Relics of a Me I'm Not.

Hey, Sounds. Long time no post.

So I'm cleaning my room right now (a laborious, unending process that will occupy me all summer, I'm sure) and I have to say, it's a bizarrely nostalgic experience. Unproductively so.

One of the downsides of an obsessive personality is that you're convinced, in the midst of your obsession, that nothing will ever change. That whatever you love right now will be the thing you love forever, just as passionately. And unfortunately that's just not the case. Do I still love Harry Potter? Hell yes I do. I always will. But I wasted a fortune on decorative pins at conventions, and they stayed on my purse until the fasteners broke. And now I have a bunch of broken pins that say things like "You had me at drink this" and "FREE STAN SHUNPIKE." They're adorable, I guess, but, like... what do I do with them?

Or, another example. Several years ago, I bought "Martial Arts for Dummies." I was big into anime at the time, and writing fanfic, and I thought it would be a good research tool. (In my defense, this was in the days before wikipedia.) I can always donate it, of course, or sell it on amazon or to the half-price bookstore in town, but that goes against my nature. I'm a packrat at heart, first of all, so any plan that ever requires me to actually get rid of something is always going to make me balk, but it's more than that. As if by getting rid of this stupid book I don't need and will never read again, I'm betraying my past self. Calling take-backs or something.

It's highly irrational. But so are my spending habits. I mean, seriously. I have a DESK GONG. A little gong, about the circumference of a silver dollar, with a twig-sized metal rod as a mallet. Why? Well, I bought it in my senior year of high school-- picked it up at Borders, from those shelves of Hey Buy One Last Thing Before You Check Out! chain bookstores set up on line before the register. I was directing a short play for drama class at the time* and also competing in Duo Interpretation on the Speech and Debate team with my friend Will. Will's a fantastic actor, and we both loved "Sure Thing" by David Ives: another student had put it on for THEIR senior-directed play a few years previously, and so we decided to use it as our first Duo piece, in Junior year. We were never happy with our interpretation-- it was too static-- and while we loved our Senior piece, a cutting of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, we never quite got over our love of "Sure Thing."

Being the youtube enthusiast that I am (well, was) and aspiring director that I'm still not quite comfortable being, I had a brilliant idea: we'd revisit "Sure Thing" over the summer, with me behind the camera and him appearing again as Bill. Some other friend of ours would play Betty. I'm still proud of the idea; if you're unfamiliar with "Sure Thing," the basic premise is that a guy and a girl try and work their way through a stereotypical romcom meet-cute. The twist is that every time one of them does something wrong, a bell rings and the scene starts over-- they get a second chance to make a first impression. In my hypothetical film version, every time the bell rang we'd cut to a new location-- some other restaurant, with Bill and Betty in different clothes. A sequence of alternate realities.** And that's where the mini-gong comes in. I was going to use it instead of the typical concierge bell, with a white-gloved hand doing the ringing. A cut-away between each scene, instead of just the sound effect.

All of which is interesting and kind of cool, except for the part where the film never got made. It probably will never get made. And yet the desk gong remains, gathering dust on my shelf next to the anthropomorphic garlic clove plushie Amanda got me when she went to California.

I mean, honestly. I have a lava lamp, for fuck's sake. What does one do with a lava lamp? Why are they sold? What purpose do they serve? But I was on the cusp of teenagerhood and I thought they were the coolest thing, I put it on my Hanukkah list, and that was that. Another useless thing to add to my collection.

I have a corkboard covered with post-cards from friends I've long since lost touch with; a desk drawer filled to the brim of all of my AP US History notes from sophomore year, because I was convinced I'd grow up to be a high school history teacher, and I didn't want to forget how Mr. Hand had done it; a book of Celtic runes I bought in England, just because it was a book of runes from England; an action figure of myself.

I feel like my room would be a sociologist's dream-- or perhaps their worst nightmare. And it all boils down, I think, to the tension between what's important and what matters. These things all mattered to me once--does that make them important? Should things that were once important to you always matter, at least in some small way? They set me on the path, after all. I wouldn't-- couldn't-- be now-me if I hadn't been then-me first.

I'm sure I could dig up a more useful and fitting quotation if I tried, but all I can think about is a rather throwaway line from King Lear. Lear gets pissed off at Cordelia for snubbing him, he banishes her, and Kent speaks up-- saying what an injustice it is, etc etc. He gets chastised for failing to observe proper court decorum and speaking out of turn, to which he bursts out "Anger hath a privilege!"***

Does the past have a privilege?



* a hilarious little one-act called Jimmy the Antichrist, the script of which is also around here somewhere, cluttering up my life.
** In the interest of not repeating myself, I've relegated this to the footnotes: GOD I still love that concept. Maybe some day...
*** What a great line. Oh, Shakespeare, the things you do to me.

"But what I really want to do is direct..."

The title of this blog post is one of the most cliched lines I can think of. I'm not sure of the origins, but it's practically a gag now: the actor who fancies herself an artiste decides that directing is where her heart truly lies.

Which is funny because, for the longest time, I didn't see the point of having a director at all.

Granted, I was young and naive. I would go and see a play, and having a vague awareness of how such things were produced, I thought, "What a waste. Actors learn lines. They say them. Why do they need to be chaperoned?" As if actors are self-sufficient beings. As if a group of people are capable of producing something cohesive without a bit of vision (and, admittedly, supervision).

Like I said. I was young.

The thing about directing is that it really plays to my strengths. I love discovering a character and figuring out how they tick and who they care about and why they're there. When you're an actor, you get to do that for one person. When you direct, you get to do that for everyone. All of a sudden, you're the one who decides what the emotional core of every scene is. I cannot count how may times I've had to bite my tongue at a rehearsal because either I had an idea, but it wasn't my place to interfere, or because the director was making a choice that didn't make sense, or because an actor was ignoring direction and no one was putting them in their place.

I want that. I want to be that person. I want it to be my vision, my baby, me getting the final word in.

There's also, of course, the fact that memorizing lines makes me acutely anxious and while I love rehearsal and production, I kind of hate (non-musical) performance. Directing allows me to have a key role in the parts I love, and kind of disappear for the part I hate.

And yet.

There's something really... not sad. Annoying? Irksome about the... invisibilty of the director. When the audience waits at the stage door after a show, they compliment the actors on a job well done. There's no way to have a floating label that reads "This was Leah's idea!" every time an actor makes a choice that came directly from one of my notes. There's no way to tell if I was great at my job or if my cast and crew just managed to get by without me.

And that bothers me.

It's not that I'm a gloryhound or an attention hog. It isn't even that I just want credit where credit is due. It's that... how do you invite your parents to see a play you directed? They don't get to watch you. It's like you aren't even there.

I love the intimacy directing affords; when you do it well, the appreciation you get from your actors is unlike anything else.

But I just wish there were a way that I could share it with everyone.