Community Theater

June 20th, 2010

A while back, a friend invited me to a matinee at the Masquers Playhouse. It’s a small community theater located in Richmond Point, a city better known for its toxins than its theater, but I thought it a good Sunday outing.

The feature performance was City of Angels. At thirty minutes before the musical began, we got there just in time. One rule of community theater: it’s first come, first served seating. After a brief tussle with an octogenarian about a seat, my friend and I sat down in separate seats (score 1 for the octogenarian) with plenty of time to thoroughly review the playbill.

The theater held about fifty people. The playbill was full of ads from such denizens of business as the local real estate agent and an ergonomics specialist. There was also a long list of theater patrons that included those who had donated in the range of $10-25 to the theater. I wondered if, at the $14 I paid for a ticket, I shouldn’t be listed.

In the minutes that stretched before me and the curtain call, I soldiered through the theater program. It was filled with upbeat descriptions of cast members, each of whom was playing multiple parts in the afternoon’s production. Some of the cast blurbs listed grateful mothers who thanked husbands and children for their support while “Mommy is on stage” while other blurbs gave shout outs to their dogs or cats.

Eventually, no curtain rose, but four people stepped out into the spotlight and began the musical. The Angel City Four, as the playbill called them, began to sing in a jazzy style that only 40s music will allow. They grooved to the melody with their bodies. The four of them were a perfect microcosm of what was to come.

There was a cherub-cheeked tall man who looked to be in his later twenties; a thin, more distinguished fellow who had to be in his sixties; a young round woman in her early thirties replete with forties hair and finally, a woman well into her sixties sporting a very bad blonde wig which didn’t move an inch in the jazzier moments of her hip shaking to the quartet’s number.

The musical progressed and after the initial shock to my aesthetic sense, I settled in to watch the story unfold and be carried away by the music.

The acting wasn’t half bad as musicals go. But the singing. It was the singing that disturbed me the most. Perhaps it’s because singing is the raw emotion – it’s impossible to hide behind. You either hit the high note or you don’t. Which sadly, in this particular case, every male cast member failed to do.

Alas, there is nothing more depressing than bad community theater. I glanced at the Act list to see what song the cast was on and therefore what time until my eventual freedom, and wondered why. Why was I depressed by this fantastic display of organization and free spirit?

Without an initial clue, I amused myself by making up stories about the cast.

There was the older player who no doubt spent a dutiful life toiling away at an office job, hating his boss, marrying, having kids, paying for college but never lost that spark to perform. So he indulged it at weeknight rehearsals and Sunday matinees, knowing full well there’s a lawn to be mowed before too long.

Then there was the truly talented older player. One of the many people who have talent that they might have pursued for some time but their talent never took them beyond small towns and small playhouses.

Right when I began to get bored with my analysis of the Angel City Four quartet, a man appeared, in drag. There was no explanation. It may very well have been a part of the musical, but in this theater it came off altogether differently. I couldn’t help but imagine that the male player convinced the director to let him indulge his fantasy of singing in drag. You can do that in community theater.

It wasn’t until the song, “It Needs Work,” that I finally got an inkling of what these players seemingly sought to capture. The blond woman who sang the song looked to be in her forties. She looked like a soccer mom, married for over ten years. There was muscle in her arms and her voice was of medium strength – the kind enjoyed around countless family pianos at Christmas-time. I flashed on what her life must be like and I realized it must be pretty interesting. Okay, granted she probably wasn’t living a glamorous life, but it seemed she must have been living one other than ordinary.

Hell, maybe her husband came to see some of her performances or simply liked the fact that after the kids are shuttled, the bills are paid and dinner is served, his wife has something more to her – she sings. She does community theater. Maybe her husband fell in love with her husky voice and every time he hears it he is recaptured by a bit of that old feeling – the excitement when falling in love and learning something new about your beloved. I imagined all this while I watched her sing her heart out onstage and then it hit me. This display is about living.

I was humbled. While I related more to one of the main players who looked about as embarrassed to be doing theater in the community, as I was to be attending, I was also awed by his courage to get on stage.

Perhaps I was so quick to boredom and subsequent analysis because I am a bit of a coward – the one audience member who hadn’t admitted it to herself. I’m not sure I could get up there. Even if one can sing, it takes quite a lot of internal fortitude to admit, that first one wants to and second that one wants to in front of an audience. Singing, acting, whatever the artistic tool, it takes courage to express a desire but even more so to act on it.

I watched and was further educated by what the whole display revealed in me. I have secret desires and dreams but unlike those community theater players, I am afraid. I fear acknowledging them and I fear missing out on pursuing them. I couch my fear in a false fear that I too will end up in a community theater when I am 50, never having reached any pinnacle of artistic success.

