Pennies

"And now I'm caught in the air

It's a good life."

-- Mae, "Ready and Waiting to Fall"

Well, it's a new year.

Got the feeling, for the first time, that this year is going to be really good, special. Got a lot of changes to make, as always, and some of them are bigger than any I've ever made. That should be a frightening feeling, but instead, I feel startlingly okay.

I feel I am shedding the chip on my shoulder.

--

Parents bought a new car yesterday. Helped some poor car salesman get one sell closer to quota, I guess. It's a nice car, longer than it looks, gray outside and inside, with small behind-the-seat pockets and a concave backseat, the kind that curls your back in that firm, insistent new-car way.

We rode it to Rick's Cafe for the last meal of the year; I had the shrimp and scallops but I should have had the sirloin. Prior to the countdown, we Wii'd until 11pm, switched to old episodes of "The Beverly Hillbillies," then scanned basic cable channels for the straightforward ball-dropping ceremony. So many kissing folks after.

We toasted the future with sparkling white grape juice--this, instead of champagne. Ate green grapes, symbols of fertility and affluence. Had coins in all our pockets, promises of more to come. Returned to Wii-ing until the troops grew weary, then hit the hay.

--

Growing up, whenever we moved into a new house (and we did that a lot), my mom would take a handful of coins from the jar and walk around to each windowsill, placing a coin in each corner. I don't know if this was supposed to ward off evil spirits or financial ruin, or to invite money, or perhaps it was a sowing gesture, a planting of currency.

My mom has a lot of those superstitions. Drop a fork, a woman will visit; a knife, a man; a spoon, a child. An itchy left hand means you will receive money (left is passive), and your right means you will pay soon.

But the ones that for whatever reason make sense to me are the coin superstitions. I read somewhere that picking up pennies only brings good luck if they are heads-up, and only if you find them randomly. If you get change, any coin minted in your birth year is good luck.

--

A word about pennies: I'm not a fan. They get stuck under car mats and beneath furniture, and they fuse to carpets with gunky laziness. They are lost and discovered with little consequence, these browning copper circles. Many are mostly zinc: poser pennies. They are obsolete. Especially if they stop making them soon. 2010 will be a year in which less pennies are made. 2011 will be the last in which they are made.

But a word for pennies, too: The idea of them is beautiful, those small, forgotten bits of worth. Alone, they disappear, falling from meaning into corrosive mediocrity. In pairs, they seem fortuitous, and in large quantities they become priceless--at some magical point the setting aside of pennies turns from a habitual gesture of frugality to a conscious act of collection, of prizing, of seeing the potential of the mass, of giving to the penny more than it deserves. A penny saved, and all that; and what they won't tell you is that a penny is what you make it worth.

Years are pennies. So's this one. I want to make it worthy.

Dreams

"No matter how your heart is grieving,

If you keep on believing,

The dreams that you wish will come true."

-- Disney's Cinderella

--

Just had a dream last night, the night after Christmas. An acting dream.

We are doing a show called Measure for Ending Well and Then Some, our director's idea of a script that satirizes the problem plays of Shakespeare. It is a sprawling, epic, disastrously long script, one that makes me think of Hugo's Hernani or Ibsen's Brand. I don't know where I fit into the show. It will come to me in time. It's a big one: most of the theatre people whom I know from high school, college, and elsewhere are involved in this play. I see them as I wander around backstage.

There is a bluish gray light coming from somewhere. It allows me to see a gaggle of beautiful girls dressed as Celtic maidens, perched all about an oversized wooden arbor (or maybe it's a pergola) that has been painted to represent rocky cliffs. Or something. They speak to me with the allure of a siren, these nymphs hanging in the air. With the voice of their characters, they ask me the questions of a friend, blurring my reality, and I begin to think they have actually transformed themselves into spirits. Then they shush me and rush me into the wings, so I won't be caught on stage during their entrance.

No, not Hernani. Wagner's Ring Cycle.

For clues, I examine my costume in the blue light. I need to know what I'm doing here, and nothing is "coming to me," as I'd hoped. I'm wearing Elizabethan garb (the black pantaloons, shiny doublet, poofy shirt) and I have a mustache on.

I'm playing the villain.

