OK, so these Choate kids and I have been at close quarters now for nearly a month (see prev. post). I know their names. They know mine. They grace me with direct eye contact. In class we’re pretty much a well-oiled thespian machine (…does that sound dirty? or have I regressed?). In homage to Kubler-Ross, I think I’ve identified the stages of my assimilation– in case you, like me, love the comfort of flattening out a many-faceted experience into numbered bullet points. I’ll try to note the associated phases of our play’s development as well.
1. Curious ignorance (coinciding with the play’s research phase). What are these tween things? How do they amble and tick? Are they friends or foes? Should I fight or flight? I could see in the animal eyes of my charges that they were in the same, scent-sniffing place. Which led to:
2. Overidentification (coinciding with the character-finding, discovering-the-story phase). For about a week, we were all miraculously the same age. Meaning I suddenly was 13. As I hunkered down in their trenches with my notebook, grasping at the violently protected, elusive furry animals known as their Thoughts and Feelings, I found myself “meeting them where they are” with a vengeance. I was childishly homesick. Even though as a visiting prof I haven’t had an official “home” for a year and a half. While a couple of my students nightly tucked themselves into dark corners of the dorm and hissed their escapist pleas to their parents, I would shut the door of my room and obsessively stand in front of my dorm mirror checking out the size of my butt, while bitching for hours on the phone with my friends about not knowing anybody, the schedule, the berg the school’s in. (Of course Choate’s a beautiful campus, in a town much like Kenyon’s Gambier.) OK, but this stage eventually passed, into the phase I am least proud of:
3. Judgment (coinciding with the play’s rewriting phase). I hate this one, but it’s a periodic virus endemic to teaching. This is the phase where we teachers formed an exhausted, wise-ass clump in the parking lot, making coffee-scented cracks about this kid’s tendency to ask sixty questions a class, that kid’s nascent work ethic, and that other kid’s painfully obvious crush on one of us. OK, it’s fun. And it bonds. An us needs a them and all that. But when I get aware I’m in this phase, I try to move out of it quick. God knows I was (am?) all of those kids at some point.
Which brings us to now, the last week of the conservatory…the phase coinciding with the full-draft, ready-for-performance, “people,-we-have-a-show” phase.
I don’t know how to capture this one, probably because we’re all still in it. Tender around the edges and peppered with spasms of white-hot irritation, this phase is a rough blend of pride, familiarity, warmth, mockery, and respect for each others’ lasting mysteries. It’s strongly familial. Which is impossible in four weeks with strangers, right? Yet like parents or brothers or sisters, we spend every day in each other’s faces, standing behind each other, shoving each other, laughing at the failed jokes of the fragile ones, slowly sanding down the cruel ones, always yelling but always listening for the small voice in trouble at the back of the line.
So this “us” forms, given time; a unified movement is made from utterly foreign to almost consanguine. It’s the same thing that happens in every cast I’ve ever been part of or witnessed at work. It’s the same thing that happens when I write or read something new. This quiet shift from “I don’t know you” to, “Ah, I know you. I know your name.” It feels impossible near the beginning. But it seems to happens every time.