Cinemorphosis

Tag: christmas

  • The First Cut is the Deepest: A Childhood Steeped in FOMO

    The First Cut is the Deepest: A Childhood Steeped in FOMO

    FOMO is never stronger than in childhood, when imagination stretches farther than reality can reach and the world feels just beyond our grasp. To a child, magic is real, enchantment is tangible, and some hidden paradise always seems just out of reach—close enough to see, impossible to touch. And nothing stings quite like realizing that somewhere, right now, a better world exists, and you are not in it.

    I learned this lesson in the summer of 1968 in San Jose, California, while riding bikes with my neighbor, Billy Cantambay. We were two six-year-olds, circling Venado Court as a fine mist of summer rain fell around us, making the streetlights glow and the air smell like wet pavement and possibility.

    Then we saw it:

    A single blue light flickering in the distance, hovering above the unfinished housing developments at the edge of the neighborhood. It twinkled through the fog like a Christmas bulb detached from time, a spectral glow that neither of us could explain.

    “Christmas lights!” one of us shouted.

    “Christmas lights!” the other echoed.

    But why was Christmas happening over there and not here? Whose house was that? What kind of people lived beneath that glow? In my mind, I pictured a lone man inside—not lonely, just content—waking up to Christmas every day.

    For a week, Billy and I worshipped the light, riding our bikes in endless circles, pointing, speculating, longing. Then one evening, it was gone. No explanation. No goodbye. Just a vanishing act, leaving behind nothing but an ache—an inexplicable sadness, as if we had been denied entry into something greater than ourselves.

    Four years later, another dream slipped through my fingers, and this time, I cried about it.

    My fifth-grade friend Marc Warren had invited me to Piper’s Smorgasbord in San Leandro, California—a kingdom of pizza, fried chicken, and blueberry pie, where gluttony was not just encouraged but a sacred ritual. By the time we left, we were bloated with triumph.

    Driving home, still drunk on sugar and grease, we talked about our flying dreams.

    Not figurative flying—not ambition, not success—actual flying. The kind where you jump off a cliff and just go, gliding over the ocean, effortless, weightless, free.

    The dreams were so vivid—we could remember the wind in our faces, the rush of air under our arms, the certainty that we would never fall.

    And then, reality crashed down.

    We weren’t flying. We would never fly.

    The grief was immediate, existential, crushing.

    Two fifth-graders, staring out the car window, weeping over the cosmic injustice of gravity.

    That’s the cruelty of FOMO—it isn’t just about missing an event. It’s about missing a world, a place so real inside your imagination that its absence hurts like a phantom limb.

    Every culture has its own version of this unreachable paradise—a place forever close but forever out of reach.

    For me, it was Bali Ha’i.

    The song, sung so hauntingly by Juanita Hall in South Pacific, tells of an island just across the water—visible, tantalizing, but never quite attainable.

    I first heard it as a toddler in the Flavet Villages—a cluster of old military barracks repurposed as student housing in Gainesville, Florida, where my family lived near an alligator swamp and a stretch of forest.

    Most people would have found the place bleak. I found it enchanted.

    At dusk, my father and I would walk to the edge of the forest to visit a Mynah bird, which perched on the same branch every evening, watching us with an intelligence I couldn’t explain.

    The swamp smelled of alligator dung, a rank, pungent stench that somehow filled me with a sense of cosmic belonging.

    One night, as we stood beneath the Mynah bird, a distant radio played “Bali Ha’i.”

    The melody wove itself into the moment, perfectly harmonizing with the humid night air, the bird’s quiet watchfulness, and the unseen creatures shifting in the darkness.

    For the first time, I understood the ache of paradise lost.

    In 1965, another world out of reach found me.

    Her name was Barbara Eden.

    She lived inside a genie bottle—a glowing jewel of a home, lined with pink and purple satin, circular sofas, and mother-of-pearl inlays.

    To five-year-old me, this was the peak of human civilization.

    I didn’t just want to watch I Dream of Jeannie. I wanted to live inside that bottle.

    I imagined myself curled up on the velvet cushions, bathed in the warm glow of genie magic, whispering secrets with Jeannie as the outside world became irrelevant.

    When it hit me—really hit me—that I would never live in that bottle, that the closest I’d ever get was a TV screen and my own relentless imagination, I felt crushed in a way I had no words for.

    Even crueler?

    That gorgeous genie home was just a painted Jim Beam whiskey decanter.

    That’s what FOMO really is: intoxication by illusion.

