June 17, 2010 – Loving the Process

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Wow. I just realized as I was finishing a previous writing that I do indeed love the process. At Tribal Revolution, on a creativity profile that Ariellah had us work on to get to know ourselves better, one of the questions was “Which do you enjoy more, the process or the result?” I just realized that I love the process. I love the result, too, definitely. But getting there is what drives me, what I love.

I love working on a story, researching it, editing it, fact-checking. I love learning things that I never knew before. I loved learning about the Star Wars Universe pretty much from scratch to write my first story. I loved studying Etruscan history, social and politic structure and burial rituals to add only a few  points of interest into a fan-fiction piece. The process, the need to learn and know those things and incorporate them into my art, it drives me.

I love developing and putting together costumes, letting the creativity flow in the pieces that I pull together, modify, or whatever. If I cannot buy what I want, I will figure out something else that will look lovely. I am not very talented with sewing but it doesn’t mean I cannot create. The make-up, the hair, the accessories, they are all part of the costume and all equally as fun to create. I mean, when else are you going to pack on the black eye shadow, just to smear it all over the place to be a crazy version of Harley Quinn? Not to mention giving yourself a Glasgow smile with red lip stain.

I love learning a dance, even though practice can be hard, I love it. The finished product only lasts a few minutes but, because of the practice, I can keep a dance piece in my head for years.

I love the creative process! I love the result, yes, but I love the process of putting things together. Watching the pieces fit, or fixing them so they do, learning new things to incorporate….creating.

June 16, 2010 – Leather-bound Life

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I love looking through my old journals. I have all of my journals from my first or second year in college until now. I’m not as prolific in writing in my journal as I used to be, though I am trying to still update it as often as I can. I would love to be able to leave those journals to my children someday; I think they would find their mother very interesting and, most likely, crazy.

One Christmas, when I was home in Cayman on break, the electricity went out on Christmas Eve. With no TV to watch with my mom and no music to listen to, I decided that some alone time was appropriate. I took a candle into my room, to my desk, sat down and opened up my journal. I began to write, just laying out my vacation thus far. Mom came into my room and chuckled at me. “Playing Jo, sweetie?” she asked. I couldn’t help but smile and nod, “Yep!” I enjoyed sitting there and writing by candlelight, letting myself fall into my thoughts, the starlight twinkling in my windows.

In college, I had an observation table at the Student Union, where I would sit and people watch and make comments in my journal, usually about the theatre students, who fascinated me. They were always so loud and boisterous and interesting to watch. It was like being at the butterfly farm or a bird sanctuary and trying to take in all the color and movement at once. I would sit there for hours and just write about what I saw and what was in my head. It gave me a certain sense of accomplishment, I think.

For a long while, I took my journal to work with me so that I could write in it during lunch, and, for a long time, it became my sounding board. The place where I could yell and scream and loose my venom. The first two years of teaching were extremely rough for me and my journal became the place of cries, prayers, and lamentations. When Ben and I were dating, I wrote everything down, what happened when, where we went on our first date, what it was like getting to know him. My students are amazed when I can recite the dates when we met, Ben asked me out, we had our first date, we officially became a couple, Ben proposed, we got married, etc. These were my firsts, my only’s, and I want to remember them.

If you have ever seen the movie “SE7EN”, then you will remember the scene I am speaking of. The detectives find the home of the man who has been killing people according to their vices (greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, etc.) and one shelves they find dozens of notebooks, every page filled, front to back, in every book, in some of the tiniest lettering. Morgan Freeman’s character refers to it as “his mind poured out on paper”. I like that feeling when I am writing in my journals, or on the computer. I enjoy pouring my mind out on paper and into print. There’s a freeing sense to it, like letting a weight off your back. I imagine that it’s a similar feeling to, if it were real, siphoning your thoughts off into a Pensieve. Yes, I am a geek. Deal with it. But when the thoughts flow and so does my pen or my fingers, I sometimes find myself sighing when it’s all over, as though I’ve run a marathon or built a wall and I flex my shoulders now that the weight is gone. I even enjoy the resettling of a new “weight” so that I have to pour myself out again to have it lifted. What can I say? I love the process.

June 15, 2010 – Light in the Dark

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At the height of day, the Darkness came. No one knew why or how or from where, but it came. It last for 10 days and 10 nights. Some went mad. It is even said that some died for want of light.

