Carra Martinez Actor A Beautiful View

First Things First

This morning I finally realized that for several weeks—okay, uhm, I’ll be honest—that for several months. Start over. Just this morning, I fully grasped that I had been manually brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush whose batteries had last seen life in early August. Awkwardly enough, the bristles themselves, intended to hum with life, were fresh. Changed them in September. But the handle, the shaft, no longer buzzed with alkaline power, had not buzzed in a good long while.

Staring at the copious blue-green foam running down the left side of my chin, I asked myself, “Had I purposefully intended to risk, sabotage even, the health of my molars/cuspids/bi-cuspids/incisors? Or was this simple proof that the pay at the pump option was, in fact, decimating the profits of Duracell, the whole entire battery industry? Even the knock-off batteries with green packaging and a name no one remembers?”

I then promptly searched about the apartment. Under my crescent wrench, boo-yah I learned that fancy bit of tool naming three weeks ago, under my crescent wrench I discovered a partial package of AAA’s. But alas no AA’s.

And so probably tonight, as I am now trying to consistently brush my teeth twice a day (two words: root canal; four even more important words: ugly ass swollen jaw), tonight I will once again execute the Pavlovian flick of my brush’s power switch, and probably once again, nothing will happen. My arm will instead locomote the brush about my mouth. I will rinse. I will spit.

Perhaps I am simply and subconsciously and oh-so-embarrassingly not hip, old-fashioned even.

And Finally Because It’s the Thing to Do

Carra Martinez is a company member of Refractions Arts Project; her work there includes Mama in The Assumption; The Philomel Project productions, both in Austin and New York; as well as American Arcana, playing the politician and tattooed woman. Other Austin credits include Lady Macbeth in The Austin Women’s Collective’s The Weird Sisters; Melba Walsh in Hyde Park Theatre’s Ham; Ursula in Austin Script Works’ Of Superheroes and Seductions; Mercedes in The Rude Mechanicals’ El Paraiso; and at The State Theater, Irene in TEATRO Humanidad’s Luminarias. Carra is an alumnus of The University of Texas Shakespeare at Winedale program. She has trained at Harvard University’s joint program between the American Repertory Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre School. By day, she is a mild-mannered English teacher.

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