On Muses and Whatnot

I took a class about a year ago at the Loft in Minneapolis. It was a four week class called The Adventurous Storyteller and out of it came the seeds for a potential novel (optimistically) or at least a short story. There were scenes created that I fell in love with and have carried with me ever since, hoping to find an actual plot in which to weave them together into something profound and wonderful. I think it may have happened. The show that I am currently involved in has done, and continues to do, a bit of a number on my emotions. As exhausting as it is, in the course of the ride, I think I may have finally picked up my Muse and found the direction in which to travel.

The play deals with various people in various stages of life. My character is minor, and in neither her youth, nor her golden years, and is frankly a little dumb and probably doesn't think much about what season of life she is in. I, however, as in ME, Jessica, do think about my current season of life...and I don't particularly know what to make of it. I am no longer especially young and ideological, nor am I old and resigned to my fate such as it is. Some would say, I suppose, that I am in the prime of my life, but I feel so uncertain about what that means. I remember being struck at 19 by the line in The Glass Menagerie, where Tom says, "I am tired of the movies and am about to move." It struck me then as profound, and today it strikes me as utterly crucial. As though there isn't any more time to think about moving - there is only time to move or to not move. I have been not moving for entirely long enough.

A pastor who I enjoy listening to once talked about how people often sit around waiting for God to change them, or to change their lives and their circumstances. They just wait and wait, doing nothing, not recognizing how improbable it is that God is actually going to saunter into their living rooms, turn off the TV for them and tell them to get off their butts and do something. We get to make choices, we don't have to wait to be shoved before we move. We also might have to work a little bit.

I was talking last week with a castmate about the beauty of the immediacy of theater. I love knowing that once you're in, you're in. When I am part of a show, no matter how small a part, I feel alive...I feel like life is happening and it's happening now. It isn't waiting for me to show up or to get my crap together...it is living and breathing with or without me and I love when I get to be a part of it's breath. But I do so want to learn how to live in real life too...how to take that immediacy - that urgency - and turn it into something that is about more than just me.

This has been a rather random rambling...nowhere near as cohesive as I'd hoped it would be...but I'm just going to publish it anyway. Thanks for reading.