Category: arts

Zoom, zoom, zoom trash day

Patty and I are getting read to head upstate for a couple of days to do absolutely nothing for our anniversary, other than occasionally wander across the street from our B&B for French food. Explaining this Do Nothing plan to my mother was slightly awkward. I could just see the look on her face as whatever I said translated to we are going to have sex all weekend, which, you know, isn’t untrue. Parents are definitely past that stage where they think my being queer is awesome because it doesn’t involve sex they define as sex. Anyway!

The less sordid truth is that I’d also like to get to Boscobel this weekend. Despite all the time I’ve spent in the Hudson Valley, I’ve never managed to make this happen, so if we’re feeling it on Sunday before we head back to the city for Easter dinner or if there’s decent weather on Saturday, I think that is the plan.

It should be noted, meanwhile, that planning a birthday party in NYC is challenging. This is currently Patty’s task of woe for her recently transpired birthday. Everything is difficult because of weather, people’s over-committed schedules, and just the general aggravation that so many aspects of New York living can be. Have I mentioned that we deeply, truly, sincerely love it here, though?

Meanwhile, I’ll be back in Boston twice in May. I may, may even be able to see people one of these times around. I also desperately need to call some hotels about a wedding we’re going to in Pittsburgh. Oh, this life of extreme glamour. Clearly, I need some, since I’m starting to get really excited about the West Coast trip for Labor Day already, but I suspect part of that is my periodic desire to have a better relationship with California than I do. That said, I love San Francisco, and its Chinatown and Seal Rock are two really fertile creative places for me. It’s been years, Patty’s never been, and it’s going to be a great good thing.

All of this aside, I have to confess I’ve been in a sort of funk lately. I do this sometimes. I say it’s pothos, and it’s a little bit that, but really it’s just me being a moody bastard. I struggle, even at 38, with accepting that I need to be the best me I can be, even if some things about me don’t seem as complimentary to my goals as things about other people. The storm in my head broke the other day though, so I’m hoping I can pull it together on getting a ton of stuff done soon. Actually — dance break, I’m going to go send some emails!

Okay, AWESOME. How was that for you? That was great for me.

Finally, I want to link here something I mentioned in passing on my LJ the other day: The Sad, Beautiful Fact that We’re All Going to Miss Almost Everything. I like this piece both because it’s about the beauty of sadness, but also because it speaks to a tendency that I not only have to fight in myself (often, admittedly, unsuccessfully), but that I run headlong into in other people constantly: the need to devalue, sometimes aggressively, things that don’t speak to us or that we don’t have time for; this is not, for the record, a complaint about actual critical discussion, because, man, I love me some stuff that is deeply flawed. Rather, this is an objection to “I don’t enjoy this and therefore no one else should either,” which, I’ll grant you, is sometimes what we hear even when it is not meant. Anyway, check the piece out; it’s cleverer than me on this front.

Now I have to throw some stuff in a satchel and get the hell out of here.

Fiction, fan culture, and the unnatural acts we engage in to protect the heart

I sort of lost any New York cool cred I had today by getting up at 5am to go hang out in front of The Today Show in the name of Glee fandom. Weirdly, this turned out to be interesting, not just because I’m relatively unabashed about my fannishness and not just because it was fun (even if it was both early and cold), but because the experience was a completely weird lens, not on the act of being a celebrity, but the process of becoming one.

This strange little window into the celebrity moment perhaps hit me especially hard in the wake of seeing Sleep No More with Patty on Saturday night. It, like most environmental theater I’ve encountered (such as WILDWORKS’s The Enchanted Palace), wound up being about celebrity, albeit, in the case of Sleep No More, through the lens of Macbeth.

Hanging around The Today Show also is invariably about celebrity, and today’s experience had a lot of moments both of exposing the backstage moment (e.g., peering into the studio as performers rehearse) and of performing them (e.g., performers coming out in the cold to greet the crowds), which also, weirdly, gave it an environmental theater-type quality beyond the obvious “we are here to see the in-studio performance” aspect of the audience experience.

On The Today Show front all of this was weirdly complicated by the strange beast that Glee is: The Warblers aren’t a real singing group; the guys you see in The Warblers on TV are all singers, but largely aren’t doing their own singing for complicated production reasons; and Darren Criss (who plays Blaine, effectively the front-man for the Warblers) has become enough of a break-out star because of this whole thing that you get these bizarre moments like when The Today Show introduction wound up being “Darren Criss and the Warblers.” Between that and their being in their (fictional prep school) Dalton blazers, the whole thing runs back and forth over the fiction/non-fiction line in a such a bizarrely incoherent way that it’s a little jaw-dropping, especially when you consider that a major Blaine-related plot point is how he gets too much of the spotlight from the rest of the group.

