Interview #6
Interview subject: Gina
Object in question: Hanging Lampshade
When I first asked Gina to throw her hat in for the 500 Hammers, she smiled up at me from the couch in our living room and said, “Oh, but it’s hard! You want to find something perfect, you know?”
Gina has long, black hair that falls straight to her waist and a smile that’s so innocent and big you sometimes forget she’s not fifteen. (Sorry Gina!) She lives down the hall from me, packing her collection of black clothes and bright sundresses into the odd-angled closet of our apartment’s last bedroom.
Gina is, in fact, twenty seven. She has accomplished the near-impossible task of remaining sweet and lighthearted in the world of professional stage management. Last night I came home to find her wandering through the apartment in one of her growing collections of dinosaur t-shirts, her arms stained to the elbow in silver spray paint as she ranted to me and the walls and our cats about exactly, precisely how silly it is to spray paint a stool silver and check it on an international flight to Victoria when it seems perfectly logical, doesn’t it, that they would in fact have stools in Canada. Silver ones, even!
She’s great to live with, is what I’m saying.
Gina’s various forms of work have taken her to Italy for two summers (as an au pair), to British Columbia, LA, Stanford, Florida, Costa Rica, England, Mumbai, Rwanda and the Philippines (all as a stage manager for Miracle of Rwanda). At the end of this list she added that the show is going to Australia and South America in the next few months, at which point she will have been with it for performances in all inhabited continents.
Because she travels so frequently, Gina’s put a lot of work into making our apartment and her room feel like a place to come home to. In this home we’re each a little cave-like in our instincts to craft neat, personalized spaces in which to rest and recover.
That said, Gina’s room has gone in two distinct directions as she’s put things together. As she explained it to me when she moved in, she grew up with a minimalist style; lots of black, white, and gray, with clean geometric lines and scraps of red thrown in around the edges. She’s planning to frame several monotone images of dancers in fantastic poses and hand them on the blank wall above her bed. Her shelves, black boxes stacked atop one another with scattered red drawers, cover one entire wall of the room and half of another. When she goes to work in the morning, it’s almost always in black pants and a dark turtleneck, her fantastic hair done up tightly in a braid or a pair of Zac’s hair spirals.
That said, she’s recently started exploring a softer style, both in designing her space and in choosing her clothes. Soft greens, brighter colors, vine motifs and draping fabrics have moved in, and her window frame is half-painted a dusky purple. When we began this project, she speculated that the aesthetic choice Zac makes in this lampshade may very well push the room and her style choices definitively in one of her two directions. (The wardrobe issue, she told me, is easier to solve; she just split her clothes in two and only wears things from one half of her closet on any given day.)
For her project, Gina’s asked us to solve a problem in her room. Namely, that she, like many of us in New York apartments, is cursed with a drop-dead ugly ceiling fixture. Exposed bulbs, beige plastic. When she moved in it was hanging by its wires a foot below the ceiling; she put it back in place, but one of the bulbs stopped working then and hasn’t come back since. She’d like Zac to create something that softens and shades the light, covers the fixture and adds a visual element of interest to the room.
When originally discussing the project, Gina told me a story. Once, traveling in Europe, she met a young man on a train. The young man turned out to be a minor royal, in a manner she never quite caught, and he invited her to a party at his sister’s house. Why not? she thought. When she arrived (shown through a secret door and all) the sister welcomed them both with drinks and a tour of her fabulous house, party already in progress. On an outdoor patio in the back of the house, Gina became fascinated by a series of enormous metal balls, punched in intricate designs reminiscent of Moroccan lampwork and lit from the inside to cast fluttering shadows on the crowd. As she told the story she knelt and held out her arms, cradling an imaginary lamp sitting on the wooden floor.
Knowing that a lamp cut in slits may work beautifully for an outdoor party, but may not cast the kind of light Gina needs to finish her organizational spreadsheets at 3am during tech weeks, she’s asked us to take that sense of beauty and interest, pick a direction for the aesthetic style and go for it – free reign.
Gina, thanks for sharing your stories, for being both scathing and cheerful in the face of theatrical chaos, and for being a great roommate. We’re looking forward to helping you complete your cave.
