Role People

This is a carefully chosen title. I ought to start by setting the scene. Sorry for the degree of Vauge - blog characters are people too.

There I am - head to toe in black, shoes held on with safety-pinned elastic, playing at being a theatre tech. It seems that a large part of playing at being a theatre tech involves slouching in the middle of empty auditoriums wearing black and looking sleepy. Only an observation, and what I happened to be doing at the point where our story starts.

People are on stage, practising for doing their Thing that evening. My natural place at this point would be on the stage doing the practising, but this year is different because I've been running around mental inside my own life and have just made it back. The people on stage remain my people all the same.

That evening I'm still wearing black, but lurking in the wings doing my techie impression. I'm careful to be in the right place to watch my people do their Thing, even if I can't see it all.

Scene set. On with the thinking. By trade I'm a Scottish Country Dancer, as are many people on this planet, but none of them ever earn a living by it. Their Real Life Job finances the dancing, but if you asked the little honest person inside their head, they'd be dancers by trade. It's a trade that I learnt young, a respectable number of years ago, so only snippets of the learning process remain implanted as memories. That said, the ones that took root have stayed put. I remember being at a dance, and trying to copy my Dad. I am now old and wise, and understand that it is inevitable that we'll all dance like our parents in the end. My Dad was already old and wise by this point, and said that there were better people to copy than him, and told me who to watch. Watch So-and-so, take note and you won't go wrong. Parental advice like that is not to be sneezed at, and so I did. Faithfully, and to this day. It was pretty good advice too. My dancing aint perfect but at least I have my own bad habits and not my Dad's hand-me-downs. All these years, I've had myself a role model, and a damned good one at that.

But role models are people too, and herein lies the problem. One day the illusion gets shattered. It may have been slowly fading and cracking at the edges, but there's still got to be a point of absolute shatter. If they've been a really good role model this gets delayed, I reckon. The little person in everyone's head who likes things to stay The Way They Are is quite good at keeping the role model on the pedestal, hiding the things the Real You doesn't want to admit just yet.

And this is what happened. Guess I'm a grown-up now.