The War Against Clutter (Part 1 - The Lana Effect)

If you don't know it exists, can it be clutter?

Seven years before I was born, Lana Turner sat at the counter of the Top Hat Cafe on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and McCadden Place and ordered a Coca-Cola. She was a 16-year-old skipping her typing class at Hollywood High. Thanks to the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter who liked what he saw sitting at the counter, she was discovered and cast in her first film within the year. So began her journey to stardom. It was the kind of Hollywood lore repeated often in my childhood, the fairytale magic that feeds fantasies and caused my mother to urge me never to appear in public without looking my very best. You never know who might be out there, she'd say before I walked out the door.

During the 1950's, I frequently sat at the fountain of Huerbinger's Drugstore on the northwest corner of Glenview Road and Waukegan Road and ordered a Coca-Cola. I watched the soda jerk in his white bib apron and paper hat fill my glass with syrup and soda while every cell in my body tingled with anticipation. Someone might be out there. But if the publisher of The Glenview Announcements was sitting in a booth admiring me from afar, he never came forward with an offer I couldn't refuse. Like Lana, I too took a typing class, but not knowing how to skip class in a suburban high school so far from town, I learned to type. It came in handy when I had no other marketable skills after graduating with a liberal arts degree in anthropology.

I was out for my usual early morning walk last Sunday, musing on how it felt to shake the hands of aspiring actors after a local production of The Fantasticks, how it felt to look them in the eye and say a few encouraging words, how it feels to be onstage myself and have audience members congratulate me after a show. Someone might be out there. That's when Lana Turner wrestled her way up out of my unconscious and, no fairy godmother, confronted me until I admitted to myself that I was still waiting to be discovered, whether as an actor or writer or simply someone out in public looking her very best. I was still waiting, as if my journey to stardom had yet to begin. Sixty-five years old and my psyche was still paying ransom to the Lana Effect.

If you don't know it exists, it can still be clutter. Once you see an outworn message for what it is, though, you can let it go. Adios, amiga.