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| It was Sept. 8th, 1998 at 6:30AM. I sat on one side of my mother's hospital bed and my older brother, a vascular surgeon, sat on the other watching the monitors and defining the beeps, the graphs, what they were telling us as our 76 year old mother, now comatos, drifted towards her release from life. My cousin, Scott stood near the door. The sun was coming up and it angled from the East, across Long Island against the wall of the 11th floor room in Sloan Kittering. The year before she had a massive heart attack occluding 98% of the largest artery to her heart. Now she had pneumonia, worn down from the chemo to kill the multiplying T cells that the Leukemia created.
My mother rarely cried. I think I saw her cry once but I can't recall the reason. This did not change as the year unfolded, facing open heart surgery with humor and an adventurous spirit or the slow recuperation from the heart surgery, only to find that her red blood count kept mysteriously dropping. I'd spent the last twelve months going in, up, down and out of hospitals with my mother. She became a professional patient, knowing which pill to take at what time. I watched her stop a nurse from giving her the wrong blood. Always polite to all around her, she screamed at this nurse before the needle pierced the vein of her arm, shocking the nurse before she could send the wrong blood type into my mother's system.
In that last year, we got to know each other in a way most mothers and sons never do. I became her primary care taker and realized that this woman had an unflappable calm that I'd never seen growing up, watching her cook, drive, pick up my father at the train station; drive and drop me or my brothers anywhere that kids go.
My brother and my cousin knew that my mother would not have wanted me to stay on until she passed away that morning, not if there was an acting job to do. She was Italian and the work ethic permeated everything she and my father did. I didn't want to leave my brother there alone with her at the end but I had a 9AM call for the first day on the feature film "The Bone Collector" to play Alan Rubin, a Donald Trump mogul type who gets trapped in a cab with his wife and then brutally murdered.
Most actors dream of working on a feature film, any feature film much less a block buster with Philip Noyce directing, Martin Bregman producing, Angelina Jolie and Denzel Washington staring. I left my mother's death bed headed to the kind of glory that most people can only imagine as some distant, unattainable dream. It was sur real like stepping onto a beach in the middle of summer with the sun in front and pitch black behind. I'd spent a lot of time with my mother as the film approached, so she was well aware that I would be working with a group of that caliber. Cornelia Bregman, Marty's wife, became close to my mother and spent time with her in the hospital keeping her apprised of the film's pre production process.
We shot the film in NYC, then up to Montreal Canada. We finished on a sound stage in New York City where we shot my scene in the cab. There were teams of crew people rigging lights, setting the stage, camera's and last minute preparations. The cab itself was cut up into sections so that the camera could get into any position that a whole cab would not allow. The green screen behind us on the sound stage gave Noyce and the crew a controlled back drop for the background of the cab making it magically appear to be traveling on the deadly run from La Guardia into the Bronx. We shot from 8 in the morning until 6 that night doing one camera angle and moving to an other and then an other. I gave each take everything I could pull up from my fears of claustrophobia. It was violent acting as my character attempted to kick, punch and push the windows out to free his wife and get them out of a night mare only a writer could create.
By the time we got the last shot, my head had a knobby lump, my hands were swollen and blood was making it's way through my pant leg just above my knee. I was collecting my belongings and about to head off the stage to my trailer when the production manager yelled at full pitch -- "Gary Swanson is rapped." Something happened that shocked me and I will remember it as my mother's moment, as though she were there witnessing the event. It's not unusual for a production manager to "rap" someone after they are done shooting so that the people who sign the papers can know the accurate time for records, the crew can know that they're moving on. But her voice was louder and more forceful almost addressing the entire sound stage for all to hear.
My mind was still blurred from the grueling hours inside the cab, but through the fog I heard a strange sound that made me stop and look around. The entire film crew, everyone in the building was standing and applauding. I'd never seen that happen before and I wasn't sure what was taking place. I asked the PM, "Why are they applauding like that." She smiled and said, "They're clapping for you."
I bowed and thought to myself, "Mom, this one's for you"...
www.garyswanson.org
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