Why I'm Going Home for the Oscars

At a dinner party recently I heard a man named Derek tell a group of friends that he was once so sick he watched the entire Academy Awards. He went on to describe the ailment that left him prone, miserable, and powerless to change the channel while Oscar nominees and their fancy guests made their way from the red carpet to their seats and--the lucky ones anyway--to the stage.

I listened to all this politely, aware that for Derek this experience was real and powerful, and powerfully annoying. I felt fortunate listening to him, but not because I’ve never been that sick, and not because I’d have had someone to change the channel for me.

I grew up in a house where we weren't allowed to talk during the Oscars. Where movies were everything, and what held us together was conversation about all things movies. Where I came to know Cher as supporting actress in Silkwood before she had any other identity to me. And where our VHS copy of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was worn thin and ratty by the time DVDs were abundant and affordable.

One of my earliest memories is Oscar night. It's hard to pin down what year it was, but it's a safe bet that it was 1980 or 1981. I was sitting on the floor rubbing my mom's feet--something my sisters and brothers and I took turns doing while we were watching TV. She was sitting in one of two "easy chairs." My dad sat in the other one, a clipboard in hand and a monogrammed mechanical pencil in the other. He was at the ready, his Oscar picks and predictions carefully listed in the half-cursive, half-printing we know as his penmanship.

My older brother had taken a page of yellow legal paper from the clipboard pad and was circulating it among us on the floor, leading my older siblings to wander, at intervals, into hushed giggles as if we were in church. Finally, at a commercial, my dad asked what was going on. I, the little sister, spoke up that my brother had been circulating a picture of "The Gays," which is what we were calling the scrawled stick figures on the now crumpled paper. I had no idea what that meant or what would happen next, but the commercial was over and the issue seemed to flare up and then die out within an instant. The Oscars were on.

In the summer of 1982 my mom thought I should see E.T. My dad had already seen it--not so much to pre-screen it for us kids, but because he saw everything. Sometimes he'd go to movies late at night after dinner, coming home while everyone slept and, if we were lucky, leaving leftover popcorn for us on the kitchen table. The E.T. date was planned for a Saturday afternoon, and my older brother was to accompany me. He was 7 and I was 5, and our mom must have thought the movie theater was a safe enough place to let us go on our own. She dropped us off and counted out four singles for my brother on the hot brown leather seat of our station wagon. This was enough for the two of us to attend a matinee. We climbed out into the sun and my brother took my hand as he would when walking me to my first grade classroom the following year. The sunlight seared my eyes, but within a few minutes we were walking the air-conditioned corridor, tickets in hand, to see my first movie.

When I was in eighth grade Kathy Bates was up against Julia Roberts in the Best Actress category. I was watching the show at my friend Shelley's house, and for the first time I started to appreciate how watching the Oscars at someone else's house was different from being at home. I also remember trying—and failing—to explain to my friend why Bates' performance in Misery was a shoe-in. Shelley contended that Roberts' performance in Pretty Woman still had a chance. After all, Shelley said, Julia "still had to act like a hooker." The reasoning rings in my ears as something that would never be uttered aloud in the house I grew up in.

At some point my dad retired, and later an email came to all us kids, telling us that he had been offered part-time work as a "Verifier" at a local theater. His job was to sit in the movies (his admission was paid) and document whether the lights dimmed on time, the ads and previews started and stopped on time, and that the correct movie was projected. In his email he joked that, "You kids always said that some day they would pay ME to go to the movies and it's finally come to pass." That year for his birthday I gave him an engraved clipboard to hold his verification sheets. The metal clip bore a small plaque that read, "John Cannon, Moviegoer."

And we would drive distances to find a movie that we just had to see before it “left.” In the Chicago metropolitan area there must be hundreds of cinemas. In one of the gargantuan suburban multiplexes, I once heard a man joke to his wife (a tired-looking woman who craned her neck to puzzle out the huge display of titles and times), “Honey, what time is our flight?” Other theaters, like the Catlow in Barrington, are faded storefronts cleverly disguising one or two art house screens—tiny establishments you could pass by on the sidewalk if you didn’t know they were there.

In my parents’ kitchen a magnetic clip on one side of the refrigerator has held a list of theater directions, movie timetables and reviews for decades. The original fridge of my childhood has come and gone, replaced with a fancy model that dispenses distilled water from the inside. The whole kitchen has been remodeled more than once, but still there is that stack of papers telling us our options for the weekend.

As in the movies, some touchstones remain: people and things blissfully unscathed, throughout the course of time. Others rise, resilient, from the tumult of any particular era. In our house—years before he appeared online with a reconstructed chin, computer-generated voice, and a take-no-prisoners Twitter feed—Roger Ebert was our local movie critic whose overweight newsprint face would smudge and smear as we passed the Sunday Sun-Times around the den.

