Diversity

Local community theatre announced their season.  There are approximately 90 roles for men and 45 roles for women, not counting musical ensembles.

I thought this felt deeply fucked up.  But, not to be hypocritical, I checked the season of script readings I put together and discovered that it's come out nearly even so far.  This wasn't even a conscious choice, though it may be a side-effect of purposely searching for plays written by women.  They're extremely biased against scripts for performers of colour, but I live in a city that's 97% white.  It's still a problem, but I'd rather do that than colourblind casting in favour of white actors.

I checked another local theatre, even numbers male to female.  I looked up the closest regional theatre, a state away, and discover they're not quite twice as many men to women, more like 1.7.  I looked up the best regional theatre near me, another state away in a major metropolitan area and they represent an even gender split as well as featuring one play each representing African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic/Latino Americans performers and audiences.  Of course, they have the local diversity to support that environment and the ability to draw nationally, but it's nice to see.

I Don't Know Sometimes, I Really Don't Know

"Can you get your laundry off the lines in the basement so I can hang up my clothes?"
You're going down there anyway, why don't you bring it up?
"I don't know if it's all yours."

I go downstairs later.  The load of laundry in question is a load of "lights" red, pink, and white, fitted collared shirts, underwear, socks and a couple of tank tops I use as undershirts.  Literally the most feminine load of laundry in the house.

I can understand being unfamiliar with my wardrobe after ten years, but there's no way those clothes could possibly be confused with anything my brother might wear.

Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc

Of course.

Of course I go back to the Internet and get greeted by that Wednesday Addams video. It bothers me because it's not Wednesday Addams.

Wednesday gets her revenge personally. She doesn't need a middle man, she doesn't need an excuse. She just does what needs to be done. 

In Addams Family Values, when someone wants Wednesday Addams to smile, she smiles, and THEY'RE the ones who regret that choice. 

The other day dredged up a memory of a common conversation among Talented And Gifted kids (TAG, at the time. Presumably someone later disliked the implication they were labeling all of us and changed it to G/T later, but, TAG'd we had been). Put a bunch of us smart kids in a room together and eventually, we always got around to asking who was in the pool or if we'd been identified. I had no idea what this meant at the time, but it always came up and we all knew. 

I'd forgotten about it entirely until I happened to be reading Moab. When Stephen Fry was about 12 years old, he found a note that categorised him as "approaching genius" with the added epithet from his headmaster, "that bloody explains everything." Many years later he took the MENSA entrance, proving that he didn't simply approach genius, he embodied it, and discovered he didn't actually want to be a member of MENSA. Anyway, at 12, he'd hated the knowledge, considering it the worst thing he'd ever found out about himself, when what he wanted to be was good at sports and swim in the pool with the other kids. Stephen's childhood rejection of this idea reminded me of how this same thing was my identity, hold, on, wait a minute... Identified. Pool. These words mean something, and led me Googling.  

Identified students are, by definition, top 3%, 97th percentile and above on tests and highly gifted. Pool was everyone else, students who were maybe developmentally a little bit ahead and might eventually hit against a wall and begin to approach average. I was identified in Kindergarten, I knew that. I didn't know that it was so unusual to be identified that early. My state, from what I can tell (though individual districts are different) doesn't formally test until 3rd grade, and under normal circumstances, *won't* test before 1st. Anyway, I was identified, not pool. Top 3%.

Of course, I was miserable in school.  

Thinking back on it, if any environment groomed me to accept abusive, unhealthy situations, public education did.  It was a necessity to be endured.  You went every day, you were told you had to go, you were the problem, and you tried to survive, hoping that, maybe, next lesson, next semester, next year, next grade, next school, things would be better.  They wouldn't get better.  And you couldn't leave.

It's fucking cruelty.  It's not how life works, it's creating a cycle of accepting being treated as less than a human being all the time.

I wonder to what extent teachers are in the same scenario, unleashing that stress and pressure on their students.  I wonder if anyone has ever looked at the problem that way before.  I wonder if anyone has ever looked at a school and considered whether it was a healthy environment for students, or individual students.

They wonder why people commit acts of violence at schools, this is why.  You don't see the administrators or school board or local government in charge of reinforcing this useless environment, you see the day to day results, a building full of miserable people more then 50% of whom are there against their will or better judgement because where would they go if they could?  Leaving isn't allowed.  There are no alternatives because you're not good enough, not well-behaved enough, not smart enough, not sick enough, not enough to warrant anything but the cycle of abuse.

