Have just emerged from indulging in a lengthy tangent over at http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/; that'll teach me to follow innocent-looking links on facebook...
In college I acted in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. The director asked each of us to bring in a photo of our mothers (there were seven of us I think), and used them for the play's poster; seven different variations. I remember we laid all the posters out, laughing as we tried to match mother to daughter. (One was super-easy: this Bond-style woman elegantly draped along the bonnet of a vintage porsche. I turned to the Bond-style elegant young woman beside me... "Yours, I presume?")
The photo I brought in was one of my favourites of Mom - her in London, in her mid-20s I guess. She's sitting at a bus-stop, flooded in sunshine, and she's wearing a neat little top and a full skirt that you know must swoosh as she sashays along the street. She's looking straight at the camera, head tilted, smiling. And the bus-stop poster behind her proclaims: Anything. Anywhere. Anytime.
It's just a great, sassy moment.
Anyhoo, my point is, after hours of reading Rilke poems this morning, this one - about clothing seeming 'right' - reminded me of that photograph.
Child In Red
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes she walks through the village in her
little red dress
all absorbed in restraining herself,
and yet, despite herself, she seems to move
according to the rhythm of her life to come.
She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,
half-turns around...
and, all while dreaming, shakes her head
for or against.
Then she dances a few steps
that she invents and forgets,
no doubt finding out that life
moves on too fast.
It's not so much that she steps out
of the small body enclosing her,
but that all she carries in herself
frolics and ferments.
It's this dress that she'll remember
later in a sweet surrender;
when her whole life is full of risks,
the little red dress will always seem right.
___
"...all she carries in herself frolics and ferments..." - what a line. Have a great weekend :-)
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2 comments:
So , you HAVE acted before ;-)
Well it wasn't exactly a state secret...
I had precisely one line in our school production of 'Annie Get Your Gun'. In college I was involved in Players for a few years; sometimes I had waaaay more than one line :-)
And I gotta say, it's lovely to be acting again.
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