Did It Sucked? Or Did It Not Suck?

Yesterday Total Husband Ron (THR) and I went to a couple of events of the Fusebox Festival here in Austin, a contemporary art and performance festival. The most striking thing we saw was a piece called An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk. A friend had told us just before we went off to see it that it was “kinda trippy.”

I like that word trippy. I think it does a really good job of telling you you may not get