The End. And the Beginning of the Second Act.

It's been a long time since I posted here -- close to five years, but tomorrow night I walk up on the stage at the Civic Center and get hooded by Dr. Fenstermaker.  Where did the time go?   No matter; it's done.  Was it worth it?  I think so.  I received a lot of gifts from this endeavor, apart from the letters after my name. I was able to be a student (formally) one last time, and I loved it.  Every single class.  I feel as though this experience plugged me into the changing world and the future in a way I wouldn't have been, had I not come up here.  I got the gift of film, and again I'm not sure I would have ever engaged with it as an art form without having taught MC Film.  And almost best of all, Sam and Dannon came up here, and Sam's close to finishing her master's and planning to get her doctorate in History.  I was able to be involved daily in the lives of two of my grandchildren. 

And it was certainly an interesting diversion from menopause.

So now I sail out into the final third of my life (here's hoping it's that much, anyway; I know every year after 55 is a gift), in some ways a different person from the one who came up here and started the program -- and this blog.

It can stand for a lot of things, ABD . . .

. . . according to Wikipedia:

• ABD, the stock symbol for ACCO Brands
• Association of British Drivers
• ABD, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Darwin TV station
• Aberdeen railway station in the United Kingdom
• "All But Degree", slang for a Candidate of Philosophy
• ABD, IATA airport code for Abadan Airport in Abadan, Iran
• "Amerika Birleşik Devletleri", the Turkish acronym for the United States of America
• Already Been Done
• Av Beth Din, referring to the Chief Rabbi of a Jewish community
• Aged, Blind, and Disabled (ABD) populations

But for me, today, it stands for

"All But Dissertation", a graduate student who has completed all the coursework for a Ph.D. but not the dissertation

I spent the week of October 15 (afternoons) writing answers to questions submitted by most of the professors I've studied under for the past three years; and yesterday I met with my dissertation committee to be asked questions -- some easy, some hard, some embarrassing as I fumbled ungracefully for any answer -- about those exams. After a little over an hour, they politely asked me to step out. I barely had time to reflect on how it might have gone when I heard Dr. C. saying "Okay, come back in" but he was smiling and holding out his hand: "Congratulations". I felt as if I were moving in a dream, watching them sign the paper that would notify the Registrar that I was now, officially, a Doctoral Candidate. Dr. Fenstermaker, head of my committee, kindly asked me to sit down for a moment. He said he knew I had been nervous but I had done well and this 'rite of passage' was over.

I hadn't slept at all the previous night and felt curiously keyed up and bizarre, so that it was hard to take it in. But somehow in the past hour, everything I'd been leading up to for three years here had come to a culmination, and I was on The Other Side -- now a doctoral candidate (not a student) and privileged to write a dissertation.

Dr. Martinez remarked in a kindly fashion afterwards that I looked stunned. I'm sure I looked positively poleaxed. It's unbelievable to have something concrete and official after all this time and all those student loans.

I am really, really grateful to my committee -- apart from being brilliant academics, each and every one makes me feel very supported -- I can tell they want me to succeed. And they seem enthused about my area of interest.

Onward and upward! A happy day for me indeed.

She's baa-aaaack.

I guess anyone who’s still keeping up with this blog – without any incentive, I might add – could have guessed what kind of semester I was having last fall. Without any complication, four courses including two grad seminars, and teaching two sections, was way too much; but having to switch courses a few weeks into the term seem to leave me perpetually behind. I never really got caught up and in fact still am not, though a new term has started; I still have two papers due.

I wrote a paper on the reception of spiritualism in England in the mid-19^th century for English History; and one for Word & Image on Edward Gorey as a reinterpreter of Victorian myth about death and childhood. I was a little too frenzied to enjoy doing them, but they were still very, very interesting to research and write. I still have due a paper on Maria Luisa Bemberg, a self-taught Argentinian filmmaker who wrote and directed her first film at age 56; and the long-overdue paper on film and music.

This is my last semester of coursework. I keep trying to remember that, but I guess it will soak in when I’m a little less busy. I have Latin III which seems a bit easier as it’s not as much memorization and much more translation. Digital Revolution is a hell of a lot of fun – exploring what’s out there and how it affects us and particularly learning. It’s forcing me to confront a lot of conflicting feelings I have about the digital/information age and my place in it. And Political Economy of the Media is also fascinating – if depressing, at least at first. I really didn’t want to know how few hands pull the strings of the media and what other pies those hands are in. Ignorance was bliss!

We have terrific selections for the Film course this semester and my two online sections are going very well. Screwball comedy's coming up this week, featuring The Awful Truth, and that's always a favorite of mine though many of the students have a hard time with old films.

