You Can't Spell Winner Without I
Today an email came in telling me that a TV script I wrote had won a contest, and while I know how dopey this sounds, I don't remember entering the contest. I must have. After all, the evidence points toward this conclusion. But it does seem somewhat uncharacteristic, seeing as how I'd made peace a long time ago with the fact that my takes on the world rarely do well in contests, probably because they're rarely shared, and so I'd stopped entering things.
There was a time when I did okay, when I had an innate sense of what judges wanted. This is how I won one of the twelve spots on a water conservation calendar in elementary school. I drew an exuberant turquoise water drop with Wayfarers and gave him gloved hands (thumbs up!) based on those of the California Raisins. He was too cool to waste-- there was your message. And so my family attended the awards ceremony, and I posed for pictures because there was a time when I did that too.
I can identify the precise turning point, the moment at which I made the peace: another art contest. This one took place during high school. Sprint asked students to submit a piece of artwork that communicated the theme of how powerful communication can be. I painted a rocky bluff hanging over a midnight beach. The moon shone large and high above, was almost iridescent and 3-D due to some very intricate highlighting and acrylic layering around the craters. On the sand below I placed a mermaid, drawn with Prisma colors, then cut out and transplanted to the canvas so that she appeared to be closing the gap between art and eye. On top of the bluff I glued a sweet little boy-- tussle-haired, maybe Aryan, and definitely a good student-- also drawn with the Prismas and similarly popping from the canvas. In the mermaid's hand? A seashell. A conch! And in the little boy's? Also a seashell. Two unlikely figures brought together through the power of communication-- there's your message.
The whimsy of the mermaid was just the entry point for additional themes, including the bridging of racial and gender differences, the acceptance of variety in human beings, the necessity of suicide hotlines (the little boy was sitting on the verrrrry edge of the bluff), and even the dangers of failing to listen, as represented by the conch, which was supposed to call to the judges' minds Piggy from Lord Of The Flies and his futile cries for mercy before death. Next time I'm at my mom's house I'll take a picture of the piece so you can see the themes at work for yourself. (Or maybe now that my mom has actually figured out how to use her Hanukah 2006 digital camera, she can take a picture for me and send it along.)
Regardless of these multi-layered meanings, Alejandra Torres, the girl in my gym class with the fastest mile time, won the contest. She copied Escher's famous drawing of the two mirror-image hands drawing each other (you know it), and I admittedly don't remember if they were holding cell phones or what, but I know that the Sprint logo was somewhere on the piece. The logo might have been what the hands were drawing on each other's cuffs.
When Alejandra's artwork was announced as the winner at the courtyard ceremony, I was eating a brownie from the dessert spread. I chewed the brownie thoughtfully, realizing I just don't have what it takes to do well in the contesting arena. Or, at least, not anymore. And since that evening I had entered very few things, never with the expectation of winning or placing, whereas as a younger girl my attitude was much more along the lines of, "All y'all fuckers might as well not waste the ink on the application because here comes my water drop."
But I must have entered this TV script contest, probably somewhere around Christmas, a holiday that fills me with great hope, despite my being Jewish. The email announcing my win was so doubly surprising that at first I thought it was one of those mass messages programmed to insert any recipient's name, making everyone feel personally addressed and thus more willing to channel funds into the bank account of a millionaire Ugandan who's chosen "you" to launder his trapped foreign funds.
Upon the second reading, though, even without the mental aid of a brownie, I finally realized, "Hey. That's me." It still doesn't make sense, but it's nice to be disoriented for a change, seeing as how I no longer drink.
