Okay, so remember what I said last week about walking? Completely negated if one of two things is true: 1 - it is colder than 25 degrees outside. 2 - it is raining and colder than, we’re gonna say, 50 degrees. Then somebody get me a ride as fast as humanly possible, please and thank you.
The above paragraph is prompted by the current weather in Ohio and the trip I just had to make from campus back to my apartment in pouring rain and leaky boots.
But now on to happier things. Questions!
My favorite thing about the internet? The communities that have formed, communities that wouldn’t have had a chance to form if this virtual place of existence wasn’t available. Nerdfighteria is a great example, of course, but it wasn’t my first online community. My first was a Harry/Ginny forum called Requiem that I was heavily involved in pre-HBP. And once I started writing fanfiction, I found a comfortable fandom niche on LiveJournal, to the point where, when I went to London two years ago, I was able to meet one of my online friends in person and spend a day with her. That’s my favorite part about the internet.
My Hogwarts house? Ravenclaw. Ravenclaw, Ravenclaw, Ravenclaw. I mean, when your reaction to getting into Ravenclaw Tower is “Oh my god, that’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever read!!!”, there’s no other real place for you to go, you know? But yes, I am exceedingly Ravenclaw, no doubt or question about it.
And now for this week’s question: So, what’s up?
Well, my world since graduating has basically boiled down to teaching my classes, prepping for my summer musical, and trying not to think about the fact that I have no idea what I’ll be doing in, oh, about four months. So, I’ll talk about those first two and go on to ignoring the last.
I work for Horizon Youth Theatre, a youth theatre production company that, up until about two years ago, was directly associated with the university. It branched off on its own, however, once its founding professor retired, and that’s when I got involved. End of spring semester 2009, my directing teacher mentioned that this group was accepting proposals for their fall show, and I was very interested, so I asked for more information.
Apart from that beginning directing class, I’d never directed anything, but I’d been involved in youth theatre pretty much my whole life, first as a performer, then as a stage manager, and I knew of a play that I’d done with my dad that I thought would work really well for Horizon. It was called Cinderella, the World’s Favorite Fairy Tale, which is essentially three one-act Cinderella stories (from China, Russia, and the Algonquin Native Americans) tied together with a series of monologues from the traditional, French, glass slipper Cinderella. It was my show against one other, and eventually, they decided I would direct mine in October, and the other girl’s would go up in February.
So I prepped and prepared and brainstormed about how to overcome the challenges in front of me (like the facts that I had no set budget, was working with a group who had only ever worked with one director before, and didn’t have an actual stage or, therefore, set), and in early September, I held my first ever actual auditions. I had 30 roles available, and I had 31 kids audition, so I squeezed the extra in. The show was a hit, and I really enjoyed working with the students, but I left the experience thinking it was probably the most I’d do with the group, since I knew they wanted to keep bringing in new directors.
But then the university went and pretty much screwed me out of graduation by failing to offer one of my required youth theatre classes my senior year. In a show of assertiveness fairly uncommon to me, I marched into the office and demanded something be done (okay, I sat down with my advisor, explained the situation and why it was the department’s fault, and together we demanded that something be done, but close enough). I and the others similarly affected were allowed to take other classes as equivalency, which is how I ended up taking an independent study in which I would be teaching a theatre class in story adaptation to 10-12-year-olds.
Which meant I had to find some. And where else would I turn but to Horizon? I ended up with a class of ten, nine of whom had done Cinderella with me. They chose to adapt Sideways Stories from Wayside School, and it was in the middle of this project that I realized it was March, and there had been no show in February. I asked one of the board members about it and was told that the other girl had pulled out, so they weren’t going to have a spring show apart from my class’s showcase, and it didn’t seem like a summer show would be happening either.
Not wanting to seem like I was offering myself a job, but wanting to give these kids the opportunity for theatre, I hesitantly told her that I’d be willing to put together a proposal for a summer show. The board agreed, and I was hired to direct The Phantom Tollbooth that June.
