Tag Archives: 2nd story

Stories as gifts

This piece was originally written for the League of Chicago Theaters.

The Domino Effect

About ten years ago, I waited tables at a brunch restaurant in Wicker Park called the Bongo Room, known for its insanely amazing Chocolate Marscapone French Toast and the insanely large crowds of people waiting to eat it. For the record, it should also be known for the kindness and generosity of its owners—Derrick Robles and John Latino—whose friendship and business supported me while I put myself through school, made art, kicked off a teaching career, and generally figured out what the hell I was doing. I’d wager there are many theatre artists and literary artists and visual artists and artists who can say the same. So, on behalf of us all, I’d like to say thank you to service industry for helping us pay our rent and live our dreams; for allowing us the flexibility to audition and finish projects; for giving our audiences the space to discuss our art over yummy food; for our after parties (!); for coffee; for wine; and, most of all, the lifelong friendships.

Anyhow, every Sunday these guys would come in—we’ll call them Steve, Jim, Mark, and Chip. Steve, Jim, and Mark were cool: they talked about last night at the Hunt Club, dressed in head-to-toe Ambercrombie and Fitch, and tried to buddy me up for faster service.  “Hi, what’s your name?” they’d say when I got to the table; then, “Hi, Megan! We’re Steve, Jim, Mark, and Chip!” I didn’t bother saying they’d told me before, told me last week, told me eighteen thousand times so can you just get on with the pancakes and Bloody Marys ‘cause the wait for a table is over an hour, the guy at twenty-three is bitching about his benedict, I just got a nine-top on twenty-four, eight of whom want soy lattes—soy, for chrissakes!—and I don’t have time to yak it up so can you order?

But of course, they couldn’t.

“You see her?” Chip said, nodding at a girl a couple tables over.  She was perfect—shiny hair, great body, big smile; imagine a television commercial for toothpaste or hairspray—and I looked back at Chip and said, “Yeah?”

“Can you find out if she’s married?” he asked, and, right away, Steve, Jim, and Mark started laughing. I should point out that Chip wasn’t like the other three. He was kinda chubby, kinda balding, kinda boring—Like, if I say tax attorney, you might imagine a guy like Chip.

“You wanna date her?” said Steve, Jim, and Mark. This was always how they treated him—sometimes he was the punchline; sometimes the punching bag—and while usually he’d turn red and laugh along with them, today he gripped the edge of the table and said, “No, I don’t want to date her. I want to marry her.”

The reaction was immediate: That girl wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy like you, That girl eats guys like you for breakfast, an appetizer for the main course, know what I’m saying? Har har, jab to the ribs—and Chip looked at me and said, “Please.”

It was the please that did it.

I went by her table, planning on doing a quick left hand check—ring or no ring?—and then back to Chip with the verdict, but it wasn’t that simple. The girl was sitting with her left arm crossed over her stomach, her left hand tucked underneath her right armpit.  I watched her for nearly a half hour, and the whole time she ate, drank, and gestured with only her right hand.

“Well?” Chip asked.

“I’m working on it,” I said. Then I walked to her table and dropped a napkin on the floor, squatting down to hands and knees on the ground and looking up at her lap—no go.

“What are you doing?” asked my friend/co-worker, Molly, once I was back in the sevice station.

I told her.

“That’s so romantic!” she said, jumping up and down and clapping. “It’s like when you’re on the subway and you see someone, and you lock eyes, and it gets too intense so you have to look away , and when you look back, they’re looking away, and what I always wonder is, what would happen if you just kept looking?”

I didn’t know.

“We’ll never know,” Molly said, “because nobody ever tries!”

Before I could fully wrap my brain around that idea , I saw that Chip’s girl was standing up. She was reaching for her jacket. She was dropping her left arm down and—no, there wasn’t any ring—because there weren’t any fingers.  There was a hand. And some stumps of varying sizes where fingers ought to be but weren’t.

I went to Chip’s table.  “She doesn’t have fingers,” I announced.

