Thursday, April 08, 2004

Getting Caught

Today I have my second of four voice-acting classes.  Last week’s kickoff session was a lot of fun, very similar to the two other classes I’ve taken there.  We started with introductions, which is actually pretty important if you are going to try to get into anything emotionally honest with people.  The teacher asked us all to include in our introductions some mention of something that really scared us, explaining that it would help her understand our blocks as actors, and help us relate to each other better. 

One of the others, who spoke before me, started describing his fear - but I really only heard him start to talk. His first words scared the hell out of me.  Even though he went further into a more complex area of his psyche, admitting to the fear of getting caught as a talentless hack, I was stuck at those first two words: “Getting caught.”

I realized, hearing that, that I’ve had this fear my whole life, sometimes even desparately running and hiding in my own house for no reason other than a pounding frightening sureness that, if I were seen, by anybody, I would die - or worse yet, disappear as if I’d never been.  I don’t think I typically do things at which I should reasonably fear getting caught, but this is not a matter of rational responses - it’s just a deep, marrow-chilling fear, and it rides under my skin whether I understand what it’s doing there or not. 

I did a creditable job for myself during class - made some reasonably bold choices, took direction without whining, listened carefully, maybe even learned something.  We’ll see.  But for sure, once I got back on my bus home at 10 o’clock at night, my mind rolled like a marble in a funnel right to the notion of getting caught and getting scared.  I didn’t understand it any better, but I could sense it more fully without the distractions of the classroom.  And this is what resulted of those cogitations:

Without admitting anything
let’s say that what they say is true -
It isn’t like they know my life
or like it’s something they don’t do
Extenuating circumstances
forced me to commit those acts;
this path, I’ve never chosen freely;
you just need to know the facts.
It happened as if I were dreaming,
just a plaything of the fates;
I tried to get out with my honor,
tried to navigate the straits.
I looked in from an outside window,
watched myself fall through the glass,
excited past the point of reason,
thrashing into the morass…

It’s easy now to say I shouldn’t
say or do or be or not
but I suspect you’d change your tune
if you had been the one they caught.