Two pilgrims together are a pilgrimage. There are spoilers ahead.
Everybody finds love in Amsterdam, or almost. Rebecca connects with the best guy for her yet, but I'm pretty sure she'll fuck it up because it's Rebecca. After five thousand product placement shots, her iPhone 14 gets dropped to the bottom of a Dutch canal. Maybe that's a sign.
Sunflowers are the state flower of Kansas. They're also the subject of one of Van Gough's most famous paintings. Van Gough suffered his entire life. He was never understood or appreciated when he was alive and died penniless at his own hand. His last words were, "The sadness will last forever," in Dutch, of course.
Season three, episode six of Ted Lasso, reached me on so many levels. Seeking new levels of inspiration and relief from his crushing depression and self-doubt, Van Gough chased the green fairy with passion. Like many artists of his generation, he drinks absinthe with abandon. Most men of his generation credited the tincture of wormwood with absinthe's legendary explorative properties, but it was probably just its extremely high alcohol content.
AFC Richmond is in a terrible rut. Everybody's life is in ruins except Keely, who is in love with one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. Coach Beard, reinforcing my thesis that he represents Merlin in this round table, provides Coach Lasso with a tea made with psilocybin mushrooms, a considerable step up from absinthe. Because Ted is reluctant to drink the tea (because he hates tea) they separate.
What makes Ted Lasso different is it's a show written by actors, an actor from Virginia especially. One of us. A Southern boy. His mother's brother: his uncle, is George Wendt, Norm from Cheers. If you didn't know that, it's probably something of a revelation. If you're a theater people, most of the people who read me are theater people, or at least are allies; if you're a theater person, you no doubt have picked up by now that there's a musical theater reference in every episode of Ted Lasso. That's what happens when you let actors have a pen. Tonight's musical theater reference was "Chicago" by Kander and Ebb. A musical about love's betrayal, crime, booze, and Jazz.
There are a number of thematic reasons why Jason Sudeikis wanted to locate this episode in Amsterdam. Because he has a lot of interaction with his cast on an actor-to-actor level, he incorporates their stories as artists into the plot. Sudeikis is twelve years younger than me. Jeremy Swift is two years older. When actors make out their resumes, they list "other skills." It's usually something like dancing or fencing or singing, but for Swift, he listed that he played the double bass. This resonated with Sudeikis, and Jazz became a driving force behind Higgin's character.
In the Sunflowers episode, Higgins takes Will the Kitman on an expedition in the Red Light District. Will thinks it's for the famous prostitutes, but Higgins takes him to the Prins Hendrik Hotel, where Chet Baker, at the height of his musical career, flung himself out of a window to his death. Higgins tries to suggest that he might have been pushed, but I think people who make that case are just being generous to Baker. Baker spent most of his life trying to kill himself. Kill himself and make fundamentally different and brilliant music. In 1988, in Amsterdam, he made the final choice between the two.
Suicide is something of a theme in Ted Lasso. The death of Ted's father, we're told, is the seat of his problems. It's the dragon he must fight and the source of his panic attacks. Famous suicides are mentioned throughout the series; tonight, it was Van Gough and Baker. The night in Amsterdam ends for Higgins and Kitt in a jazz bar, with Higgins getting to show off his skills. The episode was shot so that there's no way Swift was faking it on the bass. That's absolutely him playing, and it's brilliant.
Coach Lasso reluctantly tries the psilocybin tea after Coach Beard launches his own adventure. If you've ever tried psilocybin, and I've tried psilocybin, I've tried it with some of you; if you've tried psilocybin, you know it doesn't hit you right away. Thinking the drug didn't work, Ted makes his way to an American restaurant where a Bulls game and a tower of onion rings launch his mushroom vision quest. A quest that gives him a divinely inspired offense pattern from the Richmond AFC Grayhounds.
Four men expose their souls and find solace in each other. Roy forces Jamie to train rather than party in Amsterdam like the rest of the team. In an argument about whether windmills are real, Roy confesses that he can't fuckin' ride a fuckin' bicycle. He can't because his grandfather tried to teach him, but his grandfather died, and now he feels guilty for not having ever learned. This is the most vulnerable Roy has ever been, and he does it with Jamie, who he has hated the entire show. Maybe realizing that Keeley wasn't going to be with either of them provided the breakthrough. In an unlikely montage, Jamie teaches Roy Kent to ride a bicycle, and together they see a windmill. In literature, windmills represent many things; To Miguel de Cervantes, they represent the giants that Don Quixote de la Mancha must battle to claim his humanity. To dream the impossible dream.
