beautiful things

I have a story about my dear friend Matana that has become legend in my own anthology. Years ago, while we were both still in Boston, she showed up one day with her saxophone case absolutely covered in a collage of billions of bits of paper. It was beautiful. Still is, she still has that, and it's faded into this kind of radiant, glue-soaked antique yellow. Anyway, when I commented on it that day, she told me it had taken her 6 hours to do. Now, Matana was, like BORN busy! I'd never heard of her spending 6 hours doing anything that wasn't playing her saxophone, and I exclaimed as such. She replied that it's important to her that everything in her life be beautiful, so it was worth however long it took.
That story has inspired me so much.
I often stop myself from daydreaming, or doing things like origami or drawing my hands, because it's not productive. And now I have to fight with an even more "waste-of-time" addiction: Project Runway. Christopher and I have been watching it on Itunes (he says he downloads it for me, but I know he's super into it, too!!) It's the first show, ever, that I've felt connects with my life. I know, it's fake, it's a fake competition, but the way everyone's in this little bubble, with nothing but each other and their creative impulses and their insecurities... Seeing how each reacts to the pressure, how different some people's creations become compared to what they show at the beginning, the things they made before they were put in a petrie dish.
Plus, um, I love clothes.
When the quartet was in Singapore, we were grabbed by a palm-reader while strolling in touristy Chinatown. He said he'd show us his gifts with free "previews." From my hand he told me that I will be happiest in front of many people, "thousands of people, millions of people." I was a little embarrassed about that, it's like I'm embarrassed that he basically said I'm a performer! That's the thing about performing. I've always loved it, and I guess it was obvious to everyone but me. Like, when my mom and I went to see the Joffrey Ballet Nutcracker when I was 5, I brought my tutu and shoes so I could do a little after-performance show on the stage. It seemed completely natural to me at the time- hey, we were paying for classes at Joffrey anyway, so I deserved to be on that stage as much as anyone. Or the time we went to some kids' show, by a clown or something, and I just had to wear my new... nightgown. With cabbage patch kids on it. And then, of course, when the clown or whoever was searching the audience for volunteers, I waved my hands crazily, and my mom got to witness her daughter onstage in front of a whole bunch of people, in her pyjamas.
And then again, I wonder if these stories that have become legends to me, if they're not apocryphal and built up by my own imagination combined with need for a remarkable life or something. I've been known to do that before. For years I had it in my head that my parents met hitchhiking, that my mom picked my dad up on a road in or around Chicago. Totally not true. Or the memory I've always considered to be my first- of Mt Ranier in Washington from the backpack baby-holder, looking over my Dad's head- maybe that was just an early product of seeing a photo of those rainforests, being told I was there when only a year and a half old, and fabricating my own narrative for it.
At any rate, I have all these stories, I have all this proof that I was quite the performer when I was little. And then years and years of performance anxiety to make me doubt that. So much so that I'd judge what I was meant to do by how not-scared I felt doing it. Which is why when I got into improvising at NEC I thought that was it, I wouldn't return to classical music, because I got so much less nervous in the bands I was playing in. And then, when I did the audition with the quartet, it was such a fun and relaxed experience, I was overwhelmed. Pretty much every single audition I'd done before that I'd nearly had a heart attack, or gone "blind" so that I had no idea how I'd played or behaved.
I recently re-read an article by viola goddess (there's really no other word for her) Karen Tuttle called "'Staying Open' = Projection= Musical Excitement" about opening the capacity to projection in viola students, or more generally, any students. "When we are born we communicate directly," she writes. "If we can retain this directness, we can project. A healthy person insists from infancy, 'If it does not feel good, it is wrong.'" (sounds like I make decisions on the opposite supposition- "if it doesn't scare the crap out of me, it's ok") "He allows his body to flow with love, anger, joy or sorrow wholeheartedly and shamelessly as it did in infancy..." OK, I could type this whole article here, it's so inspiring. It's from a 1985 issue of "American String Teacher," that I copied from Karen Ritscher, my teacher at Mannes who studied with Tuttle (by the way, having a name that starts with K, or a hard C for that matter, seems to help one's viola career enormously!!)
I went to this article after Christopher was telling me about some of the methods he's being taught in his training at Berlitz, where he was hired to teach English. One thing they said is that body language and tone of voice are vastly more important than content. That bothered me, until I started thinking about it. You can't really "teach" anybody anything, I mean, you can't force it into their brain. But if you present it to them in a way where they feel open and respected and nurtured, that's huge.
I realize this is insanely messy, this train of thought I've been following. Hmm, let me see if I can sum up. I like beautiful things? I've been on vacation so I've had more time to think about these things and satisfy my hunger for them. I'm on the path to maybe someday actually being creative with the origami, making my own folds as opposed to just following patterns. I've gotten mad into watercolor. Yesterday I completely rearranged our living space, so it feels much more warmer and home-like. Christopher and I have mused on how cool it would be to, someday, take a pattern- and clothes-making class at a community college or something so we can act on all our discussions on creativity and design that have been going on since long before we started watching this silly reality show.
By the way, I was just checking my Oaxaca pics on this to make sure I put that great one of Christopher doing a handstand on the beach, and I can't believe I put two of the stray dogs there. I gotten bitten in the butt by a dog on that trip! What can I say, I'm such a sucker.