Planet Alignment

Monday was an unbelievably gorgeous day in NYC. I whistled and practically skipped to rehearsals on Monday afternoon. I was pleased with myself, and not just because it was lovely outside, but because I realized that I was about to embark on a six week period of my life in which every single day would be filled with things I actually want to do. I'm not exaggerating. Every. Single. Day. How often does that happen? I've been blessed.

I am teaching and being taught, experimenting, writing and directing and making room in my life for some things that are very, very new. I'm getting a glimpse of what my life could be like if I could only take advantage of the opportunities offered. Of course, I would also have to learn how to recognize those opportunities when they bite me in the ass, but that is another topic all together.

Already I feel as though I've been hit by a bus (a nice, happy bus, but a bus nonetheless) as I dive into a six day work week. I know that I can't conceivably keep up this pace for very long, but a few weeks seems doable as I know I will be forced to take the summer "off". But that, too, is another story.

After several years of self-mistrust I am slowly learning how to roll with it and trust that I am not the only responsible adult in the world. I am learning how to delegate and prioritize in a way I never have before. I am also learning to accept the fact that things are going to fall through the cracks. My house is going to be a disaster (possibly now through the end of time) and I am going to have those sleepless nights when my To Do List keeps me wide awake. The main difference between now and a couple of years ago, and even two weeks ago, is that I see this flurry of activity is, in and of itself, a success. If I fail at one project or another it doesn't matter as much as it would have at another time in my life. I've never been this busy before. The fact that I am busy means that I have reached a level of success that I had not reached before.

There are a bunch of boys in one of the classes I am teaching who really give me a run for my money. They have smart mouths, they have a hard time focusing, they challenge me and everything I say. They have to be prodded to do the work and they seriously resist being lead more than an inch out of their comfort zones. These boys frustrate me terribly, and yet they are also my most affectionate students. They are the first to embrace me when I walk in the door and they grumble with one another about who gets to sit next to me when we work on the classroom floor. They greedily inhale anything that sounds remotely like praise from me and absorb it into their blood streams. They challenge me and poke me and try my patience, but they also care the most. Their difficult behavior is their method of engagement with me and I need to take it as such. I can't interpret it as an indictment of me and my methods, but as a strange sign of respect.

I spent the majority of my formative years seeking and enjoying friendships with males. I learned that teasing and both literal and figurative head butting are signs of affection and validation. Maybe life's challenges are much the same. I am going to be tackling some pretty big things in the next year or so and I feel excited and somewhat intimidated. However, I have to look at it this way- Since life (God, Goddess, the Universe, what have you) has seen fit to give me these challenges and poke me from time to time, I should take it as a sign of love and respect.

That's a much more pleasant outlook than sitting around thinking that I've been screwed.

Imus Kafuffle

I have very little to say about Don Imus specifically. I have never paid him much attention and I certainly do not care to start now. However, his recent ill- conceived comments are only the latest drop in a seemingly unending stream of gaffes by public figures. As much as the content of these messages concerns me as a human being, their censure concerns me as an artist and it raises so many questions for me about how our culture deals with communication and personal responsibility.

In my lifetime I have seen personal accountability reach a new, all time low. Whether it is the 24 hour news cycle or actual stupidity that is to blame here seems to matter little. To me it seems that the real issue is how easy it is to distance ourselves from our true thoughts and feelings- however ugly they may be. It seems that once the unfortunate comment is uttered it is a little too easy to claim that it was meant satirically, make the apology to Al Sharpton and then check into rehab.
Now, if someone has real emotional problems or needs help with substance abuse then they should be able to access that help. It can provide an explanation for bad behavior, but it shouldn't EXCUSE it. A person still needs to be accountable for what they put out into the world. A person should be able to stand up and say what they think (popular or not) but they should also be aware of the effect on their intended audience and accept the natural consequences for their actions. Unfortunately in the era of the "Whoopsie Daisy" no one seems to really stand up and claim their true thoughts and feelings on anything. We live in a time when everyone must be pleased and no one should be offended.

That's a nice idea, but it isn't very realistic.

