A Preface

My friend that I wrote about a couple of posts ago, hereafter named Garrett (one of the ASC actors that befriended me during the six and a half weeks I lived in Staunton), seems to have a knack for rendering my iPod useless.

The night before leaving Staunton, I made sure it was charged and ready for what I presumed would be a nine and a half or ten hour drive back to Indiana. It was one of the only things that had managed to keep me occupied on the drive to Staunton several weeks earlier, and I assumed I would be needing its services again. But the morning before I left, I ran into Garrett in the lobby of the dorm as he was about to head to warm-ups and rehearsals with the high school campers he was responsible for. Over the past couple of weeks, I'd gotten the privilege of spending a little more time with Garrett--just before I drifted off to sleep my phone would go off and it would be Garrett asking if I wanted to join him and a couple of the others at the YMCA gym in the morning. Or he would text me at 11:00 at night and ask if I wanted to go for a late night jog (which we did, in the drizzling rain, and afterwards sat in his car listening to light rock, talking a little, and sipping hot tea he'd so conveniently happened to bring). He asked me to a local theatre group's performance of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, and afterwards we watched Batman Begins a day or so before the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. 

On several occasions, especially when it was just the two of us, we had a couple of fascinating conversations about our views of life, spirituality, even some social issues and politics. Despite my fears, I did finally manage to reveal that I came from a very conservative Christian background, and admitted that even if my personal views as an adult no longer aligned perfectly with my upbringing, they were still influenced by it sometimes. And he didn't recoil--of course not. Though he did ask curiously if I still believed in a God. I told him I did, even if I was in a rather currently disillusioned place with the church. He in turn shared with me that he grew up with his mother in a home with ideologies that were so far left there was no further to go, and that his father was Jewish (which made our next discussion about Rachel Corrie that much more poignant), and that he had believed in a God, but no longer did. 

It was good to have a real conversation. To be perfectly honest about much-deeper-than-superficial things with someone else I had just met from a completely different walk of life who was also perfectly honest with me. It was good to feel that, without any intentionality from either of us, we had shared what we needed to of our stories. Because, even though some people may not think so, we met on common ground--with no fences, no invisible walls. Exactly what I needed.

On top of it all, Garrett's charm and happy-go-lucky personality are magnetic, and by the time I had to leave--regardless of whether or not he thought the same of me--I thought of him as a friend I was truly going to miss. So when I ran into him in the lobby the morning before I left, though we had talked about going for another jog before I took off, it didn't look like time was going to permit it and I was going to say goodbye to my new friend. But he asked me to meet him for coffee before I left. 

I agreed, and met him at the coffee shop a little later. He bought us both iced coffee and we sat in the sunny back garden talking for about an hour. As the conversation drew to a close, he was telling me about a movie, and asked me to come with him back to the dorm so he could at least show me the first five minutes of it. But, when we arrived at his room, he realized he was missing a cable for the TV and instead simply handed me the movie with a wave of his hand and an, "I'm moving into a matchbox apartment in New York City in a couple of weeks. I need to get rid of most of my shit anyway--you're actually doing me a favor." Then, as we kept talking, he somehow decided that I also needed to listen to an audio book that he had. He described some of the opening plot, and told me that I really did have to listen to it because it was so good, so I obviously needed to take that too--some entertainment for my ridiculously long drive. Not able to think of an excuse to say no, I acquiesced and took both the audio book and the DVD. 

So, as I pulled out of the dorm parking lot for the last time, with Garrett looking ridiculous just outside the dorm door waving a crinkled white paper napkin in a comic farewell as I pulled away and my iPod tucked, ever useless, into one of my backpack pockets for what ended up being a twelve hour drive, I fumbled with Disc 1 of Horns, a novel by Joe Hill--a writer who has striven to make a name for himself somewhere outside of the enormous shadow of his father, Stephen King.

There are those who have tried to tell me that God and spirituality are becoming more and more absent from the world as we move into some sort of secular age, and that as atheists take over our country--removing the ten commandments from the lawns of our courts of law and striking "In God We Trust" from our one dollar bills and "under God" from our pledge of allegiance--somehow all things spiritual are being slowly erased as we plunge toward certain doom. But let me tell you. I have been convinced over and over again by conversations I've had and things I've seen, heard, and read that God and spirituality are still very much present and part of public conversation and thought in this world, whether or not people recognize it (or like the wrapping it comes in). I was planning to dive in and dissect my thoughts on the book Horns for you today, but I only just finished it and thought it might be good to let my thoughts incubate a while. So consider this the preface.

Some Nights

I can fall asleep and stay asleep basically anywhere, at any time, in pretty much any circumstances if I'm tired enough. As in, I must really be struggling if my head's been on the pillow for longer than ten minutes and I'm still not asleep. Even if the overhead light is on and there's music playing. I've had many a roommate express envy.

