House Fire

A strange smell wakes me in the middle of the night. I open my eyes to find a curtain covered with flame sitting by my window. Fire floods my room. Ash starts to cloud my vision. The smoke fills my lungs and suddenly I can’t breathe. All I have are my hands to feel my way out. The wood floors are getting hotter and hotter underneath my feet. I drop to my knees to escape the ash clouds intoxicating me. Trying to crawl and feel around for the way to the door, I focus on what I still have. I can hear the flickering of the fire close to my ear. I focus on it hard. The door can’t be far now, only a few more paces and I’ll be outside. Listening to the flame burning next to me I hear something else. A voice behind the flame. My body pauses. What a relief to hear someone in my time of need, they’ve come to save me! I can stop fighting now. You must know I’m here, sitting inside this fire. As the flames get closer and closer to my body on the floorboards, my hope is unwavering. I know they will save me. How lucky am I to have you to wait for? My hands become cold as I feel the fire dance on top of my skin. I once wrote that you will not be the hill that I die on. Now I watch my skin shrivel up in flame as I sit and wait.

Naive. This is how I know I’ll be described, the way young women are. Be quieter, be softer, be fragile. Let them hold you like a porcelain doll. Let them see how hard they can squeeze until you start to crack.

I feel so cold.

I was good, wasn’t I? Good enough to be one of the ones you save? Not a difficult woman, one who adapts to what you need. One who gets to survive to the end of the story. That's all I really want, to survive to the end.

I can’t breathe.

I see spots. My eyes can’t stay open any longer. With just the edge of consciousness left in my body, I think of you, watching my cremation. Faith in you held like religion in my bones. Yet, you don’t come. At least I die knowing you never dirtied your hands trying to save me.

Dirty Girls Retrospective

Three months ago I turned twenty. I successfully survived the trauma that is being a teenage girl and all I got to show for it was multiple mental illness diagnoses and a fear of walking home at night. It can not be understated how complicated it is to exist as a teenage girl. The entire world unequivocally despises everything about you and there’s no escape from that fact. As a teenager, I couldn’t understand why a world I had so much love and hope for wanted me to live in fear of it. I wanted to both change the world and rip it to shreds because of how it treated me. “Teen Idol” was my anthem for a reason. I felt so alone, so scared. Then, while mindlessly scrolling through YouTube, I fell upon a little documentary entitled Dirty Girls.

Dirty Girls comes from Michael Lucid as he chronicles the experiences of a gaggle of grunge teenage girls in late 90s era high school. The girls are makeup-less. They wear baggy clothes. They make feminist zines. They also partake in a bit of performance art by apparently showing up to school with lipstick all over their faces. Needless to say, the girls are endlessly ridiculed and hated by the rest of the school population. Most of the doc is made up of other students talking about how ridiculous they find the group. The “dirty girls” are led by eighth grader Amber, who responds to the bullying with a kind of calm that cannot be found in most adults, and her sister Harper. When asked why the girls do what they do, Harper explains that it is a reaction to the expectations put on women by society. And this ladies and gentlemen, is where the heart of the issue lies.

Feminism has never been, and at this rate, will never be popular. At least legitimate, action-based feminism never will. It is easy to think that in a post-MeToo world, we have solved the all-powerful beast that is patriarchy. However, the vitriol these fourteen-year-olds face for tackling intersectionality in a zine is just as common today as it was way back in the 90s. At the start of the short, two girls are asked why they think Amber and her cohort act the way they do. The girls explain they could be doing this as an act of rebellion against patriarchy. The two seem to sit with the idea for a second before instantly bursting out into laughter. There is something so incredibly dystopian about that. That feminism is such an out-there concept that it just has to be laughed at. Refuse to shave because of the beauty industry? What are we? Cavemen? It may seem like a small moment, but this kind of flippant attitude toward change is what keeps movements from, well, moving. This is how we end up with people calling police abolition a pipe dream. If we can’t believe something is possible, how would anything progress?

Another stand-out “this boohockey is still happening twenty-three years later” moment is when upon seeing the infamous zine, many students denounce it for being too weird, too scary, and more importantly, that it’s trite and for lack of a better word, cringy. Fellas, is it cringe to call out capitalism as a driving oppressor in a woman's life? The only reason the zine seems trite is because feminists have been repeating themselves for ages now. Pop feminism has made it seem that acknowledging systemic oppression is uncool or overdone. If these systems have gone away, why do so many feel the need to reconfirm their relevance? The other critique of the zine is that its cringe is still such a popular sentiment toward real activism. Cringe attacks sincerity, and any form of activism must involve sincerity. It sounds silly, but if activism is going to succeed, it must be a bit cringe. Be genuine! Have good faith! Oppressors hate when you have integrity! One student claims that “the easiest thing to do is to rebel”. This is untrue since that is exactly what these girls are doing and everyone and their mother seems to think that it’s stupid. If rebellions were easy, there’d be world peace by now.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but teenage girls are smart. They are so smart. It does not shock me at all that a group of high school girls were able to beautifully critique the intersection between capitalism and misogyny. These girls live in that facet of society every day. How could they not be aware of that? The hardest scene to watch in the doc is probably those last few minutes when Amber verbalizes her deep hurt over the notion that she’s too young to understand real issues like rape (she then states that she has been molested. Horrific.) I can say with near certainty that if these were a group of young boys, they would be hailed as wise beyond their years. Male angst and tribulations have been seen as poignant and important for god knows how long. The Outsiders, Stand By Me, Boyhood: all movies that depict young men grappling with real issues like death, class, and familial struggles. Why are teenage girls not given the liberty to explore those things?

