[I was just looking through my computer and I discovered my chapel speech from my senior year of high school. As I read through it, I was reminded of a part of myself I'd almost forgotten. It's been forever since I felt maternal or even felt like a part of a sisterhood. It's not that I can't live without those things, but it's always interesting to reflect on how I've changed over the years and what parts of me have grown vs. what parts of me have become cloistered away. So, dear readers, I invite you to join me at the gorgeous non-denominational chapel at Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts as I give my speech. It is Fall and the wooden pews creak every so often as a student shifts uncomfortably. Light streams through the bright stained glass windows depicting Columbus, Magellan, Shakespeare, and other great learners and explorers.
Up at the front of the chapel, I am standing at the pulpit. I am 18 and I am terrified. I inhale a deep breath, taking in the sea of my teachers and my peers, and then begin.]
“You’re gonna be a camp counselor?” Matt said in disbelief.
“Yup. That’s the way it looks right now.” I shrugged.
“Where?” He asked
“Camp Seafarer. It’s in North Carolina.”
“Camp Sea-WHAT?” Matt asked skeptically.
“Seafarer.” I said.
“Ha. Anne’s gonna work at Camp SEAFAIRY this summer.” He pointed and laughed.
That was the initial reaction I received from my friends last year when I announced that I had just been asked to be the director of the musical at Camp Seafarer, for girls, in Arapahoe, N.C. They were a little doubtful to say the least. They all saw me as a hopeless cynical drama/music geek who limited herself to only black attire. As far as kids went, some of my friends had seen a faculty child use a lacrosse stick to launch a graphing calculator at me. However, from my point of view, it seemed a simple task. I had directed a one act at Tabor and I didn’t think directing a show with kids could be that much harder. I might be an only child, but I had been a babysitter since age 10 and now I lived in a dorm. I figured that taking care of a cabin full of girls and living with them every day couldn’t possibly be that tough. I had no reservations when I signed my contract. What I didn’t know, is that I had just signed away my soul to Satan for two months of the summer.
I spent most of the first two weeks wondering what crime I had committed on God’s green earth that fate chose me to be a camp counselor. Everything seemed to go wrong. Not only was I accidentally welcoming people to “Camp Seafairy” on opening day. Oh no. That was the VERY LEAST of my problems. Southern drawls whirled around me and wafted on every breeze, while my Chicago accent sliced through the air. I was an only child stuck in a world of six hundred little sisters. Out of these six hundred girls, I looked after and lived with twelve thirteen year olds, obsessed with soccer, boys, and the fifth Harry Potter book, the thought of which made me ill. I felt like it would be impossible to make a connection with any of them. No matter how hard I tried to relate to their problems and advise them, it just seemed unnatural.
I was also in charge of directing “The Secret Garden,” a musical which the Camp Director selected because it seemed like a “cute” musical for kids. She had assumed it to be a nice little story about a little girl who plants a few seeds in some forgotten garden and learns how to fit in with her new family. However, the show really turned out to be about a rich hunchback haunted by the ghost of his dead wife and a little girl hardened by the death of her parents in the cholera epidemic who has to leave India and live in his lonely colossal mansion in the middle of nowhere. The show was entirely inappropriate for kids ages seven to sixteen, calling for English and Yorkshire accents and a lyric soprano, not to mention two strong male leads which would now have to be sung by girls. I heard 109 children audition for the show. Out of 109 girls, seventy five percent sang “Tomorrow” from Annie. Suicide was starting to sound like a good option. Things were only complicated further when I was told that I would not be allowed to make cuts. So now, not only had I ended up with 109 girls that I had to fit into a musical with only 12 roles, oh no, one of them was a 16 year old girl with turrets syndrome and was constantly screaming obscenities during rehearsal. In short, it was musical mayhem, an utter nightmare. My jaw dropped as I realized that I would be spending three hours daily in room with 109 girls trying to sing high “C’s” only to return at the end of the day to a cabin full of thirteen year old girls arguing over something so entirely trivial as speculations on who would die in the next Harry Potter book. I wanted to scream. My co-counselors and I started to replace the word “camper” with “hell-beast.” In otherwords “You look horrible, what happened last night?” “Oh, I had a run in with a hell beast.” Or “I just got a call; The hell-beasts are on the loose in the drama building, I’d better go over there and take care of the situation.”
