Month-Late Blogging: Santa Cruz
Jun. 24th, 2009 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetclmMonth-Late Blogging Part the Fifth:
So as these entry titles imply, unbelievably enough, I got back to Santa Cruz about a month ago. Nicola had gotten back about a week earlier than that, but there were certainly some folks who hadn't gotten out of school yet, which meant a week or two waiting for schools to disband for the summer and people, particularly busy student-senator-type-people, to be freed up.
As a bonus, though, I got to go to graduations (two) and graduation parties (two and a half)! I was going to go to a third graduation, the Ark's, for an old Teen Writing Circle and elsethings compatriot, but while I got to the park the ceremony was in some fifteen minutes earlier, I couldn't actually find the graduation within the park for an hour and a half, and at that point it was all over and everyone had successfully graduated from high school. Much easier to find was the Pacific Collegiate School graduation, because PCS is about five blocks away from my house, so I didn't have to crank out a bike or bus pass or anything. It was a very amusing ceremony with enough student performances and a small enough graduating class that a large percentage of the seniors got to go up on stage for more than walking by the principle and getting a diploma and leaving. Apparently there are a lot of techno dance parties at that school!? I somewhat knew two of the graduates, though not too well in either case, and there were a lot of friends in the audience watching still more people graduate, so it was quite exiting seeing lots of people again for the first time in...in some cases, I don't even know how long. Physically, we've all more or less stabilized, but there does remain some room for personality development when one is invisible for long enough, which I suppose is a good thing.
The other graduation I went to, of course, was Alternative Family Education's, my old homeschool program. It was an extremely small class this year, eleven students and not even all of them present, though the length was bolstered a little by having the eighth graders graduate middle school at the same time. There was a bit of a "P.S." feel to it, because the previous two years had felt like something of a who's who of people I knew in AFE, one after another standing up in blue robes and making me weepy inside as they spread their wings for new horizons (or just more Santa Cruz)...on the other hand, two of the people who were graduating, and the hosts of the parties I went to, were people I've known (with various levels of sporadicity) for twelve or so years and consider extended family, so it was more than worth going to. Elowyn's in Nepal right now and will be going to Swarthmore next year, at which point we can talk to each other even less than during previous school years because she presumably won't have buses to call from, and while I didn't see Chris (or any of his family, I think) at all last winter, it's been great spending some time with them in the last month. We've had somewhat similar lives, which lends credence to astrology, and it's great being back and feeling roots and at home in a whole variety of different ways. I feel I can be one person here one day, another another, etc., and it's quite freeing and the people around are an important part of that. The picnic on the bus is yet to be topped, but there's time yet…
On the other hand, just last week I had practically unheard of connection to Reed, so it's not a totally exclusionary dichotomy. Ellen from the train had a birthday party up in Sunnyvale last Tuesday which I somehow managed to attend, although I was unable to find a key to tag "Australia" for her, and the other day, Lillian and Laura Sard and a couple of their friends swung by here for the night (and ate some of our food) as part of their road trip through California. Both were very nice experiences. A couple Reed students wrote me some weeks ago, and I sent them cookies in return, so contact is not quite as non-existent as last year, if still pretty close. It's the other world effect.
Another AFE event was Follywood, the annual "American Film Enthusiasts" film festival where everyone dresses up nicely, consumes fancy cookies and sparkling cider, and watches as notable members of the AFE community present films created by AFE students over the past year. My brother and I were an announcing team, heralded by the German version of the Bing-Bang song from Lazytown (I was dancing up to the stage, and apparently the tech people saw no reason to cut the music as long as I was still in motion, which was totally fodder for an EXTENDED DANCE NUMBER), and we both dressed pretty conservatively for the occasion. I didn't even wear my top-hat! He and I had a blowup around the beginning of the calendar year, and while he still hasn't actually apologized for it, we're getting along a lot better now despite not having talked to each other all last semester. We've played some games, talked about German, and bounced on the trampoline...it's a definite improvement over stonily ignoring each other. He is utterly turned off by my fond stories of Lane, but that's homeschoolers for you.
