Monday, November 05, 2007
Diary: November, 1991.
Something I forgot to recount in the description of October was how late in the month (I have no idea why, but I emphatically believe it was the 20th, our director, Tony Coggins arranged a field trip to U of M Flint (which he attended) to tour their theater facility. Stagehands walked us through, explaining the flies, the spots, the rehearsal spaces and black boxes. It was a bright, sunny Saturday, crisp and cold; perfect October.
Maybe I remember that now because my main memory of November was how the play came more and more to take over my life. I had a fair number of lines to memorize, and while I don't remember our exact schedule I know that we came to spend several hours a day rehearsing after school. I was also involved in the band, and so I was pretty busy. The collective effort involved built toward a feeling of intense belonging and ownership with this group of people. It was something that, for a long time, seemed to specifically apply to theater, and is the main reason I became addicted to it for so long. But that moment hadn't arrived yet; it was still in the works.
The previous month's vampire obsession had also led me to rent Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. I beat the game, one of my very favorites, for the first time on Thanksgiving. My cousins came over, as did my grandparents and aunts, and later in the day we went for a walk back to the river. It was an amazingly mild day... windy, but we barely needed to wear jackets at all. In the field behind our barn there was one point where a dried out grey lumber post had been driven into the ground before the horse shelter. As we walked back I looked at it, and everything seemed about that time seemed to swirl around the point of that post: vampires, the gothic, theater, and impending cold. All swept up in gray grass, leaveless tree branches, gray skies, and wind.
Where were you in November, 1991?
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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Diary: October, 1991.
I was in 7th grade, and had recently auditioned for, and cast in, the Junior High Drama Club's inaugural production of The Wizard of Oz. I was to play the Wizard. The play quickly became my new social group and, between that and band, I must have asked five or six girls to go out with me. They all said no, and I learned that an assembly-line approach to dating is not efficient. For some weird reason it gives people the impression that their individuality is incidental.
At this time I was also reading Dracula by Bram Stoker, and devouring it. The book filled me with suspense and while it took maybe a week to get through the first section by Jonathan Harker, I read the rest in just a few days. I called it my favorite book, and read my Dungeons and Dragons Ravenloft supplements to get a better sense of Vampires. Ravenloft talked about the "gothic" which was a word I understood in a palpable, visceral sense more than any particulars:
Gothic was a location afflicted with limited light.
Gothic was cool and beautiful and lonely.
Gothic was old; a broken and decrepit relic of something that had once been powerful and inspiring.
Gothic was windy and autumnal.
These were my happenstance impressions based on the sound and shape of the word and whatever associations and imagery I had built in on my own. A few years back, when I reread Longinus' theories on the submlime, I'm amazed how close I got to grasping the "gothic" in '93, just by chance, and knowing nothing about the Romantics or about Germanic tribes and the legacy of the Roman Empire.
At any rate, my 4th hour Skills for Adolescents somehow got into a debate about the existence of God, with me taking on the "nope" view. Mr. Gromak had, of course, spoken in my favor, saying that I thought about things seriously – that I was reading Dracula, "one of the classics," (in fact, he knew this because he had told me to put it away after catching me reading it in class). The other kids took this as proof of some sort of satanic inclination, and harassed me until I started crying and ran from the room (drama queen that I am was). Mr. Gromak chased me out and assured me that I wasn't a satanist, and I remember after school I walked over to my grandmas, throwing walnuts through the holes in the chain-link fence.
I learned my lines.
I made lists of girls I could date and thought about how much I really really wanted a girlfriend.
I pored over Ravenloft and thought about this "gothic" thing.
Where were you in October 1991?
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