Now, if you’re looking for proof that I’m crazy, read this next sentence: The Phantom Tollbooth had a cast of 47 and a crew of four, so a total of 51 students participating, ages 6 to 18. Also? That was my choice. That’s how many kids auditioned, and I wanted them all to have the chance to be involved.
I stepped down a little for the show that happened during my last semester, only serving as assistant director while a friend of mine took the reigns for The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood. It was during that show that I found myself getting very possessive of Horizon. Not that I begrudge others the opportunity to step in, but I really want to make sure that when I leave, I leave them in good hands, with a new director who will care about the kids and the program as much as I do.
This year, I agreed to teach four theatre classes for them – two literary adaptation classes and two original playwriting classes (I apologize if I’m repeating myself – I’ve typed this information in so many places recently that I’m beginning to forget who I have and haven’t told). My story theatre classes are performing adaptations of The Tale of Despereaux and The Name of This Book is Secret. Of my original classes, I’ve got one play about the mystery-solving adventures of an imaginative twelve-year-old, and one about an evil scientist trying to take over the world while an elf attempts to stop her. I have 30 students altogether, about ten of whom are new to Horizon and new to theatre itself. It’s a wonderful experience, knowing that I’m helping introduce these kids to this activity. Most of them probably won’t continue much past high school, but a few might, and I like to think I might hold the place for one or two of them that my first youth theatre director holds for me.
And next week, I hold auditions for my first ever musical. We’re going an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. I’m a little nervous about it, but I know I’ve got an incredible production team working behind me, so that lightens the load a bit. I’m also really excited to cast this, so that helps, too, although I will be turning people away this time, which is hard. But this show has 36 roles and no more, and I have to adhere to that if I want to keep my sanity.
So that’s what’s up. You can safely expect to hear more about Horizon in the near future, but for now, that’s all I’ll bore you with.
As for a question: what would you do with your life if money was no object?
Alexandra, I’ll see you tomorrow!
Showing posts with label cassie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cassie. Show all posts
Monday, April 4, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
French the Llama! It's Monday!
Welcome to Week 2! I loved reading everyone’s intros last week, and I can’t wait to continue reading this week. Our theme? Nerdfighteria, and how we became involved in it.
But before we get to that, let’s answer some questions/respond to some introductions, shall we?
Alexandra - The fact that you opened your post with a story of Norse mythology endears me to you forever. Firstly because I adore mythology (though I’m more familiar with Greek), and secondly because that’s exactly the same kind of snarky response I might offer. And your talk about not being what you thought you would in high school really resonated with me. Up until about a month ago, I knew exactly what I was doing next and what my life would look like. Then, through a series of unforeseen and earth-changing events, that all crumbled away, and I was left with no clue what happens next. Now I’m probably headed off in a direction I never expected to go. As this blog goes on, I’ll let you know for sure!
Carlyn - You wanted to know what I would like put on my tombstone, and I have to first off thank my friend Alicia for helping me with this answer. Not for coming up with it, but help wording it. See, I think everything sounds better in Latin, especially on tombstones, but I don’t speak Latin, so I enlisted Alicia’s help. We both struggled with wording and the sound of the phrase, but what was settled on in the end was this: Narratio pergit. It means “The story goes on,” which is my way of saying I was only ever part of a whole. I helped tell the story, but I never controlled it, and it will continue on without me, which is as it should be. I wrote a manifesto on this once for one of my theatre classes. The story goes on. I believe that with my whole heart.
Casey - Robert Fulghum for the win! I was going to comment on the Howard bit, but then my brother beat me to it, and I couldn’t very well comment on it after he had (not that there’s a high level of competition between us or anything). I love all your quotes and book references – we seem to have very similar literary tastes! I love Sandman, though I’ve only read the first volume, and Hitchhiker’s Guide and Ender’s Game, all referenced in the same post? Yes, please!
Christina - You asked for the biggest difference between myself a year ago and myself now. I thought long and hard about this question, and the conclusion I have come to is that there is no easy way to state the answer; it’s going to be sappy no matter what, so I’m just going to come out and say it. The biggest difference is my boyfriend.