An interesting change I noted in myself recently between my (early-?)high-school self and who I am now is how I view the social structure around here. In high school, there were a few groups or "cliques" or what have you spread through the program, but there was definitely a group whom I could easily identify as the cool kids. I'd see them all the time – many of them were in plays and improv, for one thing – but despite my best efforts, I was never really a part of their gang. I occasionally even considered befriending people solely for the political advantages. I admired people and liked them as friends, but there was an undercurrent of "how do I get to be cool so you'll invite me to things?" As time went on, that didn't change too much, but I developed other ties, which the Teen Writing Circle helped with a lot, as I got to develop my own self there through writing, rather than existing as a general high school teenager. One way or another, I became friends, or greatly solidified existing friendships, with Athena, Julia, Elowyn, Nicola, and Cassia, although that last one of course went rather badly until time smoothed it over. These were people who cared about me and who talked about other things than I was used to, and they were also a large foundation piece for my mild misandry, which survives to this day. I still interacted and worked and played with the so-thought-of cool kids, to be sure, particularly Barak, but I was much less concerned about being one of them, because I fit in elsewhere.
These days, I'm probably more distant than ever...all the separation of graduation and going away for college seems to cause people to huddle in closer with a close group of friends and spend less time with those they know less, simply because there's so much less time to see people in and it has to be budgeted. So a lot of those people I've only seen, and only will see in the rest of the summer, a few times, and conversations have been brief, if completely friendly. I have various experiences during school semesters, and I know that they have too, and I know that they've lived through more than I will ever know about. And yet I want to know...not because that knowledge would bring me any sort of mystic access to any clandestine secret clubhouse or whatever, but because they're my friends, I care about them, and I want to know what's been going on in their lives and what all it's meant to them. I want to know what their projects are, what their plans are, because of who they are as people. I have a base I can fall back on if I need to – one interesting thing about being in Santa Cruz, particularly after having graduated, is the parent semi-fanbase I get, although I'm talking more about Nicola and folks – but in the meantime I can talk to anyone I like, and I am genuinely interested in them, and that seems to me to be definite personal growth and I am proud of it. Either that or it could just be a distancing effect where I get to feel that way when being cool doesn't depend on them, and I behave the same old way at Reed just with different people…
I don't mention it much, partially because it's kind of embarrassing and partially because it doesn't really matter anymore and I consider myself an unabashed part of the bike culture, but I only actually learned how to ride a bike just before I came to Reed. My motivations were that I knew it would make transportation easier, and that biking was, again, one of those things college kids do. I'm kind of a bad role model for non-conformity. Anyway, this summer has been the first time I've actually biked in Santa Cruz outside of to and from a local park...Reed was the first place I ever left-turned, handled stop lights, etc.; winter breaks have felt too short for biking; and last summer I was in Middlebury so much that I only had six weeks here, which all added up to my not wanting to figure out a way to pack my bike up and bring it down to California. However it turned out my father had an old road bike (i.e. one that's older than I am), and so now I'm using that to get around, and it's quite exciting. SC's a lot flatter than Portland, I think, although Nicola still lives on top of a hill, so that's nice and pleasant. I've already turned down a ride or two because I had a bike, although there's a cloud in that silver lining, as rides do allow for a little more conversation in transit. Ian A has tentatively offered to drive me (and presumably other people) up to Portland for next year if he can get his new car working by then...I am excited! And trying to curb that excitement because it might not happen.
