A Frog In Her Throat A Surge In Her Stride

Chinara & Afiriye

“Are you Canadian? You’re not American are you? You’re not from the states?”
“No, I’m from here. Actually not too far away from this neighborhood.”
“I heard you speaking English earlier and I thought ‘Who is this woman who sounds really American’?”
“I went to school there, twice. Once as a, a foreign exchange student, and then I went back for university.”
“Okay! That explains it.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yes hehe, you!”
“My dad’s from here. He died uh, recently and that’s why I, I came back. Oh, oh sorry. That’s uh... to personal. Too much too fast.”
“No, no. You’re fine. It’s just that I don’t know what to say when, when someone tells you that someone’s died. Just the standard,‘I’m sorry’, always seems like… it doesn’t help. Not at all. Then the other person is supposed to say, ‘Oh thanks’. See what I mean? Now I’m rambling, but I’m sorry. Sorry for your loss.”
“Uh…It doesn’t help, but it does, sometimes. In a way. It’s empathy or sympathy, I think. Sympathy. Anyway, change the subject. Are you an actress? Were you an actress? Is that why you’re in this class?”
“Huh. Tsch. Normally, I wouldn’t say this… it’s embarrassing but, but I always wanted to do it, but theater. I love theater, but in the end, and you know, African parents… I did the thing that kept my parent’s hair from turning grey, prematurely.”
“And… all this time you never stopped thinking about your acting?”
“Tsch. Well… I went to school like I was supposed to. I came back like I knew my parents would come and haul me off if I didn’t. I got a job. I did something else that kept my parents hair from turning grey instead of maybe doing something that would have. Then there were the three perfect grandchildren including, which still wasn’t enough. I got divorced. I continued to focus on work and, and my children, and now, now there’s time for frivolous, for frivolous things like acting classes.”
“And your parents?”
“I’m not sure if I’m ever gonna be old enough to tell them my secret, but if we do a production in the next class, I might invite them.”
“Ha ha. Do you think they’ll come?”
“Will they come? If I invite them they’ll be in the front row and they’ll be acting like they’re sportscasters giving each other play by plays during the performance much to the annoyance of the audience.”
“Hm. So they’ll finally support you?”
“They’ve always supported me when I’ve, ha ha, when I’ve had reasonable aspirations.”
“What you’re telling me now, it’s making me more and more curious about you, but actually we’re getting further and further away from what I was trying to ask you to begin with?”
“What were you, what did you want to ask me?”
“It was about your parents. The thing about the, the grey hair. Did it work?”
“Ha ha ha! I don’t think it did, but not because of me. I did everything they told me to do and by the time I finished, my father had gone grey and lost all of his hair, and my mother… she was already grey for years. Decades maybe.”
“Like mother like daughter?”
“Tsch. Yeah. I didn’t like it at first but, I didn’t want to dye my locks so the grey grew, and it grew on me and one day you wake up and you expect to see it when you look in the mirror. But enough about hair, I mean we can talk about hair later but now I wanna know about you? Have you been ever acted before? Is this your first, your first time or your first acting class?”
“I used to do the odd bit part for friends or friend’s of friend’s friends, here and there.”
“So you’re a seasoned veteran? Anytime someone downplays it like that, it means they’re almost a pro.”
“No…. I wouldn’t say that, but people love this face and this, this voice. I think I was born sounding like I had a frog stuck in my throat but, I just give the people what they want.”
“Haha, I be you do. I started listening to audiobooks a lot lately. You could definitely read for, for audiobooks.”
“Maybe you could be my agent, but how about next class I be your scene partner if you think I have such a good voice?”
“Mm… why not? But only because you have a good voice! I hope you have the talent to go with it though, and that you’re not one of those, one of those actors who has the voice but doesn’t really have the gift.”
“Ooh. Ooh. See how she doubts me papa?”
“I like that you still talk to him. It reminds me of, of things my father does.”
“I can’t stop talking to him. Even if I did, he’d find ways to talk to me. He finds ways to talk to me. I think that’s why I’m here. He was a great father but you know what? He was an incredible hoarder!”
“Ha ha ha ha! I’m sorry. I don’t know if I… Am I  allowed to, am I allowed to, to laugh? I’m imagining you surrounded by boxes. Boxes upon boxes…”
“It’s kind of like that. Like an old Donald Duck cartoon. I’ll tell you what though, sometimes after I break down in tears while going through his stuff… I, I just can’t help it I, I start laughing so hard, so hard my stomach hurts. How you get so much stuff? What does it mean? What does that say about you? And then I think about my mother. For years she would throw things away when he wasn’t looking and he would be, he would say, ‘Darling do you where my… electric blue tie with green eels on it went’, and she would just answer doing whatever she was doing, ‘No dear, I don’t’. But of course she knew what happened and he knew it was missing even though he couldn’t tell you where he left it.”
