I appear to be a liar

because i am not at all linear. And last blog, I said -- and believed -- that I would continue to talk about Around a Child, what it was, what it did, why it was good.

I didn't. Because life took over and other things seem more important to me now. Although... just today, the kid, I think we called him John, came up to me at the community event at which I was being the me I am today, and engaged me in his usually ambivalent way, but did appear to take away with him some information about my current project.

Which is...working directly with kids 12 give-or-take a year or two to develop a performance piece as the Spirits of the Great White Pine, trees which, in our geography, were savagely harvested in a 15-year-period that ended in 1884 (and now have a similar history being written in Indonesia). Their piece is the story of the pine, which intertwines with an original musical play with a variation on the usual music-theatre plot: French logger boy attending the Fall Fair buys box lunch of (English) Reeve's beautiful and beloved younger daughter, English farmer boy who believes himself the destined partner of said daughter takes umbrage, testosterone conflict ensues, romance perseveres, etc. etc. The spirits of the pine, however, whose squared bodies end up as the infrastructure of the tenements of Glasgow at the turn of the century, are released when the tenements, now fashionably located real estate, are white-painted and the covers peeled back to expose the timbers. They return to their native home to tell us how important trees are to the well-being of the earth -- and move the kids who are the Spirits into a community education project that uses physical / image theatre to engage the larger community in a tree-planting campaign, and if all goes well, an ongoing theatrical 'home' for youth in our community.

Our community is a small village in cottage country, Ontario. Every summer I am assaulted with our seasonal visitors as they take over my physical world. Long (for us) lines at the grocery store and bank machine, buzzing speedy traffic, fast-forward or non-existent social transactions around daily life events, unattibuted impatience, anonymity. Etc.

We hate it. But we also acknowledge that it is the ka-ching that feeds our economy. Not mine personally, but that of the community, so I bear it. Bitchily, I must occasionally admit.

But the week before last, the first of three weeks of Great White Pine Theatre Camp, I found myself pressed into active direct duty in running the camp. It wasn't supposed to be this way - I was supposed to be the Exec Dir - funding, promotion, hiring resources, all that stuff. But the woman who was to be Artistic Director of the Camp and the Director of the play parted company with us, after several months of collegiality, at the end of June. So the intern (god, I'm glad we have her!!!) stepped up to the Artistic Director role, and my role became much more active...

Because, although we had only 8 kids, between an immature 10 and a socially-delayed 16, fairly equally gender represented, we had a lot of work on our hands transforming them into a theatrical team. I was a grease spot on the pavement that first week. It has been, lemme see, about four decades, since I worked directly with a group of kids this age. I was gob-smacked, to use a good British term, by the social culture of the group. I was accustomed to kids respecting adults: adults spoke, kids more-or-less listened; authority gave directions, kids more-or-less complied. Not! Even though these kids were from 'good' families, were 'good' students -- whereas most of my experience is with what I lovingly call 'bent' kids, kids 'with issues', as the current lingo has it. We had 2 identified 'bent' kids in the group, but they were not our primary challenge. Our primary challenge was the junior literati of our community, kids who loved theatre, many of which had performance experience, all of which had performed well in the audition.

An exhausting week, dragging myself home after a 5-hour day, explaining to myself I was too old for this kind of challenge... But eventually figuring out that my fatigue was due to the hard work involved in absorbing in some fullness and struggling to make sense of what has happened to youth culture since the last time I had been in intimate contact. It has indeed changed... more on that another time, when I'm off the front lines...

The good news is that the second week began with a television filming. The kids demonstrated that in spite of their insolence and rowdiness, they had indeed absorbed a lot and could perform on command, did a much better job than we had dared hoped. They saw it on Wednesday. They developed an 'observing ego', theatrically speaking. Chemistry had abated. We excused the under-age camper who had been on a one-week trial. We began to offer mid-morning and mid-afternoon nutitious snacks to augment their brought lunches. (We adults were ravenous, so why not them?) We brought in community people in various roles. It became bearable, then enjoyable, verging on delightful...

Today we had a local radio performance at a community 'fair'. The kids were stellar. Not perfect. Not adult. But totally engaged, in their own ways, with what it is we are trying to do. The 'we' now including them.

The adult cast has just assembled, a bit belatedly because of the departure of the original director and the delay in locating / pitching / landing (I sincerely hope!) a replacement within, I am proud to claim, a week (and an additional week with meeting her requirements which nobody knew about but a very small cadre of 'us'). And which we did with a whole couple of hours to spare... such is show biz, I think... The cast is 7/9ths young adults. When they engage with the Spirits, who are about a decade younger on average, I predict that even more amazing things will happen. I'll let you know.

What drew me to this blog was that this evening, as the dew was threatening, while I was taking the washing in off the line, there was a speed boat on the lake with screaming youngsters, probably tubers, maybe skiiers. And my thought was that when I was young, a long time ago, we did our screaming (which I acknoweldge to be an essential element of youth) out behind the community centre while our parents and grand-parents played whist or celebrated a 25th wedding anniversary, in the course of whatever adrenalin and other chemistry-inducing activities we could devise. I don't begrudge that youth scream, or question authority -- in fact I think reality requires it. But I do think they should not do it on our time. They should leave us out of it: we don't need it, and it doesn't improve their product or their process. So do it away from me. Off my lake, outa my camp, on your own time and your own air space.

Sadly, I know we have taken away from them their time and air space. We require them to be in our ambit at all times, or purportedly so. A sad mistake, for us, for them. More on that another time.