Double double toil and please just let me die now...

Oh man, I've been bitten by the theater bug. I offered to help with props/building/whatever with the local Passion Play, and a shortage of willing players has meant that I've since been upgraded to the status of actor, with an actual honest-to-goodness line. I flatter myself by thinking that the person who allowed me to take on this role thinks I can draw upon inner acting strength I didn't know I had to add meat to this one line, when in reality (as learned from this past Sunday's rehearsal) when I act--on a good day--I just sound like a quietly constipated version of my normal, dull self.

To be fair, I am enjoying myself and I'm happy to be part of it. But honestly it also brings back horrific memories of my time as a theater major at college. All I wanted to do was play with lights and use the occasional power tool, but my college thought that in order to be a good lighting designer I needed to know how to act.

All I remember about that class is that every day was humiliating agony. I still cringe at the thought of having to perform that witches thing from the beginning of Macbeth in front of everybody. I remember during rehearsals for it my partners would nag me to put more effort into it. Get into character, they'd tell me. Double double toil and trouble... And I'd just silently pray that either I or everyone else or both would die before the performance date, because the thought of enthusiastically crouching around an imaginary cauldron and speaking in verse seemed somehow even worse than simply shitting my pants both visibly and audibly while onstage.

It got to the point where 18 year old me considered drastic solutions. Whenever I had to perform in front of my class I would fantasize that while I was reciting my poem/monologue/whatever I was wearing an enormous inflatable penis costume. "Surely that'd embarrass you even more, Sam," you're probably saying. But the fact is that imagining I was wearing an enormous inflatable penis costume made the rest of the class seem ridiculous. Here I am, wearing an invisible inflatable penis costume in front of the entire class--and these dumbasses don't even realize it! I'm giving a serious monologue in my dull voice of indigestion and I'm NOT EVEN ACKNOWLEDGING THE FACT THAT I'M DRESSED AS A HUGE INFLATABLE PENIS! And you're taking me seriously! Who's the idiot now, guys? Oh, that's right, YOU!

Well, a girl can dream...

I eventually gave up on the whole theater major thing. It wasn't just the horrific acting classes, but also the crap jobs I had to do backstage. My personal favorite was "Lint Mistress," where my job was literally picking lint off the leading man.

As part of the costume crew I had to follow around the costume designer, a grad student who had such a strong Great Lakes accent that I thought her jaw was going to pop off at any minute from the vowel strain. On one memorable occasion I was called in to help her with the leading man's pants (TROUSERS!), so I followed her into a small dressing room where the three of us could be alone together. She decided that the leading man's pants needed to be expanded, so without any kind of warning she just tore this guy's pants open. So the guy was just standing there with a huge, gaping hole in the region of Ass, looking completely appalled. The costume designer had to hurry out of the room to get more pins, leaving me alone with this guy I don't know but who I regularly pick lint off of, now with him in underpants and pathetic tatters that were once pants. I remember trying to turn around to preserve some semblance of this guy's modesty, only to find that a mirror was behind me. So instead I just sort of stared off to the side while the leading man and I both grew increasingly red in the face as we both tried to pretend like he was not wearing shredded pants right now. He was a senior and I was a freshman, so he tried to break up the awkwardness of the situation by asking me how I was settling in. "Not very well at the moment," I wanted to tell him.

After about five eternities the costume designer finally returned to fix the pants, but by that point I was pretty convinced that theater was no longer for me. I needed order in this chaotic world. I needed to know that pants would not suddenly be ripped apart at any given moment without any kind of a warning.

The whole realization that theater was not the major for me made me think of Roland the Farter, or more importantly Le Petomane.

Le Petomane was a guy who farted professionally in the Victorian era, a guy who is sometimes referred to as a "fartiste." Apparently he used to do farting impressions of the San Francisco Earthquake, and he'd do animal sounds. This flatulist retired during World War I because he thought the world was too inhumane. Just as I only wanted to play with lights, he just wanted to fart. That's all he wanted.