For some several years now, stretching over several different meeting locations, improvisational theater has been a big part of my life. I was a member of the teen improv troupe 3 Days Later up until I went off to Reed, and was briefly in a troupe called A Little Off Center as well, which sprouted off from local improv troupe Um-Gee-Um classes. I've been in various shows, I raised money for improv festivals and been in the appropriately-named "Hundred Dollar Club," and I made the website, Myspace profile, and mailing list for 3 Days Later, which were all only ever so useful. I was appropriately saddened to learn that 3 Days Later was disbanding in December 2007 because so many of its members were going to colleges or getting mired down in other commitments, especially seeing as I got back into Santa Cruz exactly three days after the final show. I've had significantly less luck at Reed...I've auditioned both years for Reed's main improv troupe, Fellatio Rodriguez, unsuccessfully each time. (The second time I said to Kay, "let's go audition for Fellatio Rodriguez and get rejected and start our own troupe" and she agreed, and we auditioned, and they let her in, so that didn't work out.) Reed's other troupe, YAM, is much more open, but their schedule never matches mine, and when it briefly did last semester they changed it immediately. But as I wrote, Nicola and I did some improv for a while during Renn Fayre, and I mentioned to her that I wanted to put the band back together, and she agreed that that would be cool. Now, when Nicola is with me on something, I can do anything…
I scoped out some relevant people at a few AFE gatherings, and eventually decided there was enough popular support to make the idea public, by, uh, putting it on facebook and tagging people. Gahh the internet. Anyway, the idea was that in the summertime, people weren't at college, and while people definitely went on trips to Germany or Nepal or wherever else, that wasn't everyone and it wasn't the whole summer either. Chances were good there'd always be some decent number of people around each week, certainly enough to get together and spend a couple hours living and laughing together. I was a bit afraid that people might think I was being regressive or ignoring the honor of the last show or something, but there have been no negative reactions...Garrett seems somewhat ambivalent, Barak can only make it some of the time, some people take vacations, but there's definitely a core group of us now that's really enthusiastic and really happy to be back again after a year and a half of not doing any improv together. We're not paying our old teacher anymore – actually, I'm not sure she even knows we're doing this yet – and we're meeting at Nicola's house instead of renting a room in the city community center. We show up more or less on time, Nicola shows off her baby ducks and they poop on things, and we deal with the entirely new challenges of deciding what to play and figuring out when to end a scene, which were always done for us. But what doesn't seem to be a challenge, at least for many of us, is getting back into the spirit. Obviously we've all gone in different directions and had different experiences in the intervening year and a half, but there's really no sort of barrier making it hard to work together or anything. One could argue that it's a little disappointing that we're basically doing the same stuff as we did back then, without much apparent growth or increased ability, but we're every one of us rusty and time will tell. In the meantime we're still working on contacting old compatriots and filling out our roster...with merriment!
I don't talk about it too much at Reed because of all my failures to get into anything at all, but as anyone from Santa Cruz can attest, I'm a drama nerd. I grew up, in more ways than one, on the stage at said city community center, playing squires and heralds and elves and Belarius/Morgan and King Henry IV. (Part 1.) On two occasions, once through AFE and once through local company Kids on Broadway, I joined a group of peers in writing and putting on an original show, first "The Political Party" and second a show that Maya and Zoe W would much rather forget. I've even acted under current town-darling Terri Steinman, who cast me as a drunken, Gershwin-singing diva. The applause, naturally, was thunderous, even before I said a word. With Infallibull Productions friends and I wrote, acted in, edited, and produced various small movies...many of the parts I was in aren't up on that site, sadly, but I have writing credits, and someday we (or at least some of us) hope to get more of the old footage released. Improv, though, is at least as or more important than any of that, and I think it made me much more "complete" as a person. With the courage to stand up on stage, without any script telling you what to do, and be a character and react to what people are doing around you and be witty and charming the whole time comes the courage to do the same in everyday life. Although there the character you play is hypothetically yourself, and you don’t have to worry about making the audience laugh as often. The improvisational dance class I took at Cabrillo Community College made me a lot more comfortable with my body and moving it (although I still have a long way to go) – to the point where someone at some dance party this year went to great lengths in the middle of a song, while we were up on stage, to tell me that I was a great dancer – and improv did the same for my person as a whole. I still have a long way to go, but it was such a huge stepping stone in getting me where I am today and giving me the confidence to have and make friends whom I hadn't already known since we were very small. And besides all that, it's just really fun in a moment-to-moment sense.
All that's why I'm really glad people are so enthusiastic about this project, which we're currently calling "Bourne Again" but which could change as time goes on, who knows? I've heard "oh my god yes," I've heard "a thousand times yes," I've heard "fuck yeah…" this is not something that people think might be fun to do for a bit for old times' sake, this is something we have all missed, for well over a year, in some cases longer. We've made audiences happy before, and we haven't talked about a show yet – we've only actually met twice so far – but for the moment, we're making ourselves happy, and seeing each other again, and reconnecting, and that's probably all that really matters. These are boys and girls (or maybe men and women now) whom I've known for years; I've seen them get through any number of trials and tribulations, and I couldn't be prouder to be working with them again, even it is just for a brief little summer in our long lives and nobody can predict the future.
