Deep Thought

“Mom, is there a…”

I was microwaving chili and hacking jagged hunks out of a pan of leftover cornbread in a hurried attempt to get a decent meal packed up. 

 …logical reason for…

We needed to dash out the door – like, NOW – if the twins were to be even vaguely on time for another evening performing in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the university.

…life?”

Um, what?

 Is there a logical reason for LIFE?  Seriously, what the hell, Lizzy. 

This child, my child -- small, pigtailed, scruffy, and deceptively quiet -- sometimes brings to mind Shakespeare’s Cassius, who “has a lean and hungry look.  He thinks too much.  Such men are dangerous.”  Such little girls, likewise. 

Okay, no, I don’t really think that one of my nine-year-old daughters is hazardous -- or destined to stab Caesar, for that matter – but Lizzy’s ruminations often drop like flaming zeppelins from a cloudless sky. This is a child who, when stymied in her desire to cover all windowsills in the house with plant seedlings, chides, “Daddy, sometimes I think you are not very good at delaying gratification.”  This is a kid who glances around the living room and says, apropos nothing, “There would be so many right angles in the house, if you tried to count them all.” She is not merely making conversation; she is searching for logical patterns within the dizzying fractal landscape of existence.  Such observations might seem delightfully precocious -- until you are forced to attempt to address them in three minutes while simultaneously wrestling mini carrots into a Ziploc. 

About a year and a half ago, my children were subjected to a test to determine who would get to be part of the euphemistically labeled “Extended Learning Program.”  That afternoon, I asked the twins what they’d thought of the experience.  “Oh, it was pretty easy,” said Molly, with casual confidence.  “You just had to find the patterns.  The last few, though,” she continued, blithely, “didn’t have any pattern.” 

Ha!  I’d laughed indulgently at her childish conceit.  How funny to think that no patterns exist, just because you aren’t bright enough to find them!

Um, ha.   

Apophenia is the perception of meaningful patterns within random data – our Rorschach-elephant cloud-locomotive propensity to confabulate monsters under the bed and tin-foil hat conspiracies.  Confirmation bias is the equally human tendency to only look at evidence that supports what we want to believe -- because my political candidate farts rose-petal freshness.  A false negative or a Type II error is denial that a pattern exists, even when it does.  Even when it totally does, dammit, dammit, dam—uh, yeah.  Patterns.  Ha ha… 

Now, I struggled to gather my thoughts and my cornbread.  Could this Life-the-Universe-and-Everything- level introspection be symptomatic of too many “adult themes” in my kids’ lives?  Wallowing in Tennessee Williams’s dark and cerebral play about death, fear, lust, and denial is an unlikely after-school activity for fourth-graders.  Kids, welcome to the tsunami of deception that erodes our souls! 

Lizzy was being semi-patient with my density -- but insistent: “There’s the Big Bang, galaxies form, the Earth, and evolution… but is there a LOGICAL REASON for life?”

There are lots of great books out there on parenting.  I probably should have read some of them. Instead, when the kids were toddlers still struggling to master their fricatives and glottal stops, I decided that I would not be the parent who snaps, “Because I said so”, or “You’re too young to understand”, or “It was the stork”.  I wanted to let them find the patterns – the messy, confusing, terrible, real patterns.  Jay agreed with my strategy of dispensing Too Much Information, although he quickly granted himself an egress in the form of, “How about you ask Mommy?”

Brick: What makes you think Big Daddy has a lech for you, Maggie?

Margaret: Way he drops his eyes down my body when I’m talkin’ to him, drops his eyes to my boobs an’ licks his old chops!  Ha ha!

Brick: That kind of talk is disgusting.

Margaret: Did anyone ever tell you you’re an ass-aching Puritan, Brick?

[Cue four children to run across the stage, shrieking.]

The twins were cast as “no neck monsters” – two of the insufferable and over-abundant children of manipulative, abrasive parents in a dysfunctional, unfulfilled, greedy, Southern-polite but below-the-surface foul-hearted and foul-mouthed family.   After the first read-through, decorously held in a meeting-room at the campus library, the actor playing the family patriarch greeted me with anxious discomfort.  “It’s not exactly an appropriate script for children…”

A few days later, Molly chirped up at me, “Mommy, what does ‘poontang’ mean?”

