Anamnetics

This could also be called "My Life as a Contact Drama."

I had a wild and crazy day that was, on the whole, British. I think. Maybe it was just cool. Judge for yourself.

Start of the day, I checked my diary (which is a datebook in England, not a little locked doowacky with rose-colored pages) to see what was going on, and WOW everything was going on. 11-1: Comedies, Comedians and Romances. My first seminar after sitting around and watching It's A Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day the two previous classes, which the professor did not attend, since they were just viewings. 1-1:45ish, LGBT Lunch. 2-4, Contemporary British Drama, in which we were discussing The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonough. Then Pancake Dinner, how the French celebrate Mardi Gras is that they make a bunch of crepes and eat them, and since we usually have Wednesday Dinner in Lafrowda with a bunch of French people, it was decided to have Wednesday Dinner as Pancake Dinner, despite the fact that Mardi Gras was yesterday.

And on top of that, it was Ash Wednesday! So I had to make it to a service somewhere. And it was 10:50 and I had to run to the Queen's Building for Comedies, Comedians and Romances.

Which turned out to be amazing. Not quite as free-form as I had expected a seminar to be, but amazing.

First off, I'd never seen either of them until I watched them in the screenings, and WOW what good movies. It's A Wonderful Life for all it's old-timey goodness, had genuine frightening moments in it. If you've seen it, go back and watch when Jimmy Stewart's in the dystopic Pottersville, when he goes to what was his home and it's a run-down wreck because his wife never insisted on buying it and fixing it up. The policeman and the taxi-driver, once the comic duo, become zombi-like exuders of menace as the follow the seeming-crazy Jimmy into the house. Like seriously, look for it. The light from the taxi-driver's car shines from behind them and blots out their faces, except for a quick glimmer in their eyes. It's frightening.

And Groundhog Day made me long for Pennsylvania, even with it's crazy groundhog traditions. It opens with Bill Murray doing the weather, talking about how a storm is going to blow in and hit Altoona, and I got a sudden pang of nostalgia, cause I know someone who lives in Altoona! AND I know PLENTY of people that live in Pittsburgh! Pennsylvania, its lawns, or level downs, and flocks grazing the tender herb ... But Groundhog Day gets a lot of the small town insanity as well. Go back and keep an eye out for the "Pennsylvania Polka" that's played in the background of the groundhog festival.

So anyway: class. The professor divided us into groups and asked us to answer certain questions, and thankfully I was in the group withe the questions I wanted to talk about: COMPARING AND CONTRASTING. Yes! I ended up having a really cool discussion with the professor about exactly that, how both movies use the force of comedy for a kind of moral force, to teach their main characters how to be better people, and he added how they also welcome both the main characters into the small-town American community, and we had come up with that point as well, which was great...

During the break while people had gone, the professor leaned in to me and said, "Are you from Kenyon?" "Yes," I said, beaming, "yes I am." Kenyon students are highly competed for by the English professors at Exeter, and I was happy to be an in-demand commodity. And also representing my school well and all that. That too.

Then, after break, we watched a television program, made by Rowan Atkinson, about comedy, which was, yet again, amazing, as he played most of the characters in the movie, but also demonstrated, very effectively, why each technique he investigated worked. For instance, he talked about physical comedians as developing characters that were, essentially, uncanny. Or alien. They were similar to humans, but from another world, and they were often possessed with an odd innocence to this world: this creates many gags in and of itself as these clowns encounter normal physical objects that they don't understand, and their battles with these objects imbue the objects with a kind of life of their own. Rowan Atkinson demonstrated this with a skit about washing his hands. He'd go to wash, and the soap would slip out of his hands. He'd pick it up and it would slip out again, and this grew into him chasing the soap around the sink, like he was beating a drum, until it finally flew off camera and he went to get it. He didn't come on for a few seconds, and then the soap bar flew across the screen and hit something on a shelf above the sink.

I learned A LOT about why I like to clown. I think I should drop out of Kenyon and go to clown college, except I don't know what kind of plays they read in clown college.

So on to lunch, which was fine, except my food took a while to get out, and I had to scarf it down and leave for class.

Contemporary British Drama was a big discussion about Beauty Queen, which I had already been a part of when I took Playwriting with Wendy last year, but nonetheless it was good to revisit it. Mmm... good plays...

From there I went home and caught a quick nap, then on to pancake night, which was YUM. I started out with a ham-and-cheese crepe, then a cremed spinach crepe, then another ham-and-cheese crepe, then a strawberry-blueberry-nutella-and-whipped-cream crepe (whipped cream is called "Squirty Cream" here! SO FUNNY!), then a bananna-nutella-blueberry-and-whipped-cream-crepe...then I think I might've called it a night. I can't remember it specifically.

But, during conversation, someone mentioned it was Ash Wednesday. "Oh no!" I said, "I haven't been to a service!" Then Meghan McClincy, a new K'Nexer, mentioned she was going to the Catholic Chapliancy for the service that night, so Clay and I joined her.