So as these entry titles imply, unbelievably enough, I got back to Santa Cruz about a month ago. Nicola had gotten back about a week earlier than that, but there were certainly some folks who hadn't gotten out of school yet, which meant a week or two waiting for schools to disband for the summer and people, particularly busy student-senator-type-people, to be freed up.
As a bonus, though, I got to go to graduations (two) and graduation parties (two and a half)! I was going to go to a third graduation, the Ark's, for an old Teen Writing Circle and elsethings compatriot, but while I got to the park the ceremony was in some fifteen minutes earlier, I couldn't actually find the graduation within the park for an hour and a half, and at that point it was all over and everyone had successfully graduated from high school. Much easier to find was the Pacific Collegiate School graduation, because PCS is about five blocks away from my house, so I didn't have to crank out a bike or bus pass or anything. It was a very amusing ceremony with enough student performances and a small enough graduating class that a large percentage of the seniors got to go up on stage for more than walking by the principle and getting a diploma and leaving. Apparently there are a lot of techno dance parties at that school!? I somewhat knew two of the graduates, though not too well in either case, and there were a lot of friends in the audience watching still more people graduate, so it was quite exiting seeing lots of people again for the first time in...in some cases, I don't even know how long. Physically, we've all more or less stabilized, but there does remain some room for personality development when one is invisible for long enough, which I suppose is a good thing.
The other graduation I went to, of course, was Alternative Family Education's, my old homeschool program. It was an extremely small class this year, eleven students and not even all of them present, though the length was bolstered a little by having the eighth graders graduate middle school at the same time. There was a bit of a "P.S." feel to it, because the previous two years had felt like something of a who's who of people I knew in AFE, one after another standing up in blue robes and making me weepy inside as they spread their wings for new horizons (or just more Santa Cruz)...on the other hand, two of the people who were graduating, and the hosts of the parties I went to, were people I've known (with various levels of sporadicity) for twelve or so years and consider extended family, so it was more than worth going to. Elowyn's in Nepal right now and will be going to Swarthmore next year, at which point we can talk to each other even less than during previous school years because she presumably won't have buses to call from, and while I didn't see Chris (or any of his family, I think) at all last winter, it's been great spending some time with them in the last month. We've had somewhat similar lives, which lends credence to astrology, and it's great being back and feeling roots and at home in a whole variety of different ways. I feel I can be one person here one day, another another, etc., and it's quite freeing and the people around are an important part of that. The picnic on the bus is yet to be topped, but there's time yet…
On the other hand, just last week I had practically unheard of connection to Reed, so it's not a totally exclusionary dichotomy. Ellen from the train had a birthday party up in Sunnyvale last Tuesday which I somehow managed to attend, although I was unable to find a key to tag "Australia" for her, and the other day, Lillian and Laura Sard and a couple of their friends swung by here for the night (and ate some of our food) as part of their road trip through California. Both were very nice experiences. A couple Reed students wrote me some weeks ago, and I sent them cookies in return, so contact is not quite as non-existent as last year, if still pretty close. It's the other world effect.
Another AFE event was Follywood, the annual "American Film Enthusiasts" film festival where everyone dresses up nicely, consumes fancy cookies and sparkling cider, and watches as notable members of the AFE community present films created by AFE students over the past year. My brother and I were an announcing team, heralded by the German version of the Bing-Bang song from Lazytown (I was dancing up to the stage, and apparently the tech people saw no reason to cut the music as long as I was still in motion, which was totally fodder for an EXTENDED DANCE NUMBER), and we both dressed pretty conservatively for the occasion. I didn't even wear my top-hat! He and I had a blowup around the beginning of the calendar year, and while he still hasn't actually apologized for it, we're getting along a lot better now despite not having talked to each other all last semester. We've played some games, talked about German, and bounced on the trampoline...it's a definite improvement over stonily ignoring each other. He is utterly turned off by my fond stories of Lane, but that's homeschoolers for you.
