Ponderings at the Salon: Finding Ophelia

  I have always been about authenticity, or at least about trying to find authenticity--of experience, of character.  Ok, so maybe people look at my bleached and toned hair, and my love of makeup, particularly the red lipstick, and wonder how they fit into this authentic landscape of which I write, but as Dolly Parton has said, “I might look artificial, but where it counts I’m real.”  

This quest for authenticity lead me to writing a play where the two main characters, if I'm honest with myself, are essentially my personality split into two people—one representing my inner self and one representing my outer self.  I played with the idea of the inner and outer self to prove once and for all that I do in fact have a filter.  Some of my friends have challenged me on this, but well, here we are. I also wanted to do more of an exploration on Gen X and what drives us. Often it feels like once Reality Bites came out Gen X was dismissed and forgotten. To point out a very Gen X continuing tech issue for example: as I am writing this, I am consciously thinking about how I should no longer double space after a sentence. 

Even though the characters represented elements of myself, I wanted to give them their own memories.  Maybe I could give them some memories close to my own.  After all, the characters were based on me, so why not?  One such memory I wanted to use was regarding my first impression of the Chateau-Sur-Mer in Newport, Rhode Island. When I was a child, my parents brought my brother and I to Newport.  Of all the mansions and all the sites, it was the Chateau-Sur-Mer that really stuck out in my memory from this vacation.  I had this memory of walking through a hallway and seeing a doorway.  When I looked into the doorway, I saw a beautiful study with books lining the walls, with the back wall having a big fireplace and hidden passageways on the side of the fireplace.  In the center of the room was a beautiful desk.  Somehow I wanted this memory to be significant to my character.  She learned something about herself and what she wanted from life in this room.  The truth was, it was important to me.  That room was about the life I strove for—one of knowledge and mystery.  Austerity and intrigue, maybe slightly ostentatious.

I wrote my play, and was happy with it, but I didn’t feel like the story was done for my character.  Specifically, I fell in love with the boldness of my character, Ophelia,  created from a dramatic version of my inner voice.  Would I write another play with her?  A Novella?  Maybe a full novel?  I had given my character life and I wasn’t ready for her to die.  I wasn’t willing to let her go.  I wanted more for her.  And so I started exploring where else to go with her story.

Before I could explore her future, I wanted to flesh out her past. To do that I wanted to bring the memory of the Chateau-Sur-Mer that I had given my character into what I wrote.  This meant I needed more than just the hazy memory of the child I was the last time I saw the mansion. As previously mentioned, I strive for authenticity. To authentically depict the touring experience, I needed to go back to the source of the memory and experience the mansion again.

Experiencing of course meant revisiting. Specifically, I wanted to get in a tour, as I remembered seeing it the first time as part of a group tour. And when I wanted to do this we were in the middle of a pandemic.  So before driving out to Rhode Island, which due to the general overall belief of non locals seeing R.I. as a place of leisure and escape, meant that it seemed forever to be in the red  “no fly zone” area of the country. A formidable covid risk.  So I decided to look up pictures of the Chateau online.  I found the room that must have been my beloved study, but it was different than I remembered it.  Some aspects were the same or close to how I remembered it, but the overall appearance of the room was different.  Was I looking at the right room? Maybe there was another one?  

Things eked opened again and I drove down to Newport with one of my best friends.  The Chateau was closed on that day, but it was open certain days of the week for tours.  I went back another day with my mother so I could do one.  There weren’t actually any tours going around—by tour I mean you could go around by yourself with a paper explaining what you were looking at. Mom and I masked up and went in.  I couldn’t even find the HALL that I remembered in my memory.  The Chateau has that old construction that is essentially one room going into another room without any real “halls” except in the servants’ area.  The study was wide open.  With a window.  It was only dark due to the darkness of the wood and drapes.  It had the book shelves in the actual walls, but they didn’t line the whole room.  The desk was in the center, but it was much more open than the room of my memories.  And that is when I realized the truth of it—the room of my memories, the room that I loved and put my idea of life and inspiration into, didn’t even exist anywhere but in my mind.

Recently I started reading John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed and I was particularly struck by the essay on scratch and sniff stickers.  Well, I love the whole book actually, and it speaks to my Gen X heart greatly.  But in this particular essay, Green writes about scratch and sniff stickers not being the actual smell but a chemical version that acts as a reminder. Banana smell on scratch and sniff stickers is a strange pungent, weird, chemical version of banana.  The watermelon ones always drove me crazy because—NO. But the question is that, in the future, maybe a time when those things no longer exist, or have changed due to our ever changing world, will people believe that how these scratch and sniff stickers smell is how their representations actually smelled?  I loved when Green said that what the scratch and sniff stickers really smell like, when he takes them out now, is childhood.  I have to agree.

The scratch and sniff stickers are memory of those smells rendered chemically.  Much like our memories are our perception of a moment, actual incidents rendered through the filter of the person we were at the time.  Our perception of these things later, then only adds  an additional layer of interpretation. 

So like my beloved Chateau study, do those yesterdays we wish were still here only ever exist in our memories?