Day 28: Another Day That Changed My Life

I've acted in many plays, but only rehearsal excited me, repetition, words, action, camaraderie, working into otherness. 

As I walk with a camera, only the doing matters. 

Life is all rehearsal, culminating in no final performance.

Zoom in on now.

Day 1 of 40

My friend Julie alerted me to this article and her practice of writing 40 days of words celebrating "The Day My Life Changed." Thus, it begins.

"There is no room in the inn." Thus began my first passion: acting. Age 11, Nativity pageant, church. Three theater degrees later, people still listen, though some say I am too dramatic: I'll take it. The first thing I did well.

Geraldine Page

Once I thought of myself as an actor. For me, theatre was a church where beautiful literature and beautiful language and beautiful images came to life in the mutual breathing of actor and audience.

Sometimes that mutual breathing is figurative: instead of a live experience, film stands at one remove. Sometimes, however, the film is so bathed with life that I do live in the same space and time.

Seeing Geraldine Page again tonight in the great 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful reminded me of just how poetic and sacred acting can be. As an aging woman with a bad heart, she escapes the confines of the small apartment in Houston where she lives with her son and his nagging wife and spends a day traveling to Bountiful in the country, where she grew up. Her longing and sadness, her stubbornness and love, her goodness and fear shine through in a performance that is a miracle meeting of word and person.

from Britannica.com (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/438217/110933/Geraldine-Page-in-The-Trip-to-Bountiful)

I don't act any longer, but when I see a luminous performance like hers, I feel the same thrill, the same illusion of being transported out of myself and wholly into another's being.

Transformation: that's what I seek from art, and that's what I sometimes get.