Maria in her own hands12/24/2023 We spend long Saturday afternoons running around the Coralville reservoir looking for fossils and talking about acting. If only I trusted in the wisdom of my own machinery. They regulate positive to negative impulses, similar to a circuit breaker: an excess of one emotion switches the current. Examples: A puppy is so cute you want to smother it a sunrise is so beautiful you cry a movie is so terrifying you laugh. “Dimorphous Expressions” they are called, an opposite, seemingly inappropriate emotional reaction to a positive or negative situation. There is psychological terminology for how I feel about you (probably a support group, too). We are two lanky kids naïve enough to be in the moment, two lanky kids who wear the word artist like a badge, who think the world will open up to them at the snap of a finger. We reminisce about when we were kids, when play pretend lasted for hours, when whole worlds and fully formed characters sprang from our imaginations, then bust-up laughing when Kenny tells us to be quiet because his mom is sleeping in the next room. It’s late when we collapse to the living room carpet and smoke Kenny’s cashed weed. And each night in Kenny’s living room when he plugs his iPod into the speaker, there’s that look you give me before the beat drops-the slight arch of your eyebrow, a dare meant just for me-before the music makes waves of our bodies and we give ourselves over to the ocean of sound. I know that when Kenny and I rehearse our make out scene, you always disappear. No one knows if you are gay or bi or straight, but I know that the night I kissed you in the front seat of your roommate’s van, you kissed me back. You are all length and angles, except for your face, baby cheeks and a round chin that practically disappear your blue eyes whenever you smile. You are crazy in the best way, cigarettes in your back pocket and light autumn jackets that smell of sweat because you have better things to do than laundry. He is everything women want, everything I should want, but I want a visionary. Kenny doesn’t understand why I’m not dating him. Kenny is still living at his parents’ house, but it’s okay because he’s six foot four and gorgeous and should probably just drop out of school and move to LA while he still has his six-pack. I think, the mark of an artist.Įach night after the show we pile into your roommate’s van and drive to Kenny’s. It is a testament of your commitment to your craft. I press my fingers to the red line where you pressed the knife. A string of red beads emerges like a necklace. Beneath the fluorescent lights I catch my neck in the mirror. Sometimes you are so committed to the moment that you press the knife hard against the bony part of my throat, harder than necessary, since the fake blood is not triggered from the knife, but from a bag sewn inside my white silk dress.Īfterward in the dressing room I wash the red corn syrup from my costume. Each night we find new moments-me fainting, you tripping over furniture-steering our ship toward the inevitable climax when your character finally wakes up to my deception and you tie my wrists to a wooden chair and slit my throat with a dulled blade from the props department. The script becomes a suggestion, an outline, and we fill in the scenes with play. You remove my gag and I wriggle my wrists free, and then we’re off. I roll to the lip of the stage where I hit my mark and sit up. I begin to rock back and forth, until I gain enough momentum to propel myself off the couch and onto the floor. When I feel your hand on the rug, I take my cue. He explains that a couple of broads gave him twelve hundred dollars to watch their rug until morning. I listen as Kenny, my co-conspirator, lays the trap for you. When the house lights dim, you and our castmate, Kenny, hoist the rug over your shoulders, carry me on stage, and lay me down on a saggy couch in your character’s shabby West Hollywood apartment. It is unclear why I begin the play this way, but as actors we do not ask questions, we do as we are told. Each night before the house opens you take great care blindfolding and gagging me backstage, then tying my wrists behind my back and rolling me up in an Oriental rug. You are cast as Gino, a dejected Hollywood dreamer with thick glasses and an even thicker head. It is your first time on stage, but it does not show. It is fall of our senior year of college when we are cast opposite each other in a play about betrayal.
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