Chapter 13 - Sally

Red Circle by Pablo Picasso (no blue eyelashes though)

For most of her young life, Sally Pope had been a struggling artist. She did not struggle with money, she had plenty, but with art. She knew that she wanted to be an artist but had difficulty finding a medium. She was not lazy or fickle or unfocused. It would be more accurate to say that she had a very strong, beautiful feeling in her head and she wanted only to be able to get it out, to make it physical, to substantiate it. This is probably not an uncommon phenomena. Sally herself thought she could recognize it in others. There was a rock singer whom she admired, and every album had one or two odd songs that on their own may have seemed like filler, like a B grade song. But all of them together felt like a desperate attempt to say one thing. That each of those songs might capture just a little bit of the song that is trapped in his head. She had a theory that Monet painted the same haystack over and over, not because he was experimenting with the way seasonal and daylight changes affected the scene but because each haystack painting contained something that was almost right. Unfortunately for Sally she had never had the luck of even being able to glimpse some substantiation of her idea.

This is evident in even the earliest artifacts of her childhood. There exists a collection of thirty-seven finger paintings, the powder paint flaking off, that Sally did in kindergarten, all some sort of variation of a red circle with blue "eyelashes" It is not immediately evident upon viewing these pieces that they contain the red circle with blue eyelashes because on most occasions the painting was so far away from Sally's idea of beauty that she obliterated the work with formless scribbles. They are very attractive formless scribbles, but formless none the less.

Christmas of her sixth year, she received the camera she had begged for. She had been allowed to take five pictures with the family camera on a field trip to a farm in the country. The adults praised her picture-taking skills and Sally was overcome with the hope that through photography she could find the thing that was missing. The camera was attached to her eye for three weeks before the thought occurred to her that when an adult praised a six-year-old's art, this did not mean that the art was any good or that said six-year-old had any talent, and the camera fell into disuse. When she was twenty-four, Sally came upon the five farm pictures and was surprised to find them to be of gallery quality.

The art forms progressed from there at a rate of about one per year. At seven she explored pottery; all red pots and blue handles. At eight decoupage, but she ran into copyright problems. At nine, textiles. At ten, sculpture. Eleven, dance. Twelve, music. Thirteen, poetry. Fourteen sculpture again. Fifteen, literature. Sixteen, at last, Drama.

Sally would be the first to admit her early plays were dreadful. Most of them centered around a hero or heroine who happened to be, or to be stuck inside, a red circle with blue eyelashes. This in itself was not the cause of the dreadfulness, however. Not that the plays weren't well-conceived, nor were they trite, or impossible to stage but Sally simply lacked any talent for writing dialogue. It seems likely that Sally would have given up trying to express her idea altogether at this point. It is possible, that upon realizing that she did not have an essential talent, after ten years marked by realizations that she did not have essential talents, Sally would have given up. She could have thrown herself into sports, or schoolwork or boys or romance novels. Or else she might have moved on to yet another art form, to fashion design or macramé. She, of course, did none of these things. Instead she got herself a fake I.D., quit her job at the art gallery, and enrolled in a college course entitled "The Art of Writing Dialogue." The class began with an in depth study of Plato's Dialogues, and then through all of the famous dialogues in drama, with the goal of trying to figure out what made them famous. This was not unhelpful to Sally and she felt that she was beginning to understand, and might have quite soon actually mastered the art of dialogue if the professor, suddenly called away to play Prospero on the West End, was not replaced by a young graduate student with the oddly paradoxical name of Oliver Fagin Thomas.

She fell in love with the way he lectured first. He did nothing but speak, there were no overhead projectors, no chalkboard, and no handouts. He would just stand in front of the class and speak, and not a memorized speech, or even a preplanned lesson, but he would simply tell the class things that were true and things that were memorable. Yet another amazing stroke of fortune lies in the fact that the original dialogue professor had stressed the importance to a student of dialogueology of always carrying a mini cassette recorder on his or her person. And to add to the fortune, of the thirty-six students who listened to the advice, seven of them had brought their recorders to class on Oliver's first day, two of whom had the presence of mind to record the lecture, and therefore audio of what was said on that day is available in stereo. However, being able to read a transcript of the lecture is also a valuable privilege, and therefore a selection is included here:

"You are here because you want to learn about dialogue. I know that you have studied for weeks now, and I'm sure that you can tell me a lot about dialogue, and unfortunately, being able to tell someone a lot about dialogue and actually being able to create good dialogue are almost mutually exclusive.

"Dialogue is words of course. What kind of a word is 'dialogue' though? I'll tell you this: it's a weird word. I almost could say that it is a stupid word, but not quite. 'Dialogue' is a hard word to spell, a hard word to pronounce if you haven't heard it. Those are not bad things. Most likely they're good things. If anyone ever tried to make all words easy to spell and easy to pronounce then we might as well be speaking Chinese.

That probably sounds offensive, but trust me it's not. Much can be said about the Chinese Language. Chinese would be a stupid language if it was like English, but thankfully it is not. Those of you who have taken linguistic classes are probably itching to tell me right now that there is no such thing as a stupid language, and I'll tell you that you forgot about French.

But we're talking about Chinese and how it would be stupid if it were English. By that I mean if they used a phonetic alphabet, and if they didn't have tones. The next time Chinese people are sitting next to you in the diner, listen to them. The language is not 'ching chang chong' at all. These people are singing all the time, and if they want to put a word on paper, they don’t' stick a bunch 'letters' together. Look at Chinese characters some time. Really look at them. After a few minutes they stop looking like someone tried to make waffles without enough batter and you'll realize that this is what words should look like.

Has anyone seen the Chinese character for dialogue? Someone out there learn how to draw the Chinese character for dialogue, come to class early and draw it on the board for me before next class."

Sally was that person. Actually she was one of a dozen people, but Sally got there first.