One day, I was contemplating how bad a life sentence in prison could possibly be, when I unexpectedly had to take one of my girls to the health center. I was walking across a bridge with her and I was trying to make her laugh in an effort to distract her from her discomfort. Judging by the smile creeping across her face, it seemed like I had been relatively successful in humoring her. As we walked, she reached over and put her arm around my waste, and I put my arm around her shoulders. She looked up at me in this picture perfect moment and said, “You are so cool. You’re like a big sister, but a cool one who’s funny and doesn’t mess with my stuff.” She grinned and I laughed as I realized that in her own little thirteen-year-old way she was telling me that I had reached her, that for her, I had made a difference in just two weeks.
It became so vivid to me, then, what I had been doing wrong all this time. I had been so focused on what wasn’t going right for me that I had somehow let myself forget about these kids. Yeah, from time to time, things got hard, smiles weren’t genuine, and the hell beasts annoyed me beyond description. Those things were all distractions. I had forgotten that in signing that contract, I was agreeing to live not for myself, but for six hundred wonderfully individual girls who needed me to help them grow and learn. From that day forward, I dedicated myself to these campers who taught me so much about the importance of selflessness. Before I knew it, I felt like I wasn’t working at all.
It was around that time when I called Matt Linton to fill him in on how things had been going. I told him how the summer had begun horribly but that lately things had been going well. I told him about how my girls thought I was cool. His take on the situation was succinct and simply put. “You’re soooo going soft,” he said. I was totally opposed to that. I most certainly was not going SOFT. I was just getting… sentimental. I…cared.
Ok, Matt. I was going soft.
I hate to admit it, but I cried on the last night of camp during the candle light service. I cried and cried until there were no tears left and then I cried again after the campers left while I was packing my own things to go home as I realized that my most meaningful memories weren’t frustrating rehearsals or trying to avoid teenybopper conversations, but the look on the faces of girls who were bursting with pride as they took their final bow at the end of the play, girls who reached out to each other and supported each other at every turn, and in knowing that I was behind their successes, lessons, and confidence.
Since the end of camp, as my room-mate can attest, I receive atleast two long distance phone calls a week and innumerable instant messages from my campers.
The other day, I received an email from Betsy, one of my campers who was in the musical. She announced that she had just gotten cast in the musical at her middle school and that she couldn’t have done it without me. She called me a hero. And for the first time, I felt like one. I was a big sister… but a cool one.
I find myself increasingly unwilling to go to work, to suffer the doldrums and intense ordinariness of my “day job.” My mind is pulled, tugged every which way, every way that is not the task at hand. I need air to breathe, to write, to envision. Yet, I sit at this desk as this conflict rages inside of me. I sit at this desk and make rent, running out the clock. When did this happen? When did I become so boring for eight hours a day?
I want to scream sometimes, but propriety shuts my mouth. Responsibility makes me see my commitment through.
When the clock strikes 6 PM, I practically leap from my chair, tripping over my legs as I dive for the door. I dash home and open my lap top, finding all of my projects waiting for me as my brain sparks to life. The electricity courses through my fingertips and ideas buzz and beep all over my body. I am alive. I am whole. I am doing what I want to do, rather than what I have to do.
Suddenly it’s 2 AM and I must find a way to get to bed so that I can wake up in time to get back to work, back to being boring. The job isn’t hard. It isn’t even awful, but it still looms like this horrible black hole, sucking me in and depleting me of energy. Every day is like a Monday morning after a weekend you didn’t want to end.
There are never enough hours in the day. By the time I get moving with all of my artistic endeavors, it’s too late to get much done. I want to go to more auditions, but I have to be able to pay my rent every month. It’s a delicate barefoot dance on a floor of broken glass.
When does your day job just become your job? It’s a question all artists must ask themselves and they must be wary of the answer.
There are facts. You must pay rent. You must feed yourself. You must pay for electricity. You probably need money for entertainment and fun with friends once a week. You could live without that, but you’d most likely go insane.
When you are trying to work creatively, it often doesn’t pay from the outset, or if it does, it’s not very much. Right now, I’m having to make my money at work while simultaneously preparing my book, creating a webseries with a friend, and going out on auditions. Do I know if any of those things will make any sort of profit?
No.
If the book gets published, that would be amazing, but that doesn’t mean that it will absolutely make a profit. As far as the webseries goes, we’ll be lucky if we break even on it unless something miraculous occurs. As for auditioning, you have to get cast in order to make money, and even then, a lot of the plays you do at the beginning of your career are with people who can’t afford to pay you, or if they can it’s a negligible stipend.