Tonight is one of those struggling nights.

I've been thinking about yesterday morning's movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado today, in company, I'm sure, with countless others. And it's still on my mind tonight.

I just finished reading a blog post by a woman who was with her kids in the theater when the shooting happened and escaped. The post is a testament to her faith. She proclaims God's profound mercy in the midst of the tragedy boldly and unfalteringly.

Please, don't mistake me. I am deeply relieved for this woman, her family, and their community that they are still together. Her words are and will be inspiring--in only hours after the tragedy, her proclamation of the grace and mercy of God has gone viral. I am moved by her faith, and my heart is glad for her.

She describes that she and her family feel closer to God because of this. She claims that, in the midst of meaningless horror, God is merciful because he spared them.

Please, don't mistake me. I do not ask these questions with any hint of hostility or cynicism or out of any desire to belittle her, her faith, or her experience, but out of genuine confusion and a desire to understand something that I cannot.

If God is merciful because he spared her life and the lives of her children, where was his mercy when the others died?

If God protected her because she spoke prayers of protection over her and her children as the horror was unfolding, were the people who died not praying? Or not praying hard enough? Is that really the common denominator?

I've been in Sunday School almost all my life. I know the right answers to these questions. Things like, God has a bigger picture orchestrated and it's all part of the plan. Or Job's answer--the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, and who are we to question? Or that God has given man free will, and chooses not to intervene because to do so would be to remove that free will, even from a murderer. Or that we are small and should not expect or presume to understand how God works. Or even, God is merciful because he is merciful--the events that unfolded in that theater are not an indicator of his mercy or love any more than plucking petals from a daisy determines another person's affection for you. All the right answers.

But often even these fall flat on ears that are straining for meaning. And in those hours of the night, when you can't fall asleep and lie there, still, not sure whether the room or your mind is darker, you sometimes find yourself thinking that there must be places beyond answers.

Preconceptions: Unadvised

After four and a half weeks now of interning at the ASC, I've met quite a few people. I've spent some time working and talking with professional actors, directors, costume designers, stage managers, and production assistants, not to mention administrative and education staff. Over all, apart from my own (occasionaly crippling) self-consciousness and uncertainty, it's been an excellent experience. I'm very glad I did it, and am generally of the opinion that--what do grown-ups say?--it's been good for me.

Watching, spending time with, and talking with the actors has definitely been one of the most valuable experiences I'll take away from the summer. It's made me realize several things. Things like, I'm really no different than any of them. They aren't particularly intimidating, nor do they all get everything perfect. There's no one set formula or path to an acting career. It's helped me adopt more of a "why NOT me?" mentality.

And now I'm going to be painfully honest. One result of my Christian upbringing, I think, is that I always had a tendency to think about anyone else I came into contact with outside of church as an "other"--to start off viewing them from the inside looking out, as it were. As if I peered at everyone else from the other side of a glass wall that I now realize I subconsciously placed there myself. I only became aware of this tendency at some point in my last two years of high school. And, as I transitioned into college, I began to realize that it probably isn't in my best interest to go through life that way. Because if I start off acquaintances with this subconscious elitist mentality, it probably means that I'm not truly seeing them, and not being truly present with them. I'm holding back, and therefore probably hindering what could be great relationships with great people, not allowing them to be all they could be. To this day it's still a conscious effort, but ever since I realized what I was doing, I've tried to tear down those invisible walls. Not just tear them down, but force them out of existence.

So, knowing that about me, and also knowing that I'm just enough of an introvert that meeting new people can be difficult anyway, you may marvel (with me) at the fact that I've been able to make successful and lovely acquaintances while I've been here. And today I want to tell you about one of these acquaintances and how it subverted some of the "otherness" I described above.

I made the acquaintance, a couple weeks ago, of one of the younger-ish actors who just finished a year with the touring troop on the "Almost Blasphemy" tour and who is relatively new to the ASC. For the sake of this post, I'll call him Garrett. I saw Garrett in all three of the tour's shows before they closed--A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale, and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. I enjoyed them all, though definitely Midsummer most. Garrett is very personable and outgoing--the kind of person who could make easy conversation with anyone on the planet. After the tour ended, he was a counselor for the three-week high school Shakespeare camp, and therefore living just a couple floors below my two fourth floor next door neighbors and I in the dorm. On a couple of nights, after lights out for the campers, Garrett joined the three of us on the fourth floor and we sat around talking about theatre, movies, art, etc. As I said, he's very outgoing, and very friendly. Very friendly. The description, according to my next door neighbor the costume designer who has known him for a couple of years, was "attracted to anything female that walks on two legs."

