act­ing lessons

Well, obvi­ously first things first: it’s time to put away those pesky heavy skirts and cardies and col­lared shirts and tights and go for the sum­mer uni­form. Isn’t this just about the sweet­est face you’ve ever seen? The gar­den is bloom­ing and lovely. I’ll try to get a pic­ture of Avery with her straw boater hat as well, but she’s get­ting sick of being doc­u­mented every minute of her life. Can’t blame her.

When I came home from my first act­ing class yes­ter­day, Avery was in the gar­den with her new babysit­ter, Erin, Katie’s room­mate. They were prac­tic­ing their cart­wheels and it was a truly beau­ti­ful spring day, a real rar­ity. Today of course the sun has seen the error of its ways, decided we’ve had enough of its pres­ence, and is in hid­ing once more.

My class was a huge suc­cess. It’s at an open uni­ver­sity called The City Lit­er­ary Col­lege, but it’s called City Lit by every­one. No entrance require­ments, and very inex­pen­sive if you are a res­i­dent of Lon­don. I am con­sid­ered, how­ever, tran­sient, hav­ing just arrived, so I am pay­ing for­eign­ers’ fees, but even so it’s a bar­gain. It felt so odd wait­ing out­side a class­room where I wasn’t going to be in charge. I haven’t been in a class­room where I wasn’t teach­ing in 19 years, and I must say it was a plea­sure to be on the receiv­ing end rather than the giv­ing end, of knowl­edge. All of us stood around out­side the closed door, look­ing furtively at one another and feel­ing self con­scious. After all, it’s not like we were lin­ing up for trigonom­e­try, this was going to be act­ing class and weren’t we all sup­posed to be sort of per­form­ers, or at least would-be per­form­ers? After a few min­utes, a gor­geous young girl came up to our hud­dled group and sim­ply reached out to the class­room door han­dle and pushed it open. “Clever think­ing,” I said, and every­one laughed, break­ing the ice.

Hon­estly, out­side the pages of “Mur­der on the Ori­ent Express” I have never heard of a more diverse group of peo­ple. Thir­teen stu­dents in all, and let’s see, I was the old­est, but not by as much as would have been embar­rass­ing. Then there was Colin the Eng­lish pub owner, Mar­cus the Brazil­ian hair­styl­ist, K (yes, she explained it all very fully, just the ini­tial K), an aspir­ing rap singer, Vicky the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Indian cook­ery book writer, and pos­si­bly our most col­or­ful cohort, Julian the self-confessed for­mer crack­head and prison inmate, father of four chil­dren, await­ing his court date for some undis­closed crime and for some rea­son cool­ing his heels in the mean­time in our “Intro­duc­tion to Act­ing” class. Do you sup­pose his parole offi­cer thought it would be good ther­apy? Any­way, then there was Tim, a six-foot-eight lanky fel­low with dread­locks, and Marte, a French girl who looked like she had raided Jackie Kennedy’s closet. All in all, every nation­al­ity you can imag­ine was rep­re­sented. I am the only Amer­i­can, and there were just I think three Eng­lish peo­ple. Our teacher came in, breezy and ener­getic, intro­duced her­self with the eco­nom­i­cal com­ment, “I’m Pip,” and we were off. Our first activ­ity was to play a game of tag where when you got caught, you stopped, raised your arm in the air and shouted, “I’m it! I’m Kris­ten!” And every­one else pointed at you and shouted, “You’re it! You’re Kris­ten!” So humil­i­at­ing but funny, and a good way to remem­ber names. Then later in the game you could save your­self from get­ting tagged by hug­ging the per­son clos­est to you. Pretty funny.