They looked at me blankly, so I held up my left hand and folded my fingers into my palm.  “No fingers,” I said again.

Steve, Jim and Mark nearly died laughing. Leave it to you to fall for a— and Guess she’s not so perfect anymore— and The one time you have balls enough to— but Chip didn’t hear any of it.  He just watched as she left restaurant, and then, when the front door closed behind her, he did the last thing you’d ever expect from a punchline or a punching bag: He got up and ran after her.

About six months later, I was walking around the restaurant refilling coffee and there, at a two-top by the front window, was Chip—who FYI looked fantastic: he’d shaved his head, muscled up a bit, dressed more cutting edge, like if I say CEO of New Social Media Empire, you might imagine a guy like Chip. It was easy to see the reason behind the change, because sitting across the table from him was—wait for it—the girl. His beautiful, fingerless, perfect girl.

It took everything I had not to cheer.

They told me the whole story: how he caught up with her on the sidewalk; how he didn’t have know what to say because he’d never done anything like that before but, dammit, he tried; and how, when people ask where they met, they talk about the crazy waitress at the Bongo Room who crawled around on the floor.

Hearing that story, for me, was a gift. At the time, I was single, sort of bitter—just done with it. Have you been there?—and knowing that these two people were giving it a go—that they were trying—had a huge impact on me. Enough to start trying myself. Enough to tell this story over and over to friends of mine in similar situaions. Enough to write it for a storytelling series I work with called 2nd Story, where we tell our stories aloud in the hopes that they will inspire our audience to consider their own, and how—even as we celebrate our differences—there are still multiple connections in our lives.

For me, this is what theatre does: it gives me a story, like a gift (I imagine it wrapped in shiny paper with the bow, the handmade letterpress card, the whole nine yards) and in that gift, I find parts of myself that have been missing, parts of our world that I never imagined, and aspects of this life that I’m challenged to further examine. Then I take that gift and share it. In the work I make myself, sure, but the kind of sharing I’m talking about here is the domino effect: how I hear/watch/experience a story, and then tell everybody and their mother about it, and then they tell everybody and their mother, and somewhere in that long line of people is someone who, at this exact point in their life, needed its message more than we’ll ever know.

We do this all the time: “Oh my God, I just saw [Liza Minelli’s Daughter or the Brother/Sister Plays or Star Witness or Write Club or the Chicago Landmark Project or Fa$hion or The Ghosts of Treasure Island or Queertopia or Filet of Solo or El Nogalar or The Encyclopedia Show or 2nd Story or insert one of a thousand plays and performances and readings that Chicago offers] and it made me think about—”

What?

What did the last piece of theatre you saw make you think about?

Did it help you find parts of yourself that have been missing? Parts of our world that you never imagined? Aspects of this life that you’re challenged to further examine?

My God—what a gift.

And now, you wrap it up and give it away. Somebody out there really needs a good present. Maybe your friend, maybe a co-worker, maybe that random person sitting next to you on a bus, or maybe the crazy waitress at the that restaurant you go to every single day, the one who’s ready to crawl around on the floor if it helps you find the love of your life.

I like to think I’m above revenge. But… well… that’s a lie.

I am interested in how different people define the same word.

In another lifetime, I had a Critical Thinking teacher who tried to explain the difference between denotation and connotation. “This,” she said, pointing at her desk, “is the denotation of the word desk. The connotation of desk is how we all individually feel about desks.” She paused, letting that sink in, and then asked, “How do you all, individually, feel about desks?” There were sixty-some of us in this class, all college freshmen. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that, at the time, desks were not a primary focus of significant emotion response. Sex, maybe. Money. Grades or jobs or fear or art or all sorts of crazy things. Think back to yourself when you were a college freshman. What did you think about? Me?: my folks were splitting up, my boyfriend back in Michigan was seeing another girl, and I shared a 10X10 dorm room with a girl looped on esctasy three nights a week, I’ll tell you what, desks were the last thing on my mind!

