Author: Kelley

Images of 2008 (part 3)

Here’s the last of Boston.com’s 3-part series.

I’m particularly in love with this one:
The Tower of David in Jerusalem

It’s the Tower of David in Jerusalem with images of books on shelves projected on the exterior walls — if you look in the top left of the photo, you’ll see part of the actual tower. How cool is this? A building made of books.

I used to think I would live a life made of books. That’s not so true these days — at least it’s not working out that way right this moment — but this photo has given me a whole new way to think about it. A life made of books. A building made of books. A city…

Images of 2008 (part 2)

Here’s part 2 of the Boston.com 2008 in photographs online exhibit.

And since today is my holiday (well, there’s not much Christ in our Christmas, but Mas just sounds religious too, so there you go), it’s my turn to wish you all well for whatever your holiday(s) may be in this season of endings and beginnings. My day will be full of cooking and serving and making a special day for Nicola and our neighbors (*blows a kiss through the internet to mother who is snowed in and can’t get here… we’ll do it another time, Mum). Whatever you’re doing, whether today is special or ordinary to you, I wish that it will be a happy day for us all.

Images of 2008 (part 1)

Yesterday Nicola posted about the beautiful photography of Jennifer Durham, and I wrote about the power of music. The power of the visual is different for me, but equally important, equally compelling. Images can be powerful stories, can touch a place in me that’s inarticulate: Jennifer’s work does that. And so do these entirely different images: The Year 2008 in Photographs from Boston.com. It’s a three-part series: you can follow the links to parts 2 and 3 yourself if you’re the impatient type (grin), but I’ll be posting those links over the next couple days.

Playing for Change

The power of music. So often, I turn to music to express things I can’t talk about any other way. Or to celebrate, or get busy, or because all I want to do is paint my room black and so I let the music drip down the walls while I cry.

And sometimes music is more than just about me. Sometimes it’s about all of us, together. That’s another power of music.

The Playing for Change Foundation wants to bring peace to the world through music. That’s not a bad idea: people who would never consider sitting down together will stand up together and dance to the same song. PFC is building community around music and committed to providing resources for musicians, music students and music schools around the world.

And they made this great video. I love the song, and I love what they’ve done with it. And right now it speaks to me particularly keenly, the way music often does: right now it seems good to remember that we all need someone to stand by us sometimes, and that when we stand by someone else we are doing good in the world.

Enjoy.

 

More on marriage

A thoughtful post by HuffPo’s Bob Ostertag on the Whole Big Frakkin’ Rick Warren Brouhaha and the general topic of gay marriage.

I’m seeing this perspective expressed more and more these days. I think Ostertag has some good points to make. And like most perspectives (including mine), it doesn’t reflect the whole picture — I can certainly empathize deeply with the commenters whose personal lives have been trashed by Prop 8 and all the intolerance that nurtured it. Maybe there are just too many differing individual experiences and “goals” to draw them together into one neat package and say Here’s the last word on gay marriage.

We’re fond of single perspectives in this culture. We like it simple. We like rules and solutions. But most things involving identity and feelings just aren’t that simple. I wish that the culture could learn to make room for the variety of human experience.

And yet — is injustice wrong? Absolutely. Is intolerance stupid? Definitely. Is this the world we live in? It sure is. So what do we do about it?

No easy answers here, just more to consider.

Periodic Table of Awesoments

When I was in high school, I memorized the periodic table of elements (here goes, without looking it up: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon. Don’t ask me why. I also have a place in my brain where practically every lyric from the 80’s lives. So many mysteries…)

Why has it taken me so long to learn that the universe is actually made from awesoments? And it is, you know. Your particular mileage may vary, but there’s no denying that the universe is a magnificent, wacky, ecstatic, terrifying and ultimately heart-stopping place to live. The more it’s made of awesoments, the better for all of us.

Don’t miss the comments, they are easily half the fun.

Enjoy.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint Archives.

It’s been snowing in Seattle this week. Combined with the December end-of-month slowdown and the financial crisis hunker-down, I feel as though I’m living in a cocoon, a temporary safe place before the new year and the new life.

