I felt so good, stretched out, open and exercised after two days in the studio with Dody DiSanto who taught a Neutral Mask Intensive here in New York this weekend. An inspirational teacher, she is considered by many to be the best neutral mask teacher in America. It was a class filled with two dozen adults, working actors, some recent MFA grads, other mid-career professional performer-creators with their own companies and several teaching artists.
An Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole experience. I was in a beautiful empty studio with a wood floor and wall of windows in the middle of Manhattan. Serious barefoot theatre professionals in dark clothing moved and watched with rapt and respectful attention as each in turn put on the mask and performed a set of actions embodying individual and universal experience in the cosmos followed by a subway ride home to my 8-year-old writhing on the floor in a concentrated attempt to get out of doing her homework.
I felt like part of a community in that Chelsea studio, and the greater New York theatre community, and the network of physical theatre artists in the United States and the world-wide physical theatre community of people who are familiar with the work of Jaques Lecoq.
And then it was over. Cell phone open talking to The Husband;
“How was the soccer game? How was the day?”
“We’ve had a good time together since the soccer game this morning.”
“There’s a Whole Foods near the studio. I’ll pick up some prepared food and we can have a nice quiet dinner when I get home and get ready for the week.”
“That sounds great.”
“How’s My Kid doing?”
“The TV’s off and the she is reading a book.”
“Oh, I’m so glad.”
And so I came home, after shopping at “Whole Paycheck”, with my wealth of roast chicken, salmon salad Nicoise, fresh baked bread and wine ready to enjoy the circle of my small family.
I don’t know how the evening fell apart. I thought I would just get the table ready for dinner while The Husband and My Kid ducked into the other room to quickly get her homework out of the way so we could all relax and enjoy each other’s company.
Half an hour later, The Kid emerged from the bedroom and flung herself onto the floor in agony. She could not write!
I reminded her that she had told me previously about something that happened with her friends at school that she had intended to write about.
No. No that was not it. That was not possible. That could not be done.
She said she was stupid. She said that we hated her. She said that she wanted to die. She hit her forehead against the floor.
She would not touch pen to paper.
I told her we were all waiting for her to do this one thing so we could eat dinner together as a family.
An hour later as the clocked ticked towards bedtime, in the interest of moving forward, I ran a bath for my stinky little athlete.
The bath revived her and she insisted I stay with her, to help her brainstorm story ideas and allow her to throw a wet ball at me.
After the bath there was renewed energy for the activity of avoiding writing at all costs. The cost paid was the family dinner. The Husband went ahead and served himself and began to make his own preparations for sleep and the week ahead. He had spent the entire day with her from the 9 am soccer game until evening when I got home. From all accounts it had been a good day involving a victorious game, a pizza lunch and a trip to the bookstore.
He told her he was disappointed that she had promised do her homework when they got home and here she was not doing it. She heard, “Daddy hates me!”
She wrote many notes, using many pieces of paper, describing how she was stupid and despised by her parents. She then shaped these paper notes into balls and airplanes which she threw at her mother and father scoring direct hits This was meant to prove how helpless and incompetent she was.
And yet, she would not touch pen to paper to transfer a single word from the brainstorming session that took place in the bathroom while she lay in a warm tub dictating ideas to her secretary-mother who dutifully wrote them on the whiteboard for her.
Thoughts crossed the mother mind such as;
“When I was a kid we didn’t get “real” homework until 6th grade, perhaps my child, and by extension most 3rd graders ought not to do it.”
“Is this what President Obama means by turning off the TV and helping kids with their homework? If it is, I don’t think I love him anymore.”
“If this is how much time we educated professionals have to put into getting our kids to do their homework at all–quality and quantity be damed–what hope is there for a single mother of several children who works two minimum wage jobs to “help” them with their homework?”
Evil tired hungry frustrated mommy offered to write a note to the teacher excusing My Kid by explaining that she was unable to complete her assignment due to emotional immaturity–It worked. The text was written–however brief. Food was eaten including My Kid’s first taste of banana cream pie which I had brought home for desert but in the construction of the piece became the finale of the text.
The child’s mood was light as air.
Mommy read her a fairy tale by “Hans Christian Anderson”. She closed her eyes and fell fast asleep with a smile on her face.
THAT KID played us like a violin!
On stage, I can only aspire to the kind dedication, focus and control over an audience that my 8-year-old kid employs on her parents in an attempt to get out of doing her homework.
Pure clown.