supplicium post mortem

My childhood tgi fantasies tended to revolve around hostile authorities, which is why I liked The Orphanage so much. The orphanage in my mind evolved out of my infatuations with Annie (as experienced in the Broadway musical), Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child, Oliver Twist, Daddy Long Legs, A Little Princess, plus any other orphanage I could find in the pages of literature.

A notable exception was Mandy, by Julie Edwards (Julie Andrews). Mandy imprisoned my imagination and my heart, but on some level made me uneasy, perhaps because it was in fact closer to me than the hostile authority orphanage. Mandy is about an orphan (named Mandy!) who has lived her whole life in a small, kind, homey orphanage. She’s allowed freedoms, has friends, and is beloved by the orphanage matron. But, she longs irrationally for something else. She climbs over the orphanage wall, finds a cottage in the woods, and secretly begins fixing it up. Long story short, in a moment of crisis, she is rescued by the landowner on whose property the cottage stands (a man on a horse, no less) and taken to recover at his big house. The man and his wife (?) fall for her. Then she gets better and goes back to the orphanage. Except now, even though she’s back with her friends and people who love her, she misses the man and his wife. It’s enormously conflicted and sad. Eventually, they adopt her. Mandy pressed somehow on a loneliness I felt as a child, even though I was growing up within a loving, caring family. In many ways, I was unable to deal with this feeling. The hostile orphanage was easier.

My orphanage (which I imagined most nights while falling asleep, which I attempted to draw in my notebooks) was called St. Peter’s. It was a special admissions type place. I (my character, whose name varied) was brought there one dark, rainy night by a priest of slight acquaintance. My mother had been an actress (the real kind, not an “actress”) but had died and left me alone, à la Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. This priest had presided over the funeral and out of pity brought me to St. Peter’s, knowing of its sterling reputation. I was about nine.

This orphanage was run by a grossly exaggerated and fictionalized version of Mrs. R, my children’s theater director, with the other children as avatars of my children’s theater friends. And in fact the children at this orphanage were chosen for their talents, and Matron made money taking us around and having us perform for people. So, even though we lived a horrible, hard life and had to scrub floors and do every kind of difficult chore and were subject to the meanest discipline, after dinner every night we were sent to the dining room and told to get on with our rehearsals. We kids organized our own shows and practiced them together. Sure, there might be rivalries amongst us, but we were absolutely united against the orphanage authorities: Matron; her scary (and retarded) brother, Jack; and the other people in her employ, who could also punish us as they chose.

There was of course a Bench at the orphanage, but you could be whacked at any time for any reason. We comforted each other in our misery and always—always—had our minds on the future when we would Run Away. Of course we would fail many times, and be severely punished for our efforts, but one day, my cadre and I would make it. We would escape, and after a period of thrilling, Faginesque adventures in The City (which would naturally include theatricals), I would happen upon the Perfect People, who would adopt me.

The promise of the Perfect People was essential, but my fantasies rarely left the orphanage. Something about the harshness and despair, coupled with the camaraderie and resistance comforted me. The dynamic with authority was important. You couldn’t win against Matron, not openly, so your only option was to resist her internally, to obey her, but not in your heart, to pretend compliance while secretly plotting your escape. The hostile authority was intoxicating for a Good Girl like me, naturally. As a Good Girl, I depended slavishly on the good opinion of the authority, unless of course the authority was a Bad Authority. Then, I could resist it, disobey it, undermine it, hate it. No wonder the orphanage was like crack to me. There I could transgress, break bounds, get into trouble and still be heroic and good. There, punishment was a badge of nobility. The heroine always suffered punishment, and yet she was always good. Win, win and win!

Perhaps you are feeling like you might be sick now. I am, too. But the interesting point is what happened once I actually began to play at age 26.

When I first started to play, APD, I wanted to be in the English school world. It was a nice blend of hostile, but not fully hostile authority. I would call it detached authority. Ideally, they were fair and not abusive, but stoicism was certainly called for. I enjoyed exploring the extent of my stoicism, and I felt a particular buzz because I had, for so much of my life, been so very fearful, particularly of physical challenges.

