Oh Brother

I Know Where Art He Right Now, But I Don't Always.

Oscar night, 2023

Text chain with my brother:

Brother: Key Huy Quan just won the Oscar

Me: OMG YAY!!!!!

Brother: Annnnd Jamie Lee Curtis just got her first for the same movie!

Me: Holy shit!!!

Brother: And she’s married to Christopher Guest?!

Me: Oh yes FOREVER

Brother: Huh

My children fight. They argue with each other, tattle on each other, blame each other, and rant about each other to us, their parents. However (and this is the part that baffles me), they are also really good friends. Even though they are 3 1/2 years apart in age, they are good friends. They walk the dog together, run errands for me together, confide in each other. They spend time with each others’ friends. They hug and say “I love you.”

I assumed their relationship would be more like the one I had with my brother in childhood. After all, my brother and I are also 3 1/2 years apart. The explanation to why it isn’t the same seems to be that even though I didn’t physically attack my brother (as my daughter did to my son in earlier years), I was significantly meaner to him on a regular basis. My daughter treats my son as a peer these days, for the most part, and I admire them both so much for learning to value that relationship early on.

You might think that because we have similar interests, that would have helped us early on. I was in my first play in 2nd grade, but by the time I was in 5th grade, my brother was joining me onstage. Instead of creating bonding moments, however, I felt threatened — he was smaller and cuter than I, sweet and funny, and had a clear, beautiful tone in his voice right from the start. I did not have the confidence in myself to withstand sharing the literal spotlight with a sibling. In addition, our fellow cast members discovered that the quickest way to get a rise out of me was to use my little brother as a weapon: spying on me changing at home and reporting back to the boys in the cast, telling him funny-but-nasty things to say to me in front of my friends, that sort of thing.

By my senior year of high school, things started to shift ever so slightly. I was more comfortable in my own skin by then, which made me slightly less likely to bite the heads off my loved ones. I finally got the lead in the Drama Club musical and got to kiss a boy on stage! Of course, my brother was also cast… in an hilarious role that showcased his beautiful voice. But when my friends and cast mates were blown away by his talent, I felt more pride than resentment. It was a huge step forward for our relationship, I think. It certainly set the stage (hee hee) for the friendship which formed when I moved away from home.

We didn’t talk much during the school year when I was at college. In 1994 we were at the very beginning of email being ubiquitous, and calling home still involved long-distance fees so that was a once-a-week extravagance, during which I mostly talked to my mom. School breaks and summers, though, saw my brother and I beginning to get to know each other as human beings. He was finding his feet — moving away from sports and immersing himself in music — and I was in a confusing space of missing college friends and not always clicking with high school friends. As would become our norm, we connected over pop-culture: music, movies, and television. I gifted him my mixtape of Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel tunes, and we watched hours of Full House and Saved by the Bell reruns.

While I had decided when I was 7 that I would be an actor when I grew up, my brother cycled through many dreams and goals. He was going to be a mailman, a writer, a film director, a movie critic. (I’m sure there were more.) I completed my full college education and emerged with a BA in Theater; he went to college to major in music (learned the upright bass for the audition), but eventually switched his major and then dropped out altogether to be in a band. Pop quiz: which one of us is making a living as an artist?

It’s true. I eventually discovered my distaste for radically unpredictable hours and oodles of rejection, and “settled down” into a 9-5 life (LOL teachers don’t work 9-5 but you get what I’m saying). My brother was in a popular band, and then another popular band which became successful enough that he had to quit the first band. In fact, that second band became so successful that it is still going today and has impacted the lives of everyone around him.

The life of a professional musician is rarely glamorous, but absolutely comes with some noodle-bending experiences. Early on I discovered the joy of middle-of-the-night texts from my brother:

“We just sneaked into Jack White’s dressing room!”

“I just saw Aziz Ansari and he’s shorter than you!”

“Dave is standing next to Paul McCartney!”

My kids have grown up attending their uncle’s concerts, which have become increasingly larger over the 20 years they’ve been together. The first time my daughter saw them, for instance, was at a downtown block party in Rochester, MN. They were opening for Soul Asylum (cool, but not mid-90s cool) with an audience of maybe a thousand people, and we were blown away that so many people came out to see them. I cried the first time I saw them play at First Avenue in Minneapolis, that historic venue where Prince ruled and all my favorite bands had a star painted on the brick walls. We have seen them at the Minnesota State Fair (moving eventually from the free Leine Lodge stage to the Grandstand), and summer after summer at Bayfront Festival Park in Duluth, MN. The families of the band members know each other well, and backstage at these concerts feels like a family reunion. We have all watched their crowds get bigger and bigger, and marveled at the fact that these “boys” — they will always be boys — remain so grounded, funny, and real with the kind of attention they experience every night on the road.

I have spent years wondering what it must be like for that brother of mine, facing crowds of thousands, all singing the band’s songs back at them at the top of their lungs. Cut to two weeks ago: my daughter and I were invited by the band to sing backup for one song, onstage at Red Rocks Amphitheater, in front of a sold out crowd who knew every lyric by heart. I walked out onstage, holding my daughter’s hand, unable to keep the enormous, goofy grin off of my face. I sang my heart out, feeling my hair blow back and my ears ring with the sound of a wall of people singing along with me.

You may be wondering — and you would not be alone — if there is a part of me, deep down, wayyyyy far down, in my deepest, darkest soul, that resents him. After all, I resented him when we were kids and he upstaged me. I put in my time and energy training to be a professional actor, and one could posit that he succeeded where I failed. Clear those worry lines, Dear Reader. First of all, I didn’t fail. This is not one of the disappointments that keep me up at night. Secondly, I am so stinkin’ impressed and proud of my brother, it chases 99% of the envy right out the door. (That last 1% is understandable — you can grant me that, right? He gets to sing for a living.)

My husband explains to people that my brother and I have our own language — a shorthand. (It is even more pronounced if we are less-than-sober.) We can talk for long periods of time about movies and shows that we love — and he is terrific at quoting verbatim, accents and all. We finish each other’s sentences without realizing we are doing it, and there is nobody who makes me laugh as hard. More importantly, there is nobody I’m prouder of making laugh. We are such different human beings — he does not have any of those rule-follower tendencies that plague me — but he is among my very favorite people. He is always honest, so you know he means it if he gives you a compliment. More than once I have used him as an ethical barometer, and he’s definitely someone I can ask if I suspect I’m blowing something out of proportion.

In reading this back, I feel I may have set my brother up as some kind of sibling paragon. He’s not perfect. Obviously. I remember distinctly our mom despairing over our constant fighting, lamenting that she had such a great relationship with her brothers. Sibling relationships are incredibly complex — there is no one else in the world who has a perspective on your childhood than the one who experienced it alongside you, for better or for worse. We may have left scars on each other, but we’ve managed to heal ours and meet on the other side. Thinking about it another way (with a brand-new metaphor) leads me to evoke a lyric from Rent, when Mimi tells Roger, “Life’s too short, babe, time is flying. I’m looking for baggage that goes with mine…”

I mean, I don’t know anyone else who would start watching Diana: The Musical, think to himself, “Susie needs to see this,” and stop watching until I could come over and have a watch party.

Thanks for reading.

Love, Susie