Marianne Hales

Being Marianne in 600 Highwaymen’s Fever

I’d call this a spoiler alert but, technically, you can’t spoil this show. You can only alter the experience. That said, if you have tickets to see this show in the near future I’d probably read this afterwards.

Earlier this month I had tickets to see a show that had been brought in as part of BYU’s Off the Map theatre festival. Because the shows brought in are consistently fantastic I bought tickets months ago without really looking too closely at what the show was and forgot all about it. All I knew going into the show was that it was highly interactive. I didn’t know (nobody did) that afterwards the company member sitting next to me would tell me that in over 100 shows, this had never happened. The company member (Jax) had speculated on what might occur if it did but it had not, as yet, happened. Jax thought it would be magical and (spoiler alert?) it was.

Because I knew the audience would be a big part of the show I wasn’t surprised when my fellow audience members were called upon to be characters in the story or interact with the company members. Several were identified as this character or that character when Abby (the company member telling the story at that point) asked me to stand up and take a few steps into the playing space, which was a large rectangle made by the seated audience members. At this point, though, we were more than just audience members. We were not the discrete lumps of two or three that we were in the lobby as we waited to go in. We had taken our first tentative steps towards being a unit and the full attention and energy of 70 people were focused on that corner. It was palpable.

Abby turned to the group, gestured to me, and said, “This is Marianne.”

I had never met this woman. We were not wearing name tags. We had not engaged in small talk in the lobby. The character’s name was Marianne, as it always had been, and she had unwittingly chosen a Marianne from the audience to be her. You might not think this is earth shattering. There were certainly audience members and company members who reacted to it like it was just a funny little oddity and when I tried to tell the story to people who hadn’t even been in the room it fell flat too. That’s why I am writing about it–to somehow give voice to the experience I had. Because it wasn’t just an oddity. It was a cosmic pay-attention-smack.

Abby went on to describe the woman and the things that stood out to me were that she was a mother, she was alone after a party, and she was in some distress. The kicker, though, was when she had me place my hands over my eyes and explained that Marianne was having an emotional reaction, that people wanted to comfort her but no one did so she was alone. Writing that out right now those words don’t particularly land. They probably don’t for you either. But in that particular moment of heightened reality and in that other-imposed physicality that was, coincidentally, so like my own, I started to cry.

There are so many reasons why that might resonate with an audience member and there was only one person in that room who knew any part of why the image of a mother feeling isolated in her distress would land so forcefully for me but because the character’s name was my name it felt like a public acknowledgment of private grief and because we were already one unit it wasn’t embarrassing or awkward. It was healing. Sometimes it is enough to say “I see you. I hear you.”

The night before the performance I had attended a large gathering of women from my church. We made blankets for a local children’s hospital, had dinner, and listened to a speaker. I had gone to it thinking, in part, that the speaker would be a balm to my soul. He was funny and had some good things to say but he didn’t really connect with me or with the friend who had come with me. “Has he ever had anything hard happen in his life?” she asked. I suspect the answer would be yes if we were to ask it of him, but we were all individual observers in that forum–unnamed, unseen, and separate. There were many good things that came out of that evening that made me feel more connected to my community but the speaker was not one of them and my private grief remained very private. The contrast between Thursday night and Friday night could not have been more stark. Granted, I am a theatre artist so it’s not so unusual that a theatre piece would speak more to my soul than a sermon at times but it was quite a contrast.

The show created such a visceral sense of unity and because I had become Marianne it all seemed pointed and pertinent–the give and take of being alternately an observer and a participant, the awkwardness of figuring out when to act, the validation of feeling a part of it all. It was bookended by this character, Marianne, and so it was all coloring her existence (and, by extension, mine) but most especially in relation to the situation that had so forcefully come to me at the top of the show. I thought about why, in life, I hesitated to act or reach out. I asked myself if I could go on without those who taught me. I wondered how to build this visceral sense of unity myself. Most of all, though, it gave me a space of heightened senses to alternately examine objectively and examine at some post-conscious level my most overwhelming and emotional problem currently. It was a relief to be wordlessly a part of the whole rather than the partnerless parent talking and talking in the spaces between herself and everyone else.

