December 29, 2004

• Lights, Camera......

  
  

  The three kids at the center of my family's festivities this year seem to have received their full surfeit of surprise, delight, sustained enjoyment, and even that inevitable sprinkling of finger-tapping boredom (grown-ups' preparatory banter is excruiciating, wouldn't you agree?). 

  
  

  There was the usual stack of presents.  There was my mother's painstakingly hand-crafted and exquisitely detailed four-foot-high doll tree house ("How professional!" breathed my eldest).  There was the bushy evergreen hauled exuberantly in from the woods and hung with my youngest brother's annual labor of love:  tens and tens of homemade, carefully decorated cookies.  There were the evenings of challenge and laughter at my middle brother's latest games of strategy (I haven't tried the hand-made one with cups and letters yet myself, fearing my six-year-old nephew's mastery, but I did give "Puerto Rico" a try:  highest marks for that strategy-based high-skill board game).

  
  

  Then there was the modern-era chorus to that age-old song-and-dance, and it goes something like this:  "Kids, could you please move aside a little?  Your uncle's trying to get a shot of Poppy opening his present."

  
  

  My relatives are camera-mad (one moonlights as a not-so-amateur photographer, another's gifts include DVDs of his latest family vacation).  In many respects our holiday scene resembles the "making-of" disk in your latest favorite extended-version DVD.  Tripods, power cords, and preoccupied camerapersons litter the background.  Repetitious remarks include:

  
  

  "Okay, okay, don't sit with your back to the light!" 

  
  

  "Yeah, well I'm taping it too -- your way of imaging it is your story; mine differs."

  
  

  "Could all you just pause right there and look at the camera, please?"

  
  

  I never bring my own equipment to my family's events; not only would it be superfluous, it would leave very few actors actually on the stage.

  
  

  As someone who's whiled away more than a few leisure hours this holiday watching my own latest favorite "making-of," I know how addictive it is to see made-for-camera moments dissected and displayed in all their well-planned, carefully-executed parts.  I particularly like watching polished well-known actors off-camera and getting a feel for their real personas.  Or so I like to think, anyway.  Of course any good actor knows where the cameras are, and can certainly act like he's The Actor Who Plays the Hero, for the purposes of the Appendices.  Just like any self-respecting four-year old can mug and smile and coo and tilt a head to the side for the uncle's videocam.

  
  

  What is staged and what's real?  What candid and what edited? 

  
  

  Like me, do you ever (especially?) play to the audience, when you're alone and unfilmed and the house is empty? 

  • 8:01 am
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