Snigger.  “It’s a rude slang term for female genitalia,” I told my kid.  She nodded.  She’d guessed as much.  No harm, no foul.

Other questions are harder. 

A logical reason…

I took a deep breath.  I closed the fridge.  “Lizzy, pretty much every aspect of philosophy and religion, throughout all of human history, has been an attempt to answer that question.  Seriously.  It’s a great question.  People have come up with a ton of crazy possible answers.”  I mentioned a few topics the twins already vaguely comprehend – world religions, pantheons, legends, holy doctrines, passionately held beliefs.

“No, but I mean a LOGICAL reason.”

Yeah, kid.  Yeah, I know.

A few rehearsals into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Molly was enjoying herself.  (Shout and run around?  Giggle backstage with friends?  Great!)  Lizzy was not.  She said she hated the play.  Why, she wanted to know, does everyone seem angry at everyone else?  Why is there so much yelling?  Why would anyone want to watch a play about such horrible people? 

I felt guilty.  My urge was to try to shelter the kids from the full force of the script.  Couldn’t the nine-year-olds just don their adorable costumes, zip out for their cues, and let the rest wash over them?  But no.  That wasn’t working for at least one nine-year-old.  So I did the opposite.  I encouraged the kids to examine, to understand, to dig deeper. 

Brick: You think so too?  You think me and Skipper did, did, did! – sodomy! – together?...

Big Daddy: … This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself.  You! – dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it – before you’d face truth with him.

Brick: His truth, not mine.

Big Daddy: His truth, okay!  But you wouldn’t face it with him!

Brick: Who can face truth?  Can you?

Yeah.  We talked this through.  We talked through… a lot.  

I asked the kids how the character Maggie, might feel, married to a man who could not love her.  I asked them how Brick might feel, trapped by a society that reviled his kind of love.  I asked them why Mae might be avaricious enough to use her kids as pawns, why Gooper might feel so bitter about his father, and why Big Mama might prefer a constant cocktail of lies to the truth in which she is drowning.  I also asked what might have been changed, to break these toxic patterns.

Slinging the bag full of chili and scripts over my shoulder and hustling my kids out the door, I told them, “Grownups don’t know the answer to this question.  Not a full answer.  Not a LOGICAL answer.  In fact, our inability to answer this question is so universal that a really funny author made a joke out of it.”  I summarized, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the conundrum faced by the computer named Deep Thought -- and its comically unfulfilling answer.  Forty-two.

They got the joke.  I grinned.

As the theatrical experienced progressed through dress rehearsals, Lizzy seemed to find her groove and become more comfortable with the storming and raging.  By the time we reached the final performance, she was ready to wax philosophical about the nuances of each altercation, the failings of each individual, and the drawbacks of the social mores to which they adhered.  In her tiny A-line dress, waist-length blonde braids, ribbons, lacy white socks, and Mary Janes, she took to the stage with greater confidence.  “I hope I’m not getting type-cast as a cute little girl,” she observed, her brow wrinkled.   

Only, I thought, through apophenia and confirmation bias.  The frilliness of the socks does not fit into an easy pattern with the personalities of the wearers.  At the final curtain call, the no-neck monsters took their bows earnestly, alongside the Real Actors.

A week after the final performance of the show, my one-minute-older-twin was busy tending to the seedlings that her father had declared to be an unmitigated irritation.  She looked up at me with a perfectly-Lizzy abstracted gaze.  “In real life,” she announced, “there are no good guys and no bad guys.” 

I asked her to elaborate. 

“Like, if I told the story about Daddy and the plants, he might seem like the bad guy.  But from a different point of view, if I told the story about him taking me out to breakfast, he’d be the good guy.”  Lest I harbor any over-inflated sense of my own merits, she added,   “You, too.  There are downsides to a person -- and upsides.”

Gosh, thanks, kid.  But… yes.  You’re right. 

The patterns are not stark in black and white.  Sometimes – apophenia -- they are not there at all.  Sometimes – confirmation bias -- finding them will stretch your brain.  Sometimes, recognizing them will make your heart ache and twist and break with the pain of truth.  Sometimes, they will remain forever beyond your grasp.  Some answers, perhaps, are better left at “forty-two”.  But … search on.  Search on.

