Louis Roney: As long as you're up

These words are reputedly said some 6.45 times a day during the average marriage from one mate to the other. Those “in the know” report that most married people are loath to rise from the sitting position for fear that they’ll be called upon to perform some favor a la “as long as you’re up.”

Whole neighborhoods of married couples are said at any given time to be in a reclining position, waiting sharp-eyed for their sucker-mate who forgets and stands up in a vulnerable position. Laziness is actually a virtue, if seen from certain points of view. It has often occurred to me that the world would have been much better off had some infamous people just been lazy — such folks as Adolf Hitler and Al Capone for example.

Lazy politicians, who deserve no public recognition, should be especially cherished, as we already have enough statues in our parks and plaques on our walls.

We memorialize people like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, yet how many of their contemporaries did anything at all that was memorable enough to be preserved in marble?

Great throngs of people have busted their necks to make other people famous only to be totally forgotten themselves afterwards. Armies of the unrecognized and unthanked parade as ghosts through the empty midnight streets of Paris, London and Washington, D.C. These forgotten ones, we hope, are enjoying full force the value of the expression “per se” i.e.: getting pleasure for its own sake alone.

A gigantic advertising business in the U.S. rests primarily upon, “making something out of” those names that have attracted little or no attention by themselves: e.g. Mr. Bayer of Bayer aspirin. I cannot recall an occasion when the word “Bayer “ has generated a romantic conversation or a heated discussion among my friends. Hollywood, however, has the power at any given time to “create” a star and can reputedly take anyone off the street and make his or her name a household word at will. I can attest that many people I have seen on TV have no visible talent—they were just there at the right time, that’s all.

A few people can quite easily cause a hoard of people to move — for example: let a few people play a football game in a giant stadium and cars may be parked for half a mile in every direction.

A guy socking another guy may cause the lifting of a few eyebrows, but put the two in a boxing ring, and you can sell tickets by the hundreds. Of course, many of us spend a great deal of effort being anonymous i.e.: “lost in the crowd.” When the tax collector is at work, or we are in certain delicate personal situations, we may try to become part of the woodwork.

People in the theater and in political life are usually hoping they will be widely seen, or else that nobody will notice their presence at all.

Getting ones name in front of the public is a career expense that people in the theater and in politics bear as highly important. “A name” is an important attribute, and there are offices full of busy people making other peoples’ names famous—for a price, of course. Such folks are the “publicity agents” of Hollywood and Broadway, and their sole purpose in life is to make famous the clients who pay them handsomely to do so.

And then, of course, we have the antics of the Justin Biebers, Lindsay Lohans, Brittany Spears, and Kim Kardashians of the world blasted in our faces — as if their lives really mattered a whit!

About Roney: Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF 2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award (Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)