DT Week 4

Daily Themes Week 3 Assignments                                    Memory                            February 5, 2013

1) The writer/visual artist Joe Brainard wrote a book entitled I Remember comprised of a series of statements that all begin, “I remember…” (see the excerpt I have posted under “resources.”). You will note the way that the language is straightforward and unadorned.  The work builds by accruing the memories and suggesting connections by way of juxtaposition rather than explanation.  Write 20 “I remembers…” of your own drawn from your whole life.  Don’t rush but don’t take too long either.  Give yourself a set amount of time to come up with these—say 45 minutes.  Then go back and revise and exchange anything you would like.  Move between specific details and slightly longer events.

. I remember the wall of movies we used to treasure, back in Lower School. Everyone knew about it. Kids would come over just to see this tower of VHS classics. Lion King, Doug, Natural Geographic, you name it, we had it. What they didn’t know was my Mom bought these on markdown at flea markets since no one was ever home. Mom and Dad never got back til’ ten at night, sometimes eleven. Sometimes we never saw them until the next day, after school. The three of us loved Rugrats and Pokemon, though, so we never minded too much.

. I remember finding a cat tooth in the sandbox during recess. I thought I’d found a dinosaur.

. I remember chasing Colin around the playground.

. I remember that Colin never loved me back. He did teach me how to tie my shoes, though.

. I remember seeing Colin on television for the first time when I was fourteen. I knew I had good taste.

. I remember my first playdate. Priya told me to stop following her around. I couldn’t help it – I was nervous, and I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to be polite. All she wanted was a snack while we were playing video games.

. I remember cutting Alexis’ face out of our group’s picture.

. I remember sticking Alexis’ cut-out-face to the inside of her locker.

. I remember, five years later, Alexis lying to favorite teacher about how I had seduced my admissions officer in order to get into college.

. I remember seeing him for the first time and wanting to run my fingers through his hair and mess it up a little bit and see if he liked it. He did.

. I remember when he hugged me from behind in the darkroom after school and falling, instantaneously, in love.

. I remember coming home at five A.M., sneaking in while the sweet spring sun was still up, hungover and happy. I would tiptoe onto our back porch, take off my flip-flops and hold them in my hands, and skip over the creaky stairs on the way back to my room. My sister would still be asleep. She is a very deep sleeper. I would put down my flip-flops, change into a big T-shirt and shorts, and slide under the covers with a big grin on my face.

. I remember punching Dad in the stomach when he caught me sneaking out. It took him four years to notice.

. I remember crying on the first day of college. And the second day. And the third day. And the fourth day. And the fifth day. And the sixth day. And the seventh day. Repeat, three times.

. I remember breaking up with him and hearing him cry for the first time.

. I remember meeting him for coffee after he got out of rehab. We both looked like shit.

. I remember his car driving off in the distance at four A.M. and walking right through the front door not caring if anyone noticed because love was dead and nothing mattered anymore.

. I remember walking into the coffee shop for the first time and seeing him. I went to that coffee shop every day, twice a day, for the next two weeks until he finally asked me out. It took two years.

. I remember running my hands through his hair for the first time. It wasn’t the same.

2) Write a second theme that builds on the first.  Take one of the “I remembers…” you have written and expand on it, filling in details and specifics, setting tone and mood.  This time paying attention to the style and form of how you render the memory.  Bear in mind that you need to make the memory compelling to someone else.  This means it must have some narrative tension or significance or revelation in order for others to care as well.

When I was six years old, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. Absolutely, irrevocably, unreservedly obsessed. With every fiber of my pre-pubescent being, I longed for the dinosaurs to return, for the ankylosaurs and hadrosaurs to emerge from the boxwoods and play with me at recess. I poured over books detailing the history and science of dinosaurs. I memorized all of their names, what their eggs looked like, what habitats they preferred. Whenever asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I proudly declared that my future lay in paleontology, that I would dedicate my life to the pursuit and study of dinosaurs. I researched what it took to become a successful paleontologist. Determined, I began my practice in the sandbox.

Digging in the sandbox for dinosaur bones became routine. My classmates thought my lack of interest in the monkey bars bizarre, but found my dedication endearing in the same way that Bill Clinton must have felt about Hilary Clinton’s pursuit of the Oval Office.

