Donna & Betsy before Mira Costa 10 year reunion, 1985
Why, when I finally get asked to be on a podcast, is it for the stuff that was never supposed to be seen??!! But there's something in me that wants out, I don't completely understand it, and after talking to Susan Danehy, local Mortified producer who edited my story, and having some reassuring e-mail correspondence with Neil, I started considering it. Often at times like this, I will have a telling dream. Which I did. Two, actually.
In the first dream, I'm driving in a small mountain town, and I run out of road. Can't go forward, back or turn around. Stuck. In the second, I'm on a mountain road again, cruising along free and easy, and take a curve too fast. You know that familiar dream feeling of putting everything you've got on the brakes, to no avail. I sailed off the edge and woke up thinking, "Is there nothing between stuck and flying off the edge?"
I agreed to an interview with Neil. The day of, I prepared by looking for my copy of Naomi Wolf's Promiscuities, so that I could sound smart and empowered on the subject, but I must have let go of it in one of my downsizings. I did find an envelope of old pics though, (including me & Bets) and Caroline Knapp's Appetites, (Why Women Want) which was similarly smart. The interview was much more difficult than I imagined. I just wanted to tell the truth- that's the driving heart of the diarist, I think- but first I had to find it. And he wanted to tell a story, of the 70's. He would ask what kids were doing, and all I really knew was what Betsy and I were doing. "Were kids doing wild and crazy things? Were there hippies everywhere? Drum circles?" Um... no. Everyone was surfing and playing volleyball, and getting high and listening to Zeppelin. It was like Neil and I were doing a 3-legged race together, our inside legs galumphing along in the burlap sack while our outside legs each had their own rhythm and their own destination.
I got off the phone in a daze and realized later, I just flew off the cliff. I'd completely lost control of my material- not the diary performance that I'd been worried about before but the new stuff, our conversation about my teen years.
Today this memory from five years ago showed up in my Facebook feed:
Sunday I take my 1971 diary to the Jupiter Hotel to get screened for Mortified. What if my material isn't embarrassing enough? What if it's too embarrassing? What if it's just right. No matter what happens, I'm bound to be... mortified.
I don't know how this is going to turn out. I woke up before I landed. I did ask Betsy if she was ok with this going out, and sent her the performance. Even though I'd written, "It is hard to be around her all of the time. Or any of the time," she was fine with it. Said she had to re-do her mascara for work, from laughing and crying.
It's all a dream anyway, right?
