Teen me had a passing interest in Escher

Did you ever wish you could go back in time and give a message to your younger self?  And did you maybe wish that other people could benefit from hearing that message?  That’s the philosophy behind Dear Teen Me, a blog created by my webly friend Emily Krisin Morse and others.  I recently had my turn talking to my teen self, and here’s what I had to say.  I’m glad I finally got it off my chest.

There are other great entries here, many by friends of mine, like this one and this one.   You could really spend an afternoon thinking about different peoples’ experiences then and now.  In fact, maybe this will be the afternoon!

Especially the one on the right

Today, anyway.

You know that writer whose blog is read and referenced far and wide?  The one run by a faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts (the finest grad school in all the land) where you can’t believe she has time to learn about and connect with so many professionals because she also is hugely prolific as a writer and has many devoted advisees?  I’m talking about Cynthia Leitich Smith and her blog, Cynsations (obviously.)  And I am honored to say that I am today’s New Voice–the new writer she interviews for her blog.

That's Cyn. She's a hoot.

Some come on down to Cynsations, read what I have to say about outlining vs. plunging into the story, how teaching has influenced my writing, and writerly self-promotion.  And then stick around and click through to read some other new voices!

(On a side note, the playwriting program I teach for is called New Voices.  We’re just voicey all over the place here!)

And on a p.s. note: On Monday, I talked to 250 kids at Scribner Middle School in Indiana!  They were awesome.  The auditorium was huge and I walked with my hand-held mike up the aisles, just like Oprah.  Photos of that to come.

I hazily remember that back when I used to work full-time, I used to do things like go into other peoples’ offices or classrooms to jabber when I needed a break.  I even remember a Catchy Jingles War with my boss Elizabeth, in which we’d wait until the other one stepped away from her desk, call each other up, and sing or whistle an annoyingly catchy tune–”I’d rather buy at PC [that's PC Richards!" or "Can-can, Shop-Rite has the can cans!"  There was also the time that Angie and I plotted a hella bad April Fool's Day prank that I couldn't laugh about for a long time.  But it's a good thing I have these memories, because when I do things like watch clips from the Fame movie during writing breaks, I don't feel like such a lout.

I had a really good reason for watching Fame.  I needed a good poem quote about swimming for the big moment when Luke takes the plunge, and I found one from Walt Whitman--

Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count.

This is so apropos you don't even know it.  But then I thought, "Oh, 'I sing the body electric'--just like that song from Fame!  I need to watch that.  And do you:

For those of you tragically not in the know, Fame was a masterpiece of 80s cinema.  It followed the lives of several students at the High School for the Performing Arts in NYC  and starred such luminaries as Irene Cara, the guy who played Rocket Romano on ‘er,’ a really cute cellist, and Debbie Allen. (“You’re going to work!  You’re going to sweat!”)  It got turned into a TV show that was on too late for me to watch (actually, the movie was too racy for me when it came out, too; it was only in later years that I rented it)–but everybody knew the songs (I think we sang them at day camp), and

everybody wanted to go to The Fame School.  It’s probably a good thing I didn’t get to watch the movie when I was little, or there’d have been much I was freaked out about, but the singing and dancing were great!

And “I sing the body electric” is such a great number, too.  I hope that one day WordPress will allow inset commentary a la Mystery Science Theatre, because there’s so much I need to say about this one.  F’rinstance:

-did someone tell everybody except the black kids who get the falsetto duet not to have any expression when they sing, a la 90% of high school students?  These guys look totally divorced from the awesome emotional content of their song.  It’s hilariously realistic.

-Mr. Shorofsky!  The coolest non-crusty teacher ever!  I wonder what happened to him?

-The dancing during the rocking-out portion–is that considered ballet?  It’s kind of just people picking each other up, albeit in really cool combos.  I eagerly await a balletomane’s opinion.

-Look at that thin, wide camera!  I’d totally forgotten about those!

-The guy they focus on during the line, “I toast to my own reunion–my own reunion” looks like the one who plays Big Love on Season 4 of House!  I’m sure he was in diapers when this came out, so maybe it was his Papa?

Oh, and.  I just found the TV theme song so I could share that with you, too, and I think some serious Fame watching is going to need to commence.  (I wonder if Wild and Woolly Video carries it?)  I haven’t seen it in years, but I have no doubt that it beats the dance-belt off of Glee, which, I’m sorry, is the most heartbreaking misuse of  story ever.  And hello, Janet Jackson and Michael Cerveris are in this?  Why didn’t anybody tell me?

One final note: watching  the credits of multi-racial kids, all struggling to rock out and fit in actually reminds me of my work in progress!  I’m sure that in some episode, there’s some Fame equivalent to the aforementioned Luke, doing something similar to swimming with his shirt off.  Yes!  This was not a totally loutish digression after all.

Remember my name–Fame!

[note: this post was originally titled, "My first Friday Five!" but by the time I had reached 500 words, no Fives had yet appeared.  So it'll be the Saturday Five. Or maybe Sunday.  We'll see.]