None of that has anything to do with this week’s pints. Just musing. I hope that all is well with you, wherever you are.

  • Pain (March 2004) — One of my stories, “Alien Jane,” is about a woman with congenital insensitivity to pain

  • The variety of art (April 2004) — So many ways to get into story, and for it to get into us.

  • Riffing (April 2004) — I am She Who Riffs. It’s still my biggest joy, and biggest trap, as a writer.

Enjoy your Friday.

Like a Song: Surrender

I’m a staff writer for the website @U2 (and yes, I say this every time, but it’s still the best damn U2 fan site on the planet). One of my favorite parts of @U2 is our Like A Song series, personal essays by staff members about U2 songs that are important to us.

This month’s podcast includes my reading of my essay on the song “Surrender” from the War album. Powerful album, powerful song. My audio is a bit hissy, alas — I’m still learning how to manage the technology we have — but I hope you’ll give it a listen. The reading is a titch over 8 minutes long.

Download the entire podcast, or listen directly to my segment.

And here’s the essay.

And here’s the song:

[Use this link if you can’t see the media player.]

Enjoy.

Trouping

Since I wrote yesterday about Bret stabbing himself, I’ve had a whole surge of college / theatre department / acting memories. So here’s another story.

From the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary:
 
trouper noun
 
1 a successful entertainer who has had a lot of experience
 
2 APPROVING anyone with a lot of experience who can be depended on and does not complain: Good old Edna – she’s a real trouper to do the washing-up without even being asked.; He took his disappointment like a trouper.

I really did want to be Juliet. Sigh. But it was not to be — a) there were better actors than I to fill the role (digression here: people in Hollywood talk all the time about “actresses” and I try to behave in their company, I really do, because it’s polite to speak the native language if one can. But we’re all actors, people! Yeesh.) and b) I was taller than Romeo, and gods know in the 80’s we just couldn’t have that kind of thing on stage.

Our Juliet was a student in her late 20’s who was small and fresh-faced and could still play a teenager. Our Lady Capulet (Juliet’s mum) was a student in her late 20’s/early 30’s who looked, as we liked to say in the South, like she’d been drug down a mile of hard road. She was, I now understand, deeply depressed and doing her best to just hang on. At the time, because I was young and stupid, I just thought she was gloomy and grumpy and a little weird.

One afternoon during the run of the show, my stage manager Suzanne came and pulled me out of class and took me for a little walk. She put an arm around me. “Kelley,” she said, “you know the tradition that if something happens to an actor, the ASM steps into the role?”

“Um, no,” I said, “I don’t know that one.”

She said, “Well, I need you to be a trouper. Because we may need you to be Lady Capulet tonight.” Then she smiled and squeezed my shoulder, and before I knew it I was in the costume shop being fitted, and then in an empty room with the choreographer learning the dances. Yep, dances. I pretty much knew all the lines, I’d been prompting for six weeks, but the dances… And I knew enough to be terrified: knowing lines from the third row every rehearsal is a hell of a lot different than knowing them in the moment, under the lights and the hot heavy gaze of the audience, especially when one is trying to sort out her left foot from her right.

6:30 pm. Actors’ call. No Lady Cap. Suzanne smiles reassuringly.

7:00 pm. Cast warm-ups. I take my place and start stretching and la-la-la-ing. Suzanne is practically incandescent with calm. The director gives me an enormous hug, looking exactly like Peter O’Toole in The Stuntman, that particular combination of what a cock-up and isn’t it all exciting? The actors look at me with varying blends of sympathy, concern and well, that’s you fucked. And I trouped. I trouped until 7:25 pm when Lady Capulet came into the room.

Everyone looked at her. Everyone looked at me. The director said, “Thank you, Kelley.” And I nodded and left the room before I gave in to my impulse to smack Lady Cap into next week and thereby ensure that I would have to play the role after all.

