Good Will Hurting

 He mimed, mimicked and he mocked. He was Mork from inner space. Robin Williams held up a cracked mirror and we all laughed. Now the comic has shown us he was crying inside-out, drowning, not waving.

His face was elastic, his legs acrobatic, his antics kinetic. He was a wind-up toy wound, but wounded. He scooted and skipped, spun and sprung as if coiled. He could be anyone, everyone, everywhere and also no one, nowhere.

Williams was the clown they brought in to bring lovers together, to pry open our eyes and see the absurd. He was the court jester who made us feel royal, King Henry’s Falstaff, made benign, playing the fool so we might see our own folly.

Give him a handkerchief and it became a hijab, yarmulke, or babushka. He turned a fig-leaf into a cape to anger the bull or a carpet launched and he was Peter Pan, Pop Eye, Fisher King and Captain Hook. Good Morning Viet Nam, Omaha, Manhattan, Marin.

A belt became a ribbon to gift-wrap our eyes, a leash to walk the beast, a snake in the garden, a whip to flagellate himself, a pull-string to bring down the curtain, a life-line unreachable. And finally a noose. 

Now Williams the conjurer is gone into the society of dead poets.

  e scoot