And now to clarify. The biggest difference isn’t having a boyfriend, and it isn’t that my life suddenly obtained worth once I had a boyfriend. It’s what entering into a long-term relationship forced me to do that makes up the biggest difference. I have always been stubbornly self-sufficient – I rely on myself as much as possible and on others as little as I can get away with. That way, I’m not being a burden to anyone, and when other people disappoint me or fail to follow through, I don’t get hurt or suffer in any way. It’s a mentality born out of a childhood spent moving around and leaving friends behind every three years or so.
But I started dating my boyfriend Chase a little more than a year ago, and what happened then was something I hadn’t foreseen. All of a sudden, I was sharing my life with this other person who insisted on being let in, on doing things for me, on making me face the fact that I couldn’t always be self-sufficient and that letting other people in to help bear one’s burdens, while terrifying, makes the world an easier place to live in. It’s been a stressful year – my best friend went through a very messy ending of an abusive relationship; my mom was diagnosed with cancer; my plans for my future, which I thought were rock-solid, were pulled unceremoniously from beneath my feet – and if I hadn’t had Chase there to help bear the brunt of all that, I’m not sure where I’d be right now.
So, biggest difference between year-ago me and present-day me is that present-day me is a lot more stable and a lot more grounded. I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to be doing in six months, which is terrifying to me, but I have an anchor now, whereas a year ago, if faced with that realization, I would have been drifting helplessly with direction.
And now that I’ve spilled my soul to the Internet, onto happier things. Nerdfighting!
It is fallacious to say that I would not have become a Nerdfighter if my friend Maggie and I hadn’t stayed up until one in the morning the night we met talking about Harry Potter fanfiction and the differences between the Weasley twins, but it is also not incorrect to say that I did eventually become a Nerdfighter because of that conversation.
This is not because Maggie was a Nerdfighter; far from it. This was summer 2006, so Brotherhood2.0 wasn’t even an idea forming in the back of John Green’s mind. But because Maggie and I started a friendship cemented in a mutual love of Harry Potter that night, Maggie introduced me to her friend Heidi some four months later, and it was Heidi who introduced me to John and Hank.
Inadvertantly. Heidi wasn’t a Nerdfighter, either. She just had nothing better to do in the days before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released than troll the internet for Harry Potter related things and email the links to Maggie and I. One of those links was to a YouTube video that had been featured on the front page. I hopefully don’t have to tell you that the video in question was Accio Deathly Hallows.
I watched it and loved it so much that I was willing to overlook the fact that the singer was mispronouncing the word Accio (a huge concession for canon-obsessed me), and I watched the video several more times before I started wondering who this guy was and why he was talking to some unknown person named John and why he was going to dye his hair green on Friday. So I went to their channel, watched John’s most recent video, and quickly decided that whatever it was these two were doing was something I wanted to follow. So I scrolled back to January and spent the next two days catching up on everything the two had done. They were awesome, and I was hooked.
I haven’t been able to be massively active in the community, unfortunately, but I watch all the videos, I participate in the Project for Awesome as much as I can, and I recruit like mad (current total: both brothers, my boyfriend, the aforementioned Maggie and Heidi, and several members of my Internet Communities class).
When I started watching, I knew my brothers and I were the only Nerdfighters in our area, and I held onto that mindset, so I am always shocked to discover when people that I know casually in real life will perk their ears up when I mention John Green and come over and say “French the Llama!” and give me the Nerdfighter salute (Okay, spilling the beans here. That example? That was Carlyn. She and I know each other in real life. We both attend(ed) BGSU, and we’re in the same fraternity. There, Carlyn. We’re out, as it were). Shocked, but thrilled, of course. I love the new forum, though I don’t spend a lot of time there, and I will keep watching John and Hank as long as they keep making videos.
