Jersey Boys: Gone Daddy Gone

I can check one more box on my career bucket list. I’ve been on the Storymen podcast.

The weekly hour-long podcast features the musings of Clay Morgan, J.R. Forasteros and Matt Mikalatos—smart, spiritual and entertaining blokes who fuse theology with pop culture (and a little bit o’ history on occasion, too), which makes them my kind of guys. Their discussions are often fascinating and always fun, and I listen to them regularly on my weekly runs. They make the miles go by faster. So when they asked me to come on, I was thrilled. You can listen to the podcast here, or download it on iTunes or Stitcher.

They had me on to chat about The Good Dad, the book on which I collaborated with Jim Daly, but naturally the conversation drifted into movie dads: The good ones (Marlin from Finding Nemo is just the tops), the bad ones (King Stefan from Maleficent: Ugh) and ones in between.

And then there’s Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys, who never was much of a dad at all. (Warning: Spoilers ahead)

In The Good Dad, Jim Daly talks a lot about how important fathers are in the lives of their kids—and how important it is for them, particularly, to be there. To get involved. To make memories with their kids and be that stabilizing influence—an old oak tree, in Jim’s metaphor—that kids need so much.

Not all fathers do this, of course. Some won’t, through fear or disinterest. And some feel like they can’t. Valli, the falsetto-blessed frontman for the 1960s hit machine The Four Seasons, was among the latter (according to Jersey Boys).

Music was job No. 1 for Valli—his profession, his passion. For more than a decade, Valli and his fellow Four Seasons work to make it big. And when they finally do, the Seasons are on the road constantly to stay there. Even when the band falls apart, Valli continues to tour relentlessly, hitting stop after thankless stop to pay off a wicked debt (courtesy the band’s irresponsible driving force, Tommy DeVito).

And according to Jersey Boys, he never really quits. At the end of the movie, he compares himself to the Energizer Bunny. “I just keep going and going and going, chasing the music, trying to get home.”

It’s admirable, in a way. Anything worth doing takes work. And after watching this flick, no one can doubt Valli’s work ethic.

But as I said in my Plugged In Review, every decision has a cost. And Valli’s decision to put the music first, while it enriched the lives of many a listener, deeply impacted his family. Valli may be trying to get home at the end of Jersey Boys, but he didn’t really have a home to go to.

We see how his non-stop touring (and what he does while on the road) impacts his marriage. But we feel it more poignantly in his relationship with daughter, Francine. Audiences see her first as a trusting-but-fragile 7-year-old, confused and frightened by her parents’ fighting and not completely sure whether her father even really loves her. Valli does, of course, and sings her to sleep. If good intentions made the father, Valli would’ve done all right.

But it’s not long before he goes on the road again, leaving Francine and some other daughters that could really use a dad.

The next time we see Francine, she’s a 17-year-old runaway, hanging out with a rough-looking boyfriend, smoking cigarettes and hurting a voice that, according to Valli, could rival his own. Valli manages to reel her back for a time, encouraging her to drop the cigs and start singing. “I believe in you,” he tells her. And Valli does. But he’s still on the road constantly. And one day he gets a call: His little girl is dead—claimed, apparently, by a drug overdose.

It’s a sobering coda for this toe-tapping movie. And when a friend tells Valli that he shouldn’t blame himself, Valli asks, essentially, “who else is there to blame?” If not his fault, whose?

In The Good Dad, Jim stresses that, eventually, kids make their own decisions. Parents can’t hold themselves solely responsible for the bad choices that children might make down the road. But we’d be kidding ourselves to say that how we raise our kids doesn’t impact them mightily as adults. We might not be to blame … but we are at least partly responsible. We can’t know how Francine might’ve benefitted if Valli had been home more. But I’m pretty sure she would’ve been better off.

Valli says that he’s just “trying to get home.” But in truth, the only way you get there is by doing it. You turn the car around and head home. And if “home” isn’t all that you’d like it to be, you stick around and try to make it better.

