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sabinetzin) wrote2020-07-20 10:53 pm
sabinetzin) wrote2020-07-20 10:53 pm
Entry tags:
I do not remember anyone's actual names so I didn't need to change them
So here is the story of the most mortifying thing I ever had to do.
It is not the most mortifying thing I ever did, because I have mortified my friends on countless occasions. I'm getting better, but my life from about 14 to 23 was "Sabine no" "SABINE YES". But this is something I was required to do, even if I kind of got myself into it and should just have said no.
Content warning: high schoolers butchering Shakespeare, language shaming, extreme Englishness.
So when I was in high school, I got to go Cambridge (the one in England) on a program for American college students, and I lived there for a summer. It really was a once in a lifetime chance, not least of all because my parents refused to entertain me going anywhere where I didn't get a full ride for undergrad and also because by the time I went to grad school I was in an area they don't work in (though fun fact, I did very nearly leave the country anyway and go to McGill). My primary classes were in genetics and Egyptology, because I contain multitudes, but there were also activities that you could do, one of which was being involved with the play. I was a big theater nerd in high school, so I auditioned and I got the part of Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I actually tried out for Helena, but the director was immediately like, fuck it, I need you for the Rude Mechanicals, so I got the role on the spot.
This goddamn play was fucking cursed.
Oberon, who was the only bigger theater nerd than me, broke his leg like day three. He didn't go home, and we let him hang around and have a good time, but we had to replace him, obviously. New Oberon was shit. I swear to you that while OG Oberon and the director were coaching him on how to be butch, they got to the line "Tarry, rash wanton!" and not only did New Oberon sound like a little kid, it transpired that he did not know the difference between the words "wanton" and "wonton".
He never did get the hang of it, though he did stop talking about food.
The director and his assistant kept having to slash whole sections of soliloquys because nobody could fuckin act. Bottom and Helena were the worst offenders, and it hurt me physically how much of "How happy some o'er other some can be" and "Bottom's Dream" ended up getting cut out simply because neither of them could remember their fucking lines worth a goddamn.
I will remind you that I read for Helena, and I auditioned with "How happy some". It wouldn't have mattered, because the director did this thing where he swapped Helena and Hermia, and it kind of worked but it would have worked better if Helena could remember her fucking lines. Hermia and Lysander did fine.
At one point it got so bad that the director was preparing to switch me out with Bottom, because it would have been super gay, but that was a small price to pay for someone who could act and memorize lines.
We were scheduled to perform this show in the garden on Erasmus Lawn, so we never built a set. We were just going to, you know, act amongst the foliage, as would befit Midsummer.
Except that there was a wedding on the lawn a few days prior that no one told us about. And they assured us that the tent they erected for it would be removed. And then it was not removed. So we had about three hours to turn a wedding tent into a theater. This was only so successful, though for the longest time their brochure had a picture of me, on that "set", in the very scene we will come on to later.
It went on. During Hermia and Helena's cat fight, during the first performance, someone did something and Helena's shoe took a chunk out of her heel. The fight looked great, but she came off "stage" dripping blood. The whole thing was a fantastical shitshow.
But I went to a high school that, at the time, so hated its drama department that for one show our drama teacher had to borrow money from someone else and just hope to recoup it in ticket sales. We did The Actor's Nightmare and we couldn't fucking afford garbage cans for the Samuel Beckett scene, because we either needed to cut plastic ones open or find certain metal ones and either way we didn't have the money, so we sat in chairs. I NEVER did a high school production where I wasn't wearing my own goddamn clothes.
The point is, I can handle a shitshow. I don't like to think how it must have looked or sounded to watch one of those plays I was in, but I don't regret having done them.
I don't quite regret Midsummer, but I do regret what I had to do in Midsummer.
So, real talk: if you've got a nonstandard accent, you know that you sound weird, and you know why you sound weird. Unless you're from parts of the Midwest, where they've convinced themselves they don't have an accent and their speech is 100% Standard, bless their hearts. And I knew what was gonna get me. It was gonna be I.