What a week. Kathy’s fall schedule:

Monday
Nothing scheduled. A good thing, too, considering how much reading is expected for the rest of the week.

Tuesday
7:30 am - Be at library to work on online classes in the grad lab with its highspeed; print out any of the week’s readings still needed. Count on downloading and reading 50 – 100 such pages a week, and that’s just articles, not books or sections of books.

9:30: - 10:45 am - English History 1714 - 1840

11:00 am – 12:15 pm - Latin American Film

Have lunch and work in the IPH office computer lab

2:00 – 3:15 - Fear, Identity and Gender in Film and Literature

Back to either computer lab

5:00 - 8:00 pm - Word & Image

Wednesday
4:45 – 5:45 pm - Grad Seminar in English History

6:45 – 9:00 pm - Screening for Latin American Film

Sometime today put up the week’s quiz for Multicultural Film (course I’m teaching)

Thursday
Same as Tuesday without Word & Image

Friday
Read articles and support materials for next week's film, and then attend the 3:30 screening and discussion; make lots of notes.

Sometime over Saturday and Sunday
Create written lecture and questions for Multicultural Film and upload them; start reading and recording assessments for the 80 responses to last week’s questions (I try to post a personal response to about 25 - 30 each week and to be sure each student gets a personal response at least every two to three posts. Impossible to do otherwise, unfortunately!)

And in and around this schedule, do the readings/writings for the four courses I’m taking. Two of them are Grad Seminars (the Wednesday part of English History, and Word & Image), which means that there is a lot of reading and you have to come to each class session (you only miss a grad seminar class if you are dead and have exhausted any possibility of reanimating your corpse through the Dark Arts) thoroughly familiar with the material and ready to expound at length. There are not many students and it would be immediately apparent if anyone came unprepared (I’ve never had the nerve to try it). No faking it here. Plus everyone gets a shot or two at conducting the class. It’s intense but very, very interesting.

I love the English history class. The professor is highly knowledgeable and a great lecturer – I’m pretty much spellbound the whole time. Then I have fifteen minutes to run uphill about two blocks to Latin American Film. I guess I’ll get used to it in a week or two but in this heat (with the backpack full of four courses worth of stuff), it wasn’t much fun this week, especially with the air conditioning not working in the LAF classroom. It makes for a sweaty day.

The director of the program agrees that I have enough courses for an M.A. in English -- a requirement I had to satisfy because my master’s is interdisciplinary. So that’s one more fence taken on the way to the finish line. Huzzah!

Back in the Fray

The good news: I’m halfway there. Five semesters behind me, and five to go. I saw my advisor, Dr. Martinez, after summer classes ended and we worked up a new audit sheet showing the program requirements and which I’ve fulfilled. She agreed that after this fall, I’ll have three courses to go to finish the coursework. I’ll take Latin III and two culture and media classes in the spring; then “read” (study for prelims) over the summer, take the prelims at the beginning of fall of ’07, and then be cleared to start the dissertation. I need 24 dissertation hours, which I reckon as 12 in the fall and 12 the following spring; and hopefully will defend and walk at the end of the spring of ’08.

The other news: to stay on this plan I am taking four courses this fall: English History 1714 – 1870 which will complete my major area of Victorian Studies; Gender in Film and Lit, and Latin American Film as a DIS, which will complete half of my minor area of culture and media; and Word & Image which fulfills my Art History requirement. I’m also slated to teach two more online sections of the American culture in film course. It should be an interesting semester. I feel slightly burnt out, but I know I can handle two more semesters and that once classes start I’ll have the old excitement back; I just plain love being in a classroom (on the student side) and I know I’m going to learn a lot. During the spring I have to decide on a dissertation topic and put together my committee. It’s nice to see a definite end to this endeavor, interesting as it’s been.

Theatah II: Leda and the Swan Take a Dive

I ran afoul of my first husband when we were both college students in New Orleans – I was major-shopping and he was finishing up his communications studies at Loyola in New Orleans, where he was involved in black box theater. One semester, in fact, he directed a local doctor’s original script of Leda and the Swan for a premiere performance. Bob had an enthusiastic little cadre of students serving as his actors and crew, but his great coup, the edge that would elevate his production to a serious status, was the acquisition of a professional actor. Stefan (that was his stage name, real name Mike) had been in a television commercial and seemed delighted to be given the lead role in Leda.