For the whole series so far, Colin has hidden his sexuality and fought to believe in himself. We're never really told what sort of athlete he is. He struggles to benchpress a single set of forty-five-pound plates, but we can assume he's good enough at football to play first-string in the premier league. Separating from the group, Colin finds a gay bar, thinking he's alone. He's not. Trent Crimm walks in after him. Colin panics and claims he's in the wrong bar. Running after him, Trent confesses that he's seen Colin kiss a boy but hasn't reported it, and there must be a reason for that. The two sit in the Dutch night air and bare their souls. Trent was married to a woman when he came to grips with his sexuality. This is a scenario that played out a lot in my generation. Guys I knew from childhood who struggled and struggled to be what they are. Together they discuss the pain Colin feels for having two separate lives and how much he wishes he could kiss his fella after a game like the other players kissed their girl.
When I was twenty-one, I grew tired of everyone, and everything I knew and everyone I knew was tired of me, so instead of Scrooges or CS's, I went to George Street. I'd been there before. Part of my job was to be an earwig to members of the legislature about bills that benefited education, which in turn benefited Millsaps and Mississippi School Supply. It wasn't really lobbying, but that's what I was being groomed for, at least until I told my Dad I hated it. I wasn't horrible at it; I just felt really manipulative.
Cotton was bartending. Cotton was something of a legend in Jackson, starting with the bar at Sun 'n Sand but also George Street, The University Club, and Tico's. I sat with a man twice my age who was in the House of Representatives. We discussed Dave Brubeck, Steely Dan, and Chicago. He was one of the few men I've met who loved Maxfield Parish as much as I do. We talked, just the two of us, for at least two hours. In a moment, he looked deeply into my eyes and put his hand on top of my hand. It was subtle; in the darkness of the bar's corner, no one would see. I tried really hard not to look shocked or hurt, or angry. This wasn't the first time this had happened to me. I really liked the guy and didn't want to hurt him or offend him or put him on the spot for anything. After a moment, he moved his hand up to grip my shoulder in a very manly, coach-to-player sort of way. He insisted on paying for my drinks and left into the night.
I stopped at a gas station across from the Baptist hospital for cigarettes and called a girl I knew to see if she was awake and see if she was alone. There's a 50/50 chance she's reading this now. I went to her apartment and watched her sleep with my hand under her shirt on the small of her back. A lot of my friends knew I liked this girl. She supposedly had a boyfriend somewhere, but it didn't seem to change anything. I thought that--I could take this girl anywhere I wanted. I could hold her hand anywhere I wanted. I could introduce her to my father, my fraternity brothers, my bartender; nobody would ever think a thing. We could spend all night talking about music and art, and she could put her hand on top of my hand, and nobody would ever think a thing. They might even be happy that I found somebody, even if she supposedly had a boyfriend somewhere.
It occurred to me how profoundly unfair that was. I could do all these things with this girl or any girl who I could get to sit with me, but this guy, who I enjoyed so much, never could. Even if I was as devoted to him as I was to this tiny sleeping creature, we'd never be able to have the same kind of life because I'm a man, and he's a man, and in Mississippi in the eighties, that made a difference.
He ended up getting voted out of office as part of the great Republican Revolution in the Mississippi House of Representatives whereupon he retired to his little farm in East Mississippi, and in ten years, he was dying of liver failure, allegedly from drinking. What Colin and Trent were going through resonated with me. I'd seen it many times before. Knowing that so many members of my tribe are gay always came with a fair amount of guilt for me. I had opportunities that I didn't really deserve that they never could, just because I'm one way and they're another. It's better for guys in the generation after mine, but it's still not good enough, and there are righteous pricks, mostly in Florida, trying to reverse whatever gains have been made. The girl married somebody else, and I married somebody else, and none of us ever had to hide who we liked from anybody.
I know that the end of Ted Lasso is coming. I'm getting to the point where I need to start slowing down on the episodes and savor it some. I'll miss it when it's over. Ted Lasso is a very positive man in a world filled with quiet personal tragedies. I'm trying to learn from that. My entire life has been a quiet personal tragedy but one I've never been able to completely deal with because so many people around me have it too, or have it worse. I guess maybe the point is that there isn't justice in our lives, but there might be hope if we believe.
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