I admire these girls so much. I wish I had half of the bravery of Amber and Harper. I wish I had done something with my rage, my isolation. Instead, I stayed in my room and wept to Pure Heroine era Lorde and hoped and prayed that one day I’d overcome this. That’d I make it past girlhood and live to tell the tale. If you happen to be a teenage girl and also reading this, and I am gravely serious about this, do whatever you want. Dye your hair, write crappy fanfiction, eat junk food, dance, sing, whatever. The world doesn’t want you to exist, so stick it to the man and do just that. Make your presence known at every opportunity you get. I wish I’d written songs or told stories or painted pictures, not caring if it was good or bad. Force the world to acknowledge me. Make them see my bloody fists and sharp teeth, the things they’d given me. I think the art I make now will always be informed by the trauma of my youth, the trauma of my gender. I can’t escape it. I will always be an angry thirteen-year-old girl at heart. And I love her. Somebody has to.

Written by Grace Bradley

Summers Hidden Treasure: The movie that got swept up in the summer chaos that you need to see.

It’s 10:20 AM, there is a cherry-coke icee in my left hand, a large popcorn in my right, and a pack of Twizzlers smuggled away in my tote bag. It’s 104 outside on a Saturday morning, and I’m expecting an empty theatre, to my delight, it is not empty, each row is filled with dazzling smiles and awaits a specific yet inviting ensemble of perky, ambitious, talented theatre kids.

It’s no secret summer is a big time for blockbusters, from Transformers to Turtles, to the unmentionable double feature that has swept the nation, the fanfare has been hearty to theaters everywhere. That being said, it is impossible to make sure you’re completely caught up with everything that makes its way to our screens, and sometimes the best things get lost in the chaos.

Theatre Camp follows the adventures (and misadventures) of a camp in upstate New York for performers and their summer under the spotlight. This ensemble cast is tasked with keeping the lights on amidst show season, secrets, and lots and lots of show tunes. With eccentric teachers and students, and eager motivations for the perfect opening night, Theatre camp is a delightful summer surprise.

Without many spoilers, the film takes approaches in a relatable, heartwarming, and original way.

It felt like watching Fame as a kid and seeing my most secretive, ambitious, musical side be portrayed, not in a caricatured way telling me there's something wrong with my eccentricities, but in a considerate unashamed way, while still poking fun at the albeit, silly ways of a true theatre kid. While Theatre Camp is most definitely not Fame, It brings something special and unique for our time that will ultimately make it a theatre kid classic.

What was even more interesting, was how well it fits into our society today and the irony of the continued efforts of the arts being taken for granted, for instance, the WGA and SAG strikes.

Creatives are struggling to live and sustain, and yet we loom on over a hundred days of the strike for the WGA, and the thought process for most is that the entertainment industry is unimportant, so their fair wages are unimportant as well, but this is more than unfair, it is unjust.

There is a line said in the film during a troubling part of putting together the production, It flies by in about two seconds before the movie moves on to its next crazy crisis, but I couldn't help breaking all my theatre etiquette training by immediately pulling out my phone (don't worry it was low light) to save it in my notes page, it was “we’re theatre people we turn cardboard into gold”.

Something like that stops you in your tracks when you've seen low-budget theatre directors make dreams come true, or spent hours putting together idea boards for a short film, or when for the past three-plus months, you've watched mentors and future colleagues walk the picket lines outside of multi-million dollar companies. It stops you in your tracks not only because of how true it is but because of how real it makes it.

The entertainment industry loves to be idolized and put on a pedestal, telling my mother I wanted to make movies was basically like telling her I intended to rule the world, in her eyes I think she saw it as foolish and narcissistic because, to her, that is what “Hollywood” makes you, this is not true.

Exhibit A comes in the form of one of my favorite plots of the movie, the relationship between Molly Gordon and Ben Platt’s characters. They are at first seen as brightened, overgrown, over-ambitious camp counselors, but as the story develops we see they care so deeply not only about the kids but the craft. Amos, Platt's character, goes through this discovery that his passion is what makes him a good director and teacher, and that where he is, isn't a placeholder for fame, just as Molly Gordon's character, Rebecca-Diane, allows herself to go after the same ambition that got her to camp in the first place, despite doing it without her best friend and her favorite safety net.

Watching Theatre Camp, or even strike coverage, one may think it's dumb. Why take something like this so seriously? why care so much? As artists, there is almost an expectation because of the field we choose, that we should expect and accept to be underpaid and overworked, but just because we can “make gold out of cardboard”, doesn't mean we should have to.

Making art isn't done because it is always sunshine and rainbows, and definitely not because it is easy and rewarding. It is done because it is impulsive and necessary, it is done because it connects, builds, and makes this world a lot more understandable.

Theatre camp takes this idea and wraps it in a bundle of joy with the core being why most of us start in the first place.

From Noah Galvin's show-stealing step in as the titular in-house role of older Joan to the throat coat dealing before performances, Theatre Camp finds its balance between humor and heart that showcases the truth of what theatre is and should be, fun.

Written by Toni Desiree