Meet Me In The Redroom

You have to make a negative before you make a positive.

You begin by cutting plaster bandages into small, irregular shapes.  You sit around with your fellow mask makers and cut the bandages into a bucket.  You get warm water in separate buckets and then you break into pairs.

You cover your face in petroleum jelly.  You make sure you get your eyebrows.  Then you sit in a char while your partner covers your face in tiny, irregular plaster shapes dipped in warm water.  She begins on your forehead, laying them over piece by piece.  The plaster layer comes down over your brow and over your eyes.  The warm plaster water runs over your lips and drips off your chin.   Your partner’s fingers run over your face gently and even though she is closing you in, covering your eyes and you lips with plaster, there is a comfort in the gentle pressure.   No one says much; they don’t want to make the people in the plaster laugh.

The first layer is complete, and your face is encased.  It is close, and dark, and stiff, and hot, and itchy.  You can no longer feel your partner smoothing the bandages.  You fight back the claustrophobia and try not to think about how little time has passed and how much more needs to, or maybe you fall into a kind of meditation and enjoy this moment where you can do nothing else but be still.

When you get the okay, you squinch up your face.  First, your lips.  Then your noise.  Then your eyes.  To the people watching, there is no change, but you can feel the mask separating from you with each move.  It sticks along your hairline at the very top, and as you lean forward, light and cool air rush up over your lips to your eyes.  There’s a little pain as the last couple of hairs give and then you’re holding your face in your hands.  And it looks nothing like you.

Is my face really that thin?  That wide?  Some of the masks look just like your friends.  Some look nothing like them.

The masks dry.  Then, you place your face down in a box full of sand and create support for it with rich, wet clay.  You reach into the bucket and grab pieces of clay, smooth them and secure them to the sides of your mask. You hands are red in every wrinkle, under every nail.

You make the plaster, kneeling by a bucket and adding cup after cup of power to the water until it forms a moonscape.  The water is greedy and keeps eating the powder.  You and your friends laugh and then begin to compete to see who will moonscape first.  More and more cups, more than you ever thought, and then the water bubbles and the powder stays on the top and you see the moonscape.  You reach into the warm plaster and mix it with your hands, hands that are dry from all the washing they have had today.  You have seven minutes.

You scoop the plaster by handfuls into the negative.  It is a slow process.  You watch the plaster fill in your features. The nose and then the eyes, the lips and chin, until your face is buried under a layer of plaster.  The plaster gets thicker and thicker as you scoop and scoop.  And then you pour it and smooth it and step back.

In 24 hours, you will pull your face out of the mold–the positive from the negative.

And then you build a new face.

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In the film version of The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews is telling the VonTrapp children–who have never heard music–about the scale. She gets a little ahead of herself quickly and starts whizzing up it, but she stops around “la” and realizes that they’re just not ready for that yet. Then the orchestra kicks in and all kinds of alpine fun ensues.

Almost exactly a year ago I announced on this blog that we would be losing our space. In the year that followed, we tried whizzing up the scale a few times only to stop around “so” or even “re,” but no orchestra kicked in to help us along into the next part. It’s been a year of figuring out who we’re going to be in the big picture (mission statement, etc.) and small picture (who is willing to do what?) We’ve had to wonder if it was the space that really kept us together. We’ve all had to deal with our own grief over losing our home, a surprising emotion that took many forms and cropped up in odd places. We’ve had to sort through all the ideas that we’ve all had about where we should go and how we should get there. There have been some misunderstandings, some hard conversations, and some big steps forward.

Last Sunday, we gathered together to make living death masks, to start at the very beginning of a new, completely different adventure.

Cue the orchestra.

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