futurebird's Diaryland Diary
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then they laugh at you
Walking down into the east village to see about my theatre troupe. wishing I could find a way to get more people to show up. Knowing that means more work.
I am not on the ball. I�m right off it, in fact, standing next to it looking at it like �you expect me to get up there?� Nobody ever said that being good at something was supposed to be easy and here I am acting like I�m on some kind of cruise ship. Letting my life drift-- wherever it may as if the tide was going someplace.
Well, it ain�t.
I ask myself: �Susan what is the ultimate goal?� then after a pause I remember: the goal is to tell it like it is. To get people to see all of the awful and wonderful things I see so they don�t go unnoticed. And to do that anyway I can.
Today I saw some men with dirty glazed faces building shelters between the buttresses of a church. One had a sign, painted in red on white cardboard tied to a make-shift wooden cross with string. It asked the cops to let him sleep. I guess, they were all claiming sanctuary, huddling in the crotches of the church walls. Now I know what they are talking about when they say that �people fall through the cracks�.
That phrase always scared me. It left me looking for holes. The world I grew up in had no (apparent) cracks. I remember my father showing me how to spread paste between the joints of dry wall to hide the cracks. I remember the smell like salt and clay. Spread once then sand then spread again and sand and the crack is gone. It is perfect-- unblemished.
�Woogies� my dad would say (I later learned this was a quasi-polite word for niggers) �are always busing holes in the dry wall. I don�t know how they do it! I hang in in spring and by fall it�s full of holes!� And then he�d go back to working. I had know idea who the woogies were, but I hated them for making my dads life so hard. Why couldn�t they be more like me? Why can�t they keep their houses nice and have good jobs?
I remember the first time I busted a wall up. It was in one of the acting rooms at Carnegie Mellon. I was stubbornly trying to move a large metal door to create a set for one of my scenes. It fell and cut right through the wall. I never told anyone. I had heard the teachers complain about �how destructive� the students could be, and there was my dad to think about. It was freshmen year and I still had the wild notion in my head that they would tell him.
So, now there are lots of cracks in my life. gathered like dead albatrosses about my feet. Flawed theories, dead ideologies, lost dreams and causes. But-- undaunted by all this, I stand five foot tall wide eyed and eager with a little putty knife in my hand. hoping I can some how catch up. Hoping I can make all of this sorry crap add up. Only if I just work hard enough.
And if I don�t forget about my mission.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you ... then you win. That�s what Ghandi said.
So, when people laugh-- that means I�m going in the right direction. Nothing to be ashamed of. Go on: laugh!
010821_16.html - 2001-08-20
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