Finding One's Muse

While living in Kansas, I participated several times in a 24-Hour Play Festival, the equivalent of a short-term writing sprint. People signed up for various activities--tech, acting, directing (6), and writing (6). I did tech once, but the other times I wrote one of the plays.

The premise is simple: At 8 p.m., all of the participants come to the theatre with one costume and one prop. The participants get up one by one and present their items, and the actors also tell anything they can do--accents, sword fighting, double-jointedness, etc.

Once that is done, the actors, techies, and directors go home to bed, while the playwrights "draft" their actors for their play (usually they end up with 4-5 actors). Using their group of actors, along with the costumes and props brought in that night, the playwrights have from about midnight to 6 a.m. to write a ten-minute play. They have a few readers who stay up with them to read and offer feedback (so that the plays are at least a bit revised and polished before 6 a.m.), and then they head home to sleep all day.

Copies of the plays are made, and by 7 a.m. the directors come, read all the plays, and then fight over who gets to direct each one. At 8 the actors and techies show up, and from that point until an 8 p.m. performance, they rehearse the play, find costumes, learn lines, and prepare for a full production of each play.

Pretty fun stuff!! Exhausting, but fun. It's also a learning experience, and it helped me realize how much I depend on PEOPLE for my inspiration. I never had a clue what my play would be until after my actors were cast. Sometimes a prop gave me a little something, but it was usually the actors themselves. No, it was ALWAYS the actors.

And I have muses in real life, too. One woman in particular in Kansas ended up in several of my plays--she was the perfect protagonist--vulnerable, kind, intelligent, sensitive. She was also an actor, and a good one, so she often ended up in the very role designed for her. She was Othello's wife in my play Desdemona, and was absolutely perfect for it.

Now I have another muse here in Georgia, a 72-year-old teenager who has more energy in a single strand of hair than most people accumulate in a year. I've already written a play with her in mind, and I will likely write more. Then again, most characters in my plays and novels are melded images of a dozen different people, some from decades ago. And they all have just a touch of me, as well (even the villains).

So, who is your muse? What or who inspires you to do the work you do? Who shapes your world?

Will You Stop Patronizing Me?

I'm an easy going kind of girl. Really, I am. I can pretty much get along with anybody. You can be stupid, and I'll help you get a clue. You're going to be imperfect (everybody is, you know, even you), yet I'll look over the imperfections easily. I have many of them myself.

But just patronize me, and you make an enemy for life.

So many have tried it. One guy in graduate school--a creative writing major--made it clear what he thought of literature majors. We had to work in a group together, three creative writing majors and me (a lit. major), and when the other three were going off on a tangent with planning, I said, "I don't quite understand."

Without blinking, this person leaned over, patted my arm, motioned to himself and the others, and said, "Don't worry. We're very creative people. We'll make sure you're okay."

I wanted to slug him. But since I am a pacifist, I didn't.

There was no shortage of such people in graduate school and academia. Usually it was a teacher of questionable worth who made it a point to patronize and insult the worth of the other teachers or graduate students around him/her in order to feel superior. But I always hated it.

Theatre has traditionally been a place for this as well, but until this last week, I hadn't really encountered it here in the community production of The Sound of Music. Sure, we have a couple divas, and they share their own little dressing room, keeping themselves aloof from the rest of us... but they haven't been too annoying.

Until yesterday.

We were just about to begin our second week of shows last night, and the girl who plays Maria came up to me with a few "suggestions." First, she wanted a bit more stage business for something, since she didn't feel like she could move the way she wanted to without it.

Okay. No big deal. I'd made adjustments for her before. Easy stuff.

But then she pulled out the patronizing card. She put her hand on my arm (always a bad sign), and said, "And be loud. When we sing together, especially. First the audience hears me sing," she says, "and then when you get up there, well, you know." And she makes a face.

Really? Did we have to go there? Three more productions, and we might never have to work together again. But she can't wait. She has to pull out the patronizing card and slap me across the face with it. I could spend the rest of the blog ranting about her acting skills, but I won't. She's not bad. And she can sing. And how well she does it is none of my damn business, since I'm not the director.

But neither is she.

I am grateful to be in the ordinary dressing room, and I'll take this as another reminder of how not to behave towards other people. We all have different talents, different strengths, and different weaknesses, and it's not my job to step on others while on my own personal journey.

It's also my job to do my best, despite the comments, and to do so with a positive attitude. Perhaps what upsets me most is that, even after all of these years, comments like this still bother me.

In the Wings

Waiting for the cue

For the first step in the light

Brighter than day

Breathing deep

Mind at rest

And buzzing

All at once

The crowd is there

But it's the story that moves me

(Not the applause)

The lines

The songs

The beatific face

I show them

Time to play pretend

To step out of my life

For a short while

To forget everything

To forget myself

To be another life

To live another dream

To see the world another way

If only for a moment

Whisperings

My play is calling to me.

Well, its characters are, and that means I need to devote the afternoon to writing (once my classes are over and I've eaten a little lunch). You see, my characters had been talking and interacting all night while I slept, and they gave me a rather interesting dream.

I dreamed last night that I was with a film star... though now the identity of the star escapes me. It's not the first time I've dreamed of film stars. I always pick the weird ones, too, the ones I'm not at all attracted to, like Rutger Hauer, Bobcat Goldthwait, etc. I once dreamed Desi Arnaz had asked my mom to marry me, and she was trying to urge me into it, even though he was really, really old (he died less than a week after I'd had the dream).

Anyway, I had separated from my husband and hadn't seen my two kids, and this star was trying to woo me into becoming his significant other, furnishing his fabulous apartment with stuff he thought I'd want, etc. I was holding back, cautious, wanting to visit my kids and husband, but when I went to our house (a brownstone in Chicago, a place and kind of house I would never live in, mind you), I discovered that my husband had left for Europe (probably in anger that I'd left) and the kids were living with my mother-in-law.

The frightening part of this is that everything was unemotional, as if I was afraid to feel anything about my husband, or this actor guy, or my own kids. I was numb, rather like the female character of my play is feeling. I kept wondering, while dreaming, what was going to happen to wake me up, and I realized that the only thing which could break me out of the misty funk I was in was my husband--his physical presence, his touch, a word of caring or recognition.

I woke up, and suddenly I knew what to do with my characters. They fell into place beautifully, and I knew that my main character had to know, in some real, certain way, that her husband wouldn't abandon her, that he'd be glued to her no matter how broken she was. Only then could she heal. If she thought he could get up and leave, she'd leave him first, just so that she wasn't the one left behind. And he needed the same assurance, that she wouldn't leave him like she'd left her own father, left so many other boyfriends before she'd met him, left so many jobs, left places and friends, anything that wore on her too much. His greatest fear was that she would take off, and he'd never see her again.

Heavy stuff for a morning, I know, but I appreciate my characters working through this for me, so that I could have the answers when I woke.

Now if I could just figure out who that film star was.