Latest / EST's "Truth Be Told" / "My Rumspringa Year" by Laura Maria Censabella

Transcript

"My Rumspringa Year" by Laura Maria Censabella · EST's "Truth Be Told"

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to season two of Truth Be Told, Love and Theater.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're so happy to be back with 14 new stories, each performed at Ensemble Studio Theater, as part of Truth Be Told, a True Story Night, created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're thrilled that season one has been downloaded around the globe and that these amazing, weird, embarrassing, profound, and hilarious stories continue to travel from EST to you.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Season two, Love and Theater, draws from two more sold-out nights: The Moment I Knew and The Theater.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: For seven weeks, you can tune in every Monday for stories of love and realization, and every Thursday for stories of the joys and madness behind the curtain.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, while most of our stories are recorded live, this one was recorded in a studio with music and production by Eric Svakar.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And now, without further ado, a return from one of our favorite storytellers, Laura Maria Sansibella asks, what happens when you fall in love with a god and do exactly what you want and when you want to for an entire year?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is it heaven or hell?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: When I am 19 years old and a sophomore at Yale, I meet a god.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: He comes in the form of the unexpected, as gods often do.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: He's a black-eyed, curly-haired, taut-armed, 17-year-old freshman.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Sammy's a monster, a motherfucker, my friend Joe says.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: High praise from one musician to another the summer before we meet.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: He sat in with all these jazz cats, plays classical too, soloed with the New Haven Symphony when he was 12.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Sammy man, Sammy's just.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: And from the way he trails off, I can tell there's an indescribable something that goes way beyond music.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm nervous as hell when Sammy shows up to a campus gig where I'm singing Joni Mitchell tunes to suss me out for his new band.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know that moment in Annie Hall, a movie that has just come out, when Tony Lacey, LA record producer played by Paul Simon, goes up to Annie after she's finished a set?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's how I feel.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Plus, Sammy's about the same height as Paul Simon, almost half a foot shorter than me, so he fits the part.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: I look down into his intense black eyes and wait.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sammy says, Yeah, your voice will cut through the horns.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I burst into tears.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: In my first semester the previous year, I placed into advanced courses, but they're pulling me under.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Take conversational French, in which we're supposed to have fascinating conversations in French.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Most of my classmates have lived in France, whereas I was taught by Sister Salvatore from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who spoke a halting book French, articulating every syllable.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: As my Yale seminar class laughs at apparently another witty remark from the professor, I desperately turn to the nice blonde guy next to me.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: What he say?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: What's the homework?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: The nice blonde guy, David Hyde Pierce, translates for me, but this clearly can't go on.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: My dream of a life filled with sophisticated conversation with people from around the world is going up in the very smoke of my classmates' French cigarettes.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Or take Music Theory 201, in which we are to harmonize four-part bas chorals and compose minuets?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: My only composing consists of crafting lyrics to simple guitar chords.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's English poetry from Chaucer to Elliot.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: When I finally get up the courage to speak mid-semester, my professor's voice rings out gaily.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: No, Laura, you're wrong, you're wrong.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, everything is wrong with me.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm from a garden apartment in a two-fair zone in Queens.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been out of the country or even flown in an airplane.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen two Broadway plays and they were musicals.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Some of my fellow Yaleys even speak fluent Italian.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Italian?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's supposed to be my language as an Italian American.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Everything I want to learn, everyone else at Yale already knows.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: So when Tony Lacey, I mean Sammy, comes up to me after I sing, I want to no, I need to be told I'm great at something.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Your voice will cut through the horns, isn't it?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: What the hell's wrong with her?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Sammy whispers to Joe as they turn away.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Despite my frightening display, Sammy asks me into his band.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: We eye each other at rehearsals, then he asks me out.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of our first date, still not sure if we're just friends, we smoke a joint and discover a trap door in Pearson Tower.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Curious and giddy, we climb inside the guts of the structure and clamber up a black iron ladder past the back of the lit up orange clock face, which looks as big and mysterious as the moon.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: The ladder ends at another trapdoor.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: It leads out to a stone balcony just under the tower spire, barely wide enough to sit on without our legs dangling off.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: The door snaps shut.