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This is the story of a guy who saw it all coming apart in front of him, and there was nothing he could do. Our tale starts much earlier, but for the sake of brevity we pick it up at Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C., notorious setting for the assassination of the great President Abraham Lincoln. In our particular story it also sets the stage (forgive the unintended pun) for the death of Love and Happiness.

Max and Lexa, let’s call them, had driven down from New York City to perform in a musical version of the story of the famous female pirate Anne Bonney. With two little girls; their daughter, 4, and Lexa’s daughter by her previous marriage, age 10, they checked into a hotel for the six week run of the play. The producers had cast Lexa as the friend of the lead and she hated that she was in second position, but it was a job and she and Max needed the work. It was not destined to end well for anyone concerned.

After checking in that night, Max left the family in the room to walk over to the theater, take a look around and watch the set being built. As hammers echoed through the dark empty house he found himself alone with his imagination in the famed historical surroundings. No one semed aware he was there, the stage crew intent on their construction under the work lights. He glanced up to the balcony and spied the box where the deadly deed was done. Curious, Max climbed the stairs to the balcony hallway and tried the door to the Presidential Box. Locked. Naturally. Not to be deterred, he went into the balcony, walked down to the rail and stood on it. Carefully holding to the wall, he slipped around the edge and stepped into the box. There he was, alone with history. The chair Lincoln had sat in faced the stage as if the President were still sitting there, calmly watching the play. To his right was the seat where his wife had also enjoyed the show, up to a point.

Max lowered himself slowly into the plush, striped, satin covered Chief of State’s armchair. Alone. in the very spot in which Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of The United States was murdered, he watched the scene below. The blue-jeaned, tee-shirted boys were laboring under bright white lights. But Max was solitary, incognito in the privacy of the silent theater box. He could almost hear the soft rustling of ghosts stirring around him. The distance from the apron of the box to the stage seemed more than fifteen feet. Little wonder that John Wilkes Booth in leather heeled boots, leaping down onto the hard oak floor of the stage below, broke his ankle. But the innate narcissistic conceit of the born “actor” clearly overrode the excruciating pain he must have felt, and he took the time to stop in the limelight and boldly pronounce“Sic Semper Tyrannus”, the supposedly heroic proclamation he had no doubt rehearsed many times prior to the great moment. Then, before a shocked, horrified cast and audience he limped off the stage, into infamy. Actors will be such hams. But the show must go on!

Max sat enjoying his cleverness for a few moments, soaking in the satisfaction of having pulled off something that none of his friends, nor a lifetime of acquaintances, had ever done. It was a warm feeling of accomplishment. I would be something he could one day tell his grandchildren. Then suddenly, he sensed the door open behind him and felt someone creeping slowly toward his back, a revolver aimed at his head. He jumped up and spun to defend himself but saw only the other two empty chairs and the darkness of the small room. Mary Lincoln seemed to glare up at him from her seat.

Chills froze his spine and he felt his hair standing up. He wasted no time at all in retracing his steps onto the precarious railing, carefully around the dividing wall, up through the balcony, down to the lobby and out onto the empty darkness of Washington’s tenth street, his heart pounding. He walked briskly back to the hotel through warm humid night air and it wasn’t until he reached the brightly lit lobby that the ghostly feeling of chill and death began to leave him. “Sic Semper Tyrannus” rang in his imagination. It haunted his dreams that night. And it served him right.

The play went very well, but was not without its ego-driven intrigues. Lexa, forgetting herself and secretly longing for the lead role, began openly flirting with the writer in hopes of advancement. This caused friction between her and Max as well as resentment in the cast, particularly with the leading lady, who happened to be the writer’s wife. Tension culminated one night at a party where Lexa, who seldom drank, became loaded on Wild Turkey. There was an argument. Max called her on her behavior. Lexa burst into a rage and with a look of hate he’d never seen slapped Max in the face. He didn’t know his feminine love was capable of violence. At that moment he awoke to the possibility it might be over.

Lexa had been steadily urging for the better part of a year for them to move to California. But Max was possessed of all the contemporary New York reasons not to do so; Everyone in California was crazy, California was going to fall into the Pacific, Charles Manson lived in California, and worst of all, Max’s mother lived there. But when the show ended, he thought it might be the valiant thing to pacify Lexa and try to save their marriage. When he announced that he was willing to make the move, she said, “California? I don’t want to move to California!” “But you said…” “All right, fine. Drop me and the kids at my mother’s. You go and find us a place to live. We’ll fly out later when it’s all settled.”

