fox

Thinking out loud, which is what a journal is for, right?

There is a sub-genre of slash in which one of the heroes has been Pining for the other for lo, these many pages. The other is Oblivious until the moment where, conventionally, he has reason to place his hand on or near the first character's sternum, at which point the first character catches his breath and opens his eyes and the other suddenly realizes what he's been missing and All Is Revealed. Smut generally ensues. :-) (Example: Smooth, by Bone.)

We tend to get a little dismissive of this; we put it in the file marked Slash: By Women, For Women. This is not -- or, at best, hardly -- the way men behave; clearly, we say, we're tinting the guys with the brush of idealism.

But then I remembered a boy I went out with in college. We met when I was the music director of a student production and he was the second male lead. He played the part very, very well, but he didn't have the voice for the house -- he could carry the tune, but there was nothing behind it. There were five or six other kids in the show with the same problem. So I set my shoulders and, one at a time, taught them what my voice teachers had taught me: how to breathe. I pushed down on their shoulders and wouldn't let them lift their shoulders on the inhale. I put my hand on their bellies and made them push as hard as they could against my hand on the exhale. I got every single one of them three times the volume and lung capacity by opening night that they'd had at auditions -- I made singers! It was very satisfying. :-)

The night the show opened, Boy approached me and asked if we could be More Than Friends. Some months later, I asked him once when he had decided that was what he wanted, and what do you think he said?

"It was when you were teaching me to sing," he said. "I already liked you plenty as a friend, and I admired how passionate you were about the music, and then you told me how to breathe and you put your hand on me and when I felt your touch that was it."

I swear, that's actually what he said.

(Of course, he was something of a schmoopy romantic himself ... [g])