Rachel’s Dance Recital

The Dance Recital: a rite of passage for so many girls.  You get a sparkly costume, fancy makeup, and the audience claps when you get on stage; it’s a little slice of being a princess.

I danced for 14 seasons when I was a kid and I remember a lot of it.  From my very first tapping for tots class (that ended in the green leotard with the big ruffly tutu), to the horrible  white and silver outfit that went with the song “I Feel The Earth Move” (and involved my 12-year-old self moving parts of myself that didn’t want to move that way), to the classic tap dance to “New York New York” in a leotard with tails, dancing was a big part of my life.  But no year was bigger than the last year, when I was 14.

The summer before my freshman year I’d started working out with a friend who was going out for JV sports.  In the three months I dropped all the baby fat and gained a few inches, so that when I showed up back at the dance studio several people did double-takes.  What a boost to my self-concious teen self!  I was signed up for tap and jazz, which was already chaotic to balance with the schedule for my first year of high school.  Then, my jazz class ended up only having three people in it, so the studio asked if we wanted to stay a trio and take a dance to competition, and take another class with older girls that would also perform.  Bam! Another hour to be at the studio and my mother, who drove me back and forth, almost cried.  It was hard, and messy, and I ate a lot of hot pockets for dinner in the car, and for a while it was worth it.  But the advanced jazz class really was advanced, and called for some moves that I had a lot of trouble with.  I fell on my knee several times doing splits, and would get big purple bruises.  By the time spring rolled around I’d found high school drama club that met right after school and didn’t involve spits, and then it wasn’t worth it any more.  That was my last recital, and I’ve never looked back.

Which brings me to last night.  It was the dress rehearsal of the recital for the studio where my friend Rachel works.  I walked into the auditorium and it was full of moms with garment bags, dads with cameras and tripods, and little girls running around in sparkly outfits.  I had a pang of homesickness for my former self as I watched them scurry around in bows and tights and too much red lipstick.  “I know those steps!  I could do that!”  But it only lasted for a second.  And once it passed I was content to be an audience member – a good one – for these little girls busily going about their rite of passage.

working… part 2

I have a new job right now that just happens to be the same job that I had in 2004, and it’s got me thinking comparatively.  See, even though it’s the same type of job it’s a different state and a different store, and most importantly, it’s a different me.   Yesterday I was reaching across the table with a blade to trim a bit of paper.  I leaned way over, on my  tip toes, edge of the table pressing into my hips, and MAN did it pull in funny ways.  That same move in 2004 would have been easy, effortless.  Now, it pulled.

Since 2011 I’ve been wearing a brace on my left wrist when I do any heavy lifting, and quilter’s compression gloves on both hands when the weather is cold or wet and I have to do fine motor moves.  I used to do my job without braces or compression gloves, and my fine motor skills were excellent.  Now they’re only sort of ok, and only with a lot of support.

To make matters quite worse, I caught sight of myself in the full length mirror yesterday, naked.  I don’t make a habit of checking out my naked self, but feeling as I did about my job I gave pause.  Things are sagging.  Things are already sagging.

All this to say that I’m feeling old.  I have this job that I used to do with vigor and energy, without ever getting tired (so much so that I was even known to do all nighters at a second job and then come in to work all day).  Now I do the same job slowly and after full nights of sleep.  I used to carry lights and lumber all over the theatre without a second thought, and now I’m reaching for ibuprofen.  And my saggy naked self?  It’s put the 2-piece bathing suit into retirement.

It’s all got me thinking, what’s next?  Is it just the slow steady slide now until I’m wrinkled and retired and hobbling around on plastic knees?  Is it true when they say that age is just a number and we can fight it with a good diet and lots of yoga?  Because I haven’t met anyone who has that working for them just yet.  And if it really is a matter of time, how do we hang in there for that long?  I don’t want to spend the next 50 years dreading the next birthday, but if the precedent is anything to look forward to, it’s not looking too good.  You know what I heard shows up between your breasts when you get old?

Your belly button.

And that’s just sad.

working

“The state of null thought is a thing of the same stuff as freedom… And then comes the time when thought is required and I’m pulled back into  the real world and parking lot by trying to figure out what to do with the half a hot dog someone left in their cart.  To tell you the absolute blunt truth, sometimes working [in retail] makes one feel just about the size of an organelle.”

