EVENT
Wow. Drew a relatively eventful month, and I’m not sure how well I will be able to describe it in the ten minutes left on my break.
The most significant event of March, 1995 for me was my involvement with the Flint Youth Theatre play The Flame of Peace, an children’s anti-violence story about an Aztec boy warrior, Two Flint, who goes on a journey to secure a blessing from the gods to save his village from warfare by neighboring tribes. Out of the literal couple dozens projects I worked on at FYT, this was just about everyone’s least favorites. The cast divided neatly into two tribes, one physical and one cosmological. The former dressed in nude skintight unitards and loincloths, making them look naked. The latter (I was of this group) dressed in red skintight unitards and yellow velcro-on loincloths with metallic plates, making them look like Power Rangers. Moreover, we were all swinging three-foot aluminum poles about, meaning that just about everyone lost their loincloth at least once during the run. The set was an angular rake with trapdoors and the like, and lots of fog.
We performed for all of the seventh graders in the Flint Community Schools and they quite predictably laughed at us.
My favorite part, though, was where I confronted Two Flint as the skeletal God of Death.
Certainly there were redeeming moments. This was the production when the FYT group really congealed and cohered… it had been around in an embryonic sense ever since the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but we’d basically all rejected all of our high schools in favor of each other as a dominant social group. It’s hard to convey to people… my Chicago and New York friends probably understand this too specifically, as peopel living together, growing up, being neighbors or from the same church or parish. Back home, it was strange because these schools were not close together. There was no truly comprehensive public transit. Most of us had just started to drive, and getting permission to drive was inconvenient. In short, we really did cohere as a social group that felt more important than our ties to Flushing/Powers/Central/Southwestern/Kearsley/Swartz Creek/Grand Blanc, and it may have assisted in this that seeing each other with regularity was actually quite a pain. Jon, John, Greg, Katie, Kate, Joy, Chuck, Gilbert, Amy, me. However things were evolving. Just as in politics, things didn’t remain still (ie. April).
It wasn’t all roses, though.
I had a crush on a girl, Clair M., who was 1) too young, 2) too immature, and 3) had no interest in me. It’s one of those things you’re retrospectively embarassed about; not the indecency of your conduct, but its impudence.
I’d just gotten over a relatively dangerous rift with another friend, and I liked moving in this circle.
I was too sensitive though, and that annoyed people.
I listened to my cassette of Pisces Iscariot by Smashing Pumpkins almost nightly. My favorite songs were Obscured, Landslide, and Starla.
I was invited to join the FYT cast of the summer production of Trace Titanic with an ensemble cast of profession actors that would tour to Minneapolis.
I got over Claire and started looking for someone new to crush on.
I decided to direct the Elysian Theatre production of a compilation of scenes and monologues called Maze. I typed up scenes and printed them out on our dot matrix printer.
Where were you in March, 1995?
END OF POST.