[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.
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.
I really am filled with hate right now. I tried to update my iPhone with 3.0 software and AGAIN it went into recovery mode and is in this odd loop hole where the computer tells me to restore it and then says there is an error and it can’t be restored. This happened once before and I took it into the store. They managed to restore the phone so that I could use it, but I’ve never updated it to the new software again for fear of having this very thing happen. I wanted to try to download it today so that I could download the Wordpress App, but it seems I have entered this annoying “You-need-to-restore-but-we-are-unable-to-restore” vortex again.
I made an appointment with the Apple Store, but there’s not an available time until Saturday, two days from now, at 5:50 PM. Even though that’s an inconvenience and it may ruin my plans for the 4th of July weekend, I HAVE to go on that day because my phone has to work. I can’t live without it.
I had forgotten what this is like. I actually feel naked. I’ve grown so accustomed to all of the tools on my phone, not to mention its run of the mill ability to, you know, make phone calls. I have plans to hang out with two people this weekend and without my phone, that may not happen. If it doesn’t, I’ll be a sad panda.
Ugh, who am I kidding? I’m already a sad panda.
I’m also pretty disgusted with how reliant I am on my iPhone. A few posts ago I wrote about how I was addicted to my iPhone and its different bells and whistles. Now I’ve progressed to going through actual withdrawal. I’m not kidding folks. I’m restless and I keep pacing around the apartment and trying to sleep this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach off. I keep wondering how people will contact me.
Would it kill me to be incomunicato for a few days?
Maybe I should just… move to the jungle and live off of fish I catch with my bare hands and water tempered with iodine tablets. I could even fashion a spear out of a branch and hunt boar. Maybe I’ll meet John Locke from ABC’s Lost. Ah, let’s face it. I’d never make it.
I used to be way more outdoorsy. I have taken several “adventure” trips in the course my blessed life. I went horseback riding with my parents in Arizona for two weeks. I’ve camped and rafted in Alaska for three weeks and gone on glacier hikes near Valdez. I went into the Montana mountains for three weeks and stayed out in the woods on solo for one of those weeks. I visited the Galapagos Islands and took naturalist tours. I worked with the National Park Service tagging sea-turtles and living on a boat in the Caribbean. I went white water rafting in the Colorado River and hiked out of the Grand Canyon.
So now I live in New York City. Rewind. What? How did that happen?
When did I become so tirelessly urban? Where has my inner cowgirl gone?
I think she’s still somewhere inside of me. I feel her stir in me whenever I can see a large expanse of sky, even if its only over Washington Square Park. I actually felt her today, of all days, while I was sitting in Grand Central Station.
I was trying to get a few moments of escape and serenity from my boss, who was making me do all sorts of annoying little tasks like canceling her Visa card and changing her legal address, both of which are real headaches for the actual person, let alone an assistant who is trying to remember all of her boss’ personal information.
As I sat on a bench, I noticed that there was a bird twittering and tweeting away. I knew immediately that it wasn’t a pigeon because pigeon’s coo.
Actually, if you ever get a chance to hear pigeon sex, its coo-rific. It makes me die laughing. I’m not a pervert, for the record, but they used to roost right outside of my window as a child. I often convulsed in giggles when I heard them going at it in a rousing “coorus.” Get it? Coorus, Chorus? Come on people! I digress.
As I looked for the source of the sound I noticed something tiny and dark running across the floor. I almost shrieked because I thought it was a nasty New York rat. Upon further observation I realized it was a red breasted robin. Phew.
My father is obsessed with birds and he taught me long ago how to identify one. Actually, we used have a huge one that lived in our backyard in Chicago. This type of bird is also significant to me because I loved The Secret Garden as a child and Mary Lennox, the heroin of the story, was guided by a “Robin Red Breast” to the gate of her Aunt Lily’s garden and he flew around the ivy covered, overgrown walls and kept the girl company while she planted seeds. That story was so gorgeous, both in text and on stage as a musical.
So there I was, overworked, underpaid, and sitting on a bench looking at my very own Robin Red Breast. This one was singing beautifully but upon closer inspection, I realized his wing was broken. He must have flown into the building and banged into a window or other reflective surface while trying to get out. It was so tragic because you never see anything but pigeons (AKA the rats of the air) in the city. Atleast I don’t. Then again I’m not specifically looking to identify birds.
It is a fact: This poor creature that reminded me of my childhood and a beautiful story will die. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. Perhaps he was singing for his supper. Perhaps it was his “Swan Song.” He must have been in so much pain. Maybe it’s stupid, but it made me tear up a little bit as I watched him waddle about. He even hopped over to me and just looked at me for a while, completely unafraid and uninhibited. It reminded me of how the animals had acted during my visit to the Galapagos Islands. The sea lions and marine iguanas would just sit and sun themselves on the beach. They hadn’t been introduced to fear of humans because they’ve never been hunted there. That whole trip made me feel like I was living in the Garden of Eden. The guide warned us not to touch the sea lion pups even if they approached us because the mothers would stop recognizing the scent of their young and disown them. They were so adorable. You just wanted to pick one up and squeeze it so badly. I don’t mean like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. I mean a comfortable cuddle rather than a life threatening clamp of doom.
As I watched my doomed bird-friend, I felt a similar conflict. I wanted to pick him up and mend him, but as we all know, birds are ridden with disease, germs, and God knows what else. Also, who am I to think I could “mend” a broken bird wing. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in theater. I’m not a veterinarian.
That thought reminded me of how when I was on my Outward Bound “solo” in Montana, I had decided to make a woven basket and failed miserably. I don’t know what made me think I would just naturally have the ability to do something like that. Did I expect it to be written into my homo sapien DNA? However, it was undeniably fun and it gave me something to do during the lonely days. I sort of remembered singing through the entire score of every musical i could remember and even the ones I was less clear on as I worked.
Somewhere along the way I traded simple pleasures and child-like curiosity for iPhone apps and rent checks. Some of that is just a part of growing up, but sometimes I think it wouldn’t be such a travesty if we all tried to retrace our developmental steps a bit and follow our silly impulses. Mind you, I’m not telling you to expose yourself to disease ridden urban creatures on the verge of demise, but a walk in the park to lie on the bedrock outcroppings and read clouds wouldn’t do you any harm.