If ever I find myself in conversations where people are debating whether the movie theater will be open on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day, my answer rises calmly and without equivocation. It begins with, “Trust me…” I know the theater is open on Thanksgiving and Christmas because in my family we go to movies on these holidays. Many Oscar contenders are released in the last six weeks of the year, and most of them will appear on email lists circulated among us in preparation for a holiday reunion. The messy reply-all action ensues, and pretty soon we have agreed on a slate of movies to see together.

The last time I remember having a TV was in 1998, and I am sure I watched the Oscars alone in my college dorm room then. I had seen The Big Lebowski the previous fall, and was so moved by its patchwork of characters and plot developments that I wrote an essay about it. I wasn't equipped to use phrases like "plot development" at that point, but I recall thinking, "You can make a movie like this?" It opened my world by its sheer audacity of newness. The Coen Brothers made that movie because they could. It was unlike anything. What might I imagine or create or be?

If a conversation at home winds its way to the Oscars, as it often does, I can hold my own, punctuating the one-upsman's challenge with these temporal markers, knowing the years of movies by who won which award, and vice versa. It's how we tell time in my family.

My Library Roots

(Cross-posted from Embedded Librarian.)

I'm still following Gretchen Rubin as part of my embedded librarianship project. I find her more and more useful every day. (In March I plan to do a follow-up post about the "Work" section in her book, which is the March chapter.) She recently encouraged her blog readers to think about what we did for fun when we were 10 years old. As for me, I went to the library.

This post is part of the Library Roots/Routes project, celebrating the myriad paths we've all taken. They are seeking blog posts from librarians like you and me about how we got here and where we're going. It's been a nice opportunity for me to reflect on the role of the local public library during my formative years, even though the library I ended up working in bears little resemblance to that small but valuable institution in Cary, Illinois. (It's weird to me that they have a website--since they had only a couple of rooms when I was young--but they do.)

In grade school I was part of the Book It! program every summer. I would have to carefully write out my reading list on a sheet of construction paper on which I had drawn ruled lines, evenly spaced apart. For each book I finished--my all-time favorite was The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright--I would get a gold star next to the title. Soon the gold stars would fill up the poster, which I proudly displayed next to my closet. If I read all my summer choices, I was treated to a pizza party at the local Pizza Hut. I'm amazed that this kind of food-incentivized reading program still exists, but I can't say enough about its role in my own reading, not to mention my library-awareness.

In high school I spent my afternoons and weekends in the reference room wrestling with huge, green volumes of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. I would look up references to my favorite bands, and then meticulously fill out call slips and take them downstairs where the periodicals librarian would hand me copies of People or Rolling Stone that I would then pore over for hours, learning what Michael Stipe's college major was, or obsessing over what John Linnell's mother did for a living.

This all seems significant to me now, given that I blog weekly about librarianship and can hardly resist weaving in musical references. But at the time--and the importance of this cannot be underestimated--this was all just an afterthought. I grew up at the library. Books were like air. It did not occur to me to become a librarian.

Like many of us, I had other career ideas during college, and for a number of years afterward. I studied psychology and French, and then joined the Peace Corps as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language. Even then I didn't see too many obvious connections with librarianship, but I did select as my "secondary" or summer project the daunting (and dirty) task of organizing my school's unused warehouse of books, "cataloging" them (before I had any sense of what that meant), and suggesting possible ways teachers could use them in their respective curricula. I was becoming a librarian.

Wara Middle School, Kankalabe, Guinea, West Africa

After a short but intense career in educational testing, I found that what I really enjoyed in the workplace was wrangling technology and training other people to do so. I was fresh out of graduate school in another discipline and the thought of going back, and taking on more educational debt, seemed crazy. Still, the field I was in was not a good fit for me. Something was missing. I wasn't sure if it was technology or people or both. Enter library school.

In retrospect, the library ethic and orientation were always in me, alive and well, if dormant for many years. For me, it took having a few different jobs to realize what I was and wasn't good at, and which of my interests were simply hobbies or intellectual curiosities, as opposed to the beginnings of a profession.

Go to now. I've found a way to combine my passion for language and literacy, my teaching background, my tech skills, my people skills, my service orientation, attention to detail, steel-trap memory, and most especially my love of reading, all in one satisfying career. Those are my library roots.

Writing is a Disease

Writing is a disease I can’t shake. And I keep trying more of it to flush it away, like antibodies to the rescue. And it keeps not working, like disappointing lab experiments. And it keeps having its funding renewed so more twisted experiments that go nowhere can be tried.

Writing is like a love affair with a person you can’t stand. A person who says the wittiest, charmingest, smartest things imaginable but who has atrocious table manners. You think you love this person and then when you’re together, just the two of you, the words “intolerable,” and “what have I gotten myself into?” play on repeat in your head. You try to have a casual, at-a-distance relationship, but your would-be lover keeps reminding you what could be.

