Gym Rat

CNN with closed captioning on. Chlorine and carpet floors. Lines of lockers. Sticky sweat rice around my collarbone. Hood up, kicks on, headphones in, out the door. Towel bins. Tile steam room. A wet hot vacuum, swallowed up whole. Pull extra hard on the suction door. Gasp at the coconut air, designer soap. Glass shower doors. Back into the night. Comedy club marquis dotting around. Salon with blinky lights. Baked chicken and pop music wafting from Brazilian Bowl.

More Dang Wed-Dang

During this:

The ladies looked like this:

This moment is history in the making, but it is also just another moment before the moment we all hit the dance flo'--another moment after the DJ said, "For their first dance as Mr. and Mrs.--", a moment after many moments of meeting Trelly my first day of summer camp. She wore braided pigtails. That moment after many moments when she was born...after many moments when her parents had their first dance at their wedding. This moment before the moment Dizz and I fell alseep in our hotel bed reading our respective novels, like it was an ordinary night. It would have been if we had not been in Milwaukee. It's history in the making, but it's also just a moment.

One Nation, Of Individuals (with Liberty and Justice for All)

This semester my Dramatic Writing Workshop is reading Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares. Yesterday we discussed her essay on Memory, which is largely about Americans' lack of memory (recognition) of the shoulders we're standing on when it comes to theatre. A classmate noted that visual artists learn to copy before they can create. They're constantly making art, turning around, revisiting Picasso, Degas, Rembrandt, then mimicking for a while, then facing forward again and marching on.

Playwrights don't much do this. We think it's important to know the basics, but no one holds you to it. The sentiment appears to be "There's too much"--which is kind of true--we definitely don't have as succinct a canon as art history (or maybe I'm just telling myself that because I still haven't read, say, Raisin in the Sun). Not only are we forgiving about neglecting our past, we are absolutely unforgiving when it comes to dragging it along with us. It is not good to be impersonating another writer. If possible, our work should be nothing like anyone's ever seen before. Not only is this basically impossible, if it were possible, approaching the goal of sheer uniqueness in this way is like just deciding to take a running jump off a roof and say we will be the first human to fly. We need to walk before we can run--and absolutely before we can soar.

Why are we this way? Why do we want to be so new? Why can't we stand to repeat classics, to learn from what has come before us? Bogart says it's a matter of not recognizing and using our own culture because American culture is so jumbled and illusive. You can't pin it. Are we religious? Yes and no. Are we helpful? Yes and no. Are we obnoxious? Yes and no. We're not even unanimously rich or talented or polite or impolite. We have almost no common literary background. We have no ritual. I can get behind this theory of not using our culture because we don't have one, but I think a more likely reason we don't go back and reflect what has come before us is because part of our culture...actually probably the only consistent part of our culture is being individual. We were founded because of persecution, we like to protest and riot and be free, and thus...write new new works.

Desert morning. April 2012.

Just some stuff I'm thinking about at 4 AM...which is another story.

The world shines as I cross the Macon County Line.

Rituals: If I Must

No, I suppose I don't have much ritual to my name. What is constant when your family splits and reshuffles when you're fourteen? What can become ritual across state lines? When my fifteenth birthday was a surprise party, sixteenth alone in my father's apartment, seventeenth listening to Jonathan Larson when Clara and her brother crossed the moat to show up with a cactus.

My anti-roots please me. Truthfully. I can be a dandelion spore. Look!

I wrote a list of personal rituals today in Theatre History. We discussed the performance ritual of the Hopi people. My list was tiny and barely existed beyond 2004. It said, "Oldies, Groundhog Day, Tremblay's Candy Shop, Malcolm in the Middle, my grandmother's house near Gurnee, celery stuffed with sharp cheddar."

If I must bring children into this world, I will run with them each fall. I will eat with them each morning. I will enforce a strict policy about attending theatre each spring, Christmas pastries each December, and reflective birthdays. Stargirl is required reading. Diana Ross is figurative king. Quiet. Listen. That train is saying "Hello! Hello town!" If I must.

And, if I don't have to, I will be my own children. And I will fill myself with Hopi hopey.