My best friend, and groomsman, Ira has a play in this year's Sketchbook Festival. Collaboraction, a Chicago theatre company, hosts a festival of new works every summer. I participated last year and will again this year...in Ira's play no less. (It's at the Steppenwolf garage theatre if you're interested...and you should be) The play - "Dated: a cautionary tale for facebook users" - deals with a young man who finds out that his relationship with his girlfriend is over via facebook (a social networking site these crazy youngsters use today to keep tabs on one another). It's a good mix of humor, tragedy and...erm...poignancy....? Sure, that'll do.
I play the young man and Ira, always considerate of the tech crew's time and energy (tech took over 3 hours yesterday for a 9 minute play) has written in a ridiculous number of projected slides, video clips and images from facebook, myspace and livejournal to help tell the story. We knew that we would need to use my facebook page with my picture for many of the images, but we needed to find a willing female to play my girlfriend. Blair readily volunteered to let us use her page as well. This presented an interesting dilemma: we'd have to cancel our relationship to get the frame shots we needed to help tell the story.
We were both really excited, both sharing a very dark sense of humor from time to time, and thought it'd be a lark to spend a half hour or so letting all of facebook think our relationship had ended. Even typing that right now sounds about 80% less cool that it once did, but we thought it'd be a laugh, as facebook tells all of your friends publicly when your relationship status changes (highly considerate of it with such delicate information).
So Ira comes over to Blair's place on a Wednesday evening during our Top Chef time (we're big geeks) to get still captures of our respective facebook and myspace pages before, during, and after we digitally cancel our relationship. What followed was a very unnerving forty-odd minutes. We thought the process would be quite simple, but it wasn't.
First of all, the character's name is Guy...not Jürgen, so we'd have to change my name first. This proved difficult as facebook is a little more toffee-nosed than myspace and won't let you post nicknames. "Guy" was a no-go, so we tried "Guy Smith" and were told there would be a waiting period while facebook verified this. Just to give you an idea of how long that verification process can take: this took place almost two weeks ago, and only a few days ago did my name magically change to Guy Smith for a few hours on facebook. Frustrated by that, Ira decided he'd just photoshop over my name.
Next: the cancelling of the relationship. Again, Guy is not engaged to his girlfriend, so when Blair ended our relationship instead of the desired "Guy is no longer listed as in a relationship," we got "Jürgen is no longer listed as engaged." So we had to restart our relationship as just "relationship," and then cancel it again. Splitting focus between all these problems and Top Chef was proving a mild annoyance but it was milder still when compared with the sense of disquiet growing inside of me.
The laugh I thought I'd have at our relationship being cancelled on facebook wasn't coming. What was coming was the unease I felt at all of facebook being able to access information about my relationship status. Though there were plenty of people I cared about who would get the joke and I wouldn't mind explaining the situation to, there are plenty more people I'd really rather not know about this. My profile isn't set to private so I can be searched by anyone in the area and from random theatre acquaintances to crazy exes I really didn't want the possibility of a rumor mill starting. I started getting very anxious for the whole thing to be over, and breathed a great sigh of relief when we finally recommitted ourselves...digitally.
So that's that...take from it what you will. We laugh about it now, but more about the surprise of feeling exposed. It was a wild thing to experience and hopefully it'll inform the play more when it opens....this weekend. Come and see it.
Below are the links for Sketchbook and the Steppenwolf box office respectively.
http://collaboraction.typepad.
http://www.steppenwolf.org/
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