thes­pi­ans, farewell

Oh, it’s sad! We’ve all had such fun togeth­er. To think ten weeks have gone by since I first ven­tured into the doors of CityLit. As hap­pens in an elec­tive course that does­n’t cost very much mon­ey, a good half of the peo­ple we start­ed out with did­n’t con­tin­ue, and mys­te­ri­ous­ly, Julian, our beloved rene­gade, did­n’t turn up for the final two weeks. Pip, the instruc­tor, was afraid she had been too crit­i­cal of him, but Kather­ine and I fig­ure he’s in jail.

So let’s see, there’s me with my scary orange hair (I got it fixed as near as it can be, by a Hair­dress­er To The Stars! he does Geri Hal­li­well’s hair, and Tara Palmer Tomp­kin­son’s hair! What, you’ve nev­er heard of them? bet­ter get a sub­scrip­tion to Hel­lo! mag­a­zine right away). Then in the back row are Pip, the teacher, Kather­ine the fash­ion mod­el, Col­in the pub own­er, Ken from Kent, Renee the 25-year-old moth­er of an 8‑year-old boy, then next to me is Mar­cus the Brazil­ian wait­er, Mag­a­lie the French phys­io­ther­a­pist, K the rap­per, and Natasha, the posh Gold­smiths girl turned bar­tender. An act­ing class is dif­fer­ent from oth­er class­es in that the sub­ject mat­ter is shar­ing your­self, in a way. There isn’t any­thing of sub­stance to learn, write down, get test­ed on. You just turn up every week pre­pared to do what­ev­er embar­rass­ing, fright­en­ing, per­son­al, goofy thing the teacher asks you to do. So every­one is very, very sup­port­ive of every­one else. The last day’s exer­cise was com­plete­ly hilar­i­ous. Three of us vol­un­teered at a time to get up in front of the rest, and Pip gave us each a slip of paper with a sen­tence on it. We were to mem­o­rize it and not share it with any­one. Then the rest of the class assigned us each an iden­ti­ty, a loca­tion, a sit­u­a­tion, and a secret that we all share. Then we were to start con­vers­ing as who we were, in the sit­u­a­tion, and some­how find a way to throw our sen­tence in with­out its being obvi­ous. Then, once Pip knew we had all worked in our sen­tences, she stopped us and the rest of the class had to guess what the sen­tences had been. Crazy!

I was in a group with Mag­a­lie and Natasha, and two of us were to be patients of the third who was a gyne­col­o­gist. “Who should be the doc­tor?” Pip asked. Col­in said, “Well, not Kris­ten, that’s too obvi­ous.” What?! So I was one of the patients and Mag­a­lie the oth­er, with Natasha play­ing the doc­tor. Our sit­u­a­tion was wait­ing in the “queue for the loo” at a rock con­cert. My sen­tence was “Stud­ies show there are at least ten pae­dophiles in every school.” And our shared secret was that we all had crush­es on the male recep­tion­ist at the doc­tor’s office. So off we went, ran­dom­ly begin­ning a con­ver­sa­tion, impro­vis­ing with what each oth­er was say­ing, and also try­ing des­per­ate­ly to work in the sen­tences. The fun­ny thing being, obvi­ous­ly, that while we’re all car­ry­ing on this con­ver­sa­tion and try­ing to sound plau­si­ble, each of has a hid­den agen­da to steer the con­tent in a way that the secret sen­tence won’t be detect­ed! Some­how I man­aged, because no one guessed, and in fact, our lit­tle three­some was entire­ly suc­cess­ful. Then we cast Col­in as the grumpy bar­rista behind the cof­fee bar in the school can­teen, and Ken as a Span­ish teacher at CityLit, and Renee as a stu­dent, and they were all hav­ing a smoke out­side the school build­ing. I can’t even remem­ber what their shared secret was, but we all guessed their sen­tences because the ran­dom­ness was com­plete­ly obvi­ous. “My uncle is a ter­ror­ist” is hard to plunk down in the mid­dle of any con­ver­sa­tion, and Ken had some ram­bling ques­tion about why all exits at the Oxford Cir­cus tube sta­tion lead to Argyll Street! Hilarious.

Then as the final exer­cise, we read through and act­ed out a scene from “Titus Andron­i­cus,” which the class had seen but I missed by being sick, damn. Even though I have act­ed in Shake­speare plays before, some­how I nev­er knew, or had for­got­ten, the notion of iambic pen­tame­ter. I nev­er real­ized that every Shake­speare­an line goes “da da, da da, da da, da da, da da,” in the rhythm of a heart­beat. Clever boy, that Will. And that when a line does­n’t do that, it’s for a spe­cif­ic dra­mat­ic rea­son. Renee had nev­er read or seen Shake­speare before and start­ed out com­plete­ly befud­dled, as I think you do when it’s new, but by the end she and every­one else had a good han­dle on the text. Most of them are going to car­ry on with anoth­er act­ing class, and Col­in in fact is tak­ing four cours­es at once in the autumn. I do think he’s good. When I got home, Kather­ine had emailed both Col­in and me, ask­ing if we’d like to get togeth­er this sum­mer for improv. How flat­ter­ing. The only rea­son to regret spend­ing the sum­mer at Red Gate Farm.

OK, speak­ing of text, I’ll close with an absolute­ly fab­u­lous poem writ­ten by Avery Cur­ran. Too bad there isn’t a QCPS Poet­ry Con­test. Prob­a­bly if I sug­gest­ed it, Mrs Davies would find a way.

Sto­ries

Come, my army
Of paper and pen.
Help me fight monsters.
Plus evil men.
Start my story,
End it too.
Stay and have tea!
For I love you!
Of course I do!
We are great friends
We’ll enter a world
Of magic.
Stories.

Avery Cur­ran 2006