Our choices matter. And every choice we make comes with a cost. Jersey Boys is, on one level, a buoyant story of four guys who overcame a lot of obstacles to make some beautiful music together. But to its credit, it doesn’t overlook the price that was paid to make it happen.

Maleficent: Broken Hearted

It's hard to watch good guys turn bad. We don't want our heroes to fall.

But sometimes, it can be hard to watch our villains turn good, too.

Take Maleficent, Disney's re-introduction of one of its all-time best/worst evildoers. In Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent is as bad as bad can be—the self-proclaimed "Mistress of all Evil" who calls upon the powers of hell to help her do her nasty work.

Let me be honest: I kinda like that in a villain. It's nice to see someone who knows who they are and really owns it, y'know? Forget the moral complexity, the makers of Sleeping Beauty said in 1959. Give us a woman with green skin and horns.

So much to my shame, I was ever-so-slightly disappointed in the positive moral trajectory in Maleficent. In the 2014 film, Angelina Jolie's Queen of Mean isn't so much as a dastardly diva as someone who's been really, really hurt—in more ways than one. The result, we see, is a pretty interesting examination of what hurt and bitterness can do to the human soul—and a hint of what is the only recourse out of it.

Be aware: There be spoilers ahead.

Maleficent wasn't always the towering figure of darkness we came to know in Sleeping Beauty. Once upon a time, she was a little fairy girl with horns and wings, full of hope and promise. When a boy named Stefan stumbles into her magical land and tries to swipe something (a pretty little gem), Maleficent gently tells him that stealing's wrong and winds up befriending the kid. The two become the best of buds (an unlikely relationship, given that Maleficent's magic land and Stefan's kingdom are constantly at war) and, eventually, even a bit more than that. In fact, Maleficent falls in love with the lad.

But the two grow apart and don't see each other for years. In that time, Maleficent becomes a powerful defender of her realm. Stefan becomes a steward for the mortal king. But when the dying king tells his court that he'll give the crown to whoever kills Maleficent, Stefan sees his chance for rapid career advancement. He takes off to the moors to rekindle his relationship with the fairy, planning to drug her and kill her while she sleeps.

But he can't: He still feels some affection for the girl (now a beautiful, winged woman). But he really covets the kingdom, too. So he slices off Maleficent's beautiful wings instead, taking them back to the king (misleading him in the process). Maleficent wakes up and is, understandably, devastated. Stefan mutilated the two things that made the fairy who she was: her wings and her soul.

Now, the potential spirituality of all this is interesting. When you look at a whole Malificent, your eyes are naturally drawn to the two things that make her so different from you and me—her wings and her horns. Both are, for Christians, instantly recognizable: When we think of humanoid-like beings with wings, most of us think of angels. Horns, on the other hand, are shorthand for the devil and demons. Neither horns nor wings are good or evil in themselves, of course, but they do represent—and have for centuries—the good and evil in the universe and, perhaps, the good and evil in ourselves (think about those angels and demons that appear on someone's shoulders in the old cartoons).

Stefan takes from Maleficent something angelic in her—something good. He steals what allowed her to fly closer to heaven. And, now earthbound—even dragging around at first as if the earth's gravity was pulling her closer to itself—she allows anger and bitterness and her more evil, horned nature to seep into the cracks of her soul.

She retreats to a dilapidated castle for a while to prood. And when she leaves it, Maleficent is a different person: Powerful in her anger, gorgeous in her hatred. She's a true villain in look and deed. She curses Stefan's little baby, Aurora. She and the king are now irrevocably at odds now, literally warring against each other. It reminds me of a really bitter divorce.

And that, I think, is at least partly intentional. We see here the horrors of a relationship gone horribly bad—how an act of betrayal can lead to an act of vengeance, a spiral of anger and hatred that can spin out of control. Each word and deed becomes more ammunition in this battle of … what? Wills? Control? Utter annihilation? Perhaps they don't know. When this sort of hatred spills over, there are no real goals, it would seem. Only the desire to hurt. We can get the same way, too. Many of us may know friends or couples who've fallen to this level—where they can no longer stand the sight of each other. In our hurt, we wall ourselves away. And when we emerge, we sometimes come out different: Our hate can make us strong (just like Darth Vader warned us), but it twists us, too. It turns us into something we weren't before and were never meant to be.