--

This vacation began as a disaster, and not the sort that arises from burnt food or other sudden, instantaneous crises. No. This one began with what we'll call motherly resentment; a kind of silent, chilly chide; my mother was mad at me for something. My first full day here, my dad had to take me out to dinner, where we discussed what I had done with my life, where I was going, and why I had offended my mother.

Long talk, and since these matters are personal, I don't know how to handle relating it here. So I won't.

It all means this: I may try something else career-wise in 2009.

--

Don't know any lines. None.

I rush to my dressing room and discover that this theatre is the Taft, in downtown Cincinnati. The air in the wings is warm. The hallways and stairwells backstage glow behind semi-closed doors like orange portals to heaven. I go there.

Find my script. It's on a table and it looks like this. I scan the pages for highlights, but apparently I haven't done my acting homework. No indications of who I am or what I say, anywhere.

My dressing roomie walks in. "Ready?" he asks, straightening the lace around his neck.

"No." I can't think of any better way to explain it to him. "No, I'm not."

He sees I'm holding the script. "You've forgotten it all?"

"I don't think I ever learned it."

"You learned it, all right. You just forgot. Here." He takes the book, rips out some pages, and hands them to me. "Roll these up so it'll look like your scroll. You're playing Spallier. Let's go."

I walk with him, rolling the papers.

--

It's not that I don't want to keep acting. Honestly, I would do this forever if I could. I just wonder if I can anymore. If I should.

I've always wanted a family. Right now, I work part-time in an ill-paying position, doing a faint imitation of what I really want to do. Never really was completely enchanted with children's theatre, and the scary (funny?) thing about it is that it seems to suck people in. You don't intend for it, but you first get a steady paycheck, then get hired onto the staff, and before you know it, you've married a local, you have a mortgage and kids, and you don't know how to do anything--anything that pays you better--except let playwrights, directors, musicians and technicians make all the serious decisions for you. All you have to do is walk through their prepared world, and you don't even have to do a terribly good job. Just be adequate, and you always have a job here.

It's not what I signed up for when I declared a Theatre major, and it's not what I envisioned for myself when I decided to take acting as a career. And that's the God-honest truth.

--

We're on stage and I can't see the audience but I can feel their silence. That wonderful quiet. Nothing is happening There, or Then; it has all been replaced by what is happening Here and Now.

There are two of us on stage. I see by the light of a tiny lantern that the other actor has plenty of speaking time before I interrupt him with a goofy sidekick line--and then it makes sense. I'm not the villain. I'm the villain's sidekick. Yes.

He stops speaking. I interrupt, shamelessly reading my lines from the "scroll." As I read my lines aloud, I find that I am supposed to be reading a letter from the villain's brother, so it's fine for me to read this scroll. It feels more than fine. It feels friggin brilliant.

The scene continues, and I glance down the page and see that soon, very soon, I am supposed to rip the scroll to pieces.

--

I'm good at my job, yes, but I know I could do anything. The question is whether I would like it or love it, or come to that point in time, or whether I would spend all my days in some other career dreaming about what I could have done in the theatre.

This longing, I believe, is what propels decent, hardworking American adults into that most grotesque form of theatre, that driven and funded not by talent, but by the community.

--

I don't rip the scroll. Instead, I give the other actor a warning look and jump lines to later in the scene. We've completely vaulted the scroll-tearing business, and now we're talking about the holidays.

And before I know it, after a final punchline about how "it's best to slaughter people when they feel most prepared for it, during the unhappy holidays," the audience gives us an encouraging batch of giggles and we leave the stage.

"What was that?" the other actor asks. He is angry. "Nothing came to you?"

"Nothing. What's the next scene?"

"Figure it out yourself."

--

My parents are clear: they think the military would be a fine option. And it is. It really is. It's just that if I had wanted to enter the Armed Forces, I think I would have done so.

Then again, Einstein flunked math, dropped out, and delivered mail before he found his higher calling.

I'm trying to think of my life in terms of What I Want. Some people want only the thrill of being on stage and telling stories, and I have to say that's a big motivator for me, too. But I've also wanted to publish a book (several, if possible), raise a family, live in a safe neighborhood, teach my son baseball, own permanent furniture (I'm still sleeping on an air mattress, for what that's worth), save up plenty of money, travel, and this, and that, and on and on and on.

