No Labels, Just Pride

Emma's journey to her first national tour, and the lessons I learned along the way

This is a different kind of Stage Dad essay.

I was laid off almost a decade ago, when Nicholas was in college and our three children were in high school. After 12 years at the same nonprofit and three decades in the never less than stressful world of journalism and communications, it was both a shock to the system and — in retrospect — somewhat merciful.

For several years, I navigated the death by a thousand papercuts path as the once robust departments I supervised were whittled down to almost nothing. Year after year, I found myself telling employees that they no longer had jobs and turning to the rest of the staff to explain how they would have to shoulder the load.

Meanwhile, Jill and I also were navigating a world in which our four kids were in four schools in three states. Nick was toggling back and forth between very different families — his mom and half siblings in North Carolina and us in Northern Virginia. Kate was mired in a seemingly never-ending struggle with her mental health. Ben was in New York, then on the road with “Billy Elliot” and “Newsies” while his twin Emma was at home dealing with the minefield that was high school.

Jill and I were endlessly grateful for the stability that Emma brought to the chaos of our lives. She was studious, hard-working, organized, determined. She took pride in her grades. She graduated from college in three years with two majors. At one point, I labeled her the Marilyn to our Herman, Lily, Grandpa and Eddie — aka the “Normal One.”

Labels — no matter how true they may seem or be — are a terrible thing.

Emma with Ben at his opening night for the national tour of “Newsies: The Broadway Musical” in October 2014. Right: Ben with Emma at her opening night for “Jesus Christ Superstar” in January 2023.

Parenting: The Imperfect Science

While all the attributes I ascribe to Emma are indeed factual — and if anything, she’s a stickler for the facts — they also undermine the complexity of who she is or what she went through during her childhood. Some things I know and understand; others I’m learning in dribs and drabs as she moves farther into adulthood.

Growing up, Emma always projected independence and a distinct point of view. Caught up in my own chaos, especially during her teenage years, I didn’t realize the projection was a cover for her insecurity and a lack of confidence in her body and in her dancing.

On one hand, I feel guilty about not reading the tea leaves. On the other, it serves as a reminder that parenting, at best, is an imperfect science. When you bring a child into the world, your individual and collective baggage comes along for the ride. The goal is to always be better parents than yours are/were, and to not ladle on the internal and external stuff that you were saddled with in your childhood.

Some of that, of course, is inevitable, because unless you actively work to change, your past and your present will remain one and the same. And if I’ve learned anything as a parent, it’s that “better” is a relative term.

I like to think I represent the best of my parents, but admittedly it’s not an objective analysis. Like my father, I look at life through a different lens, seeing more gray than black and white in everything. Like my mom, I can think in rapid succession of approaches to take in a crisis, from absolute best to absolute worst-case scenario.

At the same time, as a child and a young adult, I believed that telling a lie was better than admitting failure, in part because the fib could buy me some time to work out some sort of F to C (or even a B-) solution. The trying to work out a solution to a problem was a good trait — something I got from my parents. The lying — something they never encouraged or supported — obviously was not.

But that fear of failure — of being a disappointment to those who loved and supported me — was so visceral and real that it was overwhelming. I felt like I was only adding to the burdens my parents faced, especially in the wake of my father’s illness. Like many young people do, I pushed it away for as long as I could, until I couldn’t do it anymore.

At some point in my mid 20s, I had a tough conversation with my mom, in which I admitted that lying was my go-to stop gap when I had screwed something up. It wasn’t exactly a confessional, and I wasn’t shocked that she knew I wasn’t always telling the truth. But it was the start of a different relationship, one based in honesty no matter what.

An ad for “The Lifespan of a Fact,” which was on Broadway in 2018.

The Parent-Adult Child Transition

Navigating the parent-child to parent-adult transition is hard work. It requires open and honest communication, as well as a great deal of empathy and understanding of the circumstances under which the other person resides.

When Emma was on a break from college in 2018, I took her to see the Broadway play, “The Lifespan of a Fact,” that starred Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Cannavale, and Cherry Jones. Emma is a huge Radcliffe fan, thanks to the Harry Potter series, and we were both intrigued by the play’s characters and theme.

