Moonlighting as a princess

I've been saying for a while now that I will blog about this whole experience. Took me a while, to see if the compulsion to talk about it endured, and it has. Here's the backstory of the thing itself - A was doing a local production of The Lion In Winter. I hadn't auditioned - I'm too young for Eleanor, and too old and not right for the French Princess. Fate decided to get in there and be weird, I guess - the original actress playing the princess had a fall, hit her head, and, while she's thankfully fine now, and wasn't able to do the show, and this was two weeks before they opened. I said something like, "I'm sure I'm too old and inappropriate for an ingenue, but jumping into a show 2 weeks out doesn't scare me - I went to French Woods, after all, the home of the microwave musical." So A called his director, who presumably stalked my Facebook a bit (I know I would have done), and had me come in to meet the cast and read. I met the lovely man playing Henry (who really looks more like Mr Wednesday than anyone should be allowed to do), we talked a bit, read a bit, and the director offered me the role right there.

This was right before we broke for Memorial Day, and A helped me by spending the weekend running lines with me. Not going to lie, I was a bit terrified going in - I haven't done legitimate theatre in over a decade. And I had seen photos of the stunningly beautiful girl whom I was replacing, and that was intimidating.  Once I got in there, though, it was all okay - the rest of the cast, particularly Henry, my primary scene partner, were wonderful and embracing of me, running lines whenever I needed, and they were all immensely talented, so I had lots to work with.

I had never played a role like Alais Capet, and I don't imagine I will do again - she's a princess, 23 years old and beautiful. Clever, but very sweet. Not my usual Rizzo, you know? By a happy coincidence, the costumes they had gotten for the original girl fit me perfectly. It may not seem like a big deal, bit it is. No one, in my life, has ever seen me that way. I'm always the brassy dame, the character role who is funny or sexy - never "pretty". This was an entirely different world, in which defaulting to the dick joke was in no way my job. And since no one apart from A knew me, there weren't any preconceived notions of type to overcome. Seriously - I wasn't comfortable trying to be the pretty girl at my own WEDDING. It felt like a joke, like I shouldn't want to look like a fairy princess on that day, and I wouldn't be able to, no matter how great the dress was (and it was).

I had been struggling for the past while with gender identity and what it meant, and had finally landed on "genderqueer female" as a thing that worked for me, but with this - I HAD to use all those buried "girl" aspects of myself, that I usually repress (and indeed, had learned to exist without) because I have never felt entitled to them. But for this, they were what was required, and I would be lying if I didn't say I gloried in them. Every time our brilliant director D would tell me NOT to pitch my voice up, I wanted to hug her. I don't normally get Soprano Envy (except with Music Man, oddly enough - but I think that's only because I have always wanted to sing "Lida Rose" with a barbershop quartet), but the world of musical theatre does largely conform to vocal type, and I can fake mezzo if I have to, but that's as high as it goes, so that limits me to the types of characters they normally write for altos. Disney does a number on your head when you are a chubby, brown-haired alto growing up. The gift of beauty? Naturally blonde hair. The gift of song? Coloratura soprano. Fuck you, Disney. Okay, girls like me can't be princesses. So I was scared going in, that I would seem laughable. Now, let's be real - 2 weeks out, I am sure they were happy for a warm body who could say the lines in the right order. But I got in there (off book in 5 days), and I think showed them I actually had some game too.

I don't know if I'll ever get this kind of thing again. Even the parts where I had no lines, and was on stage with the rest of them sometimes being talked about - I loved inhabiting her. Just standing there, in it, listening to every word everyone else said, feeling what she would feel about it. And pretty? I got to wear my great blonde wig, they gown they had gotten was princess-y and flattering, and she knew she was pretty, so I knew it too. I loved being madly in love with Henry for those few hours a night. One other great thing I got to take away from this was proof that, contrary to pretty much all my previous experiences, there is actually some really good local theatre out there (I'm sure there always was - I just hadn't experienced any of it personally), and bet your ass I will stalk the director and anyone else connected to this production, and audition for them in future - and I won't talk or type myself out of it right off the bat the way I normally do. I think this has made me braver than I used to be (or had been for a long time). And while I don't kid myself that my performance was perfect or extraordinary, or that the girl who was cast in the first place wouldn't have simply been better, I feel proud of the work and what I was able to bring to the team.

On The Importance of Forward Motion

Cat Pedini, 3o
A Just Because POA

First, it is important that you imagine a river. Next, you need to think about other bodies of water, and why the river is different. The reason is forward motion. A river is not only always moving, it is always moving in one direction. Even when the twists and turns of the river take it this way or that, the one direction in which it is always moving is Forward. A salmon may fight the flow to swim upstream, but nothing can make the river itself reverse direction and run backwards. You are in the river, and you are the river. It is as macrocosmic or as microcosmic as you want to think about, and also both at once. Water in forward motion. It is your life, your body, and your world. The journey of humans, individuals or as a species, has liquid in its origins; the amniotic fluid to nourish a foetus which will evolve into a human body made up of mostly water, or the first fish with legs to crawl from the primordial ooze to also evolve into a human body made up of mostly water. It is forward flow, all of it. So first, you must picture the river. Think of the river now as life. Remember, you are the river and you want to move forward. It is what rivers do. You may not know the topography of the river or where it will lead you. You also probably don’t know where or when the river will turn to rapids, bottom out into a tide pool which is almost still when you look at it, or where a family of beavers might have decided to build a dam to block the flow. You never know when a scorching sun will cause the river to go dry, or a surplus of rains cause it to overflow. It is affected by its contents, inhabitants, the silt churned up from the bottom, or the areas so clear you can see everything that lies beneath. Different areas of the river might resemble other ones, but never will it stay the same. It is linear. It moves forward because that is its nature, and it never looks back. You are the river. Why would you try to stop your forward motion? So much time is wasted on regrets, on clinging to the past or even the present, to stagnate in the tide pool, or to avoid the rapids. This is unnatural for a river and it is unnatural for you. However, we must be able to assert some control over the river that we are, or we will be buffeted to death by the rocks within. When we encounter rapids or a beaver dam or some other thing which causes our river to get out of control or to stop, what needs to be remembered is this – you are the river and in the river and have been since the beginning of time, and you can reconnect with it if you try. There are few rituals which fail to include a liquid of some kind. Tea, wine, blood; these are all symbolic of the original liquid which is water, and the original water which is life. Connect with the liquid and remember the river and you will be there; it is ingrained within you. Sometimes the thing that stops the river is bigger than a beaver dam. While it is true that, given enough time, eventually the largest man-made structures will weather away and allow flow again, sometimes it is necessary to take some metaphorical dynamite to the metaphorical Hoover Dam and create a flood so that progress can resume. Back since Noah planted his vineyard and before, seekers of enlightenment have sought and sometimes found ways to help themselves reconnect to the river and restore motion. So often we want to hold on to what is and fear the often painful phenomenon that change is, that we make ourselves forget we are the river and we want to go forward. We must then make ourselves die, symbolically, so that we may be reborn in yet another act of forward motion, and allow ourselves to leave the past behind and continue our forward flow. The reason so many people indulge in drug use or excessive alcohol, or even something as innocuous as escape sleeping, whether they realize it or not, is an attempt to tap that part of themselves which remembers the river their conscious selves have temporarily forgotten. There again must come the reminder that you must control your journey as much as you are able, and not let it drown you. There is no past. There are memories, but there are no regrets. A tide pool is a beautiful place to catch your breath and admire the scenery, but eventually the forward motion must resume. Leave the backwards travel to the salmon, who will mostly be eaten by bears anyway. You are the river. Flow.