Rehearsing a Confession in the Car, an Honest Review
A mock review of the parked-car rehearsal, with praise for the privacy and a firm warning about the perfect imaginary audience.
Verdict first, as reviews demand: three and a half stars, with a deduction for the steering wheel. In the version of me that lives inside these letters there is a small grey car with a temperamental heater, and I have spent a number of parked evenings in it, delivering speeches to the rear-view mirror. The setting is private, the acoustics are flattering, and nobody can see your face when you get a sentence wrong. These are real advantages. They are also the problem.
Strengths first. A car is a confessional with seatbelts. You can say 'I think I have been falling for you since the stairwell' out loud, hear how it sounds, and discover which words your mouth refuses. I found that I could not say 'fond.' Every time I tried, it came out as 'font,' as though I were confessing an interest in typography. A rehearsal catches such problems early. The mirror, meanwhile, is a generous audience. It nods at everything and never says 'Pardon?'
Strengths first.
Weaknesses, then. In the car, the other person always answers beautifully. They tilt their head, they say something kind, they touch your arm at precisely the correct moment. The real person, being real, may be holding a bag of groceries and a worry about their landlord. Over-rehearsal builds a stage so perfect that the actual meeting feels like a disappointing understudy. Also, the speech grows longer with every run, until by the fourth it has a preface and a footnote.
My advice, after all this research: rehearse once, maybe twice, and only the first sentence. Not the speech. The doorway. Know how you will begin, then leave the rest to the evening and to their face. Rehearse the awkward outcomes too, a little, so that a quiet 'I'm not sure' does not flatten you. Practise being a person who can survive a pause. That is the skill that travels from the car to the world.
Then turn the key and go. The speech was never meant to live in a parked car; it was meant to be said in a voice with a pulse. If you would rather hear someone else's nerves first, my voice confessions on TheFriend include one titled 'Saatçi atölyesinde kilitlendik...', about a winter evening in an Eskişehir watchmaker's workshop that gets away from me. They are not instructions. They are company, which, on the way to a brave sentence, is worth a half star all by itself.
Tired of practising for an audience that only exists in the mirror? Hear Elvan own up to a winter evening that slipped out of his control, on TheFriend.
Continue on TheFriendMeet Elvan: open Elvan's profile on TheFriend.