Freaky Friday

Today, I accidentally did a booty drop in front of 30+ high-school students.

Yeah.

WHOOPS.

I'm helping teach the "Musical Theatre" class now, which means I get to do a lot more theatre stuff with the kids. Theatre was my other major besides English, so I've really been enjoying it. Last semester, I had to just follow along as best I could with Viola's swing dancing class, but THIS semester, I actually feel like I have something to contribute. I've done choreography with the middle-schoolers, contributed to the casting decisions, helped with the singing, and today: did some movement work with the high-schoolers.

To introduce the importance of being able to move with versatility as an actor, I spoke a little about my past experience-- moving from only-being-able-to-move-like-a-ballerina to playing a 60-something-chain-smoking-Chinese-woman-who-walked-as-if-her-bowels-had-just-all-fallen-out-of-her. They grinned at my impressions. Then I called them all up onto the stage, and arranged them in a circle.

"The first thing I'm going to teach you is a movement called the 'undulation,'" I said. "Out of this movement, I'm going to show you all the stages of AGE, like how to play an old person, how to play a kid... It's a basic movement. It goes like this."

"You bend over...."

"When you've bent over as far as you can, you bend your knees, and drop your head..."

"Then you sloooowly roll up, one vertebrate at a time..."

"Then there's this great vomiting motion, where you sort of throw your head up..."

"And then you're back centered over your feet."

"Now, to show you the different stages of age, we actually have to REVERSE this, so we start by tucking our chin and rolling down..."

"Then continue to roll down, one vertebrate at a time..."

"Then once you're all the way down..."

"You lift your head and straighten up."

Easy-peesy, right? I had them all do it a couple times, and then thought of a correction I needed to give, so went into the reverse-undulation quickly so that I could demonstrate it myself. But, turns out, when you do the undulation in reverse QUICKLY...

It looks.

Like a booty drop.

YEAH.


I realized my HORRIBLE mistake half-way up, just about the time the class realized WHAT WAS GOING ON and dissolved into laughter. I turned bright red and started laughing too. "WHOOPS...! Definitely did NOT mean to do that!!"
And they kept on laughing and talking, and I kept being red, and I kept laughing, and saying things like, "Wow. Okay. Okay, I'm sorry, daaang..." And turned around to the kids behind me, and said, "Yeah, sorry guys..."

Finally I said, "Right. So: no one's allowed to feel self-conscious now. Let's try it again.

"Um... Without the suggestive club-dancing."

So we did.

And we had a great time. :)

One More Blogger "Puts It OUT There"

You know the scene during the opening credits in the movie, “Grease,” when everyone is cartoonified? Sandy is perfect, and blonde, and has fluffy animals frolicking at her feet, and she has a canopy bed, yes, indeed, a canopy bed.

I’m using to being that. The mostly-perfect one. I’ve been a model daughter, a model student, a model mentor, and a squeaky clean Christian. I tried ballet, and was good at ballet. I tried acting and was good at acting. I tried guitar, and was able to write songs and sing them. I dress well. I’m social. People like me, dang it.

But this year has been a year of…. Not That.

I work at a silly job. “You? Are doing THAT for a living? I would have never expected that from you… I thought you were supposed to be a gypsy soul. You? Are doing THAT?”

I have fallen out of touch with important, special people. “Who? Who is this? You? I’m sorry I think you’ve got the wrong number. You couldn’t be her. I think she might be dead.”

I met with the Young Adults Leader Dude at my church at the beginning of this year, and told him that I would be his GO-TO-GIRL for Women’s Ministry. Then I fell off the map. I flaked on him. I stopped going altogether, and when I got follow-up emails, I didn’t respond. I am that flaky person that drove me crazy when I was trying to organize church leadership. “Hello? We were just wondering? If you were going to do anything? That you said you would?”

I was going to write a book at the beginning of this year. I wrote an intro, an outline, a first chapter. It was going to be about challenging the negative female body ideals that are so prevalent in this culture. I rented library books to research the issue. I didn’t read them. I stopped writing the book. I returned the library books late. I lost one altogether. I started wearing make-up again. I would challenge my imperfect face in the mirror; rub bronzer on my cheeks and fiercely argue with the nobler thoughts. “I don’t want to save the world today. I just want to feel pretty.”

