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Jan. 30th, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/business/media/30idol.html
Rani Karnik (the woman in the photo) plays DYNAMITE in my play.
Rani Karnik (the woman in the photo) plays DYNAMITE in my play.
the story of a young apprentice
Jan. 30th, 2006 07:53 pmI was in a shop today getting food and heard "Wrapped Around Your Finger" by The Police for the first time in I don't know how long. It was one of my favourite songs as a child and on the first cassette I ever owned, won in a dance contest at a cancer dance. Melodically, the chorus always annoyed me, but I loved the rest of the song and the narrative most of all. It was a prissy, dark, little joy explaining the Scylla and the Charybidis to my classmates who couldn't have cared less. My friend Vera used to go on and on about how Roxanne was a better song; now I realize we just liked very different types of stories. Also, Roxanne is necessarily a girl, and while the narrator of this song could have been anything, he was always me and a boy in my mind besides, and when he wasn't, he was my friend, which was not something I had a lot of as a kid.
I had that same smile that's in my headshot now when I was little, and maybe, thinking about it now, this was the first song that it ever really went with, despite my best attempts to the Eurythmics (a band I adore to this day). Annie Lennox was so powerful, and I wasn't, I couldn't even do a fabulous little mockery of it. But the long, slow and unpleasant victory of a creature in too far just out of dumb curiosity and the need to know things no one else does? It's funny, I guess I've known that story far longer than I'd really realized until just now.
When I was a kid, when the dances started, in 5th grade, maybe 4th, I'm not sure -- I won a lot of dance contests. Like the ability to survive dodgeball endlessly, it was my secret nerd magic and I never knew how to be cocky about it in a way that made me cool, so there was I was, grasping gnawing little nerd girl victorious. I loved dances more than anything -- at first, because we would all count up how many boys danced with us and I'd win a lot, and later, when boys stopped wanting to dance with me when girls had to have figures and smile right, because I never had to stop or talk or do anything other than be better than I was for a few hours, and it was so easy.
In fifth grade, I begged and begged my mother to let me go to sleepover camp, and so after watching the video in our home that was brought to us by the camp director, a funny little dark-haired man with a mustache who looked a great deal like Marguerita's father, I got to go to Watitoh, along with my best friend Elyse, and our classmate Heather. Elyse and I were in the same bunk, and we were treated poorly for a wide variety of reasons. It was my ugliest summer, certainly, and I had never really been around other people before -- it was very hard for me to know what to do. We were told by the other girls that they hated us because we knew each other before camp and weren't letting them be our friends, but they had all been going to camp together every summer for years and wouldn't have let us in anyway. Elyse had a brother, and was better at things than me, and we did what we had to to get by, and I never really begrduged her any of it, although maybe I should have.
I don't remember very many things about that summer. I remember there was a girl whose bed was across from mine who had been born with only one breast. She finally confessed this to us all towards the end of camp, and showed us her prosthetic. I remember the counsellors sitting around with their bathing suits half off Nairing their pubic hair; I remember the smell of that. I remember singing Happy Birthday badly to audition for Hello Dolly and being grateful to even wind up in the chorus. I remember having to wear white on Fridays and my mother not understanding and sending me white and pink striped clothes, when I needed white. I remember color wars, learning to swim and crayfish in the lake and buying Charleston Chews from the commissary and learning to canoe. These were all horrors.
But what I remember most of all was a damce. And the girls in my bunk who were always claiming to be helping me by telling me how I was ugly or wrong or encouraging me to say "fuck," took me out around the back of the wooden building where the dance was.
"Show us how you dance," they said, and I showed them, my feet making paterns, sometimes one crossing behind the other. I would turn, and I would move my arms imagining I was snakes or in a harem or both.
"That's why no one likes you," one declared, taking out a cigarette.
I didn't understand.
"You don't do it right."
So they showed me how to dance, how to step to the side, and bring the other foot to meet it, but never cross and then back the other way, just side to side, just this shuffle of nothing.
"You have to do it like this, and then we can be nice to you because you won't be embarassing."
I learnt to dance like everyone else that summer, and, in truth, it became one less thing I was harassed about there. Towards the end of camp everyone got lice. There was also a game of strip poker and I remember running about in a too-long t-shirt, having lost the rest of my garments, because it wouldn't do, just wouldn't do, to be so good at cards I'd seem like a prude.
I didn't tell my parents most of it, but after that I only went to day camps, and performing arts camps at that. Elyse and I's friendship hung on for several more years; seventh grade even had moments I could call glorious, even if almost nothing had changed for me. But there was music in the dark and the idea of esoteric knowledge and a belief that I danced to summon things, and it was all enough to call hope in some fashion or other.
