, I don't think it's that I I don't think you take an I don't think meditation is a mnematic to vomit these things out of ourselves. I know that with some plant medicine, vomiting is involved, but I think it's more of a picture of what's inside now. I don't know because I haven't done it. Um but uh but as PMA children said, you make friends with them. My friends in the A talk about doing an inventory where they list all their defects of character and then through the process they end up sharing it with someone and working on it, and they often find out that what they thought was a defect of character was their strongest asset. So meditation is about you know looking at those things that we loathe about ourselves and going, that one's not so bad, but this little bitty thing that keeps happening over here, that's really bad. I'm doing damn. Um we're supposed to talk about contemplation. Honestly, I don't know the difference entirely between meditation and contemplation and mindfulness.

[3:03] Harry Kelly: Well, I was talking to a friend and uh a French friend who's uh quarantined in northern Italy right now yesterday, and we were talking about this because I was gonna be talking about this today, and he said, Enfoudre practique la mindfulness. And I went, the what? The mindfulness. And I said, mindfulness is a French word. He said, Abby and I said, I said, I think you mean marketing. I think what you're trying to say is marketing. Because when it becomes it mindfulness has become a commodity. I have so many friends who say, I want to meditate. What kind of pillow do I need to buy? Mmm. You know, you don't need a pillow. You need it there. What technique should I use? A few years ago, the Times put out an article that said five minutes of quiet meditation a day, scientifically proved to make better quality of life for people. People who want me to teach them to meditate cannot find five minutes in their day.

[4:17] Harry Kelly: Well, I'm gonna read what Richard Rudd says in The Art of Contemplation on the question you just posed. But I can read your book. I did read the book. Okay, so he says the main difference between contemplation and either mindfulness or meditation is that contemplation also uses the mind in a proactive way. We make use of mindfulness by inwardly watching our mind, our emotions and body, but with contemplation, we are also doing something active. Contemplation engages the power of mind, emotion, and body. It fuses and uses their energy to bring about an increased state of self-awareness, freedom, and general prosperity. Thus the real power of contemplation is that it naturally turns into decisive action, and that action brings about fundamental changes in our life and in the lives of those around us.

[5:18] Harry Kelly: As I said, this this book on meditation, I've not ever finished it because at some point it becomes a saturation point for my mind, and it just like my brain just shuts off, or like almost like fall asleep in the middle of the reading. Most of them do. Most of them do. The good ones are the ones who are good storytellers. And uh I think if you find uh uh meditation book that doesn't have a good joke in it, something's wrong. Okay. Well, did you what did you have thoughts on these three techniques of pausing, pivoting, and merging, which brings about the confirmations of insight, breakthrough, and epiphany.

[6:01] Harry Kelly: No, because when I was reading about positing pausing and pivoting, I you know, I have balance problems from brain injury. I thought, oh, I can't pivot it down. So it's just what's scrambling my brain. Um I think it's a little systematic for my taste, his take on these things. Okay. You know, we're talking about theater and we're talking about spiritual practice. And I know that you believe that uh theater is a spiritual practice, as do I. And um you know, theater begins as spiritual ritual and it stays that way a long time. And um certainly, you know, people on stage and people in the audience are possessed by spirits. We find ourselves in ecstasy, which is a Greek word that means beside ourselves, where we can't it we can't depend on who we are anymore.

[7:14] Harry Kelly: Um I think having a practice makes the difference for people who are called to have a practice. That's the only way I can put it. Um I have worked on it for many years. I have chanted Psalms every day and uh read the Bible in a specific meditative way and said morning office and evening office. Um and I usually before I go to sleep sing the Russian burial hymn of the dead. Um I don't know if I do it because it comforts me, because it enlightens me, because I'm compulsive, or because I'm subject to a sin, a religious sin called scrupulosity, which means you pray too much and you're too tied up in the trappings of religion. But what I do know is that when I do it carefully, um I'm a little nicer. I'm a little easier to get along with, and I don't get as irritable as when I don't do it. And that's worth a lot to me because I can get really irritable.

