A trip back in time... to the 7th grade

I'm home for Christmas, which means rummaging through old writings.  From my 7th grade journal:

Small Portraits

Sometimes I think my neighbor Mrs. Fretch must be closely related to a hummingbird, with movements as sure, as swift, as perpetual.  She rarely sits still, and even then, her hands are busy shelling beans, playing piano, knitting.  She seems intent on not losing a second to inactivity, and her impeccable but inviting home, as well as her rich gardens full of lovely flowers and fresh vegetables, pays tribute to her energy.  Though her face and hands show signs of the many summers she has seen, her mind is sharp and quick, and she talks as easily about the Backstreet Boys as she does about the Mideast peace accord.  Mrs. Fretch moves as relentlessly as the waves, and I think she moves in an ocean so full and rich that she never intends to reach the shore.

More than notes on paper or pleasant sounds or technical precision, his music is an extension of his being.  When my cousin plays his French horn, his shoulders rise with each crescendo, his body sways, even his eyebrows lift and fall as if to underscore the dynamics of the piece.  It is clear that he becomes his music, and his music is his life.

My cat surveys her surroundings with regal disdain.  Her living room kingdom seems in order, and that pleases her.  She turns gracefully, rearranging her coiled tail to almost cover her eyes.  Her human subjects, scattered about reading or playing, seem willing to respect her privacy.  Of course, humans do serve certain menial purposes in life.  They seem good at providing food on demand, scratching that persistent itch under her chin, or even, if need be, providing a warm lap on a cold night.  That, of course, is all that humans are good for, she thinks as she drifts off to sleep.

If he could, my youngest neighbor, Jason, would practice basketball instead of eating, sleeping, or, of course, attending school.  Every day you can spot him by his basketball net, alone or with friends.  Over and over he dribbles, he shoots, he tries again.  From spots all over his wide driveway he practices fancy footwork, easy lay-ups, clever trick shots.  His determination is fierce and almost palpable.  Inside his head, you can almost hear the announcer shout with joy when he makes that incredible shot.  Inside his head, you know he is dreaming almost impossible dreams.  Inside his head, you know he is a star.

I'm fine with my Diet Coke, thanks anyway

"Oh, I'll fix that."
"Well, we'll fix that by the time the night's over."
"Don't worry, I'll fix that in no time."
"What's wrong with you?!"

-- some responses I've gotten at holiday (and other) parties when people scoff at my choice of Diet Coke as a drink and force me to say the sentence that oddly seems to turn me into a scary foreign alien to them: "I don't drink."

But what exactly is it that these would-be fixers think needs fixing?  Maybe when someone tells you they don't drink, the fixing has already been done.  Maybe nothing is or ever was broken and in need of fixing.  Would these same people force me to eat a bowl of corn flakes if I announced I didn't eat cereal?  Once at a show's opening night party, a producer (who I'd worked for several times) tried to force me to drink.  Not drinking is not now nor has it ever been a big deal to me, and I politely declined several times, trying to laugh it off at first -- each time with the producer shoving the drink into my hand with more intensity and more forcefully trying to get me to throw it back.  Realizing the moment had turned bizarrely intense, I looked over to a mutual friend on the show who had always been my cheerleader and supporter, hoping he would help me out and get her to back off, and he muttered, "It's just one drink -- just drink it" before turning away uncomfortably.  So what if it's just one drink?  If I don't want it, why is that her problem?  I walked out of the party, and that was the last time I saw any of them.

I've spent many a happy evening in a bar with friends piling on the Diet Cokes while they drink more interesting drinks, and it's a complete non-issue for everyone.  But there are always those people who just can't seem to deal with other people not drinking.  Why?  I don't think anyone is broken because they enjoy a few drinks.  Or because they don't like brussels sprouts, or ballet, or reading.  I don't shove my Faulkner book or Baryshnikov tapes in their face (not that I have them handy at parties), declaring I'll fix them.

I'm not sure which of us is more uncomfortable in those situations where people feel the need to "fix" my non-drinking, but they're clearly telling me that not only do they think there's something wrong with me but that it makes them uncomfortable to be around me because of it.

So I've got an idea.  I'll be me; you be you.  We'll both be cool with our differences, and those differences will make the world a more interesting place full of surprises.

