Diary Friday

This entry is from when I was in grad school. One of my best friends in school was a crazy Texan who would wear his Stetson hat to voice class. We were two peas in a pod. He is one of the most insightful men I have ever met. And he loves women. But somehow our relationship was always like – brother and sister, or kindred spirits. We’re still good friends. (Beth and Betsy – you met him!)

This is a very grad school-esque entry, all about acting, and craft, and the bonds that are formed between people when you are in any intensive program like that. It may sound like we are insane – and perhaps we were – but we always made sense to each other.

He and I “got” each other, in current-language parlance. From the first time we ever had a conversation, we “got” each other.

Oh, and by the way, in the entry, I talk about a note he passed me once in class – and how I will “keep it forever”. Well, I have. It is on my bulletin board right now – and I will never get rid of it. I read that little note, in blue moments, and remember who I am.

September 24, 1996

Saw **** sitting out in the courtyard, writing in a notebook, hair all haywire. I tentatively walked over. Didn’t know if he didn’t want to be disturbed. He looked up at me, deep grey shadows under his eyes. Hm. What’s up here?

He put his notebook down. We exchanged Hey, how ya doins – all with a deep subtext going on. Hm.

He asked me what I was doing. I had 45 minutes before I had to be anywhere. Then he offered up to me what was going on, what had just happened to him in his acting class.

He is so open. So angry, so conflicted, so self-aware. I really relate to this man. We can actually TALK to each other and actually BE in the conversation. It’s hard sometimes, to describe a conversation like this one. It has an essence, hard to capture, yet so potent. Deep. We’re very alike, he and I.

He described something he’s going through – very complex, very specific – and I was right with him. I know it in my bones, in my blood. “I know just what you mean, **** .”

“Yeah, I actually thought about you. I had a feeling you’d know. I mean, from that night we spent together, member, and what we talked about?”

“Yeah.”

He told me about B. [his acting teacher]. What she had said to him in class.

We go all over the place in our conversations, but somehow, we keep up with each other. Nobody else can. Others try to follow us, and get completely lost, or left behind, like: “Oh … I thought we were still talking about this…” **** and I will stare at them blankly, like: “Man, we moved on from that AGES ago… Now we’re talking about this.”

So, for the most part, when **** and I are deep in conversation, people leave us alone. It’s all telepathic with the two of us.

So I said to him, about what was going on in his class: “So do you find that to be abusive or helpful? Sounds abusive to me, actually.”

We give each other room to explain ourselves, though. It’s all about listening.

We talked about hands. Why women are so into men’s hands. How he doesn’t get that. I reached out and took his hand, to explain it to him. “I’m not indiscriminately into hands. But certain men have hands I love. For me, it has to do with if I can feel you in the hands. If I can feel the man in his hands.”

“Ohhhh.” (Light bulb on for **** .) “Yeah, okay, I know what you mean now.”

“Cause not every guy is really in his hands.”

We talked about Fool for Love. Beirut. The scenes we are working on.

**** , to me: “Oh no! Don’t learn your lines yet! Get into the situation – Time and place. Don’t even look at the lines! Understand the situation.”

We both want this year to be about getting out of the way, getting our egos or whatever out of the way, so that we can act.

He had had a mind-blowing day. B. called him “a Rolls Royce with a dent … No, you’re not a Rolls Royce. You’re a **** .”

As he was talking to me, really confiding in me, I got tears in my eyes.

Can we let go? Can we allow ourselves to breathe? To just breathe? So much of acting is in the breath. Everything starts with the breath, and half the time we’re up on stage and we’re all stressed out and we’re barely breathing at all.

**** and I sat in the courtyard at school and practiced breathing together. Slow breath in. Concentrate only on your breathing. Be in your body. BE IN YOUR BODY.

Then came **** ‘s BRILLIANT observations about my drawings.

Okay, so let me talk about these drawings now:

What do I draw? It’s really just a doodle, but when I doodle, I draw ladies’ faces. There are cartoon lady-faces all around the borders of all my notebook pages. Some have straight hair, some have glasses, some have boingy-boing curls, some have long eyelashes … I am always doodling this woman. She literally is everywhere. I do not even know I am doing it half the time.

So **** had noticed these drawings before, and had mentioned them to me once or twice.

The first time he brought up “the lady”, all he said to me was, with no preamble, “Who’s that lady, darlin’?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “What lady?”

Silently, **** pointed at my notebook, and I suddenly saw, as if for the first time, the 20 “ladies” clamoring in the margins. I BURST into laughter.

“I have no idea who that lady is!”

**** does drawings, too: skeletal woodcut-ish faces with deep shadows under the eyes, eyes bored into the head. These faces are all over his various notebooks. A counterpart to my “lady”. That’s what **** calls her. “The lady.”