sidebar: this all happened over a decade ago. Now, I have very strong feelings about desks, primarily A) I don’t ever want one in a classroom because pedagogically I find that it unecessarily divides my students and I and B) I’m dying to have one in my house so I can have a place to put all my shit. Right now, it’s everywhere, and I can’t ever find what I need, and my poor husband, he’s got to contend with my paperwork all over the place, and also my kid is at that phase where he wants to draw spaceships on everything, which is awesome except that now there are spaceships on my teaching contracts and time sheets and student work and story ideas and lesson plans and tax forms and schedules, and, yes, I know you’re thinking Get the kid some paper, whydon’tcha? and I promise you, he has it! He has every art supply you can possibly imagine! But why would anyone want to draw on paper when they can draw on the bathroom wall? Or Daddy’s web designs? Or mommy’s… everything? Also: last week, at his school, one of the little girls did orgami for show-n-share and now my kid is convinced that paper is for folding, not drawing, so my tax forms are now little birds. Which is actually pretty cool—birds are way more interesting than tax forms. Also: I’ll never again be able to think of taxes without thinking of birds. Which would mean that birds are now my connotation of taxes! Huzzah! Right back to the point!

Anyhow—desks were, at the time, not quite as ripe for connotation as some other words, words like love or race or faith. I remember, years after this whole connotation/denotation thing, reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and thinking about all the different connotations of the word solitude and how all of them were given to a different member of the (fictional) Buendia family:

You’re so brilliant that no one can understand you, so you’re alone.
You’re so beautiful that everyone’s intimidated by you, so you’re alone.
You’re so old that no one even sees you anymore, so you’re alone.
Your penis is so big that women are scared and men are jealous, so you’re alone.
And on and on.

Genius.

sidebar: Dear Marquez I love you.

Anyhow—connotation. It’s mind boggling to think about how many misunderstandings I’ve had over the years because of differing connotations. On the flip-side, I’m in awe of what I learn by listening to the connotations of others; how much I’ve grown as a human being and widened my world view. I’ll listen to how different people—friends, artists, the guy sitting across from me in a class—define words like marriage and protest and illegal and and parent and education and life. Our connotations of these words shape our politics, our values, how we spend our money, how we love—and the thing that creates those connotations are our stories.

A few years ago, there was some big case in the news about parents who were seeking revenge for something that had happened to their teenage daughter—the clincher was, she didn’t want them to. She wanted it to just go away. I remember talking about the ethical implications of this over and over again: what was justice in such a situation? There’s another word with multiple connotations—justice. Justice for whom? For her, or her family? Did her parents have the right to move forward with something she didn’t want? I remember wondering why she didn’t want revenge. Or maybe she didn’t want the kind of revenge they were seeking—the legal kind. Maybe she wanted a different kind?

What exactly is revenge? When I wrote the story Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left, I was thinking about my connotation to that single word. And—as often happens in writing—the story became about other things, as well: revenge, and the relationship between a parent and a child, and gender roles, and all this other shit that sort of surprised me, but hey—what the hell. This is what came out. It’s here, let’s examine it.

For over a decade, I’ve worked with a Chicago theatre director named Amanda Delheimer Dimond. She’s the Artistic Director of 2nd Story. She’s my friend. She challenges me to look deeper with every project, to really figure out what the hell I am talking about. I knew I wanted to make some sort of video for Shot to the Lungs, so I brought the story to her and the very amazing Kyle Hammon of KBH Media, whom I can’t suggest enough if you want to explore video/audio/multimedia in your own stories, personal or professional. The three of us got to talking about revenge, and we thought it would be intersting to ask some very different people to speak to their own connotations of the word.

I am grateful to Kyle and Amanda for creating a piece that digs into this question of how different people view the same idea, and what might happen if we take a moment to listen to each other. I am grateful to Ada Gray, Lauren Kelly-Jones, Nic Dimond, Aaron Stielstra, Jennifer Shin, and Coya Paz for sharing their time and their stories. I am grateful to a Faculty Development Grant from Columbia College for helping to fund this project, and to all of you for giving it a look and maybe a share.