Wanna be a struggling writer? Just be a writer! Just say you are a writer, and if you have one shred of honesty about you you will feel the struggle.

It starts with an alarm clock. You told yourself morning is the best time, so get your ass out of bed. Now you feel honest. And you’re standing in front of your desk trying to imagine the words and clever turns of phrase that will put that honesty to work. Now the coffee has sputtered out its last paean to percolation and you’re on. You’re next. You’re up.

You’ve typed your password and been welcomed by Windows. The filenaming routine cannot be prolonged. It’s you and a blank page and the more times you let that Conor Oberst lyric rattle through your mind the longer it will be before you create something.

And you know how good it feels to create something.

It’s just you and the universe now, and you have the honor and privilege of discovering, uncovering something hidden in the trees. A whole new species of something, or maybe just a lonely tree frog chilling in the canopy. You delicately reach forward, knowing you could lose your balance, and then where would you be?

You’ve lost it before, ended up on the forest floor. The dense velvet covering is almost too much for you and there is no light, no light. You can’t show this to anyone.

You can stumble around in awe for a while, and even stay there if you don’t care about seeing your friends again. You can consider bringing back a specimen, but you know the planet will reject you if you upset the balance. And you know your loved ones will not be impressed by something out of place and orphaned.

You trudge on. There is, in fact, a light ahead. You stare up from the clearing and wonder how high the sky is, how far away your little tree frog has gotten. And will you ever see it again?

You let it go. You walk forward. You discover that there is not just forest. There are all the biomes you memorized in fourth grade when you learned the word biome. And there are memories. There is a whole party going on over there.

A pterodactyl of sorts rushes overhead and you duck. For a moment you stay low figuring the crouch could not be that uncomfortable even for long periods of time.

But after a while your Achilles’ tendon starts acting up. You sigh, right yourself, and keep walking, resigned. You are a writer.

Heroes and High Notes

Last Sunday I saw Dar Williams perform with the Ibis Chamber Orchestra. It was a family affair: her sister-in-law is the harpist, and is married to the violinist/arranger. They've all been wanting to do a cross-over project like this for ten years, and they made very interesting choices.

Some of Dar's music is already arranged with strings on her albums, but even those sounded great with live strings: one harp, one bass, one cello, a viola, and two violins. Other songs sounded like the great Dar tunes that they are, but New! Fresh! Weird with an orchestra! She covered Comfortably Numb on her last album and they did it. Imagine--Comfortably Numb, Dar and her guitar, and six strings as backup. There were some kids in the audience and it may have been the first time they heard this song ever.

She did "Calling the Moon" first and oh, Lordy, I cried like a baby. See, Dar is not just courageous; I can tell she used to have fear. And I can tell that she doesn't just feel pretty; she used to feel ugly, too.

My friend Mary and I were in the front row. It was a small theater where I had once seen a "silent" production of Romeo & Juliet. (There was music and sound effects, but no dialogue, and Yes, it was really something.) I was closer to Dar than I sometimes am to performers at Greenbelt's New Deal Cafe, a one-room performance space. Before Dar came out I noticed how low the mic was and thought it couldn't have been for her vocals, but I always forget how little she is - no taller than Liz Phair.

In the second song Dar faltered and she pretty much never recovered for the entire show, even after intermission. But let me tell you something: this was not like seeing Stephin Merritt cock off at the bad Magnetic Fields concert I went to. I watched Dar struggle. I completely saw the pain in her. She screwed up three or four songs after that, but I didn't even care. I was so close to her that I could see her working, and see what it was doing to her. She did not want to call it off or stop trying, but she was sort of resigned to her imperfection. She forgot her own lyrics, and since she was all dressed up and standing in front of an orchestra, she did not just dissolve into self-deprecating giggles (although she is absolutely charming when she does that). She worked, but in many ways, she failed. It was important for me to see it.

We tend to think that the people we admire--the people doing the things we want to do or the things we wish we could do--that they are fundamentally different from us. We think they have more hours in the day or that they drink stronger coffee. The reality is that they have made the choices we have not yet had the courage to make, or that they work harder or focus better. That they spend time on the things they need to spend time on. Maybe the rest of us are just sleepwalking, thinking far-away celebrities got where they are through some inherent advantage rather than through sheer will. When the facade is broken and you see a far-away celebrity struggle, up close, it makes it that much harder to deny your own talent, your own agency (dormant though it may be), and your own time.

I admit I was a little overexcited before the concert. Mary leaned over and said at one point, "She puts her pants on one leg at a time, like the rest of us." Could that really be true of Dar Williams? If so, what all could be true of me?