I'm realizing that it isn't possible with my current job. Unless I get full-time employment (exploitation?) and an inside track to high-paying producing jobs, something I don't honestly want right now--or just move away and try for another job or go back to school, which is what I'm considering--I can't have those other things later on.

Those "other things" are my dreams, and what I have now is my reality. Why is raising a family and having a simple, stable life a dream? I'm nearing my mid-twenties, and soon my late-twenties, and then my thirties. I don't want to have my first child when I'm forty-five.

--

There are no other scripted scenes for Spallier and his villainous leader. None that I can find, anyway.

The director has come backstage to yell at me. It is intermission. He asks me what I've done and why. I tell him I did what I had to do, because I didn't know what else to do. He tells me that is a poor reason to do anything. I say I know.

I go back to the wooden arbor, looking for the ladies that encouraged me before. Those beautiful actresses. But they are gone. The wooden arbor sits behind other set pieces, abandoned, and now under harsh working lights it looks old and decrepit, like a gas station in the middle of nowhere, or the exoskeleton of a long-dead spider. It is obviously painted to look like something else, garishly painted, and in a way it looks beautiful and ugly at the same time.

It would have made a fine wooden arbor, holding up vines in someone's landscaped backyard, giving shade to grass and standing up to the sun, being a cliff only for the kids who would climb it. Now, there are splinters on its beams and an actress is complaining about it. It can never be a cliff.

--

Then I wake up.

I have to think about my dreams.

CDs

"We gave her everything money could buy

She's leaving home

After living alone

For so many years...."

-- The Beatles, "She's Leaving Home"

--

Four new roadtrip CDs to get me through this 11-hour drive to Bellevue, NE:

- Led Zeppelin (mix)

- The Beatles (mix)

- A Prairie Home Companion (podcasts)

- The Moth (podcasts)

For the LZ mix, I tried to take only one track from each album. Found that it was difficult not to take all of their third album; "Since I've Been Loving You" was my first choice, and it might be my favorite LZ song period...but I just had to add "Gallows Pole," "Tangerine," and "That's the Way." Was sad to see that "Immigrant Song" didn't make it, or for that matter, "Friends" or "Braun-Yr-Aur Stomp." Seriously, I wanted to add the whole album.

As for the others.... The Beatles CD is comprised mostly of Anthology tracks, though the most-represented albums are White and Sgt. Pepper. And the APHC and Moth CDs are just my favorites of their recent podcasts. Makes me wish my car played MP3 CDs as well as regular CDs; I'd get more material per disc.

--

At TCTC, our bosses want us to work until the day before Christmas Eve, and I think that's crap. We all remember being told we were released on Dec. 18, last Friday, and it was ironically on that Friday that we found out they expected us to work half of this week, too. I had planned to leave today at 1pm.

And that's exactly what I intend to do. Take the vacation days or count them as personal; I'm going home.

It's a great day for it. Checked the weather along the route. Looks like no rain or snowfall until I get to Iowa (of course, it would be Iowa where the crummy weather begins). And looking ahead to Christmas Eve, looks like Nebraska's in for quite a wintry wallop, making it a white Christmas this year.

Good.

--

Played Rock Band for the first time on Saturday night at a friend's party. I'd had some mojitos and plenty of peppermint schnapps by the time I worked up the courage to take a guitar. Ended up doing all four: two guitars, drums, and singing.

First bass song: "Eye of the Tiger"

First guitar song: "Carry On My Wayward Son"

First drum song: don't remember, but I rocked it

First singing song: "Dear Prudence" (also rocked "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?", which is surprisingly high)

--

Everything's a mix: drinks, songs, weather, work. If the name of the game is reflect and regroup, I guess that's what I've got in my hand this year. Not that it's all madness; there is method, lurking somewhere, or perhaps embarrassed; the only thing for it is to put on an antic disposition. Eat, drink, be merry, and take long drives.

See you in Nebraska.

Snowflakes

"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity."

-- Christopher Morley

--

Stopped by the library on my way home last night. Among other things (I mostly use libraries for their magnificently free DVD rental), I picked up a children's book, My Brother Loved Snowflakes, by Mary Bahr, because it seemed like it would make an interesting children's play. Read it last night and was not disappointed.