When I was forced to step back yet again by a fiery performance of “All You Have To Do is Wait,” I realized that the thing I was so critical of – the community theater performance, is the thing life is made of. And to be afraid of it is to be afraid to live. That is to perform, let loose; sing out – no matter the setting, no matter the price of the seats. Success is not reaching a pinnacle but in the doing.

So in a small playhouse in a toxic city, I learned that life encompasses wants, desires, dreams. Some realize them, some don’t and somewhere in between, well, there’s community theater.

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How to Change your Life

June 19th, 2010

I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage: the only thing you can count on is change. There was, in fact, a whole publishing frenzy around this realization about ten years back. There was “Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life”, “Who Made my Cheese?”, “Who Stole My Cheese” and even “Nobody Moved Your Cheese” (How to Ignore the Experts and Trust Your own Gut). It was a real cheese movement.

Most people get that change happens. The funny thing is that few folks seem able to affect it. The hardest part about changing, it seems, is where to start. Several years back, when everyone was moving their cheese, I was moving my stuff.

While I learned to be super organized and neat as a way to combat the chaos of my upbringing, I had never given much thought to my living environment until I moved to San Francisco. To commemorate the move, a friend gave me a book entitled, Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life : How to Use Feng Shui to Get Love, Money, Respect and Happiness

From the title you might guess that it is not a great literary work. What it is, essentially, is a fun guide for using the principles of feng shui in your home. What is feng shui? It is the thoughtful placement of objects in your environment to get positive results. As much as your living environment affects you, you can affect your environment. In the book, Barry Gordon, a physicist, describes feng shui as “the intelligent use of intention through environmental metaphor.” I didn’t say it wasn’t deep.

Anyway, the idea is to take a look around and see what you are unconsciously saying in your life. Who or what are you letting in? Who or what are you keeping out? Your things, what you do with them, how you treat them and even where you place them are a physical manifestation of your conscious and often, sub-conscious.

Without getting too much into feng shui parlance, I’ll just say this: different parts of your home equate to different aspects of life, like relationships and love, career, prosperity, etc. The book recommends looking at each corner of your home to understand what areas of your life might be blocked – literally. For example, that treadmill in your bedroom just might be an outward manifestation of the treadmill your relationship is on. The cure is to move your things so that your environment begins to feel right. When you move your things you stir up energy and a change in energy, leads to a change in life.

So when I feel stuck, I get moving. I move my body: I try new routes to work in my car; I sleep on the “wrong” side of the bed. I move my clothes: I donate clothes I haven’t worn in over a year; I organize my sweaters by color. I move paper: I figure out which of my books have gone too long without being read and create a pile to work my way through; I clean out my office of old papers. You get the idea.

It all may sound silly but I am learning to believe that if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. That being said, because I just went through a major life change, I didn’t realize what else needed changing. That is until I recently took another look around my house. Here’s what I noticed: several framed Mexican movie posters. I like collecting them but for the first time I really looked at one of them.

Exhibit A:

Do you see it? The trouble with this picture is visible but I decided to look up the movie and understand its plot. I found this synopsis of the movie: a wealthy widow hires a marriage agency to find a man to pretend to be her husband so that suitors do not bother her. Oh, dear. Is it any wonder my love life has been in such a state? I’ve literally been keeping Mi Marido (my husband) out.

I can only guess at what you might be thinking. Maybe something along the lines of “Does she really believe this stuff?” Yes. I do. Energy can be harnessed through intention and I have been hopelessly unintentional. I decided to take action. I took down that Mexican movie poster and put this up instead.

Let’s see what kind of change that brings.

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How to Speak: Speech Skills

June 16th, 2010

Course: Public Speaking 101

Institution: Speech Skills

Instructor: Cara Hale Alter

Location: San Francisco; she came to us but also offers workshops

If you couldn’t understand what I was saying in my Pilates videos, that’s because I suffer from an acute inability to E-NUN-CI-ATE. I know this because I’ve been diagnosed by a professional.

As you might imagine, as an employer, I was also concerned with the personal development of my employees. As such, I decided to have Cara Hale Alter of Speech Skills come in and teach the art of effective public speaking to a small group of Consorte Media folks. I knew of Cara because I took a class from her ten years ago via U.C. Berkeley Extension. Since then she’s turned her class into a growing business.

The class started with Cara breaking down, in a most theatrical way, the many bad habits of poor public speakers. Cara, somewhere inside, is harboring a Broadway star as she can effortlessly and humorously go from imitation to characterization. Using this skill, she laid out The Basics.

The foundation for good speaking is literally a good foundation: body language – strong posture (the spine and shoulders should form a T), fluid gestures and relaxed movement; voice – strong volume, articulation, solid pace and expression; and eye contact – making it, holding it and engaging the audience.

