After I updated an album of theatre photos, my husband smiled while perusing the pictures and said, "I love how many of these I was a part of." He then proceeded to count the productions we'd worked on together over the years, and something occurred to me:
We all mark our lives by way of story.
You might be able to locate, say, February 2010 in the files of your memory by way of a new job started, or a convention attended or a friend made or lost. Those are all stories. Mine are just a bit more, well...theatrical, that's all.
I can find February 2010 because that's when I was Anne Frank. And the world around me for a time had her journal scrawled upon it.
My husband made me realize that I have an awful lot of milestones tied to theatre. WE have an awful lot of milestones.
Looking through the album...there's the first time he ever saw me (on a stage. In a deer costume!). The string of shows we worked on together as we became friends. (And for him: the string of shows that led him to realize I was the one for him.)
We got together during that beautiful, 4-person "Lear."
We went away to get married during "Wind in the Willows" when I was an insane little stoat (when I came back to perform after the whirlwind weekend, a tiny "Just Married" had been added to the back of the tiny car that was one of my props).
We found out I was pregnant during "Taking Steps" (and while my character may not have taken any steps at all by the end, me? My husband? My life? We took terrified and thrilling baby steps. Out of a plane. Into a world so new, it continues to reveal itself to us).
For me, there is the very poignant duo of shows to mark the end of my selfhood as I knew it ("Anime Momotaro") and the beginning of mamahood (bizarrely, but perfectly...you had to be there:)...an all-girl "Titus Andronicus.")
This is how I know I am in the right profession: the stories that give my personal timeline its shape and color and vibrancy and meaning are mine AND someone else's. That person may have really lived, or may only have ever existed in the imagination of a playwright, but they become a very real something to me, and they walk with me for a few paces down the path. Heck, maybe they even create that next little stretch of path.
I read a beautiful play recently where a character angrily proclaims that she is NOT what she does.
And then she takes it back, and admits to being angry because she IS, indeed, very very much, what she does.
If you have kept up with this sporadic blog, or if you even just peruse its titles, you can piece together a mostly loving but overall tumultuous relationship to theatre. "Mostly loving but overall tumultuous" might also be how I'd describe my relationship to myself, if you caught me being carelessly honest. I AM what I do. That's why it's so hard. My marriage sprang from this, my child is tied to this. Yes, I could give it up tomorrow and forge a whole new path. But there would forever be that near-decade of Tia-as-Theatre.
And I don't see as I'd ever stop being grateful for it...for all those "friends," however strange or unlikely or eerily "me," on my timeline.
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| Exhibit A: "Strange friend" - Youtha the Stoat. | What a nut. |
Yes. Just, yes.
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