Tired

Spent a long time this morning slow-reading the Frankie monologue.  Still need to get the Emilia down, but it's interesting if I do it one word at a time, how much I actually remember, and how much time I have to think about why I'm saying what I'm saying.  It's an exercise you usually would do with a scene partner as you start working on a scene, you'd sit across a table, or just facing each other, and read each word at a time.  (It can be slightly uncomfortable to do, releasing a lot of nervousness, or maybe that's just because I've always worked on those in front of other people.)  I don't know how it'll affect the delivery tomorrow, but it helped today.  Still not solid on the driving action, not with either of them.

Had a memorial service to sing at, and then had meant to walk with the other monologue, but took a nap instead, and then it was dark out, so tried to read it sorta' quietly on the bus until someone sat next to me.

Rushed to a dance performance, David Rousève/REALITY "Stardust," at Meany.  All I knew about it beforehand was that he used a Twitter feed in the background, and that it was partially to be annoying, to make a statement about how much we check our phones and email and Facebook even when we are with someone else, because perhaps we fear we might miss something important, and because I had heard that, I wasn't reading them all initially and was trying to watch the dancers.  But...they were important.  The whole thing was the story of a teenage boy, African American, gay, who initially lived with his grandfather, and then went into foster care.  And all he wanted was to be loved.  (And that story was told in the Twitter feed.)

It destroyed me.  I had my hand clamped over my mouth by the end to keep myself from sobbing, and it's the first show in a while that I jumped up for a standing ovation for.  Just powerful.  I felt myself alternating between heartbreak and anger, that there's that spark of humanity in all of us, and that anyone would snuff that out of someone else.  What right do you have?  That you would never know that because you need to have power over someone else to feel good about yourself...what effing right do you have???  That this kid looked at Van Gogh and got it.  Heard Nat King Cole and found a kindred soul.  Thought of pigeons as ghetto angels...and then how someone could take advantage of him, kill his soul that was just starting to find itself.  (Was he a saint? No, but none of us are, we all deserve to find our way in the world, or reason for being, should such a thing exist.)  Sure...it's "fiction" for the stage, but it's happening somewhere for real right now.  Someone takes someone else's power away, or slaps a label on someone and decides they know all they need to know about them.  They know nothing, and the label builds a wall, prevents them from seeing a human being, or learning anything.

Even when you know someone well, there are secrets you never reach, what makes anyone think they can know a stranger on a snap judgment?  They don't.  We don't.  We make up stories to keep ourselves separate, to justify our actions, our discrimination, our fears.

The labels we choose to put on someone else tell more about our own prejudices than they do about whomever we choose to label.

There are too many bullies in the world.  Open your heart.  Become more human.