~ ~ ~ ~

She never considered herself to be special. Not a whit. She was short, scrappy, and loved to read. But she couldn’t talk. She had lost her voice to the Great Night. Her mother used to say that the Darkness scared her daughter’s pretty voice away.

Mayree sat in the cool shade, a scroll opened wide on her lap. Her long black hair was bound up with red yard, the vibrant color dancing against the stark blackness of her tendrils as her head bent over the scroll. She twirls her hair – one long, silky strand- around her finger as she read.

“Always reading, Mayree,” a voice above her drew her out of the world of the pages before her. Standing there was Tal. Beech-tall and russet-headed, Tal had always been there, ever since Mayree could remember. He had always lived in the farmhouse across the creek.

Tal’s smile was bright in his bronzed face, blue eyes shining in the sunlight, and Mayree’s fingers moved.

“Hello, Tal.”

He was one of the few people who had bothered to learn the little language that Mayree had created with her fingers for herself.

Smiling up at him, Mayree moved her fingers again. “How is your mum?”

“Oh, she’s fine. Her foot’s just a bit sore, though she’s threatened to turn Bell into stew.” The unfortunate cow had stepped on Tal’s mother’s foot two days before while the woman was milking her. No one had known that gentle Anya could swear like a blacksmith before then.

Tal lowered himself down next to Mayree, peering at the scroll in her lap. He could read, never really cared to. Mayree sometimes signed abbreviated version of the stories to him. “Are you ready?” he finally asked.

“Give me a minute,” Mayree signed and rolled up the scroll, hurrying towards the house. She soon returned with a large basket on her arm. “Ready,” she signed, and they were off to market.

The market was hot, dusty, and busy. A myriad of voices clamored to be heard, some offering, some refusing, and others haggling. Mayree pointed to the stalls that she needed and Tal guided her through the crowd.

Quite a few of the market folk knew Mayree after so many years, but she sometime still needed Tal to interpret for her. Market was one of her favorite things, no matter that she couldn’t speak. She was good at it, haggling in market. And Tal always interpreted clearly for her, along with that infuriating smile that said, “I’m just telling you what she told me.”

Some fruits, vegetables, some worsted wool for mother, some more meal and flour. Soon, Tal had to help Mayree carry the basket and there were still coins in her pocket. She split one to buy Tal a hot bun as a thank-you. With the bun in his mouth, he took the whole basket and hefted it onto his right shoulder, grasping Mayree’s hand with his left to weave their way through the afternoon’s crowd. Mayree smiled in her silence, letting herself be pulled along through the sea of people by Tal’s strength; it was one of the reasons that she loved being around him. He always was strong when she wasn’t and it made her feel safe. Soon, they left the dust and clamor of the market behind, heading for the outskirts of the village.

June 11, 2010 – My husband, my lover, my friend

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I am rarely away from the hubby, by choice. He’s, well, my husband, my lover, my best friend. I adore being around him, spending time with him, just being in the same room with him. So I don’t spend a lot of time away from home, away from him. Actually, it is difficult for me to do so. I find myself growing very homesick for him very quickly and thus becoming melancholy when I’m away from him.

Like this weekend. I worked really hard to set up stuff for the Game of the Month and yet I’m not even there. But I’m truly missing gaming with my honey. I miss him. I miss soothing his feathers when things get frustrating, making things easier by having the answer before he even had the question formed.

I guess I have become very used to be helpmeet and for the next day and a half, I won’t be helpmeet and I’m too far away to do any good anyway. But I miss him. I will sleep in a bed without him tonight and that makes me sad. I’ll miss his weight next to me, his warmth and sigh when he turns over in his sleep. It will be hard waking up in a half-empty bed in the morning. I know I’m only gone for two nights and I’ll be back by dinnertime on Sunday but still. I’m a long way from home.

It may sound like I’m whining and it’s not that I don’t expect to have a great time here at Tribal Rev., but I do miss him. I miss his presence, his sudden piping up with a new thought or idea to share. I will dress up tomorrow night without him to tell me how lovely I am or to make sure that I’m put together properly. No one dresses me better than he does.

Yep! I miss the hubby! Ariellah’s great but she cannot compare to my husband, lover, and best friend.

