Here I come, but I ain't the same...

Hyperichius said, 'The watchful monk works night and day to pray continually: but if his heart is broken and lets tears flow, that calls God down from heaven to have mercy.'

--The Desert Fathers

We have our choice of living in the past or the future--the present being but for an instant--not that of course, in fact. In the future there is the reality.

--The Art Spirit

So. (by request) Re-entry. Part 1.

I didn't give myself much "downtime" to recover, which was smart. I spent less than 48 hours in Virginia, during which I saw a show, then I popped up to New York to surprise everyone. Very very few people knew I was coming up, so I got to reap the rewards of shock value. (My history of exploiting the shock value of things goes all the way back to 8th grade when I first shaved my head.) While I had enough confidence to believe that people had missed me and would be quite happy to see me, I was not prepared for the amount of enthusiasm upon my arrival.

I wanted to see the Musical Theater Practicum show on Tuesday night... but my plane arrived too late. I considered just waiting to show up at PHTS until the next day, but it was EXTRAORDINARILY cold, so I ended up popping inside the building to be somewhere warm as I figured out what to do. As I walked in, I saw some of the actors (all people I knew) outside the theater, waiting. After giving them hugs and telling them how sorry I was that I was unable to see their show, that my plane JUST got in, they said, "You should sneak in with us. There's a big scene change in a blackout, we walk in, then walk right behind the audience to pick up chairs. You'd have to stand in the back, but you'd get to see at least the last part." So, that's what I did. And standing in the back, I noticed that right in front of me, on the back corner chair, was Lindsay, one of the few people who knew I was coming up. I put my hand on her shoulder, she turned, and I'm VERY impressed she didn't scream, but instead whispered, "sit in my seat!" So I hopped up and sat down and saw the ending of the show.

(I have never been so happy to be in the White Box. I don't think anyone has ever been so happy to be in the White Box.)

I'm not sure exactly how it happened that people noticed me. I know one of the actors who snuck me in started pointing at me after the curtain call. I know another one of my friends looked over, saw me, screamed, and began to cry. I just know it was a really good thing I got off the riser quickly or else I would have gotten knocked down. I was positively attacked by hugs. I heard students and teachers alike shouting, "Colleen's here!" "Colleen's back!" "When did she get here?!"

(my friend Steven and I, after I ran into him randomly in the Tisch building. Our faces sum up most of my encounters)

The next few days were filled with similar encounters. I spent all of Wednesday at PHTS. Really. All of it. I went to an acting class in the morning where some of my best friends were doing a scene from Sweeney Todd. (Sweeney's "Johanna". Amy-as-Sweeney killed me. It's been one of my life dreams to be killed in Sweeney. Thanks, Amy!) Mostly I sat in the office, or on a bench in the 4th floor lobby, running into people and soaking up the feeling of being in that building. One of my first year acting teachers saw me at the computers in the office, and said, "It's so good to see you hanging around here all the time again." One of my former teachers didn't recognize me. Actually, truly, didn't recognize me. I thought he was being facetious but then he realized who I was. The double-takes were rather impressive all around, because here I was, back from Africa, wearing dresses (with color!), with hair, and a tan.

On the one hand... it felt so good to be back there. So so so incredibly good. My blood even seemed to race as I walked through those hallways. I missed it. I missed the people. I even (sometimes) missed the stress of it. In many ways I am so comfortable there. I love the place, I love the people, dearly, extremely. And while I knew that my return would be delightful, I didn't expect that amount of love to be poured out towards me. I was expecting more along the lines of, "It'll be awesome because I'm going to see all these people I love!" and it was that, but it was also, "And that love is absolutely reciprocated! Oh, how nice!" And when you come back from a crazy, life-changing, challenging semester in Ghana, that's something which is absolutely invaluable, which I am inexpressibly grateful for.

On the other hand...

