Fictional Characters

FICTIONAL CHARACTERS THAT HAVE EFFECTED MY LIFE:

(Please note, I did not list these in any order!!!!)

Now here’s a premise. We’re all big to point out real life people when it comes to heroes. And I have a bevy, like Harvey Milk and PT Barnum.

But that’s another column.

Only other geeks would ever see a fictional character so worthy enough as to influence the real world in which we live. But that’s silly. It happens to everyone. Ever watch CSI? No one seems to remember that such deductive science in the name of crime solving were really the province of Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Dupin from Arthur Conan Doyle and Poe, respectively. How many young folk are currently putting up with bullying crap at their grammar schools due to the patience they read about by a young Harry Potter?

I suppose I could go into religion and point out several fictional characters there and show their influence, but that might piss off a few.

So? I know of some who may not be heroes to me, but have, in their own way, influenced my life in many a profound way.

Sherlock Holmes—Okay, so, yes, I’m a lousy writer, but I admit it. I like to write. I’ll always do it. I think of those chronic doodlers and their notebooks during accounting class. They have some of the best works ever—but it’ll never get past the Ticonderoga lead pencil stage. But they are artists like I am an author. It’s what we do.

When I was sixteen, my buddy Joe (strangely, I just liked him as a friend) and I saw Young Sherlock Holmes for my birthday. And then? My aunt gave a huge leatherbound text of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works of Mr. Holmes.

I could not put it down. I still watch crime shows with the same verve. That’s a profound impact of one character. But there’s the rub—it really affected me as an author. The most basic lesson ever in a writer’s mantra.

It all starts with a character. A full fleshed out character, to the point that the villain is only as good as the protagonist. And when you have a consulting detective like Mr. Holmes, you know the baddies were not only bad, they were smart too. To this day, Sherlock means much to me. It also started me on my love for all Brit Lit all the way through my senior year of high school, when I took AP Brit Lit and the world changed. I was ready for college.

Mickey Mouse—To say this rodent has effected my life is to say, “yeah, that lady? The one I call Ma? She’s the one who gave birth to me.”

It’s like a chicken-egg situation. They’re inherently linked.

That Mickey! Always playing with money!

But I’ll admit, it’s not necessarily the Mouse (capitalized, of course) that did it. But what the Mouse represents. And it’s maybe Disney (the man, not the corporatation) or the those little vignettes he starred in, but there’s something about the philosophy this guy symbolizes that draws me in. When I was younger, he was a symbol of a happier time when the world was horrid; when I was older, the Mouse offered escape and escapism on such a scale as to only be limited by my physical stamina and my creative mind. Even now, as I live up the road from his famed Magic Kingdom, a bad day is soon reversed with a spin through a Space Mountain or a séance with the dead in the Haunted Mansion.

Mickey shows us what one-little-spark of imagination can become. A man drew a cartoon; it became his empire. He never saw his limits, just knew what he wanted. Mickey rules the worlds of Disney with an iron fist, but also with an unending smile that still is visible from space. Dying patients in hospitals smile when he comes in, and, without a world, waves and hugs. I met my husband with a mutual link to the Mouse. That’s saying something.

Marilyn Monroe-“When the legend outshines the reality, publish the legend!”

Norma Jean Talmadge never existed. That shy orphan girl grew up every bit a Hollywood girl like Beth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn. But when the cameras shut down, Beth went back to drinking; Audrey went back to helping children.

Norma Jean went back to being Marilyn.

She became a symbol of what every woman in the forties and fifties wished she could be. She became what every man wanted. And, here’s the tic, the character part. She was acting both on and off screen. She would have people come over her house to get her ready just to go to the store. She became her own brand, her own product.

And the message was received. She was awesome at it, a testimony to her ability both as an actress and a person. I mean, who has to work so hard to just be liked by, well, everyone? She was awesome and looked great too.

She influenced me in other way. For one? She was a cautionary tale. She died in the end, miserable, through a suicide. Being fake twenty four seven and trying to please every single person on the planet took its toll. No matter how talented she was, she just couldn’t keep up.

How many people in the closet have to hold on a façade for others, to keep the amorphous “others” happy? It’s time consuming. It’s debilitating.

Yeah, that person will look great and perfect, but, on the inside, they aren’t living, they’re thinking if they’re using the right words for that particular moment of the day. Through this fictional Monroe (I know there was and is a beautiful woman in there who didn’t deserve what she got), I learned, at some point, we have to take stock of what we have and truly be ourselves-regardless of the audience.

If only those pecs were in three-D!

Northstar—I’m one of those geeks that just never really got into the geekdom of life. They all hang around comic book stores and talked about movies, but I found their conversations lacking and rarely sat and hung out with them outside of the occasional movie. They collected comic books. I just merely read them.

Spring of 92. The world changed. I’d been reading Alpha Flight for many moons, a secret obsession, along with other comic book titles that I hid, like some kind of pile of pornography, from the rest of the men in the jock dorm I lived in.

I guess many had been talking about that particular issue—where Northstar, a flying speedstar, was forced out of the closet, upon finding an abandoned infant dying of AIDS fight with Major Mapleleaf.

For the first time, a few weeks before I truly, truly came out to myself, I had seen in print the sentence, “I AM GAY.” And the edition flew off the shelves. The revelation was not wasted on me. It changed my world. Even superheroes were gay.

Whoa.

I wasn't alone any more.

Holden Caulfield/Atticus Finch—You knew these boys would be on here, polar opposites but totally important to me both as a writer and as a person. Holden, a cautionary tale about wayward youth in The Catcher in the Rye, taught me volumes about life on the other side of the tracks and how we choose to go there. Atticus from To Kill A Mockingbird? How doing the right thing and what you believe are completely different concepts. Atticus may or may not believe in what he is doing with the court case, but the right thing is the choice he makes before that point.

How many churches don’t accept people by way of doctrine, yet the congregations know its wrong and do right by their fellow gay Americans? Even here in the Deep South, the churches stop short of burning crosses on our front lawn-but those same people still ask how my husOtter is doing and are truly concerned with our welfare.

Just like good ole Atticus. Both are great books. I suffered reading through them but had to revisit them in college. I was so mad at myself for dismissing them in high school. Swift prose, deft pacing and full storylines.

And two fictional characters that can teach us volumes about what it means to be human. What to avoid and what to do!

MacBeth—I know what you’re thinking. It’s Shakespeare. We all know how the Bardybear loves his Bard. And you’re thinking,”ah, see, it’s the play. The character signifies the argument between Fate and Destiny and how we must choose between the two.”

"Weary is the head that wears the crown."

Well, no.

This character signifies something even deeper.

That Shakespeare’s characters are freegin’ awesome. His stories TO THIS DAY have influenced our concept of story to such a level, that when I read them to my students, they respond with, “oh, I know that story, isn’t that the one like….” Fill in the blank.

MacBeth, too, is awesome. Basically a horror story in play format. We have sex, drugs and violence for three hours.

What’s not to like?

When I find myself hung up on a tale, I always say, “How would Shakespeare handle this story?”

Most likely with some of the best characters he could muster.