The Wyrd Sisters

I used to spend a lot of energy worrying about birthdays. It wasn’t the getting older part that caused so much anxiety; it was the idea that there is some sort of status established in how you celebrate your birthday…

It’s spring in Las Vegas and I’m six years old. The elementary school I go to is much larger than Robert E. Lee in Oklahoma (total head count around 100) where I’d attended kindergarten and first grade. I’m still kind of the new kid, but worse than that I’m shy, I like to get good grades, and I’m a bit serious. Nonetheless, I’ve made a few friends and I’m not a social pariah like the kid who never bathes or little Ms. Know-It-All. So there’s a good chance I’ll have a decent turn-out at the big birthday bash my mom is helping me plan.

We spend weeks deciding on the decorations, games we can play, what kind of cake we’ll have (a homemade chocolate Mrs. Packman). I write invitations for all of my classmates and a few people who live on my block and eagerly hand them out a week before the big day. I get polite looks from the boys and girls in my class as they take my invitations and stuff them into empty lunch boxes or cluttered backpacks. And I wait.

The day arrives (I’m seven years old!) and I get into my prettiest dress; I spend the morning getting my braids just so and helping mom with the decorations. My aunt Vicki and Uncle Alan arrive early and they sit and talk with my dad in the backyard, while I plead with my older brother to please not embarrass me today (he’s in his karate phase and I have become his favorite punching bag). The cake’s ready, the games are all set, and the balloons are blown up. All we need are the guests.

Right on time arrives my best friend, Mandy. She’s a year older than me and lives a few houses down, and we have become great pals since I moved in. I’m excited by this start and my mom suggests we play a game while we wait for the others to arrive. We start in with a horserace in the backyard. Mom has borrowed a set of wooden horses from one of Dad’s friends which you race by rolling dice and moving the horses forward in position accordingly. Six-year-old Summer thought this was a brilliant idea for a party game and seven-year-old Summer is having a great time winning the first race.

I cheer wildly when I push through the finish line and quickly we set up another game. Two, three, or four more rounds later and I look up and realize that the party has started and no other guests have arrived. In fact almost an hour has passed and the horse race is getting a little tired and it is slowly beginning to dawn on me that this is all the party I’m going to have. I see Mandy struggling to have fun with a room full of “old people,” my aunt and uncle sharing a surreptitious, pitying glance, and my mom smiling and working to keep the mood festive, perhaps even oblivious to the devastation that is slowly creeping into me.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the afternoon. I’m sure we had cake and opened presents and even had some laughs, but all I can see when I look back on that day is a crushed little girl who believed she had no friends and the embarrassment of having it so openly advertised to the people she loved.

I really did age a year in that one day. I lost the innocence of a girl who just wanted to have fun at a party and gained the poisonous self-doubt of a girl who wanted to be popular. I’ve never had a birthday since without thinking of that day, usually with embarrassment, but more recently with a sense of amusement at how I let that one day affect so much of my life.

Last night I had a quiet dinner with Thom at No. 9 Park. We spent four hours eating one of the most decadent meals I’ve ever had and sharing some lovely, intimate conversation. I’ve had other quiet birthdays in the past, usually because I was afraid to repeat the scarring experience of my youth, but not last night. It was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had because I was doing exactly what I wanted with the man that I love—and because there was no seven year old little girl looking over my shoulder.

Oh, and here’s me and Nelse around that age:

So I’ve officially entered the world of "action flicks."  I had such a great time Friday night working on an Emerson student film, being a "street thug" and getting my ass kicked across the street.  I can’t tell you how much I want to be a true action hero–I’m serious, I want nothing more than to play a hard-core, take-no-bullshit, kick-ass chick like Buffy, Sarah Connor, or Ripley.

I don’t know how long this obsession has been with me; at least as long as I’ve been doing stage fighting (my junior year of college).  I love the symbol of a woman who is physically in charge, a woman who doesn’t need a man to protect her, a woman who is a threat to a patriarchal world.  The violence is so incongruous with everything I stand for, but I can’t help it–I’m exhilarated by it.  I love horror movies, thrillers, action flicks.  Those kinds of movies give me what every other kind of movie does: it makes me feel.  It doesn’t matter if it’s "Garden State" or "Resident Evil," empathy or terror, I love to feel.

Anyway, I had a fun little part as a person attacking a poor helpless woman in the middle of a gloomy park at night.  In swoops the hero who knocks me around, along with my two companions, and disappears into the night.  Lots of bruises as souvenirs today…

I don’t think it’s a bad start to what promises to be a long and industrious career as a female superhero.

