Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
"Lady Parts" Trailer is Ready!
The trailer is ready for Season 1 of Some Lady Parts! Episodes will be dropping summer 2015. Stay tuned ;)
I'm really excited about this project by Katrina Day following the life and times of female actors valiantly battling everyday sexism, in which I will happily appear as such glorious characters as "The Sexy One" and "Homewrecking Slut."
If you've ever known a woman who had more to offer the world than a pretty face, this series is for you. (If you've ever known a woman, this series is also for you.) Feminism is for everyone, and the good people of Some Lady Parts are subverting the status quo in the sassiest, best way possible. Check it out, share, and get ready for some smart (and hilarious) entertainment!
#makeart #womeninfilm #tellstories #keepitreal #doitnow #feminismisforeveryone
Monday, November 10, 2014
Voices
As artists, it's impossible to avoid the Voices in our heads. I don't mean, like, actual schizofrenia voices (though that may also happen occasionally for some), or the voice of God (I am too superstitions to actually say this doesn't happen but I will go out on a limb and say I am skeptical), or the voice of your mother telling you that she "told you so" about that whole thing you did (you know, the thing, with the stuff).
What I mean by the Voices in our heads are the Voices that tell us about who we are, what we're doing, and what we are not doing.
Sometimes friendly, sometimes fiendish, these Voices have many sources but one common result: confusion. It could begin with a note from an acting teacher that makes you question your mind/body connection (for me, it's the recurring problem of people thinking I am being a smart-ass when I am actually sincere. I blame my face). They could start with an argument with a friend that leaves you feeling isolated; a breakup that hurts way longer and deeper than you expected; a book that messes up your head; or even a discouraging casting breakdown like those featured on the brilliant new actress-run Tumblr Lady Parts, like this one: "[Seeking:] Ultimate fantasy woman of sexually frustrated college graduate. Sophisticated, stylish, sexy, intoxicating."
Any of these things (and more) can set off the Voices. Dialogue ensues:
Oh, Voices. Usually they're trying to be helpful, trying to make choices, trying to help us grow. But Voices, whether from outside or in, can become quickly overwhelming and unhelpful. A big journey in the life of an artist is learning to discern the Voices from the really important questions.
My Voices usually ask me whether I'm doing enough (obviously not - no Oscar yet) and analyze and re-analyze what I've done (Three stars average rating on that thing I did? Why not four?). Sometimes, in the voices of my parents or friends trying to be helpful, the Voices ask what I am working on right now or whether I've considered changing my hair or my city or my life-plan, because that might be what tips the scale. They ask what I was thinking. Why I did that. Why didn't I do more.
Voices. Comparing us to other artists. Chiding us for being so slow, so picky, so unemployed, so over-scheduled or over-worked, or blah blah blah. Telling me to speak louder, or I won't be heard - faster, or I'll be passed over. I publish a poem and then agonize over whether the semicolon was the best choices. I update my reel and then hate what I did with that line about chinese food. And then a Voice whispers: what would Meryl Streep have done? Look at what friend X just did! Why aren't you mobilizing a documentary film team to cover the Ebola outbreak? And Facebook newsfeed-stalking, there's the healthy way to handle this!
Voices need to chill.
I remember one of my all-time favorite days of grad-school. It was in our second-year Voice class, exploring Linklater Technique. Taught by the amazing Susan Main, we had done everything from pretending we were mythic creatures together to laying on top of each other making odd honking, bubbling noises. But this one particularly powerful day, which sticks in my mind, Susan instructed us all to stand against the wall of our black-box studio in a line. Then, one by one, we each had to walk to the middle of the room, turn to face the group at the wall, stand still and make eye-contact with every single person in the class. Each moment of eye-contact with each person had to last for an entire breath: in, out.
In silence.
We were allowed no comment, from ourselves or others. If people messed up this part, Susan would make us start over. Eye contact. Breath. Silence. No movement, no comforting habits or dismissals. Just real eye-contact, for a full breath, with everybody else. One student burst into tears after, when Susan asked us what we had experienced. He had felt so exposed, so seen - and so uninteresting.
"You are enough," Susan said.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't work on our technique or honestly examine what we do with our time, skills, and talent. I'm not saying we shouldn't be prepared and trained and exhausted in pursuit of our art. I'm not saying we don't need to develop a thick skin and discernment to handle the chorus of Voices we'll deal with in our lives as artists. But I am saying that under and over the other Voices, whatever might be said about us or by us or around us, it all comes back to that simple truth that I learned (appropriately) in voice class: you are enough.
Our identity as artists doesn't stem from the last thing we did (how often have you been told that an actor is only as good as their current project?). Our identity as artists doesn't depend on interpretations or reviews. Those things are really, really nice. So is money. But those things are not the basis of our identity, whatever the Voices may whisper. And that's not what got us in this game. What got us in this game was who we are, and what we want to explore. Our core. Our self.
You are enough.
That is where the Voices rest and the artwork begins.
What I mean by the Voices in our heads are the Voices that tell us about who we are, what we're doing, and what we are not doing.
Sometimes friendly, sometimes fiendish, these Voices have many sources but one common result: confusion. It could begin with a note from an acting teacher that makes you question your mind/body connection (for me, it's the recurring problem of people thinking I am being a smart-ass when I am actually sincere. I blame my face). They could start with an argument with a friend that leaves you feeling isolated; a breakup that hurts way longer and deeper than you expected; a book that messes up your head; or even a discouraging casting breakdown like those featured on the brilliant new actress-run Tumblr Lady Parts, like this one: "[Seeking:] Ultimate fantasy woman of sexually frustrated college graduate. Sophisticated, stylish, sexy, intoxicating."
Any of these things (and more) can set off the Voices. Dialogue ensues:
Voice 1: This is some sexist bull$@*t. This isn't a part for a human. You're an actor. You portray humans. Move on.
Voice 2: What the hell is an ultimate fantasy woman? Am I an ultimate fantasy woman? Am I pretty?
Voice 3: Oh god not you again.
Voice 1: If I submit to this, does that mean I'm egotistical for thinking I'm a sophisticated, stylish, sexy, intoxicating fantasy woman? If I don't submit, am I letting the Man and patriarchy get me down? Stupid Man. Stupid patriarchy. Stupid infinite amount of breakdowns that make no sense.
Voice 3: Is this paid? Because we could really use money about now. Don't submit unless it's paid. Because we don't have time for games anymore, literally. Only submit if you can do the gig. Tick tock rent.
Voice 2: Ummm submitting doesn't mean you'll get it. Because woah there, cocky. Also, am I pretty?
Voice 1: You're supposed to be smarter than worrying about that. Great dramatic artist here, remember? Shakespeare. Devised physical theater. Focus!
Voice 2: Am I a fantasy woman?
Voice 1: Who am I to judge? What is fantasy? What is a real woman? What is reality, anyway? What is art? What is life?
Voice 3: Blah blah blah blah blah pay your rent.
Oh, Voices. Usually they're trying to be helpful, trying to make choices, trying to help us grow. But Voices, whether from outside or in, can become quickly overwhelming and unhelpful. A big journey in the life of an artist is learning to discern the Voices from the really important questions.
My Voices usually ask me whether I'm doing enough (obviously not - no Oscar yet) and analyze and re-analyze what I've done (Three stars average rating on that thing I did? Why not four?). Sometimes, in the voices of my parents or friends trying to be helpful, the Voices ask what I am working on right now or whether I've considered changing my hair or my city or my life-plan, because that might be what tips the scale. They ask what I was thinking. Why I did that. Why didn't I do more.
Voices. Comparing us to other artists. Chiding us for being so slow, so picky, so unemployed, so over-scheduled or over-worked, or blah blah blah. Telling me to speak louder, or I won't be heard - faster, or I'll be passed over. I publish a poem and then agonize over whether the semicolon was the best choices. I update my reel and then hate what I did with that line about chinese food. And then a Voice whispers: what would Meryl Streep have done? Look at what friend X just did! Why aren't you mobilizing a documentary film team to cover the Ebola outbreak? And Facebook newsfeed-stalking, there's the healthy way to handle this!
Voices need to chill.
I remember one of my all-time favorite days of grad-school. It was in our second-year Voice class, exploring Linklater Technique. Taught by the amazing Susan Main, we had done everything from pretending we were mythic creatures together to laying on top of each other making odd honking, bubbling noises. But this one particularly powerful day, which sticks in my mind, Susan instructed us all to stand against the wall of our black-box studio in a line. Then, one by one, we each had to walk to the middle of the room, turn to face the group at the wall, stand still and make eye-contact with every single person in the class. Each moment of eye-contact with each person had to last for an entire breath: in, out.
In silence.
We were allowed no comment, from ourselves or others. If people messed up this part, Susan would make us start over. Eye contact. Breath. Silence. No movement, no comforting habits or dismissals. Just real eye-contact, for a full breath, with everybody else. One student burst into tears after, when Susan asked us what we had experienced. He had felt so exposed, so seen - and so uninteresting.
"You are enough," Susan said.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't work on our technique or honestly examine what we do with our time, skills, and talent. I'm not saying we shouldn't be prepared and trained and exhausted in pursuit of our art. I'm not saying we don't need to develop a thick skin and discernment to handle the chorus of Voices we'll deal with in our lives as artists. But I am saying that under and over the other Voices, whatever might be said about us or by us or around us, it all comes back to that simple truth that I learned (appropriately) in voice class: you are enough.
Our identity as artists doesn't stem from the last thing we did (how often have you been told that an actor is only as good as their current project?). Our identity as artists doesn't depend on interpretations or reviews. Those things are really, really nice. So is money. But those things are not the basis of our identity, whatever the Voices may whisper. And that's not what got us in this game. What got us in this game was who we are, and what we want to explore. Our core. Our self.
You are enough.
That is where the Voices rest and the artwork begins.
