FAREWELL REUBEN MITCHELL

I liked Reuben immediately.

We met when we were auditioning to get into LSU's MFA acting program back in the spring of 2004.  In the lobby of the school's Music and Dramatic Arts building, we had a friendly argument about the movie Scarface.  I took the position that the film is radically misunderstood in that it is actually a comedy; he took the point of view that young wannabe thugs look to Tony Montana as a screwed up role model.  We were both right, even though he had the better point, and it was the beginning of an important friendship, based on mutual respect and excitement about art, politics, culture, and ideas.

For my money, Reuben was the absolute heart and soul of our graduate school acting class.  All seven of us were talented, dedicated, ethical people, but there was just something about Reuben that put him in the middle of everything, which was where he belonged.  His passion, kindness, talent, optimism, and general good nature are definitely worth noting, but he was just so much more than a list of uplifting adjectives.  He was one of those people who touched lives, which would never be the same, which would always be improved, just for having known him.  One in a million.  One in a billion.

He particularly impressed me with his determination.  During the second semester of our time at LSU together, he and I worked on a scene from Chekov's Uncle Vanya.  Chekov is one mother as far as acting is concerned, and our teacher just kind of threw us all into the deep end to see how well we could float.  Reuben and I put something together and brought it into class, but John Dennis didn't like it, so we went back to the drawing board.  JD didn't like that one either, so we reworked it again, about which JD observed, "I think this scene might actually be getting worse."  I think that was it for our Chekov scene; the class had to move on.  But I'll never forget how, even as I became more and more depressed about the work, even as our teacher pronounced it to be a failure multiple times, Reuben never lost heart.  Each and every reworking was an opportunity to get it right.  His determination alone, his drive to succeed, propped me up and got me through it all.

Reuben and I shared some passions.  Hip-hop, of course, was his first love.  But he was in high school band, and his father is a big jazz fan, so Reuben also loved jazz.  I remember his excitement about the Duke Ellington Shakespeare tribute album, Such Sweet Thunder, I brought in when he had some of us on his Sunday morning radio show.  I made some comment to Reuben once at one of those awkward and boring theater/LSU reception things in the lobby of Swine Palace about some relatively obscure jazz player.  Reuben told me that he had only ever heard his father talk that way, "He would be, like, 'who's that cat that played with Art Blakey?'"  I loved how Reuben consciously used the word "cat" to describe people he liked or admired, hearkening back to a much more groovy era, when beatniks and jazz musicians spoke in unsquare lingo, the same way I've trained myself to say "groovy."

And Reuben loved cats.  In fact, I think it was at LSU when he got his first cat, and we would trade stories about the bizarre but loving dealings of our respective felines.

Of course, there was the politics.  Reuben was a strong liberal like me, and like me, as an artist, he had a very particular perspective on politics, coming at it from a cultural point of view, understanding better than most of the political establishment on the left that Americans are moved much more by stories and images than they are by policy and dry argumentation.  He and I had numerous deep discussions on politics that made us both wiser for the exchange.

He was a teacher.  When we first met, I had left the field in disgust; Reuben was looking forward to teaching, and his excitement about it was the beginning of my reevaluating for the better my experience as a high school drama teacher.  We had many conversations about education, and what it means to teach, what it means to learn.  I never got to see him in action as a teacher, but I'm certain he was great.

And he loved Star Trek.  Indeed, he went through most of the run of Star Trek: the Next Generation while we were in school together.  We talked excitedly about Patrick Stewart's acting, and how f'ing cool Worf is.  I remember talking with him about how kickass the Klingon death ritual is, the looking into the fallen warrior's eyes, the howling toward the heavens.  As the Captain and his second officer observed:

"Data: I believe, sir, that was the first time outsiders have witnessed the Klingon death ritual.
Picard: I can understand them looking into the dying man's eyes. But the howling?
Data: It was a warning.
Picard: To whom?
Data: They are warning the dead, sir: 'Beware, a Klingon warrior is about to arrive.'"

Reuben was no warrior--in fact, he was decidedly anti-war.  He was an artist.  But the kind of respect, the kind of honor, the kind of mythologizing embraced by the Klingons toward their warriors is how I feel about Reuben now that he's gone.  Indeed, if I understand correctly, Reuben died the same way that the intellectual and writer-warrior T.E. Lawrence did, a motorcycle crash.  That is, Reuben was and continues to be larger than life to me.   And this disturbs my ongoing agnosticism.  It is extraordinarily difficult for me to accept that Reuben's powerful soul could ever be extinguished, by anything at all.  If anyone is deserving of residing in Valhalla for eternity, it is my friend Reuben.  My intellect tells me that the afterlife probably doesn't exist: my friendship with Reuben, however, tells my heart that the afterlife has to exist.

He was a better man than me.

I'm linking below Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," his soulful elegy on the occasion of legendary sax player Lester Young's death.  Reuben would have understood the significance.

Farewell, Reuben.  I loved you.



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