Elayne Riggs: Beyond Fifteen Minutes
At my age (insert obligatory "hey you kids, get out of my store!, what do you think this is, a reading room?" here) the blasts from the past seem to blow with ever increasing frequency and velocity. I’m used to various elements of my past circling back on me, as my forays into pop culture hobbies always seem to result in intersecting circles of friends and acquaintances. A number of the same people who used to write for a zine I self-published twenty years ago probably (like me) have their own weblogs now, in an era where self-expression means you no longer have to spend a single cent to get your writing out to potentially millions of readers every day.
And yet, the more things around us seem to update and lurch into fast-forward, the more familiar they seem to me. No substantial difference, really, between passing around handwritten story pages to classmates or cranking out apazines or posting on message boards or blogging. It’s all one-to-many conversation, it’s all storytelling and essay-writing, it just comes down to a matter of scale and audience. The big difference is that nowadays, thanks to online archives and search engines, our stories are no longer so easily lost.
Back in a previous life I was a very struggling actor in Chicago. One summer I was working with a small troupe that, among other things, did children’s plays outdoors and in various venues. This particular show we were doing was called Wiley and the Hairy Man, based upon a children’s book. I played the Hairy Man – a swamp-man/boogeyman – and, while I kept getting chased offstage by the Wiley in the title, my character kept sneaking back in. It was not a part of particular subtlety but it did require some finesse. I was the monster in a children’s play which meant I couldn’t be too scary; just enough to produce the tinglies and a lot of laughs.