Of course, stuff that tramples all over the non-fiction/fiction divide is the stuff I love as a scholar, and often the stuff that feeds fandom interests (mine and everyone elses). It’s also the stuff that can make fandom weird: like the chick screaming at Criss outside The Today Show this morning that she wished he was straight. He is; the character he plays isn’t, and in that jacket, who knew which one of them she was talking to. Or what object and perspective any of us were singing to/from when we started an impromtu crowd sing of “Teenage Dream” a little while later.

For that matter, what the hell was going on in any of our heads when we all started singing along with the studio performance of “Raise Your Glass?” Because that song, which I’ve already talked about as a victory anthem both personally and in the context of the show, adds another layer of weird when we’re in this murky fact/fiction place and it’s happening on The Today Show and the fans are singing along: Who’s celebrating who? Who are the dirty little freaks or the underdogs here (and remember that line is “all my underdogs” – the possessive matters keenly)? What are the power dynamics? Are we all getting elevated in that moment or does someone need to call bullshit?

In something resembling a contrast to all of this, Sleep No More, being a play, is obviously and explicitly performative. We meet the actors, not as actors, but as characters, and the lines should, on the surface, enforce much clearer boundaries than those at The Today Show and around the The Warblers phenomenon. The surface, however, lies.

All audience members are required to wear identical bird masks going into the show. We become, perhaps, a parliament of rooks, a collective noun I reference here for Neil Gaiman’s take on the behavior of rooks in The Sandman, where rooks fight for their survival on the basis of the quality of stories told before their peers.

While the masks serve to delineate audience from performers, it immediately also establishes audience members as part of the narrative. This becomes more clear as more audience members enter the play space and encounter actors. Most audience members, upon encountering actors, begin to follow them, leading to moments where two actors coming from two different directions meet at the center of a long corridor, an army of bird-audience behind each of them, ready, it seems, for war, or, at least, a competition based on the scale of their fan following, to see which character (or perhaps which actor) will survive the telling of their tale.

This, combined with moments of peering into “private” chambers within the set (much, like being intentionally allowed to peer at rehearsal while waiting outside of The Today Show) and moments where actors pull audience members into private locations to remove their masks and tell them stories (I saw one girl in a phone booth in tears, after a bellhop who had lip-synched a song about the triviality of tragedy cornered her in there) suggests that the fact/fiction line at Sleep No More is equally, if more convolutedly, blurred. This further suggests to me that the very nature of celebrity may be less about a real person who rises out of a crowd in some fashion and more about a real person whose non-fiction identity is partially obscured or even erased by the act of being witnessed by a crowd.

Temporal distortion also struck me as central to these two, admittedly weird-to-juxtapose, events. At Sleep No More I found a murder scene before the actors did: for someone who once played The Lady in Macbeth, it was strange to have that blood on my hands again because I stumbled, both physically and out of time.

Similarly, because there was a rehearsal for camera that was projected on the screens outside of The Today Show we thought we were seeing a live performance when we were seeing a live rehearsal, and then when the live performance happened, thought for a moment that we were seeing tape. This sense of the correct order of events feeling out of order wasn’t just a part of the audience experience, either; before the show, Criss made a crack on Twitter about having performed on “the Tomorrow Show” yesterday.

While largely unabashed about my fannishiness, being a fan is often weird for me. There are all these different types of things I’m not supposed to do because I’m a professional in all these different types of ways. Sometimes I break the rules in ways that are good, and sometimes I break the rules in ways that are bad; mostly I break the rules in ways that matter less than anyone thinks.

Sleep No More and the complete destruction of my New York coolness factor this morning don’t say a lot about whether these types of lines are good or bad, but they do say a lot about how profoundly artificial lines between audience and performance are, as well as the lines between fact and fiction that we are often so insistent about. When we talk about these lines blurring, we often talk about the discomfort inherent in that blurring, and then mistake that discomfort for implying something unnatural about those acts of blurring.

I think the blurring is instinctive. And natural. And sort of fundamental to how we experience performance and audience-to-performance object love. I think it’s also fundamental to the instincts people on the performance side of the fence have towards fans; the gut says — at least in the process of rising to the previously mentioned obscurity or erasure — to let them in, even if wisdom and custom say otherwise.

In turn, I think these fences and lines are established to impose order — not just against all the stuff I’m sure we can all cite in the annals of bad fan and audience behavior, but against the heart, instinctively public and defensively misunderstood.