But—but. M’s instinct with Casey tended towards the domestic, and towards the firm and compassionate end of semi-con play. We imagined the orphanage together, but we never played it, at least not with me as the bottom. Actually, we played Casey at the Perfect People once or twice, and that “Casey” turned out not to be much fun; she was so traumatized, she scarcely spoke. She wasn’t very robust. So, whether through observation or instinct, M realized, I think, that although I had come out of the orphanage, it would not be a good place for me to visit, now.

We did one scene early in our relationship with him as a hostile top. It taught us a lot, not least because it was such a disaster. But that is another story…

When you live like a hermit as I do, you occasionally fall into correspondences. Since I met M via just such a correspondence, I’m always hopeful that one of them might prove interesting long term.  Today while slogging through the woods in the snow, dogs in tow, I recalled an autobiographical essay I sent to a correspondent earlier this year. It struck me, particularly in light of Emma Jane’s Christmas present, as suitable subject for a post. So, slightly adapted, here it is. I don’t think the correspondent in question actually read the whole thing in the first place, and who can blame them, it being rather long. Note to self not to overwhelm skittish correspondents with lengthy self-revelation.

In previous exegeses I have written about the growth of my tgi imagination from its unlikely beginnings in the Waspy, industrial Midwest. Besides sharing photos of my dolls, I haven’t written much about the girl I was before adolescence, a girl who bears slight relation to casey, but is far more anxious and goodie-goodie. This is her story, my story:

Despite  feeling very peculiar when reading or watching stories about tgi, I was terrified of and squicked by the reality. Part of this was a negative response to having received it in the way that I did (more on which another time). Part of it, though, has to be the gargantuan dependence on the idea of myself as a Good Girl (read: compliant, accommodating, approval-worthy, Nice). I’ve met several people into tgi who have said they didn’t misbehave while growing up. Neither did I. My parents employed a bit of light hand spanking with my brother and me for what I think of as “getting out of hand” moments. Never were there rules understood in advance, broken deliberately, and punished. The idea of deliberate punishment (whether physical or not) was enough to send me into a meltdown–because being punished would have meant that I was Bad, not Good, not me, and not lovable. I was anxious enough with my parents’ un-articulated boundaries. I was addicted at a young age to the crack of their approval. I lived in fear of losing it.

When I was six, just after joining children’s theater, I went to try outs for The Three Little Pigs. The deal at children’s theater was that our director, Mrs. R, would try a bunch of people in a bunch of roles, and you could say what your preferences were, but you had to accept whatever role you were ultimately given, with good grace. Be a Trouper. She had me try out for all the pigs and even the wolf. I was burning with shame and anxiety because I was terrified of being cast as the wolf. That would mean I was Bad. I knew I wasn’t my character, but I was young enough that I felt that their…moral state?…connected itself to me, that people would judge me as they judged the character. If I was forced to play the Big Bad Wolf, then I might not only be Bad, but it would mean I was the kind of girl who deserved to be punished, maybe even spanked! Even the first or second pigs caused me anxiety; they, too, were Bad because they lazily built their houses of inferior material. They deserved their tragedies, and worse. The third pig was the only role that would allow me to sleep at night. By massive luck, or by type casting, I got the third pig. You really cannot imagine my relief.

A little later, I was cast as a village girl in a play called The Little Juggler. It was only my third or fourth show, and I had only a few lines. We village children were mean and bratty and teased the vegetable sellers and little juggler boy. Mrs. R came up with a bit where the vegetable seller gave me a swat with a carrot after a snarky comment my character made. I froze with embarrassment, shame, confusion, horror. I almost cried during rehearsal. I was sick to my stomach for days over it and eventually was forced, through sheer desperation, to assert myself enough to talk another girl into trading lines with me. I couldn’t explain why, just that I really really really wanted to trade lines. She agreed. Later Mrs. R asked what had happened with the lines. I think I blushed beet red and near-tears blurted that we had just wanted to swap lines. She let it go, though I’d no idea why. As an adult, I now suspect she recognized one of those awkward and inexplicable childhood embarrassments, and had mercy on me.