[8:35] Harry Kelly: And interesting for me, one of the things that my spiritual disciplines have given to me is the right to be irritable. I feel like as a woman, everything is about you have to be nice and you have to be pretty and you have to make, you know, sweet. And though I don't know that anyone would ever describe me in that way, the way that you're experiencing me has been me trying to be that. And so but Todd, I love when you get irritable. I think you catch on fire. Um there was a moment in your trajectory where you got irritable with the whole world, and you wrote to the whole world, and you changed. You know, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that it's made me a happier, better person making friends with that part of myself, and that's what I mean about the you know, the judgment part of myself.

Like in my Catholicism that I was raised in, uh, to think it was the equivalent of doing the sin. So there was a way in which I was always policing my thoughts. I mean, how could I ever be good enough if I couldn't even have good thoughts that I could think something bad, and then there's just the judgment of myself, and whoo, you know, that's that's a lot of work.

[10:10] Harry Kelly: You know how literally people take Jesus and and those things like nobody ever seems to think that Jesus might have a little irony in him. Well, what do you mean? Well, like when he says that if you're IFND you pluck it out, right? Well, okay. You know, I mean that somebody would laugh in that audience. I don't know, maybe it was just a really bad stand up. Maybe you didn't know how to you know his delivery was off. He died. And then Paul said, Well, he's dead, we can do whatever we want now with this church thing. Right. If only we had had someone else to deliver the message, it could have gone over so much better. We'll straighten it out now that he's gone. Um I love that you get irritable.

And I love my own irritability. It's starting to make me laugh. It's starting to make me feel more human. But I don't like it when I direct it at people without intention and hurt them, hurt people I love. Um because I'm being unclear. You know, it's like uh to be a tiger protecting her young. I'm all in for that. And I don't mean to suddenly bring up a mother figure either.

[11:38] Harry Kelly: Um but I did, didn't I? Um, the male tiger could protect its young too, or eat them. Or he did. I have to tell you a story I heard today because it's just really funny.

[12:01] Harry Kelly: Um, and Howard posts things online all the time that are philosophical, and they're good. It's really good. But he was talking about Freud's civilization and its discontent, and all these women piled up on him about Freud's misogyny. And but one guy said, But there is one thing that I read in it that I just love forever, and it's changed my life. Freud says, Women are the keepers of the fire. It has to be so because men cannot resist peeing on fires. Even Freud will have to tell a joke. I don't think he knew he was telling a joke. Oh well, wait a minute. I've always said that you know, for the people who believe that Shakespeare is a woman, I said, of course she's a woman. That's why everybody feels like they can just take her work and do whatever they want to do with it. Oh my gosh. That alone proves it. That alone proves it. That alone proves it. Oh my God. Oh my God. That alone proves it.

[13:03] Harry Kelly: Um note on my trajectory. I have gone up these little hills and almost gotten there and then someone has died, or Aethus. It's been nonstop. And I am content. I'm content. And part of that is meditation. I do think contemplation has to do with looking inward so that we can look outward. There's some flowers blooming outside my door, and when I go out, I'm so happy to see them. You know, and that's contemplation. Contemplation is also thinking of what your heart's desire is and how you might move forward in the future, contemplating an action, contemplating an idea. But contemplation, even if you're just contemplating something that you might call God or the cosmos or infinite space or emptiness, um, it's very active. And that would help us to be active in the world. And ultimately the goal of most people who practice contemplative life is to be present for other people.

[14:24] Harry Kelly: So, you know, you said this present for other people. I'm one of those people who've always hated that movie, It's a Wonderful Life. I thought it was a damn tragedy. I hate it. Like his whole life was so other people's lives could be good. Oh, so he's like just a cog in a wheel, he doesn't get anything for himself. I was that makes me so mad. I have this nightmare that Christmas is going to come around and all the TV channels are gonna turn into the uh it's a wonderful live channel, and that's all that will be shown. Yeah. Well, yeah, what is this? I mean, uh there's this strange way in which I very much resist Aristotelian story structure because I think it is the narrative of the oppressor, this idea that you have to go on a hero's journey and that you have to be the hero of your own life, is about that capitalist way of you know, carving out some exceptional special thing that can be commodified.

