Refusing to Sit Quietly at Home
Blog 78 - Another moment when the theatre reminds me why it has always been my life.
Dolly Levi, Agoraphobia, and the Adventures of Emmeline
This blog comes from my book, Theatre Is My Life, and was written for the July 7 meditation. It has been slightly adapted for today
July 7
“The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, ‘Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.’ And the sign that something is wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.”
Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, Act 4
Today is my adventuresome granddaughter Emmeline’s birthday. When I wrote this piece, she was turning 4, and today she is 17!
Thornton Wilder is one of my favorite playwrights, and though I have never worked on The Matchmaker, I helped guide a glorious high school production of Hello, Dolly! while I was in graduate school. The rollicking comedy features the exuberant meddler Dolly Gallagher Levi, whose artful schemes bring together several improbable lovebirds.
Dolly is definitely always in the midst of an adventure, and I love one myself. When I was about three years old, disliking my naps, I slipped away from my sleeping mother and walked up to the corner fire station where the chief was the father of a family friend. Thankfully, some of the firemen recognized me and delivered me back home.
As a kid, I seemed constitutionally unable to sit still if there was a tree to climb, a bicycle to ride, or a neighborhood theatrical enterprise to join. I was a tree climber, delighting in ascending leafy branches as high as I could possibly rise. And I was a bike rider who loved the thrill of taking off down the street on my own. As a teenager, I was a radio correspondent for my high school, a department store model and teen board representative, a rock and roll reviewer for The Birmingham News, and a leader at a traditional summer camp, Winnataska.
When I was at a theatre conference in Pensacola during graduate school, I was watching a production of Peter Weiss’s play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Very Brechtian in style, with relentless assaults on the audience, this production unfolded inside a very hot and muggy restaurant in the historic section of that old Florida city, with the actors moving about the tables.
Seated at the end of a bench next to the wall, I suddenly had a terrible spell: my heart raced, I felt numb and sweaty, and I thought I was going to either faint, lose my mind, or immediately die. Some friends took me to their nearby hotel room, and I finally felt better after lying down for a while. However, at the fresh young age of 23, my adventures were over for a while.
What had made me feel trapped was the first of several hundred panic attacks, symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as agoraphobia. Like others with this insidious condition, I began to be wary of crowded public spaces. I sometimes had to get up and leave classes or church services. I drove certain roads that I knew had places where I could stop if I “lost control.”
My mother, who had suffered similarly, suggested anti-anxiety pills (“Give me Librium or give me death!” I used to cry), but they didn’t agree with me. I tried counseling, exercise, books on the subject, talking it out. Nothing worked extremely well until almost 14 years later, when I chanced upon a doctor who prescribed a beta blocker for my high blood pressure, but who said it might cure the anxiety as well. Since then, I’ve had only a couple of panic attacks.
Actually, Dolly’s quote from The Matchmaker could be re-written to describe agoraphobia: “The test of agoraphobia is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, ‘Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.’ And the sign that you have agoraphobia is when you sit quietly at home wishing you could be out having lots of adventures.”
Such an illness, over which you feel such little control, can really squeeze the life out of you. When I first wrote this piece, I had been symptom-free for 26 years and had returned to my own adventuresome self. Now the number is 39, and I often find myself on escapades with any or all of my five grandchildren.
Emmeline, being the oldest, has certainly accompanied me on many a caper!
And on her seventeenth birthday, I am grateful that one of my greatest escapades has been loving the adventurous girl who still helps pull me out into the world. If Dolly Levi is right, Emmeline has always been one of my best excuses for refusing to sit quietly at home.