Forgotten freedoms

Today I had a two-hour fitting for a 19th-century film.  The two dressing rooms were both full because an actor had been late for his fitting, so with three of us being fitted at the same time, I was the odd one out without a curtained dressing cubicle.  At first the wardrobe department had me slip into another lady's dressing room just to change, and then they'd do the fitting in the main wardrobe room....  But as I was trying on costume piece after costume piece, that quickly turned cumbersome, and a few minutes in I was just changing out in the open.  As I stood in the middle of the large wardrobe room in my tights and a camisole top while my fitter/designer went in search of a skirt for me in the racks upon racks of period clothes, and as I waited around ten feet from a dude who minutes before had been wearing a backwards trucker cap and sagging jeans and was now getting a 19th-century suit tailored to him, and as my fitter and I discussed how low a top I was comfortable with and if I have a large enough bosom to even fill out the low top we were looking at and what kind of bra that would have to be, I thought what a strange job we have in this business sometimes....

Just then, in the middle of the bra discussion, I heard "I hate corsets!!!" come from the curtained dressing room where a young woman, who minutes before had been struggling with her shyness in front of her dresser, was now being transformed into a peasant wench and apparently having her innards squeezed into unnatural (and painful) positions by that dresser fitting her with a corset.  And I know about this torture because I have, at other fitting-room and film-set times, been the girl in the corset.  As I finished up with my own fitting, I could still hear the grumbling and unhappy discomfort noises coming from the nearby fitting room, and I was reminded that, among the many important freedoms that women have garnered over the last few hundred years, it's likely that few provide more daily comfort than one freedom that never showed up on protest signs... freedom from corsets.

Discipline and maturity... or the lack thereof

When I was a child, my mom disciplined me with a highly effective method -- she told me to go to my room and come out whenever I was ready, but I had to be sure I was ready.  Unlike getting a time limit imposed on my room banishment, rather than make me resent the punishment, this engaged my brain -- What did being ready mean?  What had I done or was I still doing that made me not ready?  What would happen if I came out before I was ready?  Most importantly, it forced me to take responsibility for my own behavior -- she was telling me that I had control over myself and my actions, and those actions had repercussions... but not repercussions imposed unfairly or artificially by some external force -- the consequences were all my own making.  Though no disciplinary tactic is one-size-fits-all, I consider the way I was disciplined to be a great gift -- it gave me a huge internal sense of control over myself, my own behavior, and my surroundings, as well as a great sense of responsibility.

When I work with children in my day job auditioning public school students for a scholarship ballet program, I try to utilize the "engage their brains and get them to take responsibility for themselves" method as much as possible.  If I just tell a class of 35 NYC public school students not to talk for the next ten minutes, there's a good chance that's going to do zilch.  However, if I engage them, asking if they think they can be so mature and so responsible that they can get through the next ten minutes without saying a word, and to give me a thumbs up if they think they can, and then if I affirm that I think they can too so they should prove me right, there's a marked difference in their behavior from if I were to just tell them to be quiet.  Perhaps the most important part of the audition process that I apply this method to is when I talk to the kids who get a callback about our school's ballet uniform that we have them then change into.  As most students auditioning have never taken ballet before, a dance uniform is far tighter and more form-fitting than anything they're used to wearing, and it makes many of them highly self-conscious in front of their classmates.  And being uncomfortable and self-conscious for a seven-to-nine-year-old frequently translates into giggling.  So I ask them if they like being laughed at.  And when they all shake their heads no, I ask them to raise their hands and tell me how it feels when they get laughed at.  The most common answers I get are "It makes me feel sad," "bad," and "like I did something wrong" -- and usually they deliver these answers while making the saddest, cutest faces ever as if they're reliving the experiences in their head.  When I ask if they want to make other people feel like what they just described, they say no, and when I ask if they think laughing at others is a mature thing to do, they say no.  So I affirm that they're doing a great job being mature right now, that I know they can keep it up, and that keeping it up means not laughing at others.  And with some occasional gentle reminders throughout the audition to take a deep breath in when they feel the giggles coming on, most children are mature about the uniform from that point on and don't laugh about it.  And I'm happy to say that in all the auditions I've been out to since Fall of 2015, though we've lost a handful of kids to the uniform because they weren't willing to wear it, I've never seen a child not willing to wear the uniform or do the callback because of another child laughing.

...But today was unique....  Today was not only disappointing but infuriating.  The children were fine -- uncomfortable when I first showed the uniforms to them, very mature and quick to sober up about it and accept that it was just a uniform like any sport, and very respectful to each other.  But when one boy came out after changing -- a boy who had shown incredible promise in the first part of the audition -- he was laughed at.  Not by a student... by an adult.  A teacher at the school walked by, saw the boy come out in his uniform, and laughed at him.  This is an adult who should be an example to the students who emulate the behavior of the adults in their lives.  An adult who should provide a safe environment for the students at the school to grow emotionally, socially, and mentally.  An adult who should know better than to make an impressionable child feel "sad," "bad," and "like he did something wrong" because he tried something outside his comfort zone.

