Blue Window, Inherit The Wind (Listening to: I'm Good, I'm Gone, Lykke Li)

I'm in the advanced acting class at my school and I also do speech. This year I have a monologue for acting class and a scene in speech, and I figured I'd just put them out there because they're pretty boss if I do say so myself.

Blue Window, my monologue:
I used to be married to a dentist. We bought a big apartment on East 71st Street. We'd been married about three months. I was standing by the window. It was late afternoon. Everything was blue, as blue as it can be before it gets black.
And Marty said, come out on the terrace. I said, I don't have any clothes on. And he brought me this little robe and we walked out on the terrace. We'd only lived there two months. And he kissed me, and I put my head back to look up at the sky. Our reflections were in the glass. And I put my head back - we lived on the seventh floor, there was another one above us - and we leaned, he leaned, I set my back against the rail...and it just...we were gone. We were over. I saw our reflections leave the window. And I didn't black out. I thought, very clearly, this is bad. This is real. And it's true, you see everything pass before your eyes. Everything. Slowly, like a dream. And Marty was...climbing up me...and screaming...and we turned over once...and we went through an awning, which saved my life. And I broke every bone in my face. I have a completely new face. My teeth were all shattered, these are all caps.
I was in traction for ten months. And Tom came to see me every week, every day sometimes. Marty's family. We sued the building. I mean, they never even attached it to the wall. It wasn't even attached. It was just a rail, a loose rail. There was another one on another floor, the same thing could have happened. I landed on him. I killed him. I can't - it's seven years. I can't have anybody hold me. I can't ever be held.

Inherit the Wind, my scene:
Rachel: Mr. Drummond, you've got to call the whole thing off. It's not too late. Bert knows he did wrong. He didn't mean to, and he's sorry. Now why can't he just stand up and say to everybody I did wrong, I broke a law, I admit it. I won't do it again. Then they'd stop all this fuss, and - everything would be like it was.
Drummond: Who are you.
Rachel: I'm a friend of Bert's.
Drummond: How about it boy, getting cold feet?
Rachel: Bert knows he's wrong, don't you Bert?
Drummond: Don't prompt the witness.
Bert: What do you think, Mr. Drummond?
Drummond: I'm here. That tells you what I think. Well, what's the verdict, Bert?
Bert: No sir, I'm not gonna quit.
Rachel: Bert!
Bert: It wouldn't do any good now anyhow. If you'll stick by me, Rache, well - we can fight it out.
Rachel: I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do.
Bert: What's the matter Rache?
Rachel: I don't want to do it, Bert, but Mr. Brady says...They want me to testify against you.
Bert: You c- you can't. Rache, some of the things I've talked to you about are things you just say to your own heart. If you get up on the stand and say those things out loud...don't you understand? The words I've said to you, softly, in the dark, just trying to figure out what the stars are for or what be on the backside of the moon...they were questions, Rache. I was just asking questions. If you repeat those things on the witness stand, Brady'll make 'em sound like answers. And they'll crucify me.
Drummond: What's your name. Rachel what?
Rachel: Rachel Brown. Can they make me testify?
Drummond: I'm afraid so. It would be nice if nobody ever had to make anybody do anything, but...
Rachel: I remember feeling this way when I was a little girl. I would wake up at night, terrified of the dark. I'd think sometimes that my bed was on the ceiling, and the whole house was upside down, and if I didn't hang onto my matress I'd fall, outward, into the stars. I wanted to run to my father and have him tell me I was safe, that everything would be alright. But I was always more frightened of him than I was of falling. It's the same way now.
Random Court Official: Will Miss Rachel Brown come forward please?
Brady: Miss Brown, you are a teacher at the Hillsboro Consolidated School?
Rachel: Yes.
Brady: So you have had ample time to know the defendant, Mr. Cates, professionally.
Rachel: Yes.
Brady: Is Mr. Cates a member of the spiritual community to which you belong. Do you and Mr. Cates attend the same church?
Rachel: Not anymore. Bert dropped out two summers ago.
Brady: Why?
Rachel: It was what happened with the little Stebbins boy.
Brady: Would you tell us about that please?
Rachel: The boy was eleven years old and he went swimming in the river, and got a cramp, and drowned. Bert felt awful about it. He lived right next door and Tommy Stebbins used to come over to the boarding house to look through Bert's microscope. Bert said the boy had a quick mind and he might even be a scientist when he grew up. At the funeral, Pa preached that Tommy didn't die in a state of grace, since his folks had never had him baptized.
Bert: Tell them what your father really said, that Tommy's soul was damned, writhing in hellfire! Religion's supposed to comfort people, isn't it? Not frighten them to death!
Brady: I request that the defendant's remarks be stricken from the record. But how can we strike this young man's bigoted opinions from the memory of this community? Now my dear, will you please tell us some more of Mr. Cates's opinions on the subject of religion? Will you merely repeat, in your own words, some of the conversations you had with the defendant?
Rachel: I don't remember exactly -
Brady: What you told me the other day. That presumably humerous remark Mr. Cates made about the heavenly father.
Rachel: Bert said...
Brady: Go on, my dear.
Rachel: I can't - Bert was just talking about some of the things he had read. He...he...
Brady: Were you shocked when he told you these things? Describe to the court your innermost feelings when Bertram Cates said to you: God did not create man! Man created God!
Rachel: Bert didn't say that! He was just joking. What he said was: God created man in his own image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
Brady: Go on my dear, tell us some more. What did he say to you about the holy state of matrimony? Did he compare it with the breeding of animals?
Rachel: No, he didn't say that - He didn't mean that. That's not what I told you. All he said was- I don't understand it. What I do understand, I don't like. I don't want to think that men come from apes and monkeys. But I think that's beside the point. You see I haven't really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think - so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies, too! Maybe what Mr. Darwin wrote is bad. I don't know. Bad or good, it doesn't make any difference. The ideas have to come out - like children. Some of 'em healthy as a bean plant, some sickly. I think the sickly ideas die mostly, don't you, Bert?