It's a thing I'm learning as I struggle to get my life into a new place.  I am capable of changing my environment.  I can positively control the world around me in a way I hadn't realised was possible, because up to now, it hadn't been.  I got out of high school and thought, "now," while I was living on a college campus.  It was better, but it wasn't autonomous.

After spending a decade living with someone who doesn't know what to do and to whom all ways are shut and barred, I'm figuring out that, no, it doesn't actually work like that.

Does anyone tell a victim of abuse, "It gets better, just stay in that marriage, job, relationship?"  No.  But they tell that to teenagers.  It gets better?  No.  You learn to make it better.

You do your thing, loudly, and regardless of anyone else.  Be an Addams.  

Gabbitas and Thrings

I read all of Moab is My Washpot in the last two days.  Stephen Fry's life and background are nothing like mine.  But it's the first autobiography I've read where I feel like I can actually relate to the person writing it.

I've read Katharine Hepburn's, Tina Fey's, Carrie Fisher's and Beverly Cleary's autobiographies, and was reading about a life I didn't understand.  These women were touched by things I was never effected by with worries I've never had.

Stephen's is like peering into a parallel version of my own brain.  In some places.  Stephen's capacity to love and appreciate is far greater than anything I can understand.

Which is what I wonder about.  I worry that all love is Stockholm Syndrome for me, because I have never, ever experienced a total immediate attraction to anyone.  Curiosity, yes, interest.  In high school I did develop a hopeless crush on an upperclassman who came out the year after he graduated and had the power to render me brainless.  If I have a physical type, it's that.  But I've never been struck with an instant physical need for another person.

I distrust my single adult relationship, because, well, I don't know that it was ever a right choice.  The entire relationship began from an absence of compelling reasons not to be in it and advanced under the same circumstances.

Perhaps I'm really not cut out for these types of relationships at all.  Not to say that I'm not a valuable person worthy of anyone's interest, but, maybe there isn't anybody that I'm ever going to feel that way about correctly, as opposed to a self-maintained exercise in learning tolerance and compassion for someone who repeatedly proves they didn't deserve it.

Contortion

Woke up at 4:30 this morning convinced I had another speech performance at 11 o clock today and would conflict with my needing to be in a box office at noon.  The force of waking up with this conviction made me irritate my old gymnastics injury.  

My mention of gymnastics makes people look at me funny.  However, it's true, I took gymnastics lessons from third to sixth or seventh grade.  I was terrible, but I liked doing it.  I went to a slumber party one night and gymnastics the next morning and pulled a muscle in my neck.  Tiredness and a specific movement will always irritate it again.  It's always a problem I've managed to irritate every single time I've ever moved house.  

Perhaps part of the reason it happened was dreaming that I was moving out of the house back in Illinois and, supposedly, back to an urban apartment in Washington DC, a city that I've never ever visited, never mind lived in.  I was excited because the first time I'd lived there, I hadn't had the opportunity to see all the things that were literally blocks from the apartment.  

I remembered the address when I woke up, but Google tells me no such address exists in DC.  I've never been there, but my dream showed the city like a cross between Vienna and Munich.  

Packing the house in Illinois was proving complicated because there were so many hidden closets (I frequently dream of that house with an entire basement it never had; closets is a new one) and there was more to pack than I thought initially.  

The cats were also a problem.  The dog, who never lived in the house in Illinois, wanted to go and was happy to move.  The three cats I don't have except in the dream, however, would not be convinced this was a good idea and refused to cooperate.  

I could speculate, of course, about each of these elements, but the overall message is that I'm excited about the possibility of change, but not really prepared to make it happen.  Huzzah.  

Caffeinated Enough to Hear Colours

I hate the taste of diet pop.  I *can* tell the difference.  I buy the old recipe Pepsi with sugar in it rather than corn syrup.  I drink between 75 and 120 mg of caffeine a day.

When I was in high school, I remember a kid doing a report where he stressed that caffeine was as bad for you as all the rest of the stimulant drugs.  Listening to it, it seemed to me to possibly be a reason to reconsider restrictions on other stimulants, but he intended it as a call to arms against caffeine.