New York City is weird. Right? WEIRD. I got off the LIRR at Penn Station and went to walk to the NRW subway line, and I looked like some confused tourist, staring up at the buildings (which had never seemed that tall before) and looking around at the fast-moving crowds with my face contorted into a question. I said, "I live here?"

Theater is weird. So weird. I can't even say how it's weird but it's a strange, strange thing we do. And the conversations we have around it? They're BIZARRE. I don't know what standard of normality I'm holding it up to, I'm extraordinarily inarticulate about this (sorry PHTS!), but it's definitively strange. I had this moment watching the PHTS 4th Year Company production of Golden Boy, which was fabulous and not really that "strange" of a production as far as theater goes (it wasn't super abstract or avant-garde, you didn't find out that nothing exists or that all the characters are actually mutant hedgehogs or something), but I thought, "Theater is such a strange creature." I don't understand it. I mean, I do, but I don't at all. I was around people having intelligent conversations about shows that had happened this semester, and I sat there silently, listening with bemusement. Not that I was feeling out of the loop because I hadn't seen any of these shows, but rather that I was listening to this specific kind of conversation... which is a kind of conversation I know, I understand, I'm really good at participating in, I understood the rules of all of it, but now I was listening to this conversation with an outside ear that says, "What?" Not that it's pointless, just that it's odd. I even participated in such conversations. I sat at a cafe in the East Village discussing the artistic properties of microphones for musicals in small spaces, and it wasn't like that part of my brain didn't want to be woken up, it was thrilling, but it's strange.

I really wish I knew another way to articulate it.

And meanwhile, I've just gotten back from an experience that's totally outside everything I've known in my life. That's quite alien (though relevant) to the two floors that compose PHTS. Things have changed, clearly, but I don't even know how yet, and neither does anyone else. And while everyone knows that my experience must have been life-changing, we don't know what that means yet, and it's hard to wrap our heads around that so I (generally speaking) have been met with people expecting who they saw when I left. I'm curious at the phrase "Welcome back!" because it implies that the same person is returning. And I know I AM the same person, but things are different and I don't think any of us are able to figure out what whole balance yet. Not this soon after my arrival, and certainly not in the time span of the few hours I spent with people. I think all of these things will become clear with time, and patience, and it'll probably be halfway through next semester when people really start to notice things that are different.

But what that means for right now is that there seems to be this strange wall, this disconnect between me and the world I'm re-entering. I got to see both of my roommates from Ghana (at separate times) while I was in New York, and having breakfast with Madi on Saturday, we both expressed this feeling of being completely unrooted. It's not a constant "I want to go back to Ghana," feeling, we feel that in many ways we can't go back to Ghana, we don't belong there... but we don't belong here, either. We don't belong anywhere. It's losing a sense of home, which is very disconcerting.

But PHTS still completely feels like home.

But also not at all.

It's a strange tremor I'm in.

And I know that I just have to be patient, that eventually I'll come to a feeling that I actually belong EVERYWHERE or something similarly optimistic, but right now is the transition period. I always want to rush through the transition periods because they're awkward and uncomfortable, but they're actually the most important.

I went to see Fela! on Broadway. People have been telling me to see Fela! ever since it was off-Broadway, but I was stupid and didn't. Fela Anikulapo Kuti was a Nigerian musician who invented Afrobeat (along with Tony Allen). Ghana and Nigeria share a lot of cultural history, particularly music, and Fela, pre-Afrobeat, was really into Highlife, a Ghanaian form of popular music (thus, Highlife had a good influence on Afrobeat.) Fela was highly politically active, obnoxious, a jerk, and brilliant. One of my professors this semester worked with Fela on his film Black President, and ended up living with him for an additional month when the Nigerian government seized his passport, so he has plenty of crazy Fela stories. I saw Tony Allen perform about a month ago and it was absolutely incredible. One of my favorite parts of being in Ghana was seeing live music. The atmosphere, the dancing... Ghanaians dance. If the music is good, you dance, no one is left sitting back in their seats. You dance, you banter with the performers, you participate, and the music is fabulous. Really, truly, SO GOOD. (I'm not even going to go into what my synaesthesia does when I listen to Afrobeat except to say that I see no need for me ever to do hallucinogenic drugs when I can just listen to Afrobeat.)

