Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Dinky Episode 10: Driving


STEPHEN FALA: I’m Stephen Fala, and you’re listening to Pipe and Drape, the only podcast that spotlights the creative minds behind the Theatre For Young Audiences industry.

[The Dinky Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

Get in the car and cue up the tape player, we’re going on a drive. The summer is heating up so it’s time for a road trip, in this Dinky episode I’m talking about getting behind the wheel. Thank you for listening today!

[The chorus of "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers plays.]

When I was three years old my dad would put on this Proclaimers cassette tape as we ran errands. The mainline town rushed by and I called out the names of cars I saw, identifying the make and model of vehicles by the shape of their logos. I wanted to drive one. Around the same time my mom took me to see a production of The Nutcracker, and something about that experience ignited my desire to peruse theatre.

I spent the end of my toddler years drawing cars and Mother Ginger dresses everywhere, in a very specific way that would give me this particular magical feeling. It was the seed of the dream about the day I could step on the gas and drive to rehearsal for a play. 

[Guitar strum.]

It’s arguable if I can count my kindergarten production of The Three Piggy Opera as my first play ever. I hardly remember it, and there was probably a lot of hand holding from teachers and assistants along the way, but I was on stage performing a story with a beginning, middle, and end for an audience—so I’m going to say it was my first play. And then my family moved to an arts-saturated neighborhood filled with classes for me to take and roads that I could drive a little bit, sort of. My legs were too short to hit the pedals, but my parents held me on their lap to steer down our street while they lightly pressed the gas. I wasn’t driving, but I was?

[Guitar strum.]

I spent the next years studying—learning the literal and figurative rules of the road. I was watched over in acting, art, dance and music classes; I studied the PennDOT handbook. It was the learners permit era: the cringe years of making mistakes and taking criticism while performing in high school theatre and driving with my parents’s guidance from the passenger seat—navigating a new vehicle and learning the rules of the road. I got my license, I graduated high school, and then I was driving myself to rehearsals for shows at theatres that paid me. Hey, three year old Stephen—we did it.

[Guitar strum.]

Of course, that didn’t stop me from learning. I got a degree in theatre while picking up skills to use in the industry; I earned a certificate in driver safety while learning to maneuver a twelve passenger van. Higher education is usually not a requirement for the performing arts or driving, but for me they were very helpful and I wanted learn, and both were incredibly important in my ten years as a theatre for young audiences performer. Most TYA tours require actors to drive their equipment and company members from venue to venue from sea to shining sea. Or from Southeast Pennsylvania to the Gulf of Mexico. Each state has different rules for the road in the same way each theatre has different rules of operation, and these were things that I didn’t learn from any of my certificate programs, I just picked them up because I had to! Rather than pursuing a long-term goal of completing programs and earning certificates, I was using my tools to achieve my daily goal of bring theatre to kids and learning along the way.
A journey like this this means navigating the hard stuff on the road. The mornings are early, the weather can be nasty, drivers can be unhinged, there will be long, late drives. But this is part of it. It won’t always be sunny.

As a traveling TYA performer I was equipped with the coffee to get me through the morning, tires to keep me on the road through the storm, headlights to guide me through the night, and a radio to tune out the madness from the drivers in New Jersey. The one thing that no one can give you is the drive to do it. You have to want to get to where you’re going. If you don’t want to get behind the wheel early in the morning or drive through the storm or deal with the reckless drivers or navigate the night then you’re on the wrong road trip.

I love driving, I love seeing the world, and feeling in control of where I’m going. That’s why I thrived in the early days of touring. I had a long, uncharted road ahead of me. The the longer you drive, the farther you go. You’ll find that the highway gets wider, the vehicle grows bigger, the destinations more recognizable, and other voices become louder. And after a few miles on my journey, the music coming through the car speakers could not drown out external commentary. With this industry, everyone has something to say about everything, and every move is under a microscope. 

After years of commentary, it became a lot for me to get behind the wheel. It got to the point where even when I was alone I was calling myself out of every misstep and and missed opportunity. I was driven by fear the consequences of saying no and I feared the consequences of saying yes to what I felt was right, because if I made a mistake I would never hear the end of it. I was backseat driving myself, and people saw this as an invitation to climb on board. I followed the commands and listened to the critiques and apologized to the backseat drivers just to keep the peace for fear that I would be seen as aggressive or difficult or unhirable. I witnessed situations get out of hand and I did not want to risk burning a bridge, so would have rather swallowed the tension in the van. To an outsider on the road, it looked like I as in control. I looked responsible, I was behind the wheel, but I allowed other people to dictate what I should do and how I should do it. So who’s really driving?

I’ve been thinking a lot about where I’ve been and how I got to where I am now, and I ended up reevaluated something that happened to me on one of my tours.

I was the designated driver often since I didn’t like to drink the night before performances, and one of those times, we were rear-ended at a red light. My cast was fine; the company car was totaled. I had never been so much as pulled over before, so the scariest thing for me in that moment was when I rolled down the window to speak to the police officer. He noted immediately that it smelled like beer and asked me if I had been drinking, I hadn’t. I was so worried I was going to be breathalyzed because one time at my aunt’s house we were passing around a breathalyzer to see what we would blow. And though I was twelve, the mechanism dictated that I was intoxicated. So in that moment I thought “this is it, this is how I get a DUI, fired, and somehow blamed for being rear ended by a  larger vehicle at a stop light.” I wasn’t breathalysed, but the literal blow of the situation started to set in. As I fought off the awful feeling that you get when you’re in a car accident, I got some feedback. Someone who wasn’t in the vehicle noted that if I had the foresight, I could have put the car into neutral to soften the impact of the vehicle behind me. If I had the foresight of getting rear-ended by the truck behind me that suddenly floored the gas, and put my car into neutral, it wouldn’t have been totaled. What. Now that I look back, if I could see into the future like Raven and had I shifted gears, we would have rolled into the intersection and been hit from the side. 

No matter what decision you make, individuals who are not present, not capable, and not you will share their voice because they feel the need to be heard for whatever unrelated reason. Those with the least experience behind the wheel love to tell others how to drive. There will always be someone without their license telling you when to change lanes. I’m learning to embrace the fact that I, the driver of this vehicle, can see things that others can not. 

[Instrumental of "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers plays.]

I’m learning that the bridges I feared burning were never mine to cross in the first place. I'm not going that way. And I’m learning to remember the magic that I felt as a kid drawing and dreaming of miles on the highway and fantasies on the boards. 

I'm on the right road trip, I've got the keys.

This dinky episode of Pipe and Drape was driven by me, Stephen Fala and distributed by Anchor. The Pipe and Drape logo was created by Stephen Gordon and the theme music was composed by me, Stephen Fala. This episode also  featured selections from the 1988 song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” from the album Sunshine on Leith by The Proclaimers.
If you would like to share your pipe and drape story, send me an email at PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com or message me @PipeAndDrapeStories Instagram. And before you put down your device, please rate and review Pipe and Drape wherever you listen to podcasts! Each star given or review submitted helps future listeners find the show. Be sure to tune in every other Tuesday to hear theatre for young audiences creatives share their pipe and drape stories. Thank you for listening today.  

[The chorus of "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers plays.]

Music from this episode: "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" - Sunshine on Leith by The Proclaimers

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