"Normal"

I saw the movie Gifted this past weekend, starring Chris Evans as the uncle of a highly gifted child named Mary, played by McKenna Grace.  Mary's genius mother committed suicide shortly after Mary was born, leaving Mary in the custody of Mary's uncle Frank.  Frank, who is presumably also a genius since he's taught Mary advanced mathematics himself, has been homeschooling Mary, but now that she's seven, he thinks she should go to "normal" school (which in this film means public school).  Once her genius is discovered in school, news of it spreads to her estranged grandmother, who wants Mary to be educated to her full potential.  Frank isn't a fan of gifted education in much of any form (it's implied he experienced it and didn't like it).  This doesn't make much sense since he's already been teaching Mary at her own pace, but hey, it's a movie, and his polar opposite stance is needed for conflict.  Much family drama and debate ensue.

I went into the film knowing I'd probably have strong reactions to it, since I had heard that it explores how to "best" educate a gifted child -- a subject about which I feel strongly, having experienced both an elementary school education that attempted to "normalize" the student body and a middle school education at a school exclusively for gifted students.

What I saw was a film that dealt with the issue of what's best for a highly gifted child in a more nuanced way than I expected, raising as many questions as answers.  I had heard that the film comes down on the side of bringing down gifted students rather than educating them to their full potential.  Though that's the opinion of Mary's Uncle Frank at the beginning of the film, I did not understand the film to share that belief, and Frank himself changes his opinion along his journey.  So despite being primed to dislike the film, I surprisingly found myself enjoying it.  And after the credits rolled, I couldn't stop thinking about it.  But one particular point bothers me immensely.

On one hand, it's an emotionally manipulative film (I don't consider that necessarily a negative -- the entire purpose of books and movies is usually to manipulate the emotions of the reader and viewer; this film just does that to an extreme and happens to use a subject about which I feel passionately to do it) that turns into a story about a custody battle and family.  In that sense, I found the film highly entertaining, engaging, and full of strong acting performances and directorial choices that made me feel emotionally invested.  As a story about this particular family, the film is extremely enjoyable, even if the little girl playing seven-year-old Mary does have three layers of mascara distractingly caked on (because apparently the makeup department and director think that in order for a seven-year-old to look precociously mature she must wear makeup?).

But on another level, the film also seems to make a statement about education at a school for gifted children -- one that centers around the word "normal."  The film repeatedly refers to Mary as not normal, and her uncle quickly dismisses the idea of sending Mary to a school for gifted children because he says it would reinforce to her that she's not normal and would deprive her of a normal childhood.  When rejecting a scholarship for Mary to the school for gifted children early in the film, her Uncle Frank says, "The last thing [she] needs is reinforcement that she's different."  Though Frank's views evolve throughout the film, the subject of education at a school for gifted children is never revisited, and the film seems to support the notion that gifted schools are not "normal."  And of course "normal" = good.

Normal.  Great.  Let's give everyone a normal childhood.  I have no problem with that.

But wait.  What is "normal"?  Does everyone require the same surroundings and education to achieve "normalcy”?  Do we believe we need to force all students at every level to come out the same in order for them to be "normal," or do we agree that children have unique skills and different levels of ability that span the entire spectrum and therefore that children have different educational needs in order for them to develop at their own "normal"?

In reality, in my experience, a gifted school does not reinforce the notion that a gifted student is "different" but rather provides an environment to reinforce the fact that the student is normal, even if their "normal" isn't the same as everyone else's.  Instead of mocking the difference or trying to ignore it or put it down or hide it or eliminate it, a gifted school simply accepts it and moves forward to develop the student's potential.  No matter how many standard deviations away from "average" a student is, in whichever direction, no student should be made to feel "weird" or like there's something wrong with them for their intellectual ability.  It is the very same environment relative to the student that we would seek for all students at every level of learning, to the best degree possible.

What the film fails to show is the many abnormal effects that in reality frequently result from gifted students being forced into an education system that is unprepared to challenge them in such a way that they can properly develop socially, emotionally, and intellectually.  In fact, many of those effects provide exactly the reinforcement that the student is "different" that Mary's uncle is trying to avoid.  I personally experienced or saw many of these negative effects at my lower school.  Even at the time, I realized that there is nothing "normal" about a young child learning that they can't raise their hand every time they know the answer to a question without other students looking at them weirdly and making fun of them.  That has the abnormal effect of teaching the child to be quiet and withdrawn and teaches them to pretend they don't know things they do.  There is certainly nothing "normal" about teachers mocking a student in class and to other teachers and parents because the student raises their hand too much and asks innocent questions that go beyond a teacher's ability to answer and make the teacher feel uncomfortable around the student.  There is nothing "normal" about an eight-year-old knowing his teacher is wrong and getting in trouble for naively correcting her.  (Mary comments cutely at one point in the film that she has been instructed by her uncle not to correct adults because "no one likes a smart-ass."  In reality, she probably wouldn't have learned this lesson through her uncle telling her.  She would have learned that lesson through it happening at school.  And it wouldn't have been a pleasant, cute lesson to learn.)  There is nothing "normal" about a student being pulled from math class for private tutoring, resulting in weird looks from other kids and being further made fun of and separated as "weird."  In reality, gifted students in "normal" schools frequently wind up ostracized, labeled nerds, bullied, forced into a shyness that is the only alternative to being mocked, left to their own devices to challenge themselves (not all of which are necessarily constructive), forced to hide their intelligence, and unable to develop normal social skills with either children their own age or adults.

And I'll be honest -- that doesn't make for a very fun time at school.  And it certainly didn't make me feel normal.

Students exist all over the spectrum of ability, and that's okay.  Regardless of where they are on that spectrum, children need to learn acceptance of others' unique qualities, they need to be led by teachers who model that acceptance, and they need to receive encouragement to strive for their best.  Every child deserves to be challenged in such a way that they can be themselves and grow -- socially, intellectually, and emotionally -- at the rate appropriate to their individual intellect.  What constitutes "normal" is therefore relative to each child.  When I transferred to a gifted school for middle school -- the type of school that Mary's uncle resists her going to because he wants her to have a "normal" childhood -- it was the most "normal" I had ever felt in school.  We were all in the same boat, and I was just another child like everyone else.  I realized that some people have special gifts in particular areas but special challenges in others.  I had friends who were amazing at math but a bit troubled at effective writing.  Yet no one looked at me or any other fellow student as odd or funny; no one paired me up with another student so I could help them catch up rather than learning more myself as if my knowledge were bad and something that had to be corrected; no one discouraged us from raising our hands as much as possible.  Kids didn't make fun of me. Teachers didn't make fun of me.  I talked and talked and talked instead of keeping it all bottled up for fear of saying something that someone would laugh at, and I had true friends -- other than my teachers -- for the first time in years.  It was a school just like any school, with art class and music class and gym class, where we laughed and ran and squealed as kids should, but it was one that allowed us all to just be "normal."  And it therefore gave us the freedom to develop normal social skills that prepared us for something other than the "nerd" table in life.  Because there's no such thing as "nerds" at a gifted school.  There's just "normal."

A belated Veterans Day post and a timely Thanksgiving Day post wrapped into one

This is my Uncle John when he was in college:
 
Though I first met my uncle when I was a young girl and have always known him as a gentle, kind soul with the most beautiful, blue-green sparkling eyes and the best smile in the world, the person who is "Uncle John" to me has always lived through my mom as much as in the man I see and talk to.  They grew up best of friends, and I've always delighted in the stories she's told me about their wonderful friendship and his great sense of humor.  But I know that I've never quite met the man those stories are about.
 
Before he went to Vietnam, my Uncle John was a genius whose teachers couldn't keep up with him, so he went to a college for advanced math classes while still in high school.  He was also a wonderful artist, whose work I've seen in my Grandma's house.  Once in college, he encountered evil in the form of a professor who told his class he would flunk them all so they couldn't use their college education to defer their draft and would have to go to Vietnam.  The professor kept his word, and my gentle uncle who was too honorable to dodge the draft came back missing two legs and an eye and with shrapnel in his brain and in a coma.
 