Rehearsals began and continued apace; I’m not sure at exactly what point the terrible suspicion set in, but about three weeks from opening we could no longer ignore the fact that Stefan couldn’t, wouldn’t, and wasn’t going to learn his lines. He had a head like a sieve. He carried his script around religiously – every time we saw him across campus he waved it at us, but for all the good it did him he could have been using it to swat flies. He managed to remember his lines from about the first three pages -- the length of a commercial, maybe -- and after that he was like an amnesia victim. A look so completely blank would come over his face that I doubted he’d be able to give his name, rank and serial number under torture.

For a while Bob seemed certain that he could, by sheer power of persuasion and force of personality, deposit the unlearned lines in Stefan’s brain. There were many long, desperate talks, the gist of which was Bob saying intensely, “Don’t let me down, pal,” and Stefan replying, “I won’t. I’ll get it.”

But he never did. Two days before opening Bob finally accepted that he now had a limited number of choices, including (a) canceling the opening until another actor could be found and rehearsed; (b) killing Stefan and dumping his body in the Mississippi in the dead of night, then posing as a conscientious objector and running away to Canada, or (c) doing something desperately inventive. Bob chose (c).

One of the student actors was hurriedly pressed into service as a dramatic device. She wore a white drape and stood on a high, small platform under a white spot, behind a podium holding a copy of the script. Her job was to be cued by Stefan when he drew a blank, and feed him his lines. Sort of a prompter ex machina. Bob christened her, in capitals, The Reader.

Since Stefan only remembered three pages out of a 40-page script, the Reader had her work cut out for her. The first eight or twelve times that Stefan used the Reader were actually kind of fascinating in a hideous way and totally upstaged the play itself. Sometimes when memory failed to serve, he’d just look kind of constipated; but other times he would go so far as to open his mouth before a look of utter blankness passed over his features as if he had just been struck by lightning. Whichever the case, he would then turn ponderously toward The Reader and make a majestic, unfolding “ta-da!” gesture toward her with his arm, indicating that he was in need of a line. She in turn would jump as if bitten, and give him a horrified, unbelieving stare before looking down and reading his line in a flat monotone. She continued to watch in disbelief as Stefan reached into his acting repertoire to select a reaction. Sometimes he repeated the line with dramatic inflection; sometimes he paraphrased it; other times he just looked around meaningfully at the audience and nodded as if to say, “Well, there you go.”

Momentarily entertaining as it was, this added interplay increased the play’s length to about four painful hours and removed any traces of pacing and meaning it might once have had. But far be it from Bob to admit defeat. Opening night came as inexorably as death. A good-sized audience sprinkled itself around the edges of the little theater. The author had a place of honor.

The play opened with Stefan walking around the perimeter of the stage space, delivering the few lines he had actually memorized, which included asking the actors, scattered in the audience, their character names. I realized that Bob was much more shaken than he had ever appeared, when Stefan asked him his name. Bob abandoned his character like it was Dry Gulch and replied with his full, real name as if he were answering the census.

The play, dragging the albatross of The Reader, staggered on. The soul and meaning of “chutzpah” became real to me when the lights went up and after some polite applause, Bob thanked the audience for attending, introduced the author, and then looked around happily: “So! I’d like to know if you thought our innovation of The Reader gave added impact to the play.” And don’t you know, some of them did.

Curtain.

Revenge of the Theatah I: A Dramatic Fall From Grace

When Haley and her best friend Robin came to me for help finding a dramatic scene for their high school speech tournament, I was flattered. Flattered, and totally confident in my ability to find the dynamite, unique power skit that would rocket them to first place.

But the pages of my various actors’ guides flipped and flipped without yield. I was at the point of admitting to them that I couldn’t produce a winner, when inspiration suddenly shone like the lights over Broadway: the Tennessee Williams one-act Hello from Bertha. Hadn’t that scene impressed my professors in Intro to Acting? True, most (if not all) of the success was due to the classmate who played Bertha (an aging prostitute in the last stages of syphilis) to my Goldie (a sister-in-trade with the unpleasant job of telling Bertha she is being turned out of the whorehouse because she can no longer earn her keep). This classmate was an amateur actress so gifted she could have earned a Tony nomination playing a wad of gum. If it worked for us, I thought, surely Haley and Robin could do as well – or better.

Yes, you’ve already spotted the fatal flaw in my thinking – namely that just because I might have a natural affinity for playing a disease-ridden raddled old whore, there was absolutely no reason to imagine that two fresh-faced sixteen-year-olds could pull it off. But at the time it seemed like a saving inspiration. I brought photocopies of the script to the girls with rash assurances of sure success.

It seemed to go well at first. Racking coughs and heartbroken moans issued from behind Haley’s door as they threw themselves into rehearsal. I delivered snack trays, suggestions of bits of business I had used, and mini-lectures about Tennessee Williams during their breaks.