And that, my friends, is beautiful.


(Speaking of theater, if you'd like to read a short scene about St Thomas a Becket that I wrote when I was 16, please click here)

The Eighteenth Wheel

I’m in the library studying theology. Aw crap, you caught me. I’m actually hiding in the library (with an open theology book, mind you) because I’m too afraid to go downstairs for lunch. The college is hosting an Open Day for prospective ordinands, and so the dining hall is packed with priests, future priests, and potential future priests. I didn't really want to be the only person in the room who's destined for Hell. Not gonna lie, it’s a little intimidating. So intimidating, in fact, that I’m even giving up a free lunch [*gasp!*].

To be fair, even when it’s me among just this year’s bunch of ordinands I feel a little intimidated. I’m not sure “intimidated” is quite the right word, as on those occasions when I’m the only non-ordinand among ordinands I feel less intimidated and more like the third wheel on a 17-person date. They all lean into each other to share intimate conversations about church politics or which tune they’re going to use for the “Magnificat” at Evensong, and every now and then their intimacy is shattered by my feeling the need to laugh with a ridiculously loud volume at a joke about Giles Fraser just to prove that “HEY FOR ONCE I HAVE A FAINT IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” Those rare moments where I am even capable of doing an honest but deafening guffaw of recognition, however, are vastly outnumbered by moments of those weak smiles of someone trying to hide the fact that they are, relatively speaking, a dipshit. Most of the time I have genuinely no fucking clue what anyone is talking about, and I feel as though I crashed the house party of the Elect.

But this isn’t to bitch about the ordinands, the poor dears. They're all lovely people and those rare moments when I do understand what the hell they're talking about make all the moments of confusion worthwhile. Besides, it’s only natural to be very close to people going through the same program, and to be honest I think the people in my own program are more cult-like. Try sitting in on a conversation between a group of student-teachers and see how lost you feel—it’s like we vomit up a never-ending fountain of incomprehensible acronyms and “my pupils are shitter than your pupils” trump stories.

Still though. I think I’ll stay in the library just to be safe.

Dead Anglican Monk Ghosts

The other day I had print something, so obviously I went to the mortuary chapel to take care of that. I should probably explain that my college used to be a monastery, and apparently all the old monks used to go to one wing of the complex to die. Once dead they’d be carted down the hall to the mortuary chapel, which is now our computer room.

To be honest, I have to question how much of this is true. I know I heard the story from a priest, and when has a priest ever lied, but I can’t help feeling like the whole thing was made up for shock value. You know, the other colleges have stories like, “JRR Tolkien used to sit at this very chair!” or “And in this room, CS Lewis probably took a dump!” Tourists and students alike faint with excitement at the mere suggestion of historical connections, no matter how tenuous. And, as much as I like Fort Jesus, we just don’t have that kind of history. Because “people used to die in our college” is kind of the trump card of the desperate, the Helen Keller or Hitler card in “Apples to Apples” if you will.

Still, just in case, I insist on propping the door open when I’m in there alone at night. While not entirely sure if the suggestion of death has made me perceive an aura of death in that hallway or if there is a genuine aura of death there, I don’t like to take any chances. I figure if I prop the door open the chances of the ghost of some dead Anglican monk coming out of the walls and killing me for being Jewish are significantly lower than if I were to close the door.

So last night I was in this creepy chapel that smells of death (that is, if death smells of printer toner and faint body odor) when all of the sudden the door facing the open computer room door opened. Out from the darkened room stepped a girl, maybe about 8 or 9, who made intense eye contact with me. She gave me that look that you always get from your roommate’s friends. I’m not referring to any roommate in particular, I just mean that it’s a universal truth that if your roommate has friends over and you enter the room, all of the friends will turn to stare and give you a look that says, “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing here?” After they’ve met you their look drops the “Who are you” part, but they will always give you the “What the fuck are you doing here?” part. I’m genuinely fascinated by this look because I’m deeply curious to know what they could possibly think I was doing in my own apartment. I want to respond to their silent “What the fuck are you doing here” look with a casual shrug and an “Um, living.”