Monday, August 11, 2014
Bodies: Bizzarre and Baffling in Quail Bell Magazine
This piece of mine on bodies was originally published by Quail Bell Magazine on July 29th, 2014. They publish a mystical range of fiction and reality, check them out! I'm so excited to be a part of the Quail Bell Magazine community, and wanted to re-share the essay below. Enjoy!
I hereby solemnly swear this is not another essay about body image and self-esteem. It’s more of an existential crisis and I definitely talk about death. Lately, my eyes somewhat glaze over when I see memes about “real” bodies, Photoshop, and beauty. Not because it’s not a thing, so much, as I think it just misses my real question about bodies, which is: What the *#!@ is this whole body thing all about, anyway? What is going on with bodies? Why do I have one? What is it? Whaaat?
My question has always been: Aren’t our bodies…us? Isn’t our relationship with our bodies, fundamentally, a relationship with our very selves? And if yes, then why do I separate myself from my body, even in my own internal language about it? I mean I have to have a body to even have language, right? A brain to think, a tongue to say, fingers to type the question: Am I my body?
It’s very meta.
A dear friend, the amazing Larissa Dzegar, and I co-created a show together in New York City a few years back exploring questions about bodies. We called simply it "The Body Stories" because we’re creative like that. We asked a small group of performers to create 5-10 minute vignettes dramatizing their relationship with their bodies.
It was a pretty open-ended, fascinating process because I was really curious to see where other brains would take that general phrase “relationship with your body.” Of course, because the two guys and the one person not in their 20s in the cast ended up dropping out because of schedule conflicts, many of the pieces were about things you’d generally expect young women to focus on: insecurity about beauty, complex relationships with food and weight, desire to be desired.
I’d like to do the show again someday with a more diverse mix of ages, races and genders, but we still made some astounding discoveries as a group—the main one, for me, being that everybody struggles to accept their body, its limits, and its goodness. A good tagline for our show might have been “Bodies: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” We’re stuck with what we’ve got, and our bodies play a fundamental role in our identities. Maybe not the most groundbreaking theatrical discovery, but it felt like a major accomplishment and affirmation to have this conversation with other artists and audience members and hear my own questions echoed back to me from other people.
Here I am, though, a couple years later, still asking the same questions. Because there might not be any answers.
It’s still bizarre to me that we all know the only way we exist on this planet is ONLY in a body, and yet we seem to be so bad at dealing with this fact all the way up from self-image through healthcare. I mean if you don’t have a body, you can’t be here. Bodies are like the white tie to get in planet earth’s members-only lounge. There’s probably a sign in earth’s driveway that says “No body? No service.” And we only get ONE body (as far as we can prove).
To me, I move to the mystical to try to understand the body thing. I can’t help myself; I was raised in a pretty conservative branch of Christianity, and much as I sometimes fight it that upbringing has permanently affected the way I think about most things—bodies and their hobbies in particular: reproduction, death, food, waste, pleasure, pain, disease, unfairness of size and health and strength and politics. We are our bodies, they exist for a while, then die: that is all we can know for certain. And yet I am constantly pushing past the known and asking myself, what does this all mean, this body thing? What is it? Why is it? How do we all handle it, share it, and yet live completely and only within the walls of our own cellular structure? What is my body?
Growing up, this was my main take-away about bodies from church: they’ll sin and suffer and die, but don’t panic, there’s a way to save yourself from your body of death. Through faith, you can have God’s spirit LITERALLY live inside you and your body becomes God’s temple. And when this body dies, we get a new one. A perfect one. God loves bodies! New permanent bodies for everyone*! (*Everybody who's Christian.)
Woah.
Obviously this is a religious opinion, but let’s just think about that concept for a second, the body as God’s temple thing, because it still blows my mind with its simple beauty. It’s something like the mirror image of Hinduism where our world and bodies all exist only in Vishnu’s dream in his sleeping head, and therefore we are one with God because we exist in his mind—except that in the Christianity I grew up with our bodies are real and the dream of God’s presence is inside them. God is inside our bodies, or vice versa.
In any religion, belief in spirituality lifts our bodies from the physical to the holy, giving our experience on earth a multi-dementional, sci-fi feel with a very, very happy ending: union with God and a new kind of life after this body’s death. If our bodies could literally be God’s temple or God’s dream, every action and aspect of our physical life takes on the nature of devotion and worship. Even pooping is more special. And our earthly bodies become a sort of cocoon from which we will emerge after death even more beautiful and metaphysical than ever.
I gravitate toward this. It’s a beautiful, seductive idea, just as hell and damnation and cycles of suffering are ugly, scary, off-putting ideas. The main thing is, though, faith is faith and there’s no way to really know what are bodies are: spiritual vessels, or just material? They’re a mystery wrapped as a totally obvious, banal reality. Kids seem to get it. I don’t.
Recently, on a date, two of us stretched our bodies out on a blanket in Central Park under a shady tree and put one earbud each in one of our ears and listened together to a podcast about Alan Turing. (People, THIS is how to woo.) Turing was the genius British mathematician who basically cracked the Nazi code and accelerated the Allied Victory at the end of WWII. After an adventurous and brilliant career as a war hero, Turing was later arrested for homosexuality and chemically castrated by the very British Government he had served.
Turing, it turns out, was raised conservatively Christian much like I was. After watching his boyhood love die of consumption, Turing sought his lost love in prayers and clouds but never found him again. Turing eventually concluded this was because the boy was just gone, and that the Christian idea that humans are more than bodies and that we somehow exist after our bodies die was just a lot of rubbish. As an adult he had a sort of reverse conversion and became an atheist, a materialist, a man of science who decided that the material world and our physical bodies are what they are, and that is absolutely all there is to it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Turing believed that our bodies were the machines of our existence, and that we are essentially conscious machines. Someday he believed humans could build machines that would achieve consciousness, as our equals. The idea rather comforted and set him free, and he went about using his impressive brain/body machine to create machines and codes that changed the world. Then he got arrested for giving his body the love lifestyle it craved, as homosexuality was still illegal in England. Once his own body was turned against him through forced injections of estrogen, Turing grew so depressed and unrecognizable to himself that he chose to end his own life. He bit into a cyanide-laced apple, just like Snow White in his favorite Disney cartoon. (Oddly, it made me feel better to know I am not the only one who has epiphanies about self, bodies, life and death while watching Disney cartoons – but more on that later.)
I’ll never be able to fully burst out of the cocoon of spiritualizing the human body the way that Turing did (I am a bit of a superstitious caterpillar), no matter that I’ve long since resigned my position as president of the Abstinence Club in High School (yes, that’s a real thing that I did) and now live the life of a sinful artist in New York City (sorry not sorry).
Don’t worry, though, spiritualizing the body isn’t all masturbation crosses and chemical castration; one of my favorite Christian saints, St. Francis of Assissi, had a very grounded and humorous view of the body and all the banalities and glories that go along with it. He famously referred to his body as “Brother Ass.” (By the way, children, St. Francis of Assissi, along with every spiritual leader that has ever existed including Jesus and Buddha and Joseph Smith, also pooped. I am quite sure of this.)
I wanted to escape my own “sister ass” for the longest time, but for no reason as profound or tragic as Turing’s government-ordered body hijacking. My body identity crisis was rather clichéd, I suppose: puberty and standard-issue Christian sexual repression. I felt like my body was in my way, holding me down, and pissing off God.
As if being 12 isn’t hard enough.
Disney’s Mulan came out when I was in junior high going through puberty. I don’t know if you remember Mulan or not but I had a sort of epiphany because of it. There’s that one song Mulan sings when she’s frustrated with the limitations of having a female body in her society. She looks at her reflection in a pool and sings, “When will my reflection show who I am inside?”
Well, I used to sing this to myself in the mirror, crying, because I felt like my body was something that I wasn’t, preventing me from being who I truly was. And I did this a lot. Yup...afraid so. I hated that when people saw me, they saw me as my body and not as my brain or soul. I wished I could just be a brain or soul and skip the body part because wouldn’t that be nice. Maybe then I could teleport, mind-read, and not have to wear a bra. I could be like the blue fuzzy light-ball Martian’s in Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man.” Pleeeease? Why not?!
I doubt I’m the only one who ever thought about that: I bet we all want to escape our bodies sometimes, whether for cosmetic or political or health reasons. But one particular day, when my preteen self was singing that particular Disney song to her naked reflection in the bathroom mirror, I suddenly realized that escaping my body would mean death.
Death is the only way out of this body.
Duh! That was the moment I really realized that my body will someday die, the light clicked on, and I faced my own mortality for the first conscious time. That moment changed my life and my relationship with my body. Not to say I instantly and forever looked on my body as only good, but I’ve certainly appreciated and enjoyed it more ever since. I now know my body is only mine temporarily, like a gift that will one day break.
And so when I wrote my own 5-10 minute vignette in "The Body Stories," I did an interpretive dance about puberty (like you do) and ventured peace between my body and my religious traditions and my current questions by writing it a love letter. I apologized for hating it and being mean to it. I told it I loved the way it felt, how much I enjoyed its ability to move and touch and taste and eat and have sex and sleep. And I concluded my love letter like this:
Dear Body, someday you will die, and I will miss you. When you leave me what will I be? Will I be at all? I am afraid to contemplate the absence of you, Body. It is another world, another side, a darkness that I can’t shine light through from here. Someday we will be separated, Body, and the part of me that wanted to escape you will escape. And maybe then I will know whether that part was you all along or someone else, me, or you alone, or us, or another. Until then, we are together. We are one person, you and I, Body, til death do us part. I am married to you in a union stronger than I will ever have with another, a stronger union than anyone can understand, until we are perhaps one. I am you, Body, and I will always wonder if you are also me. You will always be a wonder to me, never answered, only felt.
Vishnu's Dream Machine
I hereby solemnly swear this is not another essay about body image and self-esteem. It’s more of an existential crisis and I definitely talk about death. Lately, my eyes somewhat glaze over when I see memes about “real” bodies, Photoshop, and beauty. Not because it’s not a thing, so much, as I think it just misses my real question about bodies, which is: What the *#!@ is this whole body thing all about, anyway? What is going on with bodies? Why do I have one? What is it? Whaaat?
