What’s your favorite month of the year? Why?
One of the things I focused on when teaching postmodernism and deconstruction was looking at the negative space, at what isn’t there.
This is not to be confused with liminal space, or the space in between things. A google search suggests a door may be considered a liminal space.
By now, you‘re probably saying, “What the heck are you talking about? Wait—what was the question again?” And hopefully something clicks below and you say, “Oh, now I get it!”
In a long-form piece I’m working on (my Digital Technology Memoir) I keep going beyond the short and merely parenthetical in my narrative, so I mark those paragraphs with the word “sidebar.” So: sidebar.
A few years ago at the Directing pre-conference before the Association for Theatre in Higher Education main conference, I volunteered to give a presentation on casting. My hand-out had a series of headshots of past students, and a partial list of the cast of Hamlet: Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guldenstern. The task for the people in the room: cast those 9 Shakespearean roles from the 11 photos.
Several of the directors in the room set about that task, weighing various options. If Hamlet is African-American, does Gertrude have to be African-American? What about Claudius? What appears to be a simple assignment quickly takes on greater complexity.
The best reaction came from one of those who was sincerely trying to fulfill the assignment as I presented it. But at one point she looked up and saw others around the room looking disinterested or even openly hostile. (“I can’t base my casting on just pictures alone!” one later said in the discussion of the exercise.) She thought (as she later communicated to me), “Oh, no, they’re not doing Steve’s exercise.” And then she looked at me standing there with a quirky satisfied smile and realized they were doing exactly what I intended. Not just casting Hamlet but discussing what issues might arise in any casting. One of those opposed to the exercise later told me he “got it” after first resisting, and thought it was a valuable method of inciting discussion.
All of which is preamble to the question of my favorite month. Well, time of year. For the negative: I hate early dusk and cold, so scratch off the winter months. Autumn? Often linking it with going back to school (and for most of my life, since I spent my career in academia) so I never got over that child’s resistance to Fall. That leaves Spring and Summer. So I will stretch favorite month to six. Any time that the mythical Persephone is reunited with her mother Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, that flowers bloom, grass grows, it turns warm, the days lengthen—I would cast the time from March through August as my favorite time of year.
Did that answer the prompt? And how was that of an academic, long-winded answer to a simple question?
MUSOFYR 