I attended an
art opening recently, meeting people I hadn’t seen in decades. The
sponsor, who had been my high school drama teacher, greeted me with a warm smile.
As we chatted, she asserted that I hadn’t changed at all. Not a bit. At all. At
first I was dismayed, thinking that my tailored knit ensemble and understated
jewelry had failed to redefine an awkward teenager as a sophisticated
gallery-goer unlikely to topple the statuary. I mumbled something I couldn’t
hear over an inner voice clamoring, “Oh my God, tell me you’re kidding!” and
launched into an anecdote illustrated with a thorough and varied
assortment of gestures, hoping that I was communicating just how much her
tutelage had meant to me. In the
late hours back at home, I realized that my over-enthusiastic display had surely
fueled her assertion that I remained as I had been decades before.
I have always
relied more on gesture than on speaking, as if communicating a request for the
salt across the table depended on the frantic illustration of a lunatic mime. Even
as recently as last night, I dipped my hand in a bowl of red salsa as I was
describing a poster I’d seen to my
dinner companion. This
habit of out-sized gesturing is of such long standing that a Humanities professor
once clasped my hands between his, saying, “Now talk” and when I was struck
dumb, laughed, released them and added, “Hmm. I just wanted to see if you could. Guess not.” I felt a certain vindication in later
years when an emphasis on gesture was promoted as a key strategy for teaching
English as a second language. My
gesticulations, bobbing and dancing around through years of teaching seemed to
keep my elementary students’ attention, although they may have been placing
bets on how soon and with which piece of classroom furniture I was most likely
to collide.
One would think
that such a dependence on kinesics would have made me a better student-actress
in high school than I was. Our early training was in mime, and I began to shape
objects in the air even in casual conversation. I prefer to characterize my over-the
top moments onstage as a soul-deep desire to get my point across
rather than a bone-deep klutziness. I was the Blue Fairy who leapt for the
papier mache tree trunk near the footlights as part of a musical number in A
Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and toppled it and myself into the front row of the
audience. In another play I was a burglar hoping to avoid capture by jumping
head-first into a large barrel that I did not see had been placed too far upstage.
When I vaulted in it, the barrel tipped over and wedged itself between the back
wall and the stage risers with me thrashing around inside it. A third time, I
was prancing off stage as the Mother Bear of the Goldilocks trio and bounced
off a pillar in the wings. Our teacher-director was impressed that I stayed in
character as I plopped down on my backside to the cement floor, still Mama Bear
wringing her hands under her chin.
A few years
later my love of the communicative arts re-emerged in my teaching. Students
love stories, and over the years I’ve taken a few workshops to refine my
skills. One of these gave me just a taste of pure glory. It was held at a
mid-town hotel. There, in a banquet room adjacent to the bustling dining area,
a staff member from the Arizona Theatre Company was using Alvin Schwartz's
“Tales to Tell in the Dark” to play theatre games with the Tucson Tellers
of Tales group. In one of the sessions, a small group was to mime the events of
a story told by a single narrator. My character was the vengeful victim of a
bully who’d died the week before. Not satisfied with just seeing him buried, I
went to the graveyard on a pitch black night with the wind rising and the trees
flailing (other gamers surrounding me, moaning and waving their arms about). I
kneeled on his grave, working up the nerve to stab through the mounded dirt to
ensure that my tormentor was truly dead and I was finally free. I looked up to
see my fellow work-shoppers encircling me, drawing closer, moaning louder,
reaching in and pulling away. I was so lost in the story that after plunging my
butter knife deep into the pillow on the carpet (I was supposed to mime
catching my coattail under the knife and so believe that the dead bully was
pulling me down to join him), I dropped to the floor wailing in terror. The
wailing tree spirits went silent. The lunch-time traffic in the restaurant across
the hall stopped dead. The restaurant manager came in to have a word with
the director. The clatter and bustle next door slowly resumed, and the workshop
participants drifted back to their seats.
I got up feeling
sheepish and in a secret way, just a little satisfied. Ah, the power of the
perfect marriage of motion and emotion. Surely you see what I mean.