I love the Nerdfighting community and what it’s become. It’s what I pull out of my bag whenever people start talking about how relationships formed online and communities that exist online are somehow sub-par to those that exist in real life. I have watched incredibly close friendship develop out of Nerdfighteria, especially through collab channels (and hopefully, collab blogs!), and the things that Nerdfighteria has accomplished are monumental and have come about, in many cases, entirely because we are an online community, and that should never be so easily dismissed.
Sorry. I wrote a paper about that last semester. But I shall save soapboxes for soapbox week.
Now, then, for my question (and outside readers should feel free to answer this as well), I want to know what topics you want to write about/want to read others' thoughts about. Also, we’re all Harry Potter fans, right? *starts developing HP themes in the recesses of her mind*
Alexandra, I’ll see you tomorrow.
DFTBA!
But before we get to that, let’s answer some questions/respond to some introductions, shall we?
Alexandra - The fact that you opened your post with a story of Norse mythology endears me to you forever. Firstly because I adore mythology (though I’m more familiar with Greek), and secondly because that’s exactly the same kind of snarky response I might offer. And your talk about not being what you thought you would in high school really resonated with me. Up until about a month ago, I knew exactly what I was doing next and what my life would look like. Then, through a series of unforeseen and earth-changing events, that all crumbled away, and I was left with no clue what happens next. Now I’m probably headed off in a direction I never expected to go. As this blog goes on, I’ll let you know for sure!
Carlyn - You wanted to know what I would like put on my tombstone, and I have to first off thank my friend Alicia for helping me with this answer. Not for coming up with it, but help wording it. See, I think everything sounds better in Latin, especially on tombstones, but I don’t speak Latin, so I enlisted Alicia’s help. We both struggled with wording and the sound of the phrase, but what was settled on in the end was this: Narratio pergit. It means “The story goes on,” which is my way of saying I was only ever part of a whole. I helped tell the story, but I never controlled it, and it will continue on without me, which is as it should be. I wrote a manifesto on this once for one of my theatre classes. The story goes on. I believe that with my whole heart.
Casey - Robert Fulghum for the win! I was going to comment on the Howard bit, but then my brother beat me to it, and I couldn’t very well comment on it after he had (not that there’s a high level of competition between us or anything). I love all your quotes and book references – we seem to have very similar literary tastes! I love Sandman, though I’ve only read the first volume, and Hitchhiker’s Guide and Ender’s Game, all referenced in the same post? Yes, please!
Christina - You asked for the biggest difference between myself a year ago and myself now. I thought long and hard about this question, and the conclusion I have come to is that there is no easy way to state the answer; it’s going to be sappy no matter what, so I’m just going to come out and say it. The biggest difference is my boyfriend.
And now to clarify. The biggest difference isn’t having a boyfriend, and it isn’t that my life suddenly obtained worth once I had a boyfriend. It’s what entering into a long-term relationship forced me to do that makes up the biggest difference. I have always been stubbornly self-sufficient – I rely on myself as much as possible and on others as little as I can get away with. That way, I’m not being a burden to anyone, and when other people disappoint me or fail to follow through, I don’t get hurt or suffer in any way. It’s a mentality born out of a childhood spent moving around and leaving friends behind every three years or so.
But I started dating my boyfriend Chase a little more than a year ago, and what happened then was something I hadn’t foreseen. All of a sudden, I was sharing my life with this other person who insisted on being let in, on doing things for me, on making me face the fact that I couldn’t always be self-sufficient and that letting other people in to help bear one’s burdens, while terrifying, makes the world an easier place to live in. It’s been a stressful year – my best friend went through a very messy ending of an abusive relationship; my mom was diagnosed with cancer; my plans for my future, which I thought were rock-solid, were pulled unceremoniously from beneath my feet – and if I hadn’t had Chase there to help bear the brunt of all that, I’m not sure where I’d be right now.
So, biggest difference between year-ago me and present-day me is that present-day me is a lot more stable and a lot more grounded. I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to be doing in six months, which is terrifying to me, but I have an anchor now, whereas a year ago, if faced with that realization, I would have been drifting helplessly with direction.
