Memorizing Lines

I was asked a couple of weeks ago by a friend of mine in the film department to help her out with a project. She is directing a scene from the play "The Owl and the Pussycat," and asked me to play... what else? The prostitute. I was out of town when I needed to start memorizing my lines and had a long drive to get back to Bozeman so I decided to record myself saying my lines onto my computer, then put the file on my Ipod so I could listen to it on the drive. I was putting orality and memorization to the test--remembering my lines just from what I'd heard. When I went to the first rehearsal, I found that I needed the script in front of me even though I thought I knew the lines. When it came to recalling the lines, it was really difficult. I didn't have any point of reference; I find that when I am reading things and memorizing them, I recognize places on the actual piece of paper that I am reading--they become loci. I could listen to the lines over and over, but until I actually read them on a piece of paper was I able to accurately recall everything. Now that we have had several rehearsals, I can recall the lines not because of memorization, but because the lines have become an actual conversation in our own pretend world. Moral of the story? It was much easier for me to memorize the lines typographically (<-- look at the big word I used) than it was orally. Maybe that's just the way my brain works, but I like to think that the words on the page act as loci.