In Maleficent and Stefan, we see the corrupting power of hurt. The bitterness of loss. After Maleficent lays the curse on Aurora, Stefan turns into a full-time brooder, so obsessed with destroying Maleficent that he doesn’t even attend his own wife’s deathbed.

Maleficent is much the same … until she grows close to the very thing she cursed. Throughout Aurora’s childhood, Maleficent is never far away—watching, sometimes even caring for the child. So close she is that Aurora recognizes her shadow, a constant presence in her childhood. And she dubs Maleficent her fairy godmother. In the space of who knows how long, the two become close. And somewhere along the line, Maleficent realizes that she has room for something other than hate in her heart. Aurora—a name which references a strange dance of light in the cold, winter dark—has illuminated something of Maleficent’s black soul. Our villainess discovers a capacity for love.

I think that Disney missed a chance here to take this story of redemption and make it extra-special. Stefan could’ve been redeemed too, it seems: He wasn’t always bad. I’d like to think that he cared for Maleficent and loved his daughter. But here, Stefan takes the mantel of the true villain—incapable of accepting love through the iron hatred inside him.

But this, too, is a powerful reflection of how love, particularly God’s love, works. We may be offered love, even forgiveness. But we’re under no obligation to accept it. So often, we refuse. Our pain and anger won’t allow us to. We’d rather nurse a righteous bitterness than accept a little grace.

Toward the end of the movie, Aurora finds Maleficent’s wings and, magically still flapping, they find their way back to their mistress. She’s again whole, and powerful—a symbolic healing reflecting what Aurora had already done in the fairy’s soul. No longer the pure, horned evildoer, Maleficent spreads her wings, looking for all her past faults and sins, a little more angelic. She’s been restored. Redeemed. Maleficent, through grace, can fly again.

Who's the Evilest of Them All?

Walt Disney always knew the value of a good villain.

Maleficent, who haughtily strides into theaters Friday in the guise of Angelina Jolie, is proof of that. This self-proclaimed "Mistress of All Evil" is Disney's most dastardly diva, a woman who could teach Star Wars' dark Emperor a thing or two about fashion and eat Hannibal Lector for breakfast (as a dragon, quite literally). Maybe it's the horns. The evil raven. The fact that her very name seems to mean something like "magnificently bad" (if we're liberal with our Latin/English construction). Clearly, even her parents knew she was up to no good.

Rumor has it that she cuts a more sympathetic figure in this newest of Disney flicks, but part of me hopes that they don't mess with the lady too much. It's nice to have someone to root against—even if it's not always fair.

See, the problem with evil (well, one of the many, many problems with evil) is that it's often quite sneaky. We like to think of it in our stories as something outside of us—something other and ugly and monstrous. But unfortunately, what we think of as evil is really just good twisted up. The ol' Latin prefix of "mal" suggests as much. Our cars malfunction. Our wayward kids are maladjusted. Our bosses are malicious. It suggests that something that once worked just fine broke along the way. It's not right anymore.

We Christians believe that break happened at the very beginning of the world, when sin entered into it and led us all astray. And we're also taught that we all are prone to sin, which means we're all a little broken, too. We've got a malady in us.

We don't like to think about that. We're all the heroes of our own stories, after all. By default, that makes us the good guys. We're Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming, right? There's no Maleficent in us.

But of course there is. And maybe, just maybe, some of these outward manifestations of evil help us see the darker corners of our own souls.

So with that in mind, here's a completely subjective countdown of my five favorite Disney animated villains—and just what they might be able to teach us, too.