Many parts

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…”

--Jacques, As You Like It (Act II, scene vii), William Shakespeare

[Nameless… wordless… swathed in black and creeping purposefully through the shadows… a killer stalked.  Silently, the hooded figure moved forward.  The quarry, unknowing, took a final breath at the cliff-edge.  At last, with a single cold-hearted shove, the murderer sent the victim plunging to certain doom.]

As the slayer strode remorselessly offstage -- as quickly and purposefully as a four-foot-tall person can stride while wearing a sweatshirt that hangs well past her knees -- her hood slipped a bit, and one of her long blonde pigtails sprang out.

Last week, I was part of a small but appreciative audience who were treated to a theatrical smorgasbord of unprecedented oddness: namely, sixteen three-minute(ish) plays written, directed, and acted by children aged 8-15.

The performance was the culmination of my kids’ Spring Break Camp with Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater, and was therefore one of those Things Parents Have To Show Up For.  I expected it to be, at best, cute, and perhaps unintentionally funny.  I did not, however, think it would inspire any degree of artistic contemplation.  But after I watched one of my twin eight-year-olds send a fellow actor to his purported demise, I began to wonder.

The audience giggled, of course.  I did too.   I simply couldn’t help it.  But I knew, in my heart, that Lizzy, the most diminutive of all sixteen playwright/thespians, was not trying to be funny.  She was being, wholeheartedly, The Mysterious Killer.

“All the world’s a stage…”

Acting has always tempted and intrigued me, although I’ve never had much success with it.  As a ten-year-old, I longed to follow in my big sister’s footsteps and earn a lead role in the school play.  I didn’t.  Instead, I was given a green pointy hat and placed among the ignominious horde of awkward elves on the rickety risers at the back of the stage. 

By high school, I was too intimidated by the apparent coolness and popularity of the theater crowd to seriously consider signing up.  Besides, I was busy with the math club and the track team. 

Math meets and track meets did not garner much in the way of audience. Not that it was really an audience I wanted – certainly not in my teen years, when being entirely invisible seemed far more appealing than being noticed.  No, what appealed to me about theater – and what still does – is the idea of being someone else, while still, enigmatically, being myself.

“…and all the men and women merely players …”

Looking through the Spring Break theater program, I noted that Molly was playing the role of “Mother” in two plays, and “Chatty Kathy” (a talkative young woman vying for the hand of a prince via a jump-roping contest) in a third.  Her twin, meanwhile, in addition to playing the nefarious (and seemingly motiveless) murderer, had garnered roles as a boy who befriends a dragon, and as a monster who devours children in their beds. 

I knew that the camp instructors had set things up such that each child, regardless of age or gender, could audition for any role he or she wanted.  Thus, the program reflected, at least to some degree, the parts my kids had chosen to play.  That fascinated me – because, what roles, real or imagined, do any of us choose? 

I’ve never had the luxury of choosing a theatrical role, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to find myself in the roles assigned to me. This past summer, I helped out with Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater’s annual outdoor production.  It was the third time I’d done so.

The first time, years back, I was part of all the crowd scenes in Julius Caesar, including the bludgeoning of an innocent poet.  While I’m not actually in the habit of bludgeoning poets, no matter the odiousness of their doggerel, the role did make me think more deeply about what can happen – and why -- when mob-madness takes hold.

In my second Shakespearean foray, I was assigned to be a dancing shepherdess.  Yes, really.  Dancing.  Also, giggling, flirting, and singing, in a shepherdess-y dress and hair ribbons.    And you know what?  It was hugely fun.  Part of my psyche (unbeknownst to everyone, including myself) actually enjoys giggling, flirting, and -- heaven help the audience -- dancing and singing.

This year, I gathered props, mended costumes, and spent a couple of scenes onstage in a non-speaking role as a “forester”.  There wasn’t much skill required, but in every tech rehearsal and dress rehearsal and each of the show’s thirteen performances, I pretended to be a stalwart member of a down-to-earth woodsy cadre.  I pretended to be terrified of the knife-wielding Orlando.  I pretended to be amused by the banter of my betters, touched by the plight of an exhausted old man, and fascinated by the ruminations of the melancholy Jaques: 

“…they have their exits and their entrances …”

Rather than merely pretending, though, I decided to find the corner of my brain that really, truly, was intrigued by this speech.  As I sat on the stage – which usually meant sitting in a dirty, frigid puddle, because it never stopped goddamn raining last summer – I let my heavy ragged brown dress fall haphazardly around my booted ankles, and I wondered. 