Ultimately, the link between these two experiences comes back to the wisdom of New York for me. I don’t know or even talk to my neighbors, because I can hear them having sex through the wall. I don’t look at people on the street, because then I’d never get to stop saying hello to strangers all day long. These barriers are artificial, and even toxic, but they allow us privacy in a place, in the place, without.

Fact/fiction and audience/performance barriers serve the same function, and are there to protect not just performers and the fictions they execute on, but to also protect audiences and fans from the permeability of all our extraordinarily vulnerable, easily bruised, relentlessly public and so very human hearts.

Where, oh where, has the trash day gone?

Hey folks. I’ve just finished a week of work best described as brutal. Between that, and having had Patty home for one week (in which at least a day was lost to jet-lag and another 60 hours had me in Boston without her), I’ve been a little distracted. Actually, not distracted. Highly focused and unavailable seems more on point.

So what’s going on both here and in the world?

Well today, we have our first script-development read-through of Dogboy & Justine. This basically means Erica and I and some of our friends are going to sit around and read the first draft, while Erica and I scribble all over it to refine the voices. This, amazingly, is sandwiched between our going to a bridal shower and going to see Sleep No More tonight at 11:00.

Meanwhile, I’m still a bit OMG, Glee! Okay, I’m a lot OMG, Glee! My friend Marci and I are totally going to Glee! Live and there are evil cosplay plans afoot. I spent a really appalling amount of time last night researching the Dalton blazers and may have found the jacket that has to be the blueprint for them from some random fashion company in South Korea. The colors are wrong, but ALL the details seem right. I may order it to take it apart for pattern reference. Look, if I knew why I was like this, I wouldn’t have to write about it here.

As usual, my friends may not understand my obsessions, but they are generous with them. Ellen Kushner sent me a link to an article about the four Glee characters that are Jewish and how they map onto the four different kids referenced in the Passover seder.

It is, in case you missed it, almost Passover, which is the most wonderful time of year, not just for us Jewish and Jewishly-adjacent folks (Patty really likes seder, okay?), but for us celiacs. Exciting products abound! The products you are looking for are non-gebroks.

To close the loops on Ellen and passover, you should also check out the air dates for her radio play with music, The Witches of Lublin, which is super cool and also features my friend, Elizabeth Boskey, who is actually the person responsible for getting me my book contract a few years back.

In other news, Patty and I have almost figured out where to abscond to for our anniversary weekend (something which is complicated by us not being exactly sure when our anniversary is and our B&B of choice being booked for when we can go).

I’ve also gotten edits back on a few things which I need to work on, and had something I did on spec cut free, although I pretty much know what I’m going to do with it next, so that’s all fine.

Less fine is the ongoing domestic disturbance going on in the apartment above us, which has involved shrieking phone arguments we can hear in our apartment and very loud pacing at 2am, but such is life in New York.

queerness, performativity and bridal showers

Patty and I were recently invited to a bridal shower for one of her friends. I’ve never been to a bridal shower before, and while this seems like a lovely affair (tasteful invitation, a request only for recipes as gifts), I’ve heard things about them.

The things I’ve heard were swiftly confirmed by the wisdom of my online social network. Yes, there are generally games. Yes, they involve things like making bouquets out of present bows or styling wedding dresses out of toilet paper or gag gifts and slightly off-color jokes about the wedding night (but the really tacky stuff gets saved, apparently, for the bachelorette party).

I’ve been a little rattled by that confirmation ever since. Not because I’m dreading the event; I’m not. But because how much of the tone of the discussion has been Well, of course, it’s like this. Like it’s just what’s done. Like I should have known. As much as I can be that way about my own subjects of concern (and hey, good reminder of why that is maybe not cool and I should chill) — seriously, does no one know the rules about wearing white anymore? — it seriously discomforted me.

I’m queer, and sometimes it is like living in another country. And I’ve always been queer. Even in my relationships with men (which have not been insignificant in import or share of my personal history), I was always extraordinarily explicit about the fact that I was queer. Sure, I often had some sort of straight privilege in those interactions (a tremendous amount in certain cases — I have a particular ex with whom we performed public, expected gender exceptionally well. In retrospect I know it sort of freaked him out, but I had mostly thought it was fun and hilarious, a game like any other, wow do I fail at communication. Anyway….), but I still wasn’t living in a kingdom that understood things like these rituals.

It took me a long time to realize this was true. I was engaged once, after all, and like many women, viewed that engagement as evidence of my success (to get back to a previous theme around here, I was chosen) and adulthood. I certainly bought wedding magazines then, thought about dresses, the whole nine yards, because that’s what you do when you’re engaged. But it was, for me, a ritual firmly about adulthood. There was no moment of wanting every little girl’s dream wedding because I had never actually had that dream.