June 10, 2010 – Books are made of single words…

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“Books are made of single words…”

As you know, I love stories. I especially love fairy tales. But not the Disney-type fairy tales, though I was in fact a complete product of Disney movies when I was a child. It was the inception of a hellish 6th grade year, by the way. But, no, the fairytales that I enjoy are the ones found in books such as Perrault’s Fairy Tales, Grimm’s Grimmest, Black Pearls, and Kiss the Witch. These are fairy tales as they were originally intended, cautionary tales, morality tales. Dark stories of poor judgment and bloody consequences of evil, foolishness or disobedience.

I’m not entirely sure why these stories draw me or why I enjoy them so. Perhaps it’s the darkness in the stories; perhaps it’s the idea that not all fairy tales are pixie dust and happy endings. I am a dreamer, but I also know for a fact that not every story has a happy ending or that not all new peasant-to-princesses are kind-hearted and magnanimous to those who wronged them. I like that they are human with faults and tempers like the rest of us. For example, in Bill Willingham’s precursor to the Fables world, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, it is Snow White who revenges herself on the seven dwarves for what they did to her and her sister Rose Red. She uses her growing knowledge of swordplay (the wedding gift that she requested from Charming) to kill them off one at a time.

I’ve devoured so many books like that that I can find, such as Just Ella, The Goose Girl, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Mercedes Lackey’s Elemental Masters series, Melting Stones, The Fair Folk, The Fairy Reel. It’s not just fairy tales, it’s the stories of the Fey Folk as well that I enjoy more when they are dark. I prefer Peter Pan as a child thief and kidnapper than as a hero; he was a self-centered little prick after all. I prefer stories of fey who calculate their use of humans rather than grant wishes with the tinkle of a bell. I enjoy stories of magic grounded in the earth rather than in pixie dust. I want a talking heart of a mountain called Luvo, just like Evumeimei in Melting Stones. I want to learn fire magic through the tarot path like Eleanor in Phoenix in Ashes. Stories that are not all talking animals and happy endings for the characters. Stories of characters who have to dig deep down inside to survive the torments of others, the difficulty of their situations, who have to grow up a bit and be honest with themselves.

Stories like Brom’s The Plucker where you are dealing with dark forces but, at the same time, it’s the toys that must save the day, those are stories that draw me in and captivate me. I love to be lost in stories, to find myself surrounded by the characters in all their darkness and light, in all their triumphs and difficulties, in all their blood and blue sky. I would throw my arms around Bigby Wolf and cuddle him like a puppy, regardless of the fact that he is THE Big Bad Wolf, EVERY Big Bad Wolf in every story and he has caused untold harm and death in his past. Yet he has seven beautiful cubs that he would do anything to protect, including cursing his own brothers. I find him fascinating and endearing.

I love fairy stories and fairy tales. But make them dark and difficult, not just bright lovely. Like Giselle in Disney’s “Enchanted” found out, it’s not all cream puffs and happy friends. Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself, raise a little hell, and work for your happy ending, over and over again.

June 9, 2010 – Preparations

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Something’s got to give. When I get busy and overworked, something has to give to make way for something to get done. Usually, it’s the fun stuff that has to be dropped off for a while. Take today, for example. I had to clean the house and finish pulling things together for Ben for our area’s big gaming event this weekend. I didn’t do it because I had to. I knew that Ben had to get his homework done and this stuff had to be done, so I went ahead and did it. I hope that everything goes alright since I won’t be there and I took care of most of the details over the past few months. I have done everything I can to make sure that things go off with as little stress as possible.

I feel badly when my fun stuff has to be laid aside because it’s my physical outlet, but it happens, I know.  I do have to be grown-up sometimes and make the necessary decisions. Besides, I’m off for a weekend of “physical outlet”. I just hope that I will be able to absorb everything and put what I learn into practice.

I know this writing sucks but it’s been a very long, hard-worked day and I’m more than a bit weary. But I didn’t want to flake out before I have even gotten a week’s worth of writing in. I will try to keep it up, even as I travel.

June 8, 2010 – Belief

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I have often been asked why I believe what I believe. How can I believe in someone that I cannot see? How I can I believe in a God who has had so much killing and violence done in His name? Why do I love God? How can I be part of a religion that can, often, be very legalistic and, in some cases, downright intolerant?