My self-portrait created during rehearsals for The Body Stories.
Am I seriously the only adult that thinks it’s bizarre that we have bodies? I know babies know what I am talking about. Watching them constantly re-discovering
things like fingers and faces is hilarious. Babies clearly don’t expect
to encounter them, bodies: still getting used to them. Bodies baffle
babies, and me along with them.
Somewhere after that stage of life, though, people seem to stop questioning the body thing. Well, I haven’t stopped.
Kids for example definitely seem more accepting of bodies than babies. Sure, everybody poops, they say, I have a book about it. What’s the big deal? That’s just the way it works. And I am the weirdo grown-up left alone going, yeah, but whaaat? How weird is that, that everybody poops? Everybody?! Everybody POOPS! That’s so weird! We ALL do the SAME poop thing together, ONE BIG HUMAN POOP FAMILY!
It’s bizarre to me that human beings, for all our questions and art forms and inventions and winter Olympics and religions and dreams, boil down to creatures of bodies. As a friend recently put it, we just eat, poop, copulate, and die. For some (I’m looking at you, religion and popular culture and longing), this is a problem. The body thing isn’t enough the way it is, or it’s simply bad. Bodies become the obstacle between us and purity/eternity/beauty/glory/whatever-we-think-is-better, an obstacle between us and the way we think it ought to be. And yet we have to have a body because, well, we just do.
So our relationship with our body becomes complicated. We have to fix it. Discipline it. Starve its appetites, sometimes, or fence them in safely. But, dear god, we must control and dominate it lest it dominate us.
Somewhere after that stage of life, though, people seem to stop questioning the body thing. Well, I haven’t stopped.
Kids for example definitely seem more accepting of bodies than babies. Sure, everybody poops, they say, I have a book about it. What’s the big deal? That’s just the way it works. And I am the weirdo grown-up left alone going, yeah, but whaaat? How weird is that, that everybody poops? Everybody?! Everybody POOPS! That’s so weird! We ALL do the SAME poop thing together, ONE BIG HUMAN POOP FAMILY!
It’s bizarre to me that human beings, for all our questions and art forms and inventions and winter Olympics and religions and dreams, boil down to creatures of bodies. As a friend recently put it, we just eat, poop, copulate, and die. For some (I’m looking at you, religion and popular culture and longing), this is a problem. The body thing isn’t enough the way it is, or it’s simply bad. Bodies become the obstacle between us and purity/eternity/beauty/glory/whatever-we-think-is-better, an obstacle between us and the way we think it ought to be. And yet we have to have a body because, well, we just do.
So our relationship with our body becomes complicated. We have to fix it. Discipline it. Starve its appetites, sometimes, or fence them in safely. But, dear god, we must control and dominate it lest it dominate us.
My question has always been: Aren’t our bodies…us? Isn’t our relationship with our bodies, fundamentally, a relationship with our very selves? And if yes, then why do I separate myself from my body, even in my own internal language about it? I mean I have to have a body to even have language, right? A brain to think, a tongue to say, fingers to type the question: Am I my body?
It’s very meta.
A dear friend, the amazing Larissa Dzegar, and I co-created a show together in New York City a few years back exploring questions about bodies. We called simply it "The Body Stories" because we’re creative like that. We asked a small group of performers to create 5-10 minute vignettes dramatizing their relationship with their bodies.
It was a pretty open-ended, fascinating process because I was really curious to see where other brains would take that general phrase “relationship with your body.” Of course, because the two guys and the one person not in their 20s in the cast ended up dropping out because of schedule conflicts, many of the pieces were about things you’d generally expect young women to focus on: insecurity about beauty, complex relationships with food and weight, desire to be desired.
I’d like to do the show again someday with a more diverse mix of ages, races and genders, but we still made some astounding discoveries as a group—the main one, for me, being that everybody struggles to accept their body, its limits, and its goodness. A good tagline for our show might have been “Bodies: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” We’re stuck with what we’ve got, and our bodies play a fundamental role in our identities. Maybe not the most groundbreaking theatrical discovery, but it felt like a major accomplishment and affirmation to have this conversation with other artists and audience members and hear my own questions echoed back to me from other people.
Here I am, though, a couple years later, still asking the same questions. Because there might not be any answers.
It’s still bizarre to me that we all know the only way we exist on this planet is ONLY in a body, and yet we seem to be so bad at dealing with this fact all the way up from self-image through healthcare. I mean if you don’t have a body, you can’t be here. Bodies are like the white tie to get in planet earth’s members-only lounge. There’s probably a sign in earth’s driveway that says “No body? No service.” And we only get ONE body (as far as we can prove).
To me, I move to the mystical to try to understand the body thing. I can’t help myself; I was raised in a pretty conservative branch of Christianity, and much as I sometimes fight it that upbringing has permanently affected the way I think about most things—bodies and their hobbies in particular: reproduction, death, food, waste, pleasure, pain, disease, unfairness of size and health and strength and politics. We are our bodies, they exist for a while, then die: that is all we can know for certain. And yet I am constantly pushing past the known and asking myself, what does this all mean, this body thing? What is it? Why is it? How do we all handle it, share it, and yet live completely and only within the walls of our own cellular structure? What is my body?
Growing up, this was my main take-away about bodies from church: they’ll sin and suffer and die, but don’t panic, there’s a way to save yourself from your body of death. Through faith, you can have God’s spirit LITERALLY live inside you and your body becomes God’s temple. And when this body dies, we get a new one. A perfect one. God loves bodies! New permanent bodies for everyone*! (*Everybody who's Christian.)
Woah.
Obviously this is a religious opinion, but let’s just think about that concept for a second, the body as God’s temple thing, because it still blows my mind with its simple beauty. It’s something like the mirror image of Hinduism where our world and bodies all exist only in Vishnu’s dream in his sleeping head, and therefore we are one with God because we exist in his mind—except that in the Christianity I grew up with our bodies are real and the dream of God’s presence is inside them. God is inside our bodies, or vice versa.
In any religion, belief in spirituality lifts our bodies from the physical to the holy, giving our experience on earth a multi-dementional, sci-fi feel with a very, very happy ending: union with God and a new kind of life after this body’s death. If our bodies could literally be God’s temple or God’s dream, every action and aspect of our physical life takes on the nature of devotion and worship. Even pooping is more special. And our earthly bodies become a sort of cocoon from which we will emerge after death even more beautiful and metaphysical than ever.
I gravitate toward this. It’s a beautiful, seductive idea, just as hell and damnation and cycles of suffering are ugly, scary, off-putting ideas. The main thing is, though, faith is faith and there’s no way to really know what are bodies are: spiritual vessels, or just material? They’re a mystery wrapped as a totally obvious, banal reality. Kids seem to get it. I don’t.
Recently, on a date, two of us stretched our bodies out on a blanket in Central Park under a shady tree and put one earbud each in one of our ears and listened together to a podcast about Alan Turing. (People, THIS is how to woo.) Turing was the genius British mathematician who basically cracked the Nazi code and accelerated the Allied Victory at the end of WWII. After an adventurous and brilliant career as a war hero, Turing was later arrested for homosexuality and chemically castrated by the very British Government he had served.
Turing, it turns out, was raised conservatively Christian much like I was. After watching his boyhood love die of consumption, Turing sought his lost love in prayers and clouds but never found him again. Turing eventually concluded this was because the boy was just gone, and that the Christian idea that humans are more than bodies and that we somehow exist after our bodies die was just a lot of rubbish. As an adult he had a sort of reverse conversion and became an atheist, a materialist, a man of science who decided that the material world and our physical bodies are what they are, and that is absolutely all there is to it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Turing believed that our bodies were the machines of our existence, and that we are essentially conscious machines. Someday he believed humans could build machines that would achieve consciousness, as our equals. The idea rather comforted and set him free, and he went about using his impressive brain/body machine to create machines and codes that changed the world. Then he got arrested for giving his body the love lifestyle it craved, as homosexuality was still illegal in England. Once his own body was turned against him through forced injections of estrogen, Turing grew so depressed and unrecognizable to himself that he chose to end his own life. He bit into a cyanide-laced apple, just like Snow White in his favorite Disney cartoon. (Oddly, it made me feel better to know I am not the only one who has epiphanies about self, bodies, life and death while watching Disney cartoons – but more on that later.)
Is
that what our body is, a machine? Turing’s concept of life as a
straightforward material equation also attracts and comforts me. To have
the experience of inhabiting the sophisticated, complex machine of a
human body can be very exciting when it’s working well, and very scary
when it’s not.
I’ll never be able to fully burst out of the cocoon of spiritualizing the human body the way that Turing did (I am a bit of a superstitious caterpillar), no matter that I’ve long since resigned my position as president of the Abstinence Club in High School (yes, that’s a real thing that I did) and now live the life of a sinful artist in New York City (sorry not sorry).
Don’t worry, though, spiritualizing the body isn’t all masturbation crosses and chemical castration; one of my favorite Christian saints, St. Francis of Assissi, had a very grounded and humorous view of the body and all the banalities and glories that go along with it. He famously referred to his body as “Brother Ass.” (By the way, children, St. Francis of Assissi, along with every spiritual leader that has ever existed including Jesus and Buddha and Joseph Smith, also pooped. I am quite sure of this.)
I wanted to escape my own “sister ass” for the longest time, but for no reason as profound or tragic as Turing’s government-ordered body hijacking. My body identity crisis was rather clichéd, I suppose: puberty and standard-issue Christian sexual repression. I felt like my body was in my way, holding me down, and pissing off God.
As if being 12 isn’t hard enough.
Disney’s Mulan came out when I was in junior high going through puberty. I don’t know if you remember Mulan or not but I had a sort of epiphany because of it. There’s that one song Mulan sings when she’s frustrated with the limitations of having a female body in her society. She looks at her reflection in a pool and sings, “When will my reflection show who I am inside?”
