Two Grown Men Crying on Delancey Street

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The Barn Rib Pit. Located in an alley off of Walnut Street in downtown Cincinnati.

The year is 1995.

A group of college-aged men — boys, really — make their way through the doors. The Rat Pack used to eat here. So did Bob Hope and Doris Day. Now they watch over the room from black and white photos on the wall, glass frames dingy with haze from the smoker.

The boys eat way too much meat, smoke way too many cigarettes, and talk a whole lot of shit. When it’s time to go, they put on their jackets, exit into the smoke-filled alley, and disappear into the night, a band of brothers. They call this tradition Caveman Night. It is a pressure release valve from the brutal day to day grind of… musical theater.

The training at UC’s College Conservatory of Music was intense. We were subjected to criticism in class during the day and rehearsals in the evening. Our talent, our bodies, our work ethic. All of it was fair game. The faculty was preparing us for a career where only a fraction would achieve the (narrow view of) success that most of us dreamed of then.

The guys in my class competed against each other for roles. Attention. Girls. We also put on dance belts next to each other in dressing rooms and played pretend like kids, trading sandboxes for black boxes. That kind of experience forges a bond.

I became part of a brotherhood.

For a guy with two sisters, I’ve been rich in brotherhood all my life. I found them in blood relatives, in summer stock theaters, in roving bands of guerrilla filmmakers, in packs of motorcycle riders, in brothers-in-law, and my fellow writers here in LA.

There’s a lot of discourse these days about the male loneliness epidemic. A lot of articles titled, “Are Men Ok?” The consensus seems to be that we are not. And yet, when I look at the longtime friendships in my life, I feel like we’re bucking the trend.

I thought if I could retrace my steps, maybe it would help someone who is in need of a brotherhood of their own.

How to Build a Brotherhood:

The first thing that occurs to me is that so many of these friendships started with shared interests or hobbies. When I was in middle school I was obsessed with music and singing. That led to forming a hair metal band with a bunch of my friends.

Lynx was my first brotherhood. We forged our bonds over thousands of hours of practice in my parents’ garage in the day and drinking Boone’s Farm and Natty Light at the cement plant at night.

Thanks to them, I may have peaked in 8th grade, when we played “Talk Dirty to Me” by Poison for the junior high talent show. The librarian who put the show together asked us to change the lyrics to, “Talk sweetly to me,” because “talk dirty” was inappropriate. When I got to the chorus, instead of singing her revision, I held out the microphone and let a couple hundred kids scream the real lyrics. People still bring this up to me today.

Once you have a few interests and obsessions, pursue excellence in at least one of them with someone who has the same drive and ambition.

One of my brothers from college, Stephen Colella, is a competitive guy. Whenever auditions rolled around we helped each other with our pieces in the practice rooms, running them over and over and giving feedback. We pushed each other to excel. We celebrated the victories, mourned the losses, and tried again. Tried harder.

Do epic shit together. For me and my friends, that was usually making a movie or putting on a show. Which brings me to the two grown men crying on Delancey Street…

I moved to New York in 1997 into an apartment with two of my other brothers from college, Joshua Kobak and Nik Rocklin. Joshua had written a musical called THE COLORS OF LOVE that he submitted to the first ever New York International Fringe Festival. I helped write the book and he asked me to direct.

We attended the first informational meeting on the lower east side, where the enormity of what we’d gotten ourselves into became crystal clear. The task suddenly seemed impossible for two kids from Ohio. Immediately afterward, we stepped out onto Delancey Street and both of us broke down in tears from the sudden flood of cortisol into our nervous systems.

I often think of the passersby who surely wondered why two grown men were standing on the corner, hugging each other tightly, and saying through tears, “We’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay.” Did they think it was a cancer diagnosis? Death of a loved one? No.

Again, it was… musical theater.

A few years later, I made a low budget indie movie with Jonathan Clark, another college brother. It took years to complete and pay off. But, we did it, along with Tony Teel, who edited it, Scott Puckett, who did too many jobs to mention, Scott Hunt, another college brother in the cast, Scott Spears, our DP… there were a lot of Scotts, okay?

Jonathan put a ton of his own money into it and pulled together more from friends and family. We spent nights sleeping side by side in my parents’ van in Warsaw, Indiana, to save on hotel rooms while we were in post-production with Tony and Puckett. The four of us worked around the clock, only taking breaks to eat tacos and watch Korean films Tony had curated. It was like a second college.

The movie came to be because Jonathan had gone through a tough breakup in Chicago, and I hopped on a Greyhound bus to visit him. It was during that trip that we hatched the idea to film a script that I’d just finished writing.

Years later, Jonathan asked me to officiate his wedding. Colella played guitar and sang. Jonathan’s mother passed away not long before the wedding, so I opened the ceremony by asking the guests to take a moment of silence to recognize her presence there. As I was saying this, I got choked up and had to pause. Jonathan reached out and put a hand on my shoulder to steady me. He consoled me, at his wedding.

In 2013, I was one of the first people to hold his daughter Harper, hours after she was born. This past November, I sat with him as he went through a round of chemotherapy. (He’s healthy now!)

Which makes me think about the importance of showing up, and my friend Tony.

Tony Teel and I became friends when he was a cook at Spike’s Beach Volleyball Bar and then a sushi chef at its sister restaurant, Noa Noa, in Warsaw. One night, I suggested a few ingredients for a sushi roll. Tony put his spin on it and called it The Mickey Roll. It’s still on the menu today. Often, we closed out the bar talking movies. When he heard I was making my first feature, he offered to edit on his system.

Not long after we started working on the post-production I learned he had Muscular Dystrophy. Over the years, I watched him battle it with dignity and humor. I watched him fall in love and performed his wedding ceremony as well. I saw him become a dad. All the while, the disease was progressing, taking away more and more of his mobility, but not his brilliant brain or his sweet soul.

When his health took a turn for the worse, I made a trip to see him in Louisiana, knowing it would probably be the last time we would get to hang out. We spent the day talking, when he was able, and reminiscing about the good times. I got to meet his son Alex, who inherited that same sweet soul.

While I was sitting by his side in the nursing home, I remembered tagging along with my dad as he sat at the bedside of a longtime friend in his final days. I had a good role model in keeping male friendships.

Tony passed away a few weeks later.

One of the benefits of making a movie together is that you can watch it back and see a whole secret history hiding in the spaces between the cuts, all the things you went through on the journey together. You see the late night taco runs, the Korean movies, you see Tony’s mom bringing trays of freshly made egg rolls. You hear the laughter.

We’re younger. We’re healthier. We’re alive.

From my vantage point at age 52, I can see that brotherhood isn’t an accident. It is forged, link by link, into a chain of steel.

I speak an incantation, four simple words that ripple back through time, past nursing homes and infusion rooms…

Past wedding ceremonies and Delancey Street…

Past practice rooms and black box theaters…

Until they brush past the ear of a young man — a boy, really — stepping out of The Barn Rib Pit into an alley in downtown Cincinnati.

They say, “Hold on to this.”

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