Scotland The Brave: February 1993

I walked out of the hall in the arts center today from Shakespeare rehearsal and found Kara and Stewart making out against the brick wall beside he old art storage room where the guys used to practice “metal” or whatever band last year.  Now it pretty much sounds like construction all the time and between that and the constant thumping of the wrestlers on the stage[1] and the hellacious sound of Caitlin’s bagpipes[2] WHICH YOU CAN HEAR EVERYWHERE FOR LORD’S SAKE, it’s hard to find a quiet place to run lines.  Rebecca and I have been sitting on the big table in the auditorium lobby, where we were interrupted by the wrestling team running sweaty laps up and down the stairs. But then the wrestling coach told us we weren’t allowed to sit up there anymore because we were distracting the team.

I guess getting the whole theater wasn’t enough for those neckless wankers.[3] I hate sports.

So now the hallways, by the music room and that’s why I keep running into Kara and Stewart in awkward moments. They’re supposed to be running lines from the whole Angelo and Isabella[4] scene, so they say, and even though I’ve never understood the Stewart thing, at least Kara’s not hanging out with that whole seersucker miniskirt crowd right now. All of those girls are mean bulimics[5] and they hate me.

I am friends with at least four people who really believe the lyrics to “Black” are the best poetry they’ve ever heard. What will I do?  I worry that I’ll never find people who can truly understand me.

PS: The Music Teacher just walked by and told me the bagpipe was the instrument they play in hell.

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[1] At the end of my sophomore year, the school tore down the building containing the wrestling room in order to construct a fancy new student center. The wrestling team was given the entire theater to practice and hold matches during the their season. That decision canceled the winter play. The School always valued “team sports” over the arts, so this came as no real surprise, but most of us drama kids had already figured our schedule around a winter play. We wrote a petition. I penned a fiery editorial to the school newspaper and we convinced the young, then under-employed wife of one of the English teachers to sign on as our director and with a little negotiation got permission to build out the music room ourselves as a black box theater. The wrestling team had first priority on the stage for two whole years, wasting the real theater with their occasional meets that no one came to and a lot of grunting and useless sweating.

[2] Required afternoon activities also included individual music lessons and studio art (as well as the traditional sports, mountaineering, drama and horseback riding). Caitlin’s instrument was the bagpipe. The music teacher put her in the chapel because the chapel was basically the only place on  far enough away from the other buildings  that her practicing would not literally stun the entire campus into horror-struck silence with all the squawking and droning. On the other hand, the chapel was kind of in the center of everything so there was no place to completely escape the sound.

[3] Welcome to my English slang phase! Good news: it’s brief.

[4] The play was kind of a Shakespearean Revue.  And the Angelo and Isabella scene is from “Measure for Measure.” If you don’t know the play, Angelo, a zealous, though corrupt public administrator, tells Isabella, a rigidly pious nun, that he will commute her brother’s death sentence (itself earned from illicit fornication) if she will break her vows and sleep with him. It’s an ugly, weird, uncomfortable scene in an ugly, weird, uncomfortable play (and still one of my favorites, by the way). The Young Director blocked the scene as a heated negotiation that turned into a borderline sexual assault. It was pretty rough stuff for sixteen-year-olds. Given that the administration regularly censored the living shit out of our scripts, I’m completely shocked that she got away with it. Of course it was the blocking that was suggestive, not the dialogue (which was Shakespeare and thus “educational”).  But the blocking . . . still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

[5] I can’t confirm that any of them were actually bulimics. There was a lot of idle chatter and bragging about binging and purging outside the girl’s bathroom on the Day Hall that year. They were, however, sort of mean.