The other day, toward the end of the camp, I happened to be washing dishes in the kitchen on the first floor when he came in, rather sweaty and in workout clothes, and asked if I'd like to join him for a run. After thinking through my plans for the day, I agreed. He said he didn't have a lot of time, and offered to finish washing the dishes while I changed. I climbed the stairs to my room with the passing thought that I actually did need the exercise, and returned in a few minutes.

He drove us to the track and, as I might have guessed, initiated a conversation as we started running (something I try to tolerate--but there really is no way to enjoy talking to anyone when you feel like your lungs are going to shrivel into raisins). I did, however, enjoy learning a little more about him, and answering some of his questions about me and my past. Unfortunately, I'm pretty guarded when it comes to talking about my Christian heritage. I know I need to grow out of that--it's probably a form of cowardice. I have a hard time with my irrational fear of being judged and grouped in with abrasively outspoken and unkind people who happen to claim the same faith. I'm afraid that people will automatically assume that I'm out to judge them. So I've often preferred to cling to the words of Saint Francis of Assisi--"...when necessary, use words."

As the conversation continued on our third or fourth lap around the track, he motioned to my (useless) iPod strapped to my arm (I never even put in my headphones because we'd started talking) and asked what I listen to when I run. I told him a little bit of anything that has a beat--Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Ke$ha, Usher, Chris Brown--

"Chris Brown?" he cut me off there. "Even after all...?"

"Yeah," I admitted. "I have like one song of his." I knew his surprise stemmed from Brown's incidents of domestic violence and general douchebaggery that have found their way into the media's capable hands.

"Once a music artist gains that much fame, their name is their brand, you know?" he explained to me. "I just made the conscious decision not to listen to any of his music in order not to support his brand."

"Ah," I huffed, as we made our way back up the other side of the track. I didn't really know what to say in response.

After a few more laps and running up and down some stairs a few times, we were both panting pretty hard and dripping sweat in the stifling 95-degree sunshine and decided to call it quits. After walking and stretching a little, we got back in the car and drove a little way to the college dining hall so he could fill up his water bottle. While there, we were discussing theatre and he was asking about roles I've played. When I told him I'd played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet he declared his envy, as well as a desire to play Benedick when I told him I was playing Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing this fall. As I discussed roles I've played and would like to play I confess that I got a little carried away, and I think my ego showed a little.

When, a few minutes later in the conversation, he made a comment about the fine line between arrogance and confidence as an actor, I faltered again and immediately hung my metaphorical head at some of the things I'd said not five minutes before, wondering if his comment was as pointed as I imagined it was. The words that I hope to see painted on the inside of the Green Room at the Black Box Theatre at IWU seemed to smart in my brain: "Do not think of yourselves more highly than you ought."

The conversation with Garrett certainly left me thinking. Here I'm afraid that if I come right out and claim a certain label people will assume I'm on some kind of personal mission to make them feel guilty about their choices, and it turns out I was the one walking away feeling guilty about things. Much of my guilt was most likely manufactured--we actually had a very pleasant conversation, traded phone numbers, and he expressed a wish to see My Name is Rachel Corrie (regardless of the fact that my school is nine and a half hours away). I have to keep in mind that it's also very easy to make me feel guilty. So, I don't pretend to think that he walked away looking down his nose at me. But I wanted to share the experience because, in a backwards sort of way, it served to subvert some of my naive preconceptions.

This Summer's Novel Number One

Not that my book choices have anything to do with being a thespian or an MK. But.

I frequently make references to the stack of books on my nightstand--my "to read" pile. I brought about half the stack with me to Virginia. Currently, in preparation for My Name is Rachel Corrie, I'm doing what I hope will be an adequate amount of background research into Israel, Palestine, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is the backdrop for Rachel's story. After reading Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Confict: A Primer by Phyllis Bennis and The Case For Israel by Alan Dershowitz, at the moment I am wading through A Brief History of Israel by Bernard Reich. Though it may not be possible to ask for objectivity, A Brief History of Israel is proving to be the most even-handed of the three I've read so far. But, as is usally the case with nonfiction and research for me, it's work to get through it.

I have always adored novels. I figured out, in encounters in early elementary with The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, and Encyclopedia Brown, that I could completely lose myself. Lose track of time, lose track of my own hunger, lose track of any other obligations in a day until I finished the book. I'm not sure what it is about that--you'd think (for someone who feels like I've wasted the day if I sleep past ten in the morning) that it would be somewhat disconcerting. But it's absolutely one of my favorite things.

So you may understand why I typically don't allow myself to start novels during the school year. And why it felt like a breath of fresh air to finally crack one this summer. And why I proceeded to spend every spare moment in the next two days devouring every one of the 619 pages.