The quote is from a friend of mine from way back in response to the part-time retail job he had in high school.  And though I am years – aeons, in fact – beyond high school I admit that I was feeling some of the same feelings he expressed as I finished my first 8-hour day in my current part time retail job.  I mean, I spent an hour re-shelving 4-ounce bottles of craft paint.  Who wouldn’t feel like an organelle after that?

When I got out of college and moved to the big city I got a retail job at which I was considered an artist.  Sure it was a big box store with soaring flourescent lights and squeaky tile floors, but I went into a back room and did my thing and made art and brought it out to the customers and, with few exceptions, they thought it was great.  They applauded my being an artist in the big box store.  The flip side (because there’s always a flip side) was that the management of the store thought us artists were generally a waste of space, treated us like we couldn’t be trusted, and complained about how long it took us to do our jobs without any appreciation for how hard it was to do the job.

Fast forward ten years.

Economics being what they are and the family situation being what it is, I took my artist self back to the big box world and got a job.  This time I picked a company that was notable for its employee/employer relationship – one that was fair, and just, and as kind as any big box could be expected to be.  As far as I can tell, it’s all turning out to be true.  I have only good things to say about the HR I’ve experienced.  The flip side this time is that I’m not an artist any more, and instead of making art I frequently spend an hour re-shelving 4-ounce paints, sweeping up feathers, putting crayons back in boxes, or folding t-shirts.

So it seems that I’ve traded being an artist for being an organelle, and it’s too early to say which I’d prefer.  I can only hope that I find, as my high school friend did, the state of null thought of the same stuff as freedom (before the next 8 hour shift).

Sometimes things go badly

In her book Traveling Mercies Anne Lamott writes that when a lot of little things start going wrong all at once it’s because something big and beautiful is trying to get itself born, and the world needs you to be as distracted as possible in order that it be born perfectly.

If you measure my life by that theory I’m about to win the lottery.

And it’s not so much that lots of things are going wrong as much as it is that things are going hard.  All the projects are taking 15 more steps than I want them to take.  The box has no instructions enclosed.  The glue bottle has a seizure and pours out all over the table. The screw holding the critical bits together doesn’t just fall on the floor, it rolls into the abyss under the stove.  Everything warrants cleaning, fixing, starting over.

Worst of all, I haven’t really been able to work at a normal level.  Creativity is one of those things that shows up of it’s own accord, with no rhyme or reason, and departs just as easily.  So of course just because I have time and energy the creativity is off and gone, flirting with someone else.  I’ve tried maps and webs and charts to kick-start it, but so far no luck (even when I use the fruit-scented Mr. Sketch markers).  Claire says she wants to see me paint again.  “And by paint,” she clarifies, “I don’t mean paint the scratches in the furniture back to the right wood tone.  I mean PAINT.”

I shrug.  Alas the best I can do seems to be holding still and trying not to break anything while I wait for the inspiration to return.

Part 2: You inspire me

It’s the stuff refrigerator magnets and greeting cards are made of.  You may have seen it written out as:

When you come to the edge of the light that you know, and are about to step out into the darkness, you can be sure of one thing – there will be solid ground beneath you, or you will learn how to fly.

or, more simply,

Leap and the net will appear.

But either way you write it the point is the same – scary things are coming, and you have to be brave enough to go through them.  Well, in theory.

I, on the other hand, have pretty much always just been afraid.  I’m not very good at believing in the net.  Maybe it goes back to a summer Saturday long ago, standing on top of a rocky point above a waterfall.  My friends, and even my boyfriend, had leaped from the cliff and were swimming in the dark pool of water below.  I tried.  I stepped to the edge. I held my breath.  I couldn’t do it.  In failure I sat down with my toes at the edge, and a bare foot appeared next to my hand.  I looked up.  My best friend Mark was standing over me, looking down.  “You don’t have to jump,” he said, and held out his hand.  “We could just walk down.”  So I took his hand, and we walked.  I’ve pretty much been walking ever since – no leaping here, no way.

Well, until now.  I’ve found myself at a junction – leaving my safe, cozy, 40-hour-a-week desk job and starting to form a career as a real freelance theatre designer. If ever there was leaping in my life, this is it.  I’m afraid.  I’ll admit it.  It’s hard out there for artists, and there are zero guarantees.  But the machinery of the change is already running, and movement toward the edge is inevitable at this point.

