Two Kinds of Weird

If you were at the Mortified show May 4th or 5th, you heard me read the embarrassingly sanctimonius  letter I wrote (shown below) to break up with C.O.W. (the Conspicuous Order of Weirdos.)

What you didn't hear, was the C.O.W. retort, which follows.  When I came across this letter many years later, and gazed upon its charming illustrations I realized, that they weren't just weirdos, they were artists.

Dear “Les,”

     I will try to explain to you once more my reasons for quitting C.O.W.  The most important reason is that I felt like a fool. The summer after 8^th grade I seriously thought about my past year at Begg. I had lost all my friends, had a rotten reputation, and I wasn’t happy being with C.O.W. I felt like when I was with you that I was obligated to be an ass. Everybody knew me as “Donna Otter…Oh! that weird kid.” Leslie, friends are important to me, and (I’m sorry to say) so is my reputation. I believe that friends and a reputation matter a lot in life. 

There are two kinds of weird.  1. Everybody’s own little “thing.” Everyone is unique in their own way kind of weird.

2. C.O.W. type of weird. I’m sorry if I gave you the “brush-off” but I wanted to get away from you, nothing personal. Some of my friends saw you the time you came over to my house with tape on your mouths, and a lot of people know you as the “ones who go around mooing.”  

 The second reason I quit was the people in the club. these people were weeeeeerd!

I’m sorry it had to be this way, but I’m so much happier now.

"Thou mistaketh human nature for weirdness. Ah, my friend, it is not so! 

And never shall be!"

And now? I think the COWs were right. It takes courage, dedication and a lot of weird friends, to become a true weirdo, in other words, an artist.

A place where weirdness is encouraged:

High School Was Too High For Me

After the Mortified show, which was a total blast, I dream of wandering the streets of my adolescence. I stop by the church we started going to after Dad's accident. But I don't go in. I come to a school and walk down the empty redolent hallway with its dark wood and musty paper smells, and then to an empty classroom. I walk out the back door to an empty space with a tall sculpture, which I climb and then become terrified of the height. The ladder down is unreliable and I realize the danger is not as much in falling, as in becoming paralyzed with fear. Somehow I find another way. Girls stream into the space and I know I'm not supposed to be there, so leave. Looking back, I marvel at how the scary rigid sculpture has become flexible for them- it bends and brings them safely back to ground.

I come to a hospital where a client wants me to sneak her a glass of wine. She's making something out of fabric and I dig through my bag of scarves for her. I show them all an old clock I bought at a secondhand (ha, get it?) shop for $15. It's a wooden box that opens, with a sculpture on top like Michael de Meng would make. An art clock box. Someone asks who made it and I look on the bottom to see the word, "CAVEWOMAN." Visiting hours are over, it's time to go. A former client hugs me, crying, says, "You didn't spend very much time with me." With a pang, I realize she's right and I cry too. Another former client, who'd been anorexic, spontaneously exclaims, "I'm hungry!" and we both open our eyes wide in surprised gladness.

I visited all the institutions: A church, a school, a secondhand shop and a hospital. High school was too high for me, and this morning I cry with missing my clients. Life is really something, I tell ya.

Post-Mortified

I'm writing this before the show for you to read afterwords if you decide to look me up. First of all,
thanks for coming! It would have been even MORE embarrassing to be reading out of my diary
onstage ALONE!

                                                  RESPOND HERE
                                                                     to:

• Share thoughts, condolences, celebrity crushes or a personal mortification of your own.
• Ask me about teaching journaling/creative writing in your school/agency/treatment center.
• Inquire about my Expressive Arts Therapy practice. 
• Sign up for my mailing list, and find out about art events & creativity workshops.

Thank-you Winnebago Man!