She then quickly had us each get up and say a few words in front of a video camera. We were all a bit nervous and through our fumbles, we learned that the most important aspects of public speaking have nothing to do with what we are actually saying. Instead, it’s about what we are unconsciously communicating via our body language, voice and eyes. In fact, what we do with our body language tends to say what kind of relationship we have with the people with whom we are speaking. If we don’t have a relationship with our audience, our body language can actually forge the connection much more than our words can.

People say a lot more than they think they do (see also, You Say More Than You Think: Use the New Body Language to Get What You Want!, the 7-day Plan). If you’re a poker player, you might call this a “tell.” The little things that people do, the micro-expressions on faces let you know what a person is thinking and even planning. Noted psychologist Paul Ekman has made a career (and TV show) out of studying these facial expressions.

Interestingly, 90% of nervousness symptoms are not visible. What is visible are the attempts to try and hide our nerves. How do people try and hide their nervousness? Through things like extraneous uhs and ums, excessive movement, emphatic gestures or stiff hands, holding their chins too far up or too far down, self-commenting or failing to pause, to name a few. Often, the behaviors that you think are not giving you away, like a poker mask or smiling, actually do give you away.

I’m sure you’ve seen the research statistic that shows people would rather die than speak in public. That’s because public speaking engages all of our primitive, animal instincts. It’s like what happens when an animal is caught in a clearing in a forest and the eyes of its predators peer at it from the recesses of the woods. The animal is very aware of all the eyes on it and its eyes dart everywhere to figure out who will come at it first. Our fear when we’re singled out from the herd is hard-wired. We become prey and all of our defenses come out. There are a lot of chemicals in our bodies to protect us and they support certain mechanisms to deal with threats, like “fight or flight” which might translate into aggressive speech or dismissive speech or “tend and befriend” which might translate into ingratiating speech or excessive smiling.

The great thing is that you can learn to be comfortable speaking in public by developing skills that communicate ease and comfort. It seems counter-intuitive but over time, if you practice being something you end up being it.

Today, that “it” is authentic. Like the shoulder pads of the 80s, aggressive, command and control-style speaking is out. Now the accepted speaking style is more about authenticity. It’s about being you but with a clear communication foundation. In the immortal words of the great Raquel Welch, “Style, is being yourself on purpose.”

The perfect balance between authoritative and approachable definitely takes practice. Check out a taping of my efforts below.

Note: I have a sock on my head to keep my head level when speaking and she is working with me here on pacing.

Cara quickly honed in on the fact that I am a speedy syllable slinger – I talk too fast. She taught me that speaking quickly can be considered less confident if it’s corroborated by other behaviors like itchy fingers, tight gestures, bowed head, etc. She also pointed out that I don’t hold enough eye contact. She taught me that I set the standard for the kind of eye contact I want to receive. Humans are really reciprocal. Holding eye contact helps turn the speaker’s focus from inward to outward and hence, it’s a great way to manage nerves. When I practiced, I discovered that focusing my eyes helped me to focus my thoughts and it lowered my adrenaline.

Next, I learned to use a downward inflection (meaning your pitch goes down at the end of a sentence instead of up – e.g., more Barry White than Valley Girl) but use a wide range of vocal expression. Then, I learned to move my heard separately from my shoulders – like an eagle or an owl. This is a key signal of leadership and comes across as regal. Once my head was moving on its own, I had to be sure to remember that my nose and eyes must point together to be seen as credible (have you ever conversed with someone whose nose is facing you but whose eyes are looking off somewhere else?). Finally, while I had solid posture, I learned that holding my hands near my belly button was the most comfortable looking, even if at first, it didn’t feel that way.

Yes, when learning to be effective, it isn’t always going to feel comfortable to the speaker. Cara was quick to remind us that as the speaker it’s our job to be aware and in charge of the signals we are sending. A speaker’s job is to highlight the message – what we want the audience to take away. We truly are leading the experience. That also means that the speaker’s attention should be on the audience, not herself. Said another way, it’s important to be present.

Taking my time, making eye contact, being present will help me to be effective. Hmm, public speaking as a metaphor for life – who knew?

Finally, she had the whole group work on articulation. She gave us long popsicle sticks and asked us to put them in our mouths horizontally. We had to practice talking as if we didn’t have a stick in our mouth. The result was we learned to open our mouths wide when speaking and take our time with each syllable. We looked pretty silly sitting around a conference table chanting an old weather rhyme out loud: “Whether the weather is cold or whether the weather is hot, we’ll be together whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.” But it worked, whether we liked it or not.

In the end, Cara encouraged us to practice and decide to use our skills. She had each of us create action plans for going forward and armed us with exercises and personal videos. Full of all this great information, I hurried home and decided to look up my notes from when I first took a class with Cara. To my dismay, I realized that Cara pointed out that I needed to work on the exact same things I did ten years ago! This really reinforced the point that to get better, taking a class is only where it begins and practice {pause} is where the change happens.

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