Acting Class

About a month ago I signed up for an acting class at a local theater, and three weeks ago I went to the first class.

That was the week of the Great Flu, and maybe it was fitting, because I exercised my acting talent (such as it is) to its fullest that evening as I pretended to my utmost that I felt fine and hadn’t spent almost the entire day in bed. Actually, I pretended so hard that at the end of the class I really did feel better—though if we’d gone beyond an hour, I might’ve passed out from the effort.

This intense concentration only enhanced the strangeness of the experience, however. The class started on center stage, directly beneath a crowded grid of stage lights. Among the typical spotlight-type fixtures were scattered a few very different ones—chandeliers and smaller lamps crammed in, ready to descend during the next night’s play. I arrived first but was soon joined by a classmate, a perky lady who was perfectly fit, dressed, and styled. Ready to be the town’s newest starlet. “Hi, I’m Anne!” she said as she sat in the row of prepared seats. “I’m so excited for this class! Aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. (Thinking: “I can’t feel my nose and I think I may have rubbed it off. Can you tell me if it’s still there? Oh wait, there it goes again. Never mind.”)

As the rest of the class filtered in, I could tell we had several things in common. We were all women, young and full of jittery excitement about this foray into theater. Many of us were working full-time and looking for something exciting to do (cube-dwellers by day, prima donnas by night!), and almost everyone had the same background in theater: we had always wanted to do it but didn’t have time going through school. The one guy in our class of nine arrived a little after class started. He looked eighteen or nineteen and was rather shy, especially in a room full of watchful women.

Our teacher, Paige, came in bouncing off the walls and stayed that way. She spent a couple minutes getting to know our names, got them mostly right, and then introduced herself and moved on with gusto.

The first order of business was a tour of the theater, and we followed Paige’s enthusiasm all around the building, which turned out to be full of poster-decked hallways, crammed rooms, and shadowy stairwells. We went from the attic’s mirrored dressing rooms to the main floor’s stage, surrounded by dark stairs and hidden wings, and then to the basement’s maze of prop rooms, wardrobe rooms, and rehearsal hall. Every time I thought we’d come to the last room, Paige would lead us on through another door we hadn’t noticed before, into another room filled with wonders. Every wall seemed to have a different mural, and the green room smelled of turpenoid and oil paint. There were racks and racks of costumes – 20s flappers to wizard robes to victorian bustles – smelling of dust and makeup, an entire wall of shoes, a small closet filled with wigs sitting on white styrofoam heads, miscellaneous furniture across each floor, and every random prop possible, from tiny glass perfume bottles to paintings to baseball bats to enchanted roses under glass domes (“Guess what play we used that in!” Paige howled). I wasn’t sure whether it was my flu or the eclectic bizarreness of this amazing world I’d just landed in, or both, but the tour left me dizzy. Nothing we passed was organized or new and perfect; everything slightly off-kilter, bunched and stacked haphazardly, held together with twine and labeled with tape and sharpies. But there was such an air of possibility hovering over everything. With just a little magic, these scuffed slippers could grace a ballroom’s floor, and that table and chair could be a cozy room in a house with only imaginary walls—part of something important happening to living, feeling characters. All the costumes and props seemed to be breathing their dreams into the air, waiting, just waiting, to be carried onto the stage and made new again; waiting for their turn in the most real game of pretend.

This was a very different sensation than the one that I feel when I sit at the computer each day and sift out errors and inefficiencies in language and code. In a theater’s basement there are no global style standards, no strict scripting logic. The contrast was exhilarating.

We were all hooked after the tour; we put up with additional weirdness without complaint. For the rest of the time we learned a warm-up chant (almost as strange-sounding as vocal performance majors’ warmups) and played some quick-thinking improv games. But Paige could have done anything with us, we were there to stay—at least until 6:30, when real life intervened and we all reluctantly returned to our cars.

I walked to mine singing quietly to myself, feeling very tired (and congested) but happy. I wondered why exactly I was so happy, when I had started out feeling excited but skeptical. I had found the world of theater a strange one that night, but perhaps that was only because it was strange for me to realize that there are adults who spend their lives working at my favorite childhood pastime. Must all childhood pastimes be shoved aside after graduation? As much as it is hidden behind constructs of career and professionalism and money, I say imagination is still a valid part of life—and I aim to enjoy this new outlet.

Of course, as with everything, balance is key, and I have a very tenacious grip on reality that won’t permit me to become a flaming thespian, but I have to admit . . . I like it. I like it a lot.

Spring? Maybe?

Even though it snowed today and is likely to snow again later this week, for the past several days the ratio of accumulated snow to melted snow has tipped distinctly towards the melted end.

I noticed this first when I was driving home from work the other day. One of the roads I take always has some kind of construction happening, either on the road or right next to it, and this time as I drove by I saw what looked like misshapen concrete blobs lining the gutter, as if waiting to be installed in some horrible bit of modern landscaping. “Those are the ugliest rocks I’ve ever seen,” I thought. A moment later I realized that they weren’t rocks at all; they were the remnants of snowdrifts, covered in muck spewed from weeks of passing cars. I kept my eyes peeled for more as I continued the drive, and they were all over: piles of shrunken snowflakes, every color of dirt, lining the gutters, piled up beside driveways and mailboxes, and miserably seeping black tendrils of water across parking lots.