Note: Inherit the Wind has been cut a lot...don't think this is the original text.

Self-Reliance (Listening to: American Names, Sebastian Grainger)

In my American Studies class we were assigned to read Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self-Reliance. Here's the full text. There's also a link at the top for a modern English version, because Emerson can get pretty wordy. Trust me though, the long version is worth reading.

I basically fell in love with Emerson reading this essay, and reading another related speech he delivered (American Scholar) only made me love his work more.

One of my favorite ideas is that there is this immense intelligence, this brilliant light, not God or some religious figure, but a universal sense of humanity which you can tap into. I love the idea that this huge, infinite reality is so enormous that it can't exist without being somewhat paradoxical. Anything truly immense has room for mutually conflicting realities. True brilliance is listening to this light that shines into you from all around, these beams of truth. But what brilliance has come to mean is the ability to copy and explain the philosophy of great thinkers before you, following people like Emerson and Thoreau like sheep. (Which reminds me of an amazing movie, Dead Poets Society).
In American Scholar, Emerson outlines how to be a free thinker, if once can even outline such a thing. He says that to be brilliant, you have to tap into this immense intelligence, and that you need to observe nature (because, Emerson says, nature reflects the human soul), you must read books (only using them for inspiration, not as a stifler of your own creativity), and finally and most importantly, you must live. Emerson is one of the only philosophers who cites experience as an enormous factor of intelligence.
One of my other favorite ideas shares some common ground with the Jewish idea of Tikkun Olam, where humanity has been split and you need to gather all the pieces to put it back together. Emerson says that all of humanity constitutes one Man, and that each of us needs tap into the immense intelligence to become instead of a man who thinks, Man Thinking. It's the same concept of gathering the pieces, only according to Emerson, we ARE the pieces.

Did I mention how much I love Emerson?

Anyway the concept of Self-Reliance, independence of other people's ideas and opinions came up in my own life. I won't get too specific, but my best friend since 6th grade and I started having problems last year. I was so scared we were growing apart. I was more terrified by the fact I wasn't sure I loved her anymore than by the thought of her stopping loving me. We worked our problems out for the most part, but then she and my two other friends started doing drugs a lot, and it's just hard to hang out with her now. It's the same thing, but I'm not scared. I don't feel dependent on her. Or any of them. It's not that I don't care what's happening, I just realize I guess that there is a deeper underlying pattern. Another concept we discussed in American Studies. And the pattern here is that people always leave, and I will be fine on my own. I haven't cried since the beginning of Summer. On that note, here is some writing I've done:

Sometimes it feels like the passing of a dream, that dull lack of some inherent sting. I barely feel alive. The pieces of my life have faded like yellowing photographs, and color is more a memory than anything else. Is this purgatory? Is this some hazy death? I used to cry so much I felt electric. I used to feel like overflowing, watching that delicious liquid slosh and dribble and spill. I am all dried out it seems. I thought my tears were brimstone; I thought I was in hell. I thought a lot of things and I believed them. Am I happier now? I can’t remember.

I think I float through your lives as a thing intangible. I have become a lonely recollection, the type that makes you shiver in warm sunlight. I can see your world shifting to cover the holes I once filled. I’m older, wiser. I am the ghost smiling at her old friends and former loves.

This thinning encircles me. I am contained, easily, quietly. Detachment hangs like an anchor from my shoulders. Strangely, it is freeing. I feel infinite. The pettiness I used to cry over, the hate I used to feel, and my fervent desires have all been replaced by a calm certainty.

