Roller Derby? I Haven't Even MET Her Derby!

Friday last I had myself a bit of an adventure, in the lovely Garden State of New Jersey. (Oh, how I can't say enough good things about New Jersey, and all its loveliness! My God! The state's beauty is only out won by its inherent and seemingly effortless virtue! Hail unto thee, New Jersey!

Hail unto thee!

)

Friend Kira

has taken up a new pastime, and Friday night was her first official bout. That's right. Friend Kira is gone and joined the army of awesomeness that is the

Garden State Rollergirls

.

Seriously: Awesome. Roller derby combines many of my greatest loves--dual identities, loud music, theatre, humor, violence and women. Tough chicks, to be more specific. Ever since joining the circus, I have had a pointed appreciation for tough chicks, and these were some of the toughest I have ever seen. And their skate names rule:

Skarzipan

(Kira),

Jenna von Fury

,

Slam-n-Legs

,

Layla Smackdown

and, my personal favorite,

Belle N. Somebashin'

. Roller derby comes with my highest recommendation.

Kira's team is dubbed The Northern Nightmares, and last Friday they went skate-to-skate with Jersey City Bridge & Pummel, and therein did they prove themselves worthy of the gods' acclaim. (Sorry--I've been reading a lot of

Mary Renault

, and it has me thanking Zeus and fearing Poseidon.) Which is to say, the NNs wiped the floor with Bridge & Pummel. You may read Kira's somewhat inebriated account of the bout

here

. I agree with her perspective on the thing: B&P were playing at a distinct disadvantage, but playing hard nonetheless. I hope Kira feels further motivated by her contributions to the victory.

It's been very interesting hearing about Kira's progress through this experience. It's been quite physically arduous for her, and she makes no effort to avoid admitting that she's the slowest of the team, yet she has stuck with it and has a kind of passion for it that surprised me at first. I don't credit myself with an appreciation for activities that I'm not naturally talented in. (Hell of a sentence, that. Shall we try again?) THAT IS TO SAY, when I don't show any kind of aptitude for a thing, I generally cease to work at it. It's hard for me to keep up an initial enthusiasm in such cases, and this has come to haunt me in the past year. I was not allowed to quit at learning Italian, because I simply needed to speak and understand it better. I suppose I could have quit trying in my performance of

A Lie of the Mind

and saved myself a lot of heartache, but the alternative of phoning it in was simply not an alternative for me. I would have had a much better time of it if I could have quickly gotten past the kind of automatic self-loathing that such occasions give rise to. It's something to work on.

Kira's experience also reminds me of a kung fu class I enrolled in with Friend Mark back in 2000. I eventually quit the class, out of frustration with the structure of the school and the time demands of trying to attend it and support my acting career, and those energies quickly found some outlet in my circus studies. But the reminiscence I particularly remember from

Alan Lee's Kung Fu/Wu Shu Academy

was the trial class Mark and I took together. Mark is a multi-degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do, and I think while he was staying in the city he just wanted to keep in shape and encourage me toward martial arts. So I found the school and he joined me in testing it out. In the trial class, we were sequestered into our own group of two and a teacher took us through our paces. One of the training methods employed by that school is to incorporate conditioning at the beginning and end of the class, which helps both to make the simply workout more efficient and keep the muscles trim--the ideal of this lithe and quick style of fighting. So one of the first things our private teacher that day asked of us was thirty push-ups.

When I look back on it, I wonder if he wasn't being a bit soft with us. At the time, however, I remember thinking, "Did he say thirty 'push-ups'? That can't be right." I don't believe I had ever done over ten push-ups in a row before in my life up to that point. When I was young and chubby, I simply couldn't. When I got older and slim, I didn't see the point. The only physical activity I had really been interested in at that point was the common pratfall, the which really only requires a willingness to take your lumps. In college I was cast in a production of

The Three Musketeers

that taught me a thing or two about stamina and flexibility, but nothing of the benefits of strength. The instructor did say "push-ups," and I did end up doing them, and more.

The next day, I couldn't raise my arms from the elbow to anything sharper than 90 degrees. I looked mighty funny, I assure you, trying to eat and brush the hair from my eyes. I was borderline injured from the exertion, yet I wanted nothing more than to do it again. I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that my incapacitation was a sign that I had done something seemingly impossible. I had transcended. I had broken past a barrier, and it hurt like hell, and it felt amazing and wonderful.