Vocal music and speech competitions always confuse me.  Invariably, they sell pizza, walking tacos (because this is Iowa), candy, chips, pop and water.  Today's speech competition was the first time I've seen a school actively sell stuff that's not terrible for vocal production.  They did the other stuff, too, but they had sandwiches and fruit and stuff too, a lot of it.  I'm for that, give them an option to make the right choice.

They only sell diet Coke.  I am willing to swear that I've heard that most artificial sweeteners are terrible for kids because they do weird shit to your brain.  It may or may not be supported as well as, "sugar makes you fat," but I was under the impression that "sugar makes you fat" was at least as well understood as, "caffeine is socially acceptable heroine."

This particular high school has a coffee shop in it.  I assume one day that concept is going to horrify people as much as if schools of this era had actual meth labs in them.

In other, slightly related, news, I'm going to have to stop starting conversations with people with the phrase, "You've heard about the lab rats that..." because no.  No one has ever heard about the lab rats.

In Which Good News is Received

I heard my new favourite words today, "The contract doesn't expire until you resign."  I've got a November-April commitment for coaching high school speech as long as I care to do it. 

Again, it's another thing that requires I keep cobbling together jobs for myself, but I'd rather do that than try to hold down one single full time not theatre position, I think.  If I were smart, I'd just get the sub's license, because it's about the only thing that works with the afterschool necessity and could replace the box office job I like least.  But I'm afraid of that, still, and it's not theatre, it's school. 

My high school drama teacher apparently failed to acknowledge my existence today.  Which was nice.  Granted, a high schooler I've worked with in the past year had no idea who I was when I waved at her, either.  Time plus context equals unfamiliarity.  But in the cast of the drama teacher, I suspect she would've ignored me if she had known who I was.  I'm not sure what I ever did to her. 

I saw a good One Act today.  It was really stylised, which I like, and required that one actor have their voice prerecorded so they could be heard under the mask.  And it made me wonder to what extent you could put together a piece with mime or dance and recorded/processed vocals. 

One Act is becoming the most traditional of theatre events, and it totally doesn't have to be. 

Had cause to describe the Reader's Theatre I directed as, "The twelve months of the year telling the story of the death of a little boy.  In a light-hearted way."  This is what I do.  I think I like that. 

Trimalchio

I turned off Facebook and Twitter in a fit of petulance, and find myself incredibly lonely.  I think I'll wait until after my birthday and then re-surface.

Maybe.

I re-read The Great Gatsby, pleased for once to read a short, engaging novel that ends, rather than sprawls over thousands of pages.  Fiction to visit, not to live with.

I'll be older than Nick Carraway in a few days.  In a few years, I'll out-grow Gatsby.  I've been feeling rather Gatsby-ish.  Not in a high-living, hopeless attempt to regain a past that never happened kind of way.  More in a running away and re-inventing yourself kind of way.  Nick tried it, and he went back home at the end of the summer.  Gatsby, on the other hand, got shot.  So maybe I really feel more like Nick.  Or maybe I'm really Nick at the end of the book, fed up with a hopeless, careless, shallow world, but I don't have someplace else to go back to.

It's possible I might actually be living in a different book altogether, I guess.

One of the theatres I work for is opening a show known best for the rape and subsequent mental breakdown of the main character.  As it plays over Valentine's Day, it's being promoted as a romance.  That's... healthy.

Passing

I happened to see a Twitter tag where women pose questions to men about being afraid for their safety.  Granted, I do not commute on foot or public transportation in a large metropolitan, so none of this applies, but the idea that all women walk around using their keys as brass knuckles and calling friends upon safe arrival home...  I'm a woman, I don't even think about it.  

I don't walk through unsafe areas, though.  I suspect there are plenty of men who regularly walk through unsafe areas who also consider their physical safety.  I am personally aware of a larger number of homosexual men who have been mugged and beaten than heterosexual men.  I have to assume these guys worry more based on past experience; I have to assume that their sexuality makes them the target.  But, ladies, by all means, you are the only ones who experience this.  Of course.  

I cut my hair short recently, and when I wear my down winter coat and hiking boots (which happens every time it snows more than about three inches), I get called sir more than I ever did with long hair (which was never).  I happened to be out shopping today and noticed that women were watching me.  Not because I'm attractive, presumably.  I've never, ever noticed a man watching me.  I also got ignored by store clerks, which was amazing.  I haven't been invisible to clerks since I was in high school.  

A hair cut is all it takes for me to threaten women and enter shopping stealth mode.