“So it’s just you? I mean your mother… no, no sisters and brothers?”
“Big brother’s dead. Baby sister’s dead. Mother died ten years ago. I’m the last of the, the hoarders.”
“Ha ha. So this is how you, how you let it all out? Community theater?”
“It’s just me and Querido, the, the dog. If I don’t do things like this, if I don’t have friends ready to beat the door down, I’ll just stay in that three rom apartment talking to papa, and developing even more bad habits.”
“So that dog sitting on the terrace in the back, the one who looks like she owns the place, that’s yours?”
“My dog… I have to get used to that, but yeah. Yes. Querido, that’s my dog now.”
“Where were you if I may ask, where were you acting with ‘that face’ and ‘that voice’, the frog in your throat, where did you act before?”
“It started with dancing. I was a dancer but I didn’t know that dancing was something that other people didn’t do, that other people went to school for. I just couldn’t stop dancing. I think like T Rex said, I danced out of the womb. I danced myself right out of the womb and my mother was probably dancing before she had me. And then I met a Polish guy on the street while I was dancing and waiting for a bus, and he convinced me that dancing was a thing. And I didn’t believe him at first. I thought, I told him I’m not a ballerina. This isn’t the United States where I could be on Solid Gold or Soul Train like on tv, and I’m definitely not an angel and a centerfold, but he was, he was convinced and he turned out to know what he was talking about, and because I trusted, I trusted life and I trusted him, he had me dancing all over the world. I would never do that again, even though it was the time. It wast ‘the time’. It’ll never be like that again, like it was when I was just a girl who grew up not too far from here. And sometimes other friends of mine and his, they wrote and I, I ended up in their productions, but like I said, bit parts.”
“That’s a… that’s amazing. It sounds like a story you hear about but no one actually lives. I was waiting for you to get to the bad part.”
“Oh trust me, so was I! It wasn’t about waiting but about watching and being careful but the whole thing, the whole thing was good from start to finish. I came into that world expecting nothing, knowing nothing, doing more than I, than I thought I could… and I left just as unceremoniously as I came. When I was done, I was done and there was never a, never really a bad part. Of course I lived off of canned soup sometimes, but that’s not, not really true. I lived of off of performing, I lived on the stage. I could and I still can, watch something two or three times and then, then it’s mine! I can do it. Now it’s a bit tricky to do everything, everything, but, I can still dance. When I stop dancing, then it’s really over.”
“So what aren’t you good at? What are your flaws? You can dance, you act, you’re, you’re so, so… I’m not gonna say it. You already know.”
“Hm?”
“Yes you do. You just want me to, you just want me to say it. Out loud.”
”What do I want you to say? I really am confused?”
”You know it. You know you’re beautiful!”
”You’ve found it!”
”What? I found what?”
”Now you know why I’m in this class? Why I need this course? I can’t act my way out of being embarrassed. Thank you though.”
”You made me say it! But is there, is there something that you’re not good at? I mean, prove to me that you’re just a mortal like everyone else.”
“Hmm. I’ll raise you my mortality and tell you I can sing too. I love singing just as much as dancing, and I play, one, two, five, seven instruments!”
“I was robbed.”
“Robbed of what?”
“All this time, I mean, I’m guessing we’re around the same age, all this time you were out there living my dream life, minus the canned food, doing all of the things I wanted to do. I mean I can’t carry a tune and, I have two left feet but if I could’ve been out there too. I would’ve been.”
“I wonder what it would have been like? To see you out there? I was usually the only one. The only one in Europe at least. And don’t knock the canned food life. You can, if you’re really creative, make canned food taste like you’re eating at a really fancy restaurant.”
“I’ll believe that when I, when I see it. The canned food is the only part that I’m not in love with from your story.”
“Maybe after we do a few scenes together, somewhere mid term, when the, the unhoarding of the house is halfway done, I… I could show you what I mean about canned food. Especially with some canned ravioli!”
“Ha ha ha ha. I don’t if that sounds… good or appetising.”
“The only reason why I could do it, why I could dance and travel around the world with Maciek was… it was because I knew no matter what, ravioli or, or goulash, that, that I had a place to come home to. I just thought… I just thought the old man would be talking my ears off just a little bit longer. Just a few more years.”
“Sigh. Here it goes, but , I’m sorry. I wish there was something more… more comforting to say.”