These are not easy questions to answer, especially for me. I am not a theological scholar. I am not a philosopher. I am a simple woman. I was raised in a family of believers. “Aha!” you might say, “It is your parents’ faith.” No, it is mine as well. I have struggled with it and rejoiced in it as well in my 27 years. I have had friends that thought I was an absolute freak and fool to believe in a God who became as a man and walked among us, suffered a blameless death as sacrifice for our wrongdoing, and rose again to speak peace and love and help and kindness. They looked at me goggle-eyed and shook their heads pityingly. I have even had some friends get almighty angry with me for believing what I do. Not because I had done anything to them but because of “the principle of the thing”. One of my conversations with someone that I met in grad school consisted of him looking at Ben and I and telling us point-blank, “If you’re going to tell me that I’m going to hell because I don’t believe what you believe, I don’t want anything to do with you.” I can tell you for a fact that neither of us has ever said that to someone. We want to live the message that we believe Christ brought – a message of faith, hope, love, and peace – but we will never beat you over the head bloody with it. Never. That is called legalism, children, and is generally frowned upon by most Quakers. I do not believe in burning “heretics” at the stake; I do not believe in shunning people because they do not believe as I do. However, if someone abuses me and despises me merely based on what I believe, it doesn’t mean that I have to stick around either, to be perfectly honest.

Someone once asked me, in the course of a Facebook game, “Why do you love God?” I had to sit and think long and hard about that before I wrote back an answer. Here is what I told him:

In all honesty, I am not sure that I can say that I ‘love’ God. I’m not sure if I can apply the idea of love (the way that humanity understands it) to God or not.

I believe in him, in his involvement in my life and those of my family and friends and I do my best to love and care for others. By all rights, I should not be here, should not have survived my birth. The circumstances surrounding that tell me, at the very least, that God has a plan for my life and that he must have loved me beyond condition because there isn’t anything special that separates me from other human beings in my importance or lack thereof. To believe in God and his sacrifice [and plan] for my life and my soul makes the most sense to me and brings me comfort. So I don’t know if I can say I ‘love’ God but I certainly believe and have faith in Him and what Jesus taught.

The idea of loving God is a hard one to vocalize. We humans are not used to the idea of getting something for nothing, of a free gift. All our lives, everything has cost something. Even human love and devotion can be deterred at times. But a love that gave instead of took, that forgives and doesn’t hold it against us? That’s a very difficult idea to take in. As a human being, I cannot sit here and tell you that I love God like I love my husband. I am in awe of God, yes, and I love the ideals of the message held in the Bible. Yes, I understand that the Bible as we read it now was voted upon and compiled by human beings. Yes, I know. That doesn’t mean that I don’t find something in there almost every time I read that encourages me, helps me, and guides me when I need it.

My faith is important to me, so very important. That does not mean that I do not question it, that I am a giant in faith. Goodness, no. I’m still learning, every day, what it means to believe and hope and love, not just God but the people around me. What it means to be patient, self-controlled, joyful, gentle. I am trying to live the good of my faith every day. For example, I want it to become natural habit to compliment rather than criticize, to answer patiently rather than let my temper get the best of me. I know that I failed at such things many, many times and will probably continue to do so even as I work on it. But, as I have said before, I’m pretty sure that I am not done yet.

 

Author’s Note: If I have offended anyone with this writing, I apologize. This was rattling around in my head all these past few hours of the morning and I try to listen to my gut when it tugs on things like this. Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.

June 7, 2010 – Them

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She glanced around the room furtively, like a deer caught in a thicket and listening to the hunters coming for it. She peered into the bright corners and under the wide expanse under her bed. They were there; she knew they were, even if she couldn’t see them. They whispered to her, hidden in the brightness of those corners. She could seem them sometimes, wisps out of the corners of her eyes. If she tried to look, no matter how quick or sneaky she was, they would be gone. And she was left with the illusion of being alone. However, she could hear them all of the time.

Little whispers, little chatters, little snarks, little bites. They pricked at her skin like sharp needles, breaking skin, drawing blood. No, not blood. Words are what seeped out of the woods. She could see them. The words that she should say, words that she should use to fight back. But she couldn’t say them. All she could do was sit there and watch them bleed out of her, leaving her defenseless. The room was stark white, tiled empty but for her bed. Nowhere to hide from them. Even if she buried herself in her bed, stuff the pillow into her ears, she could still hear them.

“Stupid girl. What did he ever see…”

“Coward! She trusted you!”

“Failure, it was so easy!”