    And long before Instagram, long before airbrushed vacations and curated feeds, I was already intimately familiar with its sting.

  • The Forgotten Song of Misfit Island: My Long, Bitter Feud with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

    The Forgotten Song of Misfit Island: My Long, Bitter Feud with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

    The most exhausting piece I have ever composed—the one that wrings my soul dry after playing its three relentless movements—is called “The Forgotten Song of Misfit Island.” This sonata, a labor of love and obsession spanning forty years, began as something else entirely: my childhood fury at the televised nightmare known as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

    Like millions of children before me, I was supposed to cherish this 1964 Christmas special as a heartwarming tale of holiday spirit and triumphant underdogs. Instead, I watched it with horrified disbelief, my small, traumatized brain barely able to process the cruelty inflicted upon the most tragic figures in holiday television: the Misfit Toys.

    These weren’t just defective playthings with minor quirks. They were abandoned children, exiled to an arctic hellscape, sentenced to a slow death on a barren glacier. They were ill-equipped for survival, dressed in flimsy rags with no food, no warmth, no shelter from the Abominable Snowman, a giant carnivorous beast stomping the ice sheets with the inevitability of fate itself. Who knows how long they had suffered? Years? Decades? An eternity? And for what crime? Simply being different. The authorities of Christmas had spoken: an ostrich-riding cowboy, a Charlie-in-the-Box, and a melancholy doll were abominations, unfit for the joys of holiday consumerism.

    Defenders of Rudolph will no doubt remind me of the “joyous rescue” at the film’s climax, when Santa Claus swoops in to distribute the Misfit Toys to “good homes.” But let’s examine that so-called rescue. These toys, who had only survived through their deep bond and shared trauma, are now forcibly separated and flung into random households. Santa, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that what these emotionally shattered creatures need is total isolation from the only community that has ever accepted them.

    Santa Claus, the supposed symbol of holiday cheer, is, in fact, an unapologetic tyrant—a man who exploits child labor, forces elves into unregulated factory work, and belittles an aspiring dentist for daring to dream beyond toy-making. My paleontologist friend, Dr. Zachary J. Rasgon, once pointed out another moment of unhinged brutality: the scene where Yukon Cornelius casually yanks out every tooth from the mouth of an endangered hominid—and we’re all supposed to be a-okay with that.

    For over fifty years, this grim portrait of abuse and forced assimilation has been celebrated as a beloved Christmas tradition. And yet, I alone seem to recognize its horrors. I have made my case countless times, but the world continues to revere Rudolph as an “iconic” holiday classic. My protestations fall on deaf ears, branding me as something of a misfit myself.

    And so, I have learned to let go of my rage. Or, at least, I have tried.

    Turning Rage into Music

    As a child, unable to rewrite history, I began rewriting Rudolph. I imagined the Misfit Toys as restless insomniacs, huddled together for warmth, singing a song to ease their suffering. It was a song born of necessity—a celestial hymn of comfort, a melody so powerful that it could momentarily trick them into believing they were loved.

    But in my revised ending, their exile ends only to bring a new torment. Ripped away from each other and cast into separate homes, the toys struggle to recall the song that once gave them solace. They catch fragments of it in dreams, in whispers on the wind, but the full melody is lost to them. The song—the very essence of their shared survival—could only exist when they were together.

    The only solution? A reunion.

    In the version that played in my head for years, an older, wiser, and absurdly wealthy Rudolph, finally understanding the true cruelty of Santa’s decree, takes it upon himself to find and reunite the Misfit Toys. He brings them to a sprawling Tuscan villa, where they can feast under the warm Mediterranean sun and, at long last, remember the song in its full glory. The world hears their melody once more, and it becomes legendary—a song of defiance, resilience, and enduring love.

    This imaginary song, the one that saved the Misfit Toys from oblivion, became the foundation for my most demanding piano composition. It took decades—forty years of reworking, revising, and searching for the perfect sequence of notes.

    A Lifelong Symphony of Misfits

    Even now, I cannot shake my affinity for misfits. My mind is overrun with them: Sidney the Elephant, Kermit the Frog, Tooter Turtle, Beaver Cleaver, Kwai Chang Caine (a.k.a. Grasshopper), Mr. Peabody, George of the Jungle, Milton the Monster. They, too, deserve their own melodies, their own compositions, their own forgotten songs.

    Until I write those songs, I will imagine them all gathered together, sipping wine in that Tuscan vineyard, basking in the company of Rudolph and his long-lost misfit family. And in that imagined paradise, I, too, find a place to belong.