Weird thing to realize, that. That one of the most common things held up as an obvious subject for collective, gendered fantasy, just completely never pinged on my radar as a kid. Not once. Not ever. That makes a lot of my 20s more inexplicable to me, but what can you do? My point is, while wedding fantasies I may have harbored at various points in my life were certainly jejune, they didn’t come out of childhood. And, as such, the games of some of those rituals (e.g., the bridal shower), which speak to me of the reenactment of childhood fantasies, completely boggle me.

I don’t know what they are for. Or why they are done. I don’t understand their appeal. And I find descriptions of them nothing but infantilizing. More than that, I’m positively disturbed by the tone of discourse as I perceive it — that of course these things are normal and pleasurable and why is this even a question. It’s not a moment of feminism or politics. It’s really a much more basic sense of huh?

Because I really and truly don’t get it, since in terms of societal positioning, I come from somewhere else. I’m not trying to be stubborn or obtuse. I lack the receptor sites for the activity, and I have not been trained to it. I find myself wishing people would be more sensitive to this fact — that I am not like them in either my desires or my experiences and, certainly, should not be expected to be — but am also fairly certain that that’s nearly impossible. It’s like the impulse to speak louder to someone who doesn’t know your language. It’s obnoxious and it doesn’t work, but most of us do it anyway. I know I do.

None of this means I’m going to be sitting at the shower with my arms crossed huffing at the what the shit is this? feeling I may have if we really do have to break up into teams and design wedding dresses for each other out of toilet paper. No. As a constant, unavoidable visitor to the world not mine (remember, straight people, visiting the world of queer people remains an option for you; but being immersed in your culture isn’t actually an option for me, but a sea about which I have no choice), I am always planning my strategy for passing as if I at least half belong or am safe to have in the room. And so I am strategizing both my wit for the occasion and the drape of this design already.

All of which leads us back a bit to what I wrote about performativity and my childhood the other day. You want stereotypes about queer people in the arts? Is it because the arts are more accepting? (puh-leaze and no.) Or is it because we became skilled at them growing up, rehearsing and performing, in order to survive? If there’s any truth to that, it’s certainly absurd that I’ve pointed it out to both you and me through wedding dresses made out of toilet tissue. What is an act of reliving childhood dreams of an adult future for one person, is, for me, a performance, not just of exclusion from heteronormative adulthood, but of my ferociously clever childhood of survival.

Film-in-Progress: Salina Conlan’s “Resistance”

One of the cool things about playing in fannish spaces is that you meet a lot of cool, stunningly creative people. While lots of people question the value of transformative work (which I don’t, and neither does Celia Tan, who is also someone I know through fandom), many people who play in transformative spaces, also play in original ones.

Among them is Salina Conlan, who I first met at the Gallifrey One convention as part of a somewhat legendary team of Torchwood cosplayers. She’s one of those people I see once a year and get to have a cool mutual respect thing with because we love some fiction in a somewhat similar way.

Salina is currently working on her senior thesis film Resistance, which is about a reporter, who happens to be gay, going to Iraq to cover a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” related story and then has to reassess his priorities (she’ll give you a better summary below).

As a queer person and someone with a journalism background who now does work about the media, this was pretty exciting to me, and not just because Salina’s good at stuff. So, I thought I’d let her talk a bit about the project here to help her get the word out about the film and her fund raising efforts:

Can you give us a brief synopsis of the film?

Reporter Joe Hodges goes to Iraq to interview soldiers about the DADT repeal and a soldier from their unit who was dismissed because of that. In the process he learns that things are not just black and white and the repeal doesn’t wash away the ingrained biases that people have.

Why did you choose to tell this story? With the DADT repeal process well underway, what makes this still relevant?

Originally, the script was built around the idea of a reporter who works to expose the truth and a closeted soldier, who works desperately to hide his personal truth. I think that theme is still prominent in this version of the story. I started on draft 1 in March or April of 2010 and the whole repeal came about when I was just locking down the structure of the film and the heart of the story. I wrote a few drafts while the politics bounced back and forth, then finally figured out how I wanted to tell this story regardless of how the politics ended up. DADT may be officially repealed, but the process of enforcing that repeal seems to be in limbo. More importantly, changing a policy won’t change people’s opinions. I made that notion a big theme in “Resistance.” This film goes beyond the bias of the policy and gets into the individual opinions that people have on gays, the military, service, and obligation.

What makes you the right person to be telling this story?