So, naturally, I was excited to see this musical, figuring it'd be a good re-entry coping activity, and curious as to how this atmosphere would adapt to a New York audience. As an added bonus, Fela! was (is) playing in the Eugene O'Neill Theater, which is my most beloved Broadway theater. I had not stepped foot into the Eugene O'Neill since September 3rd, 2006, when Sweeney Todd closed. I know that theater better than any other Broadway house. Even though I think I've seen the same number of performances at the St. James, where the most recent revival of Gypsy played, the Eugene O'Neill was my sanity for a year. For a while, my entire sense of navigation in New York City was based on where the Eugene O'Neill was. (much like my navigation of Boston is still based on where the Colonial Theater is, where Sweeney Todd played on tour.)

I splurged on a good seat for Fela!, knowing the theater well, and knowing that I was going to be obnoxious and decked out in everything I got in West Africa and wanting to be up close. They built a runway jutting off of the stage right side which took out some of the seats. I sat front row, a solo seat right by that runway/the aisle.

(the red box is where I sat for Fela!. the black ones are seats I sat in for Sweeney.)

So I went, and it was incredible. Everything was so familiar. The feel of the room, the fabrics they were wearing, their accents, the little vocal expressions I'd come to love. The snap-handshake. The music, obviously. The colors. All of it. Fela's image was cleaned up a little bit (my professor said, "Oh, everyone loves him now that he's dead and they don't have to deal with him,"). The only thing that was not familiar was the fact that everyone was sitting back in chairs. But, they did have us get up and dance, which I thought was a great solution to the New Yorker problem. I had a good enough idea of Fela's life and career that I was able to anticipate certain things, I knew some information before the musical gave it. (He said, "I have an idea for a film," and I literally whispered, "Black President?!" and then he said, "Black President!" Then I died.) I wore this halter dress I had made in Ghana, and tons of jewelry, and it was warm enough in the theater that it was almost like I was back. There was a brief talkback afterwards that I don't think I was "supposed" to stay for, but no one stopped me. Then I went back to the dorm I was staying in and had a super interesting conversation with my former roommate, Gillian, who had also seen Fela! that night, and clearly had a completely different experience having not been in West Africa listening to Afrobeat for four months.

Last night I sat down with my parents and watched Blood Diamond, which is about Sierra Leone's civil war about 10 years ago. We watched Blood Diamond our first full day in Africa... which is not exactly something I recommend. Sierra Leone is in West Africa, further west of Ghana (from Ghana, you'd have to cross through Cote d'Ivoire then either Liberia or Guinea to get to Sierra Leone). The difference between the first time I saw Blood Diamond, and now, is that now a lot more of that film is familiar, in the way Fela! was. The landscape, the architecture, some of the accents. I was sitting at the lectern in Bon Air at the Christmas Concert on Sunday, shortly after drumming for "Hope for Resolution", which included a South African freedom song from the apartheid era. And all three of these times, at Fela, after Blood Diamond, at the concert, I've thought about Africa and thought, "Wait... I lived there?" I remember landing in Accra for the first time, thinking, "What have I gotten myself into?" Now I'm here thinking, "What did I just do?" And, "Am I now expected to return to my former life like this didn't happen?" The answer is no, of course not, but how do I reconcile that with this?

How do you cope when the familiar is strange?

I light a candle that I got at Chartres and stare at it for hours and try to be patient.

I'm glad I didn't give myself a lot of recovery time. I glad I went up to New York, saw everyone, became even more confused. Now it's time for some rest. Some time to think, get myself somewhat together. I have a meeting with a mentor of mine who also just spent his semester in a developing country on the 10th, so that'll be another good check-in point on the re-entry process. I'm lining up more meetings with directors. Constructing a life again.

We'll see.