Lights! Camera! Self-Esteem!
Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly Profile in the Spring 2001 Issue
Nancy Fletcher '68 hates to see forthright and independent preteen girls gradually retreat into a shell when they hit puberty. As self-esteem plummets, they tend to "tone it down" to be more acceptable. "But how can I tell these spunky ten- and 11-year-old girls that they'll run into the wall in a few years?" she wondered. If she warned them, the girls would scoff. Yet the problem is real.
Her solution doesn't even mention the word "self-esteem" yet boosts that very quality in preteens. Nancy founded the improvisational movie company ACT NOW! to give girls practice in telling stories they create in their own voices. "We're showing them their views are legitimate, their voices are worthy of attention and that they have the power to control this medium that's so influential in their lives. That kind of power will translate into the [wider] world," she explains. "The audiovisual images our society feeds on are mostly designed by men and filtered through a male lens. We need to rebalance that."
In a twenty-four-hour marathon, Nancy and her all-female crew meet with girls, brainstorm plot ideas and characters, create sound effects, improvise scenes, shoot and edit in camera a short video. When given free rein, girls' ideas don't center only on boys and makeup, she's found. One group's suggested topics ran the gamut from "superwoman" and "friends" to "getting lost," "running for your life" and "winning." By starring in their own film, Nancy hopes girls will realize they can play the lead in their lives too. "I feel strongly that the way we're bringing up girls, we're not using half of our population's capacity," she says, "So everybody's losing."
Girls are apparently changed by their roles in front of or behind the video camera. Nancy says one mother said her shy daughter "had become much more expressive at home" after her ACT NOW! experience. Other girls said they were "inspired to do things they didn't dream of before."
Nancy says the project "pulls together everything I've ever done and loved: special events, video, parties and people, even going back to playing dress-up and making up stories." She is currently fundraising to make ACT NOW! affordable to schools and agencies around the country. "The drop in girls' self esteem is a well-chronicled problem, and my hunch is that this is a powerful antidote," she explains. Giving girls the tools to be actors in their own lives keeps them speaking up just when society threatens to shut them down.