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Locked out on the clock tower, we talk all night about our families, music, growing up.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Where did you come from?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: He asks me, looking deep into my eyes, and I feel the same way, like we've known each other forever.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: A week later, listening to records, our first kiss lasts the entire length of Weather Reports achingly beautiful, a remark you made.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Two weeks later, he moves his massive stereo system into my dorm suite and moves himself into my narrow bed.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: We sleep with our legs wrapped over and around each other like an intricate puzzle.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: But forever after, that night on the tower with the wind kicking up and gray clouds scuttling by, not knowing how we'll ever get down, that's our love.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And with this love, I begin to piece myself back together.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe I've never been in one piece before Sammy's gaze.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: I sew a button on a shirt.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: My mom works as a shampoo girl at a salon in Bergdorf Goodman, equally so.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: He adores my grandfather who in broken English explains how to cultivate grapes.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: He encourages my singing and says I have an incredible ear.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: We have the same sense of humor, mine forged in a family that jokes about outsmarting Nazis, his from his Arab American father, who used humor as currency to climb out of poverty in the deep south.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: For the first time, and through his eyes, I realized I have a culture, and I put it together with what had happened in my theater studies class the previous year, my professor turning to me to explain the Catholic references and Dubliners and the acclaim my original scenes about the working class people I grew up with received.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And everything about him is amazing to me.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: He's one of the first drummers to play four against three on his trapset, incorporating Cuban rhythms which he carefully demonstrates on my abdomen.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: With his dad on the Yale faculty, he's grown up around the leading intellectuals of the day.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, I admire the courage it took for him to write an op-ed piece in his private school newspaper about Palestinian rights, which got him suspended.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: He speaks French to me with a mischievous film star flare, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and he's learning Arabic.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think he speaks fluent Spanish too, until native speakers who laugh affectionately at his brash confidence and rapid fire delivery tell me he speaks every sentence in the present tense.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what he is, present.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've never met anyone who lives so thoroughly in the moment, interested in everybody and saying yes to everything.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: I, on the other hand, raised by a mother shell-shocked by World War II, and educated by nuns whose discipline was not only capricious but stunning in its cruelty, have a duck and cover approach to life.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: But underneath, I'm still the extroverted little girl who woke up every day dancing and singing, and through Sammy, I find her again.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: While all this is happening, Sammy and I dive deeper into drugs and alcohol.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they help me tamp down the guilt I feel at having all the advantages my family never had.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: We take spontaneous trips into New York City on the cheap commuter rail and go to jazz clubs like The Vanguard or the Bottom Line.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: We lose ourselves in the music so that we don't even realize we've missed the last train.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Once we even sleep in Penn Station.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I stop returning his calls.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: So too with the New Blue, Yale's oldest female a cappella group.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: In September, they had unanimously voted me Rush Manager to recruit and select new members.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: But suddenly the songs we sing seem quaint and ridiculous.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Without telling anyone in the group, I just stopped setting up auditions or showing up to gigs.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I could say I feel bad, but I don't.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: After years of taking care of my depressed mother, watching over my little brother, behaving for the nuns, volunteering for every club in sight in high school, hell, I was even head of the nursing home club.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: It feels liberating to do exactly what I want when I want.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Without knowing the concept or name for it, I feel we are living our rum springa year, that Amish rite of passage where you test the boundaries of all rules and commitments, including when Playboy comes to town.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: They're recruiting at Yale for the first women of the Ivy League issue.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: It goes against everything I believe, but it's new, it's thrilling.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: I spend the first semester of what should be my junior year back in Queens.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Even with generous financial aid, my father pays a portion of my tuition.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: He has lost patience with the drop in my grades, with the way Sammy and I ran off to Puerto Rico at winter break without a real place to stay.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: But Playboy is the last straw.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: The beginning of the end between Sammy and me starts later that year on New Year's Eve.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: We are skidding out in a car on black ice in a New Haven intersection.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't driven in over a year and it's not my car, but somehow it's my job to get the band to a gig in downtown New York.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: I manage to pump the brakes, slow the car to a stop, and re-swallow the smoke turkey from dinner.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Hearts pounding, Sammy and I stare at one another.