My impossible hair, my impossible bookcases

That meme:

Take a picture of yourself right now.
don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
post that picture with NO editing.
post these instructions with your picture.

The picture:



(No, you won't be able to get any of the titles off the bookshelves, since PhotoBooth mirror-images them...)

Equus

I read Equus in high school and remembered almost nothing of it by this time. I remember that it struck me as okay in twelfth grade solely because it was modern, and short, and 'relevant,' but it seemed kind of reductionistic.

Meaghan's teacher, and dianamcqueen's, taught it as a play about consumerism, which is very odd. Mine was better, and taught it as a play about the conflict between being normal (and being able to cope with the rest of the world, and surviving) and choosing the real, the authentic, the passionate, even if it's ultimately self-destructive.

I've known enough people with mental health issues to really despise this sort of framing, this romanticizing of mental illness. Being depressed doesn't make you special, it just sucks. Being a moody artist is not about being mopey and depressed and making lots of art about being mopey and depressed; it's about getting help and fighting back and working around the depression so that you can get on with the serious business of making art. To me (and I've been depressed, but a lot more mildly than some of my friends) being healthy is never going to stand in the way of being passionately involved in life, and writing, and making pretty things, and so on. Being healthy is going to stand in the way of lying on the couch watching Law & Order or playing Freecell, and that's about it.

What was most interesting about seeing Equus on stage, after not having read it for perhaps eight years, is that it doesn't seem to be asking and answering that question quite so neatly. Dysart, the psychiatrist, perceives this conflict between being normal and being passionate. But Dysart didn't seem to be nearly the wise omniscient voice that he once did. Is it a true conflict? Or is it just Dysart projecting his own regrets and insecurities onto a convenient target? If being seriously disturbed and miserable is not a good solution (and it isn't), then how to cope with this yearning for experiences that are intense and authentic, but somehow always illusory when we try to track them down? It's a question that the play can't answer, and doesn't try to, and that is what makes it haunting and beautiful.

It's interesting - by the end of the first act I admired the staging, and the lighting, and the sound, and the acting, and all of the little pieces that went into it. But by the end of the second act, I admired the play. By the end, the actors and the director and everyone involved in the play had managed to reveal to me things in the text itself that I hadn't seen before.

Honestly, I was a little leery of going to see a play starring celebrities because it seemed inevitable that the tickets would cost more than it was worth it to see the play - and indeed, I went because I got the absolute cheapest seats - but I have to say that it was completely worth it. And worth it for Daniel Radcliffe's acting, too; I hadn't seen him in anything since the second Harry Potter years ago, but the boy can really act!

I really don't go to see plays as often as I should.