It's the biography of Wilson Bentley, the first man to photograph a snowflake, told from the perspective of his older brother, Charlie. The story involves young Wilson asking for and receiving a series of microscopes from his parents, and then going on to do wonderful things in scientific photography and lectures. I believe the comparison of snowflakes to individuals--"no two are the same"--originates with Willie's work. Because many schools are now cutting the arts from their budgets and trying to steer children towards careers in science and technology, creating a play about an artistic scientist could do much to bridge this new and spreading gap.

For my own amusement, I may give a stage adaptation of this storybook a whirl, or perhaps I'll use its predecessor (and Caldecott winner) Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. If all goes well and I can get the rights, maybe I can sell this play to a children's touring company. Like the one I work for.

--

It snowed in Cincinnati not too long ago, not even a week ago, but by this gray Tuesday morning it has all melted and the grass, still green, lies matted on spongy earth. The temperature has risen. My family tells me they got dumped with a lot of early snow around the same time we did, but that it's staying cold in Nebraska. Looks like it'll be a white Christmas for us this year.

--

What amazes me about Wilson Bentley, "the Snowflake Man," is that he always looked at tiny things for inspiration. Little objects, like the veins of a leaf or the symmetrical crystals of snow.

There's one part of the book that contains this beautiful metaphor. The two boys, Willie and Charlie, go fishing for trout in the clear waters of a nearby brook, and they sit there for hours without catching anything. When Charlie finally snags a fish, Willie exclaims that he wants to learn everything about it. But when Charlie looks over at him, his brother is using his microscope to look at a drop of water, not the trout.

The Snowflake Man devised a way to calculate the mass of a raindrops by catching them in a tray of flour. Before he obtained a microscope fitted with a camera, he would catch snowflakes on a piece of black velvet so he could draw them before they melted.

The recurring theme here is one of catching. He catches images as he catches raindrops, abandoning the serious trivialities for the simple pleasures, for mere knowledge, more knowledge. He runs into the storm, eager for it to fall on him.

And it seems fitting that after he had caught all of this, Willie caught pneumonia while walking home through a blizzard.

--

From an aesthetic point of view, theatre is the snowflake art. It is caught by those who come to see it.

No two performances are the same, even as the same shows run for days and weeks with the same actors, just as the cold crystallization of H20 occurs differently in each cloud, in each storm, even if water is water is water; as the flake falls it sheds its shape or clumps with others; and the flakes together bring the stuff of clouds and dreams as a blanket to the ground, soft empires built on temperature and moisture, drifting, piling, shoveled, cleared, and finally melting.

In a time when the theatre is dying its slow and triumphant death, it is important for its fans to consider the words of the late Wilson Bentley, the Snowflake Man:

"A snowflake...is a bit of beauty dropped from the sky...that, if lost at that moment, is lost forever to the world."

Tinged

"She had written these words, to be sure.... And for her, along with the residue of fear and the dubious sense of relief, there was, of course, the guilt-tinged bafflement when she realized that, unlike Lies, she had been spared."

-- Philip Roth, in The Ghost Writer

--

I'm about to eat a personal cheese pizza in the café lobby of the community center I mentioned before. Reading the same Philip Roth book and sipping tea, when that "Summer Girls" song comes on the center's radio. A song I haven't heard since middle school (okay, maybe high school), and yet I recognized the opening drumbeats and repetitive record scratches. Can't remember the names of Kentucky's senators, but I remember that. I used to sing along with it on the schoolbus, pretending to know the words until it got to the parts where I did know the words: "New kids on the block, dah-buh-dum-dee dee, Chinese food makes me sick...something summer..."

The last class went well, considering. I was sure to apologize to the disgruntled parents and thank the sympathetic ones, hoping that they really do understand: Miscommunication led to them paying for a workshop that I couldn't deliver. It's not an excuse, it's a reason. "X equals negative-B plus or minus the square root..."

These workshops have been clouded by a sense of doom for nearly a month. Before Thanksgiving provided me a much-needed escape from these Thursday evening punishments, I was begging my boss to cancel the classes. Refund the money. Take it from my check. Anything so I wouldn't have to do that again. See those parents. Raise my voice. See that infuriating little smile on the face of a child who refuses to hear--or do--what you say.

