One of our writing students, Elliot Rosenberg, wrote the following in a class with Mopsy Strange-Kennedy, and was kind enough to share it with us!
Muse Mopsy
by Elliot Rosenberg
Try It. You Will Like It.
The Cambridge Center for Adult Education (CCAE)We all live in a huge glass house cheek to jowl among strangers. We are invisible out there. No one really sees us or listens to us in the real world. Which is good for us and the world up to a point.
In the Writing and Acting classes at CCAE , the cameras are rolling. That’s why we are here. To try out for different roles. To try on different masks. With teachers to validate us. Our break ins. Our break outs. Our breakthroughs. If for only a moment.
No matter the follies our flesh and blood are heir to, we can tell things about ourselves in a way that disarms our enemies within and parries and muffles the infinite life and death inflicted blows without.
At home, at work, in our dreams, we have our dependable ‘must play’ roles, but here it is safe to experiment, reveal our feelings about the unsung parts of our existence, play at new roles.
Even when the script is not ours, we are attentive to each other. Sometimes we do cross one another’s lines, but we do not often misconstrue what we hear about each other. Otherwise, excommunication could quickly follow and we might depart our CCAE bubble, our garden of tranquility, banished back to real life.
As Peggy Atwood says in The Blind Assassin, p 329, “If you get hungry enough they say you start eating your own heart.” It is like that with our minds, too. In life in the streets, Hamlet style, we think too much, feel too much, see too much, sans friendly ears, sans understandings eyes, sans kind but honest words.
Here at CCAE we are treated to attentive ears and shoulders for us to cry on. Here we harbor no grudges. Here we stake out no territory. We are usually ready when called upon.
Action! Camera! My turn?
