Changes

Vocal has a new Challenge called Coming of Age. The Challenge asks for a true story which tells of a time, or an event, that caused a change in the writer’s life or viewpoint. A story about something “that changed everything”. For whatever reason, I’m having a hard time with finding a good story for this topic. Until this point, most of the stories I’ve written and submitted to Vocal have been on topics that I could write about without thinking too much with topics that have always been right there, showing up without a lot of effort on my part. It’s not that I don’t have stories to choose from for this most recent Challenge. I have many personal stories about events that changed my views, or shook up my life, changing everything after the experience but I’m not ready to share most of those stories with strangers on the Internet. So, I wrote a list. And I immediately scratched off some of the things on the list, deciding against those stories. Other stories didn’t make it to the list at all, remaining in my brain with a clear “nope” and one of those red circles with a line through it to signify that this story was not to be used under any circumstances. That left me with a short list of about four or five stories that don’t feel too personal but still have potential. Thinking about each topic, one by one, I’m working on how to make the story fit the Challenge, asking myself: how did I feel before the event? How did I feel after the event? How did my life, or my view of life change because of the event? This is the hard part. I can write a short story about significant or memorable events that happened in my life, easily enough. But thinking about how they changed me isn’t something I’ve done with most of the topics that made it through the final cut.

Certainly, the time I gave CPR to the friend of a friend in his kitchen was an event that had a profound effect on me. It was the first, and only time, I used CPR outside of a class on the topic. I wrote about that day in my first published story on Vocal, which you can read here:

https://vocal.media/humans/using-cardiopulmonary-resuscitation-cpr

I’m trying to think of a good before and after. A good cause and effect. A change that happened in the way I viewed the world or something…something that isn’t so simple as the experience making me appreciate life more. Maybe a good takeaway from the CPR experience is that I learned how it felt to be a person who gave someone CPR. This experience helped me have a deeper understanding of others not employed in emergency healthcare who also find themselves performing CPR and the emotions, regrets, impressions, and all that happen afterwards. Maybe that’s the key takeaway from this experience: I gained empathy for others who attempt to rescue someone.

Perhaps it was when I was in grade school and the neighbor’s grandson drowned in a pool. It wasn’t the grandmother’s pool, it happened somewhere else. I still remember hanging out in my backyard and looking down the row of neighbors’ backyards toward the one that was his grandmother’s. He used to play there with his brother but now there was an absence that was palpable. Or when my own great-grandmother died around the same time. Or maybe it was the first funeral I attended, which was not either of these two funerals because, as I remember it, my parents were worried I was too young to attend a funeral until later. They thought it would be less traumatic if the first funeral I attended was for someone I didn’t really know.

It could be my senior year in high school when I knew 9 people who died and went to 7 funerals. Those who passed away that year ranged in ages from 21 – 83 years old. By the end of the school year, I had quite a selection of dark colored clothing and dress shoes, most of which I purchased myself at the women’s clothing store where I worked part-time. At my high school, we had a homeroom teacher whose classroom we had to go to first thing in the morning to listen to announcements and begin the day in a somewhat calm and collected manner before leaving to attend our first class of the day. It was our homeroom teacher who collected our notes from our parents explaining our absences. I remember the look on my homeroom teacher’s face as I handed him the fifth or sixth note stating “Please excuse Cathy for missing school yesterday. She had to attend a funeral.” I could tell he felt sorry for me. It was as unbelievable to him as it was to me. Each of the deceased had died of different things: car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, old age, and other things that I can’t remember any longer. By the end of the year, I was no longer as cheery, no longer as carefree, no longer as naïve. All these deaths had unquestionably taught me the value of life and the permanence of death.

As I sat in my homeroom desk on the days after attending one of the funerals, I would sometimes look around at my classmates, knowing that most of them were not spending their time thinking about the fragility of life. They didn’t have to think about such things at 16, 17, and 18 years old. I didn’t tell my classmates about all the funerals I attended that year. It seemed to be too much, too unbelievable. And really, would they understand the deep sadness I was experiencing? Could most of them even relate? Likely not, unless they had experienced death, as well, so I kept the information to myself. Well, myself and my homeroom teacher. I suppose this senior year death parade helped me become more empathetic to others.

Another story that came to mind for this Vocal Challenge has nothing to do with death. This story has to with theater; specifically, the way theater can accomplish anything. A.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. I came to this realization when I was a university student majoring in Dance in the Theater and Dance department. Our theater department did a production of Into the Woods with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and we needed a cow. All productions of Into the Woods need a cow. The cow is a major part of this musical. Some productions make smaller-than-life two-dimensional cows, or some version of a larger cow, or dress up an actor as a cow. There are many ways the cow has been portrayed. But our university production chose a route I didn’t expect.

While walking through the scene shop one day, I encountered a couple of my theater friends working on scenery and props for the production and there it was, an almost life-sized cow. A cow they were building out of a metal frame and some type of foam that they would be carving and covering and painting to produce Milky White, the famed cow that is an integral player in Into the Woods.

I was relatively new to theater, having only begun studying it after I began college. I had never been part of high school plays or any community theater productions prior to studying theater and dance in college, and I didn’t really have any experience with events that went on behind the scenes. Seeing my classmates make a cow to be used on stage was a game changer for me. It helped me understand that in theater, one can do anything. Theater techs can make anything and the likeness to the real thing is only limited by skill, money, and time available. That is part of the “magic of theater”.

Theater truly is magical. Not only because of the ability to make a realistic (ish) cow or any other props or set pieces. Theater provides a way for a writer to convey a story. It provides an avenue for an audience to escape from the real world for a couple of hours. And it provides a pathway for the actors to send their own emotions, experiences, memories, and observations about life out of themselves, through their characters, and into the theater space. Theater provides a pathway to empathy. The stories we watch unfold on the stage are acted out by human beings who have studied their craft and they use this skill to express their own experience of human emotion and express it through their characters.

Getting involved in theater and dance in college, as an adult had a profound effect on me which did, indeed, “change everything”. Theater and dance performance gave me an avenue to access and express the feelings I had inside but were too difficult, too deep, or too vast to express with words. My experiences in the Theater and Dance department, working on the craft of performing, showed me that I could transform any emotions into story on the stage. It was a realization that was transformative for me; it changed my life and my way of dealing with grief, anger, happiness, and joy. I could begin to put these memories and emotions and experiences into physical form and share them with other human beings through theater and dance performance.