Amy Lu's View

“I was fifteen when Chad and I met…” I started to tell my therapist. 

“Oh wait, I wasn’t actually fifteen, I was nineteen,”* I corrected myself. 

I misspeak all the time, so it’s not surprising that I started an anecdote with a factual error. What is surprising is that I think I know why I made this particular slip-up: I’m currently in rehearsal for a one-act (“Our Dearest Friends”) where my character, Stacy, tells a story about when she was fifteen. 

Life wasn’t imitating art, but art (or at least one tiny, but important, word from it) had burrowed into my mind and crept out of my mouth. 

I find it fascinating when I observe how my fellow community theater thespians experience the emotions of their characters. I don’t think I’m as impacted by acting in emotional scenes as others–I always feel a distance between myself and my character’s emotions. But then, I think I always feel a bit of a distance between myself and my own emotions (not sure if that’s because of my always present inner observer/narrator/critic, my rural German Lutheran upbringing, being a Gen Xer, the human condition, or what). 

I may not deeply feel a character’s feels, but sometimes I do find connections between our lives–experiences, interests, personality traits, or fashion preferences (this isn’t that surprising since I usually provide my own costume so draw from my own wardrobe). Often a play I’m in reminds me of similar (even if very loosely) incidents from my own life. 

Stacy’s story of being fifteen is about her father taking her out to a nice restaurant and not having enough money to pay for the bill. This reminded me of the time (or times?) when my dad took me to a “nice” restaurant–Ponderosa–when I was a teen or young adult. Luckily, we didn’t have any monetary issues, and I don’t remember much about us dining there. But the memory, slight as it is, does make me feel warm and fuzzy because it was unusual, and nice, to be out with just my dad. 

Once the memory center of my brain gets ignited by a show, several memories can bubble up. Fictional Stacy’s dine and dash story also reminds me of a time when I freaked out because I didn’t want a server thinking my mom and I were going to leave a restaurant without paying. Actually, I was freaking out because we were in a restaurant at the mall I worked at in Iowa when a tornado warning went off, and I immediately went into an “Oh my god we have to get out of here NOW and get to shelter but we’ve got to throw some money down so the waitress doesn’t think we’re stealing mall restaurant food!!!” state of panic. I probably then proceeded to hyperventilate (I’m not good with storms, and my fear of them was even worse in my youth). My poor mom.

Another scene from the play that has sparked a memory from my youth is when Stacy disappointedly tries to straighten up her disheveled drunken teen son. When I was wrapping up my Freshman year in college, I blearily opened up my dorm room door to greet my mother wearing a t-shirt as a pair of shorts, with my leg through one of the arm holes (I had other clothes on, too). Needless to say, I was not in a great condition to be moving my things out of the dorm room, and my mom wasn’t terribly happy with me that morning. 

Stacy isn’t a very likable character–I describe her as “deeply flawed” while another character in the show refers to her as an “insufferable bitch”–so I’m reluctant to say that I identify with her too much. But I do love playing her, and if I’m honest, I can empathize with many of her feelings and her need to feel safe. While I can relate to Stacy’s motivations, hopefully I don’t usually act on them in the same way. 

If some of Stacy’s words accidentally slip into my life, that’s okay–if you hear me telling you about StanLee’s drinking problem in the next couple of weeks, you can assume I’ve just confused my dog with my onstage son. Let’s just hope I don’t mix up the name of someone I know in real life with the name of a character I’m yelling at onstage (yes, that has happened in the past but luckily only during rehearsal). 

And if I end up spending my therapy sessions talking about the fictional problems of characters I have played–well, that will be a little weird. But as I DO talk about backstage drama and anxiety and my thespian-related insecurities with my therapist, she’d probably find hearing about Stacy’s (and other character’s) problems more interesting.

*A bit of a tangent that I can’t figure out how else to work in: Chad and I just observed the thirty-fifth anniversary of our first date! Chad shocked me by announcing this as Joys and Sorrows at church yesterday, which was very sweet (although he didn’t specify if this fell under the “Joys” or “Sorrow” category). He did make a joke about how we started dating in kindergarten and how we were drinking juice boxes, which made me point out later that I don’t think juice boxes existed when we were in kindergarten (we certainly didn’t have them in rural Wisconsin).