It's not every day we are presented with an opportunity to become more. Or is it? Maybe the opportunity is always there, but we only recognize it when circumstances align a certain way. Whichever the case may be, it is a cause for celebration, that effort to transcend. So I celebrate you, Skarzipan. Thanks for the inspiration. As soon as I find a new apartment, I'm going to install my pull-up bar and sign up for the

Ultimate Fighting Championship

.

The Revealing Curtain

When I was thirteen years of age, life started to be pretty difficult for me. That's a pretty universal statement, I believe. I don't believe I've ever met anyone who said, "Thirteen? Oh man, that's just when things started to get GOOD! Everything came so easy, and there was no confusion--not like at five. Man, at five, things were ROUGH...." It has different flavors, but they all relate to puberty, and moving on, and beginning to get a sense that someday (possibly today) you will have to fend for yourself in a much more real sense than you ever imagined before. So I don't believe my experience was unique, per se, but perhaps a little more out-there than some.

One aspect of those difficulties was that one day, in the middle of

a math class

, I took a big ol' streeeeeeeeetch // en I woke on my side on the floor to discover my tongue was bleeding. I had bitten through it, you see, when I passed out.

A very involved story follows, with a lot of doctor visits, tests, etc., the which pretty much filled up my summer before starting high school. I was ultimately diagnosed with a condition called "reflexive

epilepsy

," (a diagnosis I have had some reason to doubt) which, in sum and substance, is identified by the tendency to short-circuit one's brain with a specific series of physical cues, such as stretching a particular series of muscles in conjunction. I was put on a drug called Tegratol, which I hated. It made me phenomenally sleepy around the afternoon and--so I diagnosed it--rather depressed, lacking in spark. Being thirteen and imaginative, I also came to convince myself that what I had glimpsed the few times I had the seizure was a kind of peek behind the curtain of reality. To sum it up--and at the risk of sounding even more pretentious than I already may--I thought I was catching glimpses of actuality beyond the world that we had created for ourselves, to occupy our senses and keep us sane. That actuality, was nothingness.

Which was a little depressing.

The seizures are (yes, I still have them from time-to-time) like this: Usually they result from a standing, full-body stretch--after I have been still for some time--with my arms raised above my head. As I'm coming out of the stretch, I feel a tingling numbness that begins somewhere between my back and neck, and rapidly races through my arms and legs. My head gets, well, warm and loud. But the loudness has no noise (bear with me here), it's just a silent over-powering of any sounds in the room. The last thing that happens is that an oddly cobweb-like curtain sort of envelopes my vision, and does so rather slowly, given the drastic nature of what seems to be happening to the rest of my body. I've always thought of it as a curtain, but maybe a cocoon is more apt imagery, because it seems gray, chaotically woven, and it comes in around the edges of my vision, narrowing into a point until rapidly fading to black in which time seems to stop until I open my eyes, a few seconds later and usually looking up at a ceiling.

This story, she does have a happy ending. Somehow, in the course of grappling with high school and all it tides, I learned how to stave off the seizures when I felt them coming on. (My parents always claim the Tegratol helped in that; I always want all the credit for myself.) It was strange to discover, and took what I believe to be a lot of the resources the Tegratol robbed me of: determination, focus and a little fire. The trick is rather simple, actually. When I feel the tingling, and the curtain begins to descend, I simply focus my will on whatever I can still see in the center of my vision and sort of fight the curtain back. (Don't ask me to describe "fight" in this context. Sorry. Couldn't say.) The only thing that happens then is that, occasionally, people around me will wonder why I've just stopped and stared for a few seconds all of the sudden. It it happens less and less, and gets easier to stave off, as I get older.

Which is pretty sweet.

As was last night's performance of

A Lie of the Mind

. (HA! Thought I'd left the show behind, did you? Don't worry; I won't analyze every performance for a month. Next week we'll be back to fart jokes.) That may seem like a lame transition, but it is intentionally obfuscational. (Is SO a word!) Because you have to understand what coming out of my seizures is like to get the association I'm about to make.

Where Wednesday's performance was taught and tense, last night's was more a fiery calm. It was still an explosive, passionate show, but we had all relaxed a notch . . . just enough to be a little more in the moment, a little less concerned with making an impression. I don't know how everyone else felt (no cast hangage after the second show), but for me it was magnificent. I felt in charge of my game (apart from going up

COMPLETELY

on a line in my first scene), and much more loving toward my own character. None of the whine came through. His fight was strong enough to stand up against all those obstacles (see

4/5/07

). Great, great stuff. I was so relieved, and yet still timorous over that last line and its delivery. I had to tell myself not to think about it prior to the scene. I was afraid I would psych myself out.