Though doctors said he'd never wake up, my mom never gave up on her best friend and visited him regularly, reading to him, playing him comedy records, and talking to him, and he did wake up.  And one day she rolled him in his wheelchair out of the hospital and out into the world to restart his life.
 
I saw my uncle whenever I visited my Grandma growing up, and he was perfectly capable of carrying on normal conversations, with a fierce interest in history and a keen ability to tease my mom as he had when they were kids.  But I still knew he wasn't who he had been in the stories I'd listen to.

Several years ago, my parents, one of my mom's sisters, and I took him to the Canadian beach town where my grandpa spent some growing up years and had built a cottage and where my mom and her siblings had spent time in summers when they were children.  There, as my mom pushed him in his wheelchair fast down the boardwalk and the breeze blew through his hair and a big smile spread across his face and his eyes twinkled like the lake water, I saw in my uncle the long-limbed, vivacious boy I knew he had once been and who I knew through my mom's stories. 

As the effects of the brain damage have gotten worse with age, my Uncle John has moved into an assisted living home with a memory care wing.  This week my parents and I visited him there.

While going on a wheelchair stroll with him in his facility, I saw a woman who sat in her wheelchair, laughing and laughing, seemingly at nothing, and I wondered who she used to be.  Her hair was freshly dyed, and I wondered if someone in her family had done that for her and what stories they could tell about the person she had been, the holidays she had celebrated, the games she had played and jokes she had made.  One man sat facing a wall making repetitive motions with his hands.  A therapy dog jumped onto his lap and I wondered what the dog knew about the man inside that no one else at the facility did.  One very old woman in a different wing outside the memory care unit, just sitting on a bench in the hallway, smiled a huge beautiful smile and asked us how the weather was, and I wished I had time to just stop and talk with and listen to her, and I hoped her family knew how lucky they were that she could have a conversation and understand the moment, and I hoped she had lots of people to talk to about more exciting things than the weather.

When we eventually left and my uncle came with us to the exit, we tried to say our goodbyes, but he stopped talking, turned away, and just kept rolling his chair down the hallway, unable to face the goodbye.

So what I want to say is this: Don't wait for Veterans Day to thank a veteran.  Don't wait until tomorrow to tell someone you love them or show someone you care.  Don't lose your patience with someone who doesn't understand.  Don't make fun of the woman who laughs at things you can't see or the man in a corner who's unresponsive or the guy who asks you how to work the Metro-ticket machine because he can't figure it out.  When someone smiles and says hello, smile and say hello back because you don't know when the last time was that they received a smile or a hello or had anyone around to even talk with about the weather.  Listen to stories, because sometimes that's where people live fullest.

And never take for granted what and who you have and are today.

Happy Thanksgiving.  May it be a meaningful one.

Why you should never trust computers

My friend, via e-mail: My wife and I split up. 

Gmail's "suggested response":  "Congratulations!"

What the heck?!  Are you TRYING to make me lose my friends, Gmail?  Why do you hate me?  Or do you just have a deep-seated cynicism about marriage?  What's your damage, Gmail?  Let's talk it out.

The difference between saying words and making theatre

I saw a play last night.  At least, it was supposed to be a play.  I must admit that my concept of a theatrical "play" carries with it certain connotations, among them the inclusion of design elements. The set and lighting design tell the audience where the characters are, where scenes take place, and even when one scene has ended and another begins, or when the characters leave one location and go to another.  Sound design can do the same.  Costume design gives us clues as to who characters are before they ever say a word -- Are they upper, middle, or lower class?  Are they in power, are they leaders, or are they part of the masses?  What is their profession?  If there are opposing sides, costume design helps distinguish the factions from each other for us.  In any [good] production of West Side Story, you could tell the Jets from the Sharks even if they were all cast as the same race. Costume design is an essential element in creating the potential magic of theatre: Imagine a production of Doubt in which the characters wear t-shirts and jeans, or a production of The Glass Menagerie in which Laura is clad in Converse sneakers, hipster torn jeans, and a hoodie. Or a production of To Kill a Mockingbird in which Mayella Ewell and her father are dressed in expensive silks and furs and Scout wears a puffy satin dress with bows in her hair.  Or a production of Les Miserables in which Jean Valjean wears his tattered rags, beard, and greasy hair from beginning to end and Javert delivers his (spoiler alert) suicide song while looking as perfectly suave and together as when he made his first entrance.  These choices would all radically alter the intention of the playwright.  A play (or musical) is so much more than just the words on the page being said (or sung) on a stage with an audience watching.

Which is why I'm inclined to think of what I saw last night more as a run-through than a play.  A $120/ticket run-through.  There were no programs; the costumes were ill-fitting street clothes that offered no contextual clues as to the characters' profession, location, place in society, loyalties, power level, or even gender and never changed from beginning to end despite an ensemble cast playing multiple characters (think that sounds confusing?  Let me remind you: no programs); the changing set elements consisted of a white plastic folding table and folding chairs; there were no hand props that I can remember; and the only changing costume element was the presence of hats that made no contextual sense and did nothing but confuse me more.  (Imagine, if you will, to call back to an earlier example, one of the nuns in Doubt entering the stage with a cowboy hat, or some of the characters in Les Miserables wearing baseball caps, or Tom in The Glass Menagerie throwing on a construction helmet. These choices all make about as much sense to me as the hat changes I saw on stage last night.)

I might, perhaps, be able to overlook such curious choices (which, to be perfectly honest, came off as lazy to me on the director's part rather than simply strong choices that I dislike or disagree with) if the direction of the actors was superb. 

It was not.

To begin with -- literally, to begin with -- I could not understand half the words one of the actresses said in the first scene.  The first job of an actor is to be heard, so if you can't speak... game over.  Furthermore, with an ensemble cast playing multiple roles, and with zero help from costumes to distinguish these roles from each other, it is imperative that the actors make their different characters distinct from one another, which there didn't seem to be any effort to do.  Not being familiar with the play beforehand (it is a classic, though I don't think it should ever be necessary that audiences have any familiarity whatsoever with a play before seeing it), I was at a complete loss as to where one character ended and another began when played by the same actor.  Adding to my confusion was my inability to grasp if the male characters were being played by women to be gender neutral or if their gender was actually being switched to female, since the pronouns were switched to female but without any accompanying hint that these characters were actually females.  This could have been answered immediately with costume design, but since there was no costume design, that left it up to the director and the female actresses, who did nothing to clarify the matter.

I'm all in favor of what Stratford Festival did this summer with gender-bending casting.  They had a female play Prospero as a woman in The Tempest, while on another stage women played male characters in Julius Caesar as men, but without throwing their voices low or wearing beards or doing anything to make the audience feel they were watching a woman straining to be a man.  The women, clad as men, carrying the swords of men, walking as men, speaking the words of men, simply became their characters.  Meanwhile another production at Stratford, The Comedy of Errors, created an entirely gender-fluid society where no one was distinctly male or female.

These were all choices, and whether the audience liked or disliked the choices, the directors' visions for those productions were distinct, purposeful, and communicated clearly through direction, acting, and design elements.

In this production, however, I found the issue of gender simply a muddled mess, and if the director had a point to make, or even a distinct choice, it was lost on me.  Every time I heard a character referred to as "she," I scrambled to figure out which actress played the character and whether the character was actually a woman or just pronouned as such because of the gender of the actor playing him/her.

At intermission, I asked my fiancé if he understood what was going on plot-wise (I did not).  He said he had trouble staying awake through most of it and didn't have a clue what was happening beyond the very general blurb being used to describe the show in press materials.  We might have read the program to help us, but... no program.

By the end of the show we were even more confused, especially since we both thought the main character died but then clearly was alive in the following scene (this is where design elements come in handy -- a quick look at the script this morning tells me that the scene where we thought he was killed was actually the director merging the end of one scene into the beginning of another scene with some very confusing theatrics).

