Wednesday, September 10, 2014

A surprising memory

Elders/board meeting was tonight. For the elders meeting I have to do the monthly scheduling, so I always bring a calendar (and I'm old-skool; I use paper calendars).

A couple days ago, my old prep school (I was class of 1987) sent out their little calendar they send to donors. I like that; it seems less coercive than some of the "premium" gifts some places give, and it's nice to see photographs from my old school. (Unlike many people, I actually had a somewhat-positive high school experience. Mainly by comparison to how abysmal my junior high was. My prep school was kind of a nerd magnet, so I finally wound up somewhere where there were more people like me, and I actually kind of began to feel like I sort of fit in. And I was more academically challenged at prep school, which also made me happier. And the buildings were old and largely pretty beautiful, compared to the concrete-block junior high. And yes, that kind of thing matters to my general well-being when I am in a place. All else being equal I am happier in a pretty place and tend to feel like it is more "ideal" than it actually is, compared to an ugly place.)

Anyway, as I was flipping through, something caught my eye.

And suddenly, I tumbled back nearly 30 years.

It was 'Minerva's' dress. Yes, the dress still exists. It's been changed a little and gussied up to look more Shakespearean, but it's the same dress, the same mix of dark purple and some big floral that is kind of ugly and looks like maybe someone's former curtains.

When I was either a sophomore or a junior (I forget now), my English class did a production of selections from "Spoon River Anthology" (We were a smallish class, there were not enough of us to do them all. As it was, each person did two or three). A committee of students picked poems and assigned them to people.  We memorized the poems, created "characters" based on our interpretation of them. Then we planned an evening performance and got to raid the Theater department for costumes.

I did two "people." One of them was not terribly memorable - someone who lived a long and fairly uneventful life (I THINK it was Lucinda Matlock, because the phrase "Played snap-out at Winchester" sticks in my mind.

The one I remember, though, was Minerva Jones. Better known (well, to herself) as Minerva, the Poetess.. I remember her partly because she was so striking but also for the shock of realization when my rather innocent high schooler's mind realized that she probably died as a result of a botched abortion that happened after a rape. Pretty awful and tragic, and the fact that she may have thought more of herself than she actually was (how many people have "written poetry" that is not really that good, but who think of it as "eternal" and "deeply meaningful" and therefore requiring publication?)

Anyway. The purple and ugly flowers dress was the one "Minerva" wore. And seeing it again reminded me of something I had forgotten for a very long time.

The production of the poems (it wasn't a real play so much as it was each person coming forward, saying their piece, and then fading back into the trees - we did it outside.) I forget now how we did costume changes (I wore a much thinner and paler dress as Lucinda; as I remember I wore it UNDER Minerva's dress and just stripped out of the top dress behind the sheet we had hung up or something).

We did it at night, in a wooded area of campus (Maybe near the hockey pond? I don't exactly remember). It was an impressive thing to be able to do, especially for a fairly shy person like me who didn't go out for plays and didn't really go on stage. (Though then again, I really enjoyed giving my Senior Speech - a friend and I did it trading off lines - and we got laughs and groans of recognition and applause....the theme was Have You Ever Wondered and some of the statements that followed that were serious  and some were comic. Everyone had to do a senior speech at Morning Meeting or else introduce one of the weekly speakers....)

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