I love to tell stories about people. I like to get into the grit of what inspires us, what makes us tick and what are we afraid of. You can get on a soapbox and offer an audience all the facts and your opinion on the matter. There are times when that is the best way to tell a story, but I didn’t feel that way about this project. While I certainly have an opinion, I wanted this story to be about human issues. It’s a story about people that is framed by politics. I think that makes it something enjoyable to watch.

Tell us a little bit about your cast.

I’m thrilled with the actors who have come on to this project. Rory Coyle plays Joe and he brings that character to life effortlessly. Joe goes through a heck of a journey and there is some intense acting required to pull that off. Rory is so good, he makes it look easy. Ric Maddox, plays Lieutenant Daniel Burke and not only is he a very talented actor, but he served in the U.S. Army and has been really helpful with keeping the military aspects of the film as true to reality as we can get. I could take up pages and pages raving about this cast. I’m thrilled with every single person that we’ve gotten. They are all amazing actors and perform these roles perfectly.

Is this story personal for any of them, or are they just excited to tell a story that hasn’t been told very often?

From the start, many of the actors said that they were excited to work with this script. A couple of the actors shared some moments from their lives that made aspects of the story resonate with them. That was interesting to hear because it’s not necessarily the plot that they connect to, but the journey that the characters take or the way that they interact with each other. It seems to me that they like playing in that world and examining tensions between all these different characters. I give them a lot of freedom, as well as ownership of their characters. I still make sure it’s all true to the story, but these guys are so talented that I want to work with their ideas and bring out moments that are real.

I think most people know that film making is really hard, but not necessarily what goes into it. What do you want people to know about this process that they might not be aware of?

The first thing that comes to mind is that everything costs money. More than I even realized at first. Food, costumes, props, gas reimbursement, locations, permits, lodging, etc. all cost money. To make a film of this size and scope and do it justice takes a substantial chunk of cash. Yes, that’s a bit of a plug for support, but it’s something I didn’t fully realize until I was in the thick of it. I thought I could cut corners to get by – and I have – but it’s still a constant struggle to stay on budget without sacrificing quality.

The other thing is that we are filming 26 pages in 6 days. I’ve heard that in Hollywood the standard of shooting is about a page a day. Since we’re pushing for so much more, the amount of pre-planning and scheduling is insane. I’m very lucky to have a talented and patient assistant director on this project that makes our schedules and keeps us all on task. We have two days in Mojave coming up where we shoot our exteriors and we have to do those days like clockwork because we can’t afford another day on location. If we don’t shoot it then it’s cut from the script.

You’re using crowd-funding for this process. How is that going? I have my own experience with crowd-funding, and it was both really great and really stressful.

It’s going well because a few people have been so very generous. I’m trying to get the word out and compel people to help fund this because the film I’m making is one that Hollywood wouldn’t dare make right now. When studios are concerned about selling tickets and DVDs, they are less concerned about art and social commentary; especially when that commentary combines the US military and a gay storyline. I don’t blame them for that- a business is a business. Still, I’ve got this story being made. Talented people are working to bring it to life and it’s going to be good and unique. I’d hate to have so much going for this project and get held back because my bank account bottoms out.

If people can’t donate to your project, what else can they do to help?

Please spread the word. There are billions and billions of people in this world. If 3,000 of those people see this project and can contribute $1 that’s out budget. It doesn’t take much, if a lot of people are invested. I’m trying to get the word out and that’s gone pretty well, but I’m also in production so I can’t spend all day dropping notes on twitter and facebook. You guys can do that.

Also if anyone knows of resources I can utilize for getting the word out about this project, whether it’s a branch of HRC or a charity that assists soldiers who have been dismissed under the DADT policy, that information would be a huge help. If you work for a LGBT center or have a good relationship with your local LGBT community tell people about this film. Start a buzz.

What’s the rest of the time line on your shoot and post-production?

April 8 we’re back into production. We shoot for two days at a small studio in Mojave and then our last day is back near home (Long Beach). Once we get through that weekend we’re wrapped on filming. The editor has already been working on the footage from the first weekend so we’re somewhat ahead of the game. It’ll take about a month to get picture lock- that’s the first edit with no special effects, sound editing, credits, or music. The rest of the process will take another two months. Part of the reason it will take that long is because we’re all students and have to focus on passing other classes and graduating on top of finishing this film. My hope is to have it all done in June and start submitting to festivals right away.

And, while I’m sure thinking ahead is slightly overwhelming right now, what’s next when this is done?

