At his funeral, we met a dozen people who introduced themselves as Joel’s best friend. He was my mom’s best friend, my dad’s best friend. We argued, a lot, and still he was my biggest fan. He was loud and gregarious and arrogant and generous.
He loved to cook and could have been a chef. He had a brief stint as a conscious rapper and helped organize a boycott against Taco Bell, demanding more money per bushel for the farm workers who picked tomatoes. He had raised his son, who is now 26, as a single father.
He had played professional soccer in Europe.
When my brother died, at 43 years old, he had already lived several full lives. He was charming and adorable and then he was handsome - and always, he knew it. As he was growing up, my mother worried with some regularity that someone would snatch him in a grocery store or at the zoo. When he was born, the nurses in the hospital were so enamored with him that they threatened to steal him. Get it?įor my whole life, Joel was a magnetic force who drew everyone toward him. We begged our parents to name Michael Jr. He was my younger brother, and then the middle child when our baby brother, Michael Jr., came along. Joel and I were born only three years apart. They try to believe they can pass over to a better place. They fantasize about a better world, in which they are not trapped, without hope, in a stark urban setting. The two men, played by Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood, try to provide each other with the emotional sustenance they are denied anywhere else. There is a streetlamp, a milk crate, an abandoned tire, a steel drum. In Danya Taymor’s production at the August Wilson Theater, the set is spare. “Pass Over” is the story of Moses and Kitch, two young Black men who have little more than each other. I am grateful for brilliant art that moves me beyond the emotional walls I build around myself.
But when I’m reading a beautiful book or I watch a poignant moment in a movie or television show or even a commercial, something tightly held will break loose inside me, and tears will stream down my face. My misguided stoicism is something I hold as a ridiculous, slightly self-destructive point of pride. When I’m on the verge of tears, I try to hold them back. I am not much of a crier in my actual life. What moved me was knowing how the decision Kitch needs to make is both easy and impossible.
One of the two main characters in the play, Kitch, is faced with the choice of a purgatorial existence with something material he covets, or an eternity in paradise, free from worldly suffering. Fifth St., Los Angeles CA 90071 or call (213) 228-7555.At the end of Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s Broadway play, “Pass Over,” I was in tears.
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