Well, I used to sing this to myself in the mirror, crying, because I felt like my body was something that I wasn’t, preventing me from being who I truly was. And I did this a lot. Yup...afraid so. I hated that when people saw me, they saw me as my body and not as my brain or soul. I wished I could just be a brain or soul and skip the body part because wouldn’t that be nice. Maybe then I could teleport, mind-read, and not have to wear a bra. I could be like the blue fuzzy light-ball Martian’s in Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man.” Pleeeease? Why not?!
I doubt I’m the only one who ever thought about that: I bet we all want to escape our bodies sometimes, whether for cosmetic or political or health reasons. But one particular day, when my preteen self was singing that particular Disney song to her naked reflection in the bathroom mirror, I suddenly realized that escaping my body would mean death.
Death is the only way out of this body.
Duh! That was the moment I really realized that my body will someday die, the light clicked on, and I faced my own mortality for the first conscious time. That moment changed my life and my relationship with my body. Not to say I instantly and forever looked on my body as only good, but I’ve certainly appreciated and enjoyed it more ever since. I now know my body is only mine temporarily, like a gift that will one day break.
And so when I wrote my own 5-10 minute vignette in "The Body Stories," I did an interpretive dance about puberty (like you do) and ventured peace between my body and my religious traditions and my current questions by writing it a love letter. I apologized for hating it and being mean to it. I told it I loved the way it felt, how much I enjoyed its ability to move and touch and taste and eat and have sex and sleep. And I concluded my love letter like this:
Dear Body, someday you will die, and I will miss you. When you leave me what will I be? Will I be at all? I am afraid to contemplate the absence of you, Body. It is another world, another side, a darkness that I can’t shine light through from here. Someday we will be separated, Body, and the part of me that wanted to escape you will escape. And maybe then I will know whether that part was you all along or someone else, me, or you alone, or us, or another. Until then, we are together. We are one person, you and I, Body, til death do us part. I am married to you in a union stronger than I will ever have with another, a stronger union than anyone can understand, until we are perhaps one. I am you, Body, and I will always wonder if you are also me. You will always be a wonder to me, never answered, only felt.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Self-Soothe
"Maybe your body is trying to tell you to slow down."
Oh, Willy. You're sweet.
Willy, everybody, is my friendly neighborhood healthcare provider who I suspect is several years younger than me. Yes, he insists I call him by his first name, and no, his name is not actually Willy. (Yay, insurance!)
Poor Willy and I have seen a lot of each other lately. It's getting stupid. We may have actually started to form some inside jokes. Today, when he told me to slow down, I retorted with my usual zippy vim:
"You don't come to New York to slow down, sir."
This made us both groan. And then cry. Or maybe that was just me.
The thing is, Willy has a point. (See what I did there?) My body is - often - usually - telling me to slow down. I went through three years of MFA training so that I could listen to my body, dammit. I hear you, Body. I do. It's magical to communicate with you and all but you just don't seem to understand that I am trying to ignore you on purpose.
I don't know about the rest of you artsy lot, but I've realized over the years that I have a rather addictive personality. I over-do things. It's never just one donut hole with me, oh no. Just ask anyone who has supped with me or seen my closet; boundless enthusiasm and terrible planning. (This is why none of my clothes match any of my other clothes.)
Fortunately, I've been pretty lucky. Mostly the things I binge on are pretty innocent so far: work, wine, the occasional guilty-pleasure Netflix marathons, secret late-night Freddie Mercury Google searches...
But I wonder, is this bingey thing that I do realllllly innocent? So I'm not doing drugs, that's good, but is it ok that I have a file on my computer for inspirational quotes I've downloaded in moments of lonely, wine-sodden weakness? (Goals ARE dreams with deadlines. Wow. How did I never see it before?) Can I really justify writing a blog entry after midnight on a Tuesday? Is it smart to expect my body to do well rehearsing two full-length non-union plays at the same time while working all my dayjobs, after five months of hiatus?
Or are my self-soothing/bingeing habits actually detracting from my discipline in creating better art?
Here's what I mean. Fellow actor buddies and I have talked about the famine/feast thing, how work seems to come all at once and then not at all. The pattern seems to be echoed in our personal lives. I'll have a flurry interesting work and my personal life will sort of (necessarily, I tell myself) go on pause. Then, I'll have months of no acting work and I'll burst from my social cocoon and it's all champagne and experimental jazz until the cows come home (ok more like it's all Yellowtail and Bon Jovi until I get a headache, whatever, who cares! life is NOW!). Then, repeat.
Know what I mean?
Thing is, as artists WE ARE THE ONES CREATING OUR WORK. So...
I must be the one setting this bizarre pace. That's my astoundingly deep insight into myself for the day. Maybe I've been approaching my artistic career more like a junkie looking for a fix and less like a journeyman, but storytelling isn't a substance I can hit. I have to make it from scratch. There's a really petulant impatience at the bottom of my decisions: an "I want my artistic fulfillment and I want it NOW!" sort of nonsense, like a big moody baby with grabby hands. And, since that is impossible and actually meaningless as a statement, I guess I've tried to fill in that hunger with things that are actually real. Like wine. Wine is super real. But not necessarily art.
I take that back. Wine is definitely art.
I don't know which comes fist, the instability, the addictive personality or the binging. But I am starting to wonder: wouldn't Willy and I both be happier if we never met again? Nothing personal, Willy.
Oh look, cheese and wine and more not sleeping. How nice. I'll have some.
Oh, Willy. You're sweet.
Willy, everybody, is my friendly neighborhood healthcare provider who I suspect is several years younger than me. Yes, he insists I call him by his first name, and no, his name is not actually Willy. (Yay, insurance!)
Poor Willy and I have seen a lot of each other lately. It's getting stupid. We may have actually started to form some inside jokes. Today, when he told me to slow down, I retorted with my usual zippy vim:
"You don't come to New York to slow down, sir."
This made us both groan. And then cry. Or maybe that was just me.
The thing is, Willy has a point. (See what I did there?) My body is - often - usually - telling me to slow down. I went through three years of MFA training so that I could listen to my body, dammit. I hear you, Body. I do. It's magical to communicate with you and all but you just don't seem to understand that I am trying to ignore you on purpose.
I don't know about the rest of you artsy lot, but I've realized over the years that I have a rather addictive personality. I over-do things. It's never just one donut hole with me, oh no. Just ask anyone who has supped with me or seen my closet; boundless enthusiasm and terrible planning. (This is why none of my clothes match any of my other clothes.)
Fortunately, I've been pretty lucky. Mostly the things I binge on are pretty innocent so far: work, wine, the occasional guilty-pleasure Netflix marathons, secret late-night Freddie Mercury Google searches...
But I wonder, is this bingey thing that I do realllllly innocent? So I'm not doing drugs, that's good, but is it ok that I have a file on my computer for inspirational quotes I've downloaded in moments of lonely, wine-sodden weakness? (Goals ARE dreams with deadlines. Wow. How did I never see it before?) Can I really justify writing a blog entry after midnight on a Tuesday? Is it smart to expect my body to do well rehearsing two full-length non-union plays at the same time while working all my dayjobs, after five months of hiatus?
Or are my self-soothing/bingeing habits actually detracting from my discipline in creating better art?
 |
| I totally stole this from the internet. |
Know what I mean?
Thing is, as artists WE ARE THE ONES CREATING OUR WORK. So...
I must be the one setting this bizarre pace. That's my astoundingly deep insight into myself for the day. Maybe I've been approaching my artistic career more like a junkie looking for a fix and less like a journeyman, but storytelling isn't a substance I can hit. I have to make it from scratch. There's a really petulant impatience at the bottom of my decisions: an "I want my artistic fulfillment and I want it NOW!" sort of nonsense, like a big moody baby with grabby hands. And, since that is impossible and actually meaningless as a statement, I guess I've tried to fill in that hunger with things that are actually real. Like wine. Wine is super real. But not necessarily art.
I take that back. Wine is definitely art.
I don't know which comes fist, the instability, the addictive personality or the binging. But I am starting to wonder: wouldn't Willy and I both be happier if we never met again? Nothing personal, Willy.
Oh look, cheese and wine and more not sleeping. How nice. I'll have some.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Like and Love
"If the need to act is so strong it wakes you in the middle of the night, then stay with it." - Frank Langella
There are things in life that we like. I mean, really really like.
These might be the things that we crave for comfort on a tough day, or hope to get for Christmas. Nectarines, tea, a new dress, a smartphone.
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| What lights you up? |
The things we really really like might even be activities - hiking, reading, writing, swimming. Things that revitalize us and strengthen our health.
Then there are those things that we love.
The distance between the things we love and the things we like is subtle and sometimes confusing, but it is a sudden and shockingly deep precipice nevertheless. One day we might wake up and realize that the thing we thought we only liked we actually love, or vice versa. And then it might turn into one of those sprinting-to-the-airport, buying-the-cheapest-ticket-to-anywhere-just-so-you-can-bolt-through-security-and-race-into-the-gate-and-declare-your-undying-love-over-the-speaker-system-and-embarrass-the-crap-out-of-everyone-but-end-up-passionately-making-out-and-not-caring-anymore movie situations. That crossroads moment when everything is silent around you but the cry of your heart. The "once you know you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start right now" kind of deal. (God I love When Harry Met Sally.)
But until that day, how the heck do you know?
Sometimes I can't tell the difference between the lands of like and love. I squint and scrutinize but blur the line, spill something on my map, and lose track of where the boundaries are. Like is like love, I say to myself. Like is love in a way, I say to myself.
I think myself in circles, spending a lot of silly time trying to understand my feelings about things, and develop feelings for my feelings, and try to feel my way back to knowing whether or not my feelings are feelings of like or feelings of love - or feelings in a different category entirely unrelated to like or love.
 |
| Feelings, WTF! |
Or whether my feelings are really a factor at all?
The thing about love is you can't think yourself into it, out of it, or around it.