5. Captain Hook. For all his faults, I've always respected the sense of style of Peter Pan's main villain. Not everyone can pull off a hat like that. And honestly, I've always felt a little sorry for the guy. After all, we all might harbor some bitterness if someone fed one of our hands to a crocodile—which, we're told, is exactly what Peter Pan did. (If I was Pan's dad, I would've told him that it's never OK to feed other people's body parts to reptilian carnivores, no matter what.) But where Hook goes awry is that he never, ever lets that misdeed go. He has vowed revenge on Pan for that crocodile snack, no matter how long it takes—and in a place called Never Neverland, that could be a mighty long grudge. Hook's obsession with Pan is a good reminder that forgiveness is an important and healthy aspect of our faith—even when it's really, really hard to forgive.  

4. The Coachman. Pinocchio has so many fantastically bad characters that it's hard to settle on just one: "Honest" John, Stromboli, Monstro the whale … but since I'm morally opposed to whaling and have the upmost respect for puppeteers, I'd like to focus on the Coachman, the rotund fellow who takes Pinocchio off to Pleasure Island. He's the worst kind of villain—a guy who misleads the innocent and then turns them all into donkeys afterwards. For me, the guy's a pretty potent symbol of our own inclinations to slip into temptation and excuse our own bad behavior. We don't need a coachman to take us to Pleasure Island. Most of us can walk there all on our own.

3. The Wicked Queen. The queen in Snow White is Maleficent 1.0, and even after more than 80 years, she's still a potent symbol of evil. But in her own way, she's a dramatic and still jarring zag away from how we typically think of evil. See, we humans have a bias toward beauty. Even modern-day studies suggest that we're more prone to believe pretty people than ugly ones. But here, the evil is found in this uber-glamorous queen (love that black cowl thingy she's got going for her). It's only when she "disguises" herself as an old crone that we see her true nature. And why does she change? Jealousy, plain and simple. The Queen decides to have Snow White killed because her mirror told her that she was prettier than she was. We can all feel a little jealous at times: Someone's always, it seems, a little prettier or stronger or smarter than we are. Sometimes we all need to be reminded that, in God's eyes, we're pretty awesome. If only someone would've told the Queen that true beauty is found on the inside, well, we might've saved a handful of dwarves a lot of angst (though their cottage would probably still be filthy).

2. Chernabog. Of all the Disney villains on the list, Chernabog—the demon at the end of Fantasia—is the only one I actually had nightmares about as a kid. This guy was as bad as they come, what with all the ghosts circling his head and the weird goblins he dumps into the fire and all. He's got claws and wings and the nastiest of scowls. He scared the dickens out of me, and I don't mean Charles. But here's a funny thing about we mortals: The things that scare or repulse us are sometimes the same things that we can be attracted to, sometimes unhealthily so. As a kid, I couldn't get Chernabog out of my mind. I didn't want to be the guy … and yet, the power that he wielded at the top of that mountain was, in a way, pretty enticing to a little boy who went to bed at 8 p.m. No one would make that winged demon eat his beats, that's for sure. Power  can be an, um, powerful temptation for some. And while power in itself isn't all bad (my editor certainly wouldn't think so), it can lead us down some dark, even diabolical paths.

1. Maleficent. If she wants to call herself the Mistress of All Evil, who am I to argue? While she may find a measure of redemption in the new movie, she's really, really bad in Sleeping Beauty—as in a servant-of-the-devil bad. I don’t think it's any accident that Prince Phillip fights the ol' girl with the Sword of Truth and the Shield of Virtue—an echo, perhaps, of Paul's "Armor of God" passage in Ephesians 6. (The shield even has a Christian cross emblazoned on it.) Clearly, Maleficent made some bad choices in her life. But maybe she would've been in a position to make better choices had she, I dunno, not spent her time alone (goblin henchmen don't count) in a castle surrounded by thorns (yes, yes, you know-it-all Disney watchers, the thorns came later. Just go with me here. We're speaking metaphorically.)  I think that maybe, had she spent a little more time with her fellow fairies, she might've turned out differently. Life and faith, after all, are meant to be lived in community. We need people to tell us when we're getting a little, um, weird. And perhaps, with a little more companionship, someone might've ventured to tell her that the whole horned hat thing was a bad fashion choice.