Anyway, this little girl gave me that look, probably minus the “fuck” because she isn’t even aware of that word yet, being 8 or 9. We had an intense minute or so of just staring at each other, a minute in which I had to fight the urge to shout a word, any random word, just because I felt so uncomfortable. Luckily before I could shout “CHESTNUTS!” the little girl peered round the corner of her door and started shouting at someone down the hall. I know it wasn’t in English, maybe it was French. Yeah, I know it’s terrifying that I did a bazillion years of French and the best description of this kid’s language that I can give you is, “Maybe it was French.” But get over it. Most of my brainpower at that moment was being devoted to planning escape routes for various horrific hypothetical scenarios involving the ghosts of dead Anglican monks.

So what’s your computer room like?

The adhan is looking like a preferable alternative

I know I haven’t even been here for two full months yet, but I’ve already grown to hate somebody. And when I say somebody I actually mean an inanimate object that I’m convinced is determined to ruin me—and obviously if something is conscious enough to have a vendetta against me, it is a “somebody” as opposed to a “something.” Clearly I’m referring to my college’s chapel bell.

Being me, I don’t have the normal complaint that some non-future-priests in this college have, namely that the bell wakes them up. To be honest, the first time since my arrival on September 12th that I have ever been woken by this bell was this morning, when it went off at the buttcrack of dawn (okay, it went off at around 8:30).

No, my major complaint about this bell is that I think it is trying to make me crap my pants in complete and utter terror. Before I tell you how, you have to understand how skittish I am: the other day someone came through a doorway a little too quickly and I literally fell over with fright.

Okay, so now for this bell. Each morning I stumble, half-asleep and freezing cold, across the garden to the dining hall so I can have some breakfast. I’m sleepy to the point of disorientation, to the point where even remembering if I put pants on that morning is an intellectual challenge. The entire college is in silence, silence so powerful that you can probably hear the likely disgusting noise snails make as they ooze along. And each morning, just as I reach the most acoustically ideal place in the entire garden, the bell lets out a hearty:

BONG!!!!!

And just in case you didn’t hear that first earth-shattering BONG! the bell follows it up with about 30 more BONG!s in quick succession, like it’s the jackhammer of church bells. Like it's rubbing it in. My understanding is that the bell tells people when services are about to start, so I used to think that the bell was yelling at the ordinands, “GET YOUR LAZY ASSES OUT OF BED AND INTO CHAPEL!” (Note: I’m not suggesting that the ordinands are lazy, but rather that this asshole of a bell thinks that they are.)

Now though I’m pretty convinced that the first BONG! is actually a “BOO!” and the bazillion follow-up BONG!s roughly translate to “hahahahahahahahahahaha!”

Why is it laughing, you may well ask. Well, because after the first deafening BONG! I usually react pretty strongly. Sometimes I do a subtle flinch, like someone has just raised a hand to slap me. But sometimes I react in more obvious ways, like screaming “JESUS!” (always welcome in a seminary), or involuntarily flinging everything I’m carrying as if in self-defense, or sometimes I just fall over. Maybe I've made it obvious, but the terror I feel at hearing this bell is immense. The absolute terror I feel after hearing such a sudden BONG! shattering the sleepy silence is the sort of thing that, on a good day, makes me require a hug afterwards and that, on a bad day, makes me question the existence of God. I won't explicitly tell you how much of this is exaggeration for an effect, though if you've known me long enough you'll know that this likely isn't much of a stretch of the truth.

The obvious conclusion here is that this bell is an asshole who won’t stop his campaign of terror until I piss myself with fright .But I refuse to change what time I leave my apartment for breakfast so as to miss the bell. If we change our normal routines because we fear a terrorist will kill us make us pee our pants, then the terrorists have already won.