Check Mee and the American Myth

I just finished reading Chuck Mee's memoir, A Nearly Normal Life, which was, of course, amazing, fantastic, insightful, poetic, and powerful. You know, like anything Chuck Mee writes. (Obviously, I'm a fan. And it seems that with Chuck Mee, you're either a fan or your decidedly NOT a fan, with no in-between space).

I love this:

In truth, though I didn't know about it at the time, there were some real hardcore deviants in America in the fifties, whose lives and work, like those of my friends in Barrington, were going to make the world more accommodating for me and for others who suffered from some form of difference. (189)

And then this:

The fifties was not an undifferentiated era of conformity; a great change was already under way, one of the most fundamental transformations in America in my lifetime - not an advance in technology, nor a growth in productivity, nor a new strategic place for America in the world, but more fundamental than any of those: a change of mind. (190)

I think of all the mental and emotional labor it took to act as if there was conformity, a nice normal normalness - to act that in the face of the obvious difference: the difference of a friend struck by polio, or of the gay person(s) in the community, or of the people of color that were woven into real life but not the ideal life of television and film, or of the things that we each don't feel that we're told we are supposed to feel. Yet the myths, the stories that took so much effort to believe in, did give comfort.

Not by coincidence, this topic emerged during rehearsal last night (Mee memoir, Mee play, Mee-reading dramaturg). As we discussed Olympia, we came to the realization that she has her illusion - so beautiful, so comforting, even if a little odd - of love and marriage and happiness. And by god she is going to make reality fit that illusion. Until it simply cannot.

I suppose the disillusion is inevitable for all of us, as individuals and as a nation. It is necessary, and yet so painful (most painful for those who have invested all their time and labor and energy into it) to see it washed away, to come to accept reality for what it is and still fight to change it tangibly, and not in fantasy only.

Dramaturgy is like...

Dramaturgy is like living in Borges’s library during the day and then emerging into Carnival at night.

I Miss You, Pleasant Rowland

I never thought I would say it.

I stepped into American Girl Place today - I needed to pick up the newest catalog, make sure I was correct about the theatre (it is no more), and just take a quick peek at the place in preparation for an article I am going to submit.

Dr. Martinson, this ain't your grad student's American Girl Place.

The American Girl that I wrote about in my dissertation, the one that so effectively straddled the line between a mom's wants and her daughter's wants, the one that masked its storeness by constructing itself as an empowering educational resource and an experiential destination, the one that schooled young girls in refined taste a la Bourdieu, allowing girls to gain fluency in upper middle class cultural practices like seeing theatre and cafe dining, that American Girl is gone. It has been overwritten in garish pinks and purples (wherefore art thou demure berry interior design theme?) and animated to look like an awful Bratz-meetz-American-Girlz mash-up (only NEW My American Girls dolls come to life online at innerstarU.com) and buried in too many flowers and stars and butterflies (with whimsical faux hand-drawn clip art!).

I miss the old American Girl.

Not that I retract my critiques. I don't. Old American Girl did put forward a simplistic narrative of American progress as basically good, with only a few minor bumps (displacing native peoples, slavery, manifest destiny, orphan trains) along the way to the multicultural utopia of today in which we are all the same (so long as we are upper middle class - and preferably white). Old American Girl did teach girls about competitive consumption and social positioning. And the Old American Girl Musical Theatre pieces did favor deadening theatrical practices, did enforce racial difference (but only for people of color), and did serve as a commercial brought to life.

And now? It still does all that, only now it all seems so cheap. Not the prices, mind you, NEVER the prices - as long as suckers are willing to shell out the same dollars and get less, then the joke is on them. But the crap (now literally crap) you can buy, the store, the experience, the brand - its all so cynically lessened. You can practically taste the Value Engineering that has happened when you walk through the doors of American Girl Place or page through the catalogs. You can almost see the corporate honchos sweating over the products, looking for ways to save $.01 here and another over there by skimping on design and production and quality. You can essentially hear the meetings in which marketers discuss how "archiving" their historical characters will create a buying rush AND allow the brand to grow by introducing new characters. It slaps you in the face, this rush to maximize profits by giving consumers less and less and telling them it's all the same.

It was bad enough to have old American Girl make so much money by artfully masquerading as a school, a library, a museum, and a dose of feminism. New American Girl doesn't even have to be artful about it.

I miss you, Pleasant Rowland.