Do you know what I mean, or the return of the gesticulation

 

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.