This blog isn't going to be about anything as dirty as the heading would suggest. I just liked the quote from an essay by Chuck Palahniuk, linked in context below. Today's blog is just more career musing.
When I was in 10th grade or so, there was a touring performance stopping at a local community college in Cypress. Incidentally, I'd performed at Cypress College back in 7th grade when MYART was using the space for West Side Story. I played Anybodys.
Anyway, four or five of us drama class students went with the drama teacher (who I hated and who tried to Facebook friend me a while back - I Ignored). The performance was called "A Slice of Rice, Frijoles and Greens" and basically featured four solo autobiographical pieces by a Latina woman, a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) woman, a Chinese man, and a Black man.
The CODA actor's piece was one of the things that made me want to be an actor. I was already in drama classes, so I guess you could say I was on my way to that already. But I cried at her piece. All the performers were interesting to watch and their life stories were valuable and enriching; it wasn't just the content that set her performance apart from the rest. It was her score.
For anyone who never took Chris Herold's acting class, he was a technical man. He spent a lot of time drilling the concept of the score into our heads, the idea that actions and specific blocking, the physical minutiae, feeds into emotional reaction; acting from the outside in, in a way. I may have connected more with her piece because it involved a 12-year-old version of herself and her relationship with her parents at that age; it may have been because I had always had a fascination with sign language ever since two different grades in elementary school had separately done units on Koko's kitten; maybe it was because insufficiency of language is one of the memes that automatically make me cry. But I will always remember that performance. I think often of the perfect score during which she started out singing and translating the national anthem in sign language, dropping to humming and signing at the high part, and fading out the humming until there was only the sound of absolute silence and the sight of her signing.
Okay, maybe it wasn't absolute silence because there had to have been the sound of my quietly sobbing.
This and the reading at Cody's books I once attended where people fainted before my eyes from nothing but a voice reading words are experiences that will stick with me forever. These cement my love of literature, words - storytelling. These are nothing but words on a page, or words read out loud. Just words. That's all they are. But they cause a visceral reaction. "Words will never hurt me," they say, but "they" haven't passed out and hit their heads on the corner of a bookshelf or choked on their own vomit. "They" may have cried at the sentiment that a bunch of words or the lack of a bunch of words can or can only attempt to convey.
I was thinking about the actor/storyteller, Arlene Malinowski, who lived, wrote, and performed that piece, one of the most important live performances I've seen. From her website, I see that she's a Chicago based actor and solo artist. She performs to sold out houses and the critics love her work. She may not be a household name, but there's no doubt that she has to know she's moved a great number of people. I wonder if Ms. Malinowski knows just exactly how influential her work was once to a random 14 or 15 year old girl in identifying exactly what she wanted to accomplish by wanting to be an actor, a performer, a storyteller.
What good is a career in performing arts if you can't be a rich famous movie star?
1) Fuck you, who says I can't, and
2) Fuck you, plenty.
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