I read in and out of the script this morning.  Not only did the play I read make infinitely more sense than the one I saw (It has settings! And props! And actions! And characters!), but, hmm, how do I put this.... I have a really good memory, and what I read on the page is a bit too different from the words I heard on the stage last night, and I am quite sure that's not actor error.

In short, for $120, I expect a heck of a lot more on stage than actors saying words, not all of which are even the words the playwright wrote, with little design elements and weak directorial choices.

And the real shame in all this: One of my favorite stage actors is in this play.  He is fantastic, as always.  I planned on writing a very different blog post about this production.  But it turns out one actor cannot save a dismal production.

Life overheard

My day was pretty nondramatic. The biggest thing that happened to me was that my wedding went from being some ephemeral thing at the end of an eight-years-and-counting engagement to being an actual tangible thing in the planning stages and I discovered how much alcohol costs.  But one thing I've always loved about New York City is that no matter how routine your day is, all around you there are people who are living moments in their lives that should be feature films starring Tom Cruise as a hit man or Colin Ferrell under timed pressure or Bruce Willis saving the day or Al Pacino being scary or in one case Jon Heder doing whatever it is Jon Heder does....

 

The bits of conversations I overheard in the city today from people having more dramatic days than mine:

 

"Do it quickly or I'll kill all your family." (said by tall guy with bleached hair channeling Cruise's Collateral character)

~~

 

"Is that a serious answer? Consider your next one very carefully." (said into phone by Kiefer Sutherland type. I imagine Colin Ferrell was at the other end in a phone booth somewhere.)

 ~~

 

"The pedestal that I had her on? I knocked that down with mushrooms." Friend nods wisely like this makes perfect sense. 

~~

 

"How is she?"

"Considering she was hit by a semi, not so bad.  If you're just asking the question generally, my answer is she was hit by a semi."

~~

 

"F*&k you." -- said by a random guy on the street to me as we passed. (This wasn't dramatic -- but I did wonder what was going on with him.)

Something for the Monday blues

Today is a particularly dreary Monday.  So here is (I think) a particularly happy set of photos from my vacation this summer (some taken on a sunscreen-covered blurry iPhone; some taken on an actual camera).  A little whimsy to counter the dreary:

Treasure in the woods:

This parking spot is taken:

 

A mystical creature frozen in a tree during the day, waiting for nighttime to come alive:

 

The  "wait how did I get this??" shot:

 

A dog playing in the water at the bottom of a waterfall:

 

A tree playing in the water at the top of a waterfall:

 

Making friends at Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary:

 

Some pigs visiting the human zoo:

 

A beautiful soul:

 

 The handsome Captain Dan, looking awfully proud of himself:

 

A bunch of people lined up to watch a pig take a bath in a kiddie pool with a sign labeled "Clothing Optional Beach."  Because that pig is Esther the Wonder Pig, and she's saved a whole bunch of lives, including every non-human animal at the farm that bears her name.  The biggest pig celebrity there is. Literally.  She's about 700 pounds:

 

Theatre gone wrong

Tonight I saw the most mind-numbingly boring, pointless, poorly directed play I have ever seen and the second show I've ever walked out of at intermission.  Most of the blocking was two characters standing in a flat line talking with nothing happening physically except the actors occasionally turning out to mug at the audience like Mr. Roper on Three's Company (except not meant to be a specific gag like Mr Roper's bit, which I also hated, but at least it had a reason behind it).  That actually seemed like fitting blocking, though, since nothing happened in the dialogue either.  Nothing.  At one point an actor has the unfortunate task of turning out to the audience as her character asks, "Why are you all here?" during a scene that was particularly painful in its boredom.  What ran through my brain was "because I can't walk out until intermission!!!!" 

I don't envy her that line.  That's just cruel to give an actor that line in such a dull play.

A return question that popped into my head was "What did you all DO during rehearsal??"  Or more specifically, what did the DIRECTOR do?  I have the distinct feeling that for at least several long scenes, he said, "Hey, you stand here, and you stand here, and neither of you move, and say all your lines in the scene... Okay yeah, so I think we're ready to open."

I have to admit I was primed to be dubious of the direction by the pre-show music, which is usually used before a show to set a thematic tone, indicate the temporal setting, or just set a general vibe.  This pre-show playlist was the most random selection of songs I have heard used as pre-show.  I thought perhaps its relation to the play would become apparent once the play started.

It didn't.

Also, if you don't know how to end a scene, act, or play, and you're thinking, "Hmm, my actors are onstage and I want them to be offstage," the answer is not to randomly have the characters dance off stage in a bizarre moment that makes the audience wonder, "Is this in character?  Is this the actors as themselves?  Why are they dancing off stage?  Can they not do a blackout or fadeout?  Did the actors just get trapped onstage due to a stage manager mistake?  Is this really happening?  Did I fall asleep from boredom and I had the bad fortune to dream an even worse version of the play I'm at?  Will I ever wake up and be able to go home???"

Before the play, I was talking with someone about how we couldn't figure out from what we had read if this was a comedy or a drama.  I think now the reason for that is because it's neither.  The only real laugh came from a coincidentally topical joke that was neither written nor directed for a laugh and wouldn't have gotten one before last week, and no show this boring and unfunny can be considered a comedy.  However, the characters are all archetypes rather than real characters and they don't seem to feel or think like humans or make the audience care about them or what happens to them (DOES anything happen to them?  Do they make anything happen?  Doesn't seem like it to me), and since there IS no drama, I couldn't call it a drama either.

I recently witnessed an unfortunate audition where an actor had failed to prepare a monologue and in its stead just talked for a few minutes.  It was repetitive, lacked an arc, lacked conflict, and lacked a story.  Just like this play -- this professional, Off-Broadway play by a major playwright.

I don't get it.

But then, I also didn't get the art I passed on the way home with two fried eggs on a woman's boobs, so maybe it's me.

Like a normal girl

Today Facebook reminded me of the post below from several years ago.  And since it appears I never posted this on my blog, I'm going to do so now:

A mom, sharply, to her daughter, who was skipping, galloping, and chasséing down a store aisle: "Just walk like a normal girl!!"

A heartfelt thank you to my parents for never telling me to do anything like a normal girl. I remember many a dance down a grocery store aisle, and not one was ever reprimanded.

Also today, my parents e-mailed me some photos from when I was a toddler, and as I looked at them, I was reminded of how when I was very little, I'd frequently start the day in a shirt, skirt, and tights, and by the end of the day, photos and home videos would show that my skirt had been shed somewhere along the way and I was happily clothed in just a shirt and my baggy white tights.  The skirt had no doubt gotten in the way somewhere along my day of running and dancing and somersaulting and adventuring, and so off it went (hopefully not in a grocery store aisle, but who knows).  It was a great look, really.  I'm not sure why it never caught on in the fashion world.

I'm sure many little girls do this, but as I sat looking at the photos, wearing leggings and a Disney T-shirt, I realized I haven't changed much since then.  I just substituted leggings for the tights and dispensed with the skirt all together.  And as I type this, one leg is hanging over the armrest of the couch, as has been usual since I was little.  Thankfully, my parents never told me I had to be normal.  I can't do "normal."  I don't get "normal."

Perhaps that's why my cat is such a weirdo.  He thinks he's a dog and barks and growls and chases balls and jumps for them, and when he wants you to play with him he'll hug your arm tightly with both of his front legs and lightly bite your shoulder.  He's definitely not normal.  I tell him that frequently, but I mean it as a compliment.  I'll never tell him to be normal.  We're perfect for each other.

And though I look up and down a grocery store aisle before I do it now, I'll never stop dancing down grocery store aisles either.

I'm not going to hang my hat on the wisdom of this quote

There's a poster in the offices of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation with a picture of Matthew McConaughey giving a talk.  Similar posters of other stars adorn the walls, but unlike most of them, McConaughey's has a quote on the poster -- indicating, presumably, that he said something of great worth that bears repeating to all who walk through the building's walls.... The quote is "I'm looking for things to hang my hat on humanity."

