Friday, December 30, 2011

Wedding Perfection and Why I’m Glad I’m Love’s Executioner

For one of my counseling classes in grad school, I was asked to read a book titled Love’s Executioner about the difficultly one therapist had smashing his clients’ romantic obsessions and visions of love and marriage. While I didn’t particularly enjoy the book or the career, I’ve happily labeled myself Love’s Executioner – but unlike the harried therapist, I revel in reminding my students that the likelihood of them marrying their high school sweetheart and riding off into the sunset is highly improbable. I am the least romantic person I know. It isn’t that I don’t love my family – in fact, I feel highly satisfied with my life and all its variations – but I don’t think it should be an external display. Of course, it isn’t a surprise that when I went to see the exhibit at the Munson Williams Proctor Institute titled “Wedding Perfection,” I was bound to be cynical. That in mind, I didn’t invite my friend Jenn who is loves weddings and gowns and silverware patterns. I wanted the comfort of my wedding-hating bubble all to myself.
The traveling exhibition was two hundred years of wedding dresses. There were Vera Wang’s and 1800 finery, simple sheath dresses and ones made of leather and metal. Every single one made me thankful that didn’t choose to (and wasn’t expected to) don this uncomfortable uniform and command attention by doing an impression of an overly-iced cupcake.
Afterwards, I went home and gleefully worked on my screenplay “Exes” that emphasizes that relationships – even the ones that cost thousands of dollars and involve years of intricate planning – don’t always work out. Sometimes they end, painfully, and leave scars. I’m writing about the scars. Though it is not autobiographical, I’m examining my own scars and battle wounds, poking a stick in the tender parts of my psyche and asking, “why.” Why is it that even bad relationships make us (me) want to cling? Is the fear of something new so great that staying in a world of unhealthiness is a better option? These are the questions I play with, rolling them like colored marbles in between my fingers.
Overall, the wedding exhibition was good fuel for my creative juices and for me psychologically. My favorite display was an art installation piece called Wedding Dress by the artist Christo. It was a woman in white, tied with intricate knots of silk and satin, ropes lashing her to bulky white mass. Underneath the sack where the heavy stuff this poor bride’s future was made of: obligations to her husband, children, house, society. I loved it – marriage as a prison, the wedding dress just a prettier uniform for a life-long sentence. This is the raw material I hope my writing conveys… the less-than-happily ever after. The truth behind the pretty exteriors.
I am not a good undercover artist. I like words, and the way they look when I write them down, the way they taste when I say them. My silence during the exhibition (with “Here Comes the Bride” piped in all around me for added ambience) was maddening. I wanted to scream, “Oh these poor women! Why are we gawking at the corsets and the ribbon and the heavy bustles and thinking it’s beautiful?” I did not find it beautiful and had no one to talk about it with.
But then again, that’s art, isn’t it? The goal of the designer was not to make us all love weddings or universally desire a Cinderella story. The goal was to have a reaction, an experience. This is like my writing, the structure and design tell stories that beg for our reactions, positive or negative. Like the dress, we hope our art should live on after its debut.





Sunday, December 18, 2011

TARGET(ed) for Hell




I need a stable for my nativity set. I have a teeny tiny one (two inch high pieces). Eventually, Gram promised me her antique one that I played with as a child, but I don’t want it UNTIL she passes (I feel that getting it before then will hasten her passing). I just set up the figures under the tree BUT my cats play with them! I will walk into the kitchen and find a shepherd under the table, find a donkey under a desk, or almost vacuum up baby Jesus. Not cool.

Anyway, I went into Target to buy a stable, just a simple, little, cheap-o one to keep the cats out and keep the three wise men from turning into the two wise men. I realize it is late in the year, and I take full responsibility for this. I expected them to say, “sorry, ma’am, we are sold out.”

That is not the reaction I received. Instead, the salesman looked at me like I said, “Hi, can you please tell me where you keep your animal sacrificing supplies?”

