directed a play…

I am going through three boxes of scary files that have not been sorted. I bought something that looks like an able seaman’s chest, or some Western debutante’s Trunk, off the street where I live, and am filling it with properly alphabetized production documents. This is only reminding me of my age. I didn’t remember that I did the choreography for Don Giovanni…or AD’d a production of Frankenstein (the classical music version)…or…so many things.

I’ve been doing this for ten years, after all. Ten years. L once told me I needed to make a list of every production I’d ever done, because otherwise I would forget. I thought that was absurd. How can you forget something that takes so much work? But she was right.

Seeing these old files is like seeing a slide show of my past. Or reading a biography of someone whose work I like, but who I don’t know that well. The things I have done are now so far away that they seem detached from me. AVW and BH might as well have been directed by another person. I know I did it, but I don’t know how I did it! And I don’t know if I could do it again!

Also, I found a file of my old Stanford papers, one of which is about Bovary, and uses the word “Epist-Emma-Ology” in the title. Ha ha.

My writing, when I was in school, was insufferably arrogant. I don’t know that my writing has changed that much since then, or my ego, but I will say that reading these papers, written before I had learned how to spell “humility,” let alone possess it, makes me laugh. Some of the writing is awful. Some is okay. But all the papers, well written or not, are confident to the point of exploding.