You see, the snow here isn’t like snow in New Mexico. It doesn’t sneak in on weekends and then evaporate magically before the face of a new day’s sun. Utah snow rolls in, stern and inexorable, promptly digging in its trenches and gearing up for an entire season of squatting. It clings in place long after its beautiful white face is ruined by footsteps and grime. Shovel it, stomp paths through it, it doesn’t care—you aren’t warm enough to melt it all away, and reinforcements are coming. Even now, when it’s hardly distinguishable as snow at all, it lives on; limping, hunchbacked, shriveled, and filthy. But it’s dying, slowly but surely now, as February wanes, and beneath it something is emerging that I hadn’t thought beautiful before: mud.

Yes, mud. There’s something wonderfully alive about it, even if it’s not yet freckled with tiny green leaflets. I can almost see a green tinge on the mountains where the snow has receded. Perhaps it’s an anticipatory illusion, but I just know those plants are there, right under the surface, just waiting for a little more encouragement to show themselves to the waking world. I can almost hear them breathing.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this the past couple days as I’ve been lying here in my bed, sick with a coldish/fluish/yuckish thing. I won’t be sick forever, and it won’t be winter forever. The plants in my room are starting to perk up. Aslan must be on the move again.

Maybe there will be spring this year after all.

There are 51 states now. Who cares?

My home page at work is a corporate website that frequently features articles on what various wings of the company are doing to save the world. The blurb above the link on one of them today made me almost burst out laughing:

“There are over 37 million Americans living in the State of Poverty any given day. Who cares?”

I just had to share that with you all.

Beating the Winter Blahs

In spite of all the horn-tooting and welcoming the new year that happens every January 1st, the first couple months of the year always seem so dreary and colorless, like a two-month hangover after a string of frantic holiday parties. (Of course, that’s a theoretical simile there, seeing how I’ve never had a hangover.) But it needn’t be that way! The first step to beating the winter blahs is to admit that they exist and stop blaming your irritability on things like (and I’ve done this before) “everyone around me is inordinately stupid.”

After that, I find that the most effective way to escape the blahs is to quickly bury myself into one or more all-encompassing interests until March. In the past I’ve done series of books, TV shows on DVD, a video game, or intensive crafty projects. This temporary obsession uses all of the resources of time and energy not already devoted to essential activities (Sundays, Church responsibilities, work/school, a few social obligations, and sometimes eating and sleeping), so I don’t have a minute to spend thinking about how dark and frightful the weather outside is. In choosing a medium of mind burial, I make sure it’s long enough to last me till spring, which always turns my inclination to other things. If it’s a book, I make sure it’s a series (but not too long—to finish Wheel of Time before spring, I’d have to start at the beginning of the previous autumn); if it’s a project, I try to time it so I’ll get it done before Spring fever strikes, or I’ll have project remnants cluttering my space the rest of the year. For me, distraction is a great method for avoiding blah.

This year’s fixations are pretty evenly divided between Kindgom Hearts and a sci-fi TV show my roommate has on DVD. Have no fear, guilt over my own laziness keeps me from spending too much time on either, but it feels nice to bury myself in something frivolous and satisfying once the day’s have-tos are done.

Another thing I’ve been trying this year is to have less hateful thoughts about the weather. As Ryan and Erin dourly observed, Utah is a barren (or it SHOULD be barren), icy, snowy wasteland all winter long and sometimes unfairly far into the spring. This winter has been the snowiest I’ve ever seen in my entire life. But hey! That doesn’t mean I can’t find things I like about it! I try to force the energy of my furious irritation into grateful thoughts. I’m so glad to have not slid to my doom into oncoming traffic. I’m glad that when I scrape frost and snow off my windshield, it removes the thick layer of salt that my ancient windshield wipers can never rub away. I’m glad that a little boy next door shovels our sidewalk, even though it needs shoveling again in half an hour. Most of all, I’m happy to have two roommates and a couple of nice neighbors who will shove my car out into the street when it gets stuck after the latest dump.

Ok, so some of those were less grateful than others. Most of them have to do with driving in the snow, which is the really unfun part, though to be honest I’m getting quite good at it now. But I’ve decided that I can’t do this again. I’ve got to either move to a more New Mexico-oriented climate, work from home, or live close enough to walk to work for future winters. Hey, another thing to be grateful to the snow for: my career aspirations are slightly more defined! Positive thinking works wonders, folks.

I hope this newest post brightens up the family blog. Dunno about you, but new articles always make me happy. Whether or not these anti-blah methods work for you, to all my fellow sufferers, don’t worry: March and green grass and birthdays lie ahead, a golden, glowing orb in the gray continuum of time. Me, I’m going to dig myself a cozy burrow and wait for time’s inexorable march to pull me there.