I'm Southern, so I have /aI/-monophthongization. This means that when I say words like light, bright, dialect, why, or, indeed, I, it comes out as one sound. In Gen Am, I is two sounds, ahh-ih (aI); in most Southern dialects, it's one long sound, without moving up into the ee part (a:). Everybody fuckin knows this is how Southern people sound, and every fuckin Southern person knows they sound this way. It's not required to know the word for it; you just know it's there, and it makes you sound Southern.
These days, I am happy to be Southern; I believe the South is worth salvaging. When I was in high school, I desperately wanted to be anything in the world but Southern. I hated everything about it, so much so that I deliberately stripped every Southern feature out of my speech that I could. It got to the point where you genuinely couldn't tell where I was from; I'm paying for that now, but it was what I wanted then. And I knew fucking one line from this fucking play was absolutely going to sell me out.
Quince is trying to lead a rehearsal for "Pyramus and Thisby" that is going horribly, and Flute keeps saying "Ninny's tomb". Quince corrects him by saying:
"Ninus' tomb, man!"
I fuckin practiced this line as hard as I could, because I KNEW if I didn't hit it exactly right, that first I was gonna go flat, and this entire production, which had literally one other Southerner in it, was going to think I was an inbred hick.
So we were probably two weeks in, and we were practicing that scene, because I had the role of Quince in both the play and the Rude Mechanicals, because nobody could fucking act their way out of a paper bag. And we were running it a second or a third time, and I hit,
"Ninus' tomb, man!"
And I thought I did okay, I thought maybe it was questionable but we could move on.
My director did not share this opinion.
He lost. his. shit. He thought it was the funniest goddamn thing he'd ever heard. I would like to point out that one, the girl playing Hippolyta was Texas oil money and her accent matched, and two, he was from Northern England, so idk why he thought he could tell anybody anything. And then it was everything I hadn't wanted.
"Do you really sound like that? Go on, do it in your real voice. Oh that's too good. Hey, what if you gave it a little bit more? What if we made it really over the top, like really play it up. Yeah, like that! That'll be hilarious."
And I couldn't say no, because I was a teenager who was desperate for attention and only knew how to get it by performing or competing, and he was a college student who I was really attracted to even though he was probably gay, and I just really needed to be liked. So I did the whole of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the accent that I will now replicate:
(I'm not gonna do the whole thing, I knew it at the time but I'm reading it now)
Gentles, perchance you wonder at this fake-ass accent (I say the F word more than once)
So I, who didn't want to be Southern at all, got up in front of a crowd of people that I really wanted to like me, and pulled that shit. I was, it should be noted, the only one in the play doing an accent. But I fuckin committed to it, because I actually am a very good actress, when I put my mind to it.
But it was very much the most mortifying thing I have ever been made to do, and thank god, now I wouldn't let myself do that.
Post script: I actually did like the director a lot despite the whole accent thing, and we got along really well. My other memory of him is much more positive. We were sitting in front of Notre Dame, and he went to get a sandwich. He returned:
Him: That woman was so rude!
Me: Why, what did she do?
Him: All I did was go up there and I said [in the most English accent possible] "Je voudrais un sandwich, s'il vous plaît" and she said [gruff voice, still English] "Deux euros cinquante."
Me, American: Yeah…?
Him: And then she just took my money and gave me my sandwich!
Me, still American, marveling at watching the most English thing that ever happened: Uh huh. Yeah. That sounds, uh, brusque.
Him, now eating the sandwich, which he received upon requesting it from someone and paying for it: It was!
At no point did he ever see the problem. The American French speakers (self incl) got treated much better than the British ones, because we did things like, idk, make some kind of attempt at French phonology instead of just speaking English with different words?
It is not the most mortifying thing I ever did, because I have mortified my friends on countless occasions. I'm getting better, but my life from about 14 to 23 was "Sabine no" "SABINE YES". But this is something I was required to do, even if I kind of got myself into it and should just have said no.
