In some cases, I'd let myself get dragged along to other people's activities (perhaps because I lacked resistance), but other than that it was all about directing the play.
If I tried to focus on something else -- even simple stuff like journal writing, bookkeeping, organizing or processing anything at all -- I couldn't do it. It is as though my energy was so uniformly directed that I lost the capacity to reflect and process. Or perhaps I worried that any attempt to process would detract from my singular creative mission.
Over the years I've gotten a little better at shifting gears, at finding a little more space inside myself during these compressed-state periods of intense outer-directed activity.
But only a little.
The past several months have been consumed with drama, onstage and off.
Insane and bizarre things happened on the job that perhaps one day I will blog about; I've been through some incredibly twisted comings-together and partings on a personal level (all pretty much resolved now ... lessons learned -- albeit expensive ones -- though those are the most important kind, I guess).
Blood on the Veil is going great -- beyond my wildest dreams, and still getting better. And when I'm not rehearsing, polishing, promoting, etc. that show, I'm putting together stuff for other shows, like the recent Confessions of a Bellydancer and Mother Wove the Morning.
And of course I write lots of stuff for my job, and answer professional and personal emails at all times of the day and night, and do more than my share of chatting and posting stuff on Facebook (also at crazy hours) ... but I could not organize my mind to blog about ... well, pretty much anything at all.
Jellybeans ... I managed to squeeze out a few thoughts about that -- but only because a post on Facebook prompted me. So even that was reactive creativity.
And now I'm thinking -- maybe that's not a bad thing. Reactive expression is better than no expression; and I have been promising more blog entries....
So with that in mind, what follows is what I posted on Facebook in response to the "Things People Don't Know About Me" meme.
~~~~~~~~~
TEN things you might not know about me (Disclaimer: some of this stuff is in my show, blog or mentioned in this interview: http://reviewfix.com/2013/10/review-fix-exclusive-carol-henning-interview/ ... but I'll try to add bits that aren't generally known.... )
(1) My first bellydancing class was in 2001 with Stella Gray. The "intermediate layered" move she did that frightened the willies out of me was an earthquake shimmy with an undulation. And, as I say in BOTV, I really did think, "Good lord! You have to be a freak of nature to be able to do that!!"
(2) My first role ever was in a Girl Scout Christmas pageant about being kind to the environment. I was five years old and played a girl who poured lemonade on a tree. My line was something like, "How about over by that tree!" And the tree responded, "Ooohh... that's cold!!"
(3) I was such an enthusiastic Girl Scout that I memorized the Brownie Origin Story ... by accident. We were discussing the story, and the leaders asked us to summarize the action, going from girl to girl. When they got to me, I just started reciting the text -- dialogue and all ("and those acorns too!"). I remember the leaders (including my mother) saying, "Is she reading? Where is the book?" This began a lifetime of memorizing crap for no particular reason.
(4) I entered a Shakespeare recitation contest when I was 16 and memorized a Juliet speech, as well as Sonnets 29 and 116. I won the contest, (but I lost the inter-school finals. Boo.), and went on to fall in love with the Bard and currently know about 20 Sonnets and maybe a dozen speeches, scenes, soliloquies off the top of my head. But these days I have to work a lot harder to memorize.
(5) I have no formal training for my current line of day-job work: third-level tech support at a law firm. In my late teens I started doing secretarial work at a law firm because I was doing stand-up and didn't want to commit to an office career. But I am a TERRIBLE secretary. Fortunately, I had learned some BASIC in Junior High and was able to parlay my rudimentary programming skills into Word Perfect script, getting the computer to do much of my work for me. And then started doing this for others... and now it's what I do!
(6) I am allergic to dust and dust mites and spend the first two hours of every day blowing my nose (this is absolute MAGIC in relationships ...)
(7) I have refinanced my co-op four times over the last ten years. Each time I've done it has cost me about $4000 -- and yet the deal I have now is so good (THANK YOU, FED!) that it just may have been worth it.
(8) Throughout pretty much all of grade school I was relentlessly unfunny. When I got into college, however, I started dating a comedian and began to figure out how jokes were constructed. I figured: If he can do it so can I. So I took the mike and dumped the boyfriend.
