9/11 Morning

THEA 1000 - Introduction to Theatre - I find the first memory, of a class so long ago, interesting. Although I had a great professor for this course, enjoyed learning some theatre history, the class experience tends to be overshadowed by one morning.

I was a freshman at UW in the fall of 2001. It was September. I went to class on 9/11. I knew that four planes had gone astray; two flown into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and another crashing to a green Pennsylvania field, but I don't think I fully grasped the consequences, the ramifications of these events. Indeed, not one of us could see then how the world would change in the years to follow. If I had fully understood this calamitous event it is likely that I wouldn't have gone to the lecture late that morning. Maybe, somewhere in my sub-counscious, my walk across campus that morning was the earliest coping mechanism that I had--to get on with the familiar and to grasp for something understood. I had seen so much on TV that morning that was unspeakable, inexplainable, and completely foreign to my "world" that for an hour or two I wanted to run away from it all. I didn't get very far.

On the day of the attack no one knew exactly how many people had died. Many made educated guesses based on the number of people working in the buildings on a daily basis and so did my professor that morning. I remember him saying that there could be 30,000 dead in each tower. As we would all find out in the weeks to come that number was extremely inflated, but at the time it seemed completely reasonable; no one knew how many had evacuated the buildings, or how many were out of reach of the cascading rubble when the towers fell.

As you might expect, we didn't spend much time talking about Greek drama, Voltaire, or the Enlightenment that morning. The class was full of students, many probably trying to cope in the same way I had, having an open discussion about the days events and where the ripples of this tragedy might lead.

For me, a whole semester in this course is summed up by this memory. Although we did spend hours learning about the history of the theatre, and how actors perform certain actions on stage, it all seems to be overshadowed by the event of that semester. 9/11 seems to have this kind of effect on many of us. We will never forget the day that for some of us occupies a week, month, or even a years worth of memories.