BadMormon

Entitled Old White Guy Cries NAZI!

Or Nizi. It’s hard to take a complaint about my own behavior seriously when the man accusing can’t even catch a typo on his title.

Then there’s the whole Accusing of Nazism.

So this Old White Guy*, who I’ve seen around the open mics of the LES for a few years now shows up to Penny’s. He is not known by this room. He is recognized by the two of us left over from a past we would like to be shunt of. As he stands in this room he starts taking pictures the Lighting Guy IN THE BOOTH above Old Man, and to the side, notices the view finder zooming across the room to light on my friends bosom. Dirty Old Man has put the picture up himself to prove how NOT wrong he is. Why? Because to Old White Guys every woman in the room is an object. And if he wants to take a picture of her clothed breast and cleavage WITHOUT A FACE and WITHOUT PERMISSION he will call it ART not PREDATORY OBJECTIFICATION.

So yes, if you call concerned friends who do not like dirty old men that can’t identify their own grossness Nazis then yes, we were Nazis. If you think it’s Nazism to not allow an audience member to video tape and photograph anything they want then yes it’s Nazism. (we won’t mention the understood tradition in ALL the mics I’ve been at of NOT photographing or video taping out of respect for the person developing their art.) Of Course neither of us – me or the tech guy – has gassed millions of human beings but why bring that into a conversation about why an Old Entitled White Guy Can’t Do Exactly What He Wants?

Penny tries to have a space for artists to work on art. She also wants a space where women are not accosted. An alternative to the rooms that are about drinking and hooking up or the misogynist comedy clubs where women are simply treated like shit. A place where the focus is the stage and the performer and not the audience members headless chest region that the picture taker claims he had no idea he was taking and yet the guy in the booth saw clearly what was in the view finder.

PLEASE NASTY OLD WHITE GUY – DON’T COME BACK

*he has since removed the internet page with the photos and complaint of our Neo-Nazism and demands of an apology from me.

My Bubble of Bubbly Happy

Oh man, it can’t last, I know that. On all levels something is gonna come and sweep it all away but right now I want to document the fact that I’m having a happy moments.

Stage the other night, tues, was a new level of the character, SexyBack, that I have been working on. Acting and performing is a weird thing for me. I can toss off an act in an instant if I have too but on the big ones I pretty much hypnotize myself into a character. Sometimes better than others.

And I got into it last night. I have a conscious part of my mind thinking, what should I do next? as I make up my act on the spot, on the stage, in the light. The rest is unknowable. I’m not sure what it is I do but, as I contrive actions that might entertain, my monkeys in the basement brain stir up phrases and things that come next. It’s sorta volleyball set up. I look off and wonder, humm, what next, must say something and bubbublblbubublPOP! “I drink because I care.” and I do something for the next 30 seconds.

I always come out of these performances and sets dazed, sorta high from the endorphins and adrenaline and the trance of art. I never feel like I’ve done anything at all. It seems to me that I just thrown bits out, hit my marks, delivered the correct line but I have no idea what it looked like on the outside. I figure it sucks.

Of course this is usually when people come to me and tell me it was a great performance.

That it went somewhere.

I don’t think that Tues night was oscar caliber or anything, but I did hit a new level in it, in the character, brought out a more of the reality of another person and less of the “act.”

That makes me Happy.

Plus there was a whole lot of fun, laughing, eating, enjoying before and after and all I could do was look at this amazing group of people I hang out with and grin. So freakin happy to be in this collective now, one that we’re trying to base on real honesty. The stuff from the middle once the ego is gone. It takes a lot of practice, but what we’ve managed so far feels like it’s working to me.

Love, so much love surrounding us at that show.

Then I come home to a teenage boy, so happy to see me, so happy to have had a-do-what-he-wants night in the apartment, so cuddly, and we lay down on the couch, him spooned by me, my arms wrapped around him, him telling me he’ll go to the bed once I’m asleep and we both snooze off. He’s alive and a little smelly, and wiggly, and putting a kink in my arm. I’m not moving. We slept the morning away.

A day of tired tired tired, but satisfied, relaxed, settled for a moment in what has gone on. It’s all ok, no expectations of the future, too tired to even think about it, no pain rearing it’s head, all is too alright.

I’m not an optimist so I do know that this can’t last, no matter what. It’s a rule of life. It changes, it goes up and down and, of course, I am doomed! I “KNOW” that.

I’ll take it though, this moment of soapy, rainbow glory. I’m in a place of happy.

Thank you Internet. I love you much. More than I can ever tell you. Even if you think you get it, more than that.

