How Y'all Doing? Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived

by Leslie Jordan

“Happiness is a choice. Happiness is a habit. And happiness is something you have to work hard at. It does not just happen.”

Wes Bentley is so handsome. He is handsome like a movie star. Oh wait, he is a movie star. He is my hero. And always will be.

I think that fear keeps so many of us from being successful at things outside our realm of experience. We love to stay in our comfort zone, but the growth only comes when we wander outside of that zone.

From it, I learned one of life’s biggest lessons: true happiness can only come from being “of loving service to others.”

Aren’t dreams the best!

My relationship with Mr. Faulkner did not get off on the best footing. The first book I picked up of his was The Sound and the Fury. I sure wish I had known before I started that Benjy, the narrator of The Sound and the Fury, is intellectually disabled. If I had realized what Faulkner was up to, I might have read more of him from the get-go. But at the time, I was so frustrated trying to make heads or tails of what Benjy was wishing to convey, I threw the book across the room.

I kept watching her out of the corner of my eye. She was scribbling in her script. On the other side of her was Viola Davis. She, too, was scribbling in her script. So, I thought I had better get to scribbling. I pretended to scribble all kinds of things in my script.

She thought my cartwheel was cute. So there.

My heart broke. I suppose someone had tossed the puppy out of the car, since we were in the middle of nowhere, too far out for a puppy to get to on her own. Who on earth would do such a thing? People like that need to burn in hell, I’ll tell you that much.

Not most for me. All of my fears were imagined. Don Norman also had me write how I thought I had acquired each fear. I wrote for days and days, years and years.

Why is it that we love to drag all that baggage from childhood with us? We heave it dutifully. We haul it everywhere we go. And we pull it out at the drop of a hat for all to see. Nope, we are not going to let go of all that baggage.

The thing about shame is that it is so selective. I knew my dad loved me. He showed it daily in a million different ways. So why remember failures?

For folks who have trouble finding and believing in a “Higher Power,” as we sometimes refer to God in the rooms of recovery, I would like to submit a thought. In each of our lives, there are extraordinary happenings that could easily be chalked up to serendipity. But I personally choose to believe that on the Tuesday evening at the Nationals’ stadium when Leslie Allen Jordan was called upon to throw out the first pitch, he did so bathed in a godly light, some sort of heavenly illumination.