Two days before the tournament one of the teachers who was going to accompany them as a judge bowed out, which jeopardized the whole delegation from our high school. I found myself volunteered for the job. No worries, the speech club president would come over and tell me how it was done. I was a little leery at first, but then agreed. Prostitute, stage mother, tournament judge: what role couldn’t I play if I put my mind to it?

We left for Gainesville in the dark hours of Saturday morning and arrived at the hosting high school in time for coffee and pastries in the cafeteria. I had a full judging schedule and Haley and Robin would perform their scene about six times during the day. The three of us nibbled cardboard-tasting cheese danishes and felt like favored handmaidens of Thalia, shining jewel-like among the other participants, who, poor leaden things, didn’t suspect that Bertha and Goldie would soon climb over their untalented bodies to take first place in Dramatics. We heard the call for the first round of presentations and parted smiling. That was the last good moment of the day.

Their first round was praised by one of the judges but panned by the others on the panel. Haley and Robin were a little puzzled but decided it was a fluke. It turned out to be an unfortunately consistent fluke. Each subsequent performance brought uniformly not poor, but rotten ratings. That was bad enough, but the girls were terribly embarrassed to see that one judge had written: “Don’t dress the part!”

Haley and Robin discussed spending the rest of the day in a supply closet, but decided the show had to go on. They became increasingly rattled. Robin forgot her character’s name, Goldie, at one point, and said to the ailing, confused Bertha/Haley: “It’s me, Bertha ---aaaaaaa?” trying to slide into a questioning inflection without anyone noticing.

In the next performance Haley simply dropped about four pages of script out of her consciousness, responding to Robin/Goldie’s query, “What was the name of that guy you knew?” with “Don’t tell ME to calm down!” Long pause. Robin adlibbed: “I . . . didn’t.” They batted miscellaneous lines back and forth until they found a section they both recognized, and lurched miserably through the rest of the scene.

Desperation set in. Having nothing to lose, the girls contemplated a more arresting introduction to their scene:

“Chicago.
1935.
A burnin’ summer night in the whorehouse.
Your crotch itchin’ like wildfire.
You reach for the cream.
There . . . is . . . NONE.
Hello. . . from Bertha.”

But somehow they knew it wouldn’t help. Like Bertha at the scene’s end, Haley and Robin accepted their fate.

I was not much better off, trying desperately to keep up with my simple, no-sweat fill-in judging job. I ran around the echoing high school, whipping into one classroom after another and plastering what I hoped was an interested look on my face, and listening to yet another speech on foreign policy or dramatic monologue about incest or losing the farm. I’d mark my assessment form, throw out some words of encouragement, and hurl myself out of the room toward the next session.

At one point in the early afternoon I was desperate for a break but already late for my next session. I flew into a bathroom cubicle intending to transform myself into a human tornado that would do everything I’d been needing to do since late morning in 30 seconds or less – sort of like Superman in the phone booth: pulling off my glasses, undoing clothes, finding makeup and hairbrush. I would enter mild-mannered, uncombed and stressed, but emerge refreshed and re-energized. Instead I popped my slacks button, dropped and shattered my compact, and flung my eyeglasses into the toilet where they slid quickly out of sight.

It is truly amazing how far a person can insert an arm into a toilet. For several panicky seconds I was sure I was really stuck and the fire department would have to rescue me. But the thought of the ensuing newspaper articles gave me desperate strength and I wrenched it free. I lathered and rinsed my arm furiously, and galloped off, late and ten times more disheveled than before, to the U.S. Senate competition.

It was a crestfallen little group that convened in the late afternoon. We huddled in a back corner of the auditorium watching the other students receive first, second, third place awards. Bertha and Goldie would have welcomed a fatal case of syphilis at this point, judging by the looks on their faces, and I didn’t feel much better. Was there an award for most disasters occurring to one family in an eight-hour period? How about Worst Choice of Scene by a Clueless But Well-Intentioned Mother? Or maybe the Porcelain Heart -- I was pretty sure I had hurt myself setting some world record with that toilet.

“Never mind, it’s just been a rotten day,” Haley consoled me. “Here, have a candy.”

It was a sour apple hard candy and tasted startling and great as it worked its way to the back of my mouth and superglued itself to my right rear crown. I took them both out of my mouth with a sense of horrible inevitability.

We did eventually reach home, and life went on. After recovering from a miserable flulike disease probably caused by unnatural communion with a public commode, I had the tooth repaired; sewed the button back on my pants; bought a new compact; and replaced my glasses (lying about how I lost the originals, though I bet it happens more than people admit). I also noticed that Haley and Robin seemed somehow older and more worldly-wise. Or maybe they just weren’t asking me for advice as much as they used to.