It is, or it isn't. Right?
The thing about love is that it's mysterious and nonsensical. It can appear and disappear sometimes, and sometimes it can be a permanent weight in a small corner of your heart. Sometimes it can easily be mistaken for something else, or not acknowledged at all. It can be the huge writing in the sky that helps us make a choice, or it can be the choice we don't want to make.
 |
| King Kong's feelings are clear. |
Love makes us alive. Right until it we fall off the Empire State Building.
The reason I know that I love acting - not like it, but love it - is because I just KNOW. No thinking necessary.
Sometimes I toy with the idea of talking myself into liking acting and loving something else more, because loving acting is complicated. I sometimes want to love something that's easier to love. Something that's nicer to me.
But that's just ridiculous. Not to mention impossible. The heart wants what it wants. And what else would I do with my life for goodness' sake, make model planes? Grow a pea garden? Not there's anything wrong with those things. They're just wrong for me.
 |
| Tina knows EXACTLY what love has to do, has to do with it. |
Today, Gentle Readers, I trust that you can also know what you love. And that you can have it.
You'll just...know...
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Making Things
 |
| Fiji fixes everything, right? |
By Sunday morning, Fiji seemed less lustrous as a feasible solution. Isn't there some saying about when the going gets tough, the tough get...you know...
I may have felt like the going had gotten past me without toughening me up or getting me going. I may have felt like "the tough" probably refers to somebody else, somebody who has made enough things or has simply made "it", clearly unlike my own state of un-made-ness. But, whatever my feelings might feel, the truth is I HAVE been making things: making space, making peace, making time, making art. I make kids learn everything from grammar to soccer in my day jobs. I make gourmet meals for myself and friends at home. I make sides come to life in auditions, and worlds appear out of monologues. I make theater productions from scratch sometimes, and sometimes I make my small contribution to larger, ancienter stories. I make tapes and lists and cards and mailings and contacts and friends. I make choices and merry and connections and magic. I make motion. I make stillness.
Once again this week, I am reminded that the voices in my head and my own swirling emotions aren't always the best way for me to look at my life and my work. Sometimes, it's not helpful to let myself feel my way through slow times or low thoughts. I have to remember objective reality and calm down, breathe, and go on making things. And as long as I'm making things, I have to remember that it is enough. And so am I. It's helpful to notice that what I can make, and what I have yet to make, are on course to intersect beautifully.
So I'd like to share with you something I've made - along with many other talented makers. It reminds me of what I've done, what I'm doing, and what I'm going to do. Go on making things, gentle reader! In our making things, we make the world.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Feelings
I'm so tired. I'm capable of anything.
I still love you. I never want to see you again.
I'm rusty. I'm talented.
I can't stop thinking. My brain is a blank.
I'm still so young. Life is going too fast.
My career has barely started. I've done so many great projects already, and tackled some awesome roles.
I'm an idiot for not knowing that film lingo. One should always be learning - humility comes before honor.
There isn't enough time for me to prepare. I am capable of bringing my training, presence, joy, and personality to anything if I concentrate and breathe.
I'm doing it already. Where I want my path to go seems so far away.
I want to hide. I want to perform.
I'm lonely and alone. "I am human, and therefore nothing human is foreign to me." Art unites me to the world.
My feelings sometimes have episodes of schizofrenia; they and their opposites race around my solar-plexis simultaneously, not mutually exclusive, all true, all clamoring and jabbering and dressed up like triplets at their quinceañera. I'm a little bit country AND a little bit rock and roll. I'm one of those egotistical cocky actors AND one of those needy insecure actors. How can one individual person contain such a galaxy of burning, glaring, overlapping noise - and the white noise machine to cancel it all out? How can I possibly make sense of my impulses onstage when offstage my wires are all crossed? (And there's no cool 1940s Rosie the Riveter kind of chick as operating the board, patiently answering and transferring calls). And, not to panic, but how can I stay in the game for another 10 years if after 2 my emotions are already going cray-cray?
I'm not necessarily advocating the Pollyanna anecdote for all dark, overwhelmed, or low-energy feelings - and many of my fellow artists know that when your natural voice needs to be freed and it ain't happy, you just have to let it growl.
Clicking my heels has never brought me magically home, so what I'm attempting to practice lately as an actress and as a human is thankfulness. If a song comes on when I'm in the shower than reminds me of a sad memory, instead of bemoaning the fact that I still have feelings stirred I try to say, "Thank you. Thank you that my heart has that in it." If I see something weird happen on the subway platform I say, "Thank you, universe, for entertaining and surprising me constantly." If my feelings get all twisty and emo on me, I say, "Well thanks for your opinions, guys. Just know I'm not letting any of you be in charge right now." If I run around like a crazy person all day in 90 degree heat with no time to eat meals or finish an audition tape, I say, "...." Well. I'm trying to think of something to be thankful for about that one.
I have lots of feelings. And no feelings. And both are true, and both are ok. What I'm realizing about my acting career is that my feelings are riding the roller coaster curves too, and that the best thing I can do for myself at any given time is to not judge my own feelings. They're there, like my body or the floor or outer space. Judging might be fun for me as a hobby once in a while, but it won't effect any change over whatever I'm judging. I can say, "Sun, you are too hot." But it doesn't stop being hot. I'm not going to judge my feelings anymore. Rather, I strive to notice them, mark them, experience them, and then - dammit - use them in my acting.
I still love you. I never want to see you again.
I'm rusty. I'm talented.
I can't stop thinking. My brain is a blank.
I'm still so young. Life is going too fast.
My career has barely started. I've done so many great projects already, and tackled some awesome roles.
I'm an idiot for not knowing that film lingo. One should always be learning - humility comes before honor.
There isn't enough time for me to prepare. I am capable of bringing my training, presence, joy, and personality to anything if I concentrate and breathe.
I'm doing it already. Where I want my path to go seems so far away.
I want to hide. I want to perform.
I'm lonely and alone. "I am human, and therefore nothing human is foreign to me." Art unites me to the world.
My feelings sometimes have episodes of schizofrenia; they and their opposites race around my solar-plexis simultaneously, not mutually exclusive, all true, all clamoring and jabbering and dressed up like triplets at their quinceañera. I'm a little bit country AND a little bit rock and roll. I'm one of those egotistical cocky actors AND one of those needy insecure actors. How can one individual person contain such a galaxy of burning, glaring, overlapping noise - and the white noise machine to cancel it all out? How can I possibly make sense of my impulses onstage when offstage my wires are all crossed? (And there's no cool 1940s Rosie the Riveter kind of chick as operating the board, patiently answering and transferring calls). And, not to panic, but how can I stay in the game for another 10 years if after 2 my emotions are already going cray-cray?
I'm not necessarily advocating the Pollyanna anecdote for all dark, overwhelmed, or low-energy feelings - and many of my fellow artists know that when your natural voice needs to be freed and it ain't happy, you just have to let it growl.
Clicking my heels has never brought me magically home, so what I'm attempting to practice lately as an actress and as a human is thankfulness. If a song comes on when I'm in the shower than reminds me of a sad memory, instead of bemoaning the fact that I still have feelings stirred I try to say, "Thank you. Thank you that my heart has that in it." If I see something weird happen on the subway platform I say, "Thank you, universe, for entertaining and surprising me constantly." If my feelings get all twisty and emo on me, I say, "Well thanks for your opinions, guys. Just know I'm not letting any of you be in charge right now." If I run around like a crazy person all day in 90 degree heat with no time to eat meals or finish an audition tape, I say, "...." Well. I'm trying to think of something to be thankful for about that one.
I have lots of feelings. And no feelings. And both are true, and both are ok. What I'm realizing about my acting career is that my feelings are riding the roller coaster curves too, and that the best thing I can do for myself at any given time is to not judge my own feelings. They're there, like my body or the floor or outer space. Judging might be fun for me as a hobby once in a while, but it won't effect any change over whatever I'm judging. I can say, "Sun, you are too hot." But it doesn't stop being hot. I'm not going to judge my feelings anymore. Rather, I strive to notice them, mark them, experience them, and then - dammit - use them in my acting.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Live Your Life
Like any normal girl my age, I follow the Humphrey Bogart Estate page on Facebook. This means that whilst whiling away time reading my friends' status updates and snooping around their recent picture uploads and liking links and sharing snarky posters around the internet ether, I take an occasional break to read some quotes and get some inspiration from one of the greater actors (in my humble opinion) and studliest men that ever lived. The more I think about it, studly might seem an unlikely appellation for a somewhat small, dark, weathered and reserved person like Bogart, but I know for a fact that when I call him studly I am in agreement with a large part of the world. He is studly not so much because of his all-American good looks like so many other heartthrobs who run about a dime a dozen, but because of his edge and his energy and his soul.
This week I was so inspired by one of the Humphrey Bogart Estate page's status updates that I am going to re-post it here:
I can't quite pull off the shirtless sailing thing like Bogie (without getting arrested), and in fact I've never set foot on a sailboat - but this resonated with me in such a powerful way that I can't stop smiling about it. In a way, I've been thinking about it ever since I began acting school almost five years ago. As an eager young student, my tendency was to bury myself in the bubble of classes, classmates, and shoptalk and never come up for air even when it would have been much more socially appropriate for me to do so. (My poor, long-suffering mother really didn't need to hear me talking endlessly about vocal fry or Terence or sense memory...I love you, Mom.)
Over time, and as I read more and more biographies of artists I loved, it began to dawn on me what was wrong with this picture I was painting for myself of what it meant to be an artist. Wearing myself and my friends out with earnest discussion didn't seem to have any tangible connection to my ability to emote on stage, and that is probably because great artists don't spend every second of their life in classrooms or overtly stewing in their work. They are, first and foremost, people. What drives art is not just sweat and focus and talent. The beginning, middle, and end of art is humanity. And when you're an artist, your life and humanity is what keeps you going.
