Intellectual Autobiography

I read. My mom tells me I've been a reader since I was two years old. Parental exaggeration aside, I do have a few distinct memories of being at eye-level with the seat of the chairs at our kitchen table, and sounding out words from a newspaper. Later I remember hiding under the covers with a flashlight, reading my books when I was supposed to be napping. I remember doing this with my infant cousin in the room and trying not to rustle and wake him up. He's almost exactly three years younger than me, so I couldn't have been much more than four.

In school I was constantly informed that I was smarter or more advanced than my peers. I didn't have much frame of reference, I avoided them so I could read. I lacked interest in school assignments, and my mom and my teachers told me it was because I wasn't challenged. This was a convenient fiction. I don't know if I was challenged or not, I was simply disinterested if there wasn't a story. Where was the story in long division? Where was the story in geography or history or science? If I'd had teachers that bothered to give me context and find the narrative in what they wanted me to absorb, I dare say I would have been a far more enthusiastic student. History, geography and science are full of stories that I thrill to now, that were sorely missing when I was young and school was drudgery. The teachers saw me as a quiet girl who kept to herself and followed directions. I would read, and they were satisfied with that. I'm sure some of them would have liked to see me stretch myself, but they were distracted by the thirty-odd other children in the class who took a more rambunctious approach to life.

As a teenager I discovered the theatre, and it forced me to come out of my own head and interact with others. I still loved stories, but now I wanted to be an active participant rather than a silent observer. In 1990, Franco Zeffirelli directed Mel Gibson in Hamlet. It was my second experience with Shakespeare, (the first being The Tempest when I was five or six. It might as well have been in Dutch, but the colors were pretty!) and it was so well told, and so powerful, that it began to demystify what had until now been something to avoid. I understood this movie. The story pulled and dragged me along with it. I was baffled half the time, but the performances were so clear that I was able to keep up.

I began to read Shakespeare, and seek out other productions. Of course, nothing crystallized the text like seeing it brought to life, and at first I was unable to really absorb a play until I'd seen it. Then, as I grew older and left high school, I began to perform it, direct it and later, tutor it to college classmates.

At the Foothill College theatre conservatory I took my first class from Julian Lopez-Morillas. Julian is quite possibly the smartest person I have ever known. Aside from his Jeopardy championship and having won some of Ben Stein's Money, this brilliant scholar had a tendency to spout long passages from the Iliad, from memory, in the middle of class in order to illustrate for us the value of meter and texture to verse. Impressive, sure, but Julian did it in the original Ancient Greek. I'd asked him later if he'd memorized the Greek phonetically, but it turns out, as a former archaeology major he knew Ancient Greek. This guy had some serious smarts.

Julian was a firm believer in scansion as a tool to understand Shakespeare's intent. I dove into his methods with more alacrity than anything I had studied before. I actually put effort into this, and I spent hours breaking down verse into its component parts. I used it in every Shakespeare play I performed in, and a few years later had the privilege of being directed by Julian as Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet.

A few years after that I was in my last play, Hamlet, with Shady Shakespeare Theatre Company. It was a singularly uninspiring experience. The director, for all of her professed love for the play, had no idea what was going on. She had pre-cast the actor playing Hamlet based primarily on her own attraction to him, and although he was a decent actor, the poor fellow had never done Shakespeare before, and was lost from the beginning. Towards the end of the run, I found myself alone in a car with him lamenting the fact that many actors performing Shakespeare didn't do any scansion when preparing for the role. "What's scansion?" he said.

I gave him a brief rundown and we arrived at our destination shortly thereafter. I related this incident to my best friend Michelle, the stage manager of the production, over instant message later that week. She responded with, "what's scansion?"

Via Messenger, I proceeded to lay out the basics of scansion, iambic pentameter, rhythm, and how Shakespeare played with it. I talked about how Richard III's introductory monologue is the most twisted and irregular verse in the canon, spoken by a misshapen and twisted character. I found myself typing and typing, excited to share what I knew and loved. I broke off in the middle of a sentence and said to Michelle, "I really need to be teaching this."

So here I am.