Content warning: high schoolers butchering Shakespeare, language shaming, extreme Englishness.
So when I was in high school, I got to go Cambridge (the one in England) on a program for American college students, and I lived there for a summer. It really was a once in a lifetime chance, not least of all because my parents refused to entertain me going anywhere where I didn't get a full ride for undergrad and also because by the time I went to grad school I was in an area they don't work in (though fun fact, I did very nearly leave the country anyway and go to McGill). My primary classes were in genetics and Egyptology, because I contain multitudes, but there were also activities that you could do, one of which was being involved with the play. I was a big theater nerd in high school, so I auditioned and I got the part of Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I actually tried out for Helena, but the director was immediately like, fuck it, I need you for the Rude Mechanicals, so I got the role on the spot.
This goddamn play was fucking cursed.
Oberon, who was the only bigger theater nerd than me, broke his leg like day three. He didn't go home, and we let him hang around and have a good time, but we had to replace him, obviously. New Oberon was shit. I swear to you that while OG Oberon and the director were coaching him on how to be butch, they got to the line "Tarry, rash wanton!" and not only did New Oberon sound like a little kid, it transpired that he did not know the difference between the words "wanton" and "wonton".
He never did get the hang of it, though he did stop talking about food.
The director and his assistant kept having to slash whole sections of soliloquys because nobody could fuckin act. Bottom and Helena were the worst offenders, and it hurt me physically how much of "How happy some o'er other some can be" and "Bottom's Dream" ended up getting cut out simply because neither of them could remember their fucking lines worth a goddamn.
I will remind you that I read for Helena, and I auditioned with "How happy some". It wouldn't have mattered, because the director did this thing where he swapped Helena and Hermia, and it kind of worked but it would have worked better if Helena could remember her fucking lines. Hermia and Lysander did fine.
At one point it got so bad that the director was preparing to switch me out with Bottom, because it would have been super gay, but that was a small price to pay for someone who could act and memorize lines.
We were scheduled to perform this show in the garden on Erasmus Lawn, so we never built a set. We were just going to, you know, act amongst the foliage, as would befit Midsummer.
Except that there was a wedding on the lawn a few days prior that no one told us about. And they assured us that the tent they erected for it would be removed. And then it was not removed. So we had about three hours to turn a wedding tent into a theater. This was only so successful, though for the longest time their brochure had a picture of me, on that "set", in the very scene we will come on to later.
It went on. During Hermia and Helena's cat fight, during the first performance, someone did something and Helena's shoe took a chunk out of her heel. The fight looked great, but she came off "stage" dripping blood. The whole thing was a fantastical shitshow.
But I went to a high school that, at the time, so hated its drama department that for one show our drama teacher had to borrow money from someone else and just hope to recoup it in ticket sales. We did The Actor's Nightmare and we couldn't fucking afford garbage cans for the Samuel Beckett scene, because we either needed to cut plastic ones open or find certain metal ones and either way we didn't have the money, so we sat in chairs. I NEVER did a high school production where I wasn't wearing my own goddamn clothes.
The point is, I can handle a shitshow. I don't like to think how it must have looked or sounded to watch one of those plays I was in, but I don't regret having done them.
I don't quite regret Midsummer, but I do regret what I had to do in Midsummer.
So, real talk: if you've got a nonstandard accent, you know that you sound weird, and you know why you sound weird. Unless you're from parts of the Midwest, where they've convinced themselves they don't have an accent and their speech is 100% Standard, bless their hearts. And I knew what was gonna get me. It was gonna be I.
I'm Southern, so I have /aI/-monophthongization. This means that when I say words like light, bright, dialect, why, or, indeed, I, it comes out as one sound. In Gen Am, I is two sounds, ahh-ih (aI); in most Southern dialects, it's one long sound, without moving up into the ee part (a:). Everybody fuckin knows this is how Southern people sound, and every fuckin Southern person knows they sound this way. It's not required to know the word for it; you just know it's there, and it makes you sound Southern.