The next steps are publicity and submissions. Once it’s done, we have to find an audience. I can submit to festivals, but then people need to come and see it. At this stage, the main way to draw a crowd is to spread the word. There are so many people trying to be seen every single day that one voice crying out is easily overlooked. However, if a lot of people are vouching for a project, it’s a lot more likely to get viewers.

When that is done, I think I’ll take a long nap and maybe a bath. It’ll be nice to have some free time again.

performing nostalgia for how the light was

Long time no write. Well, not really. A few days, but things have been extraordinarily busy here, and that’s likely to continue for a bit (as ever, I know). I do have an interview with a friend who’s making a film about DADT coming up (I’ll post tonight or tomorrow depending on how much my day gets away from me), but for now, I want to talk about not about people I know, but people I used to know.

For me, it’s reunion season. For folks that went to large or, well, normal, high schools, reunions are milestone affairs set at five or ten year intervals. Certainly, having spent a couple of years at a large public school in New York, I do have that experience as well (my 20th was, in fact, last year), but the one that always looms for me is the Hewitt reunion, even if last year was the first time I actually went.

I didn’t graduate from Hewitt. Very few people in my year did. Of the near thirty girls I started with, there were only eight by the time of graduation. Most of us fled to other private schools, boarding schools, or, in a couple of cases, public school. But I spent ten years of my life there, and it has affected every single moment of my existence in a way Stuyvesant has simply been irrelevant to. Because Hewitt didn’t just teach me how to write and how to speak, which it did on both counts, rigorously. It taught me how to perform.

And I don’t just mean performance under pressure as came by way of writing two-hour essay examinations in every subject from sixth grade on. And I don’t just mean performance in terms of our required music, dance, and acting classes (geared less, I always thought, towards making us artists than making us cultured about actual artists; we were educated to be patrons, nothing else). I mean that Hewitt taught me (and it would be nice to say inadvertently, but I don’t really think so) a lot about performing class and money that served me, if not well there, than at least as a sort of necessary evil, even if it has often left me in a pretty awkward place in the rest of my life since then.

I do feel grateful for all the access I have had to secret worlds and my ability to move in world in ways I might not have otherwise learned, but it’s hard for me not to look back on those years I attended Stuyvesant after I transferred (and the faint echoes I still carry of the whole mess) and be in awe of just how much I did not know what the hell I was doing. That’s what happens, I guess, when you grow up in a world that doesn’t quite exist, that’s dying and doesn’t know it.

Last year, I went to the Hewitt reunion and it was… weird. It was good to see people and the school, an old private home, looked so much smaller and so much more modern than I recalled. It looked like a school, and I don’t remember it being that way when I was a child (to be fair to everyone, there has been some extensive remodeling). The school choir sang our spirit song (did we even have one of those when I was there?) and I felt teary and wished I could have loved the placed and been as gorgeous and coltish as the set of my childhood deserved. I’d worn a dress and felt just as much like I was pretending (and in drag) at the reunion as I had when I had worn the uniform skirts of my childhood. I walked down the central grand staircase as I had never had the honor to do as a student, never being a senior there or faculty.

But this year, despite all of that and the more fundamental No Useful Purpose of actually going, I think I’m going to go. Because there are still people I’m hoping to run into from that life, and no, actually, I can’t just look them up on Facebook.

In part, it’s that some of them aren’t on Facebook or really online at all. Some that I’ve found have been happy to click OK, but not to actually connect with words and recollections. And mostly, I’m afraid of being too motivated, or showing, after all these years, that I care too much, that I remember too well (as was noted to me at last year’s all classes gathering), that I am flawed (or rather, a desperate loser) for so cherishing the few true kindnesses and movie magic moments I remember — it was the book fair to buy our required summer reading list books and light was spilling in from the massive floor to ceiling windows in the library, and there were piles and piles of books that had that smell like ink and popcorn and no matter how many books you had to buy about girls surviving the wilderness to get into eighth or ninth grade, you still made sure to pick up a book or two that might make you cool, whether it was a teen relationships advice book you need parental permission to buy or The Vampire Lestat.

I bought both, the first because everyone did, even though I knew no boys and my parents must have been rolling their eyes at me in all my appalling wishful thinking, (“You don’t want to be sexy, do you?” they’d asked me once), and the second because my best friend, knowing I was terrified of vampires, dared me too. She changed my life that day, possibly by what was a bit of petty cruelty, actually. Say what you will, but when I read that book, it was the first time I’d ever heard anyone say that being emotionally demonstrative wasn’t wrong.

