How To Disappear Completely

Never Put Soap on Your Salad

Because it just tastes gross. In case anyone is wondering, the soap ended up in my salad as part of one of those freak kitchen accidents that involve placing food items too close to places devoted to washing up.

I should be writing a paper on Bakhtin's speech genres, specifically his ideas on parody and stylization, and applying it to music (Weird Al and Arrogant Worms on the one hand and Aaron Copland on the other come to mind). The parody caricatures a genre for comedic effect, while stylization is an adoption of a way of writing in order to evoke the meaning attached to a specific genre: Copland writes a "hoedown" into his ballets in order to signify Americana, the folk tradition of the past. I am sure I can weave Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat into this essay somewhere, too.

But as you can see, I am writing here and not on my essay. I find myself motivated to write when the purpose is practically pointless. Or maybe the freedom enjoyed over here inspires a creativity that struggles along in academic research. Perhaps I've always been attracted to pointlessness. Back when my sisters and I were budding thesbians, we founded our very own theatre company. I was the script-writer, director, set designer, costumer, and puppeteer for 75% of the characters. Perhaps this was due to my superb literary gifts, but most likely it was simply because I was the oldest. We organized under the title "Plotless Play Productions," mostly because the business cards were too small to fit a surgeon general's warning in the byline, and we felt the public ought to know what it was getting into before parting with their hard-earned pennies. My mother, with years of theatre and film experience behind her, offered her advice on plot construction: "Make sure it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Actually, just make sure it has an end." Thus, we were gently steered away from infinite improvisation and, anxious to provide employment for my out-of-work actors (my sisters), I stumbled across a copy of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare lying about on our bookshelf. The company had an inventory of three finger puppets total: one (male) duck, one (female) bear, and one (male) rabbit. Enough, I determined, to pull off Romeo and Juliet. We spent months on set design. We made a balcony out of empty toilet paper tubes. We rehearsed the scenes. We built a puppet stage out of a styrofoam box and attached strings to our finger puppets in order to transform them into marionettes. At last, opening night (really a matinee performance for our relatives) arrived. It was my first taste of Shakespeare and theatre and the glamour of the stage. I think I was ten.