The scene arrived, I opened my eyes, and there was Todd, playing my brother, barely holding it together. My character feels relief to see him in that moment, and I felt a relief at how

there

he was. His tears got through to me, and I knew if I could keep those feelings alive, blow on their embers, I'd be okay for that last line. But the audience is literally two feet away to my left, and I have to say that damn penultimate line expressing confusion over Jake's actions, and I know Laura is actually the director's girlfriend, not Todd's wife, and why can't I have a wife already anyway and what if I go up on my

last

line, too . . . . But then Laura, as Beth, says her line: "I remember you now." She's not weeping as she has before, but she sounds so fragile, so very very certain, yet scared, and I'm back. All I have to do is . . . not. Not do, anything. Be there. Just be there. If that's a difficult thing to do, I don't know about it right then, because I can't, because if I do I'll lose this . . . I've got to let it flow through me, I can't just hang on to it, but I've got to trust it'll still be there. Don't let it go. Don't hold on to it. Be. Be.

It was as though I could feel that curtain again, not around my eyes, but around my heart. (We're speaking metaphorical heart here.) And it's woven together out of all the experiences I've had that have taught me to have perspective, and protect myself, and to equate that rationale/ity with self-worth. It's me, this curtain. It's a part of me, and there's no abolishing it, but last night I held the cords and I had the strength. And the line came through the tears, and I saw and was seen clearly.

Gang, I don't know if I've nailed it. I rather believe tonight I'll have another experience of shut-down, sort of a backlash from last night's success. But maybe not. I hope not. I can't antagonize myself over it, because that only decreases the likelihood of being in that moment again. All I can do is my best, and try to learn from the worst of it.

Oh right, right! And as for actuality being nothingness: I decided it's cool to have a choice. I choose somethingness.

Breathe.

It's good for you.

Doing Lines is bad for Doing Lines

I myself, personally, have never tried cocaine. For many reasons, which are probably pretty obvious, but there are two that are personal to me. The first is that I don't like the idea of consuming--in any fashion--synthetic materials. I do; daily, of course, but some such materials we have more choice about than others. The second is that I can safely say the last thing I need in my life is more reason to be anxious or hyper kinetic. Thanks. Thanks, no. I'm all set.

The other night in rehearsal we got into a brief discussion about controlled substances, and one actor (I'm not naming names...or naming anything, for that matter) posited that one of the reasons he was beginning to have more trouble memorizing his lines was probably all the alcohol and marijuana he had consumed in his life. Another revealed that, as a result of his misspent youth and habit of ingesting cocaine, his teeth were shot to the point of mostly having fallen out--a bad thing for a performer . . . or, really, anyone. Finally, still a third member of our merry crew revealed another interesting, burdensome blight that one of her friends had to endure as a result of her years of cocaine usage.

The bridge of her nose collapsed.

AAAAAAAAUUUAAAAAAOOOOOUUURGH!

{Tangent: Our final project for make-up class in college was to be handed a picture from a magazine and emulate the appearance of whomever was photographed. We had, I suppose, about an hour to do this. I got handed a close-up of Michael Jackson, taken from an angle looking up from rather under his chin. Along with being plastically pointy, his nose was missing the connecting bit between his upper lip and his nose proper (("proper" being a relative term in this case)). I did it, and I can't remember exactly how, but I do recall smelling black greasepaint for about two days afterward.}

However it happens, memorizing lines gets harder as one gets older. It's science. (<- movie quote) When you're young, you may be able to read something a couple of times and get it surprisingly perfect on recitation. As you age, the little things, the specifics, get harder and harder to store. (I take particular issue with variances: anybody/anyone; somebody/someone; North Dakota/South Dakota :why can't we just pick one and be done with it? Poetry? Bite me.) Like crossword puzzles, regularly committing material to memory is good for one's mental health. Unlike crossword puzzles, it doesn't get easier with age and experience. It gets harder. Similar to one's prostate. You have to work it regularly to keep it in good shape, but with every use, it's getting weaker.

I can understand why we don't have redundancy on our brains; that would just get confusing. But why not on our prostates? It could be like a Pez dispenser in our pelvis. Just keep a couple of spares below the diaphragm, and when ol' faithful wears out: Ker-chunk. Out with the old, in with the new.

