Discipline
A Vocab Word o'th’Day that’ll keep you in line.
A beloved professor of my Acting Boot Camp days used to say things like: “Your goal o’th’day…(that’s Irish for ‘goal of the day’)…” and I have continued his legacy. As you’ve noticed. A compact, florid, strawberry blond, openly gay Irishman from Wisconsin, he’d require us to enter the department’s March Madness pool each year, and would assign us homework about baseball, because he told us (quite rightly) that none of us had any hobbies other than theatre and that we needed one. So we were required to adopt his, till we acquired one of our own. When he lost his temper trying to crack the veneers of us young hotshot actors barely out of our teens (if that), he’d scream DO SOMETHING!!! at us with his flushed face stretched into a kabuki mask of rage, throwing papers or chairs across the room.
I loved the guy. Still do—I’m friends with him right now on social media and I tell him regularly how much his instruction and presence in my world of that acting program helped me and my art, and continues to inspire my current (especially theatrical) teaching. His loving, yelling discipline early on allowed my self and my talent to bloom up out of the quicksand that the trauma of childhood bullying had tamped down. (I think he might be a subscriber here, actually. If so: hi there! Love you! Nice ass…*)
Hardcore disciplined acting training is like martial arts and therapy (plus tribal coming of age rites and close knit school chum hazing practices), all rolled into one. Where high school theatre saved my life, college theatre shattered the windows of hope for a career in the biz and got down to the real matter at hand: training. Living. Growing up. Getting good. Really good.
*I have to explain this, before you get all worried: so I was walking across campus one afternoon, lost in my thoughts (and I think also in my headphones? I don’t remember) and pretty well oblivious to my surroundings. This same beloved prof was driving through on his way out, and thought he’d call out to me to say hello. But he wanted to be cheeky and make a joke. So he fake-jeered, “nice ass!” at me, knowing I’d laugh and jeer right back at him. I didn’t see nor hear him, though, but just kept walking, self-absorbed.
*This wouldn’t have been a problem, if another young woman, who didn’t know him or us at all, hadn’t heard him jeer instead of me. She looked up, offended, reacted the way you’d imagine any young woman would at such a thing, and my poor prof drove away, absolutely mortified. He, still dying from embarrassment, told me about the whole thing later that afternoon in class, and of course I found it absolutely hilarious. It’s been a longterm private joke between us ever since. Now we make sure we say “nice ass” to each other every chance we get.
Those who have had real, hard training in something (especially physical, like boxing or martial arts) know what it does to transform one, to toughen one up. I went to acting boot camp** and then trained in two different combat arts right after I graduated. I am well trained. The fact that some of the best training I’ve ever received was from a man I had to tell to never speak to me again after filing our divorce papers is another weird situation—a trauma I’m still working through. Getting yourself bullied is a habit, apparently. It’s one I’ve finally broken, though it’s still hard. The brain learns these patterns and restructures its own neurons around it. It takes effort to retrain and rebuild. A change of mind, quite literally. Practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes habit.
**That’s literally what Acting 1 at my BFA program was called. Why? Because it was that hardcore. That difficult. That challenging and transformative. The training in Acting 1 (Boot Camp) changed every student who endured it; each of us that came out the other end was a different person than the kid who went in. It’s funny—as a college level theatre prof myself in very recent days, I wonder whether this beloved and excellent teacher’s hardcore instruction, which helped so many of us so much, would ever be allowed in a 2020s classroom. Some of the students that went through Boot Camp even back then in the ‘90s, it’s true, hated the process and felt resentful. They didn’t make it through and become better actors, either though—they just moved on to other, gentler, instructors and wondered why this first one was allowed to be so “abusive.” There’s a MAJOR difference, though, between discipline and abuse, strictness and unfairness. A big difference, as any martial artist, athlete, or dancer knows well, between pain and injury. I don’t think we’ve got a good grasp of that though, in today’s university system, fearful and litigious and coddling all at once. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so…
I told my mom right after my divorce was finalized that I had been severely, daily bullied as a kid, till 8th grade in fact, when things changed because I decided to change my look. I don’t know why I told her right then, I guess it’s because I was right in the middle of accepting her help funding the divorce proceedings (which I was taking care of almost completely alone beyond the fee). I must have been musing about past abusers since I was cutting off that current one at the time. I didn’t think it was a big deal, though–surely it was common knowledge, at least among those closest to me. Her response? “Now you tell me.”
Yeah, now I tell you. Now that I’m functioning as the adult survivor I am. My best friend in second grade made me put my hand on a hot burner in her father’s house, but yeah I’m telling the story now. And her dad, astonished, asked me why I’d done it. I had no answer, for him. I wasn’t going to tell on my friend. Besides, what was I going to say, Your daughter told me to do this and I did it? How does one explain to an adult the complex, Byzantine, Borgia-level cutthroat social politics of the public school playground? So instead, I let myself seem idiotic, to protect my abuser and therefore my place in that strict 2nd grade pecking order. Now I’m grown up, in my 40s during that conversation with my mom, which is the age that professor was when I first benefited from his teaching. I just turned 50 recently, which is continuing to amaze me. But my point is. … Actually I’m not sure what my point is. Something about the difference between good painful process and abusive punishment? The difference between Yes, Sir and Yes, Sir? The discipline involved in the ranks of social status?
