Tell us about a time when you felt out of place.
Fish Out of Water? Stranger in a Strange Land? Is there another phrase for not belonging? I know there’s Yank in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape who decides if things belong, and whether he belongs or not.
The FOUW/SIASL is an excellent device for playwrighting. You need to provide exposition but you don’t want to have everyone speaking in exposition, like this:
CLOCK CHIMES TWELVE.
BUTLER: (With British accent) It’s Midnight, and the Master not home yet?
MAID: (With Cockney accent) He was planning to propose to Gwendolyn tonight.
BUTLER: But he left 6 hours ago!
And so on. By the way, this is my classic example from Intro to Theatre about bad expositional writing, though it does tell us everything we need to know: what country we’re in, what type of house, what the economic level is, what time it is, and what the situation is. It’s just not well or subtly done.
So being a fish out of water character allows for easy exposition, but results in a hard life for the person who feels like a stranger in a strange land in real life. Today’s prompt (that I’m now getting around to answer after a dodge and some additional exposition) asks if there was a time I felt out of place.
Certainly high school was one such time. The second or third day of school the newspaper came out with, on page one, above the fold, a photo of me at lunch from day one. I was merely trying to swallow my hamburger, but the headline read, “Wary frosh greet first day of school.” This marked me as someone who was likely that gasping fish, and helped me to think I was.
Eventually, I made friends and felt more at home in high school, and the bullying ended in sophomore year when a certain senior in a wheelchair stopped harassing people in the lunch room. (Good cover for a thug, don’t you think? Especially if your threatening lieutenant pushes him around.)
There have been other times I’ve felt like a stranger. My theatre conferences, when I was not with friends, fit the bill. I often complain of people “sniffing nametags”: they’d look at my face, not see anyone they recognized, glance at my name tag, not see a recognizable name, and then jerk their heads away. You know, we’re at the same conference—maybe you could still say hello.
In recent years, I’ve worried less what people think of me. I figure that either they’ll never see me again, or if they do, this is me and deal with it. That is one of the perks of getting older; we can act quirky and get away with it. And of course, life is too short to still be worrying about what people think of us. We’re not in high school anymore (thank the gods).
MUSOFYR 