And now that I’ve spilled my soul to the Internet, onto happier things. Nerdfighting!
It is fallacious to say that I would not have become a Nerdfighter if my friend Maggie and I hadn’t stayed up until one in the morning the night we met talking about Harry Potter fanfiction and the differences between the Weasley twins, but it is also not incorrect to say that I did eventually become a Nerdfighter because of that conversation.
This is not because Maggie was a Nerdfighter; far from it. This was summer 2006, so Brotherhood2.0 wasn’t even an idea forming in the back of John Green’s mind. But because Maggie and I started a friendship cemented in a mutual love of Harry Potter that night, Maggie introduced me to her friend Heidi some four months later, and it was Heidi who introduced me to John and Hank.
Inadvertantly. Heidi wasn’t a Nerdfighter, either. She just had nothing better to do in the days before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released than troll the internet for Harry Potter related things and email the links to Maggie and I. One of those links was to a YouTube video that had been featured on the front page. I hopefully don’t have to tell you that the video in question was Accio Deathly Hallows.
I watched it and loved it so much that I was willing to overlook the fact that the singer was mispronouncing the word Accio (a huge concession for canon-obsessed me), and I watched the video several more times before I started wondering who this guy was and why he was talking to some unknown person named John and why he was going to dye his hair green on Friday. So I went to their channel, watched John’s most recent video, and quickly decided that whatever it was these two were doing was something I wanted to follow. So I scrolled back to January and spent the next two days catching up on everything the two had done. They were awesome, and I was hooked.
I haven’t been able to be massively active in the community, unfortunately, but I watch all the videos, I participate in the Project for Awesome as much as I can, and I recruit like mad (current total: both brothers, my boyfriend, the aforementioned Maggie and Heidi, and several members of my Internet Communities class).
When I started watching, I knew my brothers and I were the only Nerdfighters in our area, and I held onto that mindset, so I am always shocked to discover when people that I know casually in real life will perk their ears up when I mention John Green and come over and say “French the Llama!” and give me the Nerdfighter salute (Okay, spilling the beans here. That example? That was Carlyn. She and I know each other in real life. We both attend(ed) BGSU, and we’re in the same fraternity. There, Carlyn. We’re out, as it were). Shocked, but thrilled, of course. I love the new forum, though I don’t spend a lot of time there, and I will keep watching John and Hank as long as they keep making videos.
I love the Nerdfighting community and what it’s become. It’s what I pull out of my bag whenever people start talking about how relationships formed online and communities that exist online are somehow sub-par to those that exist in real life. I have watched incredibly close friendship develop out of Nerdfighteria, especially through collab channels (and hopefully, collab blogs!), and the things that Nerdfighteria has accomplished are monumental and have come about, in many cases, entirely because we are an online community, and that should never be so easily dismissed.
Sorry. I wrote a paper about that last semester. But I shall save soapboxes for soapbox week.
Now, then, for my question (and outside readers should feel free to answer this as well), I want to know what topics you want to write about/want to read others' thoughts about. Also, we’re all Harry Potter fans, right? *starts developing HP themes in the recesses of her mind*
Alexandra, I’ll see you tomorrow.
DFTBA!
Monday, March 14, 2011
Who the Eff is Monday?
Who the Eff is Monday?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here. This is Monday:
That is me, at Platform 9 3/4 in London, reading the British edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, specifically the chapter where Harry first gets to Platform 9 3/4. And already, you should know a few things about me.
I often wish I could just continually use pictures and not have to bother trying to bend words to my will, but if I was satisfied with that, I wouldn’t be a writer. So I will, instead, use my thousand words (and then some, probably) and give you all a proper introduction.
So. The easy answer:
Monday is Cassie. She is 22 years old and recently obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Communication in Youth Theatre from Bowling Green State University. And she hates introducing herself.
Don’t get me wrong; I love to make new friends, but I always feel slightly awkward meeting people, especially if I don’t have a script. If I have a script, the introduction is easy:
“Hi, my name is Cassie and I’ll be your Orientation Leader!”