The boy would not audition.  Eyes red, he said no and kept shaking his head.  So he changed back into his school clothes and, eyes still red and brimming with tears, went back to class.  What should have been a very positive experience for him -- regardless of whether he was accepted -- will now be a negative memory and a source of pain and discomfort.  Shame on that woman for not having the control and maturity of the eight-year-old students in her school.

Journey to the.... huh?

The following post contains THE biggest spoilers possible for Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, so if you haven't read it and plan on it, come back here after you have....

I'm not very happy with Jules Verne right now.  I feel kind of like I did at the end of the film Secret Window -- or that John Cusack movie that was awesome until the very end when all of a sudden it became the worst movie ever (if you've seen it, you'll know it).  No... that's not quite right.  Those films left me feeling like I wasted my time because the screenwriters thought they were being clever when in actuality they were just choosing a really cheap out because they couldn't think of a better ending.  With Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth I feel more like he got massively bored 220 pages into writing the book and decided he was done.  Perhaps he'd been shut up inside at his desk for too long and one morning looked out his window and saw what a bright and sunny day it was and heard the wind blowing and the leaves rustling and the birds chirping and got a whiff of the dewy grass and thought how much he'd rather spend the day in the great outdoors than inside writing about the earth's interior... and then he looked down at his manuscript and thought, "Gee, this is a lot of pages.  This is enough, right?  I think I'm done.  Yeah, I'm done," and so he splashed a few more words down, shut the manuscript, ran outside, and... ummm... forgot to re-title the book???

Because here's the thing: It's called "Journey to the Center of the Earth."  If I were to make one assumption about the book it would probably be that it's about some characters who, ya know, travel to the center of the earth.  Reasonable assumption, right?  Nope!  Well surely, you think, they must make it close to the center of the earth, even if they don't make it to the exact center point, right?  Yeeeaaahhh.... No.  At their closest point, the Professor tells his nephew "that to reach the interior of the earth we have only five thousand miles to travel!"......  Hey Professor?  It's only 4000 miles to the center of the earth from the surface.  Whatcha doin' up in the sky?

Now lest I sound like I'm being too harsh on one of the fathers of science fiction, allow me to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the first 220 pages and greatly appreciate what Verne contributed to literature.  And I recognize that as I read the "standard" and original 1871 English translation, it is in fact a bogus translation that changes characters' names, adds some passages, and eliminates others. (This is a bizarre and fascinating fact that I discovered as a result of researching the translation history when I became confused by the number of awkward syntax choices in a work of such prominence.  What is purportedly the most widely read English version of the book is not remotely close to a true translation -- yet if the book is as famous as it is even in the English language, and this is the translation that is most commonly printed in mass paperback, then, poor sentence structure or not, with changes large and small, is not this a valid piece of literature in its own right?  I would make the same case for paintings that were thought to be by Picasso or Van Gogh and are discovered to be by other artists instead -- if they brought people pleasure for decades or centuries, then why is their value decreased when the artist is discovered to be someone else?  How much of art's value is based on its aesthetic merits and the reaction it creates in the minds, hearts, and imaginations of its viewers or readers, and how much is based solely on the name behind it?  Why?  But I digress.)  However, a little Googling tells me that even if I were to read the book in its original French (also on my to-do list, because for some odd reason, even later English translations of the book make alterations, including changing a present-tense section to past tense for seemingly no reason -- Why are Verne's original words deemed unsuited for an attempted truthful translation?), I would still find that Professor Lidenbrock (or Hardwigg), Axell (or Harry, or Henry), and Hans make it only 88 miles down before getting spewed out by an active volcano. (They're fine, in case you were wondering --  because they're on a wooden raft....  Despite extensive scientific writing interspersed throughout the book, by 220 pages in we're just going to go with it....)

The characters who were bound and determined to reach the center at all costs -- obsessed at times with their goal and driven to madness with that obsession at several points -- are suddenly perfectly content to leave things as they are and abandon their singular goal.  No second attempt now that they know what they're dealing with, no dissatisfaction, no feeling of incompletion, no nagging "what if"....  I would happily accept that they don't accomplish what they set out to do if they responded to that situation as driven and determined people do -- with emotion.  But the book just ends.  And that left me wanting more and feeling frustrated....

 

SO... in conclusion... the book should be titled "Journey About 3% into the Earth's Mantle and Not At All Into The Earth's Core."

 

That has a catchy ring to it, don't you think?