Come Inside My Mind

It was a warm August afternoon, and my wife Courtney and I had been in our house -- our first house as a married couple -- for just over a year. I was sitting on the couch, awash in summer dog farts swirled around by the ceiling fan, when Courtney came to the top of the stairs to tell me that Robin Williams had died. After a few seconds, a wash of numbness came over me, followed by the fits and starts of understanding the new reality. Disorganization, then reorganization.

One might wonder why I would feel this way about someone I had never met, feeling the earth shifting over an actor who once set his fake tits on fire for a laugh. But like many people my age and background, there was a period of time when I wanted to be Robin Williams, before I properly understood what an impossible wish that was. If you have ever made strangers laugh, if you have ever felt your mind ricochet from one comedic concept to the next with rapidity and import -- especially as a kid -- there's really only one modern comedian's career (and that term "comedian" is diminishing his talents, but that aside) to whom you aspire, knowing full well that such a singular talent and path could never be replicated.

I was in second grade in Aurora, CO when Mork & Mindy first hit the ABC airwaves. The show was set in nearby Denver, and I finally saw someone on television who had such an anarchic sense of play, with more than a dash of poorly understood adult tension, that I felt like he was speaking just to me, even if I didn't get all the jokes and references. Fast-forward a decade, and Robin was in his breakout film role of a Vietnam DJ, just about the time I was starting to DJ around the sweaty gyms and hyper-hormoned teen rooms of northern lower Michigan, a jungle of a different sort. I'd check him out on talk shows, I'd see him do great work in solid movies -- and not-so-solid movies -- and I would watch his stand-up specials with regularity. Whatever he was selling, in whatever form, I was buying.

And just like that, it seemed, I was older and he was gone.

I was semi-dreading the release of the new HBO documentary Robin Williams: Come Into My Mind, afraid that it would dredge up that vein of deep sorrow I felt after his passing, and while I was correct to an extent, the doc was a nice summation of his depth as a performer. Like all good docs, it left a lot on the table artistically that could have been explored, such as his Juiliard years with Christopher Reeve or his experience with the Academy Awards, but it hit all the marks that needed to be hit. If you're a fan, it's an essential watch.

For me, when I'm lost in a documentary, there's always an illogical moment where I fleetingly think that if I keep watching, recorded history might become fluid and change from tragedy to something else. I felt that again today, with a brief spark of hope that the left turn of almost four years ago was somehow going to be smoothed out. But, of course, it wasn't. As with so many people before him, we have a body of work, an artistic output, that allows the person to live on in our collective imagination. Young kids will hear him as the voice of a blue Disney genie, while others might explore his underrated 21st Century filmography, especially gems like World's Greatest Dad and One Hour Photo, not to mention Insomnia. My life was richer from the artistic gifts of Robin Williams, and I hope yours was, or will be, the same.