“Yeah well, that’s what we say when it, when it happens. We didn’t come up with that, so, so thanks.”
“So you and the Polish, the Polish man?”
“Oh no! No! Not at all! Not ever! Not my thing!”
“Really? No half Polish kid out there? No, no Russian or…”
“Please stop. You’re embarrassing me. Again. But no. I mean I was always really careful, very careful so I don’t think there’s anyone out there looking for me.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha! I bet you were really careful.”
“Are your children, are they here?”
“No. They’re not. They left. Australia, Haiti, and Denmark.”
“Damn. So you, you can’t even see them all at the same time?”
“Even if I could, they, they… I’ve never been mother of the year. Let’s put it that way. I feel lucky when I get a phone call every now and then, or when they answer on their birthdays. When they send me random messages that let me know that they haven’t fallen off of the face of the earth.”
“They’ll come around. I, I shouldn’t say that because I don’t know the situation and I can’t really speak for that… but, phew, I hope they’ll come around if not for your sake, for their own.”
“I hope so too. One day. Sometimes I, it really hits me that, that my parents were… they were a lot less phased by my, let’s say my decisions, my, me embracing that I could not do it anymore, but that I could leave. But my children, my children were the ones who had the biggest problem. I planned it all. I waited for the last one to leave and, and I made it a point to have a good relationship with their father. He’s remarried and together they have other kids he and his wife… but it, it didn’t matter. Ha! They, they hate me for doing it, for not being, ugh, I hate the “b word”. It definitely wasn’t like it is now. They hate me for, for having them and I wonder if at the same time they do realise that if I hadn’t met him, if I hadn’t married him, they wouldn’t be here. Sometimes when I think about it and it’s like a spell… a loop of thinking about the same things over and over and over, like when you think about something all day until you fall asleep, you just, you just can’t stop thinking… and I laugh and I, I think it’s possible to, to be angry at something that’s unreasonable and to find where it is reasonable. Because the anger, the anger is real. It’s valid because you feel it I guess. Phew. So now I feel like it was my turn to get too…”
“Like you said, like you said to me ‘You’re fine’.”
“I think this class is gonna be good for me. I think there’s a lot to explore and to try out and… that’s what I always wanted to do, to really learn acting as a, as a craft.”
“A friend told me about the theater, about this place and I couldn’t believe that it was a space run by Black people with productions written and performed by us, for us. I thought, ‘This city, this country, here on this continen’...”
“No, it’s the city. It’s just here. It’s just happening here. And it’s not just happening, they made it happened. They conjured it and insisted and fought until they won. I’m sure there still fighting and part of the work must be making it look like it’s been easy.”
“Oh I’m sure it’s not easy. I never had the chance to work with other people with backgrounds like ours. We were either pitted against each other, or I was, I was… it was just me. But this place. When my friend told me, I couldn’t believe it and I had to, I had to sign up. I knew it would get me out of the house and away from my father’s things, his mess. I knew… I hoped it would get me out of my head.”
“I’m glad it did. I’m… I’m glad we both found our way here. It’s gonna give us, something to look forward to and something to work on. That’s just what I need right now. It sounds like so do you.”
“Oh they’re turning out the lights.”
“Hey! That’s our cue. Ha ha.”
“Ha ha ha ha. Yeah, I think it is.”
“We’re being thrown out.”
“Not if we leave first.”
“Where do you live?”
“Mm. It’s not so far from here. Like, maybe twenty-five minutes away.”
“That’s far! Here? That’s far.”
“I always have good company. Mi perro.”
“Maybe I can walk with  you… a little? I guess it depends on which way you’re going.”
“Do you make a left at the corner or a right?”
“I cross and then I make a left.”
“Okay. That works for us too. Doesn’t it Querido?”
“It means dear right?”
“Yes, that’s what it means. We could… if you feel like it, we could get a drink in one of those places where you can bring your dog. Querido’s very calm, but he’s just large enough for people to think twice about him. It’s one of the things that I like about walking through the city with him.”
“Ooh, I want to, but could we do it another time? The Mrs. is waiting for me and she’s gonna want a play by play.”
“Well we better go our separate ways at the corner so you can give the Mrs. all of the highlights. Don’t forget to mention me!”
“Hm. Like I could? I have an idea. Why don’t you come over? We could all have a drink and, Querido, your little big dear is welcome. Aren’t you boy?”
“Are you, are you sure?”
“I should call her first, but, ah, she won’t mind. It’s just drinks and if you’re hungry, whatever she made for dinner. We can share the leftovers. I don’t like thinking about you eating ravioli all by yourself.”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021