My bag is a well-used and well-loved Roots backpack. Pre-COVID, this was the bag I carried to school every day for almost 10 years. Most days it was completely full of papers, books, and a wide assortment of just in case items. The one constant, each and every day, was my thermos cup of tea, without which I could not envision even leaving home in the morning.
More recently, this same bag has taken on an entirely new role. It now occupies a rather liminal position in my life, poised and ready to go at a moment’s notice, but no longer part of my everyday routine. A new school and a new method of commute (bike instead of subway/bus) have left it at the periphery of my daily life. But no less important. It now waits in the hall closet for special events – big things happening at school for which I might need more than will fit on my bike and (hopefully soon) trips to the theatre (where my role as Stage Manager requires an extensive kit). The permanent residents of the bag are those items which for me are required in both of those situations.
While the hand sanitizer is a new addition, the remaining items have long been part of the standard:
- travel tissue package (for cold winter walks and various crises on stage),
- candy (just because),
- band-aids (harbingers of the full first-aid kit I would take to the theatre),
- lip-balm (more cold winter walks),
- emergency hair tie (for myself or any actor facing a hair emergency),
- emery board (for myself or any actor facing a nail emergency)
- 2 USB sticks (really a hold-over from pre-cloud storage days I just can’t seem to let go of)
- pliers/wire cutters (used both for my duties as a robotics coach and Stage Manager)
- multi-head screwdriver (see #8)
But the heart and soul of the bag contents lies in the remaining items:
Notebook, ruler, marker highlighter, pen, 2 standard pencils, eraser, 1 mechanical pencil, pencil leads/erasers for the mechanical pencil.
Because at heart I am a paper and pencil person. I solve problems with a pencil in my hand, I explain with a pencil in my hand. I draw robots and stage plans in my notebooks (gridded or dotted – never blank or lined). I sketch the layout of the prop table before tape is applied. Lighting notes, actor notes and any other tech reminders all go into the book. Robot parts to order, feedback for robot designers, and ideas for new programming challenges all get added to the book. But never a To Do list. Only one kind of list ever makes it into the book – the prop list. If the notebook were older, most of the pages would have doodles. But this is a sadly new one, with only a few pages used for working out some problem solutions. Theatres have been dark for a long time and this particular notebook lacks education – it has never been to school. By now you won’t be surprised to learn there’s a little stack of those notebooks at home, waiting for the last one to be full so a new one can take its place – I think the stack is gathering dust for the first time ever.
While it’s true that a trip to the theatre would see a laptop added to the bag, that would be for running the show, not for the typical text related activities for which many might use their laptop. My scripts go in book form, NEVER digital (it’s much easier to annotate a script by hand). It’s not true that a laptop would be added for school. I tend to leave my school computer at school and use my home computers at home. Very seldom do the two domains interact. My textbooks and reading material go in book form, NEVER digital (and never for annotation – sacrilege!).
Just taking these items out of the bag has made me long for the theatre and wish there was a robotics competition imminent. Soon……….