What novel was it? It must have been something exceptional in order for me to have devoured it like that. Right? And this is the part where I sheepishly glance at the floor and prepare to be judged. It was Stephenie Meyer's only other published work apart from the Twilight series, her adult novel called The Host.

I read the Twilight series my senior year of high school. As people noticed me reading the books, I received judgmental glances and warnings of all kinds from all sides (further compounded by living in a Christian community). The well-meaning mother of one of my friends even printed off a Focus on the Family-type review found online and wrote a note on the back explaining that I really probably shouldn't read the books, but if I did, I should beware of the traps in this young adult fiction that could pull my impressionable mind into a sinful spiral. I read the note with a little smile on my face, wondering what kind of note she would have written to me back in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade when I was reading Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code (followed by a couple of Dan Brown's other novels), and every Michael Crichton and Nicholas Sparks book I could get my hands on. But, back to Stephenie Meyer.

Twilight? Well, it's extremely easy reading. As in, you tend to forget that you're reading at all. (Not the books I would recommend if you're looking to expand your vocabulary or evaluate literary merit.) I have the standard problems, naturally, with the heroine's helplessness, self-deprecation, and finding her only worth in a significant other (just like pretty much every other critic of the series). Meyer obviously prefers writing in first person, and though the main character (from whose perspective we experience the story) seems to be selfless to a fault, there's an awareness of it that Meyer can never seem to get away from--a self-conscious martyrdom, if you will.

I will give Meyer this, however: somewhere, in all that, her books have managed to get me to feel. Maybe I shouldn't rely so much on my emotions, but I tend to judge stories on their ability to make me feel something. Obviously, if I'm not drawn into a story at all, there's no way for it to make me feel anything. Every novel, if it does its job correctly, has made you feel something by the end. And Meyer's books have, admittedly, done that. My eyes sped up and scanned the pages faster when the characters were in danger. I found my brain conjecturing about the plot mid-novel, wondering what would happen. I may or may not have even teared up.

I wasn't sure what to expect of The Host, naturally. I found some differences from Twilight, but quite a few bothersome similarities also.

What I liked:
 -The Trekkie in me finds the sci-fi premise (parasitic alien life forms using human bodies as hosts, initially undetected, taking over the earth until only a very few scattered underground holdout human factions remain) fascinating.
 -Again, the characterization managed to draw me in enough to make me feel something by the end of the book.

What I didn't like:
 -I can't describe the writing itself as excellent.
 -If you thought the Twilight love triangle was a little too much to handle, try the quadrangle in The Host. There are two beings (the main character--Wanderer--one of the alien life forms, and the human--Melanie Stryder) conscious simultaneously inside Melanie's head. Melanie is in love with Jared and accidentally, by forcing her memories on Wanderer, causes Wanderer to fall in love with him too. But, while she is living in the caves with one of the holdout human factions, one of the humans, Ian, falls in love with Wanderer in Melanie's body. And then, as is Meyer's specialty, she attempts to plumb the depths of the complications that arise.
 -All the self-conscious martyrdom we experienced in Bella is present again in Wanderer.
 -The turnout of the ethical dilemma at the end of the book in order to provide readers with a "happy ending" left me scratching my head. Meyer and her readers wrestle, for the majority of the book, with the ethical implications of depriving a life form of its own body and consciousness in exchange for an existence without conflict, disease, or war. Wanderer discovers she cannot be at peace with herself because she does not want to deprive any human of life or consciousness, and so (Spoiler Alert) requests to be removed from her host and left to die. Instead, however, the humans kidnap another body (which has, for the majority of its life, been inhabited by another parasitic alien life form and therefore has no human consciousness of its own) and remove the other alien life form to give the body to Wanderer in order that Wanderer can continue living with them without feeling like a parasite. But they jettison the other alien creature off to another planet without that creature's consent. In short, I think Captain Picard would have found the ethics sketchy.
 -A repeat of Bella: the fragility, utter helplessness, dependence, and self-deprecation of the main character get rather old. I'm starting to worry about Meyer. She seems to create lots of fantasies of muscular men carrying weak, disoriented, or constantly injured women around.
 -Again, a mirror of moments in Twilight, I found myself rolling my eyes at numerous points in the plot, going "Really? Really? This is what's going to happen right now?"

The movie adaptation is set to come out in theaters in March 2013. Will I be there? Oh. Probably. Out of curiosity, mainly, which is also why I read the book in the first place.

I'm trying to have enough discipline to get through some more of A Brief History of Israel before rewarding myself with any more novels, but I just recently purchased Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, also the author of Stardust (from which the movie was adapted), and I keep hungrily glancing at it on the top of the pile on my nightstand.