i was just ordering office supplies on staples.com for our new hire starting on monday and typed in the word 'pens' and had a horrible flashback.
during the summer of 1994 i spent six weeks at Carnegie-Mellon University as a student in their pre-college theatre program. it was a crazy, educational and totally fun experience—and my roommate became one of my favorite and undoubtedly forever friends—but there was one part of the whole shebang that might have scarred me.
there was some class or workshop—i think it was playwriting—in which we cast fellow students in our own short plays. i was cast in one called "PENS!" if you read that too quickly and thought it was actually part of the male anatomy, you have the right idea.
this is what i remember: a guy named Stephen Kaplan wrote it. i think he played the male character and i played the female character. i don't recall the plot at all. i do know i had to be on stage in a black slip and i had to bite and suck on a pen—"seductively"—and lay across and writhe around on a desk.
the details are hazy, i'm sure because i blocked it from my memory.
i was sixteen years old. i hadn't even made out with a guy yet. (late bloomer.) i had no idea how to be sexy, what the play was really about, or what the hell i was doing. i think Stephen was a fairly talented writer, but his puns and satire and double entendres were completely lost on me. i was about as innocent as they come, a hayseed of a girl in a hard core theatre program with kids from New York and Boston and L.A.
awww.
anyway, i nearly shuddered when i wrote "pens" earlier and had that flashback. amazing the things that stay with you and still, sixteen years later, conjure up the same acute embarrassment and helplessness as if they just happened yesterday.
mbm
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