So, spanking as a real life topic was not the slightest bit funny for me. Everyone I knew got it growing up. It was a standard punishment along with grounding and having your allowance taken away. At school there were playground games that included the “rickets” or the “spanking machine”, i.e. having to crawl through the legs of your playmates and be swatted by them as you passed. Other kids found this raucous fun. When in 3rd grade [age 8] we had “moving up day” and visited the big 4th grade classes, they played a ball game called SPUD at recess. When you lost a round, you got an S, then a P, etc. If you got up to SPUD, you had to go through the spanking machine. I felt sick to my stomach and insisted on watching only. It made me so very frightened of 4th grade.

When you misbehaved at my school, you got Sent To The Bench (which Mark hijacked in the first story he wrote for me, The Benefit of the Doubt). The Bench was a pew-like bench outside the Assistant Headmaster’s office, just inside the main entryway. Everyone could see you there. Astoundingly (or depressingly) I was never sent to the bench in all my time there, surely one of the few if only students for whom this was true. In reality, you got told off, or in middle school got a detention with the telling off. Before middle school, I had the idea that you might get spanked. Some other kids wound me up (or fanned the flames of rumor) by telling me they heard that was true. (Reality: not!)

Perhaps you are beginning to understand the little nervous wreck I was underneath that perky, A-student, nice girl in the Lilly Pultizer dresses and school uniform? She’s still here a little bit, but M (and RP) effected a lot of rehabilitation over the years (for instance, RP’s institution of Casey’s four rules).

I wore underpants at all times except when in bath or swimming costume, another habit that was whacked out of me (Casey) by RP, who forbade it under nightwear as unhygienic and perversely over-modest.

Once when I was 8 or 9, I asked my dad if French kissing was dirty. I asked it rather boldly, expecting him to 1) be impressed that I’d talk about French kissing and 2) say Right you are, it sure is. He looked at me for a second, probably surprised, and said: Of course not. It’s wonderful. I didn’t really believe him, and on some semi-conscious level thought he was giving me a party line.

I felt enormously conflicted and peculiar when my mom would read me a book called The Lonely Doll [discussed by EJ and earlier by Adele] which featured a father teddy bear taking his son across his knee, as well as  his quasi-ward, the lonely doll. It’s a terrifically twisted book–I mean, teddy bears spanking dolls?–but then a good deal of my tgi play involved my dolls spanking each other. See, I never spanked them because that would be Mean, and I wasn’t Mean, I was Nice! However, they were not all nice, and some of them were quite strict school teachers or even orphanage matrons/masters, so I was able to identify with some of my poor Holly Hobbie dolls who suffered under such wonderfully mean grown-ups. The Lonely Doll might actually be a bit of a metaphor for meeting M (if you overlook the nauseating layers of twee). Whatever her name was, this doll lived alone. Then Mr. Bear and his son came along, and she had friends. But then she and bear jr. let their hair down and played a little wild and made a mess; and Mr. Bear spanked them! She was so upset because she was sure they would leave her (because she was Bad! Not lovable!), but actually they stayed. And she wasn’t lonely, and Mr. Bear presumably dealt matter-of-factly with her and bear jr. when they misbehaved as they should like little animals exploring a wide world.

I say there is not much of this girl left in me. I say she bears only slight resemblance to casey. Is it true, though? Casey might be more willing to be naughty. She might not shatter under the shame of being punished. But she is still a recovering good girl. She is, I am. There is still work, we think, for someone to do.

