“The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back.” – Carl Sandburg
The above from Carl Sandburg was given to me at age eighteen as an assignment – memorize this – from the theatre department at the university I’d entered in the fall of 1977. Ok, I can do that. Easy-peasy. We were gathered on the stage, all 100 or so of us Freshmen and women, to do the poem as a group, with our future instructors, with the Artistic Director of the theatre and theatre program, and it was – different. Did we add motion; I think we did, robotic jerks and starts? Mebbe. All I remember feeling was way out of my depth, plus the giggles because we started with breathing and relaxation exercises and the old guy (the A.D.) was grunting like a stuck pig, as were a number of my extremely enthused peers. Ok. I can do this. I guess.
If the message was ‘we’re all in this together’, which I had hoped it would be, it was soon made clear that was not the point – although, even all these years later, I’m not sure what the point of the poem, and our stomping around like robots, was. Go with the flow, remain open and curious, swim with the other fishies, and maybe, maybe the sharks won’t get’cha, perhaps? There were a lot of girls in tights and leg warmers. Good GAWD, leg warmers. There were a few men, not nearly enough, also in leg warmers and sweats, and I hung around the periphery trying not to stand out, but also trying not to fade into invisibility.
This was not, and these folks were not really ‘my tribe’, but I stuck with it, and them, making my way through the process of getting out of the house, into college and then – bam! – out into the wider world as had been prescribed and laid out before me since childhood. Step A, step B, step C. Did they prepare me for a career in the professional theatre? Meh. Not really. Did I learn something, and get a chance to grow up? Yes, I did, even if the growing up part took many more years. The breathing and relaxation exercises that made me giggle? Now those, those were helpful.
“The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back.”