What We Are Not Now

That is exactly what reunions remind us of, and that is precisely why I dislike them. I don’t mean the high school kind- at which I would not be caught dead; why recreate torture ten years after the fact?- but the kind that just happen, the ones which don’t come with decades of emotional baggage and aren’t planned a thousand years in advance. I bring this up because on Thursday last year’s crop of MAs had their graduation ceremony, which naturally occasioned some degree of reunion.
It was a very strange thing, really, not because I didn’t do the ceremony and all (I never do- what’s the pint? Graduation is something you do for your family to watch, and there was never any chance of any of my families making it over here) but because it was seeing everyone out of context. I hate graduations on principle. They put me through an emotional wringer. It’s an ending, it’s a beginning, it’s symbolic of change, and I don’t do change gracefully. Just the first few bars of ‘Pomp & Circumstance’ is enough to turn me weepy, because it symoblises that schism.
A lot of people from here in England and Europe came back for it. With the exception of Marie, whom I didn’t see, the Stateside crowd couldn’t make it. So while it was great to see people- I went out to lunch with Lucrezia and out for drinks with Jessica and Robin- their presence served more than anything to highlight the absences. I saw some of the archaeology crowd who still live here in York- Christina, Ashley- whom I never see, even if we’re in the same town. Being with this group of people, I kept halfway looking over my shoulder to see everyone else. Without everyone being present, last year’s dynamic was also in absentia. Would it have made a difference, if, for example, Jon and Kenny, inarguably my closest friends last year and still dear to my heart, had been there? In a way, perhaps it is a good thing my dearest friends were not here: I would not like to think of how upsetting it would be to discover that even that dynamic was different.
In truth, I suspect that would be the case, because in addition to missing people, I am forced to realise how different I am this year. By virtue of living through last year, I can’t ever be who I was last year. My life is in such a different place that naturally I see and respond to things differently. My friendship circle here in York is not really made up of the group from last year- I was not then close to any of the people among the Tribe, and the Tribe and the old days don’t quite fit together comfortably.
Last year was special because each of us fit into it in a specific way and played a certain role. Take any of it away, and it can’t be the same, obviously, but add anything and it also gets peculiar. My friendships with people as individuals hasn’t altered that radically, but in larger groups the gaps become more visible. And that, to me, is the really bittersweet thing about graduations: we will never all be in that place again. All of us will never again be in one room, most likely, and even if we were, the people we would be sending who carried our names and faces would not be the people who were there before. Everything changes, and life goes on. It is not an especially tragic thing- it’s just life. But it’s still enough to make me feel a little wistful... even if I didn’t have to listen to ‘Pomp & Circumstance’.

I Heart My Dead People

I’ve been spending my post-dissertation time working on my genealogy. This is the first time I’ve had the chance to work on it since coming to England, which is kind of sad, since they’re a huge part of why I’m here in the first place. I had desperately hoped that my very first trip in York could be down to Chalgrave, the longtime home of the Bostford family, to see the medieval church where they worshipped and the churchyard where they are buried. Chalgrave is, unfortunately, so tiny that the nearest bus stop (after several trains) is about five miles away, and apparently it has a population of something like twenty people. I’ll need a car, and a weekend, and neither of these things have been possible heretofore.

Anyway, because of the Great Computer Crash of ’04, most of my work right now is just re-inputing the data that got lost. I had to transfer it off of hardcopy files, which are still in the States, into a database, and from there into my family-tree programme. Pain in the arse, but at least I know that my obsessive record-keeping on paper was both worth it and a functional system. In a way, it’s kind of nice, because it reacquaints me with my ancestors- a year and a half of grad school had kind of bumped their details out of the ready-access part of my brain.

I’m used to thinking of the majority of my ancestors as being people who lived and died “over there”. I don’t know if other people have a sort of constant relative geography in their brains, like a mental GPS where they always know where they are on the global scale, but I’m very used to seeing my ancestors as being very far away, across an ocean, on this little island of Britain. Since this is the first real work I’ve done with them since getting here, it suddenly whomped down on me: they aren’t those people far away anymore. They’re right bloody here. None of them are more than a four-hour train ride away. It’s a really strange feeling, that I’m in their midst.