Thing is, as workshops go, it wasn't bad. It hasn't really merited the bad feeling I've had after each class. I've been more trapped before this, more precisely labeled a Persona non grata. So it's a case of dementia, or exaggeration. On my part, if no one else's.

--

And when, after the class, the center's liaison joked that I must be happy that I would never have to deal with her again, well, I didn't laugh. Not because I think it's true--far from it. She's just doing her job, and I'm trying--pathetically perhaps--to do mine. I don't feel that "dubious sense of relief" you're supposed to feel after you've finished a rough process; on the contrary, I feel "guilt-tinged bafflement."

(Who knew a simple bout of suffering would make me identify with Roth's Jewish heroine?)

At the risk of pressing matter into metaphor, I feel like Oskar Schindler at the end of the film: "One more! One more!"

--

Could I have taught them the songs themselves instead of just some dances? Could they have had more fun with another instructor? Could I have saved everyone a bunch of headaches by cow-towing sooner?

"Could" is a four-letter word tonight; it doesn't coo, it cuts; remove the U and it shows its true self, "cold;" it's a warrior in the kingdom of Might Have Been. I have nothing to say to it. Only doubt, the feeling that I wasn't who I could have been, a cloud of unknowing instead of a light. "Cloud"--another rearranging of the word.

Good thing this was the last workshop for a while. I need time to recoup.

--

In the café, more parents and their children. All around, at circular tables, egalitarian tables. I can hear them discussing their plans for the evening. My pizza is eaten; the box is empty. I haven't gotten any farther in the book. It sits open, the left page (142) dogeared, with huge blocks of italics on the right page.

Michael Bublé is on the radio, singing a Christmas song.

I've been spared.

Screws

"You turn the screws

You tear down the bridge

Flimsy as it is..."

-- Cake, "You Turn the Screws"

--

Went to see Cincy Shakes's production of The Taming of the Shrew on Saturday night. A friend, who is in CSC's young company, got my girlfriend and me free tickets. Many of the shows I catch at CSC are frustrating to me as an audience member and a theatre person, mostly because their concepts (in my opinion) often distract from the plays, but this was not the case this weekend.

Their Shrew is set in 1940s screwball-comedy Hollywood, and it's wonderful. The Marx Brothers and the Stooges make several appearances, and beyond the gadzooks and boingos, the central message of the play comes across just fine, intact. If you're in Cincinnati, see it. It's worth the money I didn't spend.

--

Continuing my trend of discovering convenient technology a few years behind the curve, I have just downloaded a bunch of podcasts, over 200 episodes total. I'm a little scattered in my selections, ranging from things I know I like ("A Prairie Home Companion" and "This American Life") to crapshoots that look good ("The Bear" and "Slate Poetry"). But in another way, I guess I've been actually very narrow, looking mostly to monologues recorded live, literary readings, and the occasional human-interest podcast.

If you have any suggestions, let me know.

--

We've taken Holiday Follies on stage, to great response. It's been called "a gumdrop of holiday love," which is exactly what folks want right now, something devoid of real intellect and cloaked in a swell shell of glitter and sheen. Harmonies are tight. Costumes galore and props to the max, and I suppose that's what you do in children's theatre.

Follies

"Just because you don't have any holiday traditions does not mean you should poo-poo on others', Max."

-- Doris, in Holiday Follies, the holiday show for The Children's Theatre of Cincinnati, 2009

--

We open in two days.

Rehearsal went so well last night that our emergency rehearsal, scheduled for tonight, was canceled during notes. Crisis averted.

--

Today is the penultimate workshop at a local community center. The last few sessions have not gone well--in fact, I would go so far as to say that none of the sessions have gone "well." It's more accurate to say that the last session met basic requirements, though this was at the cost of a lot of things, including my confidence as a workshop leader.

Here's the rundown.

My boss told me that we had offered a workshop that, because of low enrollment, was changed at the last minute. Originally, the workshop was supposed to teach kids how to sing and dance, culminating in a final show for the parents. Only five children were signed up, so we told them that instead we would do a basic acting workshop over the course of five Thursdays. This would have worked just fine, except that the community center did a poor job (in my opinion) of passing on this information to the parents, who had paid X amount of dollars for their kids to have a musical theatre class.

