MomBrag™

Margaret, with one week's rehearsal, stepped into a part in a show the younger kids' drama class was performing. She got every line (as far as I could tell), and bailed out a couple of the other kids who got stuck. It was a little unnerving, though, because the part required her to cry and whine and say "ow" a lot, and there I sat, watching this kid who looked and sounded exactly like my kid, only she was crying and hurt. Oh, sure, I'm a product of post-modern life and I'm thoroughly and completely good with the concept of "actors" and "roles." And yet for millions of years, mombeasts have gotten upset when they've heard their beast-children weeping. (Get used to it, Laura. The kid wants to act.)

In other news, I spent most of the day in a playwriting masterclass with Katherine Thomson. There wasn't enough time to hang out and chat with the other playwrights (did you catch that? "Other playwrights." As in, "playwrights like me"), and I didn't find the writing exercise that took up a large-ish part of the morning to be all that useful, but the rest of it was quite interesting: we analyzed a play (Our Country's Good) in terms of what function each scene served in advancing the story, and Ms. Thomson was brave enough to let us have a look at several different drafts of particular scenes of one of her plays, to trace how and why they changed from draft to draft. I was fascinated to see what she kept in and what she changed, and I wouldn't always have made the same decisions in her place. Very interesting!

I absolutely love looking at stories and plays and doing my best to see how they work. Why did this happen then? Why did it happen to these characters and not those characters? Why these words, and not those very similar but crucially different words? What happens when you change this to that? That back to this, but then change this other thing?

Some people love to take apart computer code or car engines or legal problems. I love to take apart stories.