LA Stage Blog - Beta

And so it began (two days ago): ten weeks of notorious “interning”. The early morning coffee making. Paper shredding. Envelope licking. Morning coffee making. Paperclip coiling. Foot rubbing. Afternoon coffee making. And worst of all, maintaining a smile the entire time. Even Cinderella’s woodland friends would have had their hands full

Having worked over vacation before, the idea of the utopian summer had already been pillaged and destroyed; I knew that, just like last summer, I would not be spending everyday by the pool fanned and fed by a team of satyrs. Oh, the good ‘ol days…

Friends of mine somehow landed wonderful summer jobs; this girl I know works at a drink lounge and gets paid $15 an hour to wear a cocktail dress and schmooze with guests. No hostess duties. No swabbing the decks. Just shmoooooooooooozing.

Naturally one would be jealous, especially in juxtaposing such a straightforward job description to the subtle complexities inherent to the word “intern”. I swear that if you were to look up “intern” in a thesaurus, for a fleeting second you might see “also: slave labor, groveling peon” before some magical hand of the industry/power complex wiped it away.

That is not to say I am afraid of work. Last summer I worked at a dude ranch in the mountains of Wyoming, a job description that included a fair share of horse manure. Yet my experience at the dude ranch was “work,” and I had heard loads of manure more about the treacheries of “interning”.

Yesterday, my first day, I miraculously survived a small disaster in the kitchen of my sublet. I was trying to get a leg-up on the competition by practicing my espresso skills at home with a budget café press- let’s just say that the French device’s instructions did not come in English. After changing my shirt and pants, icing my upper thigh, and suppressing my epicene hysteria, I ran to the bus stop.

First let me describe what a noble venture I was undertaking by choosing to ride the bus. I had driven my car 500 miles from Northern California to La La Land to ensure that I would be able to maneuver freely around the area. Welcome to Los Angeles: A sprawling metropolis that within its borders could contain Pittsburgh, Miami, Australia, and the entire ancient civilization of Atlantis. I drove from San Francisco to have a car in L.A. despite record gas prices because the L.A. Metro, or “America’s #1 Fleet”, is God’s wrathful revenge for the work done by the city’s zoning commission; using a bus in South Central is like fighting a SoCal wildfire with a spray bottle- not only terrifyingly futile, but you’d be a whole lot wiser to run and head for the Hills.

I caught the bus on time, but had to pay A FULL DOLLAR because I didn’t have change. Once again, it seemed as though the same malevolent power behind the thesaurus’ disappearing act was plucking the strings of fate with a hot poker, pulling me into its arms after stripping me bare of all possessions, maximizing the hardship of my destined journey into the intern abyss.

And then something surprising happened. After I found my seat, three people came up to me with angelic eyes and outstretched hands. They each gave me a quarter, having recognized that I had paid too much for my fare. When I reached the bus stop in front of the LA Stage Alliance offices, I was still in a mildly perplexed state. How had this city, this mass of single-story smog-ridden sprawl, shown me such an act of kindness? What would Paul Haggis say?

Sitting at my desk, I couldn’t help reflecting back on my experience on the bus. I realized that people really are attentive to and invested in each other. Somehow a collective human spirit exists that really hopes that its individual parts are equal to the power of the whole. My day in the office passed quickly due to, if anything, the lasting euphoria of my bus encounter. To be more specific, I found that this same gift on the bus was re-manifesting itself in the office- incredible supervisors, friendly fellow interns, discovering the importance of “doing”, having a strong sense of purpose and value, being given responsibilities that even my mother would not have put into my hands, etc. At the end of the day, I came to the conclusion that spending one’s summer interning is ideal. To intern is to find oneself neither in Paradiso nor Inferno. Instead, one finds his or herself somewhere in the middle, transmogrified into a giant sponge readied to absorb a full days worth of freshly brewed life experience. I look forward to the rest of my time as an intern in the same way I look forward to scale sets on a piano or make-out sessions with an apple- it is practice that bears perfection.

While I would like to say that in two days I already earned a really cool nickname, or helped redesign the workflow of the entire organization, it would be expecting too much. I can say, however, that I am already learning invaluable skill-sets that could one day lead to such ends. In the meantime, I plan to stick with the day-to-day practice: the stamp sticking, mail sorting, and coffee-making-nine-to-five that I am lucky to behold this summer.