A Brief Synopsis of My Apprenticeship with Carolina Artisans Thespian Society; Part II

In order to understand the CATS organization, it is necessary to first understand the character of its leader.

Anita Ross* was a round-faced, be-spectacled woman with a bushy blonde mane, who wore lots of batik prints and floppy sunhats in the dead of winter. She cultivated the affect of a new-age, hippie art teacher, and was inclined to espouse lots of empty aphorisms accompanied by PG-13 anti-establishment keywords, which, along with her oft-repeated promises of increasingly implausible fame for all of us, made her initially popular with the young folk.

She was apt to tout her many years of experience as a Director of Theater for Young People, offered up a CV that included both professional acting work and experience with handling the vagaries of adolescence in a creative, confidence building, guidance counselor sort of way.

It was, of course, horse shit. Anita’s earth mother exterior merely obscured the fact that she was an impatient, intolerant, hard-assed, opportunist, with a penchant for hyperbole. You could blame her disposition on a frustrated theatrical career (she once had a bit part in a B-movie. That’s pretty much it), or maybe some personal misfortune left her dangling at the end of her fraying tether. I don’t know. What I can say is this:

The CATS facilities were located in a long abandoned loft on an alleyway called Carolina Lane. In those days, Carolina Lane was a mostly empty block of buildings, housing a few derelicts and a couple of painters looking for dirty cheap studio space. (These days, Carolina Lane is a desirable address for vapid hipster trustifarians and their friends, and Lexington Avenue is the proverbial nexus of vapid hipster-dom in Asheville. In those days, Lexington Avenue offered little outside of musty antique stores owned by creepy old men and hookers. A lot has changed since then.). Even the most enthusiastic studio DIY-er could have told you that the CATS HQ wasn’t much of a performance space. More like a squat. With (usually) functioning lights and occasionally running water. Five years or so later I would attend punk rock shows at squats with more amenities and cleaner bathrooms.

Likewise the company. My CATS peers were an eccentric hodge-podge of cherubic home-schooled hippie kids right off the commune, and surly teenagers, which gave all proceedings an unusual sort of dynamic. Imagine ten year old girls with stick-straight unwashed hair and homemade angel wings flitting around chain-smoking, fifteen year old skinhead girls, whose entire vocabulary centered around creative use of the Anglo Saxon idiom. If the Rainbow People’s Children’s Division put on an interactive production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at a Girl’s Reform School, the result would be no less jarring than my first night at CATS.

After years of being castigated for being too weird, I realized, within about five minutes of walking in the door, that I would be marginalized for being too boring, too suburban, too, well, normal.

My mother concealed her concern in a blasé attempt to be a good sport. She intuited Anita to be in charge of the operation, assumed (correctly) that Anita was crazy, and trotted off to talk to the only other adult in the room.

Anita Ross was literally effervescent that night, flitting through the room like an orgasmic guidance counselor, promising all kinds of personal growth and creative development and community arts incentives. For a second, I got caught up in her energy, admiring her taste in velvet hats and hippie skirts. She doted on me, telling my mother I was a born actress, a natural talent, and I glowed with the validation.

Five minutes into our first session, four days later, I felt the first trace of misgivings. Anita took the floor in a huff, citing “bad days,” and informed us that we would be spending the next six weeks preparing for her innovative new play. During rehearsals, we would be required to wear the CATS uniform (consisting of black shoes, black pants, and the CATS t-shirt—available for purchase at only $18, cash only), obey her every order, spend the first hour on the play, and the last hour on “character building exercises.”

Any negligence on our part to complete said tasks would earn us punishments, ranging from being sent home to having to clean the bathroom with a hand selected tiny instrument—toothbrush, Q-tip, mascara wand, etc—which wouldn’t have seemed quite so Draconian, had the “character-building exercises” consisted of any more but the same thing, in triplicate.

I can honestly say, in my four months as CATS member, I cleaned every inch of the “studio.” I cloroxed mildew off the walls and removed dirt that predated the Great Depression. I scoured the toilet and buffed the floors. I chipped fossilized chewing gum off the street outside the building. In fact, when I think about my involvement with CATS, I mostly remember cleaning.

As an adult, I can create a compelling argument for this scenario. Anita, knowing the vicious nature of the theater world, was only trying to prepare us for the sort of humiliating employment we’d have to procure in order to not starve to death. And her drill sergeant intimidation techniques were surely nothing more than a means to prepare us for the irrational, fascistic tendencies of most working directors. Actors are a dime a dozen, and we apprentices must literally shine (the toilet bowl with a toothbrush) both on and off the stage.

But let’s be honest. CATS was a third rate youth theater company in a fifth rate town. Most of my fellow actors there were unlikely to get roles in the High School musical, let alone in college, or New York. A better argument might be that she was trying to prepare us for reform school (where at least half of my classmates were clearly headed). All Anita had to do was show up for a couple hours a few times a week, spout off some vague Drama 101 bullshit and sell tickets to our parents, half of whom still believed we were in “Cats, the musical” anyway.

It’s not rocket science.

But Anita had other ideas. And she was a sadist.

*No one is innocent. Names have been changes to protect my sorry ass.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

--WB Yeats

Happy Halloween