It was with all of this fear in my head that I arrived at the Squealing Pig, my favorite little pub, with a group of theatre friends.  As we got to talking Adrienne explained how she was painting a show in Providence by taking the commuter rail back and forth.  And Annie chimed in that she was on her way to DC for a production meeting that she would attend, and then turn around and come back from.  They would coincidentally both cross paths in NYC a few weeks down the road, before Adrienne got back to Boston to open a show and Annie took off to her summer job in Minneapolis.  They were freelancing with vigor!  And they were both really happy about it.

In listening to them I started to feel just the tiniest bit encouraged, excited, and even inspired.  Here were two women that I think do a hell of a job at their jobs, and they are artists, and they are making it work.  “Don’t worry,” said Adrienne.  “You’re good at your art too, and you will hold yourself up.”  Aha!  I thought – this is the critical difference.  I will lay my own net!  I will walk myself down the hill.  I will bring a flashlight.  And I will fly.

Read Part 1

Part 1: I can talk to you

Have you ever discovered something so simple, so commonplace, that the discovery made you think, “how have I never noticed this before?”  I did.

About a year ago I discovered the deaf community.  I knew there were deaf people in the world, but I didn’t realize the extent of the community – there are deaf conventions and deaf clubs and deaf schools and, most relevantly, deaf people who like to go to the theatre.

I was working on a piece of theatre called Love Person, by Aditi Brennan Kapil, which has as a central character a deaf woman.  The theatre company, bravely, sought out and cast an actual deaf woman as the deaf woman in the play.  This lead us down a road in which the director took an ASL (American Sign Language) course in order to start communicating with the actress, and contacts were made at the Disability Services department of a local university, and training was held about how to create “deaf space” (which is a whole blog post all by itself), and interpreters were brought in to help us all communicate with each other in ways that would not make us pull our hair out.  In the end we created a general vocabulary that we worked from that was part ASL and part gesture, and we put together a beautiful play that was attended by the deaf and the hearing alike, and we learned how to support a deaf community at the theatre.

But this post is not really about that play.

This post is about how a year after that play I found myself back at the door of the deaf community when I, as a hearing production manager, learned to communicate with a deaf woman who also happens to be an amazing lighting designer.

Now, I’m a generally awkward person to begin with.  If someone’s going to put their foot in their mouth it’s going to be me, so dealing with the sensitivity of a specific disability was challenging at first.

Director: Make sure to let the lighting designer know about this change we’ve made to the set.
Production Manager (me): Ok.  I’ll give her a call when the meeting is over.
Director: No you won’t.
Me: What? (beat) Oh.  Right.  I’ll… text her?

The good news is that I’m also a creature that can learn, and as we got into the process we overcame having a deaf designer in a room full of hearing designers.  She could speak and was easy to understand, which helped a lot.  Seating her across from the director (so she could read lips) helped too, and putting the person taking notes next to her, so she could reference them if she got lost also helped. It was not perfect, and there were conversations that had to be clarified after the meeting, but still, we made progress.

In tech, we put extra lights around the stage manager and director so that the lighting designer could see their faces and thus read their lips.  We wrote things down and text-messaged each other, and sometimes had to just get up and point.  But the thing that hit me was that it actually wasn’t that hard.  It was certainly no more hard that it was to communicate with anyone else, it was just a different style.

By opening night I stopped the lighting designer backstage and expressed that I was sorry I had never learned ASL and asked if she would sign to me to help me start learning.  “No,” she said, and I looked confused.  “I forget to sign to you, and why?  I can talk to you just like this.”

And she was right.  We had communicated our way through putting together an entire (and beautiful) theatrical production!  We were doing just fine with what we had.

So here’s the lesson of the day (if there has to be a lesson of the day) – I can talk to you… and you… and you.  I can talk to my deaf designer.  I can talk to folks with other disabilities.  I can talk to people of different colors, and people with different traditions.  The language is different, and sometimes I have to commit to being a learning creature, but I can do it.  I can talk to you.

Read Part 2

Things I learned in College

Sometimes – who am I kidding? – All the time, when I think of college, it feels like aeons ago.  It wasn’t that long ago.  It was 10 years ago.  But it feels like twice that, or maybe like I went to college on the moon such that the time/space relationship is wiggled.