“Just finish it. You can at least do that, can’t you?”

They – the people, not the voices – stuck her with needles, too. They said it was medicine, that it would help, but it didn’t stop these things. At night, in the dark, she saw eyes glinting in the blue moonlight, sharp teeth, hooked claws. The medicine made her sleepy, her limbs heavy; she couldn’t even raise her hands to cover her ears or her eyes. Her grandmother had told her about the Things that go bump in the night. These had to be those Things, the Ones that dragged you away into the darkness that appears where you don’t look for it.

Down, down, down. Down the rabbit hole, into the Matrix, through the looking glass, into the pool. Down, down, down. Away, away, away.

The room was stark white, tiled empty but for her bed. Nowhere to hide from Them.

June 6, 2010 – To Love One’s Self is the Beginning of a Lifelong Romance

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“To Love One’s Self Is the Beginning of a Lifelong Romance”

I like me, I do. I’m learning to like me more and more. There are some things about myself that I still do not like, of course, but I am learning that I am a rather likeable person. I’m friendly, smiley, courteous, kind, helpful…goodness, I sound like the Boy Scout Law. I understand fully that it is difficult sometimes to merely like yourself, much less love you.

I sort of felt, for most of my life, that something was wrong, i.e., I wasn’t perfect. I did indeed make mistakes, lots of them, and if people found out I wasn’t perfect, life would be over, ruined, and I’d be outcast. Yes, it seems a little silly. It’s OK, you can laugh. My imagination has always been in overdrive. In college, I was able to start defining myself in my own skin, away from those who constantly told me that I was a miracle baby and that all my parents’ expectations rode on me and I was a wonderful example, blah blah blah. Not that I didn’t appreciate their encouragement and their faith in me. But after seventeen years, I still didn’t even know who I was without them.

I enjoyed (and hated) clawing my skin off down to the tender layer and starting over. That doesn’t mean that I became a totally different person. My values, personality, morals, and faith are very much intact, but I wanted a deeper understanding. I wanted to know why I believe what I believe and why I act the way I do. I began to pay closer attention to my parents when I came home on breaks: how they acted, how they reacted, how they worked and spoke, etc. They are completely different people, absolute opposites. Introvert, extrovert; practical, emotional; list-maker, risk-taker. I found that I do indeed possess two different sides on one coin – the abstract and the linear, the spontaneous and the practical. On a Gregorc scale, I measure the act same on both sides of the y-axis – 28 in abstract and 28 in concrete. My colleagues were amazed by this and I just shrugged and explained, “Those are my parents. That’s my mom (concrete) and that’s my dad (abstract).”

As I have gone through (and am still going through) this process of getting to know and like myself, I have found things that I do not like as well. Such as my silence. I have never blown up at anyone when I am angry; I cannot even force myself to do it. In my nuclear family, you didn’t do that. You kept your feelings to yourself. The rest of the extended family yelled and screamed and threatened, but we didn’t. There are times when I want to yell and scream at people when I get angry but it’s like my voice freezes inside me and I settle into a heavy silence with even heavier thoughts and, usually, more than few tears. I may eventually talk later but only after I have suffered through that silence. I am working on being more open with my emotions and my feelings, more honest as to what is running through my head and my heart.

There are things about me that I truly like as well. I love my adoration for the subject I teach. I am English major/Literature masters/obsessed reader first and a teacher second. For me, the pedagogy flows with my love for the literature, not from striving for the test scores. One of my favorite teaching experiences this year was standing before my advanced 8th grade students and reciting the tumultuous storm that was Henry VIII, his wives, and his children’s reigns, by heart and with great gusto, in order to set up the backdrop for Elizabeth I’s reign during Shakespeare’s time. One of my students piped up as she was leaving, “I wish our Social Studies teachers loved history and were that passionate about it.” I thoroughly enjoyed it, as well as shocking them with the amount of lines from Romeo and Julietthat I still have memorized. Jo March said, “The play is the thing!” For me, the story is the thing. It is a thing of greatness and beauty and power! I am a compulsive book worm and I love how excited I get over a new book, how everything around me melts away and the only sense and mental functions I possess are to see, read, and comprehend. I cannot hear, I cannot speak, I cannot move. The story has enthralled me and I am content to be its captive.