I have no idea what my experience would have been if the character had been named something else entirely or if I hadn’t been chosen to be her or if I hadn’t happened to be seated next to a company member who shared my awe of the situation. That’s the beauty of this type of show–so many moving parts, so many ways to make meaning. And, like life, the only way to spoil it is to fail to pay attention.

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Salmon in a Small Town: Payson’s Annual Traffic Jam

Payson has been putting on its Salmon Supper since 1954 and in all those years they never learned how to handle a crowd. This is so popular that groups get bussed in (if you are on such a bus you can get in line an hour earlier than the unwashed masses) but they have doggedly stuck with the one-long-line protocol for feeding the masses.

The line went up and around an entire large city block and took nearly two hours from start to salmon. The wait was exacerbated by large groups of people cutting the line every few minutes. There was no provision for line control or indication of who should go where. When I asked someone in line if this was the line for ticket holders or for those wishing to purchase tickets she just shrugged and said “it’s the everything line.” In fact, we didn’t see an event worker until an hour and a half into the wait when someone walked around asking people if they already had tickets. So, presumably, one could wait an hour and a half in line before finding out they were in the wrong line (don’t worry, we had bought our tickets online).

Actually, pre-purchase of the tickets is the only thing that kept us in line. I had heard how amazing the Payson Salmon Supper was but as I stood there, one bead of sweat tripping down my spine, I realized that all of these glowing reports came from people who live in a landlocked state, people who may never have even seen the ocean, much less eaten transcendent salmon. If I hadn’t already been $16/head into this crazy idea I would have cut my losses then and there. But I was in too deep.

I sent the elderly and the young children to a bench in the park and my oldest child and I started the long, hot walk to dinner. It wasn’t the worst line I’ve ever been in, really. There was only one brief encounter with a cigarette smoker who felt that walking a few steps away from the line (up wind) was sufficient to keep us all from smoking his cigarette with him (don’t worry, I complained on Facebook; he somehow heard my subliminal chastisement and put it out). After an hour we got some cloud cover and a gentle breeze (helpful for those who wished to enjoy their neighbor’s cigarette smoke).

At the three quarters mark we were close enough to hear the announcer’s punny salmon jokes and see the rest of our group on their chosen bench (somehow in those two hours they never thought to snag a seat at the tables). When we finally finally finally made it to the ticket taker and the folks handing out food I knew for sure I was in Utah because every single one of them (who had surely had a much longer day than I had) was unfailingly friendly and cheerful.

When my daughter hesitated about getting the coleslaw the guy said, “You’ve been in line for a really long time. You’re gonna want the coleslaw.” Thank you, Coleslaw Man, for acknowledging our pain! Another worker (I believe she was the Potato Lady), upon hearing that my daughter read an entire novel in line, told us about the Payson Library’s great summer reading programs. I was resignedly irritated when we entered the actual, active, food-on-a-plate line but when we emerged with almost more food than two people could carry (we really should have recalled our bench people when we got to the plates) I was downright chipper.

I wanted to hug all of my fellow line-waiters. We made it! I didn’t dare indulge in hoping for this moment when we slogged through our shared trauma but now we are free. We are free and we have ridiculously large slabs of salmon! And corn! And cookies! And rolls! And coleslaw! We have coleslaw! We gathered our bench sitters, found a spot at the tables, and vacuumed up the food like the ravenous fools that we were.

Was it good? Yes. Was our judgment colored by the fact that we were at the weeping stage of hunger? Yes. Will we ever go again? No. Friends, the next time I spend $71 on dinner someone else is going to carry it to the table. The next time I devote four hours to acquiring food (Payson is a bit of a drive for us) it’s going to be because we are lingering over dessert and entranced by the sparkling conversation of our fellow diners. And the next time I crave transcendent salmon? I’m going to go on a road trip and not stop until we hit a coastal city. But if I feel like spending an evening with kind-hearted, generous folks I’ll just stay here in Utah (but I’ll eat before we get to the park).

