Discoveries

And once again I have been terribly remiss in writing.  The last little while in a nutshell: Much Ado went very well, was well-received, and I had fun.  Most of the people in that cast are quite wonderful, especially a woman called Vanessa, with whom I am now friends.  Vanessa was, interestingly, the first person to pick up on my religion without my telling her.  I was happy.

As for 12th Night, it’s a bit complicated.  I read mostly for Viola during the workshop, and I know I read her well.  There was one day when Armin told my scene partner (Etta) and me that our acting was "phenominally good."  And I would really, really love to have the chance to play the role.  But it’s not going to be this time.  Armin decided to cast the whole show older — his Orsino is in his sixties, and Olivia is about fifty.  The woman playing Viola, named Lisette, is younger, but still a good bit older than me.  So it makes sense that he did not cast me.  What he *did* do is to hire me as musician and composer for the show, and he’s plugging me in as a servant anywhere he can.  I’m supposed to be Feste’s sister, who is mentioned once in the text but never actually turns up.  Except in our production she does.  And that’s me.  So, on the one hand, what this means is that I am once again playing an extra.  On the other, far bigger hand, what this means is that Armin Shimerman had no role for me and wanted me in his show so badly that he made one up.  So once again, I am not complaining.

I’ve spent a lot of time with the man since last I wrote, in workshop, at social gatherings, even twice at his house to work on music, and I can unequivocally state that we get along very well and we like each other very much and he’s really wonderful.  I might adore him a little (in a completely appropriate, he’s-57-and-married kind of way, of course).  And he’s slowly undoing years of Syracuse-inflicted damage to my self-esteem by being highly complimentary and telling me things like "You’re the perfect type for Shakespeare" and "You would have been great on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" and "You’re very talented and will go far."  And, when I told him that I had finally learned an approach to the text that worked for me in his workshops, "If I was able to give you that, then teaching the whole course was worthwhile."  I like this man a lot.

And I get to do his show.  Even if most of what I do will be sit in the room and watch, I anticiapte learning tons.  First rehearsal tomorrow!  Yay!

Also in this show is a very attractive man from Much Ado, name of Rob.  Nothing will happen.  Still, I’m pleased to do another show with him.

Since the show finished, the last two weeks have been absurdly busy, because my friend Lisa from Syracuse was staying with me for a week, and then my family went on vacation for a week, and we’ve only just come back.  We did the national parks loop, through Bryce and Zion, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, and then home again.  Ben didn’t come.  Some of it was great, some was a little weak.  It did give me a chance to get back into Nature, though, which I think I may have needed desperately.  I learned a lot, as a Pagan, on this trip.  Being Celtic-based, I and my friends in SPIRAL tend to focus very heavily on the Goddess.  Going through Utah, that was impossible.  Bryce and Zion are such masculine landscapes, such God places, that I finally began to have a sense of the other side of Deity.  And then all the troubled activity in Yellowstone, with geysers and hotsprings and mudpots and so on…I could feel the difference between that and the complete peace of Grand Teton.  And I was reminded that as a child, before I had learned the modern-day fate of the Native Americans, I wanted desperately to be part of that culture — the way I have wanted more recently to be Celtic.  I don’t know, perhaps all children growing up the the States have a fascination with the Native Americans.  But it was…more proof, more confirmation, that this is right for me.  That from birth, all along, in my soul, I have been not Jewish but something older still.

I need to spend more time exploring all this.  It kinda got buried in last semester.  This trip, and also meeting Vanessa, who showed me where our local Pagan bookstore is and knew what I was before I told her, has brought it all to the front again.

I had a moment, standing by a silent green lake in Wyoming, alone for a brief time, where something suddenly came clear for me.  I gave greetings to the spirit in the water (the spirit of the water?), and while considering in myself what it was exactly that I was talking to, I remembered hearing somewhere that all bodies have an energy and are therefore an entity — water, stone, tree, everything — and suddenly the forest around me sprang to life and I could feel each individual spirit of each tree and of the lake itself, clearly, strongly, and my illusion of solitude was shattered but that was OK because I’d found what I had wanted to be alone to look for.

–Stephanie