I wondered about the roles we assign ourselves, and the roles we are assigned by others, and how they differ.  I pondered to what degree we really get to be the directors of the ongoing improv shows known as “our own lives”.  I speculated as to what roles my friends, my family, or my kids might cast me in.  I questioned my interpretation of the roles I already play – mother, scientist, outdoor enthusiast, wife, writer, professor, activist, friend, daughter.  I contemplated what other (astonishing, rewarding, hilarious, shocking) roles I might be capable of playing, were I ever to assign them to myself.

Some of these same questions floated back into my head, as I watched sixteen kid-crafted plays unfurl on stage last week. The participants in the Spring Break camp varied widely in their acting and writing abilities, but I found myself more interested in their intent than in their skill.  What iconic roles did they create and fulfill?  Why did the plays include seven mothers (no, eight – I forgot the mother dragon), and only two fathers?  Why were all the parents (even the dragon) so bland, dysfunctional, and naysaying?

Lizzy was not the only kid whose roles reached far outside the realm of the predictable.  The iconoclastic eleven-year-old daughter of my good friends (whom Lizzy blatantly looks up to) was cast as a delightfully spacey father in Molly’s play, as well as a dashing (if argumentative) Romeo.  Then there was a boy – he looked to be about eleven – who put on a lilac wig and a skirt to play the part of “Pretty Lulu”.  I kind of loved that boy. 

Ever since Robert Rosenthal’s 1964 classic classroom experiment showed that merely telling teachers that some (randomly selected) children had great potential caused actual increases in IQ in those kids, study after study has likewise demonstrated that expectations – and the roles we are assigned based on those expectations – deeply impact our reality.  Just knowing this, and having the tiniest inkling of the terrible injustices that it engenders, chafes and angers me.  If the whole world says you’ve got to play the part of “adorable little girl” or “suspicious black teenager” or “skinny white boy who definitely shouldn’t put on a skirt and jump rope” it’s all too easy to just say, Yeah, sure, that’s who I am.  And… that’s who I’m not.

Over the course of a single airplane journey this winter, Lizzy was off-handedly called “Princess” by three different strangers.  All of them were, I’m sure, entirely well-meaning, but I longed to correct them. That little girl in slightly grimy old jeans is not a princess.  Really.  Trust me on this one.  Clearly, each of these men (they were all men) had badly miscast my kid in their personal stage-plays. 

But, to be fair, perhaps I’d miscast them in my own.  I’d assumed, with a shocking lack of creativity, that Guy #2 was “Bored Fiftyish Male TSA Agent”.   But who was he, really?  What if he also played a secret nighttime role?  Perhaps, mentally, I should have called him, “Princess” too. Yes, I’ve removed my laptop from my carry-on, Princess.  Yes, those are my shoes, thanks, Princess.

Maybe it seems frivolous – or even insulting – to imagine random strangers as clandestine drag queens, but I assure you I don’t intend it that way.  To me, humans are intriguing precisely because each of us can, and does, play so many roles.  My most fascinating and wonderful friends – the ones I long to spend more time with -- tend to be individuals who contain multitudes.  If you’ve worked as a nurse, a shipwright, a stay-at-home-dad, a mathematician and a gardener, you’re probably an interesting person to eat dinner with.  If I’ve seen you as word nerd, apple pie baker, guide-puppy caretaker, computer programmer, hiker, and gay-leather-fetish-gear-wearer, you are all the more human to me. 

“…and one man in his time plays many parts…”

Sixteen kids got up on stage last week, and my optimistic core rejoiced.  Yes, other people will always try to force roles upon us, try to direct us, try to limit us.  But, ultimately, we are all still our own writers, our own directors, and our own actors.   No matter where our name appears on the playbill, we all have many, many roles to play.

[Nameless… wordless… the four-foot tall murderer strode offstage, hoodie flapping at her shins and pigtails askew…]