I'm baffled.  The great meaning of this sentence eludes me.  In fact, the very basic grammatical meaning of this sentence eludes me.  What is being hung on what here?  What happens to the things he's looking for?  Do they get a hat hung on them?  Do they get hung on humanity themselves?  It seems there are three things here: the things he's looking for, his hat, and humanity.  And I don't understand what their relationship with each other is.

There are several potential morals of this story that jump out to me:

1. If you want to be an award-winning famous movie star, don't overthink your lines.  Just say them, even if they don't make any sense.

 

2. You should always research the origin of quotes before posting them (something no one on Facebook appears ever to do).  I can't find any mention of this particular quote on the internet, which certainly doesn't mean he didn't say it, but what I do find mention of on the internet are alternate versions of this quote by McConaughey that make some sense, including "I want to be able to hang my hat on the humanity of the character every day" and "I'm hanging my hat on reality and humanity, not morality."

 

3. Learn your lines verbatim!!!!  Also at the SAG-AFTRA offices, I listened to two older actors who have been working regularly for decades discuss how disappointing it is that young actors these days paraphrase everything and are allowed to get away with it, and how that changes the rhythm and music of the dialogue and isn't fair to the writers (I agree with this wholeheartedly).  So, assuming he has in fact said all three versions of this quote and tries to use it as a stock line in interviews, I'm going to assume this quote is hanging in the offices as a prime example of what happens when you try to get by with paraphrasing and it goes horribly wrong....  In fact, I'm going to leave you with this attempt by McConaughey at the same quote after he apparently ran it through a chopper, a dryer, a blender, a dicer, a car wash, and a junkyard compactor and the poor hat doesn't even get to hang on anything at all:  "What I was really looking for is some things where I could hang my hat and be the architect of my man, and it's based on humanity and reality."

Plays matter

When I was little, my elementary school did one play a year for every one of the third and fourth grade classes.  That meant six plays per school year in total, performed throughout the year on Friday assemblies.  Fridays were dress-up days, and there was always an assembly.  What any of those assemblies were about, I could not tell you... except for the plays.  I always looked forward to the plays. They were magic.

When I was in the third grade, it was my turn to be in a play, and when my class did The Little House on the Prairie, I was incredibly excited to get not the lead but the biggest part line-wise (34 -- I counted).  It came as quite the surprise to some of my classmates and even teachers who thought of me as the quiet girl to find out that the quiet girl could project. And loved being on stage.  Come fourth grade, I DID get one of the leads.  And I loved it.  Already a performer in dance and in the plays and puppet shows and movies my brother and I made at home, the plays at school offered a way to express myself and tell a story to an audience with not just my body but my voice, too.  It was thrilling, especially in a school where everyone thought of me as shy, a labeled I always hated.

Then came fifth grade, which was awful in many ways, including the fact that the school did a musical: I didn't sing.  Gone was my outlet to act.  And then came my middle school, which I loved except for one major flaw -- theatre was all but nonexistent there, and the only performance opportunity was a musical in the sixth grade -- and I still didn't sing. 

But I still loved the magic of plays.  When my class saw the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre's production of The Glass Menagerie, I was spellbound.  I still remember Tom sitting outside on the fire escape smoking his cigarette in silence as if it were yesterday.  He was no more than 15 feet from me, yet he was decades away, living and breathing in front of me but existing in another time and place and reality.  I was entranced.  That theatre company's Macbeth worked the same magic on me, and it is that production, not the one I saw on Broadway, that stays with me and comes to my mind when I reread or think of the play.

In high school, I finally found my way back to acting on stage in my junior year when I auditioned for When Shakespeare's Ladies Meet and landed the role of Ophelia.  And for the next two years I was happily able to actually express my love of acting regularly -- in plays and drama class.  Not musicals.  In a high school I intensely disliked, the opportunity to act, to tell stories on stage through a character, with a playwright's well-crafted words, was a gift I greatly appreciated.

Theatre took a back seat during college as I focused on television production and direction, and then when I graduated and moved to New York....  Well, in New York, I learned that musicals, not plays, are what make Broadway run. Though I have always loved musicals, too, and I disagree with those who say one discipline or the other is better, the two are simply entirely different things.  Plays are life, in front of you, transforming the audience to a fly on the wall, with an intimacy that musicals by their very nature can rarely attain. Musicals use the music to help set a tone, to give the actors a base on top of which to work, to transport the audience to another dimension where the rules of expression are different.  In plays, the actors must rely on the world and atmosphere they create on the stage with their words and actions, their looks and breaths, their silences and impulses, to achieve an emotional state rich enough that the audience is ensnared.  There are no grins plastered on in plays, no kicklines, no jazz hands, no breaking the fourth wall to smile out at the audience in song, no thrilling high belted notes or flying through the air, no dramatic bass drums or eerie violins or perky piccolos....

Plays are life, as full and rich as can be, without the outlet of song and dance to ease the overflow of emotion.  If Fred Astaire could not break out in dance in Swing Time's tense "Never Gonna Dance" lead-in scene, which feels like a snowball gathering weight as it rolls down a hill until he has no other choice but to explode or dance, what would he do?  What about Gene Kelly, as he mourns the loss of his relationship with Lise in An American in Paris?  Plays answer that question.

Well, the best plays do.  I have to admit that when I got to New York City, I was disappointed to find that plays here are underappreciated not just by audiences but by producers.  Theatrically trained actors are often pushed aside and relegated to minor roles or Off-Broadway plays while the big, dramatic, weighty Broadway roles too often go to television and film actors who lack the theatrical training and technical tools to do the role justice and explore the nooks and crannies of a character to its fullest potential on stage.  Having a "name" attached seems to mean more than casting the actor who can best play the role.  As a result, I found myself thinking the plays I saw back home in Indiana contained a much higher level of acting ability for the stage than many of the near-unaffordable ones produced here.  Consequently, over the years of being in New York, my love of seeing plays has dwindled somewhat, as most plays here have become either high concept -- as if they felt the need to belligerently assert their right to exist here in such a competitive field, and in so doing, forgot about character and story-telling -- or cast with screen actors.  There are of course exceptions: I've enjoyed wonderful Broadway straight-acting performances by Julie White, Raul Esparza, and Arnie Burton, loved one movie-star-led Broadway play (The Elephant Man), and in one major Off-Broadway play thoroughly admired the performance of a film actor, Richard Armitage, who was actually a classically trained theatre actor first.  But the Broadway plays that allow theatre talent of that level to shine are just that -- exceptions.  This seems doubly true if the play in question is a drama or dramedy.  In fact, there are currently 30 Broadway shows running, according to the Internet Broadway Database.  Three of them are plays.  Of those, one stars a movie actor who is theatrically untrained and inexperienced, one falls under the umbrella of "spectacle" (Harry Potter), and one is a broad physical comedy starring theatre actors.

The concept of seeing a Shakespeare play, or even a classic like The Glass Menagerie, with all bona fide A-list-quality theatre actors instead of television or movie stars seemed impossible.

And then, three years ago, I went with my parents to Canada's Stratford Festival, where we saw Hamlet.

It was everything a play should be: exciting, unexpected, intensely human -- delving into the complexities of where an individual goes emotionally when they can't erupt into song and dance as a release.  Jonathan Goad's Hamlet was one of the most complex, nuanced, fully articulated and lived-in performance I've seen in theatre, using every tool of voice, face, and body to inhabit his Hamlet, which I raved about in a previous blog post and so will not do again here (much).  In fact, it was his first monologue that hooked me, for rather than delivering it statically as too many actors might do, it felt almost like a musical number in its movement, bringing the audience along on its ebbs and flows.  I had never seen a soliloquy elevated to the emotional level of a song before, and it left me on the edge of my seat.  And it wasn't just Hamlet who was excellent but the entire ensemble -- none of them TV stars, all of them trained, all of them as good as any movie star.

