Lydia’s Blog

A couple of weeks ago, as I was meandering toward the opera’s cafeteria, I noticed a couple of cool colleagues from the props department in a large storage room that’s usually bolted shut. The room was well on its way to claiming empty status. The two guys, Ralf and Martin appeared to be clearing it out.

Why not? I thought.

“Hey guys, what are you up to?” I chirped. Ralf, the head of the props department (who sounds uncannily female on the phone, to the extreme embarassment of many a colleague, me included) informed me that they were emptying out the in-house props storage, to make room for an additional costume vault.

“Seriously? You mean you’re throwing everything out?” My interior-decor bone suddenly sprang to full-blooded erection. “Everything?”

The best thing about being tight with the folks in costumes, props, tech, and all other varieties of backstage concentrations (besides the fact that these people tend to be much more generally palatable than most other colleagues), is the little prezzies that one can scavenge with some charm and a bit of luck.

This is especially true for someone like me, whose design sense tends toward the “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” end of the spectrum.

I told Ralf not to move another object until I had a chance to come back with some form of transport.

And so I called Daniel. My boyfriend Daniel has, among other valuable qualities, a car…and a spartan preference for minimalism. Until now, he’s been remarkably patient to live within the tangle of Catholic kitsch, mannequin bits, French postcards and antique medical diagrams that constitutes my apartment in Stuttgart.

“Can you please bring your car around later this afternoon? The props department are clearing out their storage rooms and I NEED to get on it.”

There was only silence at the end of the line. “But Lydia, you’ve already got SO much…”

I might have blacked out from disappointed annoyance at that moment…because the next thing I remember is whimpering like a dog into the reciever while he groaned “JESUS. Ugh. Fine, just cut that out. I’ll see you at five.”

Me, Martin and a stone-faced Daniel arrived in props storage later on with a small garbage bag. We would leave about an hour later with a shipping crate. Two busts, one plaster and one bronze, three sets of mounted stag horns, four enormous medical diagrams (one of a horse) and several other delicious effects. At Daniel’s calm, pained insistence, I forewent the toy tanks and oversized greek masks…as well as a waist-high bust of Apollo.

“Nugget, are you okay?” I asked.

“Stuff.” He said dully, fearfully eyeballing the remaining shelves which I’d not yet attacked.

Later, after he’d driven off with my swag, I got to thinking about why I’ve become so militant about such artefacts, which range from the valuable and rare to the cheap and absurd.

I think it’s this: I have no real home. The apartments I live in are rented furnished, for short periods of time, and I move with a station wagon full of boxes, rather than a truck full of sofas, tables and wardrobes. Every second I’m alive, I’m reminded of the temporary nature of my practical life. These bits and pieces amount to the sum of my experiences for the last several years, and their stories are important to me…and are also in many ways much more interesting than the reality I’m living at the moment.

There’s the eight French postcards (basically softcore porn from about 1910) I bought in Amalfi, the two latex headpieces from the tours of “Plays for the Poor Theatre” in Dublin, New York and Berlin. The cigarette poster from Hong Kong. The crude painting on a scrap bit of 2 x 4 I bought from a homeless guy near the Empire State Building. The blinking “God Bless our Home” Jesus and Mary given to me by a dear friend in London, the cheap mini-icons I bought in Vatican City. The head of a 1950’s child mannequin at Karstadt. The CAT scan images from my bike accident in Berlin five years ago. The “The Enemy is Syphilis” lunch box…

Anyway, my props storage swag sat in Daniel’s car until just yesterday, when we had to clear it out in preparation for a visit from his grandmother, mother and her boyfriend.

While he went to gather his family from the train station, I went to work on the plaster bust. I slapped some hot red lipstick on him and topped him off with a lovely pink wig. Then, I placed him high atop a rented bookshelf, next to the red foam head which supports the antique bonnet I ganked from an indie film-set in Berlin a while back.

He’s absolutely delicious. I don’t know what I’d do without him.

Or the rest of it.