Enter me. For the first two classes, I haggled with a mom who "just wanted to know" if her daughter (a precocious little snot who smiles at you and pretends not to hear the things you say to her) had "what it takes" to be a singer. I told her that because I am not a voice instructor and cannot read music, I did not feel comfortable teaching music, but that I would try to include a warm-up game that involves singing, just to see if the girl took to it. I did, and she didn't. The mother, embarrassed, apparently complained about me after the second workshop.

So, because of pressure from my boss and the community center, I changed my plans for the third class. I came with a CD and a vague intent to teach them a dance (keep in mind, I had at most four hours to prepare for this). As I began the class, I told them the little bit I know about singing and proper breathing technique. And when I asked them, "Do you know what it means to support your breathing?" one of the mothers, sitting in the corner, scoffed and said, "They're six!"

Now, all of the parents were in the room for this class. This made me feel like I was being ganged-up on, and it didn't help to curb my growing frustration. One of them left and got the coordinator of children activities at the center. Because none of the children were participating in the singing or the dancing, this coordinator had to prod them along. At one point, two of the girls--one of them is that precocious little snot I talked about before--decided that their hands were glued together and began running around the room. I asked them three times, politely, to stop, and then looked to the mother for help. And instead of shooting her children warning looks, she was simply watching me: what's he gonna do, how will he handle this, what's he doing wrong this time, etc. So I met her gaze and said, calmy, simply, and quietly, "It's okay. I'll wait."

She was unable to restrain her own children, which says something to me about why she wants them in this workshop. She is a flustered mother who has lost control of her daughters. When her peers tell her that one of them might have "what it takes" to be a performer, she imagines that the secret to controlling her children is to give them a creative outlet. And when they fail to participate, obey simple commands, or socialize with others, the mother projects those feelings of inferiority onto the inept young man who happens to be running the workshop. Me.

Or maybe I'm being unfair. Perhaps it is I who is projecting inferiority onto the mother, I who does not have control of children. I have only been doing this sort of thing for a half a year, after all, and she has been a mother for at least six years. Maybe it's me.

Whatever the problem is, I will no doubt continue to be frustrated by it tonight. 4:30pm, two hours from now. I have to find another song to use.

--

Some silver lining, now...

The new laptop came yesterday, the computer to replace the one that was stolen. It's not exactly the same one--Sony stopped manufacturing mine shortly after I bought it back in March--but it runs pretty well and is much better than the ancient desktop provided me by TCTC. It's black instead of silver, and it runs Windows 7 instead of Vista. The latter is the best, because I've never really liked Vista.

The first thing I downloaded onto it? iTunes. The setup program is running now.

Before I run to that workshop at the community center, I will stop at the nearest Wal-Mart and buy myself an external hard drive. Gotta learn from your mistakes.

--

And maybe that's the sand in the glass, right? Those mistakes are only justified if you learn from them. The previous three workshops were only worth it if this fourth one is an improvement. And getting better replacements takes the sting out of being pilfered.

--

A quick note before I go.

My solo in Holiday Follies was the "Blue Christmas" number, in which I was--oddly--dressed as Scrooge but impersonating Elvis. Long story, and the short of it is: It was cut last night. Not just for time considerations, but because it's a complicated joke that lasts a while. And with an audience filled with little people who haven't heard of Elvis, Paul Newman, or Cher, it's a joke they'd never get.

I'm glad it was cut, mainly because I felt that the Scrooge/Elvis costume, on top of three layers of clothing, made me look like Humpty Dumpty leading an Episcopalian eucharist. I don't even know if the Episcopalians have a eucharist ceremony, but, ah, there it is.

So it's gone. So it goes.

Turkey

"It's a great script. It needs rewrites but basically it's a great script. I know I've told you all this before, but it's just that if I don't keep saying it I'll forget it's the truth."

-- Rita, in George F. Walker's play Beyond Mozambique

--

I think I've always been afraid of things.

The first thing I remember being afraid of was the boom of footsteps I heard in the ceiling above me. I knew that in multi-level buildings, one man's ceiling could be another man's floor, and the thought of who--or what--was walking around up there kept me awake at night. I think this was shortly after watching Jurassic Park in theatres. I imagined that if there was a clear plastic cup half-filled with water on my nightstand, that with each boom from above the water would ripple, shivering, quivering, like me wrapped in my blanket.