“Hi, I’m Matt’s sister.”
“Hello, I work for Horizon Youth Theatre.”
“Hey! I’m a 2007 Nerdfighter!”
But without that script, when left on my own to decide what’s most important about me, what a person most needs to know to know who I am? Then the introduction becomes more difficult. I have plenty of titles to choose from – preacher’s kid, honors student, director, actor, writer – but choosing one always seems to preclude choosing the others, and none give an entirely accurate portrait of myself.
So, faced with this dilemma, I began searching for a word that would work better, and I finally hit upon it. See, before I was a writer or a director or an actor, before being a sister meant anything to me, and before I understood that being a preacher’s kid was a distinction all its own, I was one thing. I was a storyteller.
When I was little, my favorite place to go shopping was Goodwill with my grandmother, and so every time I went to visit, we’d hop in the car, and she’d go buy me clothes. When I was in preschool, my favorite addition to my wardrobe was a green and purple striped shirt with a megaphone on the front that read “Star Club.” I loved that shirt the moment I saw it (don’t judge four-year-old me, okay? I try not to), and I was so excited to wear it to school, but it had an unforeseen consequence. All of my classmates suddenly started asking me what the Star Club was. Well, I didn’t know. I was four, and it wasn’t technically my shirt. Plus, I wasn’t old enough to understand things like marketing gimmicks and the fact that the advertised Star Club probably didn’t actually exist. All I knew was that I was in a problematic situation: My classmates were asking me a question, and I didn’t have an answer.
So I made one up.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I was not a pathological liar as a child by any means. Far from it. I operated under a strict code of morals. I never lied when the question was important: “Did you really clean your room?” or “Did you practice your piano lesson three times a day, six days this week?” (Okay, so I may have fudged that last one a little. But I could do the math. Really, I was being asked to play through my lesson eighteen times a week, so did it really matter how I split up those eighteen repetitions? I have a feeling my answer was likely markedly different from that of my parents. . .)
But the point is, I never lied when the lie could hurt someone or get me out of trouble or earn me something I didn’t deserve. But if the answer didn’t matter and the truth was boring, why not embellish it? Why not make something up? This was pre-Google, so as long as I worded it right, my classmates would never find out I was just making up this grand Star Club I told them I used to belong to (Golden Phrase for a storytelling preacher’s kid? “Before I moved here.” Worked beautifully in my advantage on more than one occasion).
But even after I had advanced beyond creating backstories for my wardrobe, I remained an avid storyteller. During recess in kindergarten and first grade, when everyone else seemed to be fighting for the swing or the slide or playing Chase the Boys or keepaway, my friends and I were enacting epic adventures that involved wizards and dragons and keeping the playground safe from the dark magical forces that threatened it. It was an ongoing saga, every day at recess, right up until I moved away. At my new school, a similar storytelling saga began. We were older and times were changing, so we were superheroes battling evil monsters and our own conflicted humanity (this game may or may not have been heavily influenced by The Secret World of Alex Mack).
Unfortunately for me (in some ways), when I moved away again, it was right in the middle of that awkward period where being different was frowned upon and having an imagination was grounds for ostracizing, AKA. Middle School. All the girls my age wanted to pretend to be was horses, and that just wasn’t cutting it for me. I started spending a lot of time on the swings.
But my imagination had to go somewhere. So I started writing. My first few stories were horrificly cliched, monstrously autobiographical pieces of fiction, but I wrote them, and gradually, I got better. I discovered fanfiction and fairy tales, and my love for words and stories continued to grow. I began to study them, to collect them, and to really start to think about how they were put together and how they might be better told.
I had been acting since I was six, but it was around this time that I started taking theatre classes with my dad where the goal was to write our own play. I loved that. It had been fun to bring someone else’s story and character to life, of course, but when it was my own character, and my own story, I was hooked into theatre more certainly than I ever had been before. It was also at this time that I started working behind the scenes, stage managing for my dad and seeing what he did as a director and starting to realize that what he did was what I wanted to do.