These days, I am happy to be Southern; I believe the South is worth salvaging. When I was in high school, I desperately wanted to be anything in the world but Southern. I hated everything about it, so much so that I deliberately stripped every Southern feature out of my speech that I could. It got to the point where you genuinely couldn't tell where I was from; I'm paying for that now, but it was what I wanted then. And I knew fucking one line from this fucking play was absolutely going to sell me out.
Quince is trying to lead a rehearsal for "Pyramus and Thisby" that is going horribly, and Flute keeps saying "Ninny's tomb". Quince corrects him by saying:
"Ninus' tomb, man!"
I fuckin practiced this line as hard as I could, because I KNEW if I didn't hit it exactly right, that first I was gonna go flat, and this entire production, which had literally one other Southerner in it, was going to think I was an inbred hick.
So we were probably two weeks in, and we were practicing that scene, because I had the role of Quince in both the play and the Rude Mechanicals, because nobody could fucking act their way out of a paper bag. And we were running it a second or a third time, and I hit,
"Ninus' tomb, man!"
And I thought I did okay, I thought maybe it was questionable but we could move on.
My director did not share this opinion.
He lost. his. shit. He thought it was the funniest goddamn thing he'd ever heard. I would like to point out that one, the girl playing Hippolyta was Texas oil money and her accent matched, and two, he was from Northern England, so idk why he thought he could tell anybody anything. And then it was everything I hadn't wanted.
"Do you really sound like that? Go on, do it in your real voice. Oh that's too good. Hey, what if you gave it a little bit more? What if we made it really over the top, like really play it up. Yeah, like that! That'll be hilarious."
And I couldn't say no, because I was a teenager who was desperate for attention and only knew how to get it by performing or competing, and he was a college student who I was really attracted to even though he was probably gay, and I just really needed to be liked. So I did the whole of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the accent that I will now replicate:
(I'm not gonna do the whole thing, I knew it at the time but I'm reading it now)
Gentles, perchance you wonder at this fake-ass accent (I say the F word more than once)
So I, who didn't want to be Southern at all, got up in front of a crowd of people that I really wanted to like me, and pulled that shit. I was, it should be noted, the only one in the play doing an accent. But I fuckin committed to it, because I actually am a very good actress, when I put my mind to it.
But it was very much the most mortifying thing I have ever been made to do, and thank god, now I wouldn't let myself do that.
Post script: I actually did like the director a lot despite the whole accent thing, and we got along really well. My other memory of him is much more positive. We were sitting in front of Notre Dame, and he went to get a sandwich. He returned:
Him: That woman was so rude!
Me: Why, what did she do?
Him: All I did was go up there and I said [in the most English accent possible] "Je voudrais un sandwich, s'il vous plaît" and she said [gruff voice, still English] "Deux euros cinquante."
Me, American: Yeah…?
Him: And then she just took my money and gave me my sandwich!
Me, still American, marveling at watching the most English thing that ever happened: Uh huh. Yeah. That sounds, uh, brusque.
Him, now eating the sandwich, which he received upon requesting it from someone and paying for it: It was!
At no point did he ever see the problem. The American French speakers (self incl) got treated much better than the British ones, because we did things like, idk, make some kind of attempt at French phonology instead of just speaking English with different words?
no subject
* Is that also a regional/olds thing, to say we went to college instead of university? Or is that a USian thing in general? Words are weird, man.
no subject
It's honestly pretty funny when people from the Midwest stand up and say their English is standard. What they're really implying is everyone should sound like them, because "Standard American English" is fake, and you can sit there and pick off marked features like fleas.
no subject
And, here's to trying to put our accents back together. Shit. If I could tell my younger self one damn thing it would be not to do that bullshit. That would win out over even be "YOU'RE GAY AS A MAYPOLE AND IT'S OKAY," because I did eventually figure that out, and it is indeed fine as hell, but man, I wish I sounded more like my momma, and not just when I try.