Three years later, after convincing my fiancé to take our first ever vacation together (not an easy feat, and I will find room in another blog post to talk about that), and selecting the Stratford Festival as our anchor destination, I had an opportunity to see two more plays at Stratford, both again starring Goad, this time as Brutus in Julius Caesar and Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Both plays in under 24 hours.

On the same stage.

Yes, at 8pm he was Brutus, and at 2pm the next day he was Atticus.  Cassius, played by Irene Poole, became the adult Jean Louise Finch.  Marc Antony, played by Michelle Giroux, became Maudie Atkinson.

It was a stunning transformation, and even if I hadn't loved the plays on their own, that ability to completely shift styles, eras, and dialects, to become a completely different, unrecognizable character while telling a story, is everything that made me fall in love with the magic of theatre so many years ago.  Even knowing the casting, my fiancé was unable to see or hear any of Poole's Cassius in her Jean Louise.  Goad's Atticus was gentle, strong, loving, warm, and fiercely moral, with a fire underneath his calm -- nothing of his Brutus remained.

One of the discoveries my fiancé (who is a former Broadway stage manager) and I made on this first-ever vacation was that over our years together, though I have come home many times geeking out about a production I just saw and talking his ear off while he does his best to focus on what I'm saying and ignore the TV screen even though he doesn't really know what I'm talking about, his disinterest in paying to see theatre has resulted in him not having actually ever SEEN a performance -- play or musical -- with me that I then geeked out about for hours on end.  So upon seeing Caesar and making this realization, he at first laughed and loved being part of my geeking.  By the next morning after seeing Caesar, however, when we went down to the hotel café, he was pretty much out of anything to say back. He was also pretty much asleep. And there were home-made chocolate chip pastries, so I really can't blame him for wanting to focus on those.

But I wanted to talk more.  In fact, I'd had less sleep than he because I was on such a theatre high, and I woke up right where I'd left off the night before, going a mile a minute, needing to discuss it.

Enter the magic of theatre...

The sole purpose of our hotel's existence was for Stratford Festival guests, so everyone there had seen or was about to see plays.  For the second morning in a row, a couple (different from the previous morning's) was asking strangers if they'd seen Julius Caesar.  The previous morning I had engaged in conversation with the couple asking but obviously hadn't had anything to contribute about the play myself, and the couple had expressed their regret that they'd be leaving before they could hear my opinion.  This time, however, with a different couple asking about the same play, I jumped on the chance to talk about it, just as my fiancé jumped on his chocolate pastry and probably wondered why I was talking to strangers when it was too early for him to even open his eyes.

And half an hour later, we were still talking -- about Caesar, about Mockingbird (which I had yet to see), about their themes and importance, about theatre in general.  And my fiancé was an enthusiastic participant, too.

Within a few hours, we saw To Kill a Mockingbird.  And my fiancé absolutely loved it and cried, and I again geeked out about what we'd seen, and he got right into the spirit of it, even expressing how much he'd love to see Goad as the Henry Fonda role in his personal favorite Broadway play, 12 Angry Men.  And he even admitted he was happy I'd made him come on this vacation, and especially to Stratford.

I don't know that, with the current mindset of casting screen actors onstage in New York, a couple days of seeing straight theatre on Broadway could have such an effect... whether Broadway plays could make strangers reach out for intellectual and emotional conversation, could make a seasoned, dispassioned ex-Broadway stage manager tear up, could unite an entire city around one theatre company.  I certainly don't think a cast of TV and film actors could fully perform Julius Caesar at 8pm and To Kill a Mockingbird at 2pm the next day and do both roles full justice.  And I wish Broadway could find its way back to loving theatre for the effect it has on people more than for the money it takes from people.

Because whether it's at an elementary school, regional theatre, or one of the world's most famous stages, the power of theatre to provoke thought, unite, connect, and inspire never ceases to amaze me.

Perspectives

I spent fifteen minutes trying to shoot around this kid, annoyed that he was getting in the way of the shots that I wanted.  Then I decided to just go with the flow -- just like he was.

And it turned out to be my favorite picture from the trip.

Observations from my week

Some of the things I've observed this week:

"All the things"
Has the trend of saying "all the things" been growing slowly over months? Did it just hit at full force? Or has it been around for a while now and I am somehow only just this week becoming aware of it? People say they want "all the things."  A person they like has "all the things."  A talented person is good at "all the things." After a hard day, someone says they accomplished "all the things." Oftentimes you don't even need a sentence to go around it.  If you're feeling overwhelmed, you can just sigh and say, "All the things."  In fact, you can also say, "Hashtag all the things."  Yes, SAY "hashtag," verbally, but that's a different gripe I have.  If you don't know precisely what you want "all the things" to mean, that's okay, too.  As far as I can tell, you can say a restaurant or a book or a movie are "all the things," without meaning anything particular by it.  And if "all the things" doesn't quite fit your needs (maybe you like the expression, but you, like me, were prohibited from using the word "things" in school and it mostly stuck), that's okay -- just substitute another word for "things":  "I'm thinking all the thoughts;"  "He came back with all the arguments;" "My response to you is all the words."

So... is this a derivative of "It gives me all the feels," which I admit to also finding annoying because it cuts out all the specific actual words that exist to describe the actual feelings you are feeling, which are probably not all of them?  Is it a Millennial thing?  Is it related to the hyperbole involved in people saying, "Oh my God I just died.  That actually just killed me.  I'm dead," because they saw a TV show they liked or heard a great song or experienced something else that provoked a strong emotional reaction?  Is there some greater cultural force at work of young people wanting everything and wanting extremes and not being patient and having difficulty being satisfied with, well, NOT all the things?  Does it come from a lack of vocabulary?  Am I just being a crabby older Millennial by being annoyed by it? 

Personal grooming on the train has no limits
There was a girl on my train plucking her eyebrows and shaving.  That's all I have to say about that.

Personal space invasion on the train has no limits
While riding on another train, I felt uncomfortable and instinctively glanced at the phone screen of the man sitting next to me.  He was filming my thighs and crotch.

Sometimes nerds have their day on TV

I had to include this one because the brainy, nerdy, book lover Liza at the center of my favorite TV show, Younger, has spent four seasons with a video-game playing, pot-smoking, emotionally needy and whiny and at times emotionally abusive anti-intellect who never reads and didn't go to college, and while I don't judge him (aside from the emotionally abusive part), I do judge the idea that a woman as intellectually curious and mature as Liza would be with such a man-child who doesn't seem to have any interests other than smoking pot, playing video games, playing dodge ball, going to music festivals, giving and getting tattoos, and having sex.  So when, on last week's episode of Younger, she finally got her happily-ever-now with the equally intelligent, mature (yet fun), curious, complex, and well-read Charles and he romantically recalled that the first time he saw Liza she was reading Look Homeward, Angel at her desk at lunch (his face making it clear that that was the moment he was hooked), it was the happiest a TV show has made me since Gilmore Girls's Jess flirted with Rory by annotating her copy of Howl.  The brain is sexy.  And it makes me happy for a TV show to acknowledge that.

Fun with your heart beat and props

If you slouch down on the couch and put a bookmark on your abdomen, you can see it shake with each heartbeat.  If you think this is a really nifty and delightful discovery and try to do it with a mug of coffee to see if it makes the coffee vibrate like the glass of water in Jurassic Park, you will find that yes it does, but you might also get your significant other looking at you like they've lost all the words and you've lost all the marbles.  But I still recommend it (maybe not with hot coffee though).  I'll be honest -- it's probably a lot more fun than reading Look Homeward, Angel.

