Am I the 99 Percent?

I happened upon an episode of I Love Lucy yesterday afternoon while I was folding laundry. In it, Lucy finds herself frustrated by her banker, Mr. Mooney, who won’t lend her $50 because her credit is bad. He suggests, “If you can show me that you can save $25, then I will lend you $50.” She takes him up on it. “When have you ever saved $25?” Ethel asks her. “Just because I’ve never done it before . . . ” Lucy replies. Thankfully, hi-jinks ensue and Lucy accidentally locks herself in the bank vault with Meanie Mooney for the night; as she is the only one with food (uncooked pasta), she is able to extort the $50 she needs . Comedy!

On November 2, the 99% will “liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%,” it was decided by 1,484 protesters at the Occupy Oakland General Assembly for a city of 400,000 (decided, in other words, by the .3%). By calling for a general strike, they are really trying to shut down 100%, but they’re targeting the villains of 2011′s 19th-century melodrama: “All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them.”

Despite my childhood adoration of Disney’s adaptation of the Robin Hood myth, I have been struggling with all of this. When my associate came into the office carrying an Occupy poster (having stopped off momentarily on her way to work), my audible groan prompted one of the many truly riveting conversations we’ve had about politics and social programming this past year. She plays the role of the fierce and passionate liberal while I play the wary moderate. Distilled, our debates look like this: “Dan, things are really bad and need to change!” “But how will you make it work given the limited resources of our country?” In the case of the Occupy movement, she’s made a valiant effort to educate me on the importance and power of symbolism, but I continue to get hung up two questions: Whom are the protesters against exactly? What do the protesters actually want to have happen?

The difficulty is, of course, when your movement is attempting to speak for 693 million people (today, ± six months, planet earth’s homo sapien sapien population will reach seven billion), there are bound to be any number of goals. “Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions,” explains occupywallst.org. So what unites them? “The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.”

Lucy will no longer tolerate the greed of Meanie Mooney. We stand behind her when we laugh at this man wracked with hunger pangs. He had it coming. He was depriving money from our protagonist.

While fiscally (which is the measure they’re using, right?) I’m not one of the 1% of households that have 38.3% of all privately held stock, 60.6% of financial securities, and 62.4% of business equity (nor am I even close to the top 10% that in effect “owns the United States of America” by possessing  80% to 90% of stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate), do I fit into the narrative of the 99? Have I suffered enough under the tyranny of a broken system to qualify? “We are the 99 percent,” the We Are the 99 Percent website explains. “We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.” What percentage of the 99% actually looks like this truly tragic figure?

Having never been able to afford a house from which to be kicked and currently employed, I don’t fit into this definition. Moreover, while we’re defining terms, I am reluctant to believe that everyone who lives in the 1% got there by greed (which, while a cardinal sin, is not illegal) and corruption. As someone who works in nonprofit arts, my industry is dependent on the generosity of those with money.

Batman is the 1%. Occupy Gotham would be camped out in front of Wayne Enterprises. Why should this billionaire playboy enjoy the unearned wealth his parents and grandparents accumulated while those in the Narrows are suffering? Rather than spending all his money on gear to go in that nifty utility belt, maybe he should just pay more in taxes. Maybe then the city could pay their police force more so their cops don’t have to take bribes to feed their families. Maybe then the schools would be better, and kids would not see gang life as their only option. Of course, we wouldn’t have Batman . . . but would we need him? We’d still have the video game.

Green Arrow, “liberal politician and billionaire Oliver Queen, a hot-headed social activist and owner of Queen Industries,”  is also, financially speaking, in the 1%. But he is also the modern day Robin Hood and DC’s voice of progressive politics. Will Occupy Star City march on him? Where is the line drawn, and who draws it?

On Wednesday, the Triangle Lab will Occupy Theater at Occupy Oakland. In the spirit of the movement, they are having an open call for performers: “Performances will be on the street, brief, unamplified,  and various; based on tweets, videos, and other stories coming out of the Occupy movement, responding, specifically, to one of these three prompts: 1. Whose story do you most want to share? 2. What would you like to hear the crowd chanting? What would the world look like if it belonged to the 99%?” Undeniably, there are many stories to tell, and I am excited that purposeful theater will fuse with politics (as opposed the theatricality that is inherently a part of politics). But it’s interesting, this last question. What would the world look like if it belonged to the the 99%? When Lucy finds herself in a position of power (as one who possesses what another desires), she exploits someone’s suffering to increase her wealth. Are you more benevolent than Lucy? Or, when given the opportunity, will a member of the 99% become the one of the 1%?