But I digress. I am having particular difficulty with memorizing my

Shepard

. This is actually the first Shepard play I've ever done, and there are allowances to be made for adjusting to the poetry (Anybody? Anyone?) of an unfamiliar playwright. And age, or brain abuse (chemical and cultural) stand as neat excuses. But what I really believe the problem to be is this: I haven't had to get off-book for a new script in approximately a year. Word is bond.

Todd

shares this in common with me, to some degree. For the past year, we've both been working our tails off in theatre, but never on projects with a script, per se. Everything is a workshop (script in process), semi-improvised (scenario instead of script) or movement theatre (um...dance? basically dance). I started the past year of theatre excitement with

Zuppa del Giorno

's last original play,

Operation Opera

, which was semi-improvised and essentially written (and rewritten every performance) by the actors. Then it was off to Italy, where we worked on structured improv the entire time, culminating in

Il Postina

, in which the dialogue was not only semi-improvised, but in Italian. Thereafter, I did do a "straight play,"

Over the River and Through the Woods

, but it was in its third incarnation and "memorizing" the lines consisted of reading the script a few times. Fall and spring, up to this point, were predominated by developing

The Torture Project

, which takes the concept of a work-in-progress to all new heights.

In fact, the last scripted play I did was

Good

, last March. Guess where that was? Same place

A Lie of the Mind

is going to be: ye olde Manhattane Theatre Source. Does it end the unscripted cycle of a year? Probably not. Most of the work I've invested in with any kind of long-term interest has been related to development and improvisation, in one respect or another. As in art, life. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, this past year has also definitively been the most unscripted of my personal life as well. I only hope I'm remembering enough as I go to be learning the whole time . . . maybe even learning more than the same three lessons over and over again. Still: They're good lessons. They must be. Otherwise, why would I remember them, right?

Now if only I could get that damn Eric Clapton song out of my head . . .

"Oops."

It's funny. Chris Kipiniak's Spider-Man debut? It's funny. I can't tell if it's funnier because I know Chris, and can hear his voice in it, but that only matters to those of you who don't know him, so I don't really care. Does this dissuade you from picking up a copy? Oh shoot. My blatant nepotistic promotion has backfired. Well, suppose I told you there was an interesting error in the publishing of this comicbook? It may never come to anything that would make the book valuable, I suppose. Unless Chris' career takes off, that is.

In the final moments of the final confrontation between Spidey and the Circus of Death, embedded in one of the funniest captioned frames ("Meanwhile, up above.... Remember? The guy on the trapeze?") are two frames in which the dialogue and the character's expressions are switched. When the evil acrobat's face is contorted with concentration, he says, "Oops." When it's pale with fear, he says, "Almost...got..."

Last night I had another rehearsal of

A Lie of the Mind

, still reeling a bit from head cold and the necessary medication. It was a mess for me. I would shift between congested retardation and loopy impulse-control difficulties. It got to be very frustrating to me, trying to push past this wall of mucus to make good work. Every choice I made rang false to me, range falser and flat, and I could never be sure if it was because I was making such poor choices, or if I just couldn't feel the right reverberations.

Working out of order as we are, to accommodate everyone's schedules, one of the last scenes of the evening we worked on was the first in which my character, Frankie, is introduced to the family of his sister-in-law. In said scene, he's just been shot through the thigh, and he has very little dialogue to express a variety of things: pain, anger, shock, fear, confusion. More difficult still, his intention in the scene is bizarrely structured. It's rather achieved within the first moments he arrives in the room, and thereafter he merely fights for his own freedom . . . poorly. It was going to be tricky, and I knew it. The only thing an actor can do, past any preparation, in this circumstance is to jump in. I did.

And started making mistakes left and right.

Which worked great. It turns out, having a head cold is pretty excellent base material for emulating the symptoms of shock, which is rather the key to the strangeness of the scene. The character is slipping out of reality, but fighting it all along, struggling against himself to achieve what he's already achieved. He's getting no feedback, or at least none that he can understand and interpret.

It's tricky for me to embrace ignorance, or to relish "not knowing." It was one of the biggest lessons I came away from Italy with last June. And yes, it's one of those lessons I keep learning over, and over, and over again. I'll probably never get it naturally. So for those of you who know me: be patient. Someday I'll be able to admit just how little I know. Think of how much I'll be able to learn then.