Old friends....

A few months ago, in a "let's look up old friends" mode, I searched on Google for some various names and found out a lot about one of the first people I met while at Northwestern. He and I were two of the three original members of the Performance Studies class of '97 (Perf Studies attracts many more people after the theatre kids have gotten their acting teachers). Adam and I did some cool stuff together, performance wise, during our years at NU, including a ridiculously surreal and esoteric dance where I dressed in a trench coat, wrapped my face in an Ace bandage and taped a mirror to my chest. How was Adam costumed? He wore a gorilla mask. I don't remember exactly the meaning behind our antics, but I'm pretty sure we convinced the rest of the class (it was a student organized seminar filled with not perf studies people but actors who were into issues of 'identity' which somehow translated into sketches about daytime talk shows....) that it was pertinent. I'm also pretty sure that he and I conspired to make our bits as off-the-wall and zany in order to balance out the more obvious and less-inspired bits as well. I don't remember a whole lot at all except for one moment where Adam taught me an important lesson:

We were going through a tech rehearsal, probably our only tech rehearsal, and Adam and I did our piece on stage for the very first time. I remember after finishing the scene being incredibly self-conscious and standing there waiting for the lights to drop. It was supposed to immediately go to black when we were done. The lighting people were undoubtedly writing down cues, taking notes, basically doing the things they needed to do in order to make it all work when the show actually happened. But I wanted to be in the dark. I was no performer, and I was certainly no abstract-mummified-dancing performer. So, I shouted, "Lights!" or "Lights, please!" or something.

I don't remember exactly what Adam said, but it was something to the effect of "They know, let them do their job, don't be a dick." And I immediately felt like a dick. And so I said something like, "Sorry. Thank you!" And I learned not to be an asshole to the people who were helping you out. And hopefully they heard my apology and knew what I meant, but they probably thought I was being a stuck up actor and not just a scared amateur.

I got over my fear during the shows -- I think we did two performances of it -- and thoroughly enjoyed doing them, especially after seeing the rest of the show and knowing that we were doing something that, even with its purported bits of meaning of identity and 'self' and 'mirror' and 'other' and all that crap, meant just as little as the rest of the stuff on stage.

Actually, I'm not sure if that's what Adam was going for. Or even if that's what I was going for. But in my memory, that's what we achieved, and that's good enough for me.

(By the way, Adam is still actually using his performance studies degree in direct relation to things that he does and thinks about. I merely use mine to impress people with words like "Brechtian" and thoughts like "the narrator of a story is actually a character and can be performed like any other" and stuff like that. Real helpful.)