In my life I have submited and subjugated myself. These are different things, but it was a difference I rarely understood. In trying to do the things I chose to do artfully, I often declared my nature to be terribly far from what it actually was and is, so desperate was I to be a creature of any type of absolute at all. In trying to reclaim myself from my own lies and expedient wishes, I have also put aside so many things, not always to my benefit.
Hearing that song today was staggering; it brought back so many memories and made me sort of marvel that it may have taken over twenty years, but while its narrative may be utterly key to this ever so jealously guarded part of my soul, my day to day life recognizes it only as artifact. And that's a goddamn strange sort of freedom.
I had that same smile that's in my headshot now when I was little, and maybe, thinking about it now, this was the first song that it ever really went with, despite my best attempts to the Eurythmics (a band I adore to this day). Annie Lennox was so powerful, and I wasn't, I couldn't even do a fabulous little mockery of it. But the long, slow and unpleasant victory of a creature in too far just out of dumb curiosity and the need to know things no one else does? It's funny, I guess I've known that story far longer than I'd really realized until just now.
When I was a kid, when the dances started, in 5th grade, maybe 4th, I'm not sure -- I won a lot of dance contests. Like the ability to survive dodgeball endlessly, it was my secret nerd magic and I never knew how to be cocky about it in a way that made me cool, so there was I was, grasping gnawing little nerd girl victorious. I loved dances more than anything -- at first, because we would all count up how many boys danced with us and I'd win a lot, and later, when boys stopped wanting to dance with me when girls had to have figures and smile right, because I never had to stop or talk or do anything other than be better than I was for a few hours, and it was so easy.
In fifth grade, I begged and begged my mother to let me go to sleepover camp, and so after watching the video in our home that was brought to us by the camp director, a funny little dark-haired man with a mustache who looked a great deal like Marguerita's father, I got to go to Watitoh, along with my best friend Elyse, and our classmate Heather. Elyse and I were in the same bunk, and we were treated poorly for a wide variety of reasons. It was my ugliest summer, certainly, and I had never really been around other people before -- it was very hard for me to know what to do. We were told by the other girls that they hated us because we knew each other before camp and weren't letting them be our friends, but they had all been going to camp together every summer for years and wouldn't have let us in anyway. Elyse had a brother, and was better at things than me, and we did what we had to to get by, and I never really begrduged her any of it, although maybe I should have.
I don't remember very many things about that summer. I remember there was a girl whose bed was across from mine who had been born with only one breast. She finally confessed this to us all towards the end of camp, and showed us her prosthetic. I remember the counsellors sitting around with their bathing suits half off Nairing their pubic hair; I remember the smell of that. I remember singing Happy Birthday badly to audition for Hello Dolly and being grateful to even wind up in the chorus. I remember having to wear white on Fridays and my mother not understanding and sending me white and pink striped clothes, when I needed white. I remember color wars, learning to swim and crayfish in the lake and buying Charleston Chews from the commissary and learning to canoe. These were all horrors.
But what I remember most of all was a damce. And the girls in my bunk who were always claiming to be helping me by telling me how I was ugly or wrong or encouraging me to say "fuck," took me out around the back of the wooden building where the dance was.
"Show us how you dance," they said, and I showed them, my feet making paterns, sometimes one crossing behind the other. I would turn, and I would move my arms imagining I was snakes or in a harem or both.
"That's why no one likes you," one declared, taking out a cigarette.
I didn't understand.
"You don't do it right."
So they showed me how to dance, how to step to the side, and bring the other foot to meet it, but never cross and then back the other way, just side to side, just this shuffle of nothing.
"You have to do it like this, and then we can be nice to you because you won't be embarassing."
I learnt to dance like everyone else that summer, and, in truth, it became one less thing I was harassed about there. Towards the end of camp everyone got lice. There was also a game of strip poker and I remember running about in a too-long t-shirt, having lost the rest of my garments, because it wouldn't do, just wouldn't do, to be so good at cards I'd seem like a prude.
I didn't tell my parents most of it, but after that I only went to day camps, and performing arts camps at that. Elyse and I's friendship hung on for several more years; seventh grade even had moments I could call glorious, even if almost nothing had changed for me. But there was music in the dark and the idea of esoteric knowledge and a belief that I danced to summon things, and it was all enough to call hope in some fashion or other.
In my life I have submited and subjugated myself. These are different things, but it was a difference I rarely understood. In trying to do the things I chose to do artfully, I often declared my nature to be terribly far from what it actually was and is, so desperate was I to be a creature of any type of absolute at all. In trying to reclaim myself from my own lies and expedient wishes, I have also put aside so many things, not always to my benefit.
Hearing that song today was staggering; it brought back so many memories and made me sort of marvel that it may have taken over twenty years, but while its narrative may be utterly key to this ever so jealously guarded part of my soul, my day to day life recognizes it only as artifact. And that's a goddamn strange sort of freedom.