Heart of Glass

Heart of Glass Read Free Page A

Book: Heart of Glass Read Free
Author: Wendy Lawless
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Avenue for the brief period of their marriage and its aftermath. Then, fleeing ghosts of boyfriends, husbands, and lovers past and present, my mother essentially kidnapped my sister and me and took us to London. I didn’t see my father or hear from or of him for ten years. We’d had a brief reunion just before my final fight with my mother, where I’d learned of her deception. While I had a strong emotional connection with my father, I had only spent three days with him out of the last three thousand six hundred or so. His house and second family didn’t at this point qualify as “home.”
    So for me, a theater, any theater, had become over the years a stand-in for home—a kind of sanctuary where I could invoke happier times. I had wound up in this one at NYU by accident, in a way, after my original career choice—acting—hadn’t worked out.
    I had wanted to go to theater school, but none of the schools I auditioned for would have me. Crushed, and lacking any kind of guidance, I spent a miserable year and a half at Boston University, studying whatever, just trying to get to my classes while what was left of my home life imploded: My little sister, Robin, became a runaway, my mother was arrested after drunkenly crashing Robin’s high school graduation (literally, with her car), and I wrestled Mother into AA. When my sister escaped to college far away in the Midwest, I dropped out of BU and moved back home to babysit my crazy mom. I took a job working at a newsstand in Harvard Square, but missing the theater desperately, I lucked into a position at the American Rep, where I met Michael. He encouraged me to start taking photographs—even bought me a used Olympic SLR. Those pictures had gotten me into film school. The logic of it was loopy and half-assed, but, amazingly, it ended up being my ticket out of town and my mother’s life.
    I figured that if acting wasn’t going to work out, perhaps I could find a way to be a filmmaker. Movies appealed to me the way the theater did—they were an escape, a journey to a different place where you could try on someone else’s life for a few hours. But they also spoke to me in a language all their own—a collage of images, cuts, and focuses that I had always understood. My childhood had been a long series of changing locations, casts of characters, and dramatically shifting emotional levels. Movies gave me a way to see my world that made sense. When you grow up privy to conversations about infidelity, drugs, drinking, love, greed, and hatred in language you’re too young to understand, it’s the pictures that tell you the story. The packed suitcase in the foyer tells you all you need to know about the end of Mother’s most recent fight with your stepfather.
    The lights went down, and the musty-looking black curtains slowly creaked back, revealing the screen. In the dark, I heard the other students coughing, making hissing shush noises, and opening binder notebooks. The clacking whir of the projector started up in the booth. I popped the lid off my coffee and opened the wax paper wrapped around my still-warm bagel. The film was Antonioni’s 1966 Blow-Up , the story of a bad-boy fashion photographer in London who discovers he has inadvertently taken pictures of a murder while strolling through a park. I liked the film’s self-­conscious beauty and expected it to be murder mystery, but then it evolved into a treatise on perception and reality. The hero, played by David Hemmings, has no concern or understanding for the world that surrounds him. Because he lives in a world of surfaces, where sex, love, and death are meaningless, he has difficulty discerning what’s real and what isn’t. It also has an amazing sound track by Herbie Hancock.
    After school I walked home, thinking about how lost all the characters in the film were. They were numb with boredom and unhappiness, but at least they got to do

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