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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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I'm not afraid of turkeys.