That said, I have to make all of my money in my “day job” at the moment, which means that I have to be there so often that I hardly get time to work on my real job, my true purpose. I get home and my brain is humming, but my body is exhausted. It takes effort to think straight and coral my ideas into a cohesive thought process. I want to read a book and expand my mind. I want to write for this web column. I have to edit the current draft of my book. I have a script due on Wednesday to show to my collaborator. I need with every fiber of my being to do all of that in order to move forward artistically, but I’m drained. By the time I actually get sucked, body and soul, into any facets of my creative life, it’s too late to indulge my inspiration for more than a few hours.
Some people would say that when your day job starts to get in the way of your “real job,” that you should start looking for a way out. A lot of naysayers would reply with, “Why would you leave the job that makes money for one that makes a bit less money, or take two jobs that make less money but are more sporadic? I’ve go news for you. You already doing your real job.”
My response to them is that art is about risk, both on and off the stage. You have to believe that your art is your real job, whether or not it’s making money at that particular time. If you don’t, you run the risk of it becoming a hobby. George Seurat never sold a painting in his life, and yet he is known today as one of the main innovators of the pointillist artistic movement. He never gave up despite bad reviews and non-believers in his own time. He was somehow able to see his visions through and make enough money to get by. It was worth it to him.
If artists never approach the edge of that cliff and take a leap of faith, nothing will ever happen for them. It’s as simple as that old adage, “nothing risked, nothing gained.” Of course, it is hard to feel like going for that blind plummet, especially in this economic climate, but art still has to happen. My real “career” still has to be forged, even if it means reducing my hours at my “day job” and going out less on the weekends with friends. Like Daedalous and Icarus, I must fashion my wax wings and take to the sky, unafraid to fly towards the sun and hoping that by the time I reach it, my wings will transform into those of an albatross soaring across unimaginable distances.
Otherwise I’ll just become that boring person that I hate for 24 hours a day instead of just 8, and that would surely kill me.
Last night I watched Contact twice. Not once. Twice. In a row.
The movie came out in 1997 when I was 12 years old. I was in 6th grade and absolutely obsessed with outer space. I even had my own armory in my closet which consisted of space blasters, lightsabers, and Jedi armor. As a Girl Scout, I was taught to always be prepared. Let’s just say that if Darth Vader had materialized in my room, I could have easily been ready for an old fashioned Jedi showdown.
I certainly loved everything to do with Star Wars and most other sci-fi/fantasy universes, but I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to be an astronaut. I was serious about learning everything I could concerning NASA, its history, and development.
It was only natural for my father to take me one Sunday afternoon to see Contact, the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s book by the same title. As we sat in the cool, dark movie theater, I didn’t even resent him for not letting me get candy or popcorn. I was going to see a space movie and that was all that mattered.
As the story unfolded, I idolized the heroine, Eleanor Arroway, who was played to perfection by Jodi Foster. She was so brave and strong willed. She fought for what she wanted and at the end of the movie, no one even believed her story. It made me incredibly sad for her. I marveled at how the director had used well-edited clips of Bill Clinton to make it seem like he was speaking about building the alien transport system and responding to questions about the fictional events presented in the movie. There were even interviews with my favorite hosts from “The Today Show.” which I watched every morning before school. It was almost as if the whole thing had really happened right under my nose. The audience was implied as a part of the story because the movie had incorporated figures from our daily life.
I remember leaving the theater and tugging on my Dad’s arm and asking,
“Daddy, what’s a worm hole?”
“Daddy, I can’t believe that they didn’t believe she went to Vega!”
“Daddy! Which star is Vega?”
“Daddy! How long is a lightyear? No wait! What’s a black hole?”
The list went on and on and my dorky, lovable father, who is a professional know-it-all, patiently answered all of my questions. The movie had perked my interest in the mapping of space rather than its deeper themes.
Watching Contact 11 years later is a completely different experience. I’m an actress and not an astronaut. I’m a writer with a critical mind and not a child with a dramatic sense of wonder. After such a large perspective shift, anyone is bound to see things differently than when they were 12 years old. Still, I was especially struck by the difference in my point of view on this particular film.
I no longer saw a film full of whimsical science fiction and alien technology, but a story about how we as humans can reconcile faith in a modern world where science is sometimes made out to be be anti-religious. After all, we’ve gotten to the point where certain religious institutions do not want to teach evolution because they believe that its heretical.
