Fly Over Paranoia

It is no secret that the vast majority of the United States harbors an ugly resentment against "the Coasts". Namely New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. When loose tongues are wagging you'll hear people say terrible things about the Jews in New York, the Gays in San Francisco and the money grubbing demons of immorality who run the entertainment industry in LA. To a certain extent, our fly over brethren are not necessarily wrong to be so bent out of shape- after all the majority of popular entertainment tends to narcissistically focus its energies on New York and LA for its characters and story lines and largely ignores what is going on in the rest of the country.

What fly over states may not know is that a lot of New Yorkers (in particular) are terrified of the rest of the country. New Yorkers are comfortable with their junkies, but the tweakers really scare them. New Yorkers can function (admittedly, it can be begrudgingly...) with Hasidim, Muslim, Catholic, Buddhist and Atheist populations living and working together- but the Evangelicals are enough to make the average New Yorker want to duck into a Satanist S & M parlor for safe harbor. We have religion here, but most New Yorkers would feel uncomfortable being confronted by a highway sign telling them to repent- regardless of their religious affiliation.

We fear.

That's the bottom line. Anything that is unfamiliar causes anxiety and anxiety can cause any human to jump to irrational and illogical conclusions.

Yesterday I was watching some interviews on YouTube with West Virginians about the recent primary. I'll admit that listening to these opinions made my heart race and I began to perspire. Just listening to these different perceptions caused my body to have a mild stress reaction. I wanted to scream and shake them. One woman insisted that Obama was Muslim and she didn't like that. When the interviewer corrected her and told her that he is NOT a Muslim she just closed her eyes, shook her head and said, "I don't agree with that" as if the facts were somehow able to rearrange themselves by the force of her opinion. I was angry and I wanted to reach into the screen and throttle her. Her resistance to the facts that have been available for years (the man has published two very personal books detailing his upbringing and influences for crying out loud!) made me angry and scared. I then commented to my husband that Obama probably made the right choice to concede West Virginia and not make a glut of personal appearances there because they might have shot him on the spot.

Of course- that was MY FEAR talking.

Not everyone who thinks a certain way is a gun toting radical with an itchy trigger finger. Upon closer inspection, I probably would have found this woman to be someone who was shaken by the horror of 9/11 (who wasn't?) and who has probably never met or even seen a Muslim in person before. I'm sure that the culture of racial division that is still common in some parts of the country- West Virginia reportedly being one of those places- made it difficult for this woman to see in Obama what some other people see in him. It is so much safer to take in only the information that conforms with your world view and act on that. I've done that with her. It conforms with my world view to think that she is an idiot redneck. Whereas, she may be a woman who has found herself faced with a myriad of economic and social challenges that are now foreign to her. In the last decade, the world has become a much scarier place. Can I blame her for trying to protect herself from perceived threats? Isn't that what we all do? Isn't that why I will not be considering West Virginia as a vacation spot anytime in the near future?

My point in discussing this is not to deal with the election, necessarily. Rather it is to bring up empathy. Empathy is a powerful thing - not just in personal relations or politics but in storytelling. Storytelling, as you may have noticed, is one of my chief concerns. Recently, I read a screenplay about domestic violence. (Sadly, I read a lot of scripts about domestic violence and more than a few of them fit this particular description...) I found it cliche and since it lacked any real insight into the characters' behavior I wondered why anyone would want to watch such a thing. The screenwriter had written the script based on memories of incidents that happened to his neighbors and his parents' friends as he was growing up. He had already formed an opinion of these people and he wrote the script to pass judgement on them. That was clear from the first scene. Since he lacked any empathy for the characters he was able to write this orgy of violence and insult that bordered on the pornographic. He had become so obsessed with the imagery of violence that he neglected to motivate it in any understandable way. It was kinky in its lack of compassion for the characters and their plight and worse yet- it tried to pass off its judgement of the characters as some sort of moral high ground. The voice of the writer was smug and superior. So I asked him- if you don't struggle to understand and feel for these people, then why should I? And if you don't want your audience to care for these people, what do you expect your audience to walk away with? What will they learn about the characters? What will they learn about themselves? If they walk away with a feeling of superiority over these characters haven't you just given your audience permission to ignore what you profess to shine a light on?

To his credit, this screenwriter heard me out and went back to re-writes. It takes a bold writer to do that. It takes a brave person to stretch themselves to try to understand the incomprehensible. That is what a writer needs to do. That is what an actor needs to do. Circumstance can conspire to make monsters of us all and if we want to fight that- if we really want to become better people we need stories that challenge us to empathize. I'm not pimping any kind of moral relativism here- as some have accused me in the past. There is a difference between understanding and condoning. But if you understand what you are up against you will understand how to put up a resistance. Especially if the monster that emerges surprises you by emerging from within.

