This redefinition thing...

I love being on stage. I love it, I crave it.

Designing Women is one of my all time favorite shows and one episode has stuck with me probably my whole life. At one point Delta Burke's character, is feeling low, the episode is about her trying to find herself again. As we all know her personal weight struggles were often showcased on the show. But at the end of the episode she talks about a box. A box she thinks every woman should own. A beautiful but ordinary box that would sit on our dressers and when we needed it, we could open it. And from the ordinary box would come applause. Loud, room filling applause that reminded us that we are great. We are magnificent. We are beautiful and worthy and lovely and graceful and intelligent and feminine and strong. All the things that women want and need to know about themselves. And somehow applause, endless cheering and hand clapping can provide that.

And for me it can. I learned this at an early age. I love applause. The biggest rush I've ever felt in my life is taking a solo bow on a stage flooded with lights while an auditorium full of people stood and applauded... me. In my mind I can still close my eyes and take myself back to that moment. I felt. I truly felt. It's that welling of emotions inside you that strangles your throat and turns your stomach and washes your thoughts away and allows you to just feel. It's overwhelming and amazing and it's a feeling that cannot be replaced by anything else. At least not for me.

And it's considered vain by most people. To desire praise. To need affirmation in that most public way. And I'm okay with that. Tonight, the show that, I have to be completely honest, allowed me to find myself again, opens. Tonight, as long as everything flows the way it should. Those applause will once again be mine. And I will treasure them. I will open my heart and let them fill it and then I will hold them inside me for later.

I crave that stage and everything that goes with it. To lose myself in a character. To become someone else, if only for a short time, to escape into a world that is far less mundane than my own. It about suspension of disbelief. And perceptions and I love that on the stage, my reality is irrelevant. That someone's story is more important than my own. It's the drama queen in me. You get to play with heightened emotions and words. You get to dance around topics not discussed. You are allowed to push social strictures and politically correct lines and vulgar phrasing and just be. Just be. As people we are never allowed to just be. I think, and hope, that at some point in my life, I will be able to sit and just be. I imagine its a feeling of calm within oneself. I've come close in Pilates classes to reaching that place. That absoluteness of peace. And then my brain kicks in. The closest I ever come, is in the applause. When it surrounds me. When it washes over me. When the applause immerse me in absolute sound and shut my brain off. I can't think in the applause, I can only feel.

I really need to find one of those boxes.