An interesting change I noted in myself recently between my (early-?)high-school self and who I am now is how I view the social structure around here. In high school, there were a few groups or "cliques" or what have you spread through the program, but there was definitely a group whom I could easily identify as the cool kids. I'd see them all the time – many of them were in plays and improv, for one thing – but despite my best efforts, I was never really a part of their gang. I occasionally even considered befriending people solely for the political advantages. I admired people and liked them as friends, but there was an undercurrent of "how do I get to be cool so you'll invite me to things?" As time went on, that didn't change too much, but I developed other ties, which the Teen Writing Circle helped with a lot, as I got to develop my own self there through writing, rather than existing as a general high school teenager. One way or another, I became friends, or greatly solidified existing friendships, with Athena, Julia, Elowyn, Nicola, and Cassia, although that last one of course went rather badly until time smoothed it over. These were people who cared about me and who talked about other things than I was used to, and they were also a large foundation piece for my mild misandry, which survives to this day. I still interacted and worked and played with the so-thought-of cool kids, to be sure, particularly Barak, but I was much less concerned about being one of them, because I fit in elsewhere.
These days, I'm probably more distant than ever...all the separation of graduation and going away for college seems to cause people to huddle in closer with a close group of friends and spend less time with those they know less, simply because there's so much less time to see people in and it has to be budgeted. So a lot of those people I've only seen, and only will see in the rest of the summer, a few times, and conversations have been brief, if completely friendly. I have various experiences during school semesters, and I know that they have too, and I know that they've lived through more than I will ever know about. And yet I want to know...not because that knowledge would bring me any sort of mystic access to any clandestine secret clubhouse or whatever, but because they're my friends, I care about them, and I want to know what's been going on in their lives and what all it's meant to them. I want to know what their projects are, what their plans are, because of who they are as people. I have a base I can fall back on if I need to – one interesting thing about being in Santa Cruz, particularly after having graduated, is the parent semi-fanbase I get, although I'm talking more about Nicola and folks – but in the meantime I can talk to anyone I like, and I am genuinely interested in them, and that seems to me to be definite personal growth and I am proud of it. Either that or it could just be a distancing effect where I get to feel that way when being cool doesn't depend on them, and I behave the same old way at Reed just with different people…
I don't mention it much, partially because it's kind of embarrassing and partially because it doesn't really matter anymore and I consider myself an unabashed part of the bike culture, but I only actually learned how to ride a bike just before I came to Reed. My motivations were that I knew it would make transportation easier, and that biking was, again, one of those things college kids do. I'm kind of a bad role model for non-conformity. Anyway, this summer has been the first time I've actually biked in Santa Cruz outside of to and from a local park...Reed was the first place I ever left-turned, handled stop lights, etc.; winter breaks have felt too short for biking; and last summer I was in Middlebury so much that I only had six weeks here, which all added up to my not wanting to figure out a way to pack my bike up and bring it down to California. However it turned out my father had an old road bike (i.e. one that's older than I am), and so now I'm using that to get around, and it's quite exciting. SC's a lot flatter than Portland, I think, although Nicola still lives on top of a hill, so that's nice and pleasant. I've already turned down a ride or two because I had a bike, although there's a cloud in that silver lining, as rides do allow for a little more conversation in transit. Ian A has tentatively offered to drive me (and presumably other people) up to Portland for next year if he can get his new car working by then...I am excited! And trying to curb that excitement because it might not happen.
