My daughter is getting her college degree in acting in New York City, and it fills me with endless delight to hear about her curriculum.
“How was school today?”
“It was great! We went to the Central Park Zoo.”
“The zoo? Why?”
“To pick out an animal.”
“To pick out an animal? For what? To take home as a pet?” (Now I’m imagining her riding home on a baby elephant with a snow monkey on her shoulder.)
“Mom, no, we have to pick out an animal for our midterm and then create a character based on it. I picked a snow leopard.”
“Oooooh I love snow leopards.”
She ended up creating “Sasha,” and borrowed my white fluffy snow hat to wear to class. She had to make an old-school poster with printed pictures and a glue stick, with aspects of glamorous jewel-loving Sasha covering it. She wore her furry hat, spoke with an accent, and carried a long cigarette (also borrowed from me) for her presentation.
For sophomore year, they kicked this assignment up a notch by assigning students to pick yet another animal, then walk around the classroom as the chosen creature. She told me about her friend who became a peacock, then was assigned to take those characteristics into playing a scene as a passionate Audubon Society birdwatcher. She doubled over in laughter telling me it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen to observe this kid sauntering around the room speaking in a “peacock scream” voice with peacock mannerisms while pretending to watch birds.
(I’m starting to think these teachers might be geniuses–how many jobs exist in the world where you get to spend your time wildly entertained by your student’s antics?)
I asked Annabelle what animal she was, and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Bunny,” as if I should know that was the obvious choice.
“This kind of bunny?” I asked, making bunny ears with my hands and wiggling my nose.
She rolled her eyes. “No! This kind.” She promptly dropped to the floor and proceeded to hop quickly around the living room on her hands and feet, as Henry, Sam, and I watched. She yelled in a voice strained from hopping in an upside down position: “My teacher said I need to kick my back legs higher.” She demonstrated kicking her back legs higher and made another hop around the room.
I tried to suppress my laughter. “What? Your teacher criticized your hop?”
“Yup,” Annabelle said, kicking her legs even higher.
She popped up, brushed her hands off on her pants and said, “What’s for dinner?”
Now I’m starting to think we are spending too much on tuition.
Over a game of Boggle at the dining room table, her friends talked about their tough week of finals last semester, with tests in statistics, calculus, chemistry.
Annabelle shrugged. “I had to be air.”
“What do you mean you had to be air?” I ask.
“I had to be air. It wasn’t easy Mom. You try being air.”
Weirdly enough, I actually am well-acquainted with the feeling of being the thing everyone needs to survive while simultaneously being invisible.
“It’s actually hard.” She demonstrated being “air” by holding her arms out to the side, puffing her cheeks, undulating her body, then swooshing around the room.
This is what I pay $70,000 a year for.
A while back, I was baking muffins while talking on the phone to my sister, and we were discussing how our college kids were doing. She told me how much her daughter loves running track at UT San Antonio and her son loves playing football at UNC-Charlotte.
I told her how much Annabelle loves her history class as the students attend class as a character from U.S. history. My sister and I began to discuss who Annabelle might pick. I mean, women are barely mentioned in U.S. History classes, which has always made me mad. Even in high school, I combed my school library, looking for books on women in history and wondering why we were only taught about men. I asked my teacher why we never learned about women and he just stared at me.
Back to my sister.
“I mean, who could Annabelle be?” I asked. “Abigail Adams? She’d actually make a great Abigail Adams with her sense of justice, but she’s a little young to have six children. Who else is there? Betsy Ross? I do not want her being Betsy Ross! What’s she going to do? Sit in a chair sewing?”
Granted, I was getting unreasonably worked up about Betsy Ross, but I can always depend on my sister to join my irrational outrage.
“No! Not Betsy Ross! She’s a b****!”
“She is! What would Annabelle do? Attend class wearing little round glasses, a bonnet, and sit there quietly sewing with her hook nose? That is not what I want for my child!”
“ANYONE BUT THAT F******** BETSY ROSS!” my sister yelled and we both couldn’t form words anymore because we were laughing too hard.
(And before I get canceled for trash-talking Betsy Ross, I actually have no idea what she looked like or what else she did besides sew the first flag.)
I will be the first to say I have my own issues with bonnet-wearing-quietly-sewing images of women as I was raised mormon and that was a frequent image held up as aspirational–except it was the opposite of aspirational to me–it was: “I’m running the other direction and becoming the town scandal followed by a career as a belly dancer.”
In other words, I WILL NEVER WEAR A BONNET AND SEW!
Funnily enough, Annabelle loves bonnets. I used to glimpse her running around the yard in a long white nightgown and bonnet, a basket in her hand, gathering eggs she had previously taken from the refrigerator and planted in the grass just for this purpose.
After history class the other day, I asked her how class went.
“It was really fun, everyone was cheering.”
“Why?”
“Well, it was the revolution, and we won.”
I imagined a class full of students cheering their win against the British. Did they clink glasses of cider?
My son, who wants to be a firefighter, is so intrigued by his sister’s college experience he said, “If I didn’t have to perform, I would major in acting. Annabelle’s classes sound dope.”
They do, indeed, sound dope.
On her last night at home over the holiday last weekend, I drove her to the little train station down the street to meet her boyfriend for a Celtics game. The train was late, so we sat in the car, and waited, watching the lights of the town turn on, the sky turning shades of ethereal blue as the night descended, stars appearing one-by-one. We watched people moving about the windows, of the historical house across from us. They were drinking out of champagne glasses, talking, lowering shades. All of a sudden, a bunny hopped out from under a bush, its whiskers bouncing, its ears flopping.
“Annabelle! Look! A bunny. Go show him how a true hop is done.”
“I will show him how a true hop is done!” she answered, but she didn’t move, she stayed right next to me.
We watched it dart back and forth, eating grass.
I whispered, even though we were in the car and the rabbit wouldn’t have heard us, “Please note that it is NOT kicking its back legs in the air when it hops. They are low. Your teacher was incorrect.”
“Mom, I was a different kind of bunny.”
“A high-kicking bunny? A Rockette bunny?”
“Exactly.” She laughed.
We heard the rumble of the train in the distance and the lights started to flash. She squeezed my hand. “I love you Mom.” She hopped out of the car, as a human, not a rabbit, and scurried to the platform.
I watched her disappear inside the train and felt that old mom-heart-squeeze, the one that wants her to soar but also wants her to stay right next to me forever.
I don’t care if she wants to be an astronaut, a supreme court justice, a snow leopard or a high-kicking rabbit. I just want her to be happy, the kind of happy that only comes with “To thine own self be true,” the kind of happy that allows her to dive deep, fly high, and stay grounded, all at the same time; the kind of happy that feels like lights turning on at twilight, and knowing your mom will always leave the light on for you to find your way home, one step, or bunny hop, at a time.
