74 Facts

I have been working on my one-woman piece that I will be performing next week. I’ve done it before for an audience so I know it works, and it’s a good piece, and yadda yadda. It’s a very different thing performing something that YOU WROTE about YOUR OWN LIFE as opposed to performing someone else’s words. It’s fascinating – the difference. I’m enough of an exhibitionist and I have enough confidence in my writing and storytelling ability that – it completely lights me UP to perform my own stuff. It’s more vulnerable – of course – because if someone doesn’t like the piece, I would take it MUCH more personally than if I was in some shitty play and someone didn’t like the script – hey, man, it’s not MY fault … but with 74 Facts it’s just me and my words. If you don’t like it, you’re kinda saying, “Uhm – I don’t like you.” hahaha That’s how personal it is. But I LOVE that kind of pressure – The vulnerability is a turn-on, actually (and I don’t mean tears – or sensitivity – I just mean: awareness, intense awareness). It’s a lot of fun.

But I’ve noticed – in this last rehearsal period with myself – that it’s a little bit … more challenging to ‘get into’ it than it has been in the past. I have to do a preparation for it – just like I would for any other play – to get myself into the proper mood. It’s not a huge deal, and I don’t have to turn myself inside out emotionally – it’s not THAT hard – but it’s definitely different from the other times I have performed this piece before. I used to be able to slip into the mind-set and mood of that piece at ANY minute of ANY day – mainly because I LIVED there. (If you’ve read the piece, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And man – my friends sure as hell know what I’m talking about. They were sick of hearing about the guy.) But the miracle has happened – I mean, I literally thought it would never happen. Never. I had lived with this sort of low-level sadness for, uhm, years. That’s how important and essential he was to me. But … but … it’s not that it’s GONE – I saw him this past summer and that … connection remains – but that other stuff, the … living with regrets, and the sadness, etc., is not there for me anymore. I can REMEMBER it – and that’s part of what acting is all about – tapping into emotions that you may not be feeling in that very moment in your real life but that are appropriate for the scene. I can be having a great day, a happy day, and then go do my play that night and cry and rage and all that stuff – and then go home and have a good night’s sleep. Because I know what it means to be in a rage – I have to tap into that for the show. Whatever. It’s just weird to have to do this for a piece that I WROTE. I need to remember my way back into what it felt like for me. This is not only a cool acting challenge – but it’s also a revelation to me. Of how far I have really come. Of how much work I have done to close that thing up, to heal, to accept. I have done a HELL of a lot of work … and I am only realizing now that it has paid off. It took me a couple of rehearsals with myself to realize the problem (like I’ve said before: I am always the last one to know when something is actually going ON with me – hahaha) – I was like: “Why isn’t this flowing like it used to? Why can’t I just stand up and DO it?” Then the realization: “Ohhh. Cause I guess I don’t really feel this way anymore.”

If you know me, and if you know my struggle to get over this guy – you’ll know that this is nothing short of a bloody miracle!

I’m excited to do the show next week to see what NEW form it takes – Because here’s the deal – I’m proud of a lot of my writing – there are a couple of pieces I’ve written (one which is going to be published in The Sewanee Review at SOME point this year – at last!!) where I look at it and think: Okay. I just expressed that perfectly. I am done. That piece is done. It did what I meant it to do. There’s only a couple of pieces I’ve written that I feel that way about – I can barely hold myself back from going back and editing old BLOG POSTS for God’s sake, because I always see my writing as a work in progress – But sometimes, just sometimes – I write something that comes out exactly as it existed in my dream-space in my head. (oh, and the piece about waiting in line in Central Park is another one where it came out pretty much exactly as I wanted it to come out – I did very little editing with that piece, and I am still able to read it now, 5 years after writing it, and not be overcome with the desire to edit it to death – I can just sit down and read it).

The 74 Facts piece is definitely, in my opinion, one of those pieces. I NEVER feel like tampering with it – the only thing I want to tamper is the facts themselves. Hmmm, should I take out THAT fact and put in another one? Etc. But in terms of its expression, and my objective in writing the piece – it came out just as I wanted it to.

So I have faith in the PIECE itself. Not just as an expression of where I was at at a certain moment in time … but as an expression of something universal. The responses I have gotten to the piece from total strangers – people who do not know me, who do not know “him” – have had deep and powerful responses to that thing. That tells me that I have expressed something that goes beyond just a story from my own life. Other people can relate to it, they can project onto it, they can have their own response – that’s the most fun of this for me. I mean, that’s the fun thing about acting – when audience members have some huge response to what you did, it’s PERSONAL for them – that’s great – but it’s even better when it’s because of something that came out of your OWN HEAD.

I am excited to see how it will go – knowing now that I myself have moved on past the intense first-person experience of it – into a more universal space. I can certainly, like I said, remember my way into that mind-set very easily. That’s not a problem.

It still has the power to amaze me. That I’m past it. What??? When did THAT happen? It happened gradually and over a long space of time. It took work. On my part and on his part. And so here we are. Old war buddies. With no relics, no evidence, except for his words and mine.