Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Stories, Stories Everywhere

There is a certain joy in my morning routines. One of them is the delightful ritual of dropping my son off at his neighborhood school. Every morning I pass neighbors and nod hello. I hand out a few warm smiles and receive a few as well. My son gets high fived. We meet up with classmates on their own walks to school. The weather is crisp and pleasant and the neighbors are welcoming. Once the children line up and head in to their classes it is time for the PTA parents to make thier rounds outside, catching other parents to chat or to work out details for this bake sale and that fundraiser. All in all, it is a lovely way to spend a few minutes of my morning.

This morning, however, my deeply disturbed mind came up with a rather titilating question. If any two parents here were going to have a scandalous affair, who would be the most likely? Now, I don't suspect anyone. Let's make that clear. But, WHAT IF? Would it be the older mother whose husband works a lot and she stays at home volunteering hours and hours to various causes? Would she fall for the short, awkward but very attentive father with the indistinguishable accent? Would it be the single father with the rowdy child who woos a mother going back to school despite her husband's obvious disapproval? How about the hyper organized, Puerto Rican mom and the over protective father who has any number of reflective patches applied to his childrens' winter coats? Who could it be and, more importantly, how might that go? What would happen when word got out on the playground? Would the other parents pretend it wasn't happening? Or would they rip them to shreds? Or would that depend, entirely, upon the two parties involved? Oh how I wonder...

Friday, November 02, 2007

Appropriate Forum

Navigating my way through this new and rather restrictive view of my life in art has become tiresome and old. This occurred to me as I was trying to make my way past a pregnant woman who was slowly and unpredictably zig zagging on the sidewalk in front of me. At first, the fact that she was dressed in a huge parka and flip flops amused me. Then the crusty foam at the corners of her mouth disturbed me. The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back was represented by the handful of scratch off lottery tickets that distracted her from her surroundings and made her impossible to get around. I was impatient with myself for being impatient with her. After all, this is a woman who is clearly in some kind of trouble. However, I am not without my own concerns and I could do very little for her in a brief roadside interaction. Especially when she was completely oblivious to me and my many parcels to begin with.

Once I had finally mounted the steps to my apartment building I caught myself dissecting this woman, her situation and my responsibility to her. In my wildest super compassionate fantasies what could I do for her? Oh, and what lessons could she teach me? (God I am such an after school special.) I then forced myself to think a bit more abstractly. The absolute frustration I felt while trying to get around her is not like the daily frustration I am experiencing with my creative endeavors. It is as if I have placed a big, odd, meandering, clueless pregnant woman in front of me wherever I go!

A few months ago a fairly prominant New York playwright sampled some of my work. Well, not the kind of work I usually like to show off- he read my chicken scratchings for a scene between two characters from a play I've been kicking around that had previously not had a scene together. I wrote the scene not to have the scene in the play, but to help illuminate for me what kind of relationship was between them. I needed to explore some subtext and discover whether or not their interaction was the missing piece in this play. Clearly, he didn't quite understand why I had written it and what I had written it for. I suppose that it is possible that not everyone organizes information and creates in quite the same manner as I do. His response to me was this:

"I think you might be too young to write a family play."

Well, he's a successful writer so he must be right. Regardless of the fact that he has not seen one word of the play itself and that I didn't quite articulate to him what it was I was doing with the scene, he must know better. I've put the play away.

I've tried to take it out and work on it, but I keep judging my work as I go. This is too close to something in my real family. That is too self-indulgent. This is funny but too private. It goes on and on and on like that. In my heart I know that he was wrong. (I know for a fact that he thinks I'm a lot younger than I actually am.) I know that this play is exactly where I am at in my creative life. But the meandering pregnant lady has a sign on her back that says, "Is this really the appropriate forum?"

I am heading into a part of art and expression that is personally dangerous. I've become entangled. In a simpler times my private life was MY private life. I could do with it as I pleased. I could drink a lot, make an ass of myself, say and do whatever I felt. It didn't matter. It was just me. But now my private life isn't just my private life. Now my private life belongs to so many others whose right to privacy is just as valid as mine.

So I feel stuck behind this woman, frustrated at my observations of her but too tongue tied to make the real, honest observations from which real art grows.

I've placed a lot of restrictions on myself and those restrictions are deadening my work. But I fear lifting them. As much as what I want to express is about love I know from experience that honesty can often be mistaken for malice. In short, I haven't given myself permission to say what I want to say. To be more accurate, I should say that I haven't given myself permission to feel what I need to feel. I'm letting this woman get in my way. I don't need to knock her down or make passive aggressive sighs of discontent.

I could just get her attention and say, "excuse me".