Okay, I don’t care if you don’t believe in Jesus. I don’t care if you aren’t Christian. I don’t care if you, like Darryl, think Christmas is all about Santa Claus. I’m okay with that, really I am. HOWEVER, as a country with religious choice, you have to at least acknowledge that SOME people believe that Christmas is about the birth of Jesus Christ (Christmas does have Christ in it, ya know). You don’t have to be an English teacher or even all that brilliant to able to note the similarities in the BIRTH OF THE SON and the BIRTH OF THE SUN!

End result, this Pagan girl sucked it up and went to Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby, just in case you didn’t know, closes on Sunday to keep the Sabbath holy. At the HL, those good Christians told me that they indeed had stables, tons of them, but so late in the season, they were sold out.

With a smile, I thanked them, and walked out.

I guess the cats get to bat around the Christ-child for another season. Next year, I’ll go to Wal-Mart and buy a damn stable around May, when they start stocking back-to-school items.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Writing and Me: In the Beginning



The first conscious memory I have of writing for pleasure and not necessity was in the second grade. It was spring, and Mrs. Vitro, my young and inexperienced twentysomething year-old teacher was attempting to bring a little creativity to our otherwise mundane Catholic school curriculum. It was spring, and that meant that all the teachers in Our Lady Star of the Sea would decorate the bulletin boards and windows with something spring-themed: impossibly colored flowers and smiling suns, Easter eggs and bunny rabbits. Jesus had died for our sins, been resurrected, and summer vacation was right around the corner.
“Okay, class,”’ she said, passing around Xeroxed sheets in the shape of a butterfly with five lines inside its wings, one for the title, four for the poem we were tasked to write, “we are going to write a poem about spring.” She then wrote, in her best teacher penmanship, a sample:
Spring
Spring is here.
Let’s all cheer.
Spring is great.
Let’s celebrate!
“Now, boys and girls, I want you to cut out your butterfly as neatly as possible.” She continued. “Write a poem about spring and then decorate it with bright colors.” The class of uniformed students uniformly copied Mrs. Vitro’s poem, maybe transposing a line or two, the daring ones or those who simply couldn’t follow directions varying the order. Then they cut the butterflies out with safety scissors and used their Crayolas to mimic butterfly designs. I did something different.
I wrote a poem about a bumble bee that loved a butterfly but shied away from expressing his true feelings because he thought she would be afraid of his stinger. I didn’t think anything of it. It was a poem about a butterfly, written in my neatest penmanship. Really, I wanted to get to the coloring, what I felt was the more fun part of the assignment. But when I brought my poem up for the teacher’s inspection, a necessary part of the assignment, she looked at me with surprise.
“Did you write this?” she asked. I thought I had done something wrong and reluctantly nodded that I had.
“Rebecca!” she said, smiling. “You can write!”
It was then, at age seven, that I realized I possessed a spark that everyone else didn’t have. I could write.
Over the rest of my elementary and high school years, I filled countless marble and spiral notebooks. I wrote plays and cast my friends in the roles. I wrote poems and stories and novellas. My mother told me that every single teacher praised my writing ability and assured her that one day I was going to be a writer. I wrote for my high school newspaper and literary arts magazine, eventually becoming editor of both. I made a ton of extra money writing other students’ college admissions essays. It was easy, and I could never understand why people struggled with it. Just write. It seemed simple enough.
Despite these accolades from my instructors and peers, the biggest validation of my writing ability came during my junior year of high school. Creative Writing was an elective for juniors and seniors only, a special course reserved for a select few. The teacher was Joe Morale, a chubby guy with thick glasses, bordering on nerdish. He wore jeans every single day. He was funny and inspiring, but he was also extremely critical. It was the first time in my life I ever got less than an A on a writing assignment. He was stingy with his praise, assuring us that he wasn’t doing us any favors by telling us we were perfect and couldn’t get any better. We improved, he told us, by learning what wasn’t working in our stories so we could make it better.
I adored him.