During my daily digs I would often have to share the sandbox with my peers. We were careful not to disturb each other. I would let Marina build her tower so long as she didn’t throw her excess sand in my hole. The other kids and I came to an unspoken agreement about the sandbox. Let the wannabe-paleontologist do her work, and she won’t talk our ears off about the distinction between pterosaurs and aquatic mammals while we’re trying to build a sand fort.

After weeks of digging without success, I was frustrated, but accepting. I knew that paleontologists spent months, even years, of their lives before their first big discovery. And then, I found her: the tooth. A dinosaur tooth!

I ran rampant around the playground. I showcased my dinosaur tooth to anyone who would look. I even showed it to the teacher. She was not impressed. Rather, she took it from me, put it in a plastic baggy, and told me to take it to the nurse. The nurse? She was afraid I’d caught something from it. I was fine, and the nurse called my parents to pick me up early.

That night, my parents told me I needed to stop digging in the sandbox, that I needed to try and make friends. The teacher was worried. My dad took the tooth to his lab, and we found out that it was a cat tooth, not a dinosaur tooth as I had so dearly hoped.

I cannot recall how I lost interest in dinosaurs. The cat tooth was certainly the beginning. Sometimes I wonder how my life might have turned out if I had tried to become a paleontologist. Is it too late?

I do know one thing: that whenever I go to the museum, I dash to the dinosaurs.

3) Take a memory you have of a particular event that you saw or that you participated in and write about it from someone else’s perspective (a friend, an enemy, a disinterested party, the newspapers—the choice is up to you). Feel free to fictionalize this perspective (at some level it is unavoidable) or to call someone and ask him/her about his/her perspective (and thus see how it veers from your own). The more different the perspective is from your own, the more you will be able to discover about the memory.  Avoid making yourself the hero of your memory.

            I am a teacher. The best kind: a drama teacher. I teach students from ages three through eighteen all about music, drama, and performance. Even though it isn’t what I always saw myself doing when I was younger – I had dreamed of Broadway, singing and dancing myself into a sweat every night, living in a quaint apartment in Brooklyn, dodging hobos in the greasy New York streets, bumping into Sean Penn at a Starbucks – but my career never took off. My friends and family say I did it to myself…I met a man on tour, fell in love, got pregnant, got married, and got fired. My husband and I, we both had to abandon our dreams of stardom. But it’s selfish to focus on your career when you’ve got your son at home, and another on the way… Sometimes I wonder…but I love my sons, I would never have done it differently.

            Today is a special day at Glenelg Country School. The fifth grade class will be putting on their fifth grade musical, 42^nd Street, and auditions are happening in fifteen minutes. Auditioning is mandatory for each member of the 72-person class of 2009, so today I have the chance to see the star potential in all of these children. The chances of discovering the next Broadway superstar are slim, but I can potentially steer choice children towards a life of the arts. All it takes is a bit of positive feedback, and they are hooked. That’s what happened to me. Applause is hard to resist.

            Here we go. The auditions start as they usually do. The boys jostle around uncomfortably, the girls titter nervously amongst themselves. Sheets of sixteen bar audition songs crinkle and flutter in the nervous air. There is definitely potential in this class. A lot of talented boys. A few girls who can carry a tune, but a lot of girls with a big personality. Divas, left and right. I sort girls into “ingénue,” “villain,” and “dancer” buckets when she steps forward.

            With a boombox.

            “I’m, uh, going to be using a background track. A CD. Is that okay?”

            Taken by surprise, all I can do is nod.

            She has zero stage presence. She is a bit awkward, her long, uncombed hair blocking her nondescript face. And the school uniform looks particularly unflattering on her…how regrettable. And then she sings…and it sounds quite pretty. Shaky, but good. She is singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a rather unconventional audition song. But she cares. I like that.

            I notice some of the divas laughing, even some of the guys pointing and snickering. That makes me like her just a little bit more.

            She finishes her song and thanks me. Shaking, she carries the boombox back into a corner of the room, and disappears into the sea of ten-year-olds. I wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of the crowd. She is certainly not the ideal lead, and will never make it on the big stage.

            I put her under “Ingenue,” and draw a star next to her name as the next boy steps forward.

            Someone to remember.