Until high school, I was nervous every time I had to speak to a stranger in a public place. I remember being in a McDonald's and wanting more fries. My mom gave me two dollars and told me to go to the counter and order some medium fries. I was terrified because I didn't know what would happen if two dollars wasn't enough. I told her that, and she said it was enough. I shook my head. She gave me a quarter and said that it was for the tax. This ritual repeated itself during several McDonald's meals, and every time, two dollars was enough, and I returned sheepishly with the unused quarter and random change from the two dollars.

These days, I think I'm afraid of my writing.

--

I think that's why I stick to midlength blog posts. Rarely do I have to write things for work; the two-and-a-half plays I've written recently are an exception. Sometimes I wish I was like my journalist buddies, whose blogs consist of teasers for their stories that appear on the websites of the newspapers they work for.

Blogging is self-publishing. Self-fulfilling. Vanity disguised as self-expression. One only expresses oneself because one is presumptuous. That's one way of looking at it. Another way: it is self-expression disguised as vanity. One only appears pretentious because one needs an expressive, written outlet.

--

The play I wrote for TCTC has its dress rehearsal and staff watch tomorrow morning. I'm afraid of 11:00, an hour of reckoning, a litmus test, a group of people who know me but who don't know my play. People who don't read this blog. Co-workers, some with the power to decide whether I ever write for TCTC again.

I hope they laugh, I hope they cry, I hope they lose fifteen pounds.

--

Tomorrow is a big road-trip day. I'm going to a resort south of St. Louis to meet my family for Thanksgiving. Turkey Day.

When he was little, my dad's nickname was Turkey. He never climbed into an oven, no. Apparently the name comes from a game he and I both played when we were little. My mother called it "killing your enemies," and my grandmother called it "running around making funny noises." In my version of the game, I would reenact action sequences from cartoons and movies, leaping onto couches like I was hopping the tops of city buildings, pointing a garden-hose nozzle like it was a laser gun, imagining explosions that shattered my mother's Precious Moments figurines into dust and fritzed out my father's stereo with a shower of blue electric fingers, seeing scorchmarks and bullet holes appear in the white walls of our house while masked combatants sprayed ammunition at me, and on and on.

When my dad did it, I imagine the scenarios were much of the same. The sci-fi noises coming from his throat sounded to my grandmother like the warbling gobble of a turkey. Hence: "Stop running around, you little turkey."

--

I'm not afraid of turkeys.

Puppies

"We talked about literature and I was in heaven--also in a sweat from the spotlight he was giving me to bask in. Every book new to me I was sure he must have annotated with his reading pen long ago, yet his interest was pointedly in hearing my thoughts, not his own... Then there were the great novelists, whose spellbinding names I chanted as I laid my cross-cultural comparisons and brand-new eclectic enthusiasms at his feet--Zuckerman, with Lonoff, discussing Kafka: I couldn't quite get it, let alone get over it."

-- Philip Roth, in The Ghost Writer

--

I killed a lot of puppies today.

UrbanDictionary.com says the phrase, "killing puppies," either refers to smoking marijuana, or to asking a stupid question or giving a repetitive/stupid answer.

What I mean by the phrase is this: in writing, to get rid of something that you think is really good. That's not to say that the process of editing and cutting your own work down is a bad thing; in most cases, it's good. If it hurts you to highlight a section and hit delete, chances are the piece is now better than it was when it had accrued the extra baggage. What many writers consider their own genius, others consider extraneous, dull, and a form of literary masturbation.

A professor or high-school teacher of mine used the phrase, and I thought it was perfect. And I've continued to use it up to the present, when I say to you in the least flowery terms I can muster:

"I killed a lot of puppies today."

--

How?

Well, the play I wrote for ArtReach was running long. I hadn't budgeted enough time for the long songs and dance numbers, and when we timed it last week, it ran 1:06, an hour and six minutes. ArtReach guarantees a one-hour show and Q&A, and in general, that means a fifty-minute play.

Sixteen minutes (0:16) had to go.

And so, down the drain went the puppies. "Away!" I cried, with fingers flying over the keys. "Away with the joke about 'forgetting the forest and seeing the trees'! Away with thin comedic bits! Away with the heartwarming final scene where the moustachioed villain gives back the bags of money! Away, away, and away you go!"