You could say it was inevitable, really. After all, my dad has a PhD in theatre and he taught and directed me from the ages of 12 to 18. My mom is a minister, so I listened to her tell Bible stories and root out the messages in them and tie them back to her childhood once a week for eighteen years. My mom is also a genealogist on the side, and my dad runs a Readers Theatre troupe called Spoken Images, so I have grown up fully immersed in stories and storytelling. So, yeah. You could say it was inevitable, and you’d probably be right.
These days, I put my college degree to good use, working for Horizon Youth Theatre. I’ve directed two full length plays for them, an adaptation of Cinderella and an adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth. I’m directing their summer musical, too: Alice in Wonderland. I taught two classes in adapting fairy tales to the stage at their summer camps last year, and I am currently teaching four classes: two dedicated to writing their own play and two dedicated to adapting works of children’s literature into plays, The Tale of Despereaux and The Name of This Book is Secret, to be specific. I write letter games (collaborative storytelling) with a couple friends and my brother, and then a whole lot of original stuff on my own, most of it centered around fairy tales and retelling them.
To wrap up this overly long introduction, I am a lot of things. Daughter, granddaughter, sister, cousin. College graduate, preacher’s kid, Harry Potter fan, Nerdfighter. Writer, actor, director, teacher. But I’ve finally found the word that touches on all of them and really seems to sum up my essence, as it were.
I am Monday. My name is Cassie. I am 22 years old. I am a storyteller. And I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.
My question for the rest of you: What photograph of you best encompasses who you are? If you can post it, great! If not, just describe it for us.
Alexandra, I look forward to meeting you tomorrow!
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here. This is Monday:
That is me, at Platform 9 3/4 in London, reading the British edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, specifically the chapter where Harry first gets to Platform 9 3/4. And already, you should know a few things about me.
I often wish I could just continually use pictures and not have to bother trying to bend words to my will, but if I was satisfied with that, I wouldn’t be a writer. So I will, instead, use my thousand words (and then some, probably) and give you all a proper introduction.
So. The easy answer:
Monday is Cassie. She is 22 years old and recently obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Communication in Youth Theatre from Bowling Green State University. And she hates introducing herself.
Don’t get me wrong; I love to make new friends, but I always feel slightly awkward meeting people, especially if I don’t have a script. If I have a script, the introduction is easy:
“Hi, my name is Cassie and I’ll be your Orientation Leader!”
“Hi, I’m Matt’s sister.”
“Hello, I work for Horizon Youth Theatre.”
“Hey! I’m a 2007 Nerdfighter!”
But without that script, when left on my own to decide what’s most important about me, what a person most needs to know to know who I am? Then the introduction becomes more difficult. I have plenty of titles to choose from – preacher’s kid, honors student, director, actor, writer – but choosing one always seems to preclude choosing the others, and none give an entirely accurate portrait of myself.
So, faced with this dilemma, I began searching for a word that would work better, and I finally hit upon it. See, before I was a writer or a director or an actor, before being a sister meant anything to me, and before I understood that being a preacher’s kid was a distinction all its own, I was one thing. I was a storyteller.
When I was little, my favorite place to go shopping was Goodwill with my grandmother, and so every time I went to visit, we’d hop in the car, and she’d go buy me clothes. When I was in preschool, my favorite addition to my wardrobe was a green and purple striped shirt with a megaphone on the front that read “Star Club.” I loved that shirt the moment I saw it (don’t judge four-year-old me, okay? I try not to), and I was so excited to wear it to school, but it had an unforeseen consequence. All of my classmates suddenly started asking me what the Star Club was. Well, I didn’t know. I was four, and it wasn’t technically my shirt. Plus, I wasn’t old enough to understand things like marketing gimmicks and the fact that the advertised Star Club probably didn’t actually exist. All I knew was that I was in a problematic situation: My classmates were asking me a question, and I didn’t have an answer.