When I was younger, faith wasn’t an integral part of my life. I’m the daughter of a Protestant mother and a Jewish father. We attended church pretty much only when my grandmother was in town and went to the synagogue only when a friend had his or her bar or bat mitzvah. I was allowed to believe in what I wanted to believe, but because of my own interests in science, I tended to side with Jodi Foster’s character in Contact.
I saw no evidence for or against God, but I did see a lot of civil limitations connected to Christianity.
I have always been very supportive of my gay family members and hearing the “religious right” tell the world that marriage is for a man and a woman has always seemed outrageous to me. My uncles have every right to same advantages my parents have. Seeing religious rallies against a woman’s right to choose abortion if she felt she couldn’t properly care for her child seemed like yet another misplaced limitation being forced on women.
As a child, I had seen religion as an obstacle and that’s how I identified it in regards to this film. I wanted Eleanor Arroway to be chosen to represent humankind on their mission to contact alien life and I was outraged that just because she didn’t have a strong connection to a higher power, that she was discriminated against. “What about that separation of church and state thingy?” I had asked my father afterwards.
Religion in the form of cult worship is demonized in the movie and made into the very the source of terrorist acts and the backbone of the suicide bomber who disrupts the alien machine’s first test, killing the initial candidate for the mission and destroying the entire aparatus.
What I wasn’t mature enough to recognize in 1997 was that “faith” can be separated from religion. To me, faith is an odd mixture of trust and determination. In Contact, there is a communal sense of faith in God that Eleanor Arroway doesn’t identify with. However, she experiences faith in the unknown throughout the whole film, even when no one believes in her project or in the end, her journey. She heads a project that is running out of funding which requires her to sit alone for hours, listening for a signal from beyond that may never come. Despite the odds, she knows she has to be there if it does. When others want to give up on her project, she insists that it’s necessary, convincing them of its importance despite the fact that she can’t provide a foreseeable result of her studies. When the other scientists want to add a chair with straps to the alien design for the pod, Arroway questions them. “Shouldn’t we have a little faith?” When she is offered a cyanide tablet, she refuses it, retorting that she didn’t come this far to bail out on the Vegans who sent their message across the stars. She intends to see it through to the very end and directly as instructed by the message she received. She trusts their plans for her with no guarantee of success or survival.
When the movie ended back in 1997, my 12-year-old self was most interested in the fact that no one believed that Arroway’s pod had traveled to Vega. I revelled as the president’s adviser stuck it to the movie’s “villain,” announcing that there although there was only white noise on the whole video recording of Arroway’s journey, it lasted for exactly the amount of time Arroway had claimed to be in transit form Earth to Vega.
“Ok to go,” Arroway states over and over again as she readies herself for that epic journey. She trembles as the terror takes over. She has no idea how this machine will work. She has only been able to speculate up until this point. Yet Arroway presses on. She has planned for this moment her entire life. The fear keeps her from being able to fall back into the comfort of her precious logic. She must simply be vulnerable to the experience.
As the pod moves through space, she can see through its walls,racing through worm holes and floating amidst gas formations only seen before in the form of Hubble Telescope images. Her eyes are wide. There isn’t even a hint of analysis or calculation in her gaze as she unstraps herself from the chair, looking out into the starry masterpiece. “So beautiful… It’s so beautiful,” is all she can muster.
When she finally arrives on the beaches of Vega, she is greeted not by an alien life form, but by her father, the man who inspired her to begin her work with audio analysis in the first place. She reconnects with the origins of her life’s journey, while at the same time she is meeting with the unknown, making contact with both past and future simultaneously. The Vegans never appear to Eleanor in their true form. She must decide for herself whether to believe she has had and encounter with an alien life form or merely hallucinated a meeting with her dead father.
“This is just the beginning. This is just contact,” Her father says to her, tenderly brushing her cheek with his fingertips.
Listening to that line, I think of all of those times I’ve heard people say, “That’s when I found God.” Arroway is given a precious, life affirming experience, something she cannot deny whether the experience was real or simply a vision.
Even though I’m not sure if I believe in God in the Christian sense, I can I identify with moments when I’ve felt something more, or gained a sense of the unknown. This film suggests that our great human need for discovering and connecting with the unknown is not only present in the ritual of daily prayer, but in our scientific reach for what lies beyond our star system. Science does not have to be anti-religious and at the same time we don’t have to believe in a higher power to sustain faith. We can sustain faith simply by believing in something great than ourselves, whether that lies in Heaven or beyond the reaches of the Milky Way.