Of course, I’ve had this thought periodically throughout the year- I live in York, and as a Plantagenet descendant, naturally many of those connections spent considerable time here in the northern capitol (back then). Cousins’ heads once hung on the bar that I walk through to get to the city centre every day. But then, those relatives are, while illustrious in history, somehow more distant for it. Or perhaps, more accurately, less my own. Naturally there are lots of people walking around who are also descended from the same people as I, but you only really know it with the Big Name Ancestors. (Which is still awesome, in its own way. Jon and I are cousins through the Mayflower families, for example, and our friend Chris is another Plantagenet cousin. Genuine family reunions would be about the size of New York City.) Those ancestors, therefore, belong to a lot of people, who know it. The lesser-known ancestors probably have just as many progeny, but fewer people are going to be aware of their connection, so, somehow, they feel more like mine. I don’t know any other way to explain it.

It gives me a very cosy feeling to think that they are all around, literally, geographically, in the same way that they are when I’m at home in Connecticut. England New and Old are the only places where I really feel that sort of… grounded comfort. I know who I am there, I know my place in the grand scheme of the universe, because I am where they were and are. These places are mine on some level I can’t quite put to words; I can find a sense of peace, hold my head high, and feel as if I belong. It makes me understand why people were so bizarrely clannish and attached to the town where I grew up- and it makes me understand why I felt so different, apart, and out of water there, among them. (Of course, the roots there only go back maybe five generations, tops. I just spent an afternoon typing up ancestors who were born in the 1360’s. This is why I study history: it’s really just autobiography. For me, it’s personal.)

I would really love to rent a car this summer and take maybe a two-week trip or so around the country, an ancestral pilgrimage to Chalgrave. And Bengeworth, and Blythe, and Canterbury, and Arundel, and Chard, and…. Well, you get the idea. In an ideal world, I’d have the money and the time to go beyond these borders and hit Leyden, or Valencienne, or Brandenburg, or Hamburg, or any of the other places where one or another ancestor began at some point. Such a trip will not likely be forthcoming, because much as I love genealogy and the Dead Ancestors, I love the theatre more, and I expect to be tied down to Lords in some fashion for most of the forseeable future.

Periodically, throughout the year, I’ve had the odd bought of something not quite homesickness, but missing New England, with its ancestral graves and homesteads. I wonder now if, in those moments, I would not have been wise to pull out my genealogy charts and start working. While, no, I can’t just go out to the cemetery and have a picnic surrounded by ancestors and cousins like I can at home in Newtown, where my family has lived and died for almost four hundred years, I still suspect that the visceral realisation of how close I was here, to my heritage and therefore my self, would have helped. After all, how can you be homesick when home is where you are?

Sometimes We Even Have Drama On Stage

In the main, I really like Wednesday. They’re when the Tribe goes out for lunch, and wanders aimlessly around town, popping into boutiques and antique shops and that sort of thing. It’s low stress, it’s good food, and good people, and these are the days that make me the happiest.

This has not, thus far, been one of those days. It started out all right- Adrienne is in Scotland for a poetry festival, so James I and I ran some errands, including getting my rail card renewed, which is a grey area, really, since technically I’m not a student right now, but my advisors took pity on me and signed off on it anyway. Then we went back into town, where James used his tax refund to buy a lovely 1920’s dinner jacket he’s been eyeing for months. We then met up with James II, Charlotte, and Kate for our end of term luncheon at Little Betty’s. (This has been a tradition of the G&SS- the first outing of the term is at Paolo’s, the last is at Betty’s. We’re probably going to change that, though, because James II works at Betty’s and he finds it creepy to eat where he works.)

