A Walk Among the Stars

When I was a kid I saw a play about a stray dog who had nothing to eat, but who never stooped to crime to feed himself. He didn’t wrest food from smaller dogs and never stole anything from anybody’s house.

As a result of his goodness, he was granted a wish by the Magic Dog Fairy, I think it was, and you know what he wished for? To walk among the stars just once. He was not only granted that wish but, for being so lofty in his desires, was given a doggie bone that would last forever.

It was during the Depression and the point of the drama, as I assess it several decades later, was to be true to our future goals despite immediate hungers, and everything will work out OK.

We made fun of the play after we saw it, as kids will, but in truth it had an impact on me, despite its primitive staging. While a guy in a dog suit may have done nothing to alter the course of my life, there was something about walking among the stars that appealed to my sense of destiny.

I mean, was it possible there was a hunger beyond food that was causing an ache in my soul? I’d hate to think that a play about a stray dog made me what I am today, but it did get me to thinking about the possibility of a goal other than dinner.

Which leads me, however slowly, to two plays I saw just a few days apart. One was a musical about love in the Age of AIDS called “All That He Was” and the other a play written and acted by inmates at an L.A. County Probation Camp called “Slippin’ Into Darkness.”

Each, in its way, was about walking among the stars.

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Both begin on a low note. In “All,” a character called Man has just died of AIDS. In “Slippin’,” a gangbanger named Dreamer is dying from a bullet in his brain.

But from their deaths emerge messages of atonement which, like a biblical tale of resurrection, sing of transcendence over pain.

Let me say first that I’m not a drama critic. I go to plays because my wife Cinelli loves the theater and will only see movies with me on the level of, say, “The Fly” if I accompany her occasionally to more cultural experiences.

There was an additional motivating factor in seeing “All That He Was.” The music was written by a gifted young cousin, Cindy O’Connor, from the white side of my family, and I wanted to be in on her magnificent debut.

The book and lyrics, I should mention, are by Larry Johnson. I don’t have to be effusive here because he is not a cousin.

“All” explores in flashbacks from his funeral the loves and hatreds that have marred and glorified the brief life of Man, from his “coming out” to his death from AIDS.

We meet his parents, lovers, teachers and friends and watch them come to grips with love’s many faces in an era that causes even love to be suspect.

The message that emerges is this: Like the dog that walked the stars, we can rise above temporal cruelties and realize goals much grander than satisfying an immediate hunger to condemn.

A fine play at the Tamarind Theater in Hollywood with music by an amazing new talent, my cousin Cindy.

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“Slippin’ Into Darkness” has nothing to do with my relatives, or maybe it does in the sense that we’re all little pieces of each other. It’s about kids who live and die on the streets, and the dreams that die with them.

“Slippin’ ” is a project of City Hearts, an organization dedicated to enriching the lives of at-risk young people through the arts. It was written and performed by inmates at Camp Miller in the Santa Monica Mountains and comes across like poetry from the ‘hoods.

In dying, the character Dreamer extols life in a monologue that cries out for “another day, another hour, another second to live!”

He says, “For the first time, I embrace my life, that I might live to embrace my daughter one more time. I make love to my life, that I might live to make love to my girl one more time. I celebrate my life, that I might live to celebrate Christmas with my family one more time. . . .”

Directed by City Hearts’ Robert Villanueva, “Slippin’ ” transforms a probation camp gymnasium into the psychological environment of the gangbanger. Hope emerges slowly through the smoke of gunfire, and only then over the bodies of the dead.

But herein one also comes to realize, as Dreamer does at the end, that the essential sweetness of life is far tastier than the cold, bitter hatreds that dominate the streets and, in a larger sense, the world.

That young men who have sipped the bitterness can rise to convey that truth is proof enough that the dog of redemption still walks the stars.

I guess I knew he always would.