No way!  I am participating in a meme–Friday Five! 

When an esteemed grad school classmate asked, “Jess, what is a meme?” I was not very well prepared to answer.  (“In literature, it’s like a theme, although I don’t know why they don’t just call it a theme.  But on the web, a ‘meme’ is like a thing you participate in–kind of like a theme.  Um, yeah.”)  So maybe I’ll just teach by example and say that Friday Five is a meme in which bloggers note on Fridays the top five things they’re grateful for that week.  (At least, I think that’s what they are. Quick, nobody disabuse me before I write this next post.)

Before I go ahead with my list (I know, you’re just dying of anticipation; I am, too, to see whether I have five or actually ten), I wanted to note that I’ve been thinking lately about how if all you knew about me was from the web, you’d probably think I did nothing but read, write, occasionally give readings, and watch Mad Men.  Not that I don’t spend a ton of time on these things, but there is so much of my life that doesn’t even enter in here because it seems like so much is verboten on the web, and with good reason.  I don’t want to jeopardize anything at any of my freelance jobs, and I don’t want friends to feel like they have to watch themselves around me because they might be quoted on here.  I also don’t want friends to feel left out if I write about other friends!  With all these things I don’t want to discuss, it leaves precious little that I can include.

And this is sad to me.  Because I really wish I could have written about the  afternoon a few weeks ago when I ended up hanging out with some people who had previously intimidated me and we had such a rockingly hilarious time that I’m still thinking about some of our jokes and cracking up.  Or the way a recent interaction with a previously prickly person turned out to be really terrific.  Because what if these women read this and thought, “Hey, why do you say I’m intimidating?” or “Well, I never knew you found me so annoying before!”  Argh argh argh.  I mean, it’s a good thing I write fiction, so I can get out some of these ya-yas, but when I’m supposed to have a public blog persona and then feel like I can’t write about anything that’s actually emotionally important to me, I think I end up sounding like a total hermit.

Hm. 437 words and still no Friday Five.  I think I’ll save them for tomorrow.  But at least now you may think I have some kind of social life.  But do any of you bloggers either worry about the impact of what you post, or fear that you seem like you have no life?

Does everyone learn that quotation in high school?  Or college, maybe, as I did from Waterland, about stepping in the same river twice?  It was Heraclitus, and I’m sure his observations were more metaphysical than the context in which i learned them, but it’s basically another way of saying, You can’t go home again.  Any time you step in a river, it’s a different river than the last time you stepped there.

I’ve had a couple of fun recent river steppings with another on the horizon.  This past weekend, my partner and I went up to the B&B where we got married last year.  It was so wonderful–the smell of the breakfast nook!  The main building lit with fairy lights!  the falls, which we finally got to hike to–but there was also a sense of what had passed.  Walking from our little cottage up to the barn where we got married, my insides twisted a little that I couldn’t see the rest of our guests, hiking up their dresses in the mud, on the way up to the ceremony.  My whole life, I will wish that I could recapture the Saturday morning I walked into the breakfast nook and knew and loved every single person in there.  I even missed the unbelievable sloven that A. and I had accrued from a few days of staying in the lodge–half-drafted cards and wilting flowers, cake with melted frosting, tissue paper and wrappings…that, too, was one of my favorite images from our wedding.

Now I’m about to step into a different kind of river: a reunion.  Vermont College, the best grad school in all the land, has a mini-residency for its graduates, which I think is very smart–keeps us involved and feeds our minds.  Lest you think it’s all a big fest of NECI cookies (sorry, joke for insiders), the mini-rez features master classes by Jacqueline Woodson and talks on fantasy by superstars no less than Gregory Maguire and Holly Black!  I am not very knowledgeable in the world of fantasy writing, though I do like to read in that genre, and I can’t wait to see what I learn by going outside of my usual realm of knowledge.

But I’m also nervous.  If I live my live occasionally nostalgic for that Saturday morning last summer, I also live it in deep regret that I did not preserve for posterity a scrap of paper I found at my little sister’s bedside before she went off to summer camp for the first time.  In her uneven third-grade handwriting,  it said, “What will it be like?  Will it be fun?”

I can’t even tell you how many times those words have come to mind as I contemplated any of the big occasions life has set before me, and, I must admit, the extremely minor ones as well.  I’m pretty sure the weekend will be fun, but what will it be like, to have my position as an actual student displaced, with others running the roost?  Will the faculty remember me?  Care?  (Okay, I have pretty much no doubt that they’ll remember me, since it’s a small program, but still.)  What will it be like to talk with my former classmates about the real-world events in our lives, instead of the business of grad school that takes over your life when you are there?  I am grateful for the chance to step in the river again; not everyone can find time and money to go to the mini-rez, and not every program is thoughtful enough to provide alums with a river path.  But still: What will it be like?  Will it be fun?

I bought some Chacos this year for my honeymoon–excellent water shoes, better than Tevas, so comfortable.  With luck, I will have my metaphorical Chacos on, too.

Riverbound!