Lunch was pretty normal. I got the full story of last night’s fight call for Lords, which I did not have to attend- I’d got the highlight reel last night via phone, which mostly involved trying to pull James II off the ceiling, since Strasz apparently sat through the first half of it, without mentioning that he had to leave or anything, and took off as soon as they were ready for his part. Pleading for five minutes of his time didn’t work. Needless to say, James is livid, and I am having a hard time getting my head around the idea of someone who is this poor at time management and responsibility directing. It makes me want to direct all the more, simply because I can’t bear the though of watching Lords flounder through yet another flaky, messy production process. Strasz is the other person putting in a proposal, to do Richard III. I don’t entirely disagree with the show choice, but I have a very big problem with trusting him as a director.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I remembered to ask Charlotte if Mammon had surfaced at C’tine yet. Mammon is a demon, made of two planks of wood, which Lords (me, in my capacity as unofficial closet bitch) loaned to C’tine for the Halloween party. My vague hints that perhaps he should go home reached purposely deaf ears, which I found rather frustrating, since the agreement was that he could be borrowed for the week of Halloween and that was all. He was torched- literally- for Guy Fawke’s Day, which really bothered me, given that it was on a loan with a promise from Jaclyn that everything would come home in good shape. When, just before moving out Constantine, I mentioned that I should get him home to the Lords closet, he disapeared. This freaked me out, thinking the cleaners had thrown it out, and I started asking around. He eventually resurfaced for one afternoon, and then vanished again as soon as I mentioned how delighted I was that he had turned up.

It turns out that C’tine has been having several discussions about how to keep me from returning him to the Lords closet, and it finally culminated in (I’m really not kidding about this) people bike chaining him to a chair in the Common Room. We discovered this when we got to Constatine to pick him up, since Charlotte said he was back.

I was furious. You borrow something and then hide it and chain it up so its legitimate owners can’t have it back? In my world, this is referred to as theft and it’s something rather frowned upon. Charlotte kept saying she had to stay out of it, because it was a problem everyone had with me, and she didn’t want it to reflect on her. This did not help my mood, needless to say. I’m not sure what it is about me that puts people off, but there it is, and always has been: in high school, there were an awful lot of people in colourgaurd and Odyssey of the Mind who were not my biggest fans, probably because, I suppose, I actually took it seriously and wanted to see it do well, which meant being responsible, organised, and other ugly words like that.

So Charlotte’s flipping out, I’m severely angry, James II is following suit (he takes Lords as seriously as I do, and we’re sort of stress barometers for one another), and pretty soon we’re trying to find pliers and screwdrivers to pull off the bolts, which they have screwed into the damn thing, thereby further damaging it. James I very calmly goes upstairs to have a little talk with Jaclyn, while James II runs off to go find proper pliers at Poundland. Charlotte runs off to hide in her room. And I’m standing there, fuming, when, of all people, Strasz comes in.

Normally, I am a very calm, exceedingly diplomatic person. I don’t get angry with anything. Except. I get really, really defensive of the people and groups I care about, and I have had it with Constantine House using Lords of Misrule as their private party-supply house. We work out asses off for our shows, spend what little money the shows rake in to put on new ones, and we can’t afford to be seen as a glorified thrift shop. So when he made some casual comment about Mammon, yes, I asked what the fuck had happened. And I probably did so in less than diplomatic terms. I did have the good grace to apologise for being snappish, and to say that I knew he hadn’t locked it up personally, but I was not as smiling and cheerful and circumspect as I should have been. I wasn’t helped by his comment that they had decided to lock it up specifically because of me, and my desire to return it to the closet.

James I returned from his apparently very productive chat with Jaclyn. He’s never lived at C’tine and he’s not really one of the Faces of Lords, so to speak, and he also has a genius for pointing out the absolute diculousness of the situation: “They’ve chained two planks of wood to a chair.” He pretty much told her that he didn’t care who’d done it, but really, it’s gotten a little absurd, and we would very much appreciate it if Mammon could be silently returned to the Manor by Friday or there could potentially be complaints further up the food chain. For whatever reason, where people don’t, apparently, take me seriously at all, she listened to that.

Unfortunately, this was about five minutes too late for my lack of silence and diplomacy where Strasz was concerned. I have no idea what he’ll say to the rest of the house. It’s not that I give a damn if Constantine House wants to hate me- I’d think it rather petty, but I don’t live there anymore, and caring what anyone thinks is not high on my life’s agenda; never has been. It’s what occurred to me as we were walking down Bootham: that Adrienne and I are the faces of “Macbeth”. We desperately want that show, and the vote is coming up, and I don’t want us to lose it simply because I stepped on the toes of the Constantine crew, who were in the wrong in the first place.