So I made one up.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I was not a pathological liar as a child by any means. Far from it. I operated under a strict code of morals. I never lied when the question was important: “Did you really clean your room?” or “Did you practice your piano lesson three times a day, six days this week?” (Okay, so I may have fudged that last one a little. But I could do the math. Really, I was being asked to play through my lesson eighteen times a week, so did it really matter how I split up those eighteen repetitions? I have a feeling my answer was likely markedly different from that of my parents. . .)
But the point is, I never lied when the lie could hurt someone or get me out of trouble or earn me something I didn’t deserve. But if the answer didn’t matter and the truth was boring, why not embellish it? Why not make something up? This was pre-Google, so as long as I worded it right, my classmates would never find out I was just making up this grand Star Club I told them I used to belong to (Golden Phrase for a storytelling preacher’s kid? “Before I moved here.” Worked beautifully in my advantage on more than one occasion).
But even after I had advanced beyond creating backstories for my wardrobe, I remained an avid storyteller. During recess in kindergarten and first grade, when everyone else seemed to be fighting for the swing or the slide or playing Chase the Boys or keepaway, my friends and I were enacting epic adventures that involved wizards and dragons and keeping the playground safe from the dark magical forces that threatened it. It was an ongoing saga, every day at recess, right up until I moved away. At my new school, a similar storytelling saga began. We were older and times were changing, so we were superheroes battling evil monsters and our own conflicted humanity (this game may or may not have been heavily influenced by The Secret World of Alex Mack).
Unfortunately for me (in some ways), when I moved away again, it was right in the middle of that awkward period where being different was frowned upon and having an imagination was grounds for ostracizing, AKA. Middle School. All the girls my age wanted to pretend to be was horses, and that just wasn’t cutting it for me. I started spending a lot of time on the swings.
But my imagination had to go somewhere. So I started writing. My first few stories were horrificly cliched, monstrously autobiographical pieces of fiction, but I wrote them, and gradually, I got better. I discovered fanfiction and fairy tales, and my love for words and stories continued to grow. I began to study them, to collect them, and to really start to think about how they were put together and how they might be better told.
I had been acting since I was six, but it was around this time that I started taking theatre classes with my dad where the goal was to write our own play. I loved that. It had been fun to bring someone else’s story and character to life, of course, but when it was my own character, and my own story, I was hooked into theatre more certainly than I ever had been before. It was also at this time that I started working behind the scenes, stage managing for my dad and seeing what he did as a director and starting to realize that what he did was what I wanted to do.
You could say it was inevitable, really. After all, my dad has a PhD in theatre and he taught and directed me from the ages of 12 to 18. My mom is a minister, so I listened to her tell Bible stories and root out the messages in them and tie them back to her childhood once a week for eighteen years. My mom is also a genealogist on the side, and my dad runs a Readers Theatre troupe called Spoken Images, so I have grown up fully immersed in stories and storytelling. So, yeah. You could say it was inevitable, and you’d probably be right.
These days, I put my college degree to good use, working for Horizon Youth Theatre. I’ve directed two full length plays for them, an adaptation of Cinderella and an adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth. I’m directing their summer musical, too: Alice in Wonderland. I taught two classes in adapting fairy tales to the stage at their summer camps last year, and I am currently teaching four classes: two dedicated to writing their own play and two dedicated to adapting works of children’s literature into plays, The Tale of Despereaux and The Name of This Book is Secret, to be specific. I write letter games (collaborative storytelling) with a couple friends and my brother, and then a whole lot of original stuff on my own, most of it centered around fairy tales and retelling them.
To wrap up this overly long introduction, I am a lot of things. Daughter, granddaughter, sister, cousin. College graduate, preacher’s kid, Harry Potter fan, Nerdfighter. Writer, actor, director, teacher. But I’ve finally found the word that touches on all of them and really seems to sum up my essence, as it were.
I am Monday. My name is Cassie. I am 22 years old. I am a storyteller. And I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.
My question for the rest of you: What photograph of you best encompasses who you are? If you can post it, great! If not, just describe it for us.
Alexandra, I look forward to meeting you tomorrow!
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