Lisa Workman

“Everybody’s time has come … It’s everybody’s moment, except yours”

Once upon a time, when the days of jeteeing across scratchy stages were not quite so far in the dim and distant past, I could find a song from a musical to reflect most situations, until my very young children pleaded to not have all my conversation set to music. At some point, ‘Friends’ replaced that point of reference and I found myself saying, a little too often, it’s like that episode of ‘Friends’, where … And then would ensue some comparison between my current situation and some engineered situation in ‘Friends’. I did not need any small children to tell me that this was becoming like a stuck record, so I held back the ‘Friends’ references for the foreseeable future. Now I have Regina Spektor. This Russian-American singer/songwriter has written and sung a diverse collection of songs, covering wacky topics such as the imprisonment of rowboats in classical paintings to her fascination with the life of the man whose wallet she found. Wonderful to fall in love with the music of someone who does not continually spew forth musings on broken hearts and broken people. She does a little of this, which is appreciated, but set to unpredictable melodies with an unconventional collection of instruments. Hence I can usually think of a Regina Spektor song that encompasses my mood, situation or current take on life.

The opening words of my blog are lyrics from one of her songs, ‘Tornadoland’ – https://youtu.be/hZ2QHbtR9lw – and they struck a chord with me when I was listening to her latest album. I would not be as self-piteous as to think that it is everyone else’s moment currently, but it certainly is not ‘my moment’. At present, there is not a single facet of my life that is having its moment.

In a few weeks I will leave my workplace forever. I am redundant. Rejection is hard. I felt sad at the prospect of leaving in the summer term, but then I was reinstated until Christmas and for this past term I have not been doing the job for which I was employed. To say it has not been an easy ride would be an understatement; it has been a ride through the rockiest terrain, facing adversity from every quarter, riding a horse ill-equipped for the journey. It has been the source of many tears and so, despite my overall feeling of rejection and concern over paying the mortgage, the fact that there are just a few weeks left of this, is comforting. There are some things I shall miss, like the students, but we teachers have to learn to live with the relatively short-lived nature of the relationships we work so hard to forge with hormone-fuelled adolescents who are trying to figure out what sort of people they want to be.

I am struggling to stay on the same page as my accompanist, who, incidentally, is my third one. Never mind my guitar gently weeping; I’m weeping over the dust it is gathering in the corner of my room. I had one lesson, then was ill for two weeks (half-term was one long feverish sleep wrapped up in my duvet, while morning seeped into the afternoon which drifted into the evening, which got overshadowed by the night, which was too long and quiet for someone who then could not sleep) and forgot everything. In case that was not clear, I bought a guitar so that I could accompany myself but I appear to have lost some intrinsic thing that was pushing me to become an active part of Open Mic instead of being an onlooker on the fringe. Maybe I lost my mojo. Maybe I never had one.

Don’t worry. I have no intention of working my way through every aspect of my life and indicating to you how far it falls short of having its moment. How very dull that would be. There was a fair bit I did not like about myself when I was very young. I was very shy and although I did not have a bad stammer, I was prone to stammering when I really did not want to be stammering. Well, no-one ever wants to stammer, but there are times when you really want to be fluent and articulate and of course, those are the times when you stammer. But I didn’t have much confidence anyway, so with or without a stammer, I doubt I would have spoken a great deal more. I was never in an ‘in-crowd’ but I worked very hard and was liked by teachers. Probably one of the reasons I was never in an in-crowd! I went on to secondary school and continued to be very quiet, but then discovered the theatre at the age of fourteen. It turned out to be my thing and although I do not have much interest in treading the boards anymore, it unlocked a door to a dimension whose existence had hitherto eluded me. Books had so far provided me with the opportunity to live other people’s lives and feel other people’s feelings, but this was total immersion in people that weren’t me, emotions I had never felt (and may never feel) and a re-enactment of the stuff of dreams. It irks me that governments do not value the expressive arts as they should. Teachers have children’s holistic development in their hands and bigoted, narrow-minded ministers make decisions that fuel this archaic system of education that values the churning out of under-graduates instead. Ken Robinson puts the case forward better than me, so check out his talks on Ted Talks, notably ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity#t-32360 But anyway, the point is that the theatre is one of the things that feeds the soul and it turns out that that is quite important. I’ve done some cool stuff in my lifetime. The coolest stuff is, of course, bringing my children into the world. I do not mean the actual process; moreover that they are, simply, the best things in my life and in my world and not just because they are my children. They actually deserve that accolade. Ok … proud mum-on-a-soap-box moment over.

But there are, of course, areas of my life with which I have been and still am disillusioned. I have filled those gaps in the past with theatrical polyfilla. It is not an easy concept to impart to others, but as an example, if your love life fails to fulfil you, then it helps to play characters with exciting amorous exploits woven into their lives. Or if you struggle with self-esteem, then it’s kinda fun to play a party animal. I do not have the theatre anymore as a back-up. But I can still go the theatre; or a more accessible hobby to try living other people’s lives is watching movies. On the one hand, it can be a dangerous past-time because of the false hope you are at risk from building up, about the potential success of your life. But once you have accepted the impossible dream of the world of movies, it softens the blow of disappointment. I would have thought that seeing Hollywood romances and fairy-tale endings on the silver screen would be devastating to the person suffering from terminal disappointment. But it really is not. I love a dark movie; a sad movie; a movie that sends me plummeting to the very depths of despair. But I also love a fairy-tale romance; those stylised pieces from the Golden Age of Hollywood; coy flirting and cliched gazes into each other’s eyes. At the end of such movies, I have a slice of that giddy feeling associated with the uplifting rush of being in love. I wonder if other people get it … I expect so. Anyway, I do and I am grateful. I watch a lot of movies, which is just as well because I review them for a website: http://www.eyesonthescreen.co.uk/author/lisa/ Funnily enough, most of them do not involve Hollywood romances! But if I watched them all the time, then I wouldn’t appreciate my heart skipping a beat when Gene Kelly or Alan Bates told me he loved me. I mean his leading lady …