Running on Faith: Breathing

I thought it was just going to be a little training run—another step toward our fall marathon. It was easy to sell the race to Emily, my daughter and training partner. The 13-mile Colfax Half Marathon would go through the zoo, a fire station and some of Denver's prettiest neighborhoods. It'd be a nice change of scenery from our typical training run. Plus, there'd be medals. You can never have too many of those.

You can see us here in the picture, ready for another fun, fantastic run.

And for the first four miles or so, everything was great. The zoo was fun. The neighborhoods were neat. The weather was almost perfect.

And then Emily started feeling sick.

We walked some. Then some more. Instead of counting the miles, I'd scan the streets for porta-potties. Emily was hurting bad. I could tell by how quiet she was. Normally, she talks the miles away on our training runs. But now, during this run, she wasn't speaking. She was fighting too hard with her body to talk, fighting with every step. I'd fill in the void with some mindless patter, hoping to take her mind off things. But nothing I said made her feel a bit better. And so we walked when we had to and ran when we could, listening to each other's footsteps, the sound of the other breathing.

And by mile seven, neither of us was sure it was smart to keep pushing on.

"I don't want to quit," she told me.

"I know you don't," I said. "I know."

A half-mile later, when we hit the fire station, we decided to call it. I dialed my wife Wendy and asked if she'd be able to pick us up along the way.

She couldn't: The car was in the middle of the race traffic. We were on our own.

But just when I feared things might get really messy, Emily rallied. By mile 10, she was feeling better. By 12, the only things wrong with her was her foot and knee and hip—the normal aches and pains that you sometimes get when you run a ways. And by the time she was collecting all her "free" loot after we crossed the finish line—including the medal—she joked, "this is the best day ever!"

 In these little running/religion musings of mine, we've talked about how sometimes both faith and a long run can be a struggle, and that's particularly true of when we're in pain. Our relationship with God can be tricky even the best of times. But when we're suffering or grieving, it can feel nearly impossible. The pain can be overwhelming. We can feel like quitting.

I've done quite a few stories about grieving and suffering over the years, and one central question has been at the center of many of them: How can the rest of us help? If we know someone who's dealing with a crushing loss or battling illness or suffering from indescribable pain, how can we carry a little of that burden? What can we do to ease the discomfort?

The experts always seem to come back to the same, sad fact. Sometimes we can't. We can't always take away the pain. We can't speed up the grieving process. Some things, they just hurt.

But even though we can't take away the pain or speed up the recovery, we can still be there … in body and spirit. We can walk, or run, alongside them. We don't have to talk. Sometimes, it's better if we don't. Just to be with someone—to show them they're not alone—can be a comfort, as small as it might seem.

For one of those stories, I talked with a man who had terminal brain cancer. The man, a lifelong Christian, made a startling omission to me—one so different from the feel-good Christianese that people often wrap themselves in. He said there were times when he prayed that he felt … nothing. God, his great comfort and comforter, was silent.

He added that he's had some incredible times of prayer, too, but him talking about the silence of God struck me. I've felt that same silence sometimes. There are dark nights when God's love seems to cover you like a blanket, but others where the blanket is gone. There is no solace found in that dark, quiet space. No spiritual platitudes to savor, no prayer to serve as salve.

But in those moments, I sometimes think back to an old Lifehouse song called "Breathing." It's a psalm, in a way, that patiently tries to accept those silences, to make sense of them and even embrace them. The chorus goes:

I am hanging on every word you say

And even if you don't want to speak tonight

That's all right, all right with me

'Cause I want nothing more than to sit

Outside heaven's door and listen to you breathing

It's where I want to be.

Emily and I spent a good chunk of the Colfax Half listening to each other breathe. It wasn't fun for either of us (and especially not for Em). But maybe there was something special about those painful few miles, anyway. Emily knew that, run or walk or crawl or stop, I'd be with her no matter what. I felt the strange sense of gratitude of sharing a truly, if painfully, unforgettable time with my daughter—a time beyond smiles and laughter, a time beyond words. It was a time when breathing was as eloquent as it got. And it was enough.