Next Pip assigned seven of us to stand in a cir­cle fac­ing out, and paired us up each with another stu­dent, fac­ing us. Then we were to intro­duce our­selves and say one thing about our­selves. “I’m Kris­ten and I for­got my bracelet today.” “I’m Renee and I love JayZ but I hate Bey­once.” Then we sat in a cir­cle and Pip would say, “That’s Kris­ten,” and every­one would say the thing I had to said to each of them. I won­dered pri­vately if any­one had lied, and I wanted to ask, but thought it might sound really odd, so I held my tongue. Then Pip talked about the essen­tial qual­ity for good act­ing: learn­ing to lis­ten. It’s sur­pris­ingly hard. Maybe I’m just more self-centered than most peo­ple, but I do find that I often carry on con­ver­sa­tions in which I can feel myself just wait­ing to say the next thing. Am I lis­ten­ing to the other per­son, really lis­ten­ing? As in, per­fectly open to the con­ver­sa­tion going in a direc­tion other than the one I intended? Not always. She asked us how the infor­ma­tion exchange had felt. Colin said, “I found it kind of awk­ward. I mean, I would really rather have had to talk to a lot of peo­ple about myself, rather than focus on just one per­son.” I thought about how the sit­u­a­tion would be John’s worst night­mare: a room full of strangers that, one by one, he would have to talk to, about him­self. Pip talked about the use­ful­ness of act­ing skills in daily life, not just on stage or screen. “Aren’t we all equipped with more than one self, under­neath? Maybe we don’t always bring them all out, or even think con­sciously about what we’re doing, but isn’t there one self who con­fronts the land­lord with prob­lems with the heat, and another who goes for cof­fee with a friend, and another who solves prob­lems at work? Really think, from now on, about what self you’re bring­ing out for situations.”

I thought about how, since mov­ing, I have had to rein­vent myself, or my selves, in every sit­u­a­tion. It’s get­ting less so, but every day there is at least one new per­son, and many days many peo­ple, who I’ve never met before, but have to form a rela­tion­ship with. Maybe it’s Kimia’s mother at pickup for Angelica’s birth­day party, or the drama teacher at Avery’s school, or a new babysit­ter, or now this act­ing class. I do think it’s use­ful to ana­lyze who I trot out as “myself” in these sit­u­a­tions. Of course it’s height­ened in our cur­rent life when I’m hav­ing to replace all the famil­iar peo­ple in my life (pedi­a­tri­cian, deli owner, best friend, school head, librar­ian) with strangers in their spots, stand­ing in their roles, ready to play for me the part that was played by some­one else in the last “per­for­mance” of my life. No inter­ac­tion is truly, effort­lessly nat­ural yet. But even out­side the sort of extra­or­di­nary level of role-playing that goes on in life in a new place, I think some amount of it takes place all the time. I noticed it when I spoke on the phone with my beloved grand­mother last night. I hadn’t played the part of grand­daugh­ter in a really long time! I felt myself becom­ing that self grad­u­ally as we talked, but some essen­tial part of “Mamoo’s eldest grand­daugh­ter and mother of her first grand­child” came out before I was really con­scious of hav­ing to remem­ber my lines.

I think what I will dis­cover is that, as my dad always says, per­son­al­ity traits run on a spec­trum. Peo­ple have more or less of a given qual­ity by nature, and then life impresses even more or less of that qual­ity on them as time goes on. I think I am prob­a­bly more given to the role-playing feel­ing than most peo­ple, but I bet a true actor has a really hard time fig­ur­ing out what the “real” self con­sists of. It was very inter­est­ing to have Pip say that, and then say, “Right now I have brought out the self who teaches my classes,” totally strip­ping the class­room sit­u­a­tion of any fake sense of “nor­mal­ity,” or trans­parency. Of course she was play­ing the part of teacher, just as I used to adore doing in my own class­room. It’s not as if it’s fak­ing: but it’s very instruc­tive to strip away one’s daily sense that peo­ple are “real”, and acknowl­edge that it’s all an accre­tion of parts we play.

Or, of course, I could be a dis­as­so­ci­ated nut­case with a per­son­al­ity disorder.

So then we were sent off in three­somes to plan and act out a famil­iar story, with just about ten min­utes to get it together. I was with Vicky and Marte, and we decided to do “Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood.” It was funny to try to remem­ber the exact story, and how does it end? Does the wolf really eat BOTH the grand­mother and Lit­tle Red? We decided yes. Marte said she was really sleepy and would be happy to play the grand­mother who ulti­mately doesn’t do much besides get eaten. The plays seemed like silly lit­tle things, but Pip found real things to say about what we had done: had we really planned prop­erly where the audi­ence would be, and could they see all the action? Did we remem­ber to be con­sis­tent about what hap­pened to the fake teacup in our hands, and was the imag­i­nary door­way con­sis­tently in the same place through­out the play? Kather­ine, the super pretty girl who opened the class­room door for us, played Adam to Julian’s Eve in a “don’t eat the apple” sce­nario in which God and the ser­pent were played by a Turk­ish florist (I’m not mak­ing this up). But at the end, when they were meant to feel shame for the first time, Kather­ine for­got who she was and cov­ered her breasts!

