DIARY
I have assorted, almost-disconnected images, but this was a striking year for me. From October through July I was involved six different productions and one rock concert (a record), I had gotten a girl to call herself my “girlfriend” for over a week (a record) at which point I broke up with her (also a first). Most significantly, in bright green shade of the sole coffee outpost at the Michigan Renaissance Festival, whilst sucking on a cinnimon stick they placed in my hot apple cider I was inexplicably and incontravertably convinced of the immeasurable wealth and depth and richness of alternative music. An upwelling of noble distortion… I sent in my BMG flier and ordered The Downward Spiral, The Crow Soundrack, some Melissa Etheridge album, Siamese Dream, and Core. By early October, the Smashing Pumpkins had become my new religion. In October, I was into Katie, with the aforementioned outcome. In November, it was Kate, but that didn’t work out. Several months of stomach aches. In February, I performed in Marvin’s Room as Charlie at U of M, and when I started The Flame of Peace at Flint Youth Theatre I fell for Claire, which was an embarrassing and self-effacing development. Mainly because she was very young, and I was fawning and pleading in a way that was almost apalling.
That puts me at about March.
March was the height of the Claire phase. It was the Flame was performed, involving an obligatory week off school to perform for other school audiences. This play… how shall I describe this play… many of the cast disparaged it, and I was a little skeptical myself, though probably more in retrospect than in the moment. One friend went so far as to call it “the flame of crap.” All that said, it was intended for younger audiences, and while we were performing for seventh graders, I wonder if many of the cast (primarily in high school at the time) misinterpreted the intended dialogue the show put forth.
That said, this is a funny production to describe. The stage was divided into a series of ramp and ramparts. The hero, Two Flint, (the name was a coincidence, I swear; the work was adapted) had been sent on a mission to rescue his Aztec tribe from invaders. There were then, two tribes, on operating on the basis of their position in Two Flint’s journey. One tribe was the ‘Village Tribe’ comprised of the actual people involvedi n Two Flint’s life. They were dressed in skin-colored unitards with headdress, loincloths, tunics, etc. The second tribe, of which I was a part, was the ‘Journey Tribe’ comprised of the specters and spirits Two Flint enountered on his way. We wore bright yellow unitards and red metallic headdress, loincloths, tunics etc. and wielded metal poles against one another and the hero. There were accidental onstage antics probably at every performance, as the costume pieces were all attached with velcro. When you’re fourteen or fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, you feel that you might as well be naked to be standing in front of three-hundred seventh graders wearing nothing but your cottons and a skin-tight unitard.
The life the play inspired (mesopelagic) was energizing… this was the play that, more than ever, solidified the FYT-group of my friends that held together four about four years. People came and went, some very early, but at this point I think we all gravitated to this one source from our different schools. Most of these kids were from Flint Central, Flint Southwestern, or Powers Catholic, which the most cohesive group coming primarily from Powers. An early form was a “love puddle” which, (weirdly enough, I never realized it at the time, but would have been a playground for all sorts of nervous speculations) involved ten or twenty of us laying in a heap against a wall and talking dazedly. But we were usually more typical… we ate Italian food on Linden Road between productions a lot.
Everyone’s exasperation with the whole Claire situation finally mounted and broke; it wasn’t as if I was having any luck on my own. I gave up. After the last performance, a bunch of us gathered and visted at Amy’s house. Greg was there, Jonathan, Katie, Kathryn, Greg and Chuck, Joy and John. Eventually, many of these people would be alientated from each other, and evidently I’m alienated from many today. It was late March, but a gray and still and frosty day. Later afternoon. We laughed and talked in the living room for awhile, and then I had to head home. I took I-75 to Mount Morris road instead of Pearson, which meant the sun was starting to slight down (long shadows) where the clouds broke behind old barns and corn field, and rows of still-skeletal trees. In Michigan, there’s little hint of leaves or life before April.
I got home, and that was that.
What were you up to in March, 1995?
END OF POST.