**This article first appeared in the Southern Utah Independent on September 16, 2017: Salmon in a Small Town: Payson’s Annual Traffic Jam

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Hating thy neighbor

I wrote my column a week or so ago and was typing it up for my deadline, but every word I typed seemed frivolous in light of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia recently. I typed up that sentence, and it sat on my computer like that for several days as I went back-to-school shopping and got paint brushes for a project in the basement. I went kayaking with my nieces, nephew, and children. The whole thing went in and out of my consciousness because it is horrifying but distant and my skin is about one shade darker than albino. I live in a majority white state that votes Republican. That picture of the rally (the one with the ridiculous tiki torches) contains people who look like people I know. One in particular could be the twin of a man I know only peripherally, and I have to admit that after the shock of having neighbors who voted for our current president, I found myself thinking that if that happened to actually be this man, I knew I wouldn’t be surprised.

And then I watched HBO’s Vice News episode “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” and words like “horrifying” seemed too frivolous to use in response to what happened this past weekend. The episode had a reporter (Elle Reeve) interviewing and shadowing a white nationalist leader (Christopher Cantwell) before, during, and after the rally and the events surrounding the rally. First, we see the chanting, which will ring in my nightmares forever: “Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets!” or alternately “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” So much anger was wrapped up in that mob of people who individually could probably very easily overpower me physically. We rely upon the decency of others so much in our everyday lives. We forget how vulnerable each of us is to people who decide not to be decent. It was terrifying to watch these men chant, even from the safe position of thousands of miles away behind a computer screen. And I’m white, so they’d have to talk to me before they realized they hated me enough to kill me. Yes, kill me. That is not hyperbole. That is just about a direct quote.

Christopher Cantwell not only vehemently denounces any small suggestion that he is a nonviolent protestor, he lays out the weapons he was personally wearing, and it covers the bedspread. Oh yeah, and then he says that the next rally will be even better because more people will die. I don’t make a habit of watching videos of white supremacists speaking, so a good portion of my time watching this video was trying to wrap my head around how people could come to these conclusions. Because these aren’t historical figures. These are people who live in my country. These are people who live in my state. These are people who live in my neighborhood (ok, I still can’t believe that one. It’s too horrible). Or, apparently, I live in their country, their state, their neighborhood. I walk on their streets. And I can think like them and be like them (in ways that are so intrinsic to my personhood that I can’t actually change them) or die. How is this not considered terrorism? Isn’t that the logic of a terrorist?

And then there is the footage of the counter-protesters, including the horrifying (there’s that word again, and it’s too small to even convey a small part of the depth of the horror) footage of a car speeding into a crowd of people (which Cantwell calls a self-defense move on the part of the driver). I understand the need to be physically there, to send a message, to be more than just a website (especially when one of the white supremacists saw the small numbers of counter-protesters as evidence that their point of view is a minority viewpoint), but I don’t see how anything is accomplished by sitting there with both hands flipping off the speaker or yelling swear words. It was one force of hate meeting another force of hate. When one of the counter-protesters mirrored the language of the angry, chanting marchers by saying that it was wrong that the rally was permitted to come to his city because “this is my city” I wanted to say “Wait. This is not a question of whose country it is. This is his country; this is your country; this is my country. And we all have to live with each other.”

We are never going to magically solve all of our disagreements. What we must do, though, is learn how to disagree. This means not chalking up domestic terrorist language, actions, and perspectives to “First Amendment rights.” If people are rallying while armed to the teeth and saying quite clearly that they mean to do harm to another human being, then that is no longer a rally. That is a mob. That is not protest. That is war. We cannot just yell at them and tell them to go home. They are home. We are all home. We cannot just say that we find their viewpoint repugnant. We must also let them know that their means of expressing disagreement is not acceptable in a civilized country. And we must do this by showing them how people disagree without bashing heads in and without the completely useless phrase “f— you.” This rally should never have been able to obtain permits. People with weapons should have been detained or turned away from gathering points. People threatening harm should not be allowed to foment the masses. And it darn well shouldn’t take days for the leader of the country to denounce domestic terrorism.