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're due at the gig at eight, and it's already seven.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can do this, he says.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I believe him, and the drive does turn out to be the least dangerous part of the evening.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: After we pick up the others and load their gear, we're up in Harlem and we might be able to get downtown in enough time to salvage the night.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: But no, everyone wants to smoke, drink, and get loose, especially Sammy.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: My stomach twists.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Shouldn't we hurry?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: The host of the party, Suzu, is a dear friend.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be fine, Sammy says.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: We arrive at the party at 11 PM, three hours later than the band was booked.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Suzu is hurt and furious.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Sammy tells her we were caught in holiday traffic.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: We left in plenty of time.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: I swear there was nothing we could do.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: I look at those liquid, soulful, innocent black eyes.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: I search for remorse in them.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's none.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: A chill runs through me.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: When the band begins playing at 11:30, the sad loft party jolts awake.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: People dance with abandon.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not singing tonight, so I get to watch and listen.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: The music, Latin funk, is astonishing.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: The guitar, piano, and bass locked in, Sammy on drums, conjuring the gods with his rhythms.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: I drink glass after glass of champagne.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Sammy was right.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: It is fine for him.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's always fine for him.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: His money, enormous talent, and doting family cushion everything.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: But something has shifted in me.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's because living at home for the last four months, amongst people who save up for years to buy the simplest things, I've come down off that high tower, overlooking all the splendors of Yale, where he and I once huddled alone.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe it's because I am suddenly aware of all the people we hurt in the last year and a half.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Too many, including my recent boss who looked wounded and betrayed when I told him I was going back to school.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: I had lied to him at Sammy's urging, telling him I was never going back, so he would give me an exciting gig at his recording studio.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe I know on some level, although I can't admit it, that while I've been cut off from school, working to earn enough money to go back, Sammy is sleeping casually with another student.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: The clock strikes midnight.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's 1980, the start of a new decade.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone cheers.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Sammy winks at me from the stage, and suddenly I know with absolute certainty this isn't my rum springa year, this doing whatever we want whenever we want to.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is the rest of my life if we stay together.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: I try to stuff that knowledge down along with the smoke turkey and champagne, but it comes bubbling up with a force I can't stop.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't break up with him then as he tenderly holds back my hair while I bend over the toilet.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: I can't.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't yet believe I can live without this person.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: He has educated me, cared for me, and sometimes raised me, not to mention that he and his parents are paying the balance of my tuition for the spring semester.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: But my rum springer year is over.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: I start honoring my commitments again, and although I'm not welcome back in certain spaces, that's okay because being utterly selfish for the first time in my life has let me see what my priorities are.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Sammy gives me one more gift before we break up, his biggest.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: At the start of my senior year, I am waitlisted for a writing seminar.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: I say to Sammy, I think I'll withdraw.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: The professor doesn't want me, and are you kidding?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: He interrupts.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: You've always wanted to write.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: You're just scared.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Do it.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so I take the course that changes my life and discover that writing is another kind of music.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Pure, the place where I can never lie.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: A place in which it is safe to say yes to everything.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: A place where I can lay a first love to rest and remind myself that gods can only fall one way on this earth.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Laura has received three grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts in playwriting and screenwriting, and her play, Carla Cooks the War, won the Soroyan Paul Human Rights Playwriting Prize.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Her play, Paradise, was produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tennan, and Beyond Words, will have its New York premiere at Ensemble Studio Theater in February.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends and keep listening.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: More stories of The Moment I Knew will be released every Monday, and about theater every Thursday.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And do hit like and subscribe, it really helps.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time, remember the truth wants to be known.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yours too.