“Why will YOU occupy?” the We Are the 99 website asks. My wife and I look at many of our coupled friends who are “making it” around here and note how they have smartly paired off artist and provider—the dramaturg whose spouse works at Google, the director who’s married to the banker (do we hiss?), the playwright whose boyfriend owns a condo in a high-rise downtown—then we look at each other, artist to artist, and sigh, “Remember 10 years ago when you were going to be a doctor?” Bay Area rents are climbing. Yesterday I investigated the cost of an open lot and the legality of living in a yurt. So, sure, we’re frustrated and confused about the future and looking for options. And if the Occupy movement presents any that seem moral and pragmatic, I’ll rally behind them. Until then

Reminiscences in the Age of Digital Memories

I don’t remember turning 20, but I’m sure I thought it was momentous. When I turn 40, I probably won’t remember turning 30 . . . but then I’ll just call up this blog and read what I wrote in my final hours as a twenty-something-year-old.

Time and memory have become something different than they were. When I was 18, the garage band I was in (yes, we really did practice out of a garage) performed at our senior assembly: Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So.” The administration didn’t approve of the lyrics, so we rewrote them but sang the real ones anyway with no one the wiser. I still remember the fear of walking out to the middle of the basketball court, sitting down to play in front of our entire school. I remember the slow start: Do they like it? Do they hate it? No one made a sound. Our high school was comprised mostly of black students, and Weezer wasn’t widely known; not even all the white kids recognized the song. But when I hit the high-hat snare, high-hat snare, high-hat snare, it didn’t matter. There’s something about live percussion—the thump thump thump and the tik tik tak—that hits you in the lungs and exhilarates the soul. They were on their feet. They were cheering. They loved it. As we were loading up the van later, an underclassman came up to us and said, “Man, when you went out there, I thought you were gonna be like the Backstreet Boys. But you were great, you were like the Red Chili Hot Peppers.”

A year later I recounted this to my freshman-year roommate, who was also my sophomore-year roommate, with whom I likely spent my 20th birthday (and whom I’m seeing this weekend at his wedding). I recounted it (reenacted it, really, jumping up on a desk chair) because it was a time before you shared things. I had an AIM name, but not even a friendster or a myspace account. We uploaded “If I had a Million Dollars” and the character themes from Mortal Kombat on Napster. If I had been born just a few years later, my band’s four minutes of glory would likely be on youtube (with at least 20 hits from me reliving it). We heard that one guy did videotape it, but he’d lost the VHS.

Nothing will ever be lost again. I enter my high school’s name into youtube, and videos of the marching band’s drumline pop up. Soon everything will exist in a “cloud”—which means it won’t really exist at all, and yet it will be accessible, like having pitch-perfect memory.

When I was 20 I had no intention of making theater a career. I didn’t even consider it could be a career. It was an extracurricular. It was something you could major in and then go do something real. Some friends thought they could make it as actors, but none of them considered being a professional producer or a casting director or an artistic associate.

When I turned 20, I was no longer an art history major (I had no memory for trivia), but I don’t think I was yet an English major. I think I was toying with psychology. Had I taken playwriting yet? I don’t know how to bring up my transcripts to check. I could look up old emails, but they closed our accounts upon graduation. My current email memory begins during my last year of grad school. How far back does facebook go? I open my page and scroll: my 29th birthday, my wedding, getting engaged, “my first San Francisco earthquake, and I didn’t feel a damn thing,” getting the job at A.C.T., arriving in the Bay Area, “packing and packing and packing some more” my Chicago apartment, (still scrolling and scrolling), working with Horton Foote, photos with my fellow interns at the Goodman, my first freelance dramaturgy gig, back in St. Louis working at the bar, teaching (“my students have infiltrated this site, beware”), and, finally, the beginning: “welcome to the fb, danny!!!! (May 25, 2006 at 2:43pm)” and then, ominously: “There are no more posts to show.”

It’s like looking at the reverse of death. When our time comes, will our lives flash before our eyes, or will they simply scroll?

When I was 20, I’d never even heard of dramaturgy, and now it’s my career. I won’t lie, it’s nerve-racking turning 30 with a career in theater. There is a small voice inside your head saying, “Isn’t it time to grow up now and find a good, secure teaching job.” But, there is also something exhilarating about it. And there it is: midnight: I am officially an adult, and I choose this path.

I hope it worked out for you, 40-year-old future me. And if it didn’t, here’s a little something to cheer you up: