The Rise and Fall of a Supermarket Reunion (A Story In Five Parts)

Chapter One

Browsing through the fruit and vegetable isle you’re lost in squeezing tomatoes and trying to figure out what to get for dinner when you hear a long, exaggerated “Ohhhh myyy Gaaawd!”  You look up and see a face you haven’t seen since high school: Annie Jacobs.  The hair is highlighted and chopped short in a wave and there are crows feet and an unnatural orangey glow to the skin but it’s definitely her.  There is a heartfelt if awkward hug and you almost tear up when sharing brief stories about your lives over the past twenty years.  Of course she got married, and remarried now and her husband is a doctor and boy was it great catching up and before you can even think you’re parting ways.  You find yourself roaming the aisles aimlessly, having forgotten your shopping list in a flood of memories.

Chapter Two

You see her in the soda aisle loading a case of some fancy sparkling water into the bottom of her cart and can’t help but break out in a smile.  “Fancy meeting you here” you quip before launching into a nearly hysterical retelling of the ruined performance of Grease sophomore year that birthed a thousand different inside jokes between the two of you and lead to impromptu choruses of adulterated song lyrics in a variety of inappropriate contexts.  You spend far longer than you mean to recalling embarrassing moments and rebellious pranks and you laugh harder than you have in a while and ask for her phone number when she says that you should seriously catch up.  You wander off happily thumbing the torn paper and marveling on how surprisingly great this shopping trip has been.

Chapter Three

Reaching for a pound of chicken cutlets you see her again; she’s standing in front of the display and half- blocking it with her cart.  “I guess that’s the joy of supermarkets,” she laughs, “you reunite again and again.”  You laugh politely but the fun stories have sort-of exhausted themselves already and you really do have to get home and make dinner.  You smile warmly, saying how it really was so good to see her but you purposely skip the frozen food aisle in hopes of concluding the visit while you’re still genuinely happy to have run into her.

Chapter Four

Turning down the paper good aisle to retrieve toilet paper you spot her looking through paper towels.  You nearly back track but then mentally kick yourself for being so petty.  But in all honesty, it’s really just getting ridiculous.  As you near her you see that she’s parked her cart directly in front of the TP and you start to remember why you haven’t seen her for twenty years.  Because wasn’t she always getting in the way, one way or another?  Didn’t she steal the role of Sandy in Grease while you were stuck as stupid Patty?  And didn’t she always get the solos in chorus while you were forever harmonizing with the rest of the altos?  And didn’t she go to the prom with Mark Cooper even though she knew you were totally in love with him for, like, the entirety of junior year?  That bitch.  It’s not enough that she stole all your big moments in high school, now you can’t even wipe your ass because of her!  You give her a weak smile as you reach over her cart and grab a four pack, then beat a hasty retreat back down the aisle.

Chapter Five

You make your way to the check-out stands, nearly holding your breath as you wait for her to emerge at the end of a line and once again block you from getting your damned groceries.  All the pleasant memories have faded and now you want nothing more than to get out.  How silly for you to forget that the tall, beautiful Ann was the bane of your high school existence; effortlessly taking everything you worked so hard for.  You scan the horizon for her high-heeled figure to emerge and curse the pimpled checkout boy for not going faster.  Completely forgetting all the coupons you’d cut you swipe your card and violently shove your bags into your cart, nearly running for the door.  Safely in the parking lot you rush to get everything into the trunk of your car while your brain recalls a thousand horrific failures that perfect Ann succeeded at.  The dances, the boyfriends, the compliments and praises from teachers all directed at her while you followed her around like a dog begging for the scraps of her popularity.  You see her coming out of the store as you turn on your car and look in the other direction, backing out as fast as you can and cursing her for ruining everything.  When you get home, you throw her number away with your receipt.

My Read For May

Many years ago someone gave me a very surprising and wonderful gift for my birthday.  It was a copy of Steve Martin's Pure Drivel; a collection of humorous essays and super short stories by one of the funniest men on the planet.  Having never been exposed to Steve Martin off-screen before I was happily shocked to learn that he writes just as well as he acts.  Every page of that short little book had me laughing my ass off and I counted it as my favorite collection of funny essays ever after that (blew Dave Barry away, in my opinion.)

Since then I have amassed a small collection of Mr. Martin's works (the novellas, the plays, etc) and like so many other books they've been sitting on my shelf, waiting patiently to be read.  I hate to admit that the main reason I'm picking up this volume now is that it's really, really short.  Having spent the first half of the month reading Wicked I've cut back on the amount of time I have to finish anything and a super short collection like this one is just what the doctor ordered.  Furthermore, after the grave and saddening Wicked I could seriously use a little laughter.

So throughout the remainder of the month I will be reading Cruel Shoes, Steve's very first book which was written and released before I was born.  Based on how hard his second collection hit me my expectations for the first are even higher.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Book Review: Wicked

My first experience of the Wizard of Oz was the singing, dancing, brightly colored fantasy from the movie which brought nothing but happy memories and fond imitations.  When I played the cowardly Lion in a production of the play it brought my love of the happy, joyful version of the story to a new level.  That put me in a somewhat precarious position for reading Wicked because it turns not only the characters but the themes from the original story on their heads.

It's not just that the witch is the heroine and Dorothy is sort-of a bad guy; it's that the joyful, happy version of the original story has been reversed.  This Oz is a dark, dangerous place where singing and dancing is done at the risk of rather terrifying consequences.  This is a place where everyone has a motive other than the one you see on the surface and navigating the complexities of the path set out is a fuck of a lot more complicated than following a brightly colored brick road.  This is a place where every assumption is going to be questioned, analyzed and found to be false or corrupted.  And all of those beloved characters?  Well they're almost as messed up as the ones in that Chuck Palahniuk novel I just read.

So it was strange for me to find myself getting exciting when familiar characters or events or props popped up in this version of the tale.  It was strange to see Maguire's take on the origin of all these people and places and things.  It was strange to connect the dots from the long, strange back story to the original plot of the movie.  And most of all it was strange to find myself liking all of it.

Because the biggest difference between the Wizard of Oz from my youth and the one from this book is that one was happy and the other was definitively sad.  There's no happy ending, there's resolution of the terrible events which took place, there's no reassurance that it all meant something.  No, Maguire refuses to succumb to any of the cliches one would find in the fairy tales from one's youth.  In fact, Maguire addresses that directly: "In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch, there is no happily".

It's sort of like finding out that the fat, jolly Santa Claus from your youth is actually your alcoholic, abusive uncle in a red suit.  Or that the tooth fairy is actually your mom bribing you out of a combination of guilt and some false sense of obligation to an outdated story.  Or that your favorite childhood blanket is the reason you kept getting the flu every winter.

But it's not the jaded, cynical adult version- it's the mature adult version.  It's going further into the tragic story of why your uncle is alcoholic and abusive.  Or why your mom tried so hard to keep that fantasy alive for so long.  Or why the symbolism of that blanket made it worth every sniffle in the end.  It's going past blame to empathy; past superficial explanations to nuanced examinations.

It's like everything else in my experience: the search for answers to all these complicated questions only leads to more questions.  So perhaps saying that this was the sad version of the original is far too simple.  Perhaps it's more accurate to say that the biggest difference is that one is surface level and the other is bottomless.  Because that's the thing about digging for clues- you never really get to the bottom of it.

And I don't mean to make it sound like it's not an enjoyable experience here.  Maguire somehow manages to examine endlessly complex issues like family ties, politics, religion, sexuality and intimacy, societal norms, coming of age and re-examining childhood with the air of grace one would expect from a far more serious piece of literature.  A lot of the discussions reminded me of things I've seen in incredibly well-done political dramas or award winning autobiographies.  But it's done with the whimsical characters of the original story which are so familiar from childhood.

Honestly, there were so many passages that truly blew my mind with their beauty and complexity.  Looking at the scars from youth, how they formed, and what they mean to our identity as adults.  Wanting to blame our faults on the mistakes of our parents or those who taught us and finding that we would have done the same in their shoes.  Asking the difficult questions about the nature of good and evil and why people do what they do and finding that there are no easy answers but only a maze of different viewpoints.  And what's really amazing- and possibly Maguire's greatest strength- is that he uses the same language one would find in the sources one would examine for these answers: parables, allegories, apothegms and rhetoric.  So many passages are introduced as if from the bible or an archaic fable or an ancient myth and the same controversy about the truth or validity of these is argued by the characters discussing them.

The way that he breaks down the societal norms, geographical boundaries, politics and religions of all these different peoples makes Oz look like something featured in national geographic.  He balances lyrical verse with factual observations about the characters, how they look, where they live and their culture.  He looks at love and anger and prejudice and reverence and everything in between with confounding complexity.  And he doesn't give you any answers.  Seriously, if I were pursuing a PHD in literature studies I could do a dissertation on this thing and still not cover it all.

Even the structure of the book raises questions rather than concluding story arcs.  Every time a huge life-changing event happens he ends the section of the book and moves to a different time several years later where you're left wondering what the hell happened all those years ago.  And the main character whose eyes we're seeing all this through is as perplexing and multilayered as one of Miller's antiheroes.   She doesn't understand herself and is constantly seeking to understand her own complexity.  And the more she learns, the harder it becomes to conclude anything.

In the end I think what strikes me most about this is just how fascinating and unsettling all those questions are.  It's impossible for me to draw any tidy conclusions about it because of that.  There's no good or bad because there's no black or white in this book.  Everything is gray.  But I will say this: the man has way with words.  His descriptions are heartbreaking and beautiful and although I feel sort of disquieted I'm still compelled enough to want to try out Son of Witch.  Because there's way too many unanswered questions to simply move on.

The Heiress

Wikipedia states that community theatre is “theatre made by, with, and for a community.”  In general, this is taken to mean the locale in which the theatre is located and in which the participants and audience live.  But there’s a different definition of community that applies to my experience here.  That definition which focuses on the shared “character; agreement; identity” of the people involved in a joint activity.  Because when I try to sum up what this experience has meant to me, it is that definition of community that most accurately describes it.

I felt like part of a community- a group of people whose shared passion for the art leads them to not only endure but to enjoy all the details of a production.  All these late nights, juggling schedules, reciting lines, examining characters and motives and events, cramming into costumes and enduring less-than-comfortable false eyelashes, joking about how weird the audience is or how crazy it was when that mini-catastrophe happened.  All of it.  It is this shared experience that defines this feeling of community- this sense of belonging.

When I think of “the acting bug” I think about that ever-elusive high that one gets from walking off stage and feeling that you have, within that moment, ‘nailed’ the performance.  I had that with this production a couple of times and it feels pretty damned groovy.  And it is that which I will be seeking out when I audition again for the next production.  I’ve got the acting bug in this regard and it had been dormant for a long while before this.

But those singular moments are only a tiny piece of the overall tapestry of emotions I got from this.  What means more, strangely enough, is all of the side effects.  The joking and talking and laughing down in the green room while getting on makeup and putting on costumes and waiting for your scene.  The energy circle before each performance during which we wished ourselves luck and reminded each other to have fun while squeezing hands for vigor.  The awkward moments when you stepped on someone else’s line or skirt or your scene went drastically differently than you anticipated just because of the audience or a technical hic-up or just messing up.  The celebratory cakes and gifts and thanks-yous.  The fact that we all make ourselves more than a little crazy with all of it and we all love it.

In community theatre- because theatre in college was just a drastically different experience- I haven’t really had a bad time of it.  I haven’t encountered challenging personalities or over-demanding directors or anything else that might make the experience less enjoyable.  But I’ve also never felt this strong of a sense of community before and I have to believe that what my other more seasoned co-stars were saying was true: that this was just a really great group of people.  Despite my one little scene I felt just as much a part of the cast as everyone else.  I was no less valuable, no less appreciated, no less important to the play.  I was a part of and I value that feeling more than anything else in the world.

My co-stars were not only great actors (and I honestly think that everyone did a pretty incredible job) but great people.  They were kind, caring, funny, passionate, laid back, enjoyable people and all of those nights joking around in the green room or changing costumes back stage meant even more to me than those miracle moments when I nailed my scene.  And the crew- the producer, director, stage manger, costume designer, set designers and even the people running the ticket booth and baking cookies for intermission- were no less incredible and overwhelmingly kind.  And my family and friends who hooted and hollered for me when I got cast, came out to see me with excitement, and showered me with praise afterwards reminded me of how incredibly lucky I am to have such an amazing support network.  I have so many fond memories of this production it’s hard for me to wrap my head around it all.

And although I’m trying to be nothing but grateful for all of it I can’t help but be more than a little sad that it’s over.  Leaving the theatre that last night was nothing short of heart breaking and I’ve had to console myself that if I’m lucky enough to get cast again I may run into these incredible people in the future.  But in the end, it's the fact that I had this experience- not that it’s over- which matters. 

The memories and the pictures and the gifts will stay with me.  I will audition again for another show in the not too-distant future.  And if I’m very lucky, I will be a part of another community- perhaps comprised of some of these same wonderful people.  And in the mean time, I will be grateful with every story I tell about my time in the Heiress.

The Play is the Thing

At some point over the years in this field I picked up a list of the most stressful events a human can go through as determined by some high-up researchers.  The thing that always struck me about the list was that positive events such as getting married ranked just as high as negative events like getting divorced.  Thus you might find yourself having a new baby- generally considered to be a blessing- and feeling more stressed out than you’ve ever been.  What we know about stress is that it leads to a variety of physical and mental health problems and what this list taught us is that regardless of the cause the outcomes tend to look the same.

This is a lesson I’ve been reminded of (or rather beaten over the head with) over the past couple of weeks.  A variety of really positive events- Buddy’s graduation from training class, the premier of the play, a work conference which would have been enjoyable under normal circumstances- have all collided to turn me into a zombie.  Like I said, these are all positive events but the stress level is high enough to lead to the same consequences as if they were negative: I’m perpetually exhausted.  I’m getting migraines way more frequently than normal.  By the time I get home every night my brain has deteriorated into the consistency of apple sauce and I’m mentally incapable of doing the things I’d like to be able to do- like reading the book I planned to finish by the end of this month or writing here. 

I’ve actually tried a couple of times over the past week to sit down and write something- about the play, about Buddy, or even to try and coherently sort through the mesh of story ideas in my head to write a new fiction piece.  And every time I’ve found myself staring at the screen, drifting out of alertness and then getting confused as to what I was supposed to be doing.  It’s like falling asleep- you lose time and then you’re confused when you wake up.

So even though I have a million things I want to say I may have to wait until everything has calmed down so I can formulate my thoughts into a narrative that will lead to something above the rambling, disjointed mess that’s currently swirling around my head.  In the mean time, suffice it to say that fun times are happening.  The play is the thing.

Put on Your Sunday Clothes

Last night at rehearsal my co-stars were trying on their dresses.  We premiere in only a scant two weeks and the technical costume details like shoes and gloves and costume changes are being considered.  One of the dresses struck me as being terribly at home in a production of Hello, Dolly when everyone starts singing about their Sunday clothes and I couldn't help but observe this out loud.  As if one cue we all started singing the tune and laughing.

Then I looked at my friend in her pretty yellow dress with a wide skirt and frills around the shoulders, laughing over how she needed a parasol to complete the outfit, and her face changed.  I realized immediately what had happened, and I said it:

“You’re gonna have that stuck in your head all night now.”  Her smile sank because she knew I was right, the chorus was already cycling through her mind.

Throughout the rest of the evening as we meandered around the lobby looking over lines or rummaging through the box of gloves I’d hear the first few words of the song sung quietly followed by a loud, abrupt “Dammit!”

I'd laugh and then step over to say "You're welcome!" with a giant grin on my face.

Wicked: First Thoughts

It’s safe to say that when I decided to pick up Gregory Maguire’s Wicked because I thought it would be a fun read I had no bloody idea what I was getting into.  For those of you who are fans of the series, please forgive me for being so awestruck by all this.  For those of you who don’t know much about it, let me fill you in on what I’m learning: Wicked is actually the first in a series of four books referred to as “The Wicked Years” which follow the characters of Oz through all sorts of political and social upheavals. 

Each one follows a different character and is therefore told from a different point of view.  Wicked follows Elphaba, Son of a Witch follows her son, Liir, A Lion Among Men follows the famous lion from Dorothy’s group, Brrr and Out of Oz follows Liir’s daughter (Elphaba's granddaughter), Rain.  Wikipedia informed me that although Maguire originally wrote Wicked to be a stand-alone story he got mobbed by fans asking for more due to the success of the musical adaptation and wrote the other three to finish a longer story arc.

I discovered this fandom by accident when I went looking for the definition to a word I didn’t recognize (I’ll get into that in a second) and stumbled upon a Gregory Maguire discussion board with way more topics than I, only a few pages in, realized there were to discuss.  I picked up the book because I saw the musical a few years back, adored it, and was told by a few fellow fan that the book was even better (isn’t it always?).  I had no idea that I was entering the realm of rabid fans who trace their love affair back to the creation of Oz by L. Frank Baum and went on to worship Maguire for taking the land to the next level.

Assuming that I love this book as much I suspect I will I’m going to leave more in depth discussions about the series for a time later on when I’ve actually read the whole series.  For now, I am only qualified to comment on what I’ve observed to this point.

1)      Language- It seems like I’m always talking about this nowadays.  I guess that my brain is just way more fascinated by style and syntax than I give it credit for.  At any rate, what strikes me most about Maguire’s writing at this point is the humor and the sensual nature of the descriptors he uses.  The humor: “Nanny lapsed into a bout of indigestion for which they were all very sorry, olfactorily speaking.”  The sensual: “Spring tipped in like green well water, frothing at the hedges, bubbling at the roadside, splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower.”  I’ve already highlighted over a dozen sentences because they were so beautifully described or because they made me laugh out loud.  He’s also (like all great authors) teaching me words previously unknown to me like extemporize and effluvia and brand new ones that he made up like maunt (a religious, nun-like woman).  I don't know why I get such a kick out an author creating his own words.  I just do.

2)      Characters- Maguire has that seemingly magical power to write characters very clearly through their mannerisms, habits, thoughts and phrases.  Every one in here (even the random townspeople) have something about them that makes them feel real; like people you’d see on the street.  Especially the speech patterns which seem to illustrate them most clearly because you don’t have to go into much detail to get a clear vision.  Like the fishwife rhyming like the Munchins we know from the original story, Nanny always talking about herself in the third person, the Quadling sounding very Yoda-like by switching around sentence elements as in “How can a Quadling to answer such a charge if a Quadling is given always to lie?”  Everyone has a distinct voice whether they’re in it for a page or for the whole story.

3)      The Land of Oz- I noticed this first in the musical when I saw it so many years ago: the discrimination against the animals, the different economic statuses creating entitled or disenfranchised social standings, the overt racism and bigotry exhibited by certain characters when discussing those from different lands.  Although the land itself owes it’s creation to L. Frank Baum, Maguire makes the people a lot more real and concrete.  There are different religions fighting one another on what is morally right or wrong, philosophical debates around the dinner table on the nature of life, crime and political corruption surrounding distribution of wealth and services and all the other things one might see on the nightly news.  Except that this all takes places in the very fleshed-out land of Oz where people live very different lifestyles depending on the natural resources available to them.  He examines the politics of a large oligarchy, the linguistics and races and trades of these peoples and everything in between.  As I said, the world in which Maguire sets this tale was created by L. Frank Baum and I give full credit where credit is due on this.  But Maguire’s tale has always been known as an adult version of the world where the fairy tales are turned over and the dark underbelly is shown.  Right now I can tell I’m just scratching the surface and there’s already so much to consider.

All in all, I am loving this book so far and I have a sinking suspicion that it will be the beginning of a long-standing love affair with all of Maguire’s writings.  I will have much more to say as I read on, so stay tuned.

Cadence and Hoop Skirts

I am delighted to report that the play is really starting to blossom.  We’re off book now so there’s no more heads down in scripts and we can play off of each other in a much more organic way.  There’s facial expressions and emotional inflection where there wasn’t before.  We’re moving past the point of delivering lines and actually interacting with each other and it’s adding so many layers to the scenes that it’s making me giddy.  I walk off stage now seething over the nerve of the character I converse with and it takes me a second to step back out of my enraged character.  I can’t tell you how fun that is.

We’re also starting to get a feel for the concrete details of the set.  The play is set in 1850 so all of us ladies walk around in these giant hoop skirts and it becomes a gymnastic enterprise to negotiate the tight spaces backstage or fit two of us on the couch at the same time.  And sitting down so that the hoops don’t pop up in your face takes some practice.  It’s definitely not the norm for my life and I’m enjoying it immensely.

Plus we’re starting to get props in place so timing becomes more important and blocking makes more sense in a concrete way.  When I came in tonight there were framed pictures, ceramic lanterns and other decorations scattered about and a silver haired woman was sorting through everything with the director to pick out what we’ll use.  I’m not lifting up air when I comment on that picture, the girl who plays the maid is bringing in lamps and trays, there’s a real cord to pull for the bell. 

I wrote my bio for the program and a delightfully flighty woman took our photos for the press release as we ran our scenes this evening.  There are little postcards with the play dates and cast list to hand out to friends and family.  Our show premier is on the calendar for only a few short weeks away and I see it every time I write a reminder down on my phone.  I’m starting to train my eyes to wander over the empty seats as if there were people looking back at me when I perform.  Soon enough the director will be sitting in the back row telling us “louder!” because he can’t hear us.  We’re getting the action of the scene down and starting to tweak the performance for an audience.

The magic of theater that people talk about as if it were an addictive nectar is starting to come out for real and I can’t help but be a little awe struck.  Having been out of the loop for so long I’d forgotten how exhilarating the whole thing can be.  But I’m remembering why I loved all this so much.

My task now is to try to soak up every wonderful minute of this and not lose it in the momentum as we speed toward opening night.  To remember that the flubbed lines and missed cues are just as delicious as the perfect delivery in front of a live audience.  To squeeze every ounce of joy I can get out of it.  Easier said than done, of course.  But I think I’m doing ok at the moment.

Book Review: Diary

After the cinematic brilliance that is Fight Club came out, I borrowed my brother’s copy of the novel to read.  After that I stole my brother’s copy of Survivor, loved it, and was forever more captivated.  I can’t remember if Choke or Lullaby came next for me.  Doesn’t really matter cause I loved them both.  And now, true to form, I loved Diary.  But before I get into that, a couple words on the author.

Chuck describes his writing as transgressive meaning that it focuses on characters who are outsiders, living on the fringes, and therefore usually rebel against cultural and societal norms in very controversial ways.  For those of you interested in the philosophical debate on whether or not literature should be censored this is definitely the genre for you because these novels have been in the foreground of this debate for centuries.  (Check it out if you’re interested.)

The history of the man himself, his involvement with rebellious actions and behaviors, and the personal events that (I assume) helped to shape why he writes what he writes is all fascinating and totally beyond the realm of this review.  I definitely encourage to look into him, his work, and what’s so fascinating about him.

But it is the writing and not the man that makes me love these books.  The characters he makes up all manage to walk the fine line between the unimaginably disturbing and the disturbingly familiar.  It’s the age-old fascination with monsters and murders that requires the creator to both alienate and endear the characters to the reader.  This is a balancing act that Palahniuk does very well.  Every single character I’ve read has been both psychologically unsettling and personally familiar.  I not only judge them as irreparably fucked up but also relate to them.  This is terribly unsettling since it would be comforting to just dismiss the whole thing and console yourself that you have nothing in common with these characters and their psychotic existence.  But you can’t because that thought or that emotion is too similar to something you’ve thought or felt and it draws you in and keeps you turning the page.

And the plots, of course, make the characters what they are.  They’ve all been buried under an avalanche of crap before the first page and that’s part of why you relate.  ‘How well would I cope,’ you think, ‘it that happened to me?’  The answer, always, is ‘not too well’.  Cause that’s the thing about extraordinary circumstances- they push you past your limits and you do things you didn’t think you were capable of doing.  Of course, Palahniuk’s worlds are always far more twisted than you can ever imagine they will be at the first page and the way that he gets down to the really messed up nature of the story is a thing to behold.  It’s like peeling back an onion- layer by layer it’s hard to keep your eyes open but you can’t help but want to keep going.

Another thing that seems particular to Palahniuk is his flair for throwing all these strange little facts at you.  His characters always know things that are… odd.  Everything from graphology to the ins and outs of support groups to the age of the laugh tracks on sitcoms.  Strange little factoids that clue you in to who a particular character is and add an unsettling layer to the content of the story.  At first, these just seem like quirks but as the story evolves you see how they’re connected to themes of the greater story arc and the climax of the individual characters.

Add to all that the minimalistic style he’s so famous for and you’ve got yourself a Chuck Palahniuk novel.  His writing is more like a series of interconnected poems than a typical novel.  The short, choppy sentences.  The repeating words and sounds.  The way it prevents you from falling into any kind of natural flow as you’re reading by throwing in these short, truncated sentences just when you started to develop a rhythm.  Almost as if he sensed you getting comfortable and purposefully disrupted the pattern just to mess with you.  It gives you the feeling of being in a really precarious position: always just a little off center, a little unbalanced.

Diary has all of these tell-tale signs: the characters are irrevocably messed up and the circumstances they start out in are devastating.  The main character herself is a case study in borderline madness and her questioning of reality is the key to the reader’s buy in.  The more clues we get the more confused we become until the questions she’s asking and the things she’s perceiving cause us to wonder and question the same things. 

The main thematic concept here is one that is near and dear to me: the line between creativity and madness and whether or not one can exist without the other.  Under normal circumstances my opinions on this topic tend to be pretty reasonable but within the distorted reality of this story it’s hard not to fall into the theoretical quandary.  Especially when her own creativity emerges only when she is pushed to the brink.

On a deeper level, the circumstances serve for a look at contemporary reality and the role that art plays in consumerism, financial status and what makes or breaks a community.  There are questions about family, community, sacrifice, betrayal and inspiration that fold into the bigger mystery and leave you guessing about the end.  And, just when you think it’s over, he throws in one last page that changes the whole context of the story.  The critics all rave that this is as close to a mystery as he’s ever written and I would agree.  But it’s got the familiar trademarks that make the rest of his library of work so fascinating.

I highly suggest that you check out any of Mr. Palahniuk’s books for any number of reasons, even just plain old curiosity.  This book in particular is great as a stand alone since it’s self contained and doesn’t require any pre-existing knowledge base.  But then again, all of his books are pretty much like that.  It’s the most fascinating kind of madness and it keeps you coming back for more.

The World's Greatest Puppy

One year ago today my boyfriend and I brought home the world's cutest puppy.  He was only 9 weeks old at the time, petrified of everything (and I do mean everything) and unable to manage a moment alone without falling apart.  It took a long time to get him house trained, comfortable on his own outside of the pen or able to comply with simple commands like sit or down.  And it tested the will of both of us to deal with the far greater than we could have realized responsibility of raising a puppy.  (For the record, it's really not all that different than having a baby.  It's just that growing up goes a lot quicker, thank god.)

It's so easy to get caught up in the daily technicalities.  Getting him out for a walk before work when you're running around like a headless chicken in the morning.  Being frustrated that he's still so anxious around other dogs.  Trying to get him to stop barking his head off when you come home from a long, trying day of work... The annoyances, the details, the facts of everyday reality.  Like everything, you can get caught up in it and lose track of the bigger picture.

But the bigger picture is this: he is, when it comes down to it, a miracle.  The fact that this creature exists- that he's just walking around the house, looking up at you with those amazingly round puppy dog eyes that show such overwhelming love, jumping at your heels so that you'll play a game a fetch with him, sitting in his best 'good boy' pose in expectation of a treat, snuggling in your lap like a fluffy teddy bear, all of it- is a miracle.  The world's cutest, most devastatingly adorable dog  is right there, waiting for me to get home from work and take him for a walk.

I try not to lose track of that, and I've written here about how he helps me in that endeavor.  Reminding me to slow down, take a few moments to just realize what a beautiful day it is outside as we walk around the block.  To fully enjoy a game of fetch with a puppy who wants nothing more in the world than to play with you.  To just look at that face and melt the way that you can't help but melt at the sight of such a face.  To be present that way that one can only be in the company of a puppy.  I like to think I take that seriously enough to be always grateful for him, everyday.

But on this anniversary of bringing him home for the first time I can't help but pay special attention to that and to fully acknowledge, with all the weight that acknowledgement bears, that I am so blessed to have him in my life.

Set Building

When I was in college I worked in the scene shop where we were tasked with building the sets for all the shows the college put up each semester.  There was a wide range of shows that we built the sets for and we had a wide range of things we needed to build for them.  A few stick out as being really eccentric and lead us to cart in garbage from a local dump, cut cars in half so we could have a junk yard scene, carry bags and bags of sand in to build a beach and go antiquing in search of avocado green refrigerators.  There were some interesting times that came out of all that.

Most of the time, however, we just did relatively simple, straight forward stuff.  Put flats together, painted them a billion times over, constructed door frames or book cases or chairs and built so many risers that I scarcely could find a pair of pants in my drawer I hadn’t left an allen wrench in.  It wasn’t complicated but damn, was it fun.  I loved being a scene shop chick.  I loved working with power tools, I loved covering t-shirt after t-shirt with paint splotches and spills, I loved coming back to my dorm smelling of sawdust and perpetually finding screws in my pocket.  It became equated with the creative spirit I so worshipped.

And I didn’t realize how much I missed it all until today when we built the set for the show.  As soon as I got there I grabbed a screw gun and handful of screws and went to work.  I loved it.  I loved the things that you wouldn’t think about loving in such a circumstance.  The smell of the smoke as you screw into the wood, the cold metal of the level as you try to even the legs on a platform, the high-pitched moaning the wood makes when you screw it into place, even the scrapes and bruises from a run away block that hit my arm when someone lost their grip on it.  It had nothing to do with aesthetics or how everything looked when we were done; it had to do with the hard labor of putting everything together.

It’s such a simple activity, a necessity of any production that most people don’t even think about.  But it brought up so many great memories for me and reminded me of how much I’ve missed this whole theatrical world I’ve been without for so long.  And even though we’ll tear down the set even quicker that we put it up as soon as the run finishes I can’t help but be a little giddy about what we built today.

Spring

Outside the sun is so bright it nearly blacks out the interior of the room.  The faded wallpaper surrounding the window is nothing more than a black box from which the light emerges.  A blinding green coming from every corner of the world as new life emerges again.  It’s so overwhelming he can’t see the world through the color.  There is nothing but the green burning into his eyes, enveloping him in a cocoon of greedy weeds swallowing his body completely. 

Outside fresh stalks are pushing their way up through the ground.  Slowly climbing through a thick weave of clay, top soil, dead leaves and lush weed cover until they finally break free to the air and sunlight they thirst.  He can feel the light warming his skin.  Eventually, a sheen of sweat will begin to emerge from his pores as he traces the residue of long, hard days working out in the field pushing plows through red soil in the oppressive heat.  He can sense it the way that arthritics sense rain.  A dull pain in his muscles promising hours spent kneeling in a garden combing through the moist earth planting seedlings and staking budding plants.  His body aches for it- a hunger in his bones.

Outside the wind is full and ripe, almost like it’d been blown in from off shore carrying the scent of salt water and flotsam.  He hears it beating against the window and can almost taste the scent.  If he focuses he can smell the entire world out there.  Every particle flooding his nose with scents that bring back memories of landscapes so lush he can barely breath through the aroma.  They say that emotion is more deeply rooted in olfactory stimulus than any other sense and he can feel the truth of that now.  His eyes water with the deluge of feelings that pour over him.

Outside there is a pulse beating heavily as the world moves.  He can hear it thumping against his eardrums and his body responds to it violently.  The sound of his heart, of his blood flowing through his veins, his breath moving through his lungs, his muscles stretching all fall in line with the rhythm.  Every molecule in his body is one with that sound and it moves him like the tempo of a song so old he can’t remember its origin.

Outside it is spring and he knows it.  He knows it in a way that he is not capable knowing without eyes or skin or a nose or ears with which to connect to it.  He knows it on a level that transcends the lifeless body that cages him. 

As they turn off the machines whose incessant beeping keep his heart beating at an artificial rhythm the sound of the outside world becomes more real.  As the sterile, blank interior retreats from his nostrils he can smell the soil and the sea.  As the tubes that pump air into his lungs slow he can breathe the air outside.  As the feel of the starched cloth evaporates he can feel the wind and the sun and the rain.  As the sight of people around him crying and talking of loss and endings fades away into the green he can see the shores and fields beyond the window.  An excitement expands beyond the boundaries of the physical form that once jailed him.  Because today, he is finally going outside.

Hindsight

Whenever I was with you, our conversations were so ethereal.  Not because of the content, but because of the feelings I had.  Like it wasn’t quite reality, for a time.  Like the concrete details of my life and my presence on the planet were somehow disconnected from me.  And they always seemed to linger just outside the door; I held my breath least I ruin the scene.

Every time you spoke, it seemed as if I’d missed a step.  Like a portion of our exchange had passed by unnoticed and you were on the next subject, expecting me to follow.  I did my best to follow but felt lost in a sea of near understanding.  As if I was constantly catching myself as I stumbled forward, trying to regain my balance.

Maybe that’s why I felt the way I felt with you.  There was no reality to interfere with my fantasy.  I could believe that you meant what I wanted you to, that all those silences and thick pauses exhibited a shared connection rather than a lack of understanding.  I saw us together, on the same wavelength, riding the same tides.  In actually, we were probably not even in the same body of water.

But how could we have been?  You were on a pedestal, so far above me that I couldn’t see you as anything other than a brightly burning star.  I watched you soar above the world, separate from it and immune to the everyday annoyances that plagued us mere mortals.  And I worshipped you, loved you, obsessed over this perfect, ideal vision I’d created of you.

Of course you were never really anything more than human, composed of the same capacities and failings.  But I realized that too long after you left my life to ever really see you.  And now I can't help but wonder what you look like.

Book Review: Committed

*A quick disclaimer before I begin: I love Elizabeth Gilbert.  I love her the way that people tend to love their favorites: unconditionally, irrationally, beyond concrete specifics or reasoning.  Therefore, I cannot write anything critical about her.  I just can’t.  So although I am positive there are things about this book that could’ve been executed better, I didn’t see those and I won’t be commenting on them.  This is not a critical book review; this is a fan explaining their overwhelming love for an author.
 
Now that we’re all on the same page, on to the review:

I must start this by saying exactly why it is that I love Elizabeth Gilbert so irrationally.  Although I referenced this growing attraction when I read Eat, Pray, Love (henceforth referred to as E,P,L) last year, my love and understanding of the reasons for that love has grown exponentially since then and requires further explanation.

I love her because she reminds me of my undergraduate college.  My college, which I also hold intensely passionate and unreasonable admiration for, was the kind of place where you would often find yourself engaged in intense, amazingly stimulating conversation with people who are astoundingly intelligent, well spoken, articulate, creative and passionate.  These conversations, due to the nature of the parties involved, were meandering and varied, covering a large number of vaguely related topics and often lasted for hours- sometimes split up over several consecutive meetings.  And I loved them with the kind of fierce, soul-defining passion that can permanently alter a person.

Reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s books- thus far- has been like having those conversations.  It’s sitting down in a peacefully lit, sunny little coffee house and talking to a friend whose intelligence and understanding absolutely floors you.  And why does it floor you?  Because in the midst of all that intelligence and passion there is a distinct lack of the qualities that unfortunately tend to come packaged with those: condescension, patronization, haughtiness or arrogance. 

This is not a woman who is educating you, lecturing you or in any other way talking down to you.  This is a dear old friend who is not only brilliant but also warm, comforting and welcoming.  It’s someone who you’ve known for years and who still overwhelms you with such a flood of positive emotion every time you see them that you can’t understand why you don’t see them more often save for the fact that they’re always working or traveling or taking care of their family or keeping up with their bounty of activities or just, you know, living life.  But every time you see them you’re reminded that they are one of the absolutely coolest people you know and you can’t help but thank god that they’re your friend.

My dear friend Vanessa whom I’ve just had a soul-nursing weekend with falls into this category as well, by the way.  And I was discussing this book with her while she was here.  And it was sandwiched in one of those conversations I was talking about.  So I’m not just reminiscing about college here.

So by now you will have already correctly assumed that I loved this book.  I loved it in my typical "I’ve highlighted so many passages and sentences and ideas that there’s not a single non-yellowed page in this damned thing" sort-of way.  I love it in the “that’s exactly what I said!” sort-of way that I experienced so many times with E,P,L.  I love it in the “thank you so much for addressing that- I was afraid you were going to leave it out for a second” kind-of way that she does so well.  I love it in the “how do you do that?  How do you sum up something so profound so eloquently?” sort of way.  I love it in the way that makes me feel compelled to become a college professor on marriage and family just so I can assign this book.

It occurs to me that I should probably make a quick note about what the hell the bloody thing is about, huh?  I’ll let Elizabeth Gilbert herself sum it up for you: “This entire book- every single page of it- has been an effort to search through the complex history of Western marriage until I could find some small place of comfort in there for myself.”  That sums it up better than I possibly could.

She does explore what seems like the entirety of the history of marriage and references facts from what sounds like intimidatingly large numbers of massively heavy volumes on the subject.  The critical part of me wants to read those books myself before accepting what she relays on face value, but I have no reason not to trust her and that’s not really the point anyway.  Nor is it where this book- or she- shines.

No, this book shines in the same ways that E,P,L did: in her personal stories revealing her life and the lives of the people she encounters.  The most overwhelmingly touching sections were those exploring the marriage histories of the people who had the biggest impact on her: her parents and her grandparents.  Her mother and grandmother are clearly the centerpieces of these, in her mind, and the way that she describes their choices, the sacrifices they made, and the paths they went down are hauntingly beautiful.  Honestly, her grandmother’s wine-colored coat with the real fur collar which she purchased with her own money and later on disassembled in order to make a dress for her daughter will stay with me for the rest of my life as the single greatest description of the deeply mysterious losses a woman suffers in marriage.

Which isn’t to say that she’s making the case that marriage is bad.  She admits that she wants to think that, mainly because she’s a self-proclaimed cynical divorcee being forced into a second marriage so that her Brazilian-born boyfriend will be allowed to live with her in the US.  But she somehow always manages to balance her own judgments with the realities of the lives she describes.  None of these people- not a single one of them- is used as an anecdote of a bad marriage or a good one.  All of them have their own stories and their own complex reasons for choosing the path they do.  Again I must quote her, because she says it best: “My mother herself had probably given up long ago trying to draw tidy ultimate conclusions about her own existence, having abandoned (as so many of us do, after a certain age) the luxuriously innocent fantasy that one is entitled to have unmixed feelings about one’s own life.”

I suspect that this is Gilbert’s greatest strength- the ability to see and accurately describe the world around her.  Not just flash descriptions or one-line categories.  But the beautiful and the devastating, the miraculous and mundane, the epiphanies and the mistakes- all at once, all in the same person.  I don’t think I know a single other writer who does that as well.

In the end, this book, like E,P,L before it, touched on a lot of personally significant questions for me and gave me a more comprehensive understanding of one of the most complicated milestones in human existence.  I have a lot more reading to do on the subject, and will be following some of Gilbert's recommendations for that purpose.  But without this starter guide, if you will, I don’t think I’d be as interested in studying up on it. 

In addition, after reading a second of her books and loving it so thoroughly for the writer more than the subject I am now convinced that I would be a massive idiot not to try out some of her less famous works that proceeded E,P,L.  The Last American Man is a thought-provoking title, don’t you think?

To learn more about Gilbert, click here.
To see her TED talk, one of the greatest explorations on creativity I’ve ever been exposed to, click here.
And to read my review of Eat, Pray, Love, click here.

2012 Outdo Yourself Reading Challenge

I love Fridays.  Not just because it’s the end of the work week which, of course, is vital.  But because it marks the time when I am thoroughly reminded of how many truly amazing writers there are out there.  I have the blog roll and it reminds me, too.  But I don’t check as often as I feel like I should and Friday provides that terribly needed kick in the ass to go and read and remember.  And what I’m remembering is that reading other writers is just as important as writing.  That’s something I forget sometimes.

Like last year when I was so busy trying to meet my self-mandated blog post count that my reading list was disturbingly small.  Of all the amazing books I had sitting and waiting on my book shelf I only read… maybe five of them?  A terribly low number, considering that the whole point of all this is to get better at writing.

But thankfully, I am not alone in this.  Many other people feel like they should be reading more, and one of my fellow bloggers relayed me to a useful tool to assist with this.  I came upon it last Friday when I was trolling my blog roll for new posts and I came upon an interesting side bar over at Eric J. Krause’s Writing Spot.  Eric is a good writer and in order to become a better writer he, in his infinite wisdom, has set a challenge for himself to read more.

That challenge has a name, because another blogger I discovered thanks to Eric’s link, created it: The 2012 Outdo Yourself Reading Challenge.  I had never run across the Book Vixen before clicking on the link in Eric’s sidebar.  But I’m glad I did because it reminded me of how vitally important that reading piece is- not just for my writing, but for my brain.

So, I am officially signing up to outdo myself.  I’m going to blow last year’s measly list of books out of the water by reading a total of 12 books this year.  Why 12 books?  Because it’s 2012.  And, more practically, because a book a month seems reasonable to expect of myself.  And because I already read one so I technically only have 11 to go.  And because I figure this blog needs more book reviews.

I actually started reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed before I finished Pride and Prejudice because I was so disgusted with the marriage obsession that I needed to read the words of someone coming from the other end of the spectrum.   But now it’s just that on my reading list, and I’m giving myself a week to finish it because of the need to outdo myself.

Thanks to The Book Vixen for creating this challenge and thanks to Eric J. Krause for linking me up with it!  And if you too would like to outdo yourself, click here or on the icon to your right.  You can sign up at any time and challenge yourself to whatever number you see fit.  Happy reading!