Showing posts with label Mortified. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mortified. Show all posts
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Saturday, May 5, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Mom Said I Was Too Serious
I gave away my books on the enneagram when I was in the expressive arts training, learning not to turn to prescribed systems of meaning. But before I did, unfortunately, I photocopied one important page and taped it into my journal. Every once in awhile, I come across it again and say, "oh how true" and copy it again and tape it into my current journal. This just happened, yet again. At the bottom of the photocopy I've written, "How many times am I going to tape this in my journal?"
It's about "Fours," the "tragic romantics" of the enneagram and how they need to "focus on something beyond their feelings and their imaginations." The line that always gets me is about how the "Healthy Four" has "found the courage to act without reference to their feelings and have thus freed themselves from the relentless tug of self-absorption." What could be more self-absorbing than a project which requires reading back over old journals? For a Four, could there be anything worse?
There is, however, a saving grace. Telling people about the Mortified show usually leads to them telling me their story. One woman told me she misses writing, that she hasn't kept a diary since her father read hers twenty years ago. Another told me how she too lost all her friends in a sudden turn of the popular tide. And at my little Easter party here yesterday, Jen brought some of her actual archives from age 12, including the first time she realized something remarkable was happening, worth writing about, and ran to get her special pen. The entry began, "Journal, I have a lot of questions to ask myself," and then went on for several pages describing the behavior of a covey of quail- how they moved and hid and ran and flew. I could hear the marriage of budding consciousness with the reaching for language to describe what was happening out there.
This is actually how expressive arts therapy does work- to ask a question from within, and then, instead of circling endlessly in the interior darkness, to look out, and see what the world has to say, or show.
I don't know how to make this funny. I would like it to be funny. Once, a woman in Storymakers told me, "You don't always have to be funny." I will try an experiment: that's my question for myself- how to make it funny. And I will look out to the world and see what it has to show me. It doesn't hurt that the Bridgetown comedy festival starts Thursday.
What did you want when you were 12? What obsessed you at 15? What were you on the brink of at 17? Do you know? Do you remember? If you have your teen diaries, do they surprise you?
It's about "Fours," the "tragic romantics" of the enneagram and how they need to "focus on something beyond their feelings and their imaginations." The line that always gets me is about how the "Healthy Four" has "found the courage to act without reference to their feelings and have thus freed themselves from the relentless tug of self-absorption." What could be more self-absorbing than a project which requires reading back over old journals? For a Four, could there be anything worse?
There is, however, a saving grace. Telling people about the Mortified show usually leads to them telling me their story. One woman told me she misses writing, that she hasn't kept a diary since her father read hers twenty years ago. Another told me how she too lost all her friends in a sudden turn of the popular tide. And at my little Easter party here yesterday, Jen brought some of her actual archives from age 12, including the first time she realized something remarkable was happening, worth writing about, and ran to get her special pen. The entry began, "Journal, I have a lot of questions to ask myself," and then went on for several pages describing the behavior of a covey of quail- how they moved and hid and ran and flew. I could hear the marriage of budding consciousness with the reaching for language to describe what was happening out there.
This is actually how expressive arts therapy does work- to ask a question from within, and then, instead of circling endlessly in the interior darkness, to look out, and see what the world has to say, or show.
I don't know how to make this funny. I would like it to be funny. Once, a woman in Storymakers told me, "You don't always have to be funny." I will try an experiment: that's my question for myself- how to make it funny. And I will look out to the world and see what it has to show me. It doesn't hurt that the Bridgetown comedy festival starts Thursday.
What did you want when you were 12? What obsessed you at 15? What were you on the brink of at 17? Do you know? Do you remember? If you have your teen diaries, do they surprise you?
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
On Hope
Mortified's motto is "Preserving your childhood. One bad memory at a time." True, one of my entries from 1974 begins, "I'm trying to figure out why I have so many bad memories." I just hope I'm not making a whole new one by being on this show.
It Shouldn't Be This Hard
That's not what she said. I just spent four hours trying to figure out how to fit text onto my header image so I could start this blog. Finally gave up and did it in photoshop, which is a small miracle in itself. You'd think I'd be a blogger by now, huh, the woman who made five issues of DonnaZine, each of which featured a diary story. But that was the nineties and when computers arrived I saw how laborious were my tools of scissors, glue and enlargement/reduction wheel so intended to make the switch. Little did I know how laborious it would be to do the simplest thing on the computer. And now I live in a town (Portland) where people are still doing it, proudly, with scissors, glue and reduction/enlargement wheels.
What I really want to say is that in exactly a month I'll be reading out of my junior high diary to a couple hundred folks at the Mission Theater. Since I don't seem to be able to live life without recording it, I thought this would be a good time to start this story. Ever since 5th grade, I've turned to my diary for comfort and companionship. Now that I'm all grown-up, I know that real people are good for that too. So maybe you'll hold my hand on the way to the show? It's not only teens who get angsty, right? And we might have a laugh or two.
Tonight I meet with Susan from Mortified, to sort through my "pathetic crap" in search of story.
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