Am I Savannah?????????????????????

                            As I  read "The Prince Of Tides" the third tine around, I felt a strong connection to characters and situations in the book.  And one of those happened to be Tom's troubled twin sister, the poet Savannah Wingo.

                              Who, by the way, was beautifully played in the movie by Melinda Dillon, in one of her rare appearances, but brilliant performances.  One thing I have to hand to BARBRA--she cast the movie perfectly.

                                Certainly, there are externals I relate to in Savannah.  She is a highly emotional, and creative child, and that has to come out somehow.  I love the story of how prideful mother Lila burns all the journals, and Savannah counters by furtively writing in the beach sand with her fingers. An artist is driven to do what they do, no matter what.  I get it.

                                  Savannah hated the South.  She grasped its narrow mindedness, racism and bourgeois social behavior, as quickly as I grasped that of New Jersey. And, where did we both flee to? New York, which, then, was the place writers or theatrical artists fled to.  The way things have gone in the now more than 34 years I have lived here, I am not sure where young aspiring artists go to, now!  Do they still go to New York? It seems to me like the city has closed ranks.

                                  Savannah wrote poems.  I wrote think pieces, stories of exaggerated Gothic horror, fictionalizing the worst traits of people I knew, until I found my niche, with this blog.

                                   And, yes, like Savannah, I was sexually attacked, when young, by someone on my hometown street.  But, unlike Savannah, I did not bury it. I talked about it to everyone I could.  When Tom says Lila made Savannah into a schizophrenic, he is only half right.  Lila, putting her social climbing desires first, threatened abandonment of them--her own children!!!!--if they talked about the attack and rape of them all by the escaped convicts.  Three days later, Savannah tried to kill herself.  As Tom rightly said, she could keep a secret, but she could not lie.  The more Savannah emerges, the more the truth emerges.  In some ways, there would be no story, without Savannah.

                                    Now, suicide.  Ah, that's a tough one.  I have known several people who have done it, and that is painful enough.  The closest I came to it, myself, was a night in May, of 2008, where I felt everything was closing in on me.  I was sitting in my bedroom in Woodside, Queens--a place I hated!!!!!!!!!!!!--and was having these hallucinatory visions of a movie marquee flashing before my eyes.  The movie playing on the marquee was "SUICIDE."  Some part of me that still had it together called 911 and I spent one night in a psych word.  Forget Polly Bergen, darlings!  No one looks good in a psych ward.  Eventually someone--who, by the way, no longer exists--came and got me, so I could be released.

                                   That was as close as I came to Savannah's experience.  It was just close enough for me to know I did not want to skirt near it again.

                                    So, am I Savannah?  Yes, and no.  I have her insight, her creativity, and, to a degree, her strength.

                                     Out of my Walpurgisnacht came an arrival to a place where I now am that I never thought I would be.  It pays to stick around, dears!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                      Savannah's story helped me reconnect and rediscover that, dears!!!!!!!!!!!!!