James II came running up with the pliers, ready for liberate Mammon, and we passed on the news of what had happened. Honestly, I think it was better than just hijacking him, which would be even less politically wise. Never the less, James was not happy about my momentary lapse of judgement. He wants to do Macbeth as much as Adrienne and I, maybe more, in a way, since he’s been the most impacted by Strasz’s lack of responsibility re. Lords. In truth, he’s in a better position to do some of the politicking than I am, since he’s not the one wanting to direct. Simply unscrewing the bolts and taking Mammon back to the Manor would have avoided the obvious pitfall (although in calm retrospection I think it would have opened up a different can of shit), and it would have, at least in theory, kept me well out of it. But knowing all this probably would not have mattered, even if I had proccessed all of this before opening my mouth. I’m not used to having the luxury of having someone else to fight my battles for me; I’m accustomed to handling all issues, all the time, on my own. Twenty-eight years of conditioning goes a long way, although I suspect the tongue-lashing I got for it will also go a long way- I hate being yelled at, and I recongise that what James says is true: I will be wise to keep my head down, smile and nod and be pleasant, at least until we have the show, and let other people be pushy in my place.

Honestly, you’d think all of this mattered, that we were planning to invade a small duchy or something, rather than just do a play. But it does matter, it matters terribly to me. And not because of my own ego, but because I genuinely want Lords to be all of the wonderful things it’s capable of being. I would happily say, go for it, with the summer show, if someone competent proposed a show. Yes, I miss directing and I love it and want to do it, but the most important thing to me is that we have a good production, not that I have a good production. I know I care too much about something that’s “just for fun”, but what’s the point of doing anything if you’re not going to care about it? And if you’re going to do it, why half-ass it?

We have until April to get things settled, calmed, and I have to hope that people don’t look at this as a me-versus-them issue. It’s not meant to be, it never was. Is it so much to ask for people to just be basically responsible in the first place? We’re all in grad school, for god’s sake. As James I says, “they’ve chained two planks of wood to a chair.” Yes, it is absurd. And it’s equally absurd for me to be upset about it. I am so angry with myself for being less than calm, rational, diplomatic, perfect. I hope I haven’t screwed us all over in that one moment’s ill-judgement.

So much for my lovely Wednesday. I spent most of the remainder of the afternoon halfway wanting to throw up. We ran some errands and ended up having a good wallow in the local antique shop, which is a favourite of mine- it’s a random heap of stuff, and the proprietor’s very nice, in a talk-your-ear-off sort of way. I needed to just sort of play in York, and try not to think about Lords. I didn’t quite succeed, but we did have fun in spite of myself. Now we’re home for a brief respite, and then out to the pub on North Street to meet up with James II again for one of his twice-a-week folk nights. (James is an excellent folk-violinist, and I dearly love live music, so Wednesdays and Fridays out have become a frequent occasion. He keeps trying to convince me to bring my violin, but I know how badly I suck.) Normally I have a shit-ton of fun at these things, but given the way today is going, I’m dubious.

I’m just hoping all of this is not portending things to come. I’ve had the queer, unsettled, pre-spring-holiday feeling, and we all know how last spring hols blew open the lid of hell, so I’m desperately wishing to be wrong. Lords is really the only thing in my life that has the capacity to go pear-shaped (oh, please, let that be true!), but I have learned not to trust fate: it’s very good at finding shit to drop in your lap.

My Triumphant Return From Dissertation Hibernation

I had intended to be really good about keeping up with this blog this year, but I fear I have failed whompingly. Honestly, I can’t entirely fault myself. This autumn was chaotic, not in a bad way, just really, really busy. So this is sort of the highlight reel, and from here on in I’m going to try to be better about more frequent posting, even if it’s not very detailed or long, just so you know I’m not dead.