My cold seems to be on the way out.  It’s been a miserable couple of days, and not just because I’ve been sick.  I’ve also holding my breath about this part in Hal Harry Henry.  The first week of rehearsals happens to overlap a family reunion I’ve had planned for over a year.  It’s pretty important to the director that everyone in the cast be at the first three rehearsals (my fog-addled brain recalls the word "mandatory") and that’s just impossible for me.  I couldn’t believe I might have to give up this fantastic role for logistical reasons, and I was holding my breath waiting to hear back from him.  Finally, he got back to me last night and said that they’d still love to have me and we’ll work something out with the dates. 

This has been maybe the weirdest casting processes I’ve gone through.  First I’m ecstatic because I finally have another show to work on. Then I realize that there’s this huge scheduling conflict and it’s likely I’m not going to be able to do both the show and the reunion.  I weigh my decisions and let the director know I won’t sacrifice my family for this show, and I begin to accept that decision and mourn the loss of something great.  Then I get word that I might be able to do both, but he’s got to think it over for few days, so now I’m stuck in limbo.  I’ve already accepted the fact that I can’t do the show, but this news changes that.  Even so, I can’t fully celebrate yet, because I’m hanging onto a "maybe."  And the whole time I’m so heavily doped up that I can’t see straight, let alone maneuver through this emotional minefield.

So when he gets back to me, and I know I have the part and I can go to the reunion, I should feel great, right?  But I just feel exhausted.

Some nice news is that I’m going to be playing a thug in a student film.  Yeah!   I get to beat people up!  I think it’s the first time I’ve been cast specifically for my fighting skills.  I’m particularly happy there’s been no angst around this casting process.  I’ve had enough of that for a while.

I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like spending half the night coughing up mucus, breathing through one nostril, and trying to swallow down what feels like a slug squirming around the back of your throat.  After about 6 hours of waking up from one coughing fit to the next, the pleading calls of my fatcat, Edgar, finally drug me to my feet and down to the kitchen to feed his aching belly.  That accomplished, I returned to the warm spot next to hubby Thom and proceeded to moan my discomfort until he lovingly went to call my doctor. 

Wouldn’t you know it?  Doctors don’t work on Saturday.

One more phone call to Karen, the sweet-voiced nurse on the insurance company hotline, and I’m surrounded by crumpled kleenex, warm tea, humidifier, books, cough drops, and feeling the fuzzy effects of robotussin and tylenol sinus pumping through my system.  At least I know I don’t have SARS.

I guess any plans I had today are shot, so I think I’ll be spending my morning with Wil Wheaton and Connor Oberst, the birthday presents from my parents that I’ve justified opening early with the flimsy rationalization that I’m sick, Goddamnit!

I don’t handle sickness very well.  In fact, you could say I’m a big baby about it.  Times like these I want nothing more than to snuggle up in a warm blanket in front of the tv, the soft hum of The Breakfast Club or Amelie whispering to me while my mommy attends to my every need.  Instead, I find myself having to be an "adult" about the whole thing, doing most of the pampering on my own.  Thom has been wonderful, making the trip to the local drugstore to load me up on meds, trudging down to the storage room and setting up my humidifyer, and even slipping me a chocolate to take the bitter medicine taste out of my mouth, but I don’t want to be an imposition on him and I already feel like he’s done too much.

An now, since the meds are really kicking in and my world is starting to feel like a Hunter S. Thompson book, I’m going to close on this and return to my bed.

P.S. Here’s Edgar:

So I’m finally ending a three-month dry spell! I got word from Jake at Shakespeare East yesterday that they’d like me to join their show, a compilation of 8 plays by the bard to go up this summer. It’s not likely to start rehearsing for a few months, so I’ll have to keep looking for other projects. It just feels good to be wanted for something again.

Thom and I were talking about the professions we’ve chosen and that fact that both of us are always in the process of finding new work. It’s taxing enough for one person in the relationship to go through, but with both of us on the receiving end of rejection more often than not, it almost funny. We have to laugh–it’s too depressing otherwise. And I love it. I love the variety, that every day has the potential to bring something new and exciting, that I can’t map out my future for the next month, let alone the next year. I think that would be hell to me: watching my future unfold before me, unalterable, inevitable, stale, stagnant death.

And on that lovely note, I’m going to start my day.

So here’s the obligatory "first post" post… How many of these online journal-type things have I started only to abandon after a few weeks?  I’ve been feeling a need to start doing some form of journaling again, so this seems like as good a spot as any.  Being somewhere between Gen X and the current generation of teens that seem to have been handed their first cell phones at birth, I don’t really know the point of a blog.  For now, consider this a relatively-uncensored forum for the crap in my head.   Likely it’ll just be me mumbling into the ether–which should be fun.