Life's Lovely When You're a Woman Like Me

Have I returned to blog? I'm not sure. Maybe a bit.

I had some blog posts backlogged about my summer and theatre and stuff I saw and thought about but it all seems like very long ago and as if another person wrote it.

A number of things have kept me from blogging, the most prominent being my endless confusion over whether I should even continue doing theatre in the first place, and if I did, whether I should continue talking about it. I also broke and then lost my camera and as I'm sure I've mentioned already, blogs without pictures are like very bad books.

Right now I'm not acting in anything and am pretty convinced I'll never be acting in anything again. It's awful and worrisome and I don't know what to do about it.

'A ha!', you say, 'You can write!' You are wise, reader. Except I can't. I try, and I'm not that good. I've been writing a lot lately, some creative stuff and some 'please give me money stuff', but I'm struggling.

I'm trying to write a play about friendship and about memory (I AM THE MOST ORIGINAL PLAYWRIGHT ALIVE), and for whatever reason, the characters I've created have come out being girls. Initially they weren't, but I recently wrote something that there is no part for me in, and I honestly can't see myself ever producing it. I need to feel there's at least a chance I can be in the damn thing if and when I write it. Is that awful? Also, I want to write for girls. So that we have something to do onstage.

A while ago I was talking to a girl I really thought I could work with and I said that I wanted to write something for us where we played girls in school uniforms with psychotic tendencies. She immediately said, 'No, why can't we just be girls who are nice and normal and not insane?'

I was really bummed out by that. First of all, I don't think that having psychotic tendencies precludes you from being nice, normal, not insane. Second of all, because no one wants to see the play about four girls who really respect each other and have uneventful interactions full of positivity, and I sure as hell don't want to write it (also, not being a normal positive respectful person, I don't think I'm qualified to write it). And third of all, this idealization of females, this thing that if women aren't paragons of virtue they're bitches, that is just an incredible wad of bullshit. Boys want to play (get to play) Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago: FLAWS APLENTY. The great roles aren't always people you want to be....just people you want to play.

But I'm writing this thing about/for/ with girls now, and it's hard to walk that line with characters that are flawed, and characters that are just heinous bitches. How to write girls that talk back and are insecure, but don't immediately fall into tropes of sarcastic know-it-alls, or secret anorexics, or evil frenemies. I'm trying to write something to give five girls a chance to act (in my head, it would be an all-female team, backstage too), but I might be creating something that's so anti-feminist I would want to die.

I'm having an enormous amount of anxiety about this, second only to the anxiety I'm having that the play is a piece of shit. What is that about??? If I can't write likeable interesting female characters, who else is going to?