Well, I did not see this one coming.

January 8, 2011

Well, I did not see this one coming.

One of the most shocking things anyone ever said to me came from my Mary Lyndon hall-mate Sally–one of the very few fellow dorm residents I ever talked to much at all–in my junior year of college.

She told me I had “mad style.”

I had never considered myself to have very much style at all, let alone mad style.  I was always a nerd in school.  Lately I had taken to wearing skirts with t-shirts and sneakers.  I was trying to figure out some way to better express my femininity while remaining comfortable, and occasionally putting some of my new found awareness of line, silhouette, and color from costume design class to work for me in the many fine thrift stores of downtown Athens, GA.  But to be someone with style, was a fate that had never crossed my mind as a possibility.

So, having never gotten all that good at taking compliments, it was with similar awkward though delighted surprise that I found myself the recipient of a Stylish Blogger Award.

My award comes from Aspergirl Maybe, who is blogging her way through the book Aspergirls: Empowering Females with Asperger Syndrome, by Rudy Simone, herself an author, musician and comedian with Asperger’s Syndrome.  It’s a marvelous, concise, useful and emotional book, and I thank Ms. Maybe for introducing me to it and for her ever honest and fascinating blog.

As a condition of accepting this award, I am supposed to pass it on to three more blogs…and tell you seven things you don’t know about me.

The winning blogs are:

1.  A Year of Plays, by Anna Moore.  One of the things you wouldn’t expect about working in theater is that it’s really, really hard to get out and see theater.  Anna pledged to see and write about one play a week for a year.  She’s still going, on a less strict schedule…and producing a play and starting a theater company.

2. Pomo Freakshow’s yet-to-be-wittily-named blog, by Kestryl Cael Lowrey.  I’ve now seen two absolutely stunning one-man shows by Kestryl, and want to wish hir all possible encouragement and joy in hir new blogging exploits.

3. The Intimacies Project is a collaborative multi-media public art project of dance, poetry, and visual art, which last year did a series of free performances from a storefront space in the Port Authority bus terminal, inviting people in off the street to get a little art in their lives.  One of the dancers involved, Billy, is someone I’ve worked with before, and poet Claire Donato is a friend of a friend.

The stuff you don’t know about me is a little bit harder.  Oddly, while I’ve always conceived of myself as a private person, I was realizing the other day that I actually have very few real secrets anymore.  There’s almost nothing about me that somebody doesn’t know.  The strange part is that almost nobody knows all the same things…I feel like people know different versions of me entirely depending on when they knew me.  So the following aren’t anything that I guarantee you didn’t know about me, but rather that you may not have guessed, depending on what part of my life you came from….

1.  I can in fact curse.  I’m actually very good at it.  Around the apartment, I have the mouth of a sailor.  In the interest of professionalism, I try to keep a lid on it in rehearsal, which often leads to the hilarious misconception that I can’t curse…and a lot of shocked cast members when tech week rolls around and they hear me drop the f*bomb for the first time.  In college, I auditioned for the role of Catherine in Proof, and the director asked me to say “fuck you” to her, just to make sure that I could.

2.  I really enjoyed acting classes in high school.  Other people were shocked, because I’d always been so shy, but I loved learning that I had the power to create an illusion, and the powers of expression I had while being somebody else.

3.  I have a biology degree.  It’s sort of a long story.

4.  I drank a lot in college.  Like, a lot.

5.  I love living in New York, but I miss so many things that I don’t have here: hearing owls and crickets at night, being able to see the stars, a real porch, open sky.  I’m not sure when, not even in the foreseeable future, but sometime I might have to leave NYC for someplace quieter.  But I worry about being able to make a living someplace else.

6. My favorite words are all the ones without vowels.  I do not believe that ‘y’ counts as a vowel; when they taught us in first grade that it did, I just chose not to believe it.

7.  I wish I went to church more than I do.

Anna and Kestryl, come pick up your award anytime!  (Intimacies Project involves multiple people, so I don’t expect them all to complete the lists.)

And lastly on the topic of unexpected things, as it approaches one year since I started writing this blog, having very little idea of where it would take me, it’s become one of the unexpected pleasures in my life, along with the interaction it’s brought with people both old and new to me, so I thank you all for reading.

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