I still don’t know what happened. But whatever it was, I understand now how brave she must have been to have come back when she did. I imagine at that point it would have been far easier to just bail. I think she was much more a trouper than I.

Showstoppers

From the Daily Telegraph comes a story of an actor who stabbed himself onstage by accident.. I hope he’s okay. I can easily imagine how it happens: it’s hot, you’re sweaty and focused and maybe very much in the moment as you draw the prop knife across your throat — and you know immediately that something is very, very wrong, and the blood comes out, and the pain, and the world tips 10 degrees to the right…

I’ve never done something like that (all my injuries came in rehearsals), but I was there one time when it happened.

When I was working on my theatre degree, I had the good fortune to learn, work and play with Bret Ancell, who was talented and funny and especially gifted at improvisation and finding the absurdities in small moments.

One year, the theatre department did Romeo and Juliet, directed by Paul Massie, a great teacher and charismatic actor who we were all half in love with because he was that charming. So everyone worked hard for Paul. I wanted to be Juliet, but I didn’t get the part, and so I took the job of assistant stage manager. It was Shakespeare, it was R&J, and I just wanted to be a part of it.

During performances, Suzanne, the stage manager, sat up in the booth and called the show. For the non-theatrical, that means that she was on headset telling everyone when to do what — lighting cues, sound cues, scene changes, etc. There were hundreds of lighting cues alone, all written down in Suzanne’s Big Notebook along with every single piece of blocking, line edit, costume change, etc.

As ASM, I was in charge of backstage. I gave the actors their time warnings, double-checked that all the props were in place, and spent the show on headset in the stage left wing making sure everyone was in place for their entrances, that scenery shifts went smoothly, and ready to prompt if anyone needed it.

We were several shows into the run, and one night little things were going wrong. Not enough to change the show for the audience, but enough for cast and crew to notice and maybe be a little thrown. And Bret was doing a scene with his extremely blunted dagger — seriously, it was so blunt that the end wasn’t a point at all, it was more like… hmm, like the end of an Allen wrench, maybe. Squared off, at least 1/8 – 1/4 inch thick. It was safe.

Well, hah. Bret slipped, or stumbled, or something happened, and he basically fell onto his own dagger so hard that the damn thing punched a nice square hole in his abdomen. About six feet away from where I was sitting on my stool with my headphones.

He went white. His scene partner blinked. And then they went on with the scene, Shakespeare flowing trippingly from their tongues and just the tiniest bit of blood on Bret’s shirt.

There was no way I could get on the headset with everyone listening and tell Suzanne that the lead actor had just put himself in the hospital. So I did What No ASM Must Ever Do. I abandoned my post and scuttled behind the curtains of the aisle up to the lighting booth. Suzanne was calling cues bam bam bam, so fast she couldn’t take here eyes off the notebook to look at me. But she knew I was there, and she was pissed.

Until I said Bret stabbed himself, and then she was just… well, she was amazing. I don’t remember a lot of the details at that point, just that Suzanne was the calm center of what could have been a real shitstorm if anyone had been allowed to freak out.

After some frenzied negotiation, I went back to my post with strict orders from Suzanne to keep myself and everyone else together. I checked on Bret. Someone put a bandage on his tummy. I told everyone in my most stern ASM voice that Suzanne said to stay calm. Then I stood terrified (in a calm way, grin) in the wings with two large young men ready to run out and scoop Bret off the stage if he started talking nonsense or falling down. Bret finished the show, although I’m pretty sure that there were a few moments when he honestly had no idea where he was or what he was doing. There is a reason that we rehearse these things all those weeks, you know? And then we all went to the hospital.

Bret was okay, thank goodness — we all liked him and admired the fact that he went the distance without passing out or wandering off into some other script. And of course it was probably dumb to go on with the show. *Shrugs* That’s what actors do unless we are actually unconscious or bleeding out on stage.

I have a lot of other theatre stories to tell one of these days — how I almost was in R&J after all, the day I did a monologue with a shotgun in a bikers’ bar, the night I was sure someone was coming to kill me up in the lighting loft. Good times.