I finished the doc before going to sleep and then had angry dreams! So mad, I woke myself up with a flaring expansion in my chest, tears in my eyes, and exclaiming to myself, "I'm so mad!" At what? There was a lot to be mad about, starting with myself for leaving the TV news just as mom and dad were about to come on- jeez, couldn't I have waited 8 minutes to go get something to eat??!!  Then a friend cut the hands off my body print and the woman who was supposed to sing me the sufi song wasn't paying attention and didn't know the words. C'mon People!!!  It felt good to be mad. Or maybe it just felt good to feel. When I wrote about it in my journal, I used the words, "That burns me up!" which is what my 14 year old self says, in what has become my favorite entry to read out loud.

It was a great doc...  seeing how the filmmaker, Ben Steinbrauer changed from nice laughing kid to angry frustrated guy in order to stay with this aggravating project, to stay with Jack Rebny that is, and then to see Jack transform, when he finally submits to meeting his fans at the Found Footage Festival. In a weird way, not for Jack but for the film, it was nice that he'd lost his sight. It allowed the camera to stay on his face as he heard the applause and laughter. To see the softening.

p.s. I might not have my website up after all, by showtime. But I'd love to be able to hear from you, and it's so hard to make comments on blog sites, so I'm going to try something... inserting a link to my e-mail so you can comment directly to me, if you like. When's the last time you were burned up mad?

SAY HEY

update: 5-5
It wasn't until after the Mortified performance last night that I realized my fave angry entry had been cut. Here it is:

Thursday, October 21, 10:00 PM (dark blue)

            Dear Diary,

            I’m angry! I asked Linda to ask Omar if he liked me, and he said, “She’s okay.” Then Linda told me that she went to Costa and Omar rode her on his motorcycle. Now she thinks she’s “cool” and Omar doesn’t like me. Jeff, this guy she’s supposed to be going to the movies with, and goes to Costa said he thinks I’m ugly and conceited, but not to tell me, so she tells me! That burns me up, also my ego. I don’t like him though, if he kisses me, but just thinks I’m O.K. He has 1,000 girls Linda is one. I like Steve Pflug.

Voice of the Tribe

Last night was dress rehearsal and I got to meet the other Mortified performers and hear their stuff. As one woman said, "my face hurts from laughing." It's all great... I love diaries, and no other age surpasses the painful honesty, overblown emotion, obsession with appearance, romantic obsessions, and overall angst, of the teen years.

 I still have work to do in the next two days. My reading turned out to be 17 minutes and it needs to be 12, so there are some tough choices about what to cut, and the intro has to shrink too. I'm impressed with how the Story Producers have teased out the stories from multitudes of badly written pages, blending just the right amount of tenderness in with the hilarity.

In between doing important things like working on the performance, my website, and homework for my business foundations class, I'm watching "Winnebago Man," a documentary about "the angriest man in the world," Jack Rebny, whose outtakes from a disastrous commercial went viral a couple decades ago.  Somehow I'd never seen it until now, have you? At first I thought, "who would want to know more about this guy?" (and he thought that too) but I'm fascinated with what people are fascinated by. I'm only halfway through the documentary but it looks like the filmmaker is getting a lot more than he innocently bargained for. I'm already cringing.

Funny, how "found footage" has become its own genre. Stuff that was never supposed to be seen. (Like diaries) At Whistle Stop Bar in South Park, they used to do a found film night, where they'd bring in old reels from garage sales & trashcans, set up a couple musicians with a violin and a keyboard, who'd not seen the films, and go at it. I remember a medley of the Rose Parade, homemade porn and baby's first steps. And of course, there's the Museum of Bad Art- stuff that was on its way to the landfill.

I wonder what will become of all this? I'm thinking back fondly on my Folk Lit class, taught by Charles Ingham at SDSU in 1991. The only reason I took it was I needed a cross cultural elective on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. What a surprise- it became the culmination of my undergrad degree and ruined me for further academia. I'll never forget hearing Charles say, "the diary is the voice of the tribe spoken through the individual and a legitimate form in its own right."

If so, teenagers are a very special tribe indeed.