Memory is a funny thing. It plays tricks on us and makes more sense out of events than ever existed in them in the first place. We lie to it and it deceives us. It convinces us we were better than we were and more courageous than we are. It’s something of a bully and a wound. It is the private manifestation of the public performativity I learned as a survival mechanism in school. I remember, at Stuyvesant, that my friends and I took the public bus to the prom, because it stopped across the street from my house and went right to the Plaza.

I had the luxury of leading that little act of rebellion because of the school I had come from. I didn’t have to prove I could afford a limo, because it was presumed I could, even though I couldn’t, and I remember feeling so pleased that people were impressed with us for taking the M30. I remember too, lying on the roof of my parents building, 38 stories up, afterward, and not telling my year younger than me prom date that I was in love with him or kissing him or anything. I felt like a coward then, but looking back, maybe I was brave to be silent, or at least, not to perform that too. I did find my prom date on Facebook. He has three kids now; the thought of it is like the ocean around my ankles between us.

When I was nineteen, I was part of a truly ridiculous social circle in New York City, even as I lived in Washington DC. We were all people who had met on the brave new world of the Internet, before anyone talked about social media and PPP was a shocking and novel technology. It was 1991 and we were all living in a lot of strange castles in our heads. We were going to found an off-shore stock market in the British Virgin Islands. I would have five sons. There would be a hacker revolution. We would change the world. Believe me, no one is clearer than me, no one how jejune it all sounds now, even if I can find a clear and vivid thread from there to here in things like Anonymous and the global financial crisis.

In that moment in my life, I was involved with a man twice my age, and we knew, in passing (also from this Wild West of an Internet), a boy a couple of years younger than me, seventeen and delicate and luminously beautiful. And one night, I took him back to a friend’s apartment (he lived at home, I was visiting from DC), and we made out all night, because the older man I was involved with said I should. I should be ashamed of this. Embarrassed. Tell you how appalled I am at the way I let people treat me then. I could, and none of those things would be untrue. There’s a reason this is not a story I tell early, often, or at all.

But what I remember about it is that this beautiful too young creature, whose real name I’m not sure I ever knew and certainly can’t quite remember now, kept telling me thank you and kept looking at me in awe and kept acting like it was important to him that I be the happiest person in that room; I don’t think he’d ever touched someone before. Not like that. At any rate, I certainly didn’t have such grace about such things at 19, and I can’t even imagine having it at 17. We stayed up all night; I remember talking at dawn; and we never really spoke again for no other reason than the world was busy and complicated. It wasn’t, in the end, particularly important.

Like the girls of my private school years, like my once best friend who saved my life with vampires and doesn’t even know it, like the people I can’t really bring myself to look up on Facebook, I wonder from time to time how he is and if he would have any recollection of me as anyone other than that mad girl who remembers too much and merely did as she was told with a kindness she could not offer herself.

So when people ask me why I go to reunions for any reason other than to mess with people, why my high school and college years can seem so complicated, or why I don’t just look up the people who matter on Facebook, all of this is why.

I remember too much, stories are too fragile, and I am often expected to hold a certain cynicism for my teenage years that I was not able to muster at the time and still can’t seem to muster now. But somehow, in spite of all of that, of all my mistakes and trying too hard and petty cruelty and really misplaced generosity and completely poisonous nostalgia, I just want to know that someone remembers, as I do, the way the light was on some of those days.

And I can’t do that on the Internet, because it doesn’t feel safe or possible. I can only tell you about it. Which, thanks to a school I once went to that taught me I had to perform myself in order to survive, is often quite good enough.

Public Relations for Creatives 101

I’m teaching a class at Trade School in New York on Thursday, March 31 at 8pm. It’s Public Relations for Creatives 101, and you’ll learn the basics of how to write press releases, develop media lists, pitch stories and give good interviews.

Because Trade School is based on a barter system, the cost of attending is up to you. There’s a list of things I’m looking for on the site that include various types of household assistance , a few items, as well as things that are no-cost and low-in-time (like certain types of local business recommendations).

Please check it out, spread the word, and register!

Thanks!

The brutality of being chosen

One of my creative associates (who may have words with me at that particular phrasing in the name of identity plausible deniability) has a discussion piece up on Friends of the Text today about the premise of being chosen within texts and the idea of being chosen by texts. Thematically relevant to the stuff that interests me? You bet.

But also, of course, thematically relevant to my life. It’s easy to say, I think, and Balaka says as much in the piece, that everyone wants to be chosen. It is, she notes, like winning in the passive voice. But I wonder. Do boys want to be chosen as much as girls? Is the chosen part of the narrative what makes Harry Potter and Star Wars exciting to the male segments of their audiences? Do men have a Pygmalion narrative in their fantasies, one in which they are the transformed and not the transformer? Are women more socialized to this idea of being chosen? Is that why Twilight flies off the shelves? What’s it like, I wonder, to grow up, wanting to choose. Who is that person? And how are they formed? Were they once waiting to get chosen and finally got sick of not having magic powers or not becoming a star just for sitting at the table in the window of some diner?