It goes on. I have plenty of woe-is-me examples, but today I got hit with one in particular that just made me feel so lame. My dear friend and travel buddy Nicole is taking off to be a park ranger for seven months. This Saturday, she had a goodbye party. I was invited. I didn’t look at the Evite. I forgot to RSVP. I forgot the party. And I didn’t go. This girl is a GOOD friend of mine, and I totally spaced on her celebration.



So what do I do with all this? Holy Voice says, “Accept Grace little ragamuffin,” and I know that’s the answer. None of us are perfect, can be perfect, will be perfect—there’s a reason we need a Savior. But honestly? Looking at that concept, and accepting it in a way that is heart-felt are two different hills to climb. Intellectually, I know that I have received enough grace to dive into and splash around in. But emotionally, I still feel like a laaaame-o.



I heard a sermon last night that was about being present right where you’re at, and finding the purpose in what would seem like a random situation. The pastor talked about Einstein, who apparently had trouble finding a job after graduation. Einstein applied to every physicist in Europe—multiple times. No one would hire him. Einstein deserves a “FAILURE” forehead-sticker too right? He probably thought so anyway.

He ended up working in a patent office. It was a very silly job. But it only took him two hours to get all his work done; the other seven he spent doing physics. He explored his own ideas, unleashed his own theories… And in doing so, came up with E=mc², along with a whole lot of other mammoth brilliance.

I see that God puts people in places for a reason. I see that He can turn seeming failures into successes. His own death on the cross seemed like a shattering failure to everyone who expected him to overthrow the Roman Empire, I’m sure. But the cross wasn’t about politics or winning the popularity vote-- it was about establishing grace for loserly losers; for perfectionists putting on a show. It was so that He could say to me, every time I feel like slapping a Failure sticker on my forehead, “Stop being so dramatic. Don’t dwell in pity puddles, because I’ve already forgiven you and taken care of it. Now go do something productive. Go swing.”

Working on the heart part. Working on the head part too, because let’s be honest: that could use a little bolstering. In the meantime, I do thank God for Grace, and for forgiveness, and for not wasting even silly jobs, and for the possibility of triumphant surprising successes out of failures. I also thank Him for dear friends like Nicole, who had the decency to cut me some slack with words that were impossibly gracious.

And I doubt that I’ll be coming up with the next advancement in quantum physics while killing the hours at this slow, silly job. But.

I can continue to improve my paint skills.

An Illustrated Autobiography of 4/3

An Illustrated Autobiography of 3-27

Allegorical Smattering

Once there was a little girl who walked along a nice forest path and she had on a nice backpack with pink strappies. Inside the back-pack was a sack lunch full of tidily packed plans and suggestions of where the girl should walk along to. She had a map just in case she got lost. But she didn’t. She walked along whistling and grinning with round rosy cheeks.


Then the path ended.

And the girl fell off a cliff.

Don’t worry—it’s not quite as dire as you may have thought. The girl is sort of floating. Sort of falling. There’s a definite gravitational pull that she can’t wriggle out of. But it’s more like she just fell into empty outer-space, and the girl keeps floating all around, all around, and the girl keeps floating all around.

This is the main point: her nice back-pack with all the nice plans and trajectories in it got too small/girl got too big, so she’s trying to scrap together a knap-sack now. And granted, a knap-sack suits this chica way better than a pink sparkle back-pack does, but it’s a freak-deeky thing to assemble it herself. And where the heck did the nice forest path go. Whhhoooaaaaaahhh, far beneath the empty universe, it is.


Choices float by the girl like asteroids and comets. She uses her cool new knap-sack to try to swat at them, and she catches a few. The floating gets UNCOMFORTABLE. Why the empty universe. Why the chaos and asteroid comet choices. Why the lonely astronaut suit. Friends drift by—no they don’t, they hike on by below her, on the nice forest path, with Northface back-packs and ruddy cheeks. What up ya’ll. They can’t hear. WHAT. UP. YA’AAAALLLL. What? Oh. (A look up.) Hey floating girl! What’s it like up there? Meh, we don’t really care. See you around!

Peace out. Um.

Yeah.