My roommate K. who is not an actor has a saying that I think sums this up beautifully and, actually, has helped me relieve a lot of pressure and reinsert the joy into my acting career - not to mention putting a sparkle and wink into my personal life. "Live your life," she says. She says this when I ask if it's okay to eat another helping of nachos, or when I decide to go out at night even though I have to work a lot the next day; if I wonder if I can pull off wearing a bright pink belt on a bright green dress, or instead of studying lines like a good little actor I tell her I'm going to ditch the homework to go out for a walk. "Live your life," she says. Yes, dammit! I will, thank you.
After all, what is it that actors do, children? That's right. We act like...people! We act out stories about...LIFE!!! We pretend to be...people living their lives!
And, as a side note, what do actors spend a majority of their time doing in daily life? That's right...not acting, and actually being people.
This may seem really obvious to you, and if so, I congratulate you - because this is still hard for me to grapple with in my relentless, goal-oriented brain. Confession: I'm going to be real with you here. Part of me feels like this whole "live your life" thing is just a nice way for me to try to coddle myself with nice-sounding sweet talk when I'm not booking the roles I want or achieving my goals. But that's baloney. Jobs will come and go. Auditions will come and go. Apartments, clothes, even some friendships will come and go. Even ambitions will come and go. But you know what will stay with me my entire life? What the common denominator is? Me. Who I really am. My personality. What I really am, not who I am currently pretending to be.
So this week, the Humphrey Bogart Estate facebook page helped me blow some smoke away and realize in a practical way how important - nay, ESSENTIAL - it is for an actor to ground their personality in real life. Yet, I submit to you gentle Reader that this wisdom is applicable to all humans everywhere and not just to actors. So, what is your stabilizer? What helps you nail down your personality, and realize who you really are versus what you are pretending to be? Honestly, for me, this blog is a big help. Writing. My church community. Yoga. Working with kids.
There are so many ways to be a person...
This week I was so inspired by one of the Humphrey Bogart Estate page's status updates that I am going to re-post it here:
"An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail down ...what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be." - Humphrey Bogart on his life-long love of sailing
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| Danger: studly, shirtless Bogie on a boat. |
Over time, and as I read more and more biographies of artists I loved, it began to dawn on me what was wrong with this picture I was painting for myself of what it meant to be an artist. Wearing myself and my friends out with earnest discussion didn't seem to have any tangible connection to my ability to emote on stage, and that is probably because great artists don't spend every second of their life in classrooms or overtly stewing in their work. They are, first and foremost, people. What drives art is not just sweat and focus and talent. The beginning, middle, and end of art is humanity. And when you're an artist, your life and humanity is what keeps you going.
My roommate K. who is not an actor has a saying that I think sums this up beautifully and, actually, has helped me relieve a lot of pressure and reinsert the joy into my acting career - not to mention putting a sparkle and wink into my personal life. "Live your life," she says. She says this when I ask if it's okay to eat another helping of nachos, or when I decide to go out at night even though I have to work a lot the next day; if I wonder if I can pull off wearing a bright pink belt on a bright green dress, or instead of studying lines like a good little actor I tell her I'm going to ditch the homework to go out for a walk. "Live your life," she says. Yes, dammit! I will, thank you.
After all, what is it that actors do, children? That's right. We act like...people! We act out stories about...LIFE!!! We pretend to be...people living their lives!
And, as a side note, what do actors spend a majority of their time doing in daily life? That's right...not acting, and actually being people.
 |
| Me and some roommates, living our lives. |
This may seem really obvious to you, and if so, I congratulate you - because this is still hard for me to grapple with in my relentless, goal-oriented brain. Confession: I'm going to be real with you here. Part of me feels like this whole "live your life" thing is just a nice way for me to try to coddle myself with nice-sounding sweet talk when I'm not booking the roles I want or achieving my goals. But that's baloney. Jobs will come and go. Auditions will come and go. Apartments, clothes, even some friendships will come and go. Even ambitions will come and go. But you know what will stay with me my entire life? What the common denominator is? Me. Who I really am. My personality. What I really am, not who I am currently pretending to be.
So this week, the Humphrey Bogart Estate facebook page helped me blow some smoke away and realize in a practical way how important - nay, ESSENTIAL - it is for an actor to ground their personality in real life. Yet, I submit to you gentle Reader that this wisdom is applicable to all humans everywhere and not just to actors. So, what is your stabilizer? What helps you nail down your personality, and realize who you really are versus what you are pretending to be? Honestly, for me, this blog is a big help. Writing. My church community. Yoga. Working with kids.
There are so many ways to be a person...
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Happy Lent
“When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites
do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting.
Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face,
so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only
to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done
in secret, will reward you. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.
But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin
do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." - From The Book of Common Prayer, Ash Wednesday, 2012 (Matthew 6:16-21)
Happy Lent everyone! Last year, I gave up movies for Lent and was very cranky. Hardest thing I've ever done, probably, and a HUGE lesson for me in the nature and purpose of fasting. This year, I don't feel a particular pull towards any specific Lenten sacrifice. Maybe hot air balloon rides? Maybe group sex in public parks?...or inappropriate jokes?
Growing up, I spent most of my time attending "non-denominational" Christian churches with my mom and missed out on a lot of the the more ancient church-calendar practices of the Catholic and more traditional protestant churches. As an adult, I've developed a sense of curiosity and respect for the mysticism and tradition of these practices and am still learning a lot about what's behind the thinking of something like Lent, for example. Today I discovered Liturgical Time, a blog that tracks and illuminates the church calendar. There's a great deal of peace and reassurance for me in following the footsteps of this cycle of meditation, grace, and mercy.
There's something artistic and uncanny about Lent, and the church calendar, and indeed about church. But Lent in particular, for me, is a creative act; a time of gestation and preparing the soul to be receptive. For me, the season of Lent is a sense of smouldering embers, suppressed desire, boiling water stirred up and seasoned tightly under a lid (as my acting teacher might say), and of really facing truths that might be hard to look at.
A friend of mine recently told me that one reason he no longer participates in the church is because of an involuntary epiphany he had one day. Already an actor, he attended service and found himself looking at it from a professional theatrical point of view. Like always, he saw priests and volunteers wearing costumes, standing on a stage, following a script, using music and cues, telling a story based on a book. With a sudden, life-altering smack, he concluded that church is basically the same as the theater - all a big show. He went on to conclude, differently than me, that it must be a fiction.
I see his point, I really do. There's an element of religion that's mass manipulation (pun intended), where church assumes the role of a big business playing and preying on peoples' senses of conscience and dignity, family and guilt to take advantage of them financially and, worse, spiritually. I do see what my friend means about churches seeming an awful lot like theater - there's music and performance, the leaders use public speaking techniques to manipulate their audiences (sorry, I mean, congregations), and the entire teaching and message is part of a narrative/story that some argue is created, not divine. I get it. Sure. A good church service - or any public event - will most likely follow Freytag's pyramid of dramatic structure, just like a good play or a good calendar year. And I'm not going to say it's always a great thing that churches put on a show, but for me, in general, the theatrical elements of church can make it all the more beautiful. Indeed, I go to theater for much the same reason that I go to church - to experience the truth, to enter a no-bullshit zone where I can make some sense and possibly even some joy out of being human. We can know God (I believe) as easily in a black-box or the subway as in a pew.
And if church is like theater, the church calendar spells out it's dramatic structure. Lent is sort of the climax. In Christian terms, it's the crucifixion - and now, everything is waiting for the denouement, the surprise reversal of Christ's resurrection. But for now, the shit has hit the fan in Lent. We have to deal with being human. The beauty of believing in God is that our story doesn't end there. Being human isn't limited by our humanness, but rather transcended and set free in infinity. All of it is building, building, building....waiting, waiting, waiting...
"Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return." It's theater at it's best. And then some.
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| photo from blog "liturgical time" |
Growing up, I spent most of my time attending "non-denominational" Christian churches with my mom and missed out on a lot of the the more ancient church-calendar practices of the Catholic and more traditional protestant churches. As an adult, I've developed a sense of curiosity and respect for the mysticism and tradition of these practices and am still learning a lot about what's behind the thinking of something like Lent, for example. Today I discovered Liturgical Time, a blog that tracks and illuminates the church calendar. There's a great deal of peace and reassurance for me in following the footsteps of this cycle of meditation, grace, and mercy.
There's something artistic and uncanny about Lent, and the church calendar, and indeed about church. But Lent in particular, for me, is a creative act; a time of gestation and preparing the soul to be receptive. For me, the season of Lent is a sense of smouldering embers, suppressed desire, boiling water stirred up and seasoned tightly under a lid (as my acting teacher might say), and of really facing truths that might be hard to look at.
A friend of mine recently told me that one reason he no longer participates in the church is because of an involuntary epiphany he had one day. Already an actor, he attended service and found himself looking at it from a professional theatrical point of view. Like always, he saw priests and volunteers wearing costumes, standing on a stage, following a script, using music and cues, telling a story based on a book. With a sudden, life-altering smack, he concluded that church is basically the same as the theater - all a big show. He went on to conclude, differently than me, that it must be a fiction.
I see his point, I really do. There's an element of religion that's mass manipulation (pun intended), where church assumes the role of a big business playing and preying on peoples' senses of conscience and dignity, family and guilt to take advantage of them financially and, worse, spiritually. I do see what my friend means about churches seeming an awful lot like theater - there's music and performance, the leaders use public speaking techniques to manipulate their audiences (sorry, I mean, congregations), and the entire teaching and message is part of a narrative/story that some argue is created, not divine. I get it. Sure. A good church service - or any public event - will most likely follow Freytag's pyramid of dramatic structure, just like a good play or a good calendar year. And I'm not going to say it's always a great thing that churches put on a show, but for me, in general, the theatrical elements of church can make it all the more beautiful. Indeed, I go to theater for much the same reason that I go to church - to experience the truth, to enter a no-bullshit zone where I can make some sense and possibly even some joy out of being human. We can know God (I believe) as easily in a black-box or the subway as in a pew.
"Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return." It's theater at it's best. And then some.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Showtime
Inspiration becomes a solid, smoldering idea. The idea becomes a need. The need becomes a collaboration. The collaboration becomes a pursuit. Consultation. Pitching.
Fundraising. Crowds of supporters come out of the woodwork, from sometimes surprising and always humbling and amazing places. Concept building. Casting. Booking space. Finding a theater. Weeks of rehearsal. More collaboration. Evolution. Hiring support. Volunteers. Building a website. Finalizing the script. Organizing tickets. Trying on costumes. Buying snacks. Tech week. Light cues. Dress rehearsal. Speed through.
What's different about this opening day? What's special about this particular showtime, for me?
That first inspiration, that little idea that became a need - it was my need, my idea. It met a partner, Larissa Dzegar, and evolved to something better when our ideas and needs mixed. Our ideas together became a pursuit that both of us just HAD to see brought to life. We made this show out of the raw materials of our own selves and what we could reach in the world around us, joined by other artists, supported by an astounding number and caliber of people who believed in us and our project. Today, when the audience walks into Space on White, it will be because Larissa and I wanted it to happen, because the universe supported our venture. And because, of course, God is good.
The Body Stories is a dream come true for me. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for letting me tell this story, for putting this show on the stage, for acting, for showtime. Now I can say, "I am Jeanne Joe Perrone - an actress, a writer, a producer, an art maker, and a director. I am a creator of The Body Stories. My dreams come to life."
Monday, October 10, 2011
"The Body Stories"
Today I am honored to tell you about my upcoming theater project The Body Stories - an original production I am creating together with fellow Actors Studio Drama School MFA alum and fearless truth-teller Larissa Dzegar. While together at school, Larissa, myself, and a gaggle of bold performing artists discovered a uniting passion for physical storytelling that has developed into this collaboration. We're taking our secret obsession public in a performance on January 22, 2012 in New York City and we couldn't be more excited to share our work with you!
We all have complicated relationships with our bodies - I myself am no exception, and that is my inspiration for creating The Body Stories. Here's a bit of my story: bodies always confused me. Puberty hit me way too early. I was wearing a D-cup bra by age 10 and routinely experiencing the humiliation of sexual harassment. Much of my time was spent being embarrassed and uncomfortable and ashamed of my body. My habits, posture, and clothes were designed to hide my body. I didn't know how to handle the attention I was getting, or how to connect my body with my personality and the world around me. It all got even more complicated when I couldn't figure out how to reconcile my religious culture with the realities of my physical life and desires. I wore an abstinence pledge ring but spent the night at my boyfriend's house. I advocated healthiness but starved myself down 30 pounds. My body often felt like the enemy. Why was it was so hard to live in my body? What did my body wanted from me, or I from it? These questions haunted me throughout my teens and early twenties. My person was torn in two, afraid to let one part of me know what another part was doing.
It's only over my years working as a professional artist in New York City that I've re-thought my body and yearned to explore these questions about bodies as a theater piece. I am emboldened by the discovery that I am not alone in my struggles. My body's journey is culminating in this project, where my body - along with the bodies of a team of incredibly brave and talented performers - gets a taste of freedom, connection, and liberation. My body, finally, gets to tell its side of the story!
The Body Stories is a blessing and a triumph for me, and I firmly believe that this project can inspire hope, acceptance, compassion, and healthy body awareness in others. I have never felt this strongly about a theater piece before, and know that this will be a life-changing production for me - and not just for me. We all have bodies. That's why The Body Stories is truly for everyone.
Myself, Larissa, and our team are willing to work for no pay but I'm sure you can imagine that even an efficient production in New York City requires funds for rehearsal and performance space. Our goal is to raise $1500 by November 1st, 2011. We are now requesting the contribution of our friends and families in making this project possible. Your support will breathe life and possibility into our show, and any monetary amount that you can invest is a lifeline for us.
Please visit our indigogo fundraiser website to make a donation and learn more about The Body Stories.
http://www.indiegogo.com/The-
To learn more about The Body Stories, or to find out other ways you can get involved, please contact us! Your body also has a story...if you'd like to share it with us, don't hesitate to reach out! We are open and curious to learn and grow, confident that this is simply one rendition of an ongoing project. We welcome any of your questions or comments.
Thank you very much for your attention and consideration. And thank you for being a part of our story.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Binge
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| Binging can be sexy, can't it? |
Last night we celebrated life with what can only be called a binge. After a leisurely unplanned outing to Gardiner, Maine (complete with a trip to the A1 Diner, a bout of library hugging and a rural motorcycle ride in the mist), a cluster of TAM company members feasted at a farmhouse with steaks, seafood, fruits and vegetables on the grill. We drank several bottles of wine and over the course of 4 or 5 hours never once stopped eating, strumming guitars and singing. It was a glorious night for me for many reasons, but especially because it was the very first time any of my lyrics have been put to music and performed. Thanks to Ambien Mitchell for her collaboration, organization, patience and genius! We binged on food. We binged on good company. We binged on creative synergy. We decided that my song and a song of hers should be spliced together in a medley of gloriousness, and that is how "About Your Shirt: The Laundry Song" was born. Creating and sharing are perhaps the two most important things you can do in life - but also, sometimes, the most costly and scary. My Dad (who you may notice I quote incessantly) always says, "Generosity is very expensive."
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| Don't burn out! |
Yet, there is a definite majority that do not live long and prosper. Hence the existence of the Forever 27s - that uncanny, ever-growing group of brilliant musicians that have died tragically and unexpectedly at the too young age of 27 years old. To my thinking at least, Winehouse is now a member of that group. I love her music. I admire her artistry. She was a one of a kind original. I worry about a world in which souls that are so eager to share themselves wind up crushed and extinguished.
In all the myths of the creation of the world, one of my favorites is the story that my step-father has sort of invented for himself; God, in the act of making life, matter, space, time, and creatures, poured himself out and in to everything he made until there was no more God separate from his creation, because God WAS literally in his creation: he used himself as the prime ingredient and spent himself entirely to create something new. As if God was the seed, and creation was the sprouting plant. Once there's a thriving plant, there is no more seed.I don't actually buy this origins story, as I am firm in my conviction that the act of creation needn't destroy its source. But there is something beautiful about looking at creation as an act of sacrifice. The creative mind is constantly pouring itself into what it makes and living fully only in what it makes, sometimes to the point of ceasing to live outside of its own art. This may be an unhealthy extreme for a human being, but I can't help but be drawn to such wacky passion. "Damn the torpedoes! Give it your all. Reckless abandon," and all that jazz. Like Billy Joel would say, "Only the good die young." I always had a somewhat twisted fantasy of dying at 24. I figured by then I'd have created brilliant art, lived fast and furious, and duck out leaving everyone wanting more. Genius, I reasoned, burns at both ends. Wouldn't it be more awesome to go down in flames than to sputter out for lack of spark? That's how I used to think, caught up in the glamor of the creative binge. It's true that the wild binge of life sometimes creates more life, but there is a line where it turns destructive.
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| One of my favorite artists on the outer fringe: Dali |
We humans definitely do need to take care of ourselves, especially if we're spending ourselves. Those of us who use our selves as the materials to create, who blur the lines between their art/work and their lives, may suffer needlessly and perish unnecessarily if we loose our equilibrium...but gosh darn it, those chaotic, feverish artists living on the outer fringe of sanity without a tow line sure do create beautiful things. Why is that?!?! Does art spring from life, or vice versa, or nada?
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| Fuels my spirit... |
So binge carefully my friends, and don't spend yourselves too soon. We all have our addictions, and we wouldn't be human without them - and perhaps the most intoxicating, dangerous and enlivening addiction of all is our addiction to each other. As we create and share, let's share wisely; our souls don't grow back like lizard's tails. We're all we've got.
Up next: King Lear opens this Friday at the Theater at Monmouth! Talk about feeding your soul. What a powerful story. Can't wait to dive in...
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Gunshy
Last week, Larissa Dzegar of "Thoughts Simply Arise" honored me with a guest writing spot. In case you missed it, I'm now publishing it here at home. This one is close to my heart; it was very personal and timely, a joy to write and a joy to share on Larissa's blog. This is what it says:
When reigning Artistic Director David Greenham invited me to spend my summer with Maine's Shakespeare Theater, I wasn't sure who was wooing who. Clearly I was enamored immediately with the theater and desperate to be likable enough to warrant an invitation to join the company. When I received an email for a phone interview my heart went pitterpat and I said okay, Joe, this is game time. Put on the charm for this one. Get a job. You can do it.
On the phone, I was so stinking charming I believe I even chatted with Dave (who is himself charming and hilarious, with bone-dry sarcasm and a lifetime of theater experience to pepper his conversation) about house additions and contracting companies - which I know next to nothing about. And then he offered me a job, and our roles seemed to reverse. He said humbly, courtingly, "Are you SURE you want to step out of your life for 10 weeks and come to Maine?" I remember how smiley my voice was. It drew my roommate out of the kitchen to make sure I was alright (normally my voice is not exactly smiley). "David," I said, "I would love to step out of my life for 10 weeks."
It's one thing to talk big. I can talk big about a lot of things. I can talk big about dropping everything for 10 weeks and build myself up to be some kind of gun-slinging desperado. I can talk big about being a gypsy, eating three plates of pasta in one sitting, heartbreaking, moving on, adulthood, professionalism, double entendres, flirting; but when the rubber meets the road I find myself shrinking a little from my bold words, distracted and worried by ghostly whispers and flashbacks. Last time this didn't end so well...I know where this is going....I was kidding...no you're right I wasn't kidding..were you kidding?...damn. Yup, this is happening.
Gunshy. Listen to this song and you'll know what I mean:
I've stepped out of my life for 10 weeks and into...still my life. As my father likes to say, "You always take yourself with you." Usually I'm pretty good with the confidence and risk taking, but sometimes I feel less like a sexy beast and more like a hot mess. Leaps of faith can be hard to make and wisdom is hard to come by.
