“Where are my writer glasses!” I puff, having ill-advisedly tried to run up the stairs. “Where are they!”
“And which would they be, exactly?” asks my husband.
“The ones you hate, the Dame Ednas.”
“And what’s wrong with the ones on your face?”
What is wrong with them is they may give the impression I am not a serious playwright. It is rehearsal night for two of the key characters in my new play ‘Friller’ and I don’t look even remotely artistic in my sensible Silhouettes. Why would anyone take me seriously? Granted, the Writer’s Glasses (aka ‘Ednas’) do make me look a bit like those women in Gary Larson ‘Far Side’ cartoons but that is at least a comedy resemblance.
I used to live in Crouch End in North London so I know what kind of glasses are needed in order to look arty and important. And until I can stop flinching and screaming and making the optician drop the contact lenses, I am stuck wearing specs.
Jenny Eclair is, of course, the poster girl for fabulous frames and the WOW Festival was thick with statement black glasses and red lipstick. Unlike Jenny, I can’t wear red lipstick without making people spill their tea because they think the room has suddenly gone all ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’.
I bought the Ednas online. The website didn’t call them that. No, the site implied they would make me look all sexy 1950s siren from ‘Mad Men’ but it’d take more than a bit of plastic and glass to pull that off.
Anyway, I arrived at the rehearsals space on Monday feeling hot and bothered and fake.
Then the director Adam arrived and I started to feel better. He really does know what he’s doing and radiates infectious confidence and competence and encouragement. A really wonderful and quite moving thing happened next. I watched enormously talented actresses bring my writing to life. Right there in front of me my characters left my page and became flesh and blood. We were all grinning and there was a kind of energy in the room that was new to me. Finally I started to hear the people telling me it was a cracking play. It is funny and it is going to Haworth Festival and next year, Edinburgh.
I really am a playwright, even in my boring specs.
You have to ask yourself – for the millionth time – why women often feel like this. Why are we convinced we are not worthy of joining the party, convinced we’re about to be ‘found out’, convinced we are getting a bit above ourselves? Looking at it objectively for a minute I have written successfully for readerships in, quite literally, the millions in a long career as a journalist and…
Stop! And there we have it. I just spent a full minute deciding whether or not to delete that last sentence as it looked a bit like showing off. It’s not showing off, it’s just a fact. It feels like setting myself up to be knocked down but here’s the thing, no-one is trying to knock me down. Very talented and generous people are joining me in doing this thing. All this needy cringing is coming from me and it’s going to stop.
It’s William Blake’s crippling ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ again. So I think it’s time to start enjoying myself – even though comedy is not a matter of life or death.
Unlike footy, it’s much more important than that.