Very little actual discource has been had in this country about the gulf which divides us. Although we understand what is supposed to be the accepted behavior in our culture (we understand it enough that any breech necessitates an apology) we understand very little about what causes someone to feel that way in the first place. This is something we are not really allowed to discuss outside of over-simplified terms. As difficult as it is to hear how someone might have reached these conclusions about one group of people or another, I think it is vitally necessary to hear it if we are to change hearts and minds. We have all heard about the affects of this kind of speech from its targets and we should continue to hear it. But we also can't assume where and how bigotry is born. We can't assume that it is communicable and passed from ear to ear, bigot to bigot. After all, if someone tells you the sky is maroon and you have any spine at all you will dismiss it as an erroneous statement because your previous experience tells you otherwise. When it comes to racist thought and action there is something else at play here and it is a moral imperitive that we understand it so that we will know how to kill it.

Sweeping ugliness under the rug only makes the rug dirty underneath. Stopping the chatter only makes the chatter more dangerous. Removing your listening support undermines the credibility of the message. I've always had this little fantasy about getting a huge group to attend a Klan rally only to turn our backs, put our fingers in our ears and sing "La la la! I'm not listening! La la la!".

Now that would be fun.

Easter Adventures

This Easter I agreed to lend my skills to an Easter service at St. Bartholomew's in Manhattan. The whole idea was to take the congregation's children on a walk through the Easter story. At several areas in and around the church there would be scenes that the children would encounter depicting the events surrounding the Resurrection.

Now, my own personal religious/ spiritual beliefs aside, I thought it would be a fun way to spend an Easter Sunday. It was fun. Which, in retrospect, makes me think I am probably a very sick person to have found this fun.

First off were the people I was working with. Some were old friends from my days at Circle in the Square and others were new faces. Such a nice group of people to work with! That definitely added to my enjoyment. Second was the sheer awesomeness of St. Bartholomew's itself. It is a sprawling and gorgeous piece of archetecture complete with tall columns, stained glass windows, mosaics, and weird nooks and crannies that satisfy the romantic little girl in me. The baptismal font itself is worth the trip. None of these things seem odd or out of the ordinary to enjoy. It is the third thing that makes me wonder.

I spent the entire day crying.

You see, I was to play Mary Magdelene (which I am quite certain that most of the parishoners confused me for the OTHER famous Mary) at the moment she discovered Jesus missing from the tomb. It was suggested to me that it would be powerful if Mary were really crying instead of indicating her loss. So, I went whole hog. I didn't go to the ugly cry place because that would have terrified the children, but I did sit and contemplate loss for an entire day. After all, at that moment the injustice of the whole situation must have been crippling for Mary. Not only has she lost her teacher and friend, but she has lost the means through which she could begin to cope with her grief. She has lost her hope for the future. The ritual of anointing the body would have been painful and yet would have helped her to move through her grief in a last gesture of love and caring. The loss of that moment, of that chance to say good bye must have been devastating to her.

We did three "shows" and each time I felt compelled to shake things up a bit and release some sadness and frustration of my own. I've heard many tales of dead dog personalizations and whatnot and I am certainly familiar with my own bag of tricks. However, I decided to focus on mass murders/ suicides and genocides to bring up the required sense of loss.

In a particularly morbid display I found myself thinking about Jonestown when the sound of a reluctant young parishoner reached my ears. He was chanting, "I don't WANT to go! I don't WANT to go!". This was somewhat serendipitous as, at that particular moment I was having difficulty connecting to my circumstances. But that child's protests added to my Jonestown scenario as I imagined a child who did not want to drink the Kool Aid struggling against his own mother. I needed no more for the rest of the day.

This is where my self loathing kicks in, because it feels so exploitative and wrong to attempt ot make art about real peoples' lives. And yet, what else have we got? What is more compelling that real life? What is more important than real life? But my ability and my need to bounce back from these emotional episodes and even share them and find them darkly funny disturbs me more than a little.

I know that I have developed a defense mechanism that helps me separate my acting reality from my actual reality and part of that mechanism requires me to look at my process this way. I need to be able to step back and analyze how I used this or that in order to survive the work I do and to understand my world. But sometimes I wonder if that is a good thing for my soul not just to use such things in my work, but to walk away having somewhat enjoyed the experience.

When I was pregnant my actor friends invariably said two things when they found out. Number one was congratulations. Number two was some variation of "Wow! Just think of everything you'll be able to USE from this experience!". This made me want to slap them because some things should be sacred, shouldn't they?

But as I creep up on that magic seven years after the birth of my son, I am begining to see how it would be useful and I shudder to think how it will creep into my work whether I like it or not. But then I think about how my work is sacred to me and it only makes sense that I would use that which is most holy to me in my creation. I wonder how the subjects of my silent homages would feel if they knew.

As for me, I'd be flattered. But then again, I'm a narcissist.