File: Blog, Art

Changed the sidebar. Added some new reads.

Spent the majority of the weekend putting together a stage reading from Anne Frank's diary that I'm doing tonight at Kol Ami. It's a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, but it was intriguing to culminate the four weeks of work I've put into it. I chose, edited, and rehearsed parts from her diary to create a 15 minute performance. Hopefully, it'll be moving and respectful.

I walked a thin line, trying to decide what to include and what to leave out. In the first half of the book, she's going through all of these awful changes that involve going into hiding and living with seven other people in a cramped space that you can never leave; however, she's still 13 when she begins writing. And so she's got all the drama that comes from being 13. She's whiny, she hates her parents, people treat her like a baby, she wants her period to come.

It's the second half of the diary that she becomes the Anne Frank that everyone wants to remember. She's insightful, she writes beautifully, and she's slightly older (14-15). The weird thing is that her writing only changes after she hears a report on the radio. There's a news story about people who keep diaries after the war. She decides she wants to publish hers as the Secret Annexe and even goes back to rewrite and edit some of her earlier entries. (She goes as far to change the names of the other housemates.) After the war, her father only decides to have the diary published because of her constant entries detailing this very same desire. (There are a lot of them.)

It's true that writing for publication changed the way that she wrote. Most people (self included) write differently when they believe that someone may be reading. Does that make it any less true? I'm not sure what I think on this one. She wanted to be seen as insightful; therefore she is. I realize that there's more to it than that, but still. One never knows that, if she lived, what she would be like, or if the diary would have been published. I'd like to think that she would have gone on to great things, like I hope to do.

I need to go back and read my own journals from 13-15. What will I find in there? Did I leave myself a message in those forgotten pages? Is there something that will give me conviction and courage? Or will I only find the "unbosomings of a schoolgirl?" (Anne Frank.)

Her writing made me think about my personal heroes: Anne Frank, Nellie Bly, Anne Lamott, my husband, my dad. These are all people who worked to change their corner of the world. Sometimes, in light of the first three, they changed more than their corner. in the case of the second two, the jury's still out on how much of the world they ahve changed. They sure changed me.