12:38am May 16, 2015

Annie headcanon, and SJCMT ramblings.

I recently watched the version of Annie I was obsessed with in childhood. Only this time… My headcanon started taking over really fast and replacing what was actually on the screen. So here’s what happened, if only in my head:

* Annie had severe complex-PTSD from a lifetime in a terrible orphanage.

* Annie could never get used to life at the Warbucks mansion. She couldn’t just fail to work, suddenly, after working every day of her life. She felt empty when everyone tried to do everything for her. She felt lonely for the other orphans, even Pepper. The whole song “i think I’m gonna like it here” never happened.

* Annie manipulated the people at the mansion into adopting her as a way out of the orphanage. Since she was considered young and innocent, nobody noticed the money she kept stealing and buying things or making contributions for people in need, which is the only reason she can see to be a billionaire in the first place.

* Annie has to keep from gagging when she realizes that Warbucks became super-rich as a reaction to childhood poverty, but then opposed programs like the New Deal that would help poor people who weren’t so lucky, get back on their feet. And doesn’t, himself, use any of his money to actually help poor people who didn’t manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

* Despite being disgusted by Warbucks on so many levels, Annie continues to play the cute lovable adoptable orphan role around him, so he won’t suspect she has any plans for his money. (Helped along by the era’s sexism, it’s assumed a little girl couldn’t conceive of such plans.)

* One of her first acts with the money she now has access to, is to find homes for any orphan at the orphanage who wants one (everyone, but she asks first because orphans never get asked anything about their wishes in these matters), pay off Miss Hannigan enough for her to not have to work for quite some time, and shut down the orphanage due to conveniently failed inspections.

* She does all this with small enough sums of money that nobody notices them missing compared to the billions of dollars Warbucks has.

* She has been without parental figures too long to form that kind of bond with anyone, at least not easily. But she already knows the value in pretending she does. Her actual bonds and loyalties lie with the other orphans, and she spends the rest of her life trying to make sure nobody would go through what she did.

* She takes care, growing up, to never let an adult notice she doesn’t emotionally need parents the way other people do, because even in the thirties there were plenty of rumors of adopted orphans (especially older children) “gone bad” because they didn’t form the “right” kind of emotional ties to their adoptive parents. She knows she can love, but nobody else would know, if they realized the truth.

* Once she grows up and her adoptive father has died, leaving all his money to her, she and her partner (another woman, who also grew up in an orphanage) choose to adopt older children, specifically, some of them older disabled children and others who don’t usually get adopted easily.

* She continues using the money to actually help people, but now she doesn’t have to hide those activities quite so much.
* And after seeing the latest Annie, I will always headcanon Annie as a girl of color.

BTW I was in a production of Annie as a child. Not with a speaking part, because neither my singing voice nor my acting were ever as good as my family led me to believe. ;-) I was one of the huge cast of random orphans (everyone who tried out got a part, orphans were where they put anyone who didn’t get put elsewhere).

My mom says she got a lot of dirty looks walking me to rehearsals, because we were clearly mother and daughter but I was wearing ill-fitting dirty patchwork rags and my mom was dressed in clean and neat well-fitting clothes.

I had fun, but I also got head lice. All the orphans without speaking parts shared a smallish dressing room. You can imagine how happy lice were in that environment.

BTW, if you’re a parent in the San Jose area and you want to get your kids involved in musical theater, I think CMTSJ {http://www.cmtsj.org} is the same group I acted with. I was only in a couple shows but they were always both hard work and a lot of fun. Back then it was SJCMT (San Jose Children’s Musical Theater), not CMTSJ (Children’s Musical Theater San Jose). I don’t know what prompted the name change. They still have casting everyone who auditions as one of their core principles.

But I have to wonder what happens when a kid known to be disabled auditions. I wasn’t diagnosed back then – people saw me as highly unusual, often in a bad way, but I didn’t have the stigma of an autism diagnosis, I could walk without assistive tech, and while my speech was often non-communicative echolalia, it took a trained professional or someone else using the same language tricks to hide their own lack of comprehension, to notice that. And echolalia was perfect for memorizing lines and songs in the inflection I’d heard them in.

Autistic catatonia was starting to set in during my last play with them, but all that meant was I got cast as a tree because (according to my mom at the time, who had no way of knowing this was neurological: I hadn’t started freezing yet) I stood absolutely stock still during my auditions. I liked playing a tree though – in my eyes it was the best role in the show. You could only see my face and hands, like Holly on Red Dwarf (my favorite TV show at the time – Holly was the computer, and you could see its face only usually, but in a dream sequence its hands showed). I was always on stage so unlike anyone else but the couple other trees, I could watch the entire show from a platform at the back of the stage. And I got to grab and shake anyone who got near me.

But anyway – I have no idea how they handle casting children with known-to-them disabilities. And I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up that their principle of casting everyone applies to known disabled kids, because so often we are the exception to organizations upholding principles like that. And I know from talking to other disabled people, that often directors are singularly unimaginative when it comes to incorporating disabled people into their shows. Even when the disabled actor lays it out for them and says “Here’s an easy way to include someone with my disability regardless of which role I end up getting.”

Still it’s worth a shot if your kids (disabled or otherwise) like musicals and acting and live in or near San Jose.

Also I should say one other thing about disability and SJCMT. During one of our performances of that show where I was a tree, a group of inmates from the local state developmental disability institution came to watch. It was one of a number of moments of recognition of “That person moves and/or sounds like me, and they grew up to live in an institution…. HALP???!!!!??!!” that happened to me starting right around that time period and left me scared shitless about my future. And judging from what that future held for awhile, I had every right to be scared out of my mind.