It’s a sticky, nasty, uncomfortable question. At least for me. Because it touches, potentially, not just on ideas of gender, but also on ideas of dominance and submission and of leadership. It speaks to the troubling idea that chosen just means, “you’re good enough to be transmuted into gold.” It’s not just that you’re nothing without being chosen, it’s the suggestion that you’re nothing without acquiescing to the consequences of being chosen, and they are legion.

For me, this whole chosen business also speaks to ideas I have about the directorial imagination and my fears about whether I have enough of one. And it speaks to the doubt I have about the idea that the best thing anyone can do for themselves is get over that fantasy of being chosen, even though I know that waiting isn’t how to do life, poetic, rigorous, and narratively enticing though it may sometimes be.

Of course, I work in industries that largely are about “winning in the passive voice.” I write something, and then someone snatches it out of a pile of slush and publishes it. Sure, sometimes I get asked for things up front, and sure, I have to write things (which is an active endeavor) before waiting for them to get chosen, but “winning in the passive voice” is definitely the right description of the experience of it. At least for me.

Acting can be even more bizarre in that regard. You get a call; someone likes how you look; can you come in now and show us what you can do? It’s “winning in the passive voice” before there’s even a chance of winning in the active voice, and trust me, when they say you’ve got it, and it’s a contract, it doesn’t, in that moment, feel like you did anything, other than get plucked out of a crowd. A week later, you might recall how damn hard you worked for that opportunity, but the first flush of reaction is, at least for me, and I suspect for many other performers is “They picked me! Me!” Chosen.

“Winning in the passive voice.” It implies all of the benefits and none of the hard work of this success thing, doesn’t it? Seems snazzy. But there’s a real brutality that underlies it, one of clay in the kiln, and the insidious possibility that it might have actually been a certain peculiar and shifting inadequacy that brought you to attention. To be fair, I grew up as a dancer, and being chosen meant being told how you were wrong and being pressed harder and further into shapes to which you did not yet conform. But I suspect, regardless of background, that for a lot of people, it is this idea of brutality that appeals.

To return us to matters of the text and this idea of being chosen by the text, it makes me think about the work I’ve done regarding death and mourning. Or, at least, the tangential experience I’ve had in having done that work of seeing a lot of anger and distress from audiences in which beloved characters do die. Does this speak, I wonder, to this idea of being chosen by the text, and then finding out — for those who have had negative reactions to these fictional deaths — that this was really not what you signed up in that moment where you felt the text chose you. Conversely, for those of us who have felt vastly satisfied in those losses, is it because of the relief of encountering the expected brutality in our selection by the text?

And it’s not just on death that texts can brutalize us. Look at Bella in Twilight and look at our reactions. Is not the inspired longing for that type of impossibility a brutality of the text? Is not what Bella experiences in the face of the love she endures another brutality of the text, this one intradiegetic, instead of extradiegetic?

What, ultimately, do these narratives of being chosen suggest to us about the ethics of favor and brutality in our relationships with texts and in texts’ relationships with us? And how much choice do we have about those relationships, when the narratives themselves are, at base, about not having choice, and the supposedly great good fortune of that condition? Nobody ever asked Harry Potter if he wanted to save the world.

Thinky thoughts are a double thumbs up. Please make sure to give Balaka’s post some love too, especially if your reactions are more about her work than my little digression/extrapolation here. I would also particularly love to hear here from men on the subject of Pygmalion narratives and anyone who feels they are instinctively wired towards being the one who chooses.

do you hear the people sing?

As I think anyone who knows me knows, I am an unabashed lover of both musical theater and politics. And, I believe that American politics are often at their best, or worst, when those politics are engaged in theatrically. It’s political theater for a reason, and I think we’ve lost a great deal in the discourse due to the current societal devaluation of both rhetoric and performance.

Which is why this Les Miserables moment from the Wisconsin protests has me in tears, especially as word is coming out that among other petty actions by the Wisconsin governor in this struggle, he has just ordered that the windows of the capital building be welded shut in order to prevent food deliveries to the occupying protesters.

Read the stuff. Watch the video. Pay particular attention to the protesters in the background of the footage uninvolved with the planning of the intentional performance. People singing along, and one man, right at the beginning, who smiles and seems to take his hat off in respect.

Stories matter.