Kids!  Writing from a public pc at the Shepperton Public Library. Gives new appreciation for NSFW, ha ha. I don’t really dare to twitter lest I scare off the OAPs hunt-and-pecking next to me. I apparently have 45 minutes left. There are many good things about Englandland, but first gripes:

1. The internets are locked up over here. I found one cafe near Covent Garden with free wifi, but nothing else. Here in the suburbs, they look at you like you’re speaking Greek when you ask about it. When you open up your laptop somewhere to see if you can mooch off anyone’s wifi, you find that everyone has wireless, but it’s all locked up. This would surely be so that your neighbor in Surrey doesn’t…hack into your pc? It’s just not like this where I come from, even in rural US. So I’ve had interwebs withdrawal.
2. This keyboard has a foreign layout, starting with the @ key which is not above the 3. Slows typing down, reducing efficiency of 60 minutes pre-booked (yesterday) free library time.

OK, some good things about Englandland:

1. Gardens. Everyone has beautiful front gardens, even on the most unprepossessing street. It smells like roses here.
2. Footpaths. We just don’t have this in the US, the ability to walk freely through countryside. Like UK internets, a lot of land in the US is locked up under private ownership. Here you can be right by a motorway, even hearing it, and still be walking down a tree-covered footpath, smelling nature. I miss my dogs!
3. Jam donuts. Even gourmet expat places in the US don’t do them like Englandland, and certainly not as simply, ubiquitously, and economically.
4. LUSH. Less expensive than home, and newer products we don’t have.
5. Roundabouts. Why don’t we have more of these at home instead of the awful blight of stop signs and unnecessary traffic lights? Traffic just flows better with them.
6. M&S sandwich container design – you zip it open and it lies flat like a little tray.
7. Theater ticket prices. I saw Oliver with Rowan Atkinson on Wednesday. Cast of hundreds. Fun. I’m glad I saw him do the role, but to be honest, I was slightly bored by his shtick in places.

the local pub

In other news, I’m driving on the left & shifting with my left hand, successfully so far. Yesterday I had a terrific time walking around Windsor & Eton with @adelehaze. Tonight, off to Somerset for a family weekend, which will hopefully not be too suffocating & hopefully include some walking in Dartmoor.

Because I managed to get this library slot, I posted wildcards for Flash Fiction Friday. Sorry I didn’t get to take words from other people this week – not possible logistically. I’m going to try to post my entry from my mother-in-law’s dialup, if it still works.

I’m trying to find things to enjoy here, and I did enjoy my afternoon in Windsor yesterday. Otherwise, though, I have been disappointed to discover that the world over here is just as empty as the world at home. And, amazingly, M is not here. He wasn’t waiting for me at the airport. He wasn’t that guy who looked like him from behind on the Hungerford Footbridge. And I don’t think he’s going to be waiting for me at his mother’s house.

Seeing Oliver was the kind of thing he would have taken casey to do. During other trips (and sometimes for other trips), he took casey to the revival of Another Country, His Dark Materials (all one day), and The Secret Garden. So, even though we had no appetite for anything (including breakfast, which literally was like dust – those psalm writers knew what they were saying), TL went and bought tickets (in the center, row E) so casey could see everything up close like she likes to. Also, this was a nostalgic experience since I’ve been in the show four times in my life, plus my first novel featured it heavily. To me it represents the joy of children’s theater, pure playing, and (since my first boyfriend played Oliver) the pure niceness & excitement of first romantic affections. So when the overture started, I teared up. However, I got over this and enjoyed the first half.

At the interval in England, people come into the auditorium and sell you little ice-creams. So we queued up and bought casey an ice-cream because that is what you do in England, and it’s what RP always did. She didn’t feel like it, but we got it anyway, not even begrudging the £3.20 price, because RP always bought it for her, and we thought she should have it.

So there we were, in the middle of a crowded, lit matinee auditorium, eating vanilla ice-cream with the little plastic spoon, and casey was so in (where are the quotation marks on this keyboard?), meaning so fully present in me, and it was like RP really had bought her the ice-cream, except he hadn’t, or had he, from the grave? We’d bought it with the £5 note that was in his wallet when he died. And then she/I/we… my hands were trembling like they did the day he died, and I felt nauseous, and tears were streaming down my face though I was trying as hard as possible not to break into full-scale sobbing in public. Casey couldn’t finish the ice-cream. We threw half of it away. People sort of understand grief, I think, but I’m not sure how many people can grasp having an attack of grief through different parts of your personality.

