For those of us who remember All in the Family, that groundbreaking and highly amusing though often hard to watch look at racism in America, we heard over the weekend that Jean Stapleton, the long suffering and always striving to be compassionate and understanding wife in the series, passed away at age 90.  As I reflected, I thought of how Ms. Stapleton is most likely to be remembered:  the goofy and seemingly naïve wife to one of network television's first openly racist characters.  Although this is not necessarily the legacy most of us may want to leave when we pass out of this existence, unfortunately, given the twenty-four hour pundit machinery that inhabits Western media, it is the one to which Ms. Stapleton will probably be attached.
     It's a shame, really, for Ms. Stapleton was a fine actress in her own right, earning credentials and plaudits in many other arenas of drama.  Besides, not everyone could have pulled off the role she played for those many years All in the Family blazed its path through the American heartland.  To a person, the critics agree that she performed superbly.  But the character wasn't who Ms. Stapleton really was.
     By its very nature, however, acting tends to do this:  it asks people to become what they, in any other life, are not.  Yet isn't this the way most of us live?  Most of us tend to live as actors, presenting ourselves in various guises and forms, be it to make a point, sell a product, ingratiate ourselves, accomplish a goal, which we know in our hearts that we really are not.  Very few of us live with total transparency.
     The nature of acting also points to something else.  It tells us that, as Shakespeare once remarked, "the world is a stage," and that whatever we do or become, we are in the end simply actors playing a role.  We have had no choice as to how we came into this role, but we play it anyway, for we somehow know that it is what we are supposed to do.
     Play your role today, play the role you've been given.  Be thankful you're here, be thankful you have a place.  Be thankful that although you didn't create the stage, you nonetheless have one on which to play.
     Isn't it good to know that we in ourselves, but of ourselves, came into the world?  Indeed, how else would we be here?