(9) My first time onstage as a stand-up was in February 1989 -- and it went GREAT. The next 30 or 40 times were not so good, however..... But I was hooked.
(10) I commuted for my first year at NYU and had a 4.0 grade point average ... but was miserable. Then I had the opportunity to move into campus housing with the Science Fiction club (finally -- to be with my own kind!), albeit renamed the SubGenius Alliance because of a prank the SciFi club played at Loeb Student Center (Glenn Hauman could tell you more about that).
My happiness level rose dramatically ... and my GPA dropped. I earned my first F ever... IN PIANO! Ah well...
(Coda in a follow-up comment about playing the piano: "I can barely play at all anymore. The first semester I got an A; but then when I moved on campus, I had to reserve rehearsal time with the piano, and I kept getting shut out by the music majors who got first dibs. So I was never able to practice. The only piano I could get had a broken E key .. and I was learning to play Chopin's Prelude in E Minor!! Grrrr. )
(1) My first bellydancing class was in 2001 with Stella Gray. The "intermediate layered" move she did that frightened the willies out of me was an earthquake shimmy with an undulation. And, as I say in BOTV, I really did think, "Good lord! You have to be a freak of nature to be able to do that!!"
(2) My first role ever was in a Girl Scout Christmas pageant about being kind to the environment. I was five years old and played a girl who poured lemonade on a tree. My line was something like, "How about over by that tree!" And the tree responded, "Ooohh... that's cold!!"
(3) I was such an enthusiastic Girl Scout that I memorized the Brownie Origin Story ... by accident. We were discussing the story, and the leaders asked us to summarize the action, going from girl to girl. When they got to me, I just started reciting the text -- dialogue and all ("and those acorns too!"). I remember the leaders (including my mother) saying, "Is she reading? Where is the book?" This began a lifetime of memorizing crap for no particular reason.
(4) I entered a Shakespeare recitation contest when I was 16 and memorized a Juliet speech, as well as Sonnets 29 and 116. I won the contest, (but I lost the inter-school finals. Boo.), and went on to fall in love with the Bard and currently know about 20 Sonnets and maybe a dozen speeches, scenes, soliloquies off the top of my head. But these days I have to work a lot harder to memorize.
(5) I have no formal training for my current line of day-job work: third-level tech support at a law firm. In my late teens I started doing secretarial work at a law firm because I was doing stand-up and didn't want to commit to an office career. But I am a TERRIBLE secretary. Fortunately, I had learned some BASIC in Junior High and was able to parlay my rudimentary programming skills into Word Perfect script, getting the computer to do much of my work for me. And then started doing this for others... and now it's what I do!
(6) I am allergic to dust and dust mites and spend the first two hours of every day blowing my nose (this is absolute MAGIC in relationships ...)
(7) I have refinanced my co-op four times over the last ten years. Each time I've done it has cost me about $4000 -- and yet the deal I have now is so good (THANK YOU, FED!) that it just may have been worth it.
(8) Throughout pretty much all of grade school I was relentlessly unfunny. When I got into college, however, I started dating a comedian and began to figure out how jokes were constructed. I figured: If he can do it so can I. So I took the mike and dumped the boyfriend.
(9) My first time onstage as a stand-up was in February 1989 -- and it went GREAT. The next 30 or 40 times were not so good, however..... But I was hooked.
(10) I commuted for my first year at NYU and had a 4.0 grade point average ... but was miserable. Then I had the opportunity to move into campus housing with the Science Fiction club (finally -- to be with my own kind!), albeit renamed the SubGenius Alliance because of a prank the SciFi club played at Loeb Student Center (Glenn Hauman could tell you more about that).
My happiness level rose dramatically ... and my GPA dropped. I earned my first F ever... IN PIANO! Ah well...
(Coda in a follow-up comment about playing the piano: "I can barely play at all anymore. The first semester I got an A; but then when I moved on campus, I had to reserve rehearsal time with the piano, and I kept getting shut out by the music majors who got first dibs. So I was never able to practice. The only piano I could get had a broken E key .. and I was learning to play Chopin's Prelude in E Minor!! Grrrr. )
1 comment:
You are a blogger and now my inspiration. I just love the blog post. Its very informative, interactive and quality content. I wish you all good luck for your coming blogs and posts. Keep sharing!
Post a Comment