Going Down-State

After only two days—it seemed like a year—we're done scouting in Springfield. It's been an experience I'll never forget for its surreality. Drama teams of teenagers who by dint of their lack of life experience can have no real connection to the material they're performing, the emotions and ideas they hope to communicate to their audiences.

My favorite was the "group interpretation" event. Bunches of pimply-faced, painfully awkward boys and overdeveloped, overly made-up 16-going-on-35 year old girls all dressed in matching show choirish/glee clubbish outfits chanting in unison the most inane words anyone has ever heard. Picture a cheesy Disneyland glee club in sequins attempting to "energize" a spoken-word performance. Insanity. The genre seemed to have no point and neither artistic nor entertainment value.

Once I fully accepted the pointlessness of it (other than as an exercise in competition and in suffering the subjective judgments of one's betters) I could relax and watch the kids to see how they might look on film. Mostly bad.

Here are some randomly overheard items: "Don't play just to the judges. Play to the whole audience. The whole audience."

"I hate when you have to give a speech about something like a peanut allergy!"

"Corn syrup: yea or nay?"

We imagined the judges to be power-mad, unaccepting of any normally forgiveable glitch. One of them was over a half hour late to a performance. I speculated s/he and a coach had been in a fistfight, disqualifying the best team and forcing the judge to call for the EMTs on standby in the hall.

I'm glad we're leaving, but from here we go to my former residence to pack up and move out, finally, getting the rest of my meager belongings to Chicago. This could well be listed among the strangest weekends of my life, second only to the infamous Alien Posada in Cancun last Xmas. Sofia, Jehovah, Hayseuss.