The service was uncanny, but in that clowny kind of way. The only other Catholic service that I'd been to had been inside a serious Catholic Church. I mean, it wasn't St. Peter's, but it was ornate, it had screens, and kneeling cushions, and statues and things. We went when I was a kid and my brother was playing football with a Catholic school team, and so my family essentially pretended to be Catholic for a year, I think, so he could play football. It was worth a Mass, apparently (NAME THAT HISTORICAL REFERENCE!). Anyway, I went to service once, and like the good little Calvinist I was (raised in Doylestown Presbyterian Church, after all), I was outright offended by all of the ornate garb and singing in Latin. After the service, the priest stood by the door to shake hands with everyone as they left. I refused to shake his hand. Me. At around age 12 or something. I was a snob.

Anyway, not only had I aged something like 10 years since then (I just felt really old, on top of this being Lent and having just come from being told that I was "dust, and to dust [I] will return."), but this was far from being an ornate place. I'd been to the Catholic Chaplaincy twice before, both in Freshers Week, and both because the Chaplaincy was holding a number of Cream Teas to encourage people to come see what it was about. It's described in "The Wheat from the Chavs," particularly how far it is from campus - it's actually off campus. It's a put-upon little place, the rooms are small, the building itself is small, it's not like the Anglican Church which has astounding acoustics and a ~50-foot vaulted ceiling.

So we missed the bus and had to walk all the way there in the dark, Clay, Meghan and I. All the way across Streatham campus, down Cardiac Hill, out to the very outskirts, across the overgrown path with a sign on it signifying that we were entering a Residential Neighborhood, and that the campus had ended. Through the Residential Neighborhood and finally, to the Catholic Chaplaincy.

We were late, but we were quickly shown in to a small room, no bigger than someone's family room, maybe half the size of Philo, for all you Kenyon folks. In any case, there were cushions to sit on, it was lit by candles, it smelled like incense, there was a small band in one corner, and apart from a crucifix on the wall, a power point with the responses, and an altar with some candles by the Bible, the leftovers of their Pancake Day, and a basket for a fast they were having on Friday, there wasn't much for the now-thawed Puritan in me to accuse of "graven images." The priest sat in a chair amongst the congregation (or would it be a Mass, as that's one of the Protestant-Catholic issues: whether to translate eklesia as "congregation" or "Church"), and there was a metal box hung on the wall with a flame on it, where I think they kept the Eucharist. That in particular struck me. I had only heard of that in classes like Reformation and Literature.

My first reaction to the whole place was ridden with thoughts of Mage: The Ascension, of magical thinking, talismans, etc., but I tried to put it from my mind. Next I started thinking about all the little details I learned in classes like Reformation and Literature - I found myself at a loss of what to do when we all had a response-prayer that talked about the Blessed Virgin. I ended up skipping that part, and I usually feel bad when I hear people do that in Church.

Next I was came to how G.K. Chesterton, in his book Orthodoxy (I think... I mean, I read this from a snippet in amazon.com...), asserted that people needed a kind of romantic dash of orthodoxy in their lives, in order to defend the practices of the Catholic Church. But again, these were all analytic responses. They weren't the point of going.

One of the things I did discover, though, was how downtrodden, how contrite, the Mass, the Church even, felt. Here they were in a little room with candles while the Anglicans had a complete traverse-style, all-out church and highly-competitive chapel choir. These Catholics had some candles, a power point, and a band. I found myself surrounded by that kind of contrite hope that so many people of various religions must have felt when practicing their faith by whatever means they had. Stories of the first Christians that met in catacombs and had secret symbols (i.e. the Ixthus, the "Jesus-Fish") to alert each other of whether the meeting was on or not. Protestants that were repressed under Bloody Mary, Catholics that were repressed under the Protestants. Joan of Arc, Jews, Muslims ... the Cathars, the song "Anatevka" from Fiddler on the Roof... But the hope that was present there, despite the semi-bleak world outside, was almost tangible. Looking back on it now I can think of Bill Caine, the Jesuit priest / playwright I met at the Ojai Playwright's Festival, who visited the Tower of London and was appalled by the sign that read "No prisoner was ever killed in the Tower" - a blatant lie - and even more appalled by the fact that a Jesuit's cell had been turned into a gift shop. How that Jesuit carved words into the wall that Bill read.

Maybe it was just the change of pace, but I felt a lot more awake to everything there, much more alert. Everything was very present. It was really fitting for Lent.

And the priest showed us how they made the ashes for Ash Wednesday, by taking out a blow torch and burning in a bowl some of the palms from Palm Sunday, grinding them up, and then (I think) he added holy water. He sang part of the pre-Eucharist prayer just like Karl Stevens did, and presumably does, at Kenyon, which made me feel like home again. While he was blessing/breaking the bread, "...in remembrance of me" was skipped over, and I wondered if it was to emphasize the transubstantiation rather than the commemoration of the last super, which was a big argument in the Reformation. Then after he blessed the wine, he added "...in remembrance of me," and I was really happy. That's kind of my favorite part of the Eucharist.

And then I got to walk around with ash on my forehead, and a bunch of people literally said, "uh, Griffin...you've got something..." My friend Thomas suggested it looked like a penis. But I just laughed it off and came right here to write about it to all of you.

Have a lovely night, everyone.