Fade to Black

I may or may not continue this saga. Today I know I will not. Maybe tomorrow I will. It's all fading so fast...that's an unfortunate fact about the nice things in life. They go away so quickly. I remember sitting next to Beauty one day watching scenes that we were not in being blocked and reblocked and lines being run and rerun. I leaned over to her and said, "It's so weird, but I don't remember this part of the theater at all." She looked at me oddly and said, "What part?" I motioned towards the rehearsal and said, "This...the rehearsal. I only remember performing." We laughed at how silly that was because 90% of a show is rehearsal.

It's true though...I remember the conversations in the dressing rooms and the parties after rehearsals and the cheering of the audience during the curtain calls, but the work surrounding it all is so forgotten. I remember the things I learned that had little to do with rehearsing, but everything to do with the overall experience.

I remember the when my "Mother" in The Glass Menagerie explained to me what she meant when she said that DeeDee and Tiffany* were "affected". I've never forgotten that word...I had never heard it before (in that context). She was describing two girls who put on airs of being far more grown-up and cosmopolitan than they actually were. And it helped me to understand them so much better. Up until that moment, these two girls hovered at the edge of my periphery as two glamorous strangers who held the all of the answers to the feminine mystique. In that moment, their sparkly auras were slightly dimmed, and I found that I was far more interested in having my Mother respect me than to have her lump me in with the "affected" girls. I wonder how I would remember them today if we had never had that conversation.

*names have been changed to protect the innocent