I had just flipped to fakebook when I saw it -- headline splashed over the Chicago Tribune like a gangland shooting. (Recently, I had "liked" the Tribune's page so I could get through and tell 'em, "Do not ever, Ever sell out to the Evil Koch Brothers and may you burn in hell if you ever betray your friends.")
Actor James Gandolfini, dead at 51. Suspected heart attack.
I was so sad. Too many people dying. Trouble in life, I've seen...always.
A few weeks earlier, the same day one my best reporter friends became a first-time grandma, it came over the wire that Jean Stapleton, who played "dingbat" to Archie Bunker on the groundbreaking All in the Family had died. That half-hour Norman Lear created comedy, derived from a sitcom on the British telly, changed the game forever.
So did The Sopranos.
Tony Soprano was, I think, the first morally ambiguous character in television history. Here was a man conflicted between his innate conscience and a criminal life that had been his birth right from the moment he popped from the babyhole. Born of Italian-American stock, he was mob enforcer of a New Jersey crime family.
A little boy watching his capo father -- Johnny Boy Soprano -- slice off the fingers of a guy when he couldn't pay his debts. A mother, Livia, who never exactly told Uncle June -- Corrado Soprano, Jr. --- to bump off her only son in order to control the crime family, yet left no doubt.
Think this guy had issues? Oh yeah. His pop and uncle June would use his big sister Janice as lookout when they pulled a job at an amusement park or street deli. She was his father's favorite child, right?
Trying to control his Mafia Family was nothing compared trying to keep his suburban clan intact. Materialistic, self-absorbed, narcissistic, manipulating, they were ----
us.
I was driving to work one morning. Trouble at home. Trouble on the job. People talking in the hallways. Secretly plotting? How secure was my job? My family's home? Cell phone rings. Name on the screen: "Maria." ---- "Shit." A blow-up argument 'cuz I don't take out the garbage enough and it's just the way I was raised and no communication. (It happens to all couples at one time or another.) "You're breakin' my balls, here." Yelling and cussing. Connection lost.
I feel like Tony Soprano
Automatically, inadvertently, the thought shot into my head. And I realized that David Chase and the other writers of the Sopranos, James Gandolfini and the other actors were holding a mirror to America at this fin de siecle and here we were. A microcosm.
Tony Soprano was just another American middle-aged guy with job stress and a dysfunctional family. His job just happened to entail killing people.
Maybe America identified. Maria's brother Matt took to watching the show and said, "The fat guy, he reminds me of Dad with his temper."
Oh we've seen it. Maybe not the guy knocking a street hustler's teeth out, strangling a turncoat with piano wire or breaking some guy's arm and threatening to take away something no man can live without. No, we haven't seen it. But we know that guy. Crude, boisterous, pugnacious, emotional, quick-to-anger, likely to punch you in the nose if you're not mentally quick and able to defuse the situation before the women and children start crying.
We know that guy. You better believe it. I think a lot of other people in America do too. Many probably grew up with that guy.
It takes an intelligent and contemplative artist, a true Shakespearean actor to pull off a complicated character like Tony Soprano. That James Gandolfini could do it, shows he was a sensitive man.
Recently, while at the Warren Theater in Wichita, Maria and I saw a preview for a film in which Gandolfini played a kind, devoted Southern husband in a feel good movie. Now what the hell was the name of that thing?
I was looking forward to seeing what all this actor could do. At 51, he was taken away way too soon. But look online and you'll see a database filled with films and roles you may never have heard of.
Check 'em out.
We're sure gonna miss you, James Gandolfini. And Tony Soprano, may you swim with the fishes.