He introduced me to Rocky Horror and the Who’s Tommy. He wrote long comments on our assignments, asking pointed questions about character motivation, symbolism, and realistic dialogue. He was a passionate writer himself, authoring several plays that were produced by small-time local theater companies and performed in the Jewish Community Center. I always saw him as a writer first, teaching school to pay the bills. Most students were shocked – and even insulted -- by his brutal honesty. Whenever a student told him he or she wanted to be a writer, he was famous for responding, “Don’t quit your day job.” He slapped you in the face with reality: not everyone was talented, not everyone could be a writer.
I was petrified to turn in my final paper, a first-person narrative about where we saw writing fitting into our futures. Dare I tell him that I hoped to write someday? Dare I risk being told that I wasn’t nearly as talented as I thought? Perhaps I could instead tell him I aspired to be something more practical, a journalist who dabbled in creative writing for fun. I even wrote that if I ever did get a book published, I would dedicate it to Mrs. Vitro, the first teacher who made me feel proud of my writing.
When I got my paper back, it was uncharacteristically unmarked, without critique, except for a simple sentence at the end of the essay. It said, “Dedicate your second book to me.”
It was more validation than I could have ever hoped for, especially from Joe Morale.
In my yearbook, under his smiling picture, he wrote, “Remember that life is precious.” I thought he was referencing the chronic depression I battled and wrote about. It was during his class that I started wearing black and rimming my eyes with thick eyeliner. I listened to the Sex Pistols and The Cure and The Ramones. I wrote long, wordy opinion pieces in the school newspaper about how pointless I felt it was to live in Bayonne, New Jersey, how people who stayed in New Jersey were bound to be sucked into the cesspool of despair that clung to every mile of the Garden State Parkway. I broke the school dress code and refused to take off my sunglasses in class. I bragged when I made a new teacher cry. Saying life was precious was akin to saying, “Good morning, Star Shine, the earth says hello.” I thought he was being his sarcastic self, thumbing his nose at my lugubrious ways.
Mr. Morale died of AIDS-related complications four years after I graduated. He was 41 years old.
Coincidentally, it was during this time I stopped writing. I was an English major at USM, shedding my journalist aspirations years earlier when I realized that I didn’t like reporting and writing about facts. I didn’t know what I was going to do with a BA in English. I just knew that I liked to read, and writing academic papers about literature seemed like an easy way to earn a degree. I didn’t have time to write creatively, not when there were failed relationships to focus on and alcohol I could legally drink. I certainly didn’t have time to write after I found out I was pregnant, a result of a rebound relationship. Suddenly, with a baby in my near future, I had to focus on graduating and getting a job.
I took a creative writing class in college because it fit into my schedule and fulfilled a requirement for my major. I hadn’t written anything non-academic in years, and rekindling my lost creativity felt like the first time I ate an oyster, scary and unfamiliar. I stared at my computer screen, the cursor blinking back at me, without a single thing to say. Long gone were the days when I could make up stories, spit out pages of dialogue without hesitation, adjectives pouring from me. The class was filled with aspiring poets and prosers… I wanted to tell them all not to quit their day jobs. If I had one, I wouldn’t have quit mine.
My daughter was born, and single motherhood and full-time classes didn’t leave time for writing. What could I write about, anyway? My life was filled with diapers and breastfeeding, term papers and studying for the GRE. I was going to be practical and get a graduate degree in higher education administration. I was going to grow up, become marketable. I wanted something safe, something with benefits and paid vacation leave. Writing wasn’t going to give me any of those things, so I didn’t give it any consideration. I went forward with my life, sans writing.
I thought I was happy.
I earned an MS Ed in college administration and landed a job in upstate New York, at one of the state universities. I liked working with the students and adored my staff. For fun, one weekend, my assistant Nychey asked me if I wanted to go with her to see a psychic. It seemed harmless enough. I was 30 and hoping to move to the west coast where I could get an administrative position that allowed me to teach a few college classes. I thought I was happy even though I was single and lonely. Maybe this psychic could give me some direction. The first thing she said to me was, “There’s a man… who has passed… with dark hair and glasses…And he wants to know why … you stopped writing?”