[15:26] Harry Kelly: And it's American storytelling is very much about that. Whereas if you get into Jersey Skolomowski, a Polish storyteller, he can take, you know, some Polishmen going to England to renovate a house and make this harrowing, almost horror level tragedy, terrifying story about just the hardships of them doing their life. Because most of us are not the heroes of our life. The heroic things, if we get to survive everything that happens in our life and die in our sleep at a ripe old age. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And um the people I know who are the heroes of their own life, well, one's our president, you know, and you're gonna have to go a little further on that. Well, to see yourself as the hero of your own life is to be really caught up in your intellect um and ego. Um to sit down at the end of the day and go, I did good work today. Um means that some days you don't.

[16:50] Harry Kelly: But if you do good work every day and sit down and say, I'm the hero of my own life, you know, you're not getting deep. You're not gonna get deep. You gotta have bad days. You gotta have days when you go in the theater and you can't do anything. You gotta have the why do you think the bad days are important? Because they make you look at what you're uncomfortable with. Because uh, you know, um let's say I'm not an actor, but let's say I'm casting a role that I don't feel I'm appropriate for, and it makes me really uncomfortable. I can go one of two ways. I can go, let's talk to the director and try to move this into something that everybody will be comfortable with, or I can jump in and go like let's let's make this uncomfortable and find out what that's about. And so it's that kind of thing I'm talking about.

[17:47] Harry Kelly: Um I want to stick with that for a second because you know, I don't know who it was. Maybe it was Anath Garber, who I did a podcast about psychodrama, and or someone I was reading was saying, you know, if you get to do kind of work that allows you to have catharsis, which um I think sometimes the work that we do as actors allows us to have that. Certainly Carolina Change, which people always ask me, was that hard. It was so cathartic for me to have this place to release all of this, you know, pinned up judgment, rage, anger that as a good Catholic girl I wasn't allowed to have. This was this place where it was allowed to be. And it was, I think that the power of the work was that I was allowed to just be it so darkly, so fully, that it touched that part in every person in the audience who was willing to see that shadow in themselves, and it kind of broke that open in them.

[18:34] Harry Kelly: Yes. Yes, which is to me what can be the sacred thing about being in the theater, is that you can bring people to a cathartic thing by living through what they fear ever having to live through. Well, this gets back to grief. One of the things that I've learned about grief is if we had an adept spiritual life, we could take the little griefs that happen to the things that we grieve, like, you know, our cat who died 20 years ago, or the book I lost that my father gave me, or the fight I had in junior high school with my best friend, and we never spoke again. We hold all those little griefs like a rock in our stomach. And then when a big grief happens, it's too heavy to move the rock. This is not an idea. It's Stephen Levine's in a wonderful book called Unattended Grief. So that you end up with this 300-pound rock when your husband dies, and you can't move that rock. You can't get away from it. All you can do is make more space for the rock.

[20:09] Harry Kelly: So, you know, meditation and contemplation become really important. Um, yeah, you know, my first Aya session, I had this something came to me and said that it was the Archangel Michael, and I probably have already told you this. Yes, you have. And it said, We're all slave prisoners to the all. And some part of me was questioning that. And it said, Well, everything you make is just making more of the all. You can't create anything outside of the all. All is all. It wasn't a choice. I gave up the idea of believing I had free will. I suddenly was like, oh, all is all, and everything that's my life is gonna be is already within the all. And so I have the choice to embrace the life that's destined for me, or I can fight it. That's the free will I have to fight my life or to resist it. But it is already within the all what it's going to be. And maybe there's an infinite number of me living every possibility that there is.

[21:28] Harry Kelly: So when the pain comes, I can just feel the pain. And when the joy comes, I can just feel the joy rather than this way that I'd been living before, which is thinking that the pain was a sign I was doing something wrong, and the good was a sign that I was doing something good, but fear that I didn't know how I did it, and how am I going to keep doing it? And that sort of loop that just is demoralizing and depressing, and you just can't ever break out of it. Yes. Was that a moment of self-forgiveness?