My airport day

After meeting my brother's baby (whose adorable self can be seen in my previous post) with my parents and then spending a few relaxing days playing on a beautiful beach, I'm currently spending a not-so-relaxing day at an airport waiting to go back to New York City.  And my flight's been delayed three hours (and counting), and New York's LaGuardia Airport is shut down due to inclement weather systems.  My parents, leaving for their home, left hours ago and are already at their house.  I have three books to read with me, but since flights are getting cancelled left and right and I need to be ever ready to book myself on the next flight tomorrow, I've opted instead for people watching....  So here's what I see:

There's the very pretty, slim, early-40s woman opposite me wearing a green mini dress and strappy gladiator sandles, her hair perfectly coifed and blown out and hairsprayed, her skin bronzed, her makeup flawless.  Her ring finger is bare, and she's smilling and giggling as she texts with what I would wager is a new romance, playing with and tossing her perfect hair, biting her lip and sparkling when she gets a text she is particularly charmed by....  She sends a text and then watches the screen with anticipation, eyes lighting up as she sees the dots that mean her guy is typing, then trying to bite back the broad grin that wants to steal across her face as she reads the text.  She reminds me of Ann-Margret singing "How Lovely to be a Woman" in Bye Bye Birdie.  Do people ever look like that when texting their partner of twenty years, I wonder?  I hope her man always makes her feel so lovely and sparkly and feminine and wanted, and I hope she shakes her hair out and uses less bronzer and loses a little control and lets go and still feels like the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world, just like she seems to right at this instant.... 

There's the middle-aged man who insists that the chair next to him is taken, though I've had my eye on it for the last 15 minutes and no one has sat in it that whole time, while I sit on the dirty floor....  Is it me he objects to?  Does he really have some traveling companion who's off on some airport adventure?  Or does he have an imaginary friend?

There's the goat.  I don't see a goat, but I hear a goat.  Maybe it's the man's goat.  I'll definitely save a chair for a goat.

There's the cluster of young women, including me, who have somehow all unintentionally wound up gathered around the same phone charging station and are now welcoming a new member to our group.  The new girl has been waiting seven hours and is hoping to wind up on our flight... which has now been indefinitely delayed.  We're all dressed casually though, and the newcomer is wearing a slinky dress.  She chats with us for a bit and then slinks off to join the more elegant ladies and men who are standing rather than sitting crosslegged on the floor.  The young woman next to me slouches down against a pillar and yawns loudly.  We're not feeling very slinky dressy right now.

There's the hipster across from me whose khakis are six inches too short and rolled up an extra two inches.  His grey athletic socks are pulled high.  I think this looks silly, but I suspect that might be the point.  I wonder if he would say he's dressing "ironically" (not a correct usage but a popular one), and I also wonder if the giant headphones he wears actually have any sound coming out of them....

I look for anyone reading a book.  In scanning a couple hundred people, I find one.  Its cover is pastel blues and greens, and I wonder if it's women's fiction in the present tense.  I also wonder how airport bookstores stay open.  I also realize the hypocrisy of me writing a blog post in the present tense after I lambasted it two posts ago.  But you see, I actually am typing this as it happens, so that just underscores my problem with the mechanics of present-tense fiction, because the characters in those books aren't doing that.... Okay, moving on....

Every time I look up I catch too-short-pants hipster guy looking at me before he looks away.  This makes me aware he is sitting perfectly still like a Buddhist statue.  Who sits perfectly still when listening to music?  Those headphones are definitely silent.  Or else he needs to be exposed to some new music.

I spot a second book.  And it's old and hardcover, which makes me miss the smell of my hometown's library, which makes me wonder what exactly makes old books smell like old books, which reminds me that writing in the present tense really does lead to rambling.

Two more women are doing the "I have a beautiful secret" smile while they text.  But no men are doing this.  Do men not do that?  I wonder what the men on the other side of these text conversations look like as they text.  That makes me think of all the times my fiancé has told me my texts almost made him laugh out loud at inappropriate times at work (well, ya know, maybe don't glance at your phone during a meeting and then I won't make you laugh), and I think it would be delightful to be a fly on the wall to see that expression on his face.

And now I'm back at my brother's house where I started several days ago, because my indefinitely delayed flight has been delayed until tomorrow.  I am thankful for family, and I am thankful for my mom telling me to make sure my carry-on always has clean underwear, and I am thankful for not flying at night during a thunderstorm.

Maybe tomorrow I'll actually get on a plane at the airport.  Wouldn't that be a novel idea.

A princess's rules for happy days

This is my big brother and me many, many, many days ago:

He had recently gifted me with chickenpox, from which he was recovered by the time of this photo but which I was still suffering through. Still, I was dressed in one of my princess costumes, and everyone knows that princesses don't bear grudges. Plus a princess costume makes everything better... though I do think my brother looks awfully gleeful about the whole thing here....

And this is me with my big brother's little baby for the first time yesterday:

When I'm not depriving him of chewing on my hair, which he so very much likes and thinks belongs in his hands and mouth, he's also a very gleeful and joyful little baby, just like his dad.

Days go by quickly.  So my advice to anyone reading this, regardless of your age, is to play in a sprinkler, hug a baby (preferably not just a random one on the street, 'cause, ya know, that'll probably wind you up in jail), tell someone you love them, play dress up and make believe whenever you can, climb all over the furniture, let your kids destroy a velvet green couch, go barefoot, wear pink shoes, and do like a princess and never bear a grudge.

My week in literary likes and dislikes

Things I dislike from this week:

1.  Books in the present tense
 I hate books in the present tense.  Why do they exist?  Why is this an acceptable and seemingly now common way of writing? In fact, it seems to me it might be the only way of writing women's fiction currently.  I've checked out three of them from the library recently by accident when checking out well-reviewed women's fiction.  Is this just a women's fiction thing?  It's been since a 5th grade visit to my school's library that I picked up a book to find it was written in the dreaded present tense, and now I can't find a single women's fiction book not written that way. It reads to me like stream-of-conscious ramblings in a diary.  And yet, books outside of women's fiction are still written in past tense. Are we saying that women and only women want to read rambling thoughts rather than the complexly crafted work facilitated by past tense?  Because if so, that's just insulting.  Third person present tense is obnoxious enough to me, but first person present tense is also baffling.  It pulls me out of the story entirely and makes me question the mechanics by which the narrator is recounting the story, which should never happen unless it's a plot point or story tool. Is the narrator speaking into a recorder as things happen? Unlikely.  So that means we're just getting her internal monologue, which is generally how the examples of these books I've unwittingly checked out read -- every single thought that passes through the narrator's head like she's a 14-year-old trying to fill up her diary as quickly as possible.  And reading them makes me want to scream.  (I will say present tense can be used properly when it serves a very specific purpose, but the only instance of present tense fiction in a novel I have ever read that makes sense to me and I enjoy can be found in several chapters of Dean Koontz's The Husband.  There is such a specific reason for it being written that way and it serves the story.)

2.  Poorly written books that sell well

This week, this item seems to go hand and hand with what I consider an insulting portrayal of women. One of the aforementioned women's fiction, first person, present tense books that I checked out was a #1 New York Times bestseller.  In the first two-and-a-half paperback pages, the author has 28 paragraphs (all of which are non-dialogue, which means the paragraph breaks read like the character is jumping from thought to thought in rapid succession), 7 "Gods"  (as in "Oh God, oh my god"), 11 all-caps words, 9 comma splices, 11 uses of "like," "okay," "I mean," or "you know" (again, not in dialogue), and one misuse of "irony."  All in two-and-a-half pages!

I'm sure there will be people who say I'm being a literary snob, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who will say this is good writing because it's accessible and conversational.  I like conversational, and I'm not asking for staid and formal writing, but this character isn't a teenager.  She's an adult woman, and strong adult women characters shouldn't speak like a 14-year-old girl hanging out with her friends at the mall trying to fit in, unless it's a plot or character point that the woman speaks unusually beneath her age.  It's not cute, it's not funny, it's not flattering, it's not empowering, and I would hope it's not honestly that relatable.  Also, this specific character fails to recognize someone she's known for months because she's disgusted by that character's clothes on this particular day. I certainly hope that's not relatable. I would like to think we as a gender are capable of more than recognizing a person by their fashion.