I think the most cru­cial thing that Pip said was that the thrill of act­ing is in know­ing that the thoughts and expe­ri­ences of the audi­ence are in YOUR hands. That’s why, she said, most actors pre­fer stage to screen. There is a real-time, real-life effect you’re hav­ing on the peo­ple who have paid good money for you to play a part, and she described the incred­i­ble high of look­ing out into the audi­ence and see­ing every eye trained on you, and know­ing that your job is to do for them what they came for: play a part and change their lives, for the next two hours. “And pro­fes­sion­al­ism comes into it, too. You can’t change your mind halfway through the play and not fin­ish it, or not give it your all because you’re hun­gover or have a sick child at home. Any­more than a bus con­duc­tor can be hav­ing a bad day and decide that today, the Num­ber 137 bus will end at Oxford Cir­cus and not go on to Pic­cadilly. No, the bus jour­ney, and the the­atre jour­ney, must con­tinue until they are over, and that’s your job.”

It was an exhaust­ing three hours! Then I decided to walk home, and it’s a jolly long way from Covent Gar­den to May­fair, I can tell you. In high heels, no less. But I got to talk to John’s mom on the phone as I walked, and she’s such a good audi­ence that it went quickly.

Right now I have a straw­berry cake in the oven to take to Avery’s school cake sale (“not ‘bake sale,’ like in Amer­ica, it’s a ‘cake sale’ here, Mummy” she pointed out, the unspo­ken words “you dummy” hang­ing in the air like a con­ver­sa­tion bal­loon). There is also a hand-me-down uni­form sale, so per­haps I can pick up an extra cardie for her. I’m in denial that the down­side of the sum­mer uni­form is the neces­sity of yet more name-tape sewing. Avery’s play­ing at Anna’s house after school, and I am under great pres­sure to remem­ber to bring along her new Syl­van­ian ani­mal fam­ily as nece­sary items for “the game.” What, you’re not famil­iar with Syl­va­ni­ans? That must mean you don’t have a nine-year-old Eng­lish girl. They are these lit­tle flocked ani­mal fam­i­lies, with lit­tle out­fits and belong­ings and, if you’re super lucky with par­ents who aren’t ogres like we are, they have houses. With real lights that light up. It’s John’s night­mare, tiny lit­tle things all over the house with all their tiny lit­tle accou­trements. But they’re de rigeuer for the King’s Col­lege set, and I caved and took Avery to Ham­leys Toy Store in Regent Street this week and let her choose a fam­ily. The amount of Sylvanian-pertinent infor­ma­tion that flowed forth from Avery on the long, long walk home that day, Ham­leys bag clutched in her hot sticky lit­tle hands, was mind-boggling. Now you know what you can give her for her birth­day. If you want to earn John’s undy­ing enmity, that is.

Oh, and the wash­ing machine saga goes like this: the part has to be ordered from some medieval vil­lage in Ger­many, at which point it is appar­ently walked over land until it reaches the sea, and then migrat­ing fish swim it over to Eng­land where it under­goes some psy­cho­log­i­cal test­ing, even­tu­ally arriv­ing at my flat around the end of May. Or, alter­na­tively as they like to say here, I can get a new machine with a sim­i­larly tor­tured deliv­ery tale, around the mid­dle of May. I got this all from Bob the porter (who’s back! lame Iaian hav­ing got hired in the City, can’t imag­ine who would want him) as I strug­gled to free my straw­berry cake from its pan (of course I burned it while I wrote this post, so much for my future as a foodie). In the mean­time I have to say it was a real plea­sure to pack up all our dirty clothes into plas­tic bags and have some­one from Zoots Laun­dry Ser­vice come and col­lect it. It’s osten­si­bly to arrive all clean and dry and folded, this evening. “Did you sep­a­rate the whites from the col­ors?” Bob asked. “You’re such a trou­ble­maker,” I said. “Is a laun­dry ser­vice going to put blue jeans in with white shirts? Come on,” I scoffed. But now I can’t stop wor­ry­ing about it. Oh well, a cou­ple of hours sell­ing cakes to posh Eng­lish mums obsess­ing over their double-parked Range Rovers will dis­tract me, I’m sure.