Logic of the Dreamscape

There are types of dreams that we all have in common. Anxiety can sneak into our dreams in a number of ways- all of them fairly obvious. Who hasn't had the dream about finding yourself naked in a public place? Dreams of being in a driverless automobile are also fairly common. Slightly less common (or perhaps people just don't like to admit to it) are dreams of having to relieve certain pressing intestinal situations without having a private space to do so. Among actors the so called "Actor's Nightmare" where you find yourself onstage unrehearsed and unprepared is so common that Christopher Durang wrote a play about it. It is also normal for a pregnant woman to dream about giving birth to strange creatures (cats, monsters, giant talking pies...) thereby playing out the anxiety of waiting in her sleep. We all experience anxiety. What I find fascinating, however, is that the ways in which certain anxieties present themselves in sleep can be so similar in structure from person to person and yet still maintain the idiosyncrasies of the dreamer.

For example, a rather conservative friend of mine once confessed to me that in her public nudity dream she always finds herself in a formal setting amongst people she wishes to impress in her waking life. Others find themselves ready to give a speech back in their high school class. One woman I know who prides herself on her appearance and public presentation is mortified to find herself naked in a room with all the men she has ever met. As for me personally, the anxiety producing situation is less about where I find myself or in who's company but more about the fact that I am naked in public and no one seems to be paying any attention! Hello! I'm naked over here! Why aren't you looking at me?

Last night I had a curious combination of anxieties mingle into one dream. I was producing and directing a tribute to Carol Burnett in a packed Broadway house. At the last moment the two stars of my show ran out to get hamburgers at a restaurant with a notoriously slow wait staff. (As a side note, the two actors in the dream are friends of mine with whom I had brief producing partnerships before they succumbed to the lure of film and television in LA.) The curtain was about ready to go up and I did not have the two people that I was counting on to deliver the show. I found myself stepping onto the stage and winging it. I covered fairly well, trying to play two roles at once when I was faced with a major dilemma. I had sensed that the audience would love a good pratfall. If I timed it right the laugh would be enormous. However, I worried that I might harm my baby (Yes, I am even pregnant in my dreams). The action slowed down while I weighed my options and decided to go for it by signaling my brilliant stage manager in the wings who anticipated my needs and was ready with a crash box. I dove into the wings, the crash box went off and the crowd went crazy. I staggered back onstage to greedily accept my applause and went blank. I had nothing else. I should have graciously exited but I couldn't think of anything. So I sat down and meaningfully stared into the lights. The crowd turned on me. All the good will I had worked for was slowly ebbing away and all I could do was sit and hope that I would get a black out and fast. Well, it didn't happen. I was left hanging in the light and I could hear the crowd mumbling, "That's not funny", "What is she doing?", "That's stupid!", "Boo!". Finally the lights came down and Carol Burnett herself was kind enough to come onstage and start singing "I'm Shy" from Once Upon a Mattress. I took the opportunity to go to the burger joint to drag back my two actors for the second half. As I was leaving the theater I saw the audience breaking out tissues because they were laughing so hard they were sobbing. I immediately thought of a brilliant way to close the show and started composing in my mind a speech about the meaning of laughter. On the way I saw my sister and her husband peering into the window of a suburban kitchen to admire the bizarre turkey carving technique of a Jamaican woman. Rather than having the bird on a platter she had placed the turkey in a Baby Bjorn and was carving it toward herself. My sister and her husband were fascinated. With classic boldness my sister tapped on the window to request a demonstration. I wanted to warn them about the dangers of carving with a blade facing in the direction of your own neck but I was suddenly confused by the fact that I was standing on a warm beach and strange creatures were emerging from the sand after just being hatched. They mistook me for their mother and I had to lead them down to the ocean or they would die on the hot sands. When I finally reached the burger place, one of my actors had choked on his hamburger and the other refused to leave until her fries arrived.

That is when my alarm went off and I found myself wondering how it was all going to turn out. I hit the snooze, hoping to return to the dream and force it to some kind of resolution, but to no avail. I was unable to see if I could pull off the big closing tribute speech or if I could save my actor's life with the Hiemlich. Even so, I am pleased to say that even though the dream contained a startling number of pressing anxieties- it also gave me the opportunity to produce and direct (and act, I suppose) for a packed Broadway house! Normally my anxiety dreams place me in tiny black boxes where no one is paying much attention. At least this gave me a change of pace and a bigger sense of scale.

However, I don't recommend carving a turkey in a Baby Bjorn. That just seems dangerous.