CARPE DIEM! SIEZE THE DAY!

MUSICAL theatre...learn how to act...meet new friends! A fantastic four-day musical workshop, now enrolling. Young people aged 7 to 18 will have a chance to act in Lion King, Mamma Mia or Hairspray, shouts an advertisement displayed by a music academy.
This hip workshop is one of the extensive options available for summer. After all, school is out for three months and restless teens are inundated with opportunities to choose their creative fields and hang out with others of like mind.

They can test out the fantasy of a glamorous Broadway musical career even.

Given a chance, everyone can be passionately creative. I am talking about indulging in performing arts. The performing arts are those forms of art where the artiste makes use of his own body, face, and presence as a medium. This includes dance, music, opera, drama, magic, spoken word and circus arts. The artistes are called performers, including actors, comedians, dancers, magicians, musicians, and singers. My first foray into the world of performing arts was when I was studying at Universiti Malaya and acted at the Experimental Theatre.
So, I was glad I was invited to see the outcome of the musical workshop for amateurs last Saturday. Looking at the young ones prance and sing on stage, anyone would think that they had practised all their lives and not just four days. I could see that their faces were beaming. Beaming with pride, joy and expectation. After the performance, I went backstage and I could hear squeals of excitement.

An actress in Hairspray said, "Our sweat could probably flood a whole house but it was definitely worth it. I so totally want to join this again next year. It was a non-stop run through and we all were just freaking out hoping not to forget any lines, lyrics or dance moves but thank God, it was a success! It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty awesome!"

I am glad I appreciate the arts.

Even at school we were always caught up in the battlefield of Science versus Arts. Everyone seemed to clamour to enter the best science class, never the Arts. I remember I was in Form Four Science One and after one semester I knew I was more inclined towards the Arts. Making the switch was unheard of at that time. Every well-meaning teacher discouraged me from doing so because unfortunately, the Arts classes were synonymous with poor teaching and classroom management and certainly students who were thick in the head. It was good that my parents were behind me and I have no regrets making that switch.

And now, I have just returned from watching Les Miserables at the Queens Theatre in London and a strange feeling starts to wash over me. It was the same kind of bliss that I experienced when I watched the amateurs on stage: seeing the actors, singing along with them as every song is as familiar as a nursery rhyme, my shoulders untangled and a feeling of appreciation was all around. I felt so relaxed I almost forgot to breathe. The performers had the same passion as the young amateurs. The only difference was these were professionals acting almost every day of their lives and they carried out the musical very well.

The performing arts remind me of the need to stop and smell the flowers. From the day we arrived on the planet, we have not stopped blinking, running and working. It is almost a crime to enjoy life. So like Tracy in Baltimore who notices that the rats on the street all dance around her feet shouting, "Tracy, it's up to you", it is really up to us to make a life for ourselves, to choose how we want to live it to the fullest.

Carpe Diem, seize the day. If not now, when?

LOOKING FOR LEFROY

I lingered outside a huge iron gate on 18 July 2010 hoping to catch someone friendly enough to answer my curiosity because I was informed that the house within was no ordinary house as the owner is a Lefroy. Just as the name Kennedy would bear associations to U.S. presidency, to an English literature enthusiast, the name Lefroy could be the Lefroy that Mr.Darcy was probably modelled after in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Let me explain.

Jane Austen died on 18 July 1817 and Mr. Darcy the novel’s hero, made famous by Colin Firth in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is the man that most ladies would die for. Word has it that one of the likely candidates of real life Mr. Darcy was Tom Lefroy, a 20 year old Irish who visited Jane at her Hampshire home of Steventon in mid December 1795 on her 20th birthday.

Unlike Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of the novel who finally tied the knot with Mr.Darcy, Jane Austen remained single throughout her life, despite being called on by potential suitors. It was a question of being successful and risking it all. Tom Lefroy was expected to ‘rise into distinction and there haul up the rest’ but he could risk all of it if he married Jane who had no money. Tom who chose the former went on to build a massive Gothic mansion Carrigglas Manor for his family in County Longford. The grey turreted house has recently been renovated into a hotel with a rambling 660-acre golf course and housing estate. Interestingly enough, Tom called his first daughter Jane after marrying Mary Paul in 1799. This private segment of Austen’s life was portrayed in the 2007 biographical portrait ‘Becoming Jane, directed by Julian Jarrold with Anne Hathaway acting as Jane.

Jane Austen said, "A woman especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."

When we compare the station of a young person then and now, we have indeed come a long way. The good and the bad. When before young girls could only dream of going to school and cash and status conscious parents kept women from the men of their dreams, now we have opportunities to succeed and the liberty to live. It was also not uncommon then for young men to leave school to fend for the family and take on more jobs than one. They were determined, focussed and industrious. They took pride in the toil of their labour, so to speak.

But now, we have survival guides on how to cheat the welfare state.

I have been here for a fortnight and I have met more than five young educated people who prefer to depend on the state for their daily sustenance and hang around pubs smoking, drinking and idlying. Psychologically, they are convinced that state benefits are not charity handouts but they are their rights. They still live with their parents and their parents still pick up after them. They take on part time rather take full time jobs. I even heard one grumbling that working from 3p.m. to 9 p.m. at a part time job had destroyed his social life.

I watched a cartoon once where a group of graduating students queued to receive their scrolls from the college president. After having received their scrolls and tossing their mortar boards into the air, they made a bee line to another queue, this time the dole queue. I was eight then and did not understand one bit what it was all about.

According to a Leicester Mercury report early this year, Leicestershire's dole queue has seen its biggest increase in 11 months after soaring by more than 1,000. The number of Jobseekers' Allowance claimants in the city and county rose by 4.3% to 24,607 in January. Northern Ireland has been hit harder by the economic crisis than any other UK region. New figures show that six towns in the province are in the top 10 UK dole blackspots based on regional increases in claimants.

I was brought up in a generation where living off the state would be a huge embarrassment and a disaster. We all had to try different types of work while deciding on a long-term career plan. In fact, while we were yet students we did part time jobs during the holidays. I knew someone who worked at his parents’ food stall after school and yet he rose to become a successful dentist. I knew of another who gave all the prize money he received from the university to his parents to help run the household.

As in every scenario there are genuine cases of hardworking people being laid off. But then again, there are plenty of loafers. It is every working class parent’s dream to see a child graduate and get a job, move out of the family home by 25, own a house by 30 with some savings on the side for marriage and set up a new home. It represents upward social and financial mobility. Now, we sincerely rejoice with the parents who have responsible grown up children and lament in silence if ours are not the same.

That brings me back to the industrious Lefroy who being the first son among 12 siblings probably gave up personal happiness to help better the status of his family. So as I reluctantly walked away from the huge iron gate, I told myself I must call another day just to confirm my suspicions that the real descendents of Tom Lefroy are in my neighbourhood. I live in hope still.