Airplanes

This is clearly not a theater blog! I have not been prolific in theatrical prose or thought in any real capacity since I finished my classes… (save for the occasional caricatures I write for my friends while talking online)…………which goes to show that it is a hobby not unconnected to a sense of duty. How disappointing.

Serene’s wedding is soon. And to get there, I have to take a plane, which is a large, really heavy metal object that they tell me is capable of flight. In the air. With nothing under it. This is the official public debut of my FEAR OF FLYING. There. It’s out now.

I don’t experience anything like what people with real aviophobia do… since apparently you have to actually not fly due to your phobia to qualify for that diagnosis. And diagnosis is the only thing that leads to professional attention and then pills, pills, pills.

So maybe it’s better this way. But I do have to pray profusely before taking off, completely occupy myself with people-watching and seatbelt adjustment until takeoff, clamp my eyes shut and grip my armrests for the first 5 minutes of flight (85% of accidents) while attempting to not look visibly anxious………………… and then for the rest of the flight: staying busy with Vogue magazines, hokey Christian books, my iPod (above 20,000 feet), ordering complex juice cocktails, staring at the wing flaps moving around, staring at emergency exit rows, the nuts and bolts of the plane body, and envisioning falling to earth in the air…. and trying to combat all this by thinking about something that I know for CERTAIN God wants me to do at my destination, therefore securing my safe arrival. (?) And people wonder how I manage to be skinny while gorging myself. Intense and constant stress and anxiety in many parts of my life, anyone?

Sigh. I tell myself that they have therapy for people like me (and worse), which should prove this entire thing irrational which then means……… I should be above it? Hah. I think ever since I was 5 or 6, I’ve been slightly afraid of flying… perhaps because I’m a control freak. I always read those safety booklets and stared at the emergency exit cartoons until my eyes fell out. Other things could have also contributed to it… I had to fly alone at age 7 from China to Canada to join my parents, 9/11 probably, and being caught in a huge scary electrical storm while stuck in the window seat next to a very, very obese and smelly man (who does improv comedy and was very interesting to sit next to). Arghhh………

Perhaps blogging about it will help some.

But until I see you, please pray for my my safe trip!

 

clog

I feel clogged up in an important part of my life. Like some huge spider has caught me and spun me into a stifling cocoon. Why must everything be so structured, so rigid, so forced… everyone trying so hard?

Is there a groove we must fit into? If so then I am as ill-fitting as my plastic sparkly prom shoes (my worst shoes ever). But I can’t bring myself to let go of it. But is it because of God or… other things? Fear? Of what? I must find out this summer.

Living with other people this summer should be an interesting experience. I hope that I will be open to God’s lessons wherever I may be. It will be a simple summer:

• lab like crazy
• GRE studies
• (… stepping out of wedding denial?)

EGADS.

 

drama

Sometimes there’s enough drama in real life to fill the pages of many plays. Just in my acting class, for example. There are at least 2 love triangles, constant homosexual undertones, a lot of nerves being strummed like guitars, buttons being pushed… And we only have 10 students and 1 amazing professor in the class. That’s why people are so interesting and why I am going to make characters this summer. I will cast the characters, like actors, into new plays.

The following is an example: (Male 1, thus far unnamed)

• Appears extremely confident, almost to a fault
• Good-looking, smooth-talking
• Possesses an initially undecipherable vernacular that inevitably gets picked up by others
• Labeled as the “jerk” or “asshole”
• Contains a great humanity about him, compassionate when necessary
• Reads and understand people very well
• Finishes other people’s sentences in his mind
• Quick to judge and characterize
• Faster to act than to plan/organize, sometimes rashly
• Very enthused about things he is definitely passionate about
• Medium tolerance for alcohol
• Generally apathetic to very specific things (TBD)
• Question: Is he deeply insecure about something?
• Question: What is a flaw about him that will allow us to fall in love with him ? Right now he mostly angers us.
• Question: In a play, do we want to root for him or love to hate him?

 

service

Alan (my ancient genius director) says that theater is a service art. I thought about that and decided it was only too true. Actors must find the story they are telling, live through it multiple times, and only then generously give back to the audience.

Yet when we are in rehearsal, he refuses to speak of the audience. We focus on controlling our own bodies and speech in entirety, breathing down to our loins and centering ourselves, doing balancing acts around the room with our scene partners, getting personal and sweaty with them- reciting lines all the while…

…taking every thought and attuning it to the minds of our characters, stepping into their bodies without an apology and putting them on like pants… Alma, the spinsterish minister’s daughter in love with a wild-hearted young doctor; Celia, the exhausted housewife of a postwar crackhead; Sheila, the mother of a 9-year-old vegetable daughter; Fanny, a closeted recluse in a fantasy world… until we are slathered like butter on the stage floor, dripping with body fluid and immersed in the full euphoria and misery of our new mutant-person-thing. Every thought has been turned into a mixture of myself and of she (and sometimes he) who is on my script- and all of this happens before I’ve said one word.

We give and give and give to the audience. All the frustration, headbanging, memorization, pantomiming… plus Alan cursing at us: in the end we give 150% of what we earn. Feels like a ripoff, but I guess that’s what service is. And it also explains why Alan looks so, so old. (Hopefully he never discovers computers… he’s probably seen one before though. Okay hopefully he never discovers the internet.)

 

my stage

At the end of my playwriting class, I ended up with a lot of unrevised plays and a mess of new ideas. This will be a good place to put them down. It will be a stage for ideas to plant and grow, for words to engorge into dialogue, dialogue into characters, characters into relationships, relationships into stories. The essential part is your input.

I thank you in advance for helping me grow.