Since last I wrote (the end of October, and here it is March already!) the biggest thing has been, of course, the dissertation. Well, technically the biggest thing; I did the vast majority of the work for it in the last month (February), and in the end I actually really enjoyed spending six hours a day at the computer writing. I got very fond of the Mystery Plays, and I certainly feel like I know them extremely well at this point. Remarkably, although there was still a bit of a chaotic push towards the end, I did pace myself reasonably well, and the last week of it wasn’t insanity or anything, just steady work throughout. Now that it’s done- two weeks now- it’s a little strange, like I don’t quite know what to do with myself.

In case you were curious, the ultimate study was of the twentieth-century revivals and how they reflect perceptions of the Middle Ages. The answer to the question is: it depends upon the director. Some years, the Plays are very medieval looking, especially since they’ve moved back onto the wagons in the streets of York. In a couple of years, at the Theatre Royal, they bore no resemblance to the Middle Ages whatsoever, except the odd archaic word in the script here or there. Some directors seem to like using medieval costume and settings as a sort of extra layer of story- one year they framed the Plays with a “medieval street” scene, so it was like a play-in-a-play- while others view the Mystery Plays as scripts like any other, to be used as plays, full stop, and the medieval is simply not important or necessary. I am curiously torn on this issue: as an academic interest I rather like having the medieval in there, and I’m really delighted that they’re back on the wagons (and hot damn do I intend to be here to direct the Lords’ play come 2010 when they next run!); on the flip side, I’m not sure, as a director, that I would want to feel hemmed in by that if something else came to mind. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of updated versions in general (Shakespeare set in the twentieth century just doesn’t work, to my way of thinking), but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently wrong. My academic and director personalities fought about this a lot while I was writing.

Which brings me to theatre, which, as I’m sure we’ve all figured out by now, is really my truer calling and the thing that really takes up most of my time (I’m just a medievalist in between plays). This fall we did the Nativity plays- The Annunciation (Townley, I think), Joseph’s Trouble About Mary (from the York Cycle), and the Second Shepherd’s Play (whatever it’s fashionable to call that cycle these days- nobody knows where it’s from, and I usually think of it as the N-Town Cycle, but Rachel consistently referred to it as Wakefield, which is actually pretty well disproved at this point). I was only in Joseph’s Trouble, which is actually a fairly comic and one of my favourites, since it deals with a very human point that the Bible rather skips over, namely the idea that it took a bit of convincing for Joseph to be kosher with his wife being knocked up by God. Pragya directed it and the Annunciation, and I’ll say only that I think she’s a much better secretary for Lords than director, and I’m not all that convinced she’s got a calling to secretarial work. There were a lot of problems, not merely in her camp, but in lack of line-learning by Joseph up to opening night, which was flummoxing everyone else horribly, and similar difficulties. I honestly went into opening night pretty sure I was going to want to go home and crawl under my bed and die of embarassment. How we pulled it together, I still couldn’t say. It was a genuine miracle of people really pulling together in the eleventh hour, and we were quite shocked that it worked out. (There were still a few truly cringe-worthy moments.) Second Shepherd’s was excellent- Rachel directed it, and however much I may disagree about certain administrative ideas she has for Lords, she’s a decent comedy director. She also had good fortune in her cast- she had Louisa and Fernando as Mak and Gill, the sheep-thief and his wife; James Wright and Kate Thomas and Bill White and Tom Davies were the shepherds, and they’re all good character actors. This show lead off what is apparently the theme of the year: obscene sheep jokes, which are pretty common in England anyway (and usually at the expense of Wales), and which we’ve carried over to the winter show.

The winter show has been a disaster from day one, and it remains to be seen how that will all resolve itself. Fernando and Jeremy are directing it; Fernando’s just really, really flaky, and although Jeremy is actually a very good director, he’s rather too passive about it and tends to act as the silent partner, which is a pity. We’ve had a lot of chaos over dates, casting, script revisions, and I could go on for several hours on this point, but won’t. Suffice to say that there have been several nights when we might not have survived were it not for the pub after the fact, and copious amounts of beer, and some heavy-duty kvetching sessions. We find ways to amuse ourselves in spite of it all, like the ongoing betting pool about how many times in any rehearsal Pragya will play backseat director, or how often Strasz will be out to lunch and miss his lines or an entrance. (I have an astonishingly good track record at winning this game.)