[22:10] Harry Kelly: I don't know if it was forgiveness, but it was a relief. Explain the problem, you know, because I was in that as I was telling you that. So dissect the problem. And they're very different levels of subtleties in the different denominations about this. So I can't say, confronts this at some point. And um either goes to the all or goes to the not all, you know, the two sides of the Tao, the two sides of um, you know, the being of God and the non-being of God, you know, it's holding two things in tension and then accepting it. You can it's really beautiful, it's a beautiful image, and um Angel Michael um is the one with the sword who cuts Lucifer's head off, and uh and you know, so it's that end of torture, that end of self-torture there, yeah.

We are losing that image is very powerful. Woof. I didn't know that about the Archangel Michael. That like makes that moment for me even uh more profound of you know that perhaps somehow inside of myself I was cutting off my devil, my devil torturer.

[24:13] Harry Kelly: You know, with all the tragedy that you've had, I mean, all of us have tragedies, there's no degrees because each of us is built with the thing that is going to be our hard thing. Is there any failure that you had that set you up for a success? All of them, um all of them made me work on my inner self that was painful to do. Um all of them made me go places, see parts of the world I hadn't seen, make friends in a different way, let go of friends who had become uh who revealed that you know it's not time for us to be friends again anymore. Um a lot of things that I thought I was being successful with when someone would die, and I couldn't continue to work on it. It looks like that was set me up for failure.

But in the end, Tanya, I'm a contemplative and not an artist. I write well, I do things well, I'm working on a piece now that I just love. Um but my journey has been to accept that I don't have control over these things. You know, it's you know, I can say I was born on the day of the dead, my life has been nonstop dying. People really, it's the roll of the dice. It just happened this way, and I can fight it, like you say, or I can enter the all and um let the all support me.

[26:12] Harry Kelly: I have one last question for you, which may lead to another one, but I know that you're deeply um committed to young people. I am and helping young people be hopeful for the future, and I think that it was already a dark time for you know the last two generations of feeling like they couldn't even reach the level that their parents were, and COVID is setting the whole world back. What are you sharing with the community of young people that you're involved with there in Michigan? What is your what is the rope you would throw to them? The rope I would throw to them, it's something that you said as we started this out that um we're not going back to normal. Normal was never normal, and we can't go back to it.

Normal's an illusion. But we have a chance to do things differently, and um to look at the blessing that this is after you finish watching Tiger King and Love is Blind. You can do that first, but then we gotta get we gotta get around to you know imagining how to do things. I'm meeting kids online, you know, friends. I'll say they'll say, Um, you need to meet my friend Jack, it's a well, let's let's do it online. That's how we meet now. Um I find young people, it's interesting because I'm here in Michigan, I'm by a university where about 80% of the student body are the first people in their families to go to college. I chaplained at Bard College, I did uh student life at Vassar. I have deeper conversations with these kids than anywhere else.

Um they're hungry, they really think about things, they listen well, and um I think a lot of them are imaginatively hopeful. And what I try to do is just talk to them through anxieties, fears. You know, they don't want to talk to me about God or prayer. Thank goodness. Thank goodness.

[28:40] Harry Kelly: But so what do they want to talk to you about and what do you say to them? They want to hear they want to know my story. They want to know they want to know how to get on Broadway. They want to know they want to know did you hear of this terrible woman in New York who quit MOTHER COURAGE. She is yes she is and it's gonna make a big difference in how people treat black people on Broadway and off our way over time. It's the start of something and I'm really proud of her and you know that's how one way of helping kids it's like watch what you say when you're in the theater watch what you say and then I explain the three block world to them. What's that? You can't say anything bad about the play you saw till you're three blocks away.

Oh you know I think the biggest immaturity that I have gotten over the last year, and I think I'm settling into it in this COVID lockdown. Is that my honesty and authenticity doesn't matter to most people. Oh most people don't want to hear my opinion, they just want to know they're doing a good job, and they just want encouragement. Oh, it's such a waste.