And as the next request, because somehow I feel like if I stop asking for stuff you will forget I am here and it will all go away, I think I want the thing I need. Whatever it is. The next step on the path of personal growth. But maybe not in a dramatic and devastating manner? Maybe? lol, crap, what did I just ask for? I’m rollin my eyes at myself.

YouTube – Sexy Back 3-31-09

YouTube – Sexy Back 3-31-09.

FYI – I never ever can sit through a whole video of myself.  I’m a wuss.

More Sexy Back 03-18-09 – 2nd Performance!

YouTube – Sexy Back 031809.

Really love this character when I’m on stage.  REALLY WEIRD to look at your own performances.  Never looks like you think.  BUT I like where this is going.  Last tues, the 03-24-09 performance missed being videoed.  i hear it was the best ever.  LOVE THE PROCESS OF ART!!!!

SexyBack 3-10-09

Sexy Back on Youtube – 3-10-09

Oh and I dance out from the back to SEXY BACK. Hence the title. very funny too, but not on the video.:(

well, huh, I’m funnier in my memory now that I’ve gotten through the whole thing. Couldn’t fix sound so it is up and down and that doesn’t get all the audience interaction. My face is also not seen so good and that, my friends, was GOLD!. So LISTEN CLOSELY WITH EARPHONES! but not too closely cause I yell too. It’s the beginning of something, nothing scripted or slick.:D DON’T HATE ME! we’ll see where it goes.

Last Night at the Open Mic

According to my general operating theory I decided to do exactly the opposite of everything I thought I wanted to do last night.

I had thought a lot about avoiding the mic. It’s theme was Do Over and the totality of that stabbed me in the chest.

Then I had a song that showed up on my shuffle and I wanted to sing it, probably badly, and it meant a lot to me about my personal mental state and I worked a whole thing around singing this song about being a grown-up way to just settle things somehow.  Right?  You know, this cognitive/shamanistic healing theory that I’m making up as I go. The words applied to several layers of my toppling jenga tower of mental balance.

But after a lunch full of salad and cheese and a quick before show rehearsal I started feeling sick. I have a flopsy tummy anyway. I have a memory of my mother having suppositories in the refrigerator for the next time I just couldn’t keep anything down.

So if something goes wrong I am much more likely to throw my guts up than anything else. Years of such things have, however, given me practice to do so gracefully and usually without hitting anything too awful to clean.

Last night it was a little snowy alleyway in the back of the theatre building where it was unnoticeable and quickly kicked over with snow.

I was tense and upset to my stomach for the rest of the night. Crunched over, eyes closed I kept wanting to be the 11-year-old I have been claiming to be the last month, the 11-year-old left standing in the water, the world hushed, mother run off across the beach, the boat motored away for help, my younger sister in it.

Just me. Knowing something had happened. Standing there with water around my thighs, the sound of it slapping the sides of other boats. Standing there, my last moment before, before I yelled, testing the stillness, seeing how far I could go, what I should do, asking a frenemy in the larger yacht bobbing next to me if she wanted to play. She sharply hushed me, someone was dying!

And there part of me stayed.

Left alone, uncared for, waiting for someone to pick her up again, hug her, tell her what was going on.

Well, last night I just wanted to really be her again and I went on stage and crouched on a box and looked into the darkness surrounding the spotlight and explained that I was 10.5 again and 11 sometimes and I was gonna try and get over everything but fuck it, I decided to stay stuck and let her be. That my DO OVER was already happening in life in general and that I also wanted to Do Over my lunch, considering I tossed it earlier.

And then I said other things, and many of them adult and I’m not sure what all of it was, and there was one part when I spoke of the Men who will lecture before sex to remind me I have no right to fall in love and I screamed into the dark audience, “I KNOW, I KNOW YOU DON’T WANT ME! I GET IT! I promise I WON’T LOVE YOU!” pause – pause – pause – audience felt it, my rage at being treated like nothing so many times and then, “SO SHUT IT, SHUT UP AND FUCK ME RIGHT!” Hold for large laughs. But I’m 10 again and that no longer matters. I no longer have to worry one way or the other. I ended at the bell with a pithy sum-it-up line, not that I remember what it was either, and then I stumbled off stage, dazed, confused and one more time dumping the coat I had taken off and tossed aside upside down and spilling my things all over the place and spilling me into the arms of friends.