So, yes, as I get to know me, there are things I need to work on, to mature in. But there are also things that I find I adore more and more every day. I was perhaps a prodigy mentally, academically, and artistically but a late-bloomer emotionally and internally. And, you know what? It’s all right. I’m quite obviously not done yet.

June 6, 2010 – Pretend Time

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“Pretend Time”

You know, there are some cases in which being a drama queen isn’t a bad thing. If it’s actual drama, it’s perfectly appropriate. In school, I never got the lead in any of the Easter or Christmas plays, though Heaven knows I auditioned. They always went to the same person. Though if I ever got a part where I had to interact with the lead, I did so to steal the show, I will happily admit. Perhaps that was part of the reason why I enjoyed my Oral Interpretation class in college so much; there you learned to read so that it didn’t sound like you were reading. When I acted, I didn’t play a character, I became it. I suppose that’s what you would call method acting.

In college, I was introduced to the wonder that was Masked Bandtiz: a series of ad libbed movies that my friends shot on campus. A good vs. evil story, the Banditz kept the campus of the University of Evansville safe from the machinations of The Affiliation, who sought to take over campus and use it to influence the students to their own means. On my 18th birthday, towards the end of my first semester at UofE, I participated in my first Masked Banditz filming, as a minion sent out to destroy EKO, the main female Bandit. EKO was played by the woman who would become my mentor and “duani” (bosslady) in college. Needless to say, it was an honor to get my butt beaten by her, and the movie turned out great. However, I was not content with remaining a “minion”. That night I made the goal of becoming the head of the Affiliation, the main villain, someday throughout the course of our movies. And what can I say? I did. An entire movie revolved around me as the main antagonist and instigator of the Affiliation on the campus of USI across town. It also came along with the best fight scene I have ever had in my life; I still have some of the scars to prove it. I was larping before I even knew what larping was. I even larped “Castle Wolfenstein” for a friend’s birthday; I was a medic.

I adore what my mother-in-law calls “pretend time”. I kept myself gorgeously occupied as a child with long chain stories that could last for days and required no one else to narrate and play them but myself, speaking for my toys. I would compose huge verbalized stories based on picture that I was drawing when I was 4 or 5. I sat on the arm of the couch and pretended to ride a horse into the TV when I watched “Young Riders”; I was one of the cowboys (thankful that one of them was actually a girl).

So I was prime material for larping when I met Ben. It took a few months of him explaining the game to me and helping me build a character, but, finally, in January 2005, he took me to my first Vampire: The Requiem larp. I recognized the book, actually; I had seen a boy with it during my senior year of college and I remember calling it the “creepy red book”. I trembled all night as a terrified thrall (a human controlled by a vampire, a servant) on her first foray into the night-world of vampires. In fact, I don’t think anyone had played a ghoul in the troupe game before I did, so I unwittingly began to set precedent. By the time I left the troupe game, there were rules in place that every new player had to begin as a ghoul and work their way up, ghouls’ heads were never higher than their regnants’ (ie, kneeling on the floor when your regnant sat), and all ghouls wore some sort of binding or “collar” around their neck to signify their position (girls normally wore ribbons, men wore a necklace or something of the like). It amuses me to see some of those things still in practice in game 5 years later. The ribbon came about, honestly, because I had a length of ribbon with me that I couldn’t decide what to do with so I tied it around my throat. STs and other players liked it and thus it was. Fun times!

I enjoy letting myself fall away and occupying the life of someone else for a while, someone who may be similar or vastly different from me. There is a sense of freedom to it, to inhabit the mind of another person, however made-up they may be, let their confidences or fears wrap around you and act accordingly. I once played a ghoul character that had been in an accident and the fear center of her brain destroyed because of it. Now THAT was amusing. I think like my characters, move like they do, speak like they do. Oh, Mel is still here, of course, but she is sitting back and enjoying “pretend time”. And pretend time is lots of fun when you can do it with other people. Ben’s mother laughs at us and teases that we didn’t get enough pretend time as children. We assure her that we most certainly did but we enjoy it so why give it up? I spent my sunny lunch hour as a child playing pretend with the other children. Sometimes it was house but, especially in kindergarten, it was Peter Pan. I was either Wendy or Tiger Lily and, of course, I was in trouble, captured by Captain Hook. And I didn’t want to be rescued. Never. Even at the age of 5, the drama of it all was too intoxicating and I was just too much of a drama queen to let it go without a fight.