Girl on Fire

Did you miss me?

I missed you! Apologies for completely dropping off the face of the earth--graduation brought on a whirlwind of new adventures... Sometimes you have to step away from the keyboard and live life a little in order to have anything to write about.

I've been quite the busy lady. I work 40 hours a week opening at the Café. I am the Production Management Intern at a theatre company in Boston. I've started my own small theatre company.

You could say I stay active. 

And I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm not quite sure how to explain it without sounding too lame...  I feel as if my insides were made of embers. And every now and then, something or someone pours or spills lighter fluid everywhere and I find myself engulfed in an impassioned flame of propulsion. 

I love being aflame. I feel like I'm running at a thousand miles an hour, dragging a stream of light behind me. It's the way I built to be--impassioned. I love working on what I love. And when I'm inspired, nothing could dream of stopping me.

I got a tattoo since we last talked. I've been planning on getting this done for more than a year now; I have the very phrase taped inside the front cover of my moleskine. I knew exactly what I wanted and how I wanted it to look and I was lucky enough to have a tattoo artist who simply scanned my scrap of paper into the computer and made it a part of me.

"Riveder le stelle."

"To see once more the stars." These are the last three words from Dante's (no, not Dan Brown's) Inferno. When the narrator/Dante and Virgil come up from the fire and brimstone of Hell itself, they look up, take a breath, and see again the stars. 

It's meaningful for a plethora of reasons.

1. I love Italian culture. In many ways, I believe that my Rome trip taught me how to live when I most needed it.
2. I love poetry. Especially Inferno. And it only gets better when you realize that T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (my all-time favorite poem) was heavily inspired by Dante. 
3. It's the last three words of Inferno--they provide closure. At the same time, there is still more to come from La Commedia--just like there's more to come from my life. 
4. Furthermore, if Dante has withstood almost 700 years' worth of time's famed test, I believe he can definitely withstand a lifetime on my wrist without growing irrelevant. 
5. It's my own handwriting, which I believe is deeply characteristic of who I am, unfinished "S" and all.
6. It's on my left wrist, over where you'd feel my pulse, and near the most battered section of my skin.
7. It's positioned so that I can read it. It's a reminder: when Hell is burning me from all sides or even when I find myself consumed in the fire of my own fragile body, I need to take time to remember that I will see once more the stars. 

Sometimes I feel like the world is burning me and I'm stuck roasting on the spit. And sometimes I'm propelled by the fire that is constantly sizzling right behind my sternum. Either way, fire is intextricably intertwined with the way in which I interpret my life. 

This fire is driving my CoffeeSpoons Theatre Project (I'll post on that soon). It drives my almost-ceaseless Café cheer. It keeps me smiling at my internship, even when I'm doing heavy, thankless labor for unpaid hours on end.

I'll keep clicking the lighter as long as I can, and I hope that this flame won't burn out. 

Time for just another moment.

Today was one of the most difficult days I've ever had to face, and I know this is just the beginning of the painful detachment I have to go through for the next two weeks. I say "difficult" with the tears in mind, but these tears were so different than the ones that I'm used to. I didn't publicly sob today because I was sad. Yes, I was sad, but I was also happy, hopeful, lonely, loved, and most of all, nostalgic. Feeling all of those things at once, it's no wonder I bursted a little at the seams (my seams being my tear-ducts).

I performed for the last time on the Vinik stage today. The tears started before I even made it to the dressing room. Reminiscing with old friends about what my school's theatre program has meant to me over the past six years got me started. The funny thing is, although I felt like a phantom walking through the green room, the minute I got into makeup and costume I felt sewn up again.

I performed without shedding a tear. I didn't think, "This is the last time I'll ever do this," as if I had already finished. Everything was present tense, and I threw my soul into it all. I lived the show more fully than I've lived my real life at times. I let go.

The tears came back for the Finale Ultimo, just as I expected. As I stood there under the lights, singing my last ever notes for an audience in that room, I felt all the time I had spent in that very same theatre whooshing by me. Set changes, tech rehearsals, performances, acting classes and other memories seemed to all be clanging together simultaneously: a cacophony of time, space, and growing up. I thought back to the awkward fifthie who was asked to step in for the title character one April day in 2009. That, in turn, makes me think of the passionate senior who proudly stepped into the light as the title character in 2013.

The funny thing is, right after I got off the stage, I felt the loss. The magic has disappeared. Vinik became a room again; the hallway just a hallway; the props just objects. The Theatre Collective would never be mine in the same way.

When I was very young, I had this dream about a toy coming to life. It was extremely vivid, and I remember just how attached the living toy and I had become. We loved each other. At the end of the dream, however, the magic was lost. I remember that the dream ended with me shaking the suddenly lifeless toy, pleading for time to rewind so I could be so happy again. I woke up sobbing. And I never forgot that feeling.

This chapter of my life, doing high school theatre, has closed. It's gone. My director will never be the same guy to me. I will never act with many, if not all, of these people again. Some may never do theatre again. We're all going to get older. We're all going to continue moving. With or without one another.

I was thinking today; there will be so much room for so much more in my life. When I think of who I am, I think of all the anecdotes that brought me to where I am. But hopefully my life will be five times as long as it had been. I've lived so much, felt so much, learned so much, and I might only be 20% of the way through. I can't linger in the beginning forever. I need to let the plot develop and thicken--allow the characters to develop more. Such a great beginning deserves to be seen through to its ending.

Light 'Em Up

Here we are. Opening night. The last opening night I will be sure of for a long time. My last opening night in the beautiful Vinik Theatre. You can bet your ass I made it count.

Opening night is a beautiful yet terrible thing. Beautiful because you can watch, see, and feel something magical coming together for the first time. Terrible because as soon as the first strains of the overture begin, you realize that this beast is out of your hands.

I suppose that's me thinking like a director. This big, snarling beast of a musical is no longer in the place where you can yell "STOP!" and run a number five more times. You've got 200 pairs of eyes, and one shot to make an impression. 

A new friend summed it up quite nicely: "Compared to rehearsal, performing is easy." 

I'd agree with that for the most part. Rehearsal is the learning. The teaching. The envisioning. Performance is the doing. The culmination. The end game.

But performing adds something entirely different to an equation that we've tinkered with for weeks. Performance adds the audience. Those other humans for whom we make our art. 

They bring this indescribable energy to the room. I believe that the theatre is the most human place in the world. You bring hundreds of different people into the room for one thing: an experience. You know going into it that this experience will be different for everyone; we celebrate that difference. 

Theatre is art made for, by, and with people. As a director, I proudly call myself an artist. My medium is humans. We strive to find emotion, drama, movement, narrative--all while asking our audience to open their eyes and see themselves on the stage. Everyone's a bit of a Man in Chair. People dream of spontaneous tangoes and Show(ing) Off. We all put monkeys onto pedestals. We all just want to be taken away sometimes.

This night poured some serious lighter fluid on my passion for theatre. Those lights you see in that picture caused the fire to catch. 

Life is uncertain. The future can be scary. Friendships don't last forever; people come and people go. You'll wake up one day and wonder how you got there. I can't promise that there will always be advice that is coherent and relevant to the situation. But I'll give it a shot...

Follow your passions. Do what lights you up. Live while you can.

I can promise that as long as we can hear our own little bluebirds, there will be a fucking song.

As we plumble along.