How do you know what - and who - to let in? As artists I know there's an eagerness to be open, to live dangerously and fully and impulsively and I am ALL ABOUT THAT - for about 3 weeks. Then I start feeling feelings and I'm afraid to pull the trigger. How does one do all that, and still have a home inside oneself to rest in - a home that goes with you wherever you lay your head?
I remember in my second year of graduate school I had the "Say Yes to Everything and Everyone" phase, where I let so many people and things into my heart I could no longer hear my own voice in my head. After about 6 months I was dizzy and heartsick, but not very sorry. It took me about a year to be sorry. Now, sometimes I miss the extreme peak experiences I had back then. Life out of grad school is a little more about surviving, which sometimes isn't as fun...but I'm a little hesitant to toss myself to the winds. There's an element of maturity that wants to control and monitor a person, a performance, a self. My pendulum doesn't seem to know how to fall to center: I'm always a freakish uber-marionette or a wanton will o' the wisp. Was my mother right? Are all things really moderation?
Honestly, I kind of hope not. Ultimately, what do I got to lose by taking a chance? It's just one small human heart. As Beatrice says in Much Ado About Nothing, "Poor fool (heart), it keeps to the windy side of care."
Every day is starting again. Some days that's exciting to me - when I know my lines, when I know how I feel, when I know what I want to do - or when I don't know what I want to do and can't wait to figure it out as I go. Sometimes the idea of starting again makes me not want to wake up, preferring my dream people and dream lives. Sometimes when I hear a foreign voice say, "Let me in," I am running to the door or the window or the skylight and throwing back the shutters, shivering in sun, damning the torpedoes and racing full speed ahead. Other times when that voice comes along suddenly I'm hiding in the closet with the skeletons, afraid to meet those green eyes or blue eyes or brown eyes or whatever color pleases God eyes. Afraid to be unprofessional. Afraid to be professional.
Gunshy.
What if...what if this time...
Today, I'm a bit embarrassed to report, I'm hiding in the closet. You can come in too though. We can share my flashlight and listen to this beautiful song again, and try to muster the courage to open the door.
For the record, since this was written several weeks ago and published last week, I DID manage to get up, open the door, and toss myself into some adventures. More on that later... :)
When reigning Artistic Director David Greenham invited me to spend my summer with Maine's Shakespeare Theater, I wasn't sure who was wooing who. Clearly I was enamored immediately with the theater and desperate to be likable enough to warrant an invitation to join the company. When I received an email for a phone interview my heart went pitterpat and I said okay, Joe, this is game time. Put on the charm for this one. Get a job. You can do it.On the phone, I was so stinking charming I believe I even chatted with Dave (who is himself charming and hilarious, with bone-dry sarcasm and a lifetime of theater experience to pepper his conversation) about house additions and contracting companies - which I know next to nothing about. And then he offered me a job, and our roles seemed to reverse. He said humbly, courtingly, "Are you SURE you want to step out of your life for 10 weeks and come to Maine?" I remember how smiley my voice was. It drew my roommate out of the kitchen to make sure I was alright (normally my voice is not exactly smiley). "David," I said, "I would love to step out of my life for 10 weeks."
 |
| Calamity isn't gunshy |
Gunshy. Listen to this song and you'll know what I mean:
I've stepped out of my life for 10 weeks and into...still my life. As my father likes to say, "You always take yourself with you." Usually I'm pretty good with the confidence and risk taking, but sometimes I feel less like a sexy beast and more like a hot mess. Leaps of faith can be hard to make and wisdom is hard to come by.
How do you know what - and who - to let in? As artists I know there's an eagerness to be open, to live dangerously and fully and impulsively and I am ALL ABOUT THAT - for about 3 weeks. Then I start feeling feelings and I'm afraid to pull the trigger. How does one do all that, and still have a home inside oneself to rest in - a home that goes with you wherever you lay your head?
 |
| say yes? |
I remember in my second year of graduate school I had the "Say Yes to Everything and Everyone" phase, where I let so many people and things into my heart I could no longer hear my own voice in my head. After about 6 months I was dizzy and heartsick, but not very sorry. It took me about a year to be sorry. Now, sometimes I miss the extreme peak experiences I had back then. Life out of grad school is a little more about surviving, which sometimes isn't as fun...but I'm a little hesitant to toss myself to the winds. There's an element of maturity that wants to control and monitor a person, a performance, a self. My pendulum doesn't seem to know how to fall to center: I'm always a freakish uber-marionette or a wanton will o' the wisp. Was my mother right? Are all things really moderation?
Honestly, I kind of hope not. Ultimately, what do I got to lose by taking a chance? It's just one small human heart. As Beatrice says in Much Ado About Nothing, "Poor fool (heart), it keeps to the windy side of care."
 |
| with the skeletons |
 |
| It's just one small human heart |
Gunshy.
What if...what if this time...
Today, I'm a bit embarrassed to report, I'm hiding in the closet. You can come in too though. We can share my flashlight and listen to this beautiful song again, and try to muster the courage to open the door.
For the record, since this was written several weeks ago and published last week, I DID manage to get up, open the door, and toss myself into some adventures. More on that later... :)
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
The Course of True Love Gathers No Moss
"Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked." - Blythe Spirit, Act 1 Scene 2
This blog title is taken from one of my all time favorite films: The Philadelphia Story. In it, a drunken Jimmy Stewart is trying to be charming at a high society party in which he is very uncomfortable and fumbles his quotations, mashing up two tired and trite proverbs into one that I think is way better than the originals. The course of true love gathers no moss. Freaking profound. True love is a gypsy, and it doesn't wait for time to pass or moss to grow. For now, my true love has taken me to Maine to do Shakespeare Theater.
A funny thing happens when I know I'm in a place for a specific, brief amount of time. Relationships accelerate, their curves and crannies compounding to fit the full range of my humanity into x amount of days, complete with soulmates and nemeses. Time is rich. Even the quality of the light seems more like light, the night seems more nightish. I sleep less. I swear more. I fall in love with everyone's talent like a floozy, and then get my heart broken like a child.
God bless seasonal theater: the constant flutter and haze of feeling unprepared and lazy all at the same time. It's like being paid to go to summer camp. (I hated summer camp as a kid, but after 7 years in New York City, I am more than ready for the Equity/Shakespeare/Adult version.) What is weirder than summer camp? Unionized, adult Shakespearean summer camp. We have brown bag lunches with our names on them, long days, warm nights, and the power of consent. The canoes here aren't really built for one.
One of the plays I'm in is Blythe Spirit by Noel Coward, in which I get the scrumptious slapstick role of the maid. It's a romantic comedy about ghosts, kind of, that is both comforting and disturbing. It has us all joking a lot about death (you know, like you do) and busting out a lot of joy. As if the mood weren't bizarre enough, the apartments I'm living in are across from a cemetery. We are all somewhat bemused about it. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, not sure where...(yup, was a literature major)...
Not to be macabre, but I've kind of gotten an immense kick out of the intense temporality of this particular theater contract, which is bleeding over into a new kick out of the temporality of life the universe and everything. We are all here with no pretenses about the fact that most of us are not neighbors after August, and that after our 10 weeks we'll all split to different roads. It's kind of a rush to be so honest, like taking a shot of adrenaline in the arm: it might kill you later, but it will make you feel great for a while.
Ultimately, I think that is a commonality between life and theater: it's all temporary. The short duration of a play - a mere two hours - is perhaps what gives it the power to burn so brightly and exist so boldly. I plan on living so fully these next weeks that it's probably illegal. That's okay though, the cops here seem pretty friendly to us. There's something about having an end in sight that gives me a lot of freedom to be open and free, the same way it's sometimes easier to talk to a stranger than to a close friend. There's a release from consequences, and a total surrender to the moment.
Like true love, life and death, the course of time itself gathers no moss. As my Dad likes to say, this is not a dress rehearsal. Time stretches and vanishes and leaves explosions of inspiration in its wake. During our greatest adventures, we're still across the street from the graveyard. Time. Our frail mystic ships are wrecked on it; our loves and hearts are all stranded together in time and we are all swimming together in the soup. This summer and these roles are temporary. I myself am temporary. I am so glad that I get to go along for the ride.
A funny thing happens when I know I'm in a place for a specific, brief amount of time. Relationships accelerate, their curves and crannies compounding to fit the full range of my humanity into x amount of days, complete with soulmates and nemeses. Time is rich. Even the quality of the light seems more like light, the night seems more nightish. I sleep less. I swear more. I fall in love with everyone's talent like a floozy, and then get my heart broken like a child.
 |
| Some of my TAM peeps |
One of the plays I'm in is Blythe Spirit by Noel Coward, in which I get the scrumptious slapstick role of the maid. It's a romantic comedy about ghosts, kind of, that is both comforting and disturbing. It has us all joking a lot about death (you know, like you do) and busting out a lot of joy. As if the mood weren't bizarre enough, the apartments I'm living in are across from a cemetery. We are all somewhat bemused about it. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, not sure where...(yup, was a literature major)...
Not to be macabre, but I've kind of gotten an immense kick out of the intense temporality of this particular theater contract, which is bleeding over into a new kick out of the temporality of life the universe and everything. We are all here with no pretenses about the fact that most of us are not neighbors after August, and that after our 10 weeks we'll all split to different roads. It's kind of a rush to be so honest, like taking a shot of adrenaline in the arm: it might kill you later, but it will make you feel great for a while.
 |
| Kenneback River |
 |
| On the wall of Toad Hall |
Like true love, life and death, the course of time itself gathers no moss. As my Dad likes to say, this is not a dress rehearsal. Time stretches and vanishes and leaves explosions of inspiration in its wake. During our greatest adventures, we're still across the street from the graveyard. Time. Our frail mystic ships are wrecked on it; our loves and hearts are all stranded together in time and we are all swimming together in the soup. This summer and these roles are temporary. I myself am temporary. I am so glad that I get to go along for the ride.
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