As I said, high school theatre helped with the survival factor. And what that lovely, immensely talented, fiery Irish prof did for me in college after that was to cut the bullshit, thereby allowing me to tap into the powerful mine fields of emotional strength I had within, stuffed down deep. He cracked through all the barriers and showed me and all of us in his Acting Boot Camp class how to dip into that potent stuff in order to use it onstage.
No discipline…seems pleasant at the time but painful in not even the long run. Being soft or distracted or otherwise out of shape does actually hurt much more than disciplined critical thinking or physical training does. And those things do hurt, but they hurt in a good way. Which is the theme of a chapter in my memoir, and should also be a whole ‘nother piece here, shouldn’t it: pain as pleasure. Pain that feels good. Discipline that leads to flow, breaking stagnation. The strict frame that opens up the gooey creativity, compiling it into a consumable shape.
The fact that I began my drinking habits in college ain’t no coincidence, either. See, this good prof and the others showed us how to find that dark pool inside our psyche and jump in. But what they didn’t teach us was how to swim, get out, and dry off. Many of us stewed in our own juices too much and couldn’t cope. Some of us drowned. Most of us took to drink. I was an odd one—also a writer, I found writing to help in that drying-off process as well as the drink. I was the only undergrad allowed into a graduate level poetry workshop one late semester at the end of my BFA time. All ways of dealing with the discipline of intense training. Looking back on it now, it makes me wish we had an after-care system, like what BDSM practitioners do for each other after that particular type of good pain. It seems that these days, with the advent of the Intimacy Coordinator in theatre and their much more sophisticated paths through difficult work into safety, that today’s deep work is supported and allowed to heal much more completely. Though part of me does wish that my young self in the ‘90s had some after-care, a bigger part of me is proud of that girl, and feels extra tough, and capable, because of what she ground through. Disciplined. Talented (which is exactly what training is, it’s not magic, and not inborn).
The first time I mulled this topic over in writing, it was on an old pen-named blog in the Before Times right as my divorce was going through its sludgy process of completion. I had just begun to read a book called The Professor in the Cage, by Jonathan Gottschall. An adjunct English prof (like me!) got himself into MMA fighting, at almost 40 years old, because of some brand of masculine longing paired with restlessness and feeling too soft in life. I had a sneaking feeling (if he wasn’t too insufferable a mansplainer, which he ended up not being) that I’d find a lot to relate to in that memoir. I did, actually, but in a different way than I expected. I didn’t expect to hear how difficult it was for him, and I had expected he’d continue on with his training after the time he recounts in the book, but no. I was interested in his discussion of gender and violence, though too (the subtitle of the book is: “why men fight and why we like to watch”). I found his sociology-type researchy bits on that particular concept to be fascinating, and I also found that I had very similar loves and desires for the violence he describes. But then I’ve never been a typical woman, either, and I have a feeling an article about gender and violence in my personal experience must needs be written at some point here as well, doesn’t it. I also feel like I need to read that book again. Well hey, there’s two more ideas for my newsletter—what do you think, wanna talk punches and pain and gender with me for a bit on here? I’ll go get that book off the shelf again…
But before I can pleasure read: Gotta do revisions on another article, then plan for a Zoom meeting with the grad-level writing workshop I’m teaching this quarter at DU.
Maybe I’ll throw a chair, to wake ‘em up…
Wait, I followed a link to this (awesome) post to learn what outside-in vs. inside-out acting was; did I get lost? I am generically interested in anyone who has "never been a typical" whatever, and I'd love to read more about your thoughts on violence, FWIW!
Your writing is always fascinating. Not just the subject, but the style.
Uh ... I had a flash where I tried to describe the experience of reading this piece. It reminded me of picking up a small wild animal and is frantic, frenetic movements as you try to, say, move it off your porch and into the woods. Although ... it's more like you're bucking convention than the grasp of a person.
I don't actually think that description is helpful, but I do think it's funny.
Alternatively, the cafe article felt more than a little "small town noir" ... but in a town that is neither small nor "noir" (literary genre). It's the internal dynamic and juxtaposition of your writing that I find so interesting.
I'm sure the lit types that read this will be like, "dude, you need to read more genres ... your expectations are super narrow." Which is probably true.... I read almost nothing contemporary or recent in monograph-length works.
In fairness, one of my dissertation committee members said that my (professional) writing reads like a runaway train (referring to the relentless procession of technical concepts in a linear fashion).
Hmmm. Have you considered/done playwriting? I'm wondering what that literary persona would look like on the stage.