Valentine's Day mood lighting, screenwriter-style
Mmm. It’s only just after 10:30 p.m. and I’m already under my duvet with my laptop and I’ve got the Drive soundtrack playing on low on my iPhone dock and a pot of cinnamon tea at my bedside. I’m tuckered out from a day of walking the city (Outremont -> Westmount; Westmount -> Old Port; Old Port -> Outremont), a lunch meeting, a soak, a steam, and a haircut. Life is so hard, right? (Also: one of these things doesn’t belong.)
But really, thank goodness for today; the volume of work I’ve been churning out is verging on obscene. I needed to resuscitate myself because the rest of the week is filled with story meetings, lunch meetings, and deadlines. It doesn’t help that I’ve been having trouble sleeping for absolutely no (read: absolutely a million) reasons.
But who cares, the big news is that I got my hair cut! Stop the presses! My bangs are now actually bangs again! I can see!
I recently had dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while and he asked me why I had decided to let the bangs grow out in the first place. I offered two very good reasons: 1) I stopped having time to cut my hair; and 2) I had decided that the bangs made me look too young and I was tired of being asked for ID any time I wanted to replenish the Ardbeg (as though I were buying wine coolers or some similar crap).
“I’m trying to be more womanly,” I elaborated playfully, trying to make my voice all breathy and sexy (in other words, the opposite of what it actually is). And then he said something really interesting. He said he didn’t buy it.
He and I often return to the subject of self-fashioning and very often it becomes the subject of my writing:
Excerpt from Penny on the Verge
But this time my friend suggested that the register of my voice, my [spoken] diction, and my slightly adolescent physicality have all been conscious choices. Selections, even. You know, like an outfit.
So what? You’re absolutely right. His suggestion isn’t very far-fetched; in the case of my idiolect, for sure, I’m extremely conscious of how I speak to different audiences. But I never considered my voice or physicality to be a part of my projected persona. Emphasis here on the word projected. And what’s more: he suggested that if what I really wanted was to be more womanly, that I would simply act more womanly. That I would move like a woman and speak in the voice of a woman, that I would be less self-deprecating, less self-effacing, less awkward, less playful, and essentially that I would undermine myself less in how I present myself and my ideas. He’s well-versed on this topic, of course, because he’s a man who has made quite a career for himself based on the fact that he speaks in a way that just makes people listen up. But I found this conversation to be more than a little perplexing. I’m trying to imagine sitting at the dinner table in the country with my family, or having coffee with a friend, or giving a lecture, or taking a story meeting, and speaking in a different tone of voice (different how? I can’t even imagine), changing the way I gesticulate and express, you know, facially. I mean, imagine how strange that would be, in particular for those of you who know me personally.
It would take all of 20 seconds before someone would call me on it and ask me what the f*ck I was up to. “Oh, I’m just trying on a new persona — you like?” No. Nope. I’m afraid I can’t do that. The hope is that the audience will listen more to what I’m saying than how I’m saying it. Which, I realize, is the opposite of how it actually works. (Example: Oh, I don’t know, Hitler.) But I imagine one day I will naturally stop projecting like a 20-year old. In fact, today — even with my bangs — a woman at a restaurant guessed that I was 28. 28, people! Nobody’s thought I looked 28 since I was 17 or so! Not only that, but she said I was “chic.” Ha-ha-ha. Things are looking up, my friends!
Hey, you know who else has great fringe? The girl from The Chromatics. Who have a song on the Drive soundtrack. Which I’m listening to right now. See? Full circle. Goodnight. And let this blog post be pathetically remembered as The One in Which She Blogged About Her Hair.