I tapped into the rage, the adult, the child, the crazy and paced out back in the snow, missing another woman on stage after me speaking of losing a close friend recently. Had a couple of cigarette drags to take the nerves down to manageable levels and then into the theatre again to sit in the front row for a friend who read some amazing words from Leonard Cohen. I started to shake from the center of my being. Something in what he said, which I honestly stopped consciously hearing, was jerking the grief out. I covered my face with my hands, (my forehead shouldn’t exist I rubbed it so much last night) and then as he finished and left the stage and I didn’t stop and I found myself in the arms of friends again, whispering in her ear, “I miss my dad!” I shook and hugged through another’s 7 minutes and then the guy I spoke with at the end of the show from last week step up to the mic.

The personal conversation we had the week before about his mother dying at 13 became a public conversation on the microphone and he mentioned that he didn’t want to tap into his pain about because of how huge it is and how it’s so long ago and the years of pretending it didn’t matter…

I heard him say outloud every word I have said in my head around the death of my father, at one point or another.

My heart wanted to sit with him all night and let him talk and let me talk and see if any healing could happen but my entire rest of myself said go home, sit with friends, try some soup, don’t take on another person’s problems right now. You are still processing your own and you know what you do with stray cats! Feed them and they stay! You are at your limit right now!

I listened to myself.

And now? Today?

Well I’m not sure. I woke up feeling like crap, slept some more, did random minor upkeep of the home things, made plans for how to get everything done (I make lots of plans) and sat on the internet all day long avoiding all the real stuff.

My bottom lips still quivers when I start to think about the stuff all crammed up and down in me.

But I found myself dancing to music as I did the few dishes I needed to have something to cook with and eat off of.

I will accept that break up Art

Folks, we haven’t really started talking too much about this art life of mine. I’m an old lady with a need for attention and I run downtown as much as possible to hide in black box theatres, drink cheap beer, and try to reveal something new in this world. I am happy to settle for the fact there is nothing new under the sun and what I’m probably doing is simply blowing the cobwebs off the archetype of a moment in the backmind of the public psyche and waving it around again.

Of course when you go to one place every week for 7 years and hang with much of the same people there is dating, and smooching, and “situations” that develop. Especially when there’s cheap beer. People do what they do, and date, and fall in love, and find out that was a bad idea, and then there is the break up art.

This is the risk of dating at an open mic. Your life may be spilled out of another’s mouth as you sit with your friends in the audience and hear what you were like from the OTHER side of the relationship.

Often people try to be nice and make up sweet little sappy good-by poems. Or others do things that are half-assed and others cruel spelling out each and every petty wrong. Poetry wars.

He has been doing his own versions of break up art in the past few weeks, I think. I was listening to snippets and walking away, trying to disengage completely, not wanting to see the songs he would sing for her, not wanting to be put away with maudlin sentimentality that copied many of his other songs, not wanting it to happen at all. There was also the issue that there were NO CONCRETE words I could understand, due to my personal brain issues. “Tell it to the wind?” Am I the wind? Is she the wind? Are you the wind? What the hell are you trying to say with that? IS that even break up art? Are you saying I didn’t mean anything I said? Are you saying you didn’t? IS THIS ABOUT THE LOSS OF A FAMILY PET AND HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ME?

So I would reject it all and go smoke out back. Usually crying softly.

I’m a bitch and if you’re gonna be on stage and try to work through OUR whatever you better be fuckin brilliant cause I do demand a tribute of some sort. I don’t know, I get a feeling over some of the men in my life, that they are MINE and that is just that even if it doesn’t work out. This is more of my personal crazy.

And in the way these things work out as I struggled to save my soul I helped drive him completely insane and something had to give and he gave it, on stage, his completely open self.

I accept that. I’m happy for him. His whole life is going to change now. He did it. And it means something to me.

Yet, being the selfish monkey that I am, I can’t help notice – I’m still here.

I’m trying to do my own breakup art on this blog and on the stage and it has helped in so many ways to at least get my internal spelled out in my conscious brain.

But I am stubborn. Others may vouch for how stubborn but it’s pretty damn bad. That’s also ok because most of the time my stubborn works out for the best. However. I don’t want to give it up. If you’ve been reading you know what I mean and if not oh well, it’s a struggle with everything inside of me to even reference it. I’m spose to be fine.

I think to myself this is what therapy is for, so you go and tell them over and over what you don’t want to do, and they nod, and you keep talking until you talk yourself into letting it go, or finding a reason it’s a good idea, and then it’s spose to make you feel all better.

Blech.

How am I the person who wants to choose to stay stuck?

Cause every time I’ve tried to move forward, as I see it, I get hurt.

This is defense.

And

Keeping the me I’ve been for the last 27 years.