After the show, we roamed around London for a long time, and eventually made it back to the footbridge by the Embankment. Walking down that big street that leads to it, mostly empty, we had to sit down on a bench and sob – because the world here, the world everywhere, was empty without him. Other people seemed perfectly able to enjoy it, but I just couldn’t. Can’t. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy says (melodramatically) that without Heathcliff, the universe would be a mighty stranger. With me, it’s the other way around: I’m the one who has become the mighty stranger.

Still – unfortunately – we breathe in and out.

And still – fortunately – England is beautiful and full of roses in June, daylight lasts until past 10pm, there are good and nice people into tgi here and elsewhere, and jam donuts can be bought in the shops. So…

I was looking through the archives, as you do when you wish there was something new to read, and I thought it was probably time to re-post this story. It is the first tgi story I ever wrote, penned before I met M, and before I had ever played. Thus, although I had done plenty of scenes in the theater, I had never done a scene like this, and never felt a whack since childhood. Even though this story is overwritten and naive in many ways, I like it as a portrait of who I was in the summer of 1995, weeks before I met the man who would become my husband. It has all the markers of a new-at-this 26-year-old: the over-intellectualization, the bravado, the over-estimation of how much it might hurt, etc.

Some bio for those who like that kind of thing: I did do summer stock in Boston, and during college I had a roommate with a wild sex life and a predilection for TMI (which at the time I wistfully considered liberated). Andrew is loosely based on a guy I knew in college, but we never roomed together and nothing ever happened between us. In fact, once, just before he graduated, he asked if he could kiss me. I froze in terror because I had never actually kissed anyone [can you believe it??]. “Er, I don’t really do kisses,” I lamely said. He accepted this, sadly. He probably went away thinking I hated him or was a lesbian. LOL! Poor guy!

When I first started emailing with M, there was such an instant connection that I thought we already knew each other. I accused him of being the guy who had inspired Andrew. Not true, of course. But in role-play he wound up sounding a lot like Andrew sounds here.

I started acting at the age of six. I did a lot of directing in college. The acting stuff here is all taken from experience. It was one of the ways I was able to get my head around role-play then, and in retrospect, I find it still true, maybe more true than I knew when I wrote this piece.

A last remark – it’s odd for me to read this story and see “Casey” as this adult character, basically me with a pseudonym, whereas for most of her existence, Casey has been a kid. I suppose that’s because when I wrote this story, she was still evolving.

Equity Day Off

© Casey Morgan 1995

1.

It was ten o’clock at night in early June and the air felt like breath for the first time that year. When you went outside and walked around, it smelled like Florida. I had spent my first Equity day-off getting high with my roommate Judy. We took blankets out to Walden Pond and lay around in the sun from about ten a.m. until three thirty, at which time Judy had gone home and packed for her great-aunt’s funeral. I’d smoked pot before but never got high until that day. I’m not generally into drugs. Maybe I’m a goodie-goodie, but I was always afraid they’d fry my brain cells or make me do something I regret. On this occasion, though, Judy talked me into it.

“You can’t expect me to spend two days in Fairfield County Connecticut and not get stoned first,” she told me. I agreed because I knew going home was horrible for her. Though there might have been something else working in the decision. It was the first summer I’d had an apartment (albeit with my college roommate and her cousin). We were all part of a summer stock company. Judy was the designer, I was a director, and our third roommate, Andrew, was one of the actors. My play was up first, and after a week of eight-hour rehearsals I could barely think. Still, the legitimacy, the sense of adulthood intoxicated me. Maybe that’s why I agreed to get high. I don’t know. The point is I had.

And I was regretting it by ten o’clock. After Walden Pond, I’d gone to Quincy Market and gorged on chocolate ice-cream smush-ins. By the time the pot wore off, my stomach ache had set in. When I got home, Judy had left, and Andrew was nowhere to be found, so I crashed on the couch. When I awoke, I remembered what I’d done. That was when my stomach really started to hurt. I thought the best remedy would be work, so I sat down at my desk and got out my script. The play was Cloud 9, and I had to finish blocking the first act the next day. The harder I concentrated, though, the more I heard in my head awful snatches of my conversation with Judy.

