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In honor of Charlie Hunt, the main character of How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, if your name is Charlie (or Chuck or Charles) you can get a ticket to How to Disappear for only $25.  What a deal!

Just go here or call the box office at 503-445-3700 and use the code word DISAPPEAR to get the special price.

Offer good through this Sunday, March 15 only!

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As I thought about it more, this becomes a pervasive concern- for far more people than just the few who want to radically alter their life. Nearly every person I went to high school with looked forward to traveling across the country for college in the hopes of a fresh start with friends and potential partners who did not know about that time when you peed your pants in the 3rd grade and how truly revolting you looked with floor to ceiling acne and braces (and by you, I mean me. Really, those photos can NEVER come to light). Throughout my twenties I had friends who hopped off to New York or L.A. to reinvent themselves. Even when you change jobs from one place to another you are giving yourself an opportunity for a mini-makeover. You haven’t had the ugly fights with these people. They don’t know about the brutal catastrophe you made out of that one project that one time.

Reinventing oneself is frankly what our nation was built on- one trip across the ocean and you can make a name for yourself that is not bound by what family you were from or what patch of ground you were born onto.

Its a hugely powerful opportunity to play with the markers of your identity, to live a life not fettered by the consequences of what you used to be. I’d hate to lose that possibility. Even if I never took that opportunity, it would be nice to know it was possible, some how. And with a 24 hour archive of photos, status updates and late night musings, how does that stuff NOT follow you across town, across country and around the world?

Ironically, I’m a HUGE fan of social media. I have reclaimed relationships that have been of huge value to me because of sites like MySpace and Facebook. I’ve forged new relationships because someone reads my blog or follows me on Twitter- and when I meet them in the real world it is like we are already friends.

But let’s say I’d been uploading onto my Facebook page since I was 12 years old all of my ill-advised high school ‘zine projects and that picture of me where I look like Anthony Michael Hall? What if the year I ran the school newspaper and decided to dispense with typewritten titles in favor of hand drawn bubble letters was still permanently archived in Google somewhere for anyone who typed in my name to read? What if my wordpress blog archived the agony and embarrassment of my 8th grade year? Or my 27th year? And a guy planning a first date with me (or a potential employer) could just pop online and see it in all its gory, lame, dorky detail.

How embarrassing… in some cases how SHAMING. Right?

Or then again, maybe not so shaming. After all, I’m bringing them up here, right? If you’ve made peace with your past…how much power does it really have to harm you?

In How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, Kennedy posits the idea that changing your circumstances doesn’t change who you are…and that real connection with people does not occur through the facades we create to showcase ourselves, but through our willingness to share ourselves. Warts and all. The only way out is through.

In which case, perhaps it is better to have your journey archived (lame gory details and all) and to know that there will be no hiding of the battle scars and unfortunate fashion moments. If you can’t escape them, perhaps you can use them as markers to track your growth. Perhaps you can gain the inner confidence to know that who you are now can withstand the occasional reminder of who you were then. Perhaps we are not doing ourselves any favors by skipping across the country and trying to pretend that we have no past. That we have always been beautiful and successful and poised and wryly self aware.

By pushing them down into the keepsake boxes beneath the bed, maybe we create bogeymen out of what could really be opportunities for connection and community. After all, we’ve ALL had our horrible moments.

I think that’s why I am so interested to see the work that Storm Large will be placing on our stage later this month. The skeletons in her closet go way deeper than a love affair she wishes she could forget or a bad prom hairdo. She has been down some of the scariest rabbit holes it is possible to go down as a woman. And her willingness to share the icky inside parts with the world AFTER having reinvented herself as an unstoppable gorgeous talent in the Hollywood mythmaking machine is really inspiring to me. If she can share those hard and unglamorous moments…if she can say ‘yeah, I’ve been there, it sucked, I’m fine’ then maybe someday I can too. Maybe we all can.

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“We don’t know where he is, quite frankly” is what
ROSE ROMERO, director of the Securities and Exchange Comission’s Texas office, said about the SEC’s inability to find billionaire R. Allen Stanford.

Read the article here.

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