Normal-lite

“The blackness, weight and terror of childhood in mid-America strike deep into the stem of life. Like desert flowers we learned to crouch near the earth, fearful that we would die before the rains, cunning, waiting the season of good growth.  Those who survive the psychic mutilation have a life cunning, to keep the stem tight and spare, withholding the deep blossom, letting it sour rather than bloom and be blighted.
I have seen your beauty and your terror and your evil.
I have come from you mysteriously wounded. I have waked from my adolescence to find a wound inflicted on the deep heart. And have seen it in others too, in disabled men and sour women made ugly by ambition, mortified in the flesh, and wounded in love.
Not going to Paris or Morocco or Venis, instead staying with you, trying to be in love with you, bent upon understanding you, bringing you to life. For your life is my life, and your death is mine also.”
-“Salute to Spring” Meridel Le Sueur

I am a townie. An in-betweener in the world of a university that draws its population from the suburbs. I am from the world just outside the ISU bubble, creeping into the safely middle class, academic minded world of a university population that raises the heartbeat of a community from September until August .

I am Normal by birthrite, they have merely adopted it.

Every year, I watch as ambitious college graduates run from a place they’ve called home for four years.

As far and as fast as they can.

They cite small town small mindedness. They will make snide comments about The Pantagraph. The Wal-Marts. The Bus system.

Wrinkling their noses, they wax poetic about the lack of resources, the lack of entertainment, the terrible restaurant choices. They go to seek their great perhaps…

Perhaps if I get away, I can find my dreams. Anywhere but here
.
And I get it. I do.

In High School, I had the same feelings. A desperate need for escape from this Midwestern world, for something real to happen. I was positive that my future and my happiness rested on the distance I could put between myself and my hometown. Sometimes, I still feel that way.

It would be false to say that being a Normalite has not affected me. That because I can point out its faults, (can read it’s blackened streets like a book), I have grown beyond the corn fields, the strip malls, the 5:00 p.m. traffic, the subdivisions with names of presidents and trees. I consider myself a flight risk.

A Plot Twist:
Instead of performing an escape act worthy of Houdini, I stay. I choose to accept, for my last year, that opportunity really is just around the corner--From my mother’s old house, from my sophomore year apartment—I dig my roots deeper into the pavement that I’ve walked since I was a child.
 It doesn’t feel anything like coming home.

A Decision:
It’s a bold choice for an untenured, untested first year cooperating teacher, choosing a play about a vicious hate crime against a young gay man and a town on the brink of unraveling. For my Normality, it hits too close to home already.  We’re both unsure about how exactly to proceed with such a project, but at least we’re making a statement. We bring in pictures of Matthew, pictures of fences and blood. The cast brings in newspaper clippings about hate crimes and towns that have become a noun.
Later that week, a gun is brought to a local school. The posturing student wielding it is described in the local paper as “Harmless”. As we sit, spread in a circle on the clean wood paneling of the stage, 16 faces stare back at me just as wide-eyed as I am staring at them and that night, we dream of shots fired, even though we had heard none. Because we all know what sound a weapon makes when it is only drawn.
The next day at rehearsal, the words flow more easily.

A Process:
We push, but gently. The trick is to get them thinking with cracking skulls or breaking hearts. For the most part, they have no context for the pain they are being asked to portray. A freshman with huge Disney eyes and an enthusiasm that borders on the manic finds a well of anger she didn’t know she had. A self-described sheep in wolf’s clothing finds a connection with a killer. A senior bravely leads them on. It becomes okay to yell, to cry, to explore the empathy they barely understand. We push harder.

A Change:
Cast T-Shirts are out. Instead, we will be proudly wearing “Erase Hate” t-shirts. They want to make a difference, they say, they want it to last. A Campaign is started. The idea is simple—here, everyone belongs. Pictures show up on the website of students in their favorite spaces—the gym, classrooms, the common area, the band hallway. A makeshift “U” with thumbs and fingers gets flashed at sporting events and painted in the main hallway--a signpost for the weird in the heart of Normal—U Belong.

Picture This:
I stay. I live. I teach. I learn. I find in my understanding a group of Normal kids, who are everything but. -- Sara Phillips