My Free Bird moment is coming
21 March 2009 10:13 AM Categories: Blogs & bloggers
The auditions were on a muggy spring Saturday in 1981. I couldn’t sleep the night before. Nerves. My mother and I walked into a theater smelling of preadolescent sweat, each kid tingling with nervous energy, wondering how they would do on stage. Someone called my name in low, deep voice. I pushed myself up and wobbled down the aisle, a skinny eleven-year-old with long frizzy hair and a preternaturally serious demeanor. At that moment, my mind was dusty as chalk. Up on stage, though, I pulled it together and gave a sufficiently melodramatic reading from Beauty and the Beast. The fall before I'd played the female lead in a children's theater production.
"Beast! Beast! I love you, Beast!" Beauty cries over the dying brute. In the small theater production, the handsome high school boy who played the Beast was made up to look like a proper monster. His delicate Italian features were obscured by a greenish-yellow gelatinous substance, his hair a hawk’s nest of detritus. Whatever was on his cheeks stuck to my lips as I bestowed the chaste kiss that eventually returned him to his princely state. That boy wasn’t on stage with me for the audition, but I faked it well enough. I got my acceptance letter for drama camp six weeks later.
It was the summer I considered myself twelve, in between sixth and seventh grades. The camp was made up of ambitious 11–14 year olds. For two hot July weeks we took acting classes together on the campus of Goucher College, culminating in a production of Free to Be You and Me. Most of my memories are about the dorms, where I discovered a love of dark chocolate, developed an aversion to public showers, and shared giggles with the girl in the next room over. But the main flavor of those two weeks was an overwhelming feeling of awkwardness, a sense of being quiet and overly polite, to the strange boy who pursued me by the salad bar, to the other girls on my floor.
On our last night, the camp counselors put together a dance, the soundtrack heavy on 1970s rock lightly flavored with disco. The evening wrapped up with a final song: Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd. It was the first time I'd heard it. The strange boy found me across the darkened dining hall and held out his hand. We danced close. I felt a longing for what wasn't quite over yet.
In about three weeks, the contract for writing to survive's web hosting is up for renewal. I have decided not to renew (though I am conflicted about this. Is it worth $100/year to keep this blog out there? I'd love your thoughts.) Leaving is scary. In the past year and a half, I've become friends with a few people scattered across the world. This place has been my virtual support system as I grappled with my past and figured out what it means to be a writer. I will miss the conversations with my blogging friends here, but hope to keep on commenting and interacting in the blogosphere. Just because the blog is disappearing doesn’t mean that I am, too.
I haven't quite decided what is next, but I know that I need to devote my energy to writing. That's scary, too, to take it on without the wonderful instant feedback, knowing I'll be alone, typing in my little room, writing stuff that maybe NO ONE WILL EVER READ! But I think that the words will grow in that environment, where it's just me and them, without worries about posting or commenting or dropping zillions of Entrecards.
My Free Bird moment is coming and I'm feeling a bit melancholy about it. Before the last dance however, I'll have a heap of appreciation for the people who have kept me afloat in the blogosphere. If you want to skip out now, that's fine, but I hope you stick around until the end.
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