3.  Sentences. With. A. Period. After. Every. Single. Word.  What. Is. This. About.

4. Pages with a new paragraph every. single. sentence.

5. Improperly titled and marketed books

I read an excellent book this week titled The Husband List. Its cover is white and adorned with pink hearts and pink and red writing and lots of flourishy designs.  It looks like the kind of book I would pass by without giving a second glance and like it would have lots of passages about heaving bosoms and other pulsing body parts and what-not.  Its title suggests it's about a character trying to get married and find a husband.  In fact, if I were to take a wild guess at the main character without even picking up the book, I would guess that she's a romantic who dreams of getting married and is determined to do so, working her way through the list of men she's set her eye upon.  That's not really the kind of lead character I'm interested in reading about. In fact, none of what this book appears to be from the cover interests me.  What does interest me is Janet Evanovich's name on it.  My Nancy Drew books as a little girl turned into Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books as a teenager.  To me, Stephanie Plum is the perfect heroine -- someone who dreamed of growing up to be Wonder Woman, loves adventure, is as plucky as they come, never leaves home without pepper spray, has a gun in her cookie jar at home (sometimes even with bullets), is 100% independent and does no man's bidding, and is equally at home in jeans, sneakers, and a flannel shirt as she is in a low-cut dress with three-inch heels.  And did I fail to mention she's a bounty hunter?

Before Evanovich started writing her own brand of plucky adventure stories, she wrote romances under a different name.  After her Plum books hit fame, her romances were re-released under her own name.  The book The Husband List is a post-Plum novel that's a co-write with another novelist, Dorien Kelly, who appears from a Google search to be also known for romances.  So it makes sense to market this book to both authors' romance fans.

A search of it on online seems to confirm that those fans, however, think it's boring and "nothing happens."  I found it to be anything but boring, but it is about character development rather than a complex plot.  In reality, I think the book falls prey to the unfortunate fact that most authors write in a single genre and are known for that genre, making it hard for them to break out of it.  Is it an adventure book that would work well being marketed to Stephanie Plum fans? Probably not quite, though its main character would certainly like her life to be an adventure story, and she gets her wish towards the end. And she probably would be Stephanie Plum if she lived 100 years later.  Is it a romance book? It certainly has a romance at its center, and even a couple heaving bosom passages (though the authors word it so much more gracefully than that -- and I have to add that those passages are actually in support of character growth), but to me the book is most similar to Louisa May Alcott's An Old Fashioned Girl about a young woman crossing the threshold from girl to young woman as she deals with the way she was brought up and how that conflicts with what she wants and the world around her.  Not every book with a romance IS a romance or should be marketed as such.  And the title is all wrong.  It's about an incredibly strong 21-year-old in 1894 who is trying to avoid her family's demand for marriage -- the list of the title is her mother's, not hers, and it serves as an obstacle to her desire for independence and personal growth, both of which are more important than any romance in this book.  The character dreams of going to Oxford and Yale more than she dreams of a man, and she sneaks out for museum lectures and speaks at least three languages, and yes, she has a gun, just like Stephanie Plum, though hers is fully loaded.

What should have been marked as a humorous and character-driven Gilded Age women's fiction book about a young woman's search for independence was instead marketed as a hearts-covered romance book about looking for a husband, failing to reach one audience and disappointing another.  And that makes me sad.  Because of #1 on the below list....

Things I like from this week:

1. Books that appreciate character development as plot development

I'm a slow reader. I say each word in my head, and I see a book like a movie in my head. I savor the words (assuming it's a good book), which means it takes me a longer-than-average time to finish a book.  This week I read one (The Husband List) in three days, which is incredibly fast for me.  I couldn't put it down. I loved it. I loved the characters, I loved their personalities and their fire and ambition, I loved watching them grow and struggle, and I loved their conversations.  I loved the zippy writing. I loved how fleshed out side characters were and how they had their own arcs in addition to enhancing those of the main characters.  The characters were real to me, and I so appreciated that there was not just one female character who was strong and fiery and smart, but two.  I had never heard of the book before, so I looked it up, and I was shocked that many reader reviewers thought nothing happened for the first 220 pages.  So much happens.  Characters grow up and find themselves -- characters of all ages.  I like my adventure stories too, but let's please take a moment to appreciate a good character story.  I never reread a book because it had exciting stuff happen.  I reread a book because I love the characters.  And I hope there will always be an audience who loves books with wonderful characters who grow (written in the past tense), and that books like this never go out of fashion (though I certainly hope they get categorized better and get better marketing than this one did). 

2. Chapter 35 of Pride and Prejudice, which contains a five-page paragraph

I'm a lover of a nice long paragraph that breaks when it's good and ready to and not a moment before.  White space be darned.

3.  After rereading the first two-and-a-half pages of the book under #2 of my dislikes list in order to count all those things listed, I'm going to make #3 on my likes list the authors who write well-written books with periods and commas in the right places and fleshed out characters who don't riddle their speech with fillers and who speak believable dialogue and grow throughout the book. To you authors, I say, thank you.  Please don't ever stop writing.

The ick factor

My cat loves people.  He's extremely social, and he will run to the door like a dog to greet anyone who walks in (even complete strangers), sniffing their hand and looking for attention.  Not long ago, however, my fiancé and I saw a very different, very atypical reaction from him.  We opened the door to a potential cat sitter, who reached out to touch our cat (as he lets everyone do).  As soon as she touched him, he ran away from her down the hall and cowered there, hiding.  In the year we've had him, he has never once reacted like that to anyone.  He sensed something about her....  Something was off....  Something only he could feel.  Needless to say, she did not cat sit for us.

I completely understand his reaction. I'm not normally randomly judgmental, and I try not to form snap opinions about life and people.  Still, though, there have been a number of people in my life with whom I've felt something very similar -- inexplicable but strongly negative.  Some people, sometimes, just seem to exude (to me, at least) an overwhelmingly bad aura. There was a much-loved faculty member at my high school who, for me, fell into the category of “strange creepy guy,” but I was the only one I knew who felt that about him.  Many students, in fact, seemed to adore him, treat him as a mentor, seek him out for advice, hang out in his office, and generally view him as a wise older man.   He appeared to be gentle and soft spoken, and there seemed not a reason in the world to dislike him... but I did.

In fact, I instantly disliked him and got an “icky” feel about him.

It felt to me like he was fostering a cult of students who worshipped him rather than just being a nice old man.  He ran a program that was a rip-off of a nationwide program, but by renaming it, it stripped the meaning of listing that program on a high school diploma.  "My version is better," he said.  No.  His version gave him more control of his students. The students enrolled in that program tended to view him as the ultimate authority figure.  He could do and think no wrong.  His opinion was always correct. If the students' friends and family disagreed with this man's opinion, well, their friends and family were wrong. I felt he was anything but the innocent old man he seemed to be, and I thought he would love nothing more than to run a full-on cult, or worse. What I had was little more than a feeling combined with the fact that his tactics seemed isolating and like the perfect foundation on which to build either irrational worshipping or abuse. But it was a very strong feeling.  I refused to join the program, though on paper I was its target audience, and once I declined his invitation to join the program, I always felt like he was almost as wary of me as I was of him.

I was telling my fiancé about this man late last night as I was sitting on the floor in our living room petting our cat in his Chewy box (he prefers the box his stuff comes in to any of the things we actually buy him -- 'cause ya know, he's a cat). I asked my fiancé to Google the man to see if he'd ever been fired or wound up in prison or anything.  Nope.  Still honored and revered.  Maybe he was just a nice old man. Maybe I was wrong about him.  Maybe.  But he still gives me the creeps thinking about him, and if I were a cat, I'd still run down the hallway away from him. Then I looked out our balcony door window and saw a man across the alley taking a shower with the drapes on his unfrosted bathroom window pulled open, his face pressed against the window watching me as he cleaned himself. I shrieked, and my fiancé closed our drapes.