[30:16] Harry Kelly: Why do you say that? I feel happy about that. That they don't want to hear your opinion. I think most people don't. I just think I mean I've gotten that way about some things as well. Like, okay, I don't need your opinion. Just, you know, encourage me to move on. Like, I'm gonna figure this out. I think it's I think of it as that way. It's like, you know, I don't need you to dissect this and tell me how to make it better. Just you know, answer whatever question, but give me the encouragement. When I put yourself and I'm fumbling around trying to say it, you'll ask me questions and I answer them the best I can, and I say what I like, but um Yeah, but you have your you're like I have a very you're that's why you're one of my favorite people is that we can go deep and and and we take the time to go deep.

I think most of the people we encounter in our lives, people aren't going deep. So I value where I can, and so I go, Oh, I get to go deep with Harry. But most of the time when someone comes up to me, they just want to go, good job, keep going. Good job, good job. Good job, keep going. I mean, the man who encouraged me to make my film, he never read my script. But every day he would just tell me that I could do it, and if I came into a problem, he would try to help me solve the problem. But he was like, You got this. Well, you'll you'll call this wasn't, or you'll do this one. You know, if there was a that's what I say to a lot of the kids, that's the main thing I say to them. You know, find your heart's desire and don't let anybody tell you it's not your heart's desire, and then see if it's possible.

I don't believe in this American idea that you can do anything you want. I don't believe that. Um, but the potential to do the great things is much bigger than anyone lets on. And you know, going to New York and failing at getting on Broadway can be the greatest thing that ever happened to you.

[32:13] Harry Kelly: Mm-hmm. I have so many friends who are on Broadway who are so miserable, and then some who are really happy, but yeah, yeah. I I often say, you know, you gotta know what's the life gonna be like when you have the thing, you know, and is having the thing that you dreamed of going to be enough to sustain you forever. I know that I'm someone that once I have anything, I'm always curious about what else? What's next? What else? What else? What else? My friend Tom was doing the lead role in Phantom, and he did it for three years, and he called me up and he said, Harry, I can't do this anymore. And I said, Well, why don't you quit? And he said, Because everybody says I've been given a gift by God, and I have to use it.

I said, Shut up. Shut up. When you give a gift to someone, that's do you put a note in it saying you must keep this gift the rest of your life? Can we sit down and calculate how many people you've sung Phantom for? So I made him do it. It was like three million. It's a you've given this gift away three million times now. That's enough. That's enough. And the next time he saw his answer, she said, You really want to stay, don't you? And he said, You know, Aunt Jane, I think you want to get in community theater.

[33:39] Harry Kelly: Yeah. Well, Harry, I always love talking to you. It's made me really happy. Sharing, you know, your wisdom um and humor. I think it will be uh a gift and a comfort to people uh going through this very difficult time that is a death of an old way, and honestly, there's no way any of us can know what it's going to be. No way. No way, we're gonna lose people, we're gonna lose jobs, we're gonna have a crashed economy, and I trust the word in the Bible that's translated faith. I don't know what faith is, I could never figure it out. But when I look at the Greek pistolo, it means trust. I can trust in something when I can't know I don't even know if it exists or not, but I can trust in it because trust is an action that I can do based on contemplative viewing of the sky, the stars, the trees, the flowers, the faces of other people, the kindnesses of other people. Um that there's something there that we will survive into and can grow. But we have to be patient and we have to wash our hands and stay at home and love our hands.

[35:09] Harry Kelly: Tanya, thanks so much for having me over.

[35:13] Tonya Pinkins: Thank you so much, Harry. I'm Tonya Pinkins, and you're listening to You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[35:26] Tonya Pinkins: Thanks for listening to You Can't SAY THAT, the show where you can. I'm Tonya Pinkins. This is part of the Broadway Podcast Network, produced by Dori Berinstein and Alan Seales, edited by Derek Gunther, music by Anthony Norman. Available wherever you get your podcast. And visit me on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and let me know what you'd like to hear me talk about. For more information, visit BPN.fm forward slash YCST.