The date changes of the winter show have put paid to my intentions to visit this States this spring and see everyone; as it turns out, I will only be back Stateside for the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and then I have to get home again for Hell Week. Hopefully, even before that, we’ll have started rehearsing for the summer show. Adrienne and I have a proposal in to do “Macbeth”, and we’ve been campaigning for it all year with the seriousness of a national election. Too many shows with dubious direction have made me desperate to get back at the helm of things, and I really want to do that show; we have some brilliant ideas for it. Our competition is Strasz, who’s got the Olly problem from last year of slating Lords in only when it’s convenient for Drama Society on campus; I hate the thought of our play being directed by someone who doesn’t see Lords as a priority. This isn’t really a personal slam, as I have nothing against him, I just think that if Drama Soc is his primary focus, he should go with that, and let us get on with Lords. He’s proposing “Richard III”, which I actually think is not a bad idea. Rumour hath it that Louisa is putting in for “Midsummer”, which I don’t quite understand, since she’s in the States until June, last I heard. But I know she wanted to do it last year, and I think Louisa will make a good director. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I desperately want “Macbeth” to win.

I suppose the other really big development is that I moved out of Constantine House. My original plan when I came to York was to spend the first year in university housing and then get a flat, and give or take a few it’s worked out pretty much according to plan. James and Adrienne and I found a lovely house just south of Micklegate Bar. It’s not much from the front, just a plain terrace rowhouse, but inside it’s gorgeous. The owners have clearly put money and love into it, for it’s quite updated, but it has the original Victorian tiling in the foyer, and they’ve kept that style throughout- we have the lovely textured Victorian walls, high ceilings, a fireplace, wood floors… and we have a nice little backyard, where we’re going to have a pot-garden of tomatoes and herbs and beans and things. There’s also a shed in the back with a loo (The Oubliette), and two rooms that we’re calling the Brewery, as we plan to put in beer and mead and wine-making stuff, and my Pantry, where I can keep all the preserves and veg and things that I’m making. We’ve christened the house the Villa Epicuria, because we’re all snobs with a fondness for food and wine and general elegance, and it’s sort of the central hub for the York Gourmet & Snob Society, a group made up of the Tribe and general friends.

The Tribe is our name for the inner circle of people this year, which is a very different group from last year. We’re completely decentralised, really, as opposed to be a Constantine cadre. James I, Adrienne, and I are here at the Villa; fairly obviously, they’ve become my closest friends in York this year. It’s strangely not unlike my life in Washington, minus some of the chaotic overtones. James II (I gave up on trying to find nicknames, because absolutely nothing would stick for either of them, so I’ve resorted to numbers) is usually the fourth person at the centre of our group, my other best friend here in York, which is somewhat unexpected, given that I knew him for a good part of last year without ever really paying him any mind. Charlotte, SA, and Kate Thomas are the other three who are often around in one way or another, and who come to most Wednesday outingts. (The G&SS meets every week on Wednesday for lunch or dinner, either at a restaurant or at someone’s house, and we usually spend the day antiquing or shopping or doing something amusing.) Charlotte and Kate did their MAs with James and Adrienne, and now they’re back to do PhD’s; SA was an online friend of Adrienne’s who is in York doing a philosophy MA. The other G&SS folks, who aren’t around quite often enough to really be part of the Tribe, are Shamsi, Sara, and Alison, the latter two of whom are really new to the group. It’s an interesting and very mixed group of people, and I’m quite happy with my friendship circle at present.

This fall has really been, apart from the easy chaos of dissertation, which I can handle easily, as it’s intellectual, not emotional, exceedingly calm and pleasant. We celebrated the end of 2007 with a three-day house-party at Constantine, while I was still living there, and welcomed in 2008 with the most glorious Victorian New Year’s, also about a three-day event. (There are pictures of a lot of this, and other things, up at the photography site.) And this year really has been quite good to me. Having finished the dissertation, I now have all the time in the world (until this fall and my next MA or Mphil) to enjoy my life in the Villa and being among kindred spirits. After the nightmare of drama that was last year, it’s incredibly relaxing and something I really appreciate. It’s not often that life gives you a reward for just hanging in there. I mean to enjoy this as much, and as long, as I possibly can.