There are plenty of you (okay, well like three) who have been asking why I’ve not been writing the last few months. The answer is this:

I was sort of waiting until I had something witty, appropriately trivial and charmingly self-depricating to expostulate upon. In other words, I was hoping that this pesky cloud of cursed fate-splattered self-loathing would dissipate for long enough for me to write something, well, characteristically cute.

Seeing as that prospect doesn’t even qualify as a speck on the horizon at this point, I’ll just throw something together. Hope it doesn’t spoil any well-deserved office procrastination time you’ve chosen to devote to the Kittensnake.

My favorite tortured decision of the last few years of my adult life has defiantly refused to resolve itself in my frequently alcohol-soaked brain. Should I leave Berlin for Stuttgart?

Well. The decision was made. I now fear that it wasn’t the stifling hierarchy at the Komische Oper that was sucking my will to live…rather…it was assistant directing in general. House assisting, to be specific.

Here they’re called Festregieassistenten. In England they’re called staff directors. In the U.S., they’re called staff ADs. Here is the fun little life paradox endemic in all three forms: When you’re contractually bound to an opera house (and that seal is pretty air-tight), you will invariable receive all forms of offers for really well-paid freelance work elsewhere…all of which you’ll be forced, kicking and screaming, to turn down in favor of the gray, thankless labor expected of your contractual obligation.

The other side of the coin, from what I’ve gathered from some friends who decided to avoid contract-renewal, is that once you’re free of a “fest” (firm) contract, guest work becomes as scarce as heterosexual men at a midnight screening of “Dreamgirls”.

Why bother with a house contract then? Well. Good question. We idealistic jackasses are somehow lead to believe that this particualr form of white slavery will put us in a better position to begin directing our own mainstage work…that we’ll earn, from our blood, sweat and tears, the respect of those in positions of power…so as to eventually make that fairy tale jump from assistant director to just “director”.

Lies, people. All lies.

Sure there are seductive moments. Remounting a show is like a hard narcotic…making you high on responsibility and (loosely interpreted) power…so much that you forget that this particular baby, no matter how cute and roly-poly it is…actually belongs to someone else.

I am actually in the unfortunate postion of having directed quite a bit on my own. University stuff. Offity-off stuff (that was fucking dope and toured the U.S., Europe and Asia, I’ll have you know…) and chamber-mainstage stuff. I am significantly worse off that most in my caste…those that are still waiting for their first shot. I know what it feels like, and oh baby, do I remember…

So here I sit, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to stage two brand-new casts into a questionable production of a certain monster Verdi tragedy I’ve learned from a video, a few reviews and an interview, in three spottily attended weeks with only one chorus rehearsal and no final run-through.

Stuttgart, Berlin, Rovno Gubernya. It’s all the same. I guess in the end my decision didn’t really matter.

The problem for me, I guess, is that I still believe in opera. I still love it more than anything. I still believe it can move and change people when it’s used in the correct way. It’s formal powers are nearly limitless. However, in all these hours of list-writing, rehearsal-plan wrangling, glazed-eyed video parroting and general asshole-licking, I can sense my own wonder and innocence in this entire world drying out and crumbling. The bottom line is this. If I didn’t love opera so much, I’d be a much better assistant. As it is, at best, this is basically a state of suspended animation. Every time I fabricate a smile or nod for some dramaturg’s robotic justification for idiocy…I feel the foundation of my entire personality strain to the point of cracking. Every time some talent-impaired yet up-and-coming young director asks me how I managed to sit out a performance in the Artistic Director’s box wearing a bandana on my head…

Well, I just feel like ditching this shit and going to law school.

Paying one’s dues is a normal part of professional life, one tells oneself constantly. Still, if paying one’s dues becomes tantamount to auto-amputation…can it really be worth it? Can it?

The administration floor in Germany is called the Verwaltungsetage. Verwaltung means administration. One of my charming yet mortifying German mistakes is mixing up the word Verwaltung with Vergewaltigung…which means rape. I’ve been corrected for slipping and saying “Vergewaltigungetage”.

The rape floor. In some existential sense, maybe it’s not really a mistake.

And the melodrama draws to its close. Lydia goes to bed. And goes to work in the morning.

With a smile, however frozen, on her face.