#thatAWKWARDmomentwhen...

You have a seemingly completely random memory of what was a seemingly inconsequential moment in your life that upon further review puts your current mess in perspective.


Let's take a jaunt down memory lane.

It's 7th grade and yours truly is sitting in the middle back of language arts, hot-combed hair parted down the middle and rocking glasses that were thicker than Nicki Minaj post-injections, and creating an impressive C-curve in my back from all the under the desk stories I was writing and from the fact that I thought hunching over would make me feel less like a giantess. We had started to learn about iambic pentameter, the bah-BOOM bah-BOOM bah-BOOM bah-BOOM bah-BOOM rhythm that Shakespearean verse is rooted in. The teacher had given us the creative assignment to think of a lyric from a song that had used iambic pentameter, and I thought I had discovered the Lost City of Atlantis when I realized that Marshall Mathers himself had employed it in his song "Shrooms" (test it out, the line  "I never meant to give you mushrooms, girl," is a perfect line of verse. The Bard would have been proud.)

I raised my hand and delivered this information to my teacher, my crush at the time, the extremely cool -honey complexioned-neat Lil' Bow Wow-esque braids having-'why is his voice so deep at 12?'-throwback jersey and creaseless white Air Force Ones- man of my dreams,and subject of my CosmoGirl quizzes turns to me and tells me that it's cool that I knew that.

Internally I did about 12 cartwheels, and began picking out our future kids names.

Later that day, still on the newfound high of kinda being called cool by the coolest and cutest guy in the gifted program, I caught him the locker by his friends and thought I'd take my chance again. In perfectly measured iambs, in a crowd of boys whom I towered over (ah. puberty.), I told him the second line "I never meant to bring you to my world", all done in an attempt to relive the magic we had shared only three class periods ago. He looked at me like I was nuts, which in retrospect may have been fair, given the fact that I was standing at his locker Shakespeare-talking Eminem lyrics.


I just wanted him to think I was cool.

I eased back to my locker and scooped up some of my dignity on the way out the building, skin a little thicker, walls a little higher.

Random glimpses into my past serve to remind me that at all times, the things that make me who i am, the people I've met, the profoundly awkward things I say, the place I've been, are constantly floating around in me, informing my next steps. Peeping back into those moments remind me of my foundations, the building blocks that have made me me, the trials and errors and remarkable flaws.

Recently, in an almost daily manner, I'm reminded of the fact that in a few short months, I'm not going to be near the people I have held the most important for the past four years of my training. The people who I've watched grow exponentially, shared philosophies, heartaches, triumphs and breakdowns with over boxes of Franzia, the people who know tears and joy and who even accept me in my gross movement attire. The people I love. My colleagues in the struggle, my troops in the trenches, fellow artists in the field, and moreover, my friends.

Experience and memory are beautiful things, things that are invaluable to me in my acting, and, more importantly, to me as a person. I know I won't have the opportunity, just as with my recalling out of the blue the Shakespeare-Eminem snafu, to filter out the recurring thoughts of my classmates/castmates/playmates nor would I ever have the desire to do so. I'm carrying them, constantly influenced by them, as they whirl through my being, amd holding onto them dearly, next to my thoughts of sun-soaked block club party mornings of my youth and the Kool-aid stains of my high school hair dye extravaganzas. I know that our times together, regardless what parts of the world we venture off to will be right there with me, in my art, in my life, in me.

In our theatre-speak, we throw around the notion of personalizing, the idea of starting from who you are as a fully actualized, flawed, living, loving, breathing, feeling human being, in an effort to give life to the character. This is my cheers to the people who teach me more and more about who that is.

Now let's get some Franzia.

Sloppy Firsts

"I don't know anything."
-November 5, 2010

I wrote this, first semester of my junior year. This was the time when acting became "serious". Unitards, crying jags, Checkovian  pause serious. I was in class, steeped in the sorrow that only can come from foolishly expecting that I was supposed to be a finished product so early on. I was convinced that if I was to ever be anybody in this industry that I needed all the answers, right then and there, that I had been in training for this long I should have solidified my brand and known exactly what the "right" choices that a black actress of my type should make. With the undue stress that this put on me, I started to crack, question the validity of all my choices, if I even had a place in the theatre, if I was really an artist at all or just the weird girl who had a lotta feelings.

When I penned those words, I saw it as the rueful admission that I was somehow lacking the stuff to make me an actress. Now, nearing the icy precipice of Get A Real Job Land, I'm thinking of that phrase as a bit of liberation. 

Somedays I wake up and think, honestly, what the fuck are you doing? May is coming faster than a fat kid down a water slide, and the collegiate cocoon is about to break wide open. And while I know I have more questions than answers about the world I'm trying to break into, I'm welcoming the mess and the confusion on a day by day basis.  I'm a work in process, my work is messy, sloppy, incomplete, sometimes God-awful, but I got something that's been growing  as a result of classical training and faith. Its growth is inconsistent, but I get glimpses of it just when I need it. It's the belief that I'm on the path that I need to be on, that somewhere in the margins of scripts near the smudged pencil marks and torn corners is where I belong.

I don't have a clue as to what's ahead, but I'm blessed to be where I am. I got no interest in making my art something neat and polished, but I'm devoted to making my art honest and beholden to who I am. 

Til next.