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
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• 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.

Not A Potter

It's been fun, going back to the 70's, looking up old friends, and reading my old diary. It's really something to see how life paths and choices showed up so early. It's also clear how some paths were NOT meant to be...

Here's a tiny diary story from the ceramics class I took in summer school, between junior high and high school. 

Wednesday, June 23, 10:05 PM (hot pink)

I’m making Mom what I call a “Thud Bell”! It’s made out of clay in three pieces and when it “rings” it thuds!

Wednesday, June 30, 10:10 PM (black)

I got my first project back in design structure and I really dig it, but I only got a C+ on it because (I think) he didn’t like it because it had that rough unfinished look.

Tuesday, July 6, 9:25 PM (blue)

In Design structure my bowl cracked.

Tuesday, July 27, 10:10 PM (olive green)

            Dear Diary

You know what makes me sick? The beautiful drape shape I made is missing. BOULDERDASH!!!!!!!!!!!

Early Morning Throat Clearing

It's 4:30 a.m. and I'm drinking ginger tea with milk & honey, listening to the train. I can see the red light on Broadway two blocks away through my white floral burnout curtains from Ikea. Now it's green. Someone is walking below, oh now they are coming up the stairs so it must be my bartender neighbor. A wind is picking up, now it's still.

Haven't blogged in more than a week though I was really enjoying it- what happened? What happened was I wrote an entry that I decided not to post. Why not? Oh, it sounded too serious, and it referenced my sexuality. This was after seeing the Lena Dunham film "Tiny Furniture." I was delightfully surprised to see a diary show up in the film. Aura, just home to live with her mother and younger sister after graduating college, finds and reads her mom's diary, written at the same age that Aura is now. I loved how the diary brought them closer, Aura asking her mom, as they are snuggled in bed together, who this guy was, and that one, and how talking about this stuff seems to make it easier for Aura to tell her mom that she had sex with the guy she was with that night. "Where?" her mom asks, "Here?!" (aghast.) Aura says, "no."  "His place?" "No." "In the street?" "No... In a pipe... in the street." "Wasn't it cold?" asks her Mom.

I haven't seen Dunham's new HBO series, "Girls," where apparently sex is as random, awkward and unsexy as it was in "Tiny Furniture." But knowing that she is sharing those stories it easier for me, to read out of my teen diary to strangers. But what about to daughters?

I'm still looking for my blog voice. If it can only be light and funny, the entries may have long spaces in between. Maybe that's ok. And I'm looking for my website voice too, trying to find the right tone that blends playfulness with professionalism. At first the subtitle under my name was, "artist, writer, dreamer, community builder." Now it says, "compulsive chronicler, accidental artist, playful person." We'll see if that sticks. "Compulsive chronicler" sounds more accurate than 'writer.' Writers write articles and books and novels and poems. "Compulsive chroniclers" record what they did and didn't do that day, the weather, the quality of light in the flowers, leaves and sky (which could turn into a poem with a little effort but the C.C. just needs to touch the pen to page in familiar repeating loops and slashes, not to labor over making something), how the hair is looking and whether to make an appointment, who she saw and talked to, what she read and maybe what she ate. (bagel with cream cheese, turkey, slice of red onion, tomato and avocado.)

When I couldn't sleep, I reached for my phone to check e-mail and read the blog of a young woman in my business foundations class. It's a travel blog, and refreshingly outrospective.

I'm still reading, "The Midnight Disease" about "The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain."Author Alice Flaherty cites Kay Redfield Jamison's work, saying that "writers are ten times more likely to be manic-depressive than the rest of the population and poets are a remarkable forty times more likely." !  Certainly I'm not manic-depressive, or bipolar as we say now, but I definitely have my ups and downs. When I'm down, it's difficult to pick up the phone. For example, I still haven't talked to my high school best friend, though we are now e-mailing, texting and leaving phone messages.

"Expression is the opposite of depression." Laura Perls. Read that line decades ago and it has always stayed with me. My young checker at Trader Joe's today said she can't go a day without writing. That was just before she tossed my salmon salad to the floor. I really must stop engaging customer service people in meaningful conversations. But it does make me wonder about this town...  the rain and fog, the easy access to favorite writers (just bought my ticket to Alison Bechdel), and books... I parked behind an "I'd Rather Be Reading Flannery O'Conner" bumper sticker yesterday at Curves, and found the woman inside. We exchanged favorite stories and lines in between the recorded, "Change stations now!"

I got my diary story back from Susan- 25 pgs. down to 5. She did a great job with it and I'm surprised at how the diary story is different from my memory. I'll meet with her Wednesday to work on delivery.
And I'll keep listening to those old David Cassidy songs.