I am self-reliant. I don’t cling to you. I know, with a tranquil but irrevocable conviction, things which once made me ache to glance at, and they sing to me a lullaby. I am lulled by the song of the universe, by this serene knowledge of my own soul. My vantage is high, and pure of your distortions. I can see so clearly. This tangled web of manic pirouettes and bowing dancers has a pattern, and free of jealousy and fear of loneliness I understand it.

This thinness, this detachment, is but the stilling of my own frantic dance. The clearing of my lovely mind.

Enough of Love (Listening to: Black Cadillacs, Modest Mouse)

Slip me some gum.

Have I got a secret for you.

Let me sing it to you.

Here is your hand on my thigh.

Look how your arms pen me in.

Riddle me this.

I’d give you everything

Myself

To know what you want when you kiss me.

Split my string of pearls.

Don’t you want to break me?

I am your disposable income.

You can be my impulse buy.

Mess me up, I’d like to tousle your hair.

Grab me, squeeze me,

But don’t you ever dare touch me.

Whispers?

I’ll kill you.

Love me?

Fuck that.

Bruise me, use me.

Tear me down.

Let me drink myself crazy.

Won’t you rough me around?

Abacus (Listening to: Horizons, Son, Ambulance)

Use me. Define me. Stencil me, if you can.

Count me on your abacus.

Why I never say hello, you know the answer.

I only wish you would tell me it.

It’s the bridge that I could never cross, even once I had arrived.

It’s the raspberries in my cheekbones and the chocolate I eat while I cry.

You always say I have the best food. (It’s me, it was always me.)

And I lied. I don’t cry anymore.

Break my teapot. Flesh me out.

My fingers have no thoughts these days.

Smashed eyelashes, my whispering belly.

Reeling in my first fish, tears as bait.

I don’t blame you.

I was beautiful.

Kissing clocks and the faces of our knees,

They never seemed so futile. (Chasing white rabbits was always enough.)

Gardens in the small of my back and bleak cities on my brow.

I just wonder why you won’t plant me a tree.

I could really use some oxygen right now.

Sing me the story, teach me the song.

About the way my toes'll curl under with someone else’s love.

The arrondissements and the sunflowers I know I’ll see alone.

Do people get tired of changing?

Do you believe in blank slates?

Tell me your thesis. (Oh, oh, your personal examples.)

Please win me over, I want to surrender.

I was never all that good with guns to start.

Crumple some paper, crinkle my bones.

Have my words all eloped in secret with you?

Curtains and couches and the fact that you won’t settle down.

What do you call a three and a half minute harmonica solo?

Knock me sideways and gnaw me near.

Kick me closer, force my flush.

I don’t want some pretentious, artificial gain.

Brush away my misconceptions. Tell me what remains.

Kiss The Clock, It's 11:11 (Listening to: Light Years Away, Mozella)

It probably won't be by the time I'm done writing this.
I haven't had time to write for weeks. School is basically eating my life et cetera and I'm too busy swooning over The Expelled Boy to write about swooning over him.
Wow, my life is so pathetic.

I thought I'd tell the entire world about it though.
First of all I'm in love with some new music, but I'll totally tell you about that later. Maybe I'll do a top whatever playlist sometime. That might be fun. Anyways, this song I have on repeat right now is an old favorite off my very first painting playlist freshman year.

Also known as two years ago, when the world was still black and white and oh so much easier.

I think I'm happier in color, even shades of grey.

But anyway, this song is beautiful. I've always loved it. It is just so mellow and the rhyming couplets are enchanting. Her voice is beautiful in an ugly-pretty way. I forget sometimes how much music has become a soudtrack to my life. Listening to it takes me right back to some of my first paintings, made in a few hours on the floor of my room with shitty brushes and my mini easel. The smell is...wow. Gotta love sense-memory.

I don't think I got this song back then. Back then I was so innocent; I had never had a boyfriend, a kiss, or even a hand to hold. I forget sometimes how much I wanted what I've had. It was worth it.

I'm remembering how long I spent crying over not being called by Art School Boy. The lyrics really fit that. I never realized it I guess. I was stuck on Tiny Vessels to get me through that crisis.

But:

Boy, looking back I see, I'm not the girl I used to be. When I lost my mind, it saved my life. But I don't blame you anymore, that's too much pain to store.
And I think I cried for days but that seems light years away.
And I'm never going back to who I was.
That life seems like light years away.

My head is so full of stories and things to say. It's totally jumbled.
Songs, my essay about myself, weekend spontaneity, LOVE, death, acting class
I wish I could share them all, right now.
I'll come back to them.


This is terrible blog. I'm pretty sure I'm breaking all the rules.