Last year, in voice class, I noticed a skeletal face staring up at me from ****’s voice journal.

Or maybe I noticed it on the memorable day he sat next to me in Theatre History, and we wrote notes to each other in our respective notebooks, like we were in high school. Legs sticking out from under our desks. Whispering. Random guffaws. Shelagh said it looked like he and I had become the same person.

Anyway, whenever it was – I noticed this skeletor drawing in ****’s notebook and I mentioned it to ***** afterwards and we had an intriguing talk about him. Ruminating – or, no, not even – just commenting on these faces we draw, over and over and over. What are they about? Why? Who are these people?

And I remember **** saying point-blank, “Well, I know I’m drawing myself.”

And that sparked a tiny bit of recognition in me. I remember him suddenly drawing the parallel between his drawings and mine. I didn’t even know he noticed my “ladies”.

****’s eyes, man. Nothing gets by those eyes. Nothing. Especially if you’re a woman.

I remember feeling sort of startled when he dragged me into the discussion of his drawings. Wait, this is about you, not me!

But **** is smarter than me in some ways. He was like: I had noticed your drawings, and related to them on a subconscious level, because – subconsciously again – I recognized myself in it. I saw your drawings and was like: Oh. You do that too?

**** said casually, “It’s like that lady you draw.”

I was puzzled, again having no idea what he was talking about. “What lady?”

“You know. The same lady you draw everywhere. The one with the luscious lips.”

Startled. I felt naked.

I was almost pissed to be discovered like that. How dare he see so much? I can never ever hide when I am with **** . It pisses me off.

This was all last year, during the first conversation about the drawings.

And it came up again today.

**** actually looked like one of his own drawings today, sitting in the courtyard. The eyes burrowed into his head surrounded by shadows that almost look like bruises, the pale sensitive face, the pain exuding from that face.

**** burst out, “That’s why I just love the lady you draw! And her lips! Those sensuous lips! You’re drawin’ yourself, darlin’.”

There are moments when I feel closer to **** , more known by **** , than anyone else at this school. Even Shelagh. I do not know what I would do without him. He sees my dirt, my shame, the stuff I don’t like about myself. And he loves it. It makes me human to him. We talked about that today.

We talked about Lily Taylor.

We talked about Jennifer Jason Leigh. She drives **** crazy. He said, “I want to see her in a movie where she does nothing. Where she sits still. Where she keeps it simple. She’s always so busy distracting herself, twitching, all mannerisms. It drives me out of my fucking mind.”

We talked about Martin Landau.

**** told me a story about Landau and Tim Burton, during the filming of Ed Wood, a movie I loved. Landau said to Burton, during the rehearsal process, “So this film is a tribute to Bela Lugosi.” And Burton said, “No, it’s a tribute to acting.”

I welled up as **** told me this. It’s true. That’s the genius of the movie, that’s actually why I loved the movie. The horrible pathos of the scene with the octopus … Lugosi flailing about in the puddle with the octopus arms … it was hilarious, and tragic. M.G. and I saw that film together, and we were literally laughing and crying at the same moment. Humiliation hand in hand with dignity: acting in a nutshell.

So **** and I parted, after we had a conversation about holding tension in our mouths.

**** has always commented on how tense my mouth is. So sitting there, in the courtyard, I consciously tried to relax my jaw. **** scoffed at my attempt, openly. “Sweetheart, you’re TENSE. Come on now. Really relax.”

So we both sat there, doing it, massaging our jaws, sticking our tongues out, moving our mouths around. We roared at how stupid we must look.

I told him about the clipped-tongue thing I had when I was a baby. And also about having braces for three years in high school.

**** exclaimed, “Ohhhhh! No wonder!” He meant it kindly but it just came out funny. I laughed, and threw my arms around him, saying, “No wonder you’re all fucked up, Sheila!”

“No! No! You know what I mean!”

“No, I know. I’m kidding.”

**** kept pondering this, silently – I could tell – the fact that I hold tension in my mouth, and that I had braces when I was a kid … He kept looking at me ponderingly.

Later that day, in voice class, he passed me a note. A propos of nothing. I literally will keep this note forever. FOREVER. I CHERISH IT. Here it is, spelling mistakes and all:

“That explains a whole lot. ie: about your mouth. You have beautiful teeth. It’s muscle memory. You may have been an ugly duckling. Your now a swann. Swann’s are beautiful. And mean.”

HAHAHAHAHA

Swanns are beautiful and mean. That is absolutely classic.

**** loves me because I am like a swann. I am beautiful and MEAN.

Later in the day, I left a scrap of paper in his mailbox. All it said was:

To: ****

From: Sheila

And in that big space, I drew a “lady”. Just for him.