“How was it seeing Klaus again?” I had asked her. Her German boyfriend had just arrived in Boston for a three-week visit, and I knew she’d missed him.

“It was…different,” she said.

“Different?”

“Fantastic, but different.” She took another drag on the joint, and so did I.

“What do you mean?” Judy usually took no prompting to go into the most intimate details of her sex life. She simply refused to be ashamed of anything she did. I admired this and hoped I might someday become as liberated as she was. Today, though, she turned over onto her stomach and squinted at me, as if I’d irritated her.

“You’re a real piece of work,” she told me. “You’ve been listening to me tell about my lovers for two years and you’ve never once told anything in return.”

“There’s nothing to tell. You heard all about my aborted kiss with Justin.” My virginity and pathetic lack of experience was something Judy accepted, even if she did vigorously encourage me to Go For It.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “There’s always something to tell. You must have fantasies.”

“I dream about making out with Hugh Grant, if that’s what you mean.”

“That is not what I mean.” Judy seemed pissed off at me. “You are my best friend, Casey, but I’ve got to say I’m sick and tired of being your tutor or your erotica supplier or your voyeurism satisfier, or whatever it is I am to you!” At first I’d thought she was joking, but now I thought she was weirded out on a combination of pot, funerals, and Klaus, and was taking it out on me.

“I know you’re not as pure and naive as you make yourself out to be,” she said. “It’s not possible. And I take your Nothing To Tell line as an insult to my intelligence. You must have fantasies that are a little bit smutty.”

“Well, sure.”

“So let’s hear one.”

“No way, Judy.”

“What do you mean, no way? Think of all the embarrassing stuff I’ve told you!”

“Look, it’s nothing personal, and I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of fantasies, but I am.” I saw her cock her guns for another attack against Shame. Words came from my chest, not my brain: “I hate myself. As much for the fantasies as for being ashamed of them.”

She shut up. We finished the joint, then went swimming. Afterwards we lit up another (the third, I think), and I asked Judy to reapply the sunscreen to my back. I was wearing a black, one-piece in the style of a 1930′s bathing suit, the kind that fit like Calvin Klein Boxer Briefs. It had a big scoop back. Judy’s hands were always soft and squeezy, and when she rubbed the lotion on my back she also gave me a little massage.

“That’s great,” I said. “A little higher.”

“Casey, I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“Uh-huh.” I felt deliciously relaxed as Judy kneaded my back in the frying sun.

“I hate to think of you hating yourself.”

“I don’t usually,” I said, feeling a little dizzy.

“The thing is, I feel strange talking about what Klaus and I did last night. I mean embarrassed strange.”

“But you’re never embarrassed.” I couldn’t tell if it was the massage or the pot or what, but my body felt heavy and buzzing all over, like I was floating in humming water.

“Well, this particular incident embarrasses me. So here’s what I propose: I’ll tell you what Klaus and I did last night if you tell me your most embarrassing fantasy.”

“Come on Judy, I said I didn’t want to tell.”

“Please, Casey. It would mean a lot to me. See, it’s going to drive me crazy if I can’t talk to someone about last night, but if you don’t tell me something equally embarrassing then I’ll feel gross.”

“Oh I don’t know…” It was all starting to feel really dreamy. She was my best friend. She was genuinely asking for my help. “I’m afraid you’ll hate me, or think I’m sick.”

Judy burst out laughing. “That, I think, is impossible given my experiences. Please, Case. What good is it getting stoned if you don’t tell embarrassing secrets while doing it? Don’t be a Puritan.”

“I’m not a Puritan!” I’m as broad-minded as they come. I was directing Cloud 9!

“Prove it.”

“All right,” I told her. “If you promise not to think less of me.”

“Less of you? The smuttier it is the more highly I’ll think of you.”

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