The moral of this story: Sometimes, creepy is subtle and lives in a grey zone with doubt.  Sometimes it sticks its nose against the window and says, "Hey I’m a perv."  In either case, it's okay to be creeped out, trust your instincts, and run down the hallway.

Spyscape through the eyes of one very competitive woman

I'm very competitive. I like to win.  I like to be better than my previous best.  I jump at the chance to prove myself.  And I relish challenges as opportunities to prove myself.

I also love to work under pressure.  My favorite stage management memories are the shows when sound went out, lights went out, actors skipped pages -- anything where I had to problem-solve to save the show.  Likewise, one of my favorite college memories is when (very very out of character for me) I somehow managed to forget I had a final paper due in what was for me an easy fluff course (so it had apparently zipped to the back of my mind as low priority -- a total tortoise and the hare moment), and I didn't remember it until my final exam in live television directing the period directly before the paper was due.  So I directed a live television show while simultaneously writing a final paper for another class.  And I succeeded in both.  I have absolutely no idea how I did that, except that I'm at my best under pressure.

And I've been a fierce observer since I was a baby (so I'm told).  I see thoughts behind aborted words and actions, I see controlled impulses, I see lies, I see attempts to keep secrets.... 

So, not surprisingly, when you put these things together along with my love of agility and physical tests and acting, I also like spy stuff.  When I was in college, I went to a recruitment event for the CIA.  In a lot of ways, it seemed like the perfect job for me: physical skills, working under immense pressure, acting, high reward and purpose, problem solving and brain power usage.  I still have a paper somewhere with the contact's contact info and name (which is of course not his real name).  In another life, I'd like to be a spy, but in this life, I don't want to risk my life every day.  

And yet, a lot of what I do still fits into that mold of the qualities that attracted me to that recruitment event. I still look for ways to get a pressure adrenaline rush, to observe things beyond the front people put out for the world to see, to problem-solve and find patterns, to have variety in my daily life, and to challenge myself.

So I was beyond excited to find out about Spyscape, the spy museum that just opened in New York City.  Part museum, where you can learn about Alan Turing and breaking the Enigma code in WWII, or the capture of Robert Hanssen, or The Limping Lady (Virginia Hall), the coolest part about it (to me) is that it also includes a series of tests and challenges that result in each participant getting a unique "Spy Profile."  After receiving a bracelet with a scannable tag when you check in, each visitor can complete IQ tests, personality tests, risk assessment tests, an encryption challenge, a deception challenge, a special ops challenge (with laser beams! Extra cool because I've always wanted to be Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment), and a surveillance challenge.

Now, to my fiancé, the museum was equally exciting but for slightly different reasons.  He's a huge James Bond fan, so while I was all about the tests and challenges, he was getting wrapped up in the gadgets that inspired Q's creations and the spy stories.  The tests were casually fun to him, while they got me all charged up ready to go like I'd had five espressos and was gunning for an Olympic medal (gold, of course).  When I heard him laugh loudly while we were taking the personality tests and asked him why, he said, "It just asked if I do well under stress." (He doesn't.)  Next it was time for the risk assessment test, a test in which you have six attempts to pump a virtual balloon that can break at any time.  You get $1 for each pump that it doesn't break, but only if you "collect" the money before it breaks.  After six "collections," you're done, and that's the amount of money you earn.  The second pump on the first attempt breaks the balloon, to make you scared of the risk and less likely to keep pumping on subsequent collection attempts.  So at the end, I asked my fiancé how much money he'd earned.

"Six," he replied.

"Six? What do you mean six?  Six on one attempt?  I mean all together.  How much did you have after all six attempts?"

"Six," he replied again.

"I don't get it."

"I got six."

"So... wait... you never pumped more than once?"

"Of course not. I collected after each pump. Because it might break."

"What did it tell you at the end?"

"That I should try taking some more risks -- like trying hot sauce."

I, meanwhile, went up to 50 pumps on one attempt.  I'm a bit of a risk taker, at least when it comes to virtual balloons.

When it came time for the surveillance challenge, my competitiveness (with myself, not with my fiancé) really kicked in.  This, after all, was basically what I did in college while directing live television.  The participant is encircled by the feeds from approximately 60 numbered CCTV cameras in a giant room while wearing a headset with a mic and has a limited amount of time to spot things on the camera feeds and answer questions through the mic about what's going on in the camera views.  Each station has several headsets, so several people can do the exercise at the same time.  A woman casually looked around her as she searched.  My fiancé looked with more decisiveness.  And I, hands on hips, did my best impression of Skyfall's young Q searching for Javier Bardem in London's subway system as I spun around the room and announced the answers with finality into my mic.  But then... then... blasphemy of blasphemies... my mic stopped working.  I kept saying the answer over and over, louder and louder.  The woman next to me looked at me like I was crazy.  But didn't she understand?  This was my greatest skill, and the system was recording my abilities incorrectly!  The recorded voice asking the questions over the headset announced I had run out of time on that question.  And then the next.  And then the next.  I hung up my headset and stared bleakly at my fiancé.

"My mic stopped working.  I got them all right, but it wasn't acknowledging my speaking.  It thinks I didn't answer three questions."

"It's okay, it's just a game," he said.

"Yeah, but it's going to have my profile wrong now. I got them right. And it thinks I got them wrong."

"Twelve out of fifteen's not bad."

"But I didn't get twelve out of fifteen! I got fifteen out of fifteen!"

He shrugged.  "Nothing you can do."

"Hm. I wonder if that's true.  I wonder if the system will let me do it again."

And so I did the whole thing over.  It still screwed up and didn't recognize that I knew where the man in the blue and white checkered shirt on the payphone was or the painting of the woman with the red lips (I know where both are, and I still remember their camera numbers), but at least I got 13/15 that time. I'd have done it again, but my fiancé would probably think I'm even weirder than he already does. And let's be honest -- that's already pretty weird.

I worked my way through the rest of the challenges and tests with equal competitiveness, but then I got to the part that two days later is still bugging me.  On one of the brainpower challenges is this question:

What is the next number in the sequence?

12    6    4    2    1    1/2

I was stumped.  Not just "I don't get it" stumped but "I don't get it and it's making me mad" stumped.  I wondered about it all day.  I decided it was unsolvable without more information.  I complained about it to my fiancé.

"It's about the experience, Jessica," he said, laughing and shaking his head and hoping I would give it up so we could watch Sherlock.

"No, it's about doing it right and the best and winning!  Do you think spies are cool with just doing it for the experience?"

"No, but they're spies. You're doing it for the experience of being a spy."

"Right. Which means the experience of doing it to win."

So I had to solve this problem.  So then the next day I sent it off to my parents, who came to the same conclusion I did.  Though there might be logic to it if it's two interwoven sequences, with the numbers provided there are at least three different possible answers if it's two interwoven sequences in the pattern A, B, A, B.  One possibility is sequence A is "divide by two" and sequence B is "divide by two and then square the smaller factor."  That gives the next number in the sequence as 1/16. (1/2 / 2 = 1/4. 1/4 squared = 1/16).  But another potential answer is that pattern B is "subtract (x-1)" where x is the amount subtracted in the previous link of sequence B (6-2 = 4; 2-1 = 1; 1/2 - 0 = 1/2), and so 1/2 is then the next number in the sequence.  Yet another possibility is that pattern B is "subtract x/2" where x is the amount subtracted in the previous link of sequence B.  In that case, 1/2 - 1/2 = 0.  So 1/16, 1/2, and 0 are all potential solutions if the sequence is two interwoven sequences, and therefore the question is unsolvable as two interwoven sequences unless more numbers in the sequence are given (specifically, the number before 12).  If it's only one sequence rather than two interwoven sequences, then I'm stumped.  As are my parents.  As is the math genius my dad sent it to.

So, in conclusion, I love Spyscape, I hate to lose, I really hate not being able to solve problems, and if you or anyone you know is capable of solving the above sequence, please please please tell me the answer.