It’s so easy to see crazy when someone else is wearing it.
I watched a documentary last night, Confessions of a Superhero. The title refers to the Hollywood characters who live off tips by dressing as superheros and having photos taken with tourists. Okay, it’s a gig. It’s better than a total panhandle, there’s entertainment value and some effort, but the really interesting thing were the partners of these people. I mean the one in the tights and cape, well, that crazy is easy to see. But the woman standing next to him in a wedding dress….that’s a crazy of a different color.
I’m fascinated. While I wouldn’t necessarily dress up as Wonder Woman and roam the streets, I was involved with a man who did. It was to promote his comic book, and it wasn’t Wonder Woman – I mean, he wasn’t a cross dressing superhero, but still, I lived with a man who dressed up like an imaginary character, even when we weren’t at the Comic-con. It wasn’t even a famous superhero like Batman, or a third tier superhero like Captain Planet, but one he’d made up on his own. No one knew he was supposed to be a superhero, except for him, his best friend and me.
In Confessions of a Superhero, after dating a man for only two weeks, because “all they ever do is go to the movies,” Wonder Woman and her beau head to Vegas. They get married rather than see yet another movie. That’s crazy talk!
Yet, two weeks after meeting a homeless man who called himself Red Wolf in a public park, when he asked me to marry him, I said yes, rather than spend yet another night alone.
Superman thinks he’s going to be noticed by a casting director and become a movie star. He cries when talking about the death of Christopher Reeve. He makes shoebox dioramas of scenes in Superman’s life. Just for himself. Just because. His girlfriend refers to herself at one point in a side conversation as “his Lois Lane” and together they collect rooms full of Superman memorabilia. They trek to a Superman convention where he proposes marriage, while wearing his Superman costume, in front of an entire ballroom of Supermaniacs. They’re married, of course, in Metropolis in the shadow of a Superman statue. The bride wore white. The groom? Yes, of course, blue tights and a red cape.
Mrs. Superman is working on a Ph.D in psychology. There is irony there. There is also crazy there and while he’s wearing tights and imagining he’s the missing son of Jor-El, what is going on with her?? What did her mother say when she called and said “Ma, I married Superman. No really, I did.”? You can see the crazy from here, can’t you? You don’t even need to see the film, her crazy is that big.
What did my own mother say the day I brought Red Wolf home and told her he was my husband? He did not speak all day, but I remember what I said as we left. I looked at her and said, “I’m sorry. Really, I’ll never do this again.” And I haven’t. I didn’t marry the man in the Dark Angel costume, even when he asked. Even though it would’ve made a good story, to have married a homeless sleeping-in-the-park bum and a superhero.
Funny, how it’s so easy to see crazy on someone else and so much harder to see it when I’m wearing it. Like a dog chasing its tail, I never quite get that that crazy I see coming from a block away? that crazy that I’m laughing at in someone else?… it’s me.
