Goody 2Shoes

Well, how very exciting. What divinely good news. My delightful younger sister 2Shoes is about to start a Performing Arts degree course a bike-ride away from her hippy-house. See my excitement...feel it spring off the screen... :|

So, some history: 2Shoes managed to skive most of school. She was a sickly child, and contributed to her sickliness with psychosomasis (?) and to her image of sickliness with some general acting skills. Whenever we moved house, we'd start a new school. I would be desperate to fit in; 2Shoes would be desperate to get out of it. Poor 2Shoes...she suffered...with asthma, wearing glasses, having an oversized jaw and an oversized belly, starting puberty before anyone else...blah blah. And of course she was clever, so our parents built her up into this Special Person who needed Special Treatment, and harangued school after school to put her up a year (she was, after all, an October child, so old in her year as well as bright). But of course the schools all knew she hadn't covered enough from any given year to skip it and move ahead. So eventually she got into ballet school, her party trick being the dance of the sugar-plum fairy, and eventually quit school altogether at 14, with 4 GCSEs to her name. Meanwhile, yours truly was working hard. By the time she'd quit school altogether, I'd done 3 schools over the 2 years of my GCSEs, and still came out with a good set of grades. I went on to fuck up my A-levels, but I was busy with other things ;) Got a place at uni, was the only 1st in my year, and onwards and upwards from there. But she didn't need all of that: she's going to be a star when she grows up. Poor special 2Shoes...how we were all supposed to pity her lot in life. It's hard being a star before everyone else realises it.

So my hero today is an amalgam of hard work and playing by the rules, and I'm not sure whether to sling it out the window or frame it for display. I'm happy where I am, don't get me wrong. She's 4 years my junior, so by her age I already knew where I was trying to go, and was well on the way to getting there; she's just starting this degree. And I get that not everyone is suited to any given system, so in a way I've been lucky. But there are several things that annoy me, not least of which is the absolute commitment displayed by 2Shoes and our parents to denouncing The System, particularly the education system. She's managed to blag her way on to a degree course with 4 GCSEs and a talent for little other than arrogance and self-promotion. Maybe that's all you need for Performing Arts...So now she's taking the education where it suits her, with no heed to all the hours of trigonometry and tectonic plates and Thomas Hardy that the rest of us thought we had to suffer. If only I'd known! I could have avoided the lot! Or, should I adpot the moral high ground? Or what? Is there any point in feeling anything about it? And if not, why does it make me so very irritated?

And the other thing is this: I had an email recently from my mother, whom I saw recently at a family gathering. I had played the piano, been doing caricature dancing with Little Lad... and she sees fits to suggest that I get into amdram, or musical theatre, or some kind of performance... 'real music' she says, not just theory 'which might get a bit boring after a while'. We exchanged emails; I defended my choice of direction against no explicit attack; and all was well. But right under the surface of that exchange, and her excitement over 2Shoes's recent fortunes, is this: the age-old privileging of 'doing' rather than 'thinking about'. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And what about those-who-can-teach? And am I really not Doing? I Can what it is that I Do. What makes singing better than writing about singing? Oh, of course, it's the drama and the skill and the joy given to others and the specialness of it. By comparison, I'm rather dull...regular salary, direct debits, permanent address - no touring - terribly drab.

Looking at our histories, it's me that's been the Goody Two Shoes, toeing the line (no, it's not towing: there's a story about the phrase and I'll tell you if you ask), doing what's asked of me, complying. And yet she's the special one. In conclusion, the only possible way to validate my continued existence is to celebrate this hero of hard work and systems, in the hope that others might understand something of the value of compliance.