Based on the story behind John d’Agata’s essay, “What Happens There,” the play describes an ongoing battle between the writer and a fact checker over what passes for truth in literary nonfiction. It’s an exploration of “factual truth” vs. “emotional truth” and calls into question whether the narrators of stories are ever truly reliable.

At the time, I thought the play was a perfect distillation of our approaches to life and learning. Mine is rooted in intuition and observation; Emma’s — at least as I saw it — was based on facts and analysis. I see the gray in everything; for the longest time, her point of view came across as black and white.

As we left the theater, I bought Emma a signed poster that she has framed and hanging in her bedroom in New York, where she moved after graduating from Point Park University in 2019. Ten months after moving to the city, she found herself uprooted when the pandemic hit, and stayed with us during the initial lockdown.

Those two months in were hard for everyone, and we clashed periodically/semi-frequently over developments in the changing and uncertain world we lived in. At times I said some things I almost immediately regretted because I decided to “win” the argument rather than listen and understand.

It has taken time, but I believe we’ve learned how to communicate better and more respectfully. We fall back into old patterns at times, but I can’t begin to say how proud we are of her growth as a daughter, woman, performer, and human.

The three of us in Times Square — December 2020

Figuring It Out

When the lockdown restrictions were lifted, Emma went back to New York, even though her chosen industry was far from reopening. She was determined to figure it out on her own.

To no one’s surprise, she is doing just that.

Over the past two years, Emma has juggled two and sometimes three jobs while pursuing her dream in New York. She and Ben, who were separated from each other at 11 when he moved to the city, have reconnected, and have an even tighter bond. She also has developed solid, loving relationships with Nick and Kate.

Last year, Emma started running again. She and Jill had done a 10-mile race when Emma was 13, and she spent years trying to “figure out a healthy relationship with running.” At the same time, she has continued to work on “feeling secure and confident in myself, my body, and my dancing.”

In April, Emma ran the Tar Heel 10 Miler in Chapel Hill with Nick and her Uncle Michael. In September, she and Nick ran the D.C. Half Marathon together. As she got out of the car to train back to New York, she told her mom that she was going out on a second date with a dancer named Colby. The two announced their relationship publicly on Halloween.

Emma with Nick after running a half marathon in Washington, D.C., September 2022. With Colby at Halloween 2022.

Through videos she has shared, we’ve seen Emma’s dramatic growth as both a dancer and performer. As she has become more comfortable and confident, the latter is shining brightly.

Performing on the Road

On Christmas Eve, Emma booked her first national tour: “Jesus Christ Superstar.” She left for Los Angeles three days later, learned the Mob Leader role in four days, and was in the show on January 7.

The Mob Leader is the lead dancer in the show. The role requires precise movement and incorporates a variety of dance styles to convey the emotions you see on stage. The amount of information that Emma had to cram into her head and translate to her body just astounds me.

On January 17, my birthday, I went to Houston with Ben to Houston to see Emma in the show. As the iconic score played and the curtain rose, I felt the same pit in my stomach that I do every time one of my kids is on stage. I also had the same swell of pride and joy that any parent has when you see your child — now an adult — doing something they love.

Throughout the 95-minute show, I glanced over frequently at Ben to see his reactions, just as I did when Emma sat next to me at one of his shows. At one point he whispered to me, “She’s killing it.”

And he was right, even though he didn’t realize the irony of his word choice. She did.

Afterward, Ben and I went to the stage door, then out for a drink and debrief with Emma. Watching my twins banter and talk about dance for the umpteenth time was both normal and surreal. It also was the best birthday present I could have gotten.

With Emma and Ben in Houston after the January 17 performance — on my birthday.

Emma is on the road with the show through June 25. She’s traveling today from Tempe to Sacramento, Calif., the eighth of 32 cities in 21 states that she will see during her six months on tour. Throughout her journey, she continues to forge her own path in the way only she can.

Applause. Applause.

Postscript

Like a number of theaters that host national tours, the Hobby Center has someone from the cast paint a piece of art with the show’s logo on it. Houston is the first venue to have paintings with the signatures of both of our twins. For this Houston-area native and former resident, that is a proud “Stage Dad” moment.