Sums up how I feel about meeting my life partner, Andy, almost five years before the day I recorded this. From the Broadway musical On The Town, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Green.
I posted this almost a year ago on our family blog via Flickr (no closed-captions), and at the time, I was critical of my own performance. Now, I just enjoy it. I hope you do, too.
A lot has happened since I last wrote a blog post, but this post is about how I interpreted my first Shakespeare play.
I had been preparing to interpret The Merchant of Venice for the Southwest Shakespeare Company at the Mesa Arts Center since early March, but after I presented my workshop at the Arizona RID State Conference at the end of March, I got to work on Merchant in ernest.
My co-interpreter, Sandra Solomon, who had already interpreted four shows for SW Shakespeare Co., met with me several times to rehearse interpreting the show. We corresponded with Missy Keast, our ASL Producer, via e-mail and met with her over videoconference to show her some of our interpreting and get her feedback, which was very beneficial. (Sandra came to my house and we sat together in front of my iMac with built-in iSight camera and used iChat to connect to Missy in Hawaii, since she also has a Mac with built in iSight and iChat. I only wish we’d been able to do this more than once.)
In addition to meeting a few times at each other’s homes to discuss the play and rehearse, Sandra and I interpreted four performances of the show at the Mesa Arts Center before actually interpreting it for an ASL audience on Saturday, April 18 at 2 PM. There were about a dozen people who came to the show specifically to see us, so that was a good turnout. I only wish there had been deaf people in the audience, but as much as I got the word out, there were none.
How did I get the word out, you ask? Well, in quite a few ways: Sandra & I each brought fliers to our respective workplaces at Sorenson VRS and Purple Communications. We also left them on the Arizona RID table at the Arizona RID Conference. I gave a stack of fliers to Robin Dragoo, the president of Arizona RID, and he put them on the Arizona RID table at the DeafNation Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center. In addition to that, I created an event on Facebook to publicize the interpreted performance and invite all the deaf people I know who live locally and are on Facebook, but alas, none of those people came. Still, about a dozen people came to see us perform our interpretations, and several of them were ASL interpreters who will no doubt benefit from our work and use it to inform their own theatrical interpreting, which will in turn benefit other audiences.
I strongly believe there is a positive ripple effect in this that is a good thing for the community as a whole– for the hearing world to see that SW Shakespeare offers interpreted performances, for local deaf people to see that it was available (and maybe they’ll come another time?), and for local interpreters to add to their professional development by interpreting (in our case) or watching (in the case of our colleagues) an ASL-interpreted Shakespeare play.
I know, for myself, that interpreting Shakespeare forced me to work on conveying meaning while dropping form. Let’s just say that I am proud of all the words I didn’t sign. It was a pleasure to be able to convey Shakespeare’s language in a way that was understandable yet retained a touch of his creative spark.
I wrote the other day Am I a winner… or a loser? I wasn’t really asking the world; I was asking myself.
Yesterday morning, I felt rather down about my lack of success in the corporate world, and I put out a call for positive strokes on Twitter and Facebook. They both said, “I’m feeling down, and I need to believe in myself today. Please tell me something you admire about me. I’ll do the same for you.” (Actually, the update on Facebook began, “Daniel is feeling down…” and the rest I kept in the first person.)
I really did feel the need for positive strokes, yet I also thought it would be an interesting experiment in comparing my current self-and-other presence on Twitter and Facebook. The result was that I got more responses on Facebook. This isn’t altogether surprising, since I have more friends on Facebook and it seems to be popular with a larger audience than the geek-and-early-adopter crowd on Twitter. Of course, there could be other reasons for this result that I can’t divine. Anyway, here’s what some of my supporters said:
I am sincerely grateful for these strokes, and even for the non-stroke advice to stroke myself (that came out wrong). They’re all right, of course. 
Including the friend who said, so wisely, “Believing in yourself will only only work if you find your own reasons for admiring your own inner qualities.”
What continues to puzzle me as I go through life is the enthusiastic feedback I’ve received from friends and colleagues yet the continued rejection I’ve received at commercial auditions (when I was eight and again when I was 37), the fact that I was rejected by all four SAG-franchised commercial talent agencies in the Phoenix Metro area when I moved here four years ago, and the five promotions I’ve been passed over for in the past three years. It has always seemed that whatever charisma I have, and whatever makes me “a wonderful person” doesn’t translate to commercial or corporate success.
So, I’m left with these questions:
There are people who love me in this world, and yet it’s not enough. I hate the sound of even saying that. Why is it that when I have a husband and two dogs clamoring for my attention, I am clamoring for the attention of “the world”? Why is it that when the people who love me tell me I’m great, I let “the world” make me feel small? When is it all going to be enough? When am I going to be enough? Perhaps when I feel that I am enough, and when I really “get it” that I am lovable, the commercial and corporate world will fall in line.
What do you think of all this? How do you define success?