And that’s what happened. Max drove all their stuff out, rented a house in Encino, and waited for his family to arrive. In six weeks Lexa came with the girls, stayed for a somewhat chilly week, after which she returned to the East Coast for three more weeks of the show they’d been doing. Oh yes, with Lexa herself, now in the lead. She left Max with three hundred dollars in the bank, two little girls to feed and care for and…disappeared. No contact, no trace. The only other thing she left was her diary. But Max was an honorable man and honorable men don’t read other people’s private diaries. But after trying to track Lexa down for two months to no avail, leaving multiple messages with friends and getting no response, he decided one night that the diary might shed some light on her whereabouts and his present condition. Perhaps some explanation as to why a woman would desert her children and vanish lay between the covers of the only other thing she had left behind. So Max threw honor aside and read the secret pages, wherein he discovered that for the past year she had been carrying on an affair with one of his best friends. Watch out for best friends. They’re not always what they seem.

Max’s heart snapped. It broke into a sad, wet pile of heart shards in his chest. The manipulation and betrayal he felt, combined with grief, and the fear of his solo responsibility for the two little ones, without help or support in an alien world, was agonizing. Max realized he was dumped, a jilted, rejected, uninformed dupe, the trusting fool of someone who had cleverly planned her every move.

And here’s where we come to the lesson in this whole tale. So poor Max was gutted. He was in emotional agony. He had to put on a brave cheery face for the little girls, who every day asked when Mommy was coming back. He fed, nurtured and loved them, washed their clothes, found them a happy school to attend. He read them stories every night and tucked them in. Then he lay on his mattress in the living room, sobbing in the dark while they slept the sleep of the innocent. After a couple months of this he woke in the middle of the night in tears, out of a sound sleep. Oh yes, Max was feeling very sorry for himself. He was actually crying in his sleep. Well, finally he had enough! What’s your problem?, he asked himself. What’s going to fill this hole in your guts, pal? Because we’re done with this suffering and moaning. No more whining! Stop it!

The conversation went something like this. What do you need that you don’t have? I guess love. Whose love? Not hers. We know who she is now. Even if she walked in the door I wouldn’t want her back. So whose love, you don’t know anybody here. Well, I guess I have to love myself. Wow, there’s a concept! How do you do that? Well if you loved somebody else, how would you show them? I’d say nice things to them. I’d buy them nice presents, I’d hug them and kiss them and tell them how much I loved them. Well, pal. Ya better start doing that to yourself. What? Yeah, right now! Get up! Go into the bathroom and tell yourself you love YOU! So Max pulled himself up off his cry baby bed and went into the bathroom, snapped on the glaring overhead light and stared at his ugly, swollen eyed, weepy face and said I love you. He kissed his hand and patted it on Max’s blood shot eyes. He hugged himself and said over and over I love you I love you I love you. He kissed both hands and rubbed his face, declaring his love for himself, something he’d never done in his life. He also created a mantra for himself. He looked at his bloodshot weepy eyes in the mirror and repeated I can do It, I can do It, I can do It, I can do It, again and again. His only hesitation was that the girls might wander in and catch him in the midst of this ridiculous ritual and think Daddy had totally lost his mind. But it sure made him feel better.

Max practiced this routine every day for five minutes without fail. The surprising thing is that within a few weeks miracles started happening. A complete stranger came to his door announcing that a commercial would be shooting down the street and and apologizing for any inconvenience. When he discovered Max was an actor, he cast him in the commercial. His first acting job in California.. Max soon became friendly with several young women who seemed to find him attractive and before long he had a couple girlfriends. And they loved helping out with his little girls. Then another job came. And another. He managed finally to track down Lexa, who, naturally, had run off with the writer, wrecking his marriage in the process. But she wasn’t ready to care for kids because she had to find herself, whatever that meant. But that was ok with Max. He didn’t need her for anything anymore. He didn’t tell her that most of all, he knew now he was his own best friend and true love. All ego aside. He didn’t need to tell her he’d found jobs and relationships and was doing just fine. He certainly didn’t want to make it sound too inviting to her. However after a year he did suggest that she had a responsibility to her own daughter who was heading rapidly for puberty. Max didn’t feel it was his place to inform a young girl about tampons and female things and the like.

Anyway, long story short, the point of this whole meandering narrative is that no matter what, you must to learn to love yourself. And I don’t think it’s easy. I’m not saying it is. It’s something we, as humans, don’t practice as a rule. We hear always I’m my own worst enemy. Hey, how about I’m my own best friend? What a concept! I love me. I’m a good person. I do no intentional harm. And whatever I have in mind as a goal. I can do It, I can do It, I can do It, I can do It! How’s that for a mantra?

I’m assigning you the task of practicing this exercise for five minutes a day for one week.

Only five minutes. Only one week.

Watch for results in your feelings and in your life.

Don’t tell anyone. Keep it our secret.

Hammer this like a nail into your consciousness:

I love you (Your Name), I love you (Your Name), I love you (Your Name), I love you (Your Name),

I CAN do it! I CAN do it! I CAN do it! I CAN do it! I CAN do it! I CAN do it!

In private, in the mirror, every day!

Use it. Over and over, relentlessly! Try it out for a week. Feel it! See what happens.

Well, that’s it for this blog. Thanks for checking in. If you have suggestions or there’s a subject you’d like to have addressed, write us at ——-