One of my favorite memories from college is about the Pin Straightener.  The Pin Straightener was a theatre thing, from the theatre department, which is where I hung out.  It went like this:

Say you had someone working with you who was either incompetent, or too chatty, or just needed to go away for a minute so you could think about what you were trying to solve.  You’d send them to someone else on the team (usually someone in the costume department) to get the “pin sorter.” Well, that person in the costume department knew the game, and they would say something like, “you can have the pin sorter when so-and-so gives me back the board straightener, go get that!” So the dutiful worker (often a Freshman) would go off to get the board straightener, and the next person would send them off go get, oh, whatever, and on and on it would go.  It was most joyful because often the scene shop and the costume department were far apart from each other, so you’d have this poor soul running back and forth looking for these things that entirely did not exist.

This is how we entertained ourselves.

These days there is no Pin Straightener, because someone would get sued for bullying.
Come on, you know it’s true.

These days people come out of college aggressive and terrified, one minute owning the world and the next covering their tracks so there is no proof.   Colleges seem more demanding and cut-throat – and they have to be, because the world is more demanding and cut-throat – and the people coming out of them fight harder and brag bigger and have shiny, crispy resumes covered in internships before they even hit the job market.

My class did not have that.  My class… it was more like… we just loved the world, and all we wanted was for it to love us back.  We made fun because it was fun, and because we were allowed to have fun, because we were not worried about whether or not we would have a 401K five years down the road.  Some people would call us “innocent” or “sheltered”, or maybe just agree that I went to college on the moon.  But you know what?  We were happy.  And for the most part, I’m still happy.

That said, most of my class has gone back to graduate school in recent years and learned to be more demanding and cut-throat.  It’s working for them.  They’re getting the jobs, and the 401K’s, and largely forgetting about how we made each other laugh.  As I sit at the brink of my own career change, I weigh this against my memory of the Pin Straightener.  Time to grow up and get tough?  Maybe.

Maybe not.

Beautiful women singing

I’m in rehearsal for a Christmas show.  Well, that’s how I like to say it.  But the people working with me will say that I wrote and designed a Christmas show and now I’m directing it.  Difference of perspective, I suppose.

So the other night we were rehearing, and started at the top of the show.  It starts with O Come, O Come Emmanuel, and everyone sings together at the front of the stage in a line.  It’s not particularly weird that the whole cast is female.  It’s not even particularly weird that they’re all light-haired.  But what I noticed that night about my whole cast blew me away: they’re all amazingly beautiful.

Now, let me explain: this was a Tuesday night.  It was drizzly outside, and windy.  Everyone had been at work all day.  Most of them had taken their shoes off, and we’d just eaten big plates of Thai take-out.  No one was wearing makeup.  You could say that we were not exactly dressed for the prom.  And yet, as I stood there watching them sing, I was struck by how beautiful they are just they way they are.

At a time when the world is talking so much about bullying, and when culture is so focused on how we all look, this moment was refreshing to say the least.  As I get ready each morning I frequently find myself caught up in the conventions of perfection – hair, make up, clothes – it feels like every time I go out I have to look like I’m on parade.  To see these other ladies shining after a long day, a commute to the rehearsal space, and a hurried dinner gives me hope, and a resolution to remember what we’re all told as children: it’s not the wrapping paper that shows the quality of the gift.

Thanks, ladies.

Sneak Peak at the new show

Last year I designed and directed this little show called The Puppet Nativity.  It had one performance.  I can’t say everyone loved it, but it was good in that “we did this in the basement of the church” kind of way… A way that sometimes gives theater a break for being a little bit held together by duct tape and prayers.

This year I wanted to make a Puppet Nativity that was NOT held together with duct tape and prayers – that was instead held together by good craftsmanship, and rehearsal, and performers that could sing (last year the cast included me, and I can’t sing, so that’s the first thing we changed).  The first rehearsal with the puppets is tomorrow, and I’ve been working very hard with my glue gun and a bottle of wine to get them done so that we can use them.  So here, for the world, is the sneak peak.

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This happened yesterday…

My boss saw it.  She said, “Oh, it’s Paul Revere’s ride.  No wait.  It’s YOU doing Paul Revere’s ride.”

And I said, “Yes, yes it is.  Good job.”