(Or something like that.)

In a creative process of any kind, and especially in theatre, I believe you have to have at least one other person telling you which ideas are full-grown, healthy, Pedigree dogs, and which are diseased, runtish, awkward puppies. Children's stories like Charlotte's Web tell you to save the runts, but with the abstract goal of creating an ideal product, the runts have to die.

(Die, die, DIE! Away and away!)

And in many rehearsals, I think, the person with the most puppies is the director. With no one but a stage manager to kill them, these puppies continue to grow until, like a rash or boil, they are too large to be ignored. In this particular case, it's the opposite. I'm the playwright. I have loaded down my play with written-in puppies. The director is the one who has been asking me if it's okay to kill them.

All of these puppies have met their Maker, who has condemned them to oblivion. Adios, perros. So be it.

--

After all the cuts, we are down to fifty-two minutes. We did it. All's fair in love, war, and the massacre of small, metaphorical mammals.

And now, it's lunchtime.

Trumpet

"When rehearsing a Walker play, it's useful to raise the stakes higher than you imagine they could be and to increase constantly and mercilessly the size of the obstacles to understanding and communication among the actors. The more awesome the barrier, the greater the energy released to smash it and the more complete and desperate the emotional exposure. Intensify the desperation even more by removing cool intellect, by doing everything you can to nourish an instinctive response to the moment; free-fall through the words, do the unexpected, surprise each other, never let the bodies be a safe distance apart; make them too close or too far, but never leave them safe or settled. Discover by attempt, by ceaseless, active, breathless attempt. Do a scene over and over and over and over without pause until you work yourself into a thoughtless, lucid, present-tense fever, so that understanding comes from the gut, from living with the plays where they live, trusting to their extremity, taking a leap of faith across a bottomless emotional canyon, a leap justified by experience on the other side, experience inaccessible by creeping, incremental analysis. Set a punishingly swift pace and make the progress buoyant. Otherwise, the speech becomes considered, the bodies take a nap, the emotions hide away, the bravery is no more."

-- from Stephen Haff's "The Brave Comedy of Big Emotions: An Introduction" to Shared Anxiety, a collection of plays by George F. Walker, who wrote Zastrozzi

--

That description (above) of a rehearsal process sounds like heaven.

Which would mean that the current rehearsal process qualifies as earth, purgatory or hell. Take your pick.

--

Confrontation among co-workers is never pretty. Even uglier in theatre. Because the personal(ities?) and the business intertwine in a kind of Medusa headpiece, all vipers hissing at each other when the pressure is on.

--

I have returned, as I always do, to my refuge of books. A friend from last show's cast dropped by today with his new puppy and some gifts. Among those gifts was a paperback copy of my favorite E. B. White book, The Trumpet of the Swan.

I had to read the thing in sixth grade, right between The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen. Loved it. If I get the chance, I may reread it tonight, between The Fantastic Toy Shoppe and Holiday Follies.

--

Back on track as far as the identity theft goes. Got a new driver's license and the other cards followed, and I've reverted to an older, torn wallet. New cards, old wallet. One in, one out.

My cubicle is a mess. Props for the holiday touring show have been my main assignment for the last week or so. There's a narrow trail from the entrance to my chair, and piles everywhere else. There's a pair of scissors on the floor. There are no longer scissors on my floor.

--

Have the third in a five-workshop series this evening at a local community center. Because we originally advertised that it was going to be taught by another TCTC staff teacher, who specializes in (among other things) teaching music and voice, the parents have begun to complain that they aren't getting what they paid for. Little me, in a room with six kids for an hour, and only acting exercises to show for it.

So: Today, I launch my new campaign to teach children how to sing and dance. In the remaining three classes. I feel unqualified despite qualifications--after all, my degree is in Theatre, not Music, and not Musical Theatre. I have three hours, over the next few weeks, to teach six kids at least one song, voicewise, dancewise. Nothing else for it.

Sometimes life is a test. To see how well you achieve goals beyond your grasp. To see how you perform without a script. Or how good you are at faking your own abilities.

Talk the walk.

--

In my little world of books, I can read about experimental theatre, post-apocalyptic survival, mute swans, and jungle doctors performing Frankenstein-esque operations on unsuspecting natives. It's a good little world.

Good little escape, too.