For some several years now, stretching over several different meeting locations, improvisational theater has been a big part of my life. I was a member of the teen improv troupe 3 Days Later up until I went off to Reed, and was briefly in a troupe called A Little Off Center as well, which sprouted off from local improv troupe Um-Gee-Um classes. I've been in various shows, I raised money for improv festivals and been in the appropriately-named "Hundred Dollar Club," and I made the website, Myspace profile, and mailing list for 3 Days Later, which were all only ever so useful. I was appropriately saddened to learn that 3 Days Later was disbanding in December 2007 because so many of its members were going to colleges or getting mired down in other commitments, especially seeing as I got back into Santa Cruz exactly three days after the final show. I've had significantly less luck at Reed...I've auditioned both years for Reed's main improv troupe, Fellatio Rodriguez, unsuccessfully each time. (The second time I said to Kay, "let's go audition for Fellatio Rodriguez and get rejected and start our own troupe" and she agreed, and we auditioned, and they let her in, so that didn't work out.) Reed's other troupe, YAM, is much more open, but their schedule never matches mine, and when it briefly did last semester they changed it immediately. But as I wrote, Nicola and I did some improv for a while during Renn Fayre, and I mentioned to her that I wanted to put the band back together, and she agreed that that would be cool. Now, when Nicola is with me on something, I can do anything…
I scoped out some relevant people at a few AFE gatherings, and eventually decided there was enough popular support to make the idea public, by, uh, putting it on facebook and tagging people. Gahh the internet. Anyway, the idea was that in the summertime, people weren't at college, and while people definitely went on trips to Germany or Nepal or wherever else, that wasn't everyone and it wasn't the whole summer either. Chances were good there'd always be some decent number of people around each week, certainly enough to get together and spend a couple hours living and laughing together. I was a bit afraid that people might think I was being regressive or ignoring the honor of the last show or something, but there have been no negative reactions...Garrett seems somewhat ambivalent, Barak can only make it some of the time, some people take vacations, but there's definitely a core group of us now that's really enthusiastic and really happy to be back again after a year and a half of not doing any improv together. We're not paying our old teacher anymore – actually, I'm not sure she even knows we're doing this yet – and we're meeting at Nicola's house instead of renting a room in the city community center. We show up more or less on time, Nicola shows off her baby ducks and they poop on things, and we deal with the entirely new challenges of deciding what to play and figuring out when to end a scene, which were always done for us. But what doesn't seem to be a challenge, at least for many of us, is getting back into the spirit. Obviously we've all gone in different directions and had different experiences in the intervening year and a half, but there's really no sort of barrier making it hard to work together or anything. One could argue that it's a little disappointing that we're basically doing the same stuff as we did back then, without much apparent growth or increased ability, but we're every one of us rusty and time will tell. In the meantime we're still working on contacting old compatriots and filling out our roster...with merriment!
I don't talk about it too much at Reed because of all my failures to get into anything at all, but as anyone from Santa Cruz can attest, I'm a drama nerd. I grew up, in more ways than one, on the stage at said city community center, playing squires and heralds and elves and Belarius/Morgan and King Henry IV. (Part 1.) On two occasions, once through AFE and once through local company Kids on Broadway, I joined a group of peers in writing and putting on an original show, first "The Political Party" and second a show that Maya and Zoe W would much rather forget. I've even acted under current town-darling Terri Steinman, who cast me as a drunken, Gershwin-singing diva. The applause, naturally, was thunderous, even before I said a word. With Infallibull Productions friends and I wrote, acted in, edited, and produced various small movies...many of the parts I was in aren't up on that site, sadly, but I have writing credits, and someday we (or at least some of us) hope to get more of the old footage released. Improv, though, is at least as or more important than any of that, and I think it made me much more "complete" as a person. With the courage to stand up on stage, without any script telling you what to do, and be a character and react to what people are doing around you and be witty and charming the whole time comes the courage to do the same in everyday life. Although there the character you play is hypothetically yourself, and you don’t have to worry about making the audience laugh as often. The improvisational dance class I took at Cabrillo Community College made me a lot more comfortable with my body and moving it (although I still have a long way to go) – to the point where someone at some dance party this year went to great lengths in the middle of a song, while we were up on stage, to tell me that I was a great dancer – and improv did the same for my person as a whole. I still have a long way to go, but it was such a huge stepping stone in getting me where I am today and giving me the confidence to have and make friends whom I hadn't already known since we were very small. And besides all that, it's just really fun in a moment-to-moment sense.
All that's why I'm really glad people are so enthusiastic about this project, which we're currently calling "Bourne Again" but which could change as time goes on, who knows? I've heard "oh my god yes," I've heard "a thousand times yes," I've heard "fuck yeah…" this is not something that people think might be fun to do for a bit for old times' sake, this is something we have all missed, for well over a year, in some cases longer. We've made audiences happy before, and we haven't talked about a show yet – we've only actually met twice so far – but for the moment, we're making ourselves happy, and seeing each other again, and reconnecting, and that's probably all that really matters. These are boys and girls (or maybe men and women now) whom I've known for years; I've seen them get through any number of trials and tribulations, and I couldn't be prouder to be working with them again, even it is just for a brief little summer in our long lives and nobody can predict the future.