If there were ever a picture of a combined Robin Williams and Dorothy Day, it might look like the above by Jimmy Turrell.* I was recently privy to a conversation between them.
Robin: Hey, Dotty, old bag, let’s you and me see what goin’ down at the Coke-Hey Coral tonight. Lots of good friends there who took a sleigh ride down the hill on the white stuff.
And don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean…
Dorothy: No, I could never claim to live up to the image I created. Started out in a slop house of misery, news, misery, sex, misery, and booze –and misery. The only thing I missed out on was drugs, but I would have tried them if I could have found them.
I wanted. I wanted. I wanted. And what could fill that want, answer that appetite? Nothing was enough. Not news, not sex, not partying all night, and not feeding off of the money earned on the backs of other people’s misery and despair and being thankful I wasn’t the one in the ditch or on the streets.
And, hey Tubbo, don’t tell me you don’t understand appetite.
Robin: Well, there we are at one, nothing was fast enough for me, not my mouth, not my mind, not my unholy glee in the most shocking juxtapositions. And I’ll take Tubbo, I’ve heard a lot worse, Your Sainted Highness.
Dorothy: Well and you know how to get to me. I hated that term more than any other. Everyone, everyone can find they own path to generosity. That is all that we need in this world, that and compassion, and you had plenty of that.
Robin: Yeah, well, when you’ve been living at the bottom of the hill, you can’t look down on anyone. So did you have compassion for me?
Dorothy: And for myself and for every living soul who walks this planet in confusion and fear. So I think we have come to join hands here to say that God has provided a safety net. You can’t see it, but you can feel it every time you stretch out your hand to offer what you have to another.
Robin: And I had friends that did that the many times I was at rock bottom.
Dorothy: You did too Robin. A more generous soul than yours was never put into being by our Creator.
Robin: I am unmanned to hear you say so.
Dorothy: It was that as much as your humor that touched the hearts of your audiences, that turned them from fans into devotees. The light of the Lord was in you Robin and still is. And here you come again to offer it here to anyone who happens to stop by.
Robin: Hand in hand, Old Bag.
Dorothy: Heart to heart. Tubby.
__________
Ann: Robin, I feel so useless next to her.
Robin: Everybody does. But she’s not a bad old thing, is she?
Dorothy: Robin!
Robin: Yes ma’am. See ya around, guys, gotta go….
July 14, 2020
*"Death and Mrs. Doubtfire: The secret ingredient of Robin Williams’s greatest role: grief," James Parker, Atlantic Magazine, November 2014
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