I am still trying to wrap my head around how people who live in this country can come to all the conclusions that my fellow human beings express. But the biggest disconnect for me is the idea that we can’t all live together and so one segment of the population feels emboldened to kill another segment of the population, that it’s either one group or the other that controls everything, that one group is replacing another group. I know you are more than hate speech and violence. I know you have families. I know you have hopes and dreams that are not centered on this movement. I know you are more three dimensional than I see on the news. I know this because I’m a human being too. I have a family. I have hopes and dreams. I am three dimensional. Engage with me like a human being, engage with all of the other human beings who call this country home in a way that does not deny their humanity, and we can find a way to all sit down at the bounteous table that is the United States of America.

**Previously published in the Southern Utah Independent on August 19, 2017 as This is Not How Civilized People Disagree

Everyday Sexism

What Diana doesn’t know: Feminist commentary in “Wonder Woman”

The biggest source of comic relief in the movie “Wonder Woman” is the juxtaposition of Diana’s ultra-competence in battle with her utter lack of competence in all things “womanly” (ok, not all things). Having been raised outside of the male gaze, she hasn’t learned to defer to males in terms of governance, she hasn’t learned that her body is an object to be lusted after, and she doesn’t care whether the guy in the bar ever answers the question of whether to be afraid or aroused at the sight of her. Yes, she does follow Steve Trevor around like his little lost puppy, but the reason she is lost is because life with males as distant figures is so very different from life as we know it (making her “Born Yesterday” appearance itself a form of feminist commentary).

From the start of the movie, men and women are cast as two different species. There are Men, who are mortal and fallible, and there are Women, who are Amazons. Sure, there are mortals who are female, but we are (for the most part) encouraged to forget them as one scene wonders — the woman whose plea inspires the much previewed press into No Man’s Land, for example. Even pervasive characters like the plucky secretary Etta Candy and Dr. Poison have one essential moment before fading into the shadows of a male-dominant world.

The Amazon Women, though, aren’t doing too much better by being tucked away on a hidden island spending all of their time training to defeat their own dominant male (thus creating a grown woman who knows how to swing a battle axe but can still say with a straight face that she was created by being formed out of clay and breathed to life by a god). She looks hopelessly naïve when she says that (guess Amazon Mama didn’t have the “birds and the bees” talk with little Diana), and there are similar comic setups for her simple view of war and her expectations for male behavior. Wonder Woman is presented mainly as someone who doesn’t know things we take for granted. The list of things Diana doesn’t know is pretty long: Diana doesn’t know ice cream, Diana doesn’t know corsets, Diana doesn’t know babies, Diana doesn’t know social boundaries — but especially, Diana doesn’t know her own origin story and her full power. It befuddles me that Amazon Mama felt that ignorance was Diana’s best defense and that she could really send Diana out into the world to meet her fate with her blinders still intact. I know Amazon Mama meant well, but it was infuriating to see her push Diana back into ignorance over and over again.

Being ignorant didn’t keep Diana safe — it just meant that she met her fate on someone else’s terms and not her own. It’s interesting that Diana couldn’t defeat her enemy until she became The Diana Who Knows. The movie is also bookended with this version of Diana — the one who can slip easily through the world in her pencil skirt, who has found a way to navigate the world of Men, who holds secret stories in her heart that men only wish they knew. The movie is the journey from The Diana Who Doesn’t Know to The Diana Who Knows, and we are left wondering at the end if this is a good thing (though we presume it is). But even this more savvy secret Amazon can’t help but look back wistfully at The Diana Who Doesn’t Know. We don’t know what compromises The Diana Who Knows has had to make over the years (though one can make some assumptions based on the fact that her shield is on display in a museum case and her pencil skirt hasn’t been ripped in two by a good roundhouse kick), but we end the movie with the hope that even though Diana Knows Men, she’ll always have a piece of the Diana Who Doesn’t Know Boundaries. That is what resonated with me — feeling the shared weight of being Women Who Know how the dominant male world works and having the shared memory of a Woman Who Doesn’t Know the boundaries and expectations, doesn’t care about that, and kicks a lot of deserving tush as a consequence.

Does this journey make me feel empowered? Sort of. Probably a better description would be cautiously optimistic. I’ve only just met The Diana Who Knows. I don’t really know how she fits into this world. I only know she put her lot with the fate of Men, she has compromised on her dress, and she’s nostalgic about her adventure with the first man she ever met. I hope she continues to call Men out on the ridiculous things we seem to just accept as a society. I hope she keeps her ideals. But at the end of the movie, I really don’t know for sure what will happen for Wonder Woman, and as I read commentary that goes back and forth on whether or not this movie is truly feminist commentary and truly a breakthrough movie, I am similarly at sea about the “Wonder Woman” franchise. Is this a new era for blockbuster movies? Could be. Maybe. I’m cautiously optimistic. I want to see more. I want to know what happens next for the Movie Director Who Knows, the Writer Who Knows, the Actress Who Knows, and the Audience Who Knows. Where will we go from here?

**Published previously in the Southern Utah Independent on June 17, 2017: What Diana Doesn’t Know

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An Argument for Steel Straws

My sister and I are part of an elite club called the Nature Wasters. We earned that title by not being as extreme in our environmentalism as our children (the Nature Savers). It’s hard to match elementary students in their zeal for saving the planet because it is coupled with a flagrant disregard for practicality. My sister and I, while sympathetic, could not quite bring ourselves to cut out all consumables, fossil fuels, and other Nature-Wasting items (despite the constant reminders about how our egregious use of paper towels was bringing about the extinction of tree frogs in Zambia). But you can’t live with Nature Savers for years on end without becoming more and more of a tree hugger.

This is how the Great Steel Straw Project began.

My sister sent me a link to a video about plastic waste and asked, joking, if we should show it to the Nature Savers. No! Oh my goodness, no. I take enough flack for paper goods. I do not need the children policing my plastics. But it nagged at me. The image of all of those plastic straws — discarded and forgotten but as pristinely undecomposed as they are in a store — was haunting. Every time I threw away a straw, I saw it floating toward the miles-wide ocean garbage floats that the Nature Savers tell me have developed over the years. So, to the delight of my daughters, I bought a set of steel straws and endeavored to give up plastic straws.

It’s harder than it should be. First, you have to remember to put them in the car, not just the first time but every time you wash them. We had them at least a week before we used them because we wouldn’t remember about them until we encountered a Straw Situation. Then we would have to remember we had them in the car. The children are committed enough to leave a restaurant to retrieve the steel straws. I am not.

Another hiccup is the two-window drive through. You can clearly tell window No. 1 that you don’t want straws, but window No. 2 will put them in the bag just in case. Or you may not catch them in time and the straw will already be in the drink. At this point, the girls wanted me to pull out the plastic straw and use the steel straw. I don’t think they quite believed me when I said it would be a useless gesture.

The biggest problem, though, is that we use so darn many straws. Four straws for three people isn’t nearly enough, even with our loose hygiene standards. One trip to 5 Guys with sodas and milkshakes left us wishing we had bought a second set.

We haven’t cut out plastic straws entirely (sometimes they are just so much more expedient) but even cutting out half of what we use is more than I thought we would be doing. I never realized how many straws I actually use in the course of a month until I stopped using them. This is a tiny drop in the ocean of plastic waste. I recognize that, too. Some might even call it a useless gesture. But it is a small thing that I can actually do that reminds me of a larger goal: to waste less. Not what you would expect to hear from an avowed Nature Waster, I know. And I’ve always said that if the choice is between my sanity and the planet, it’s got to be my sanity. But if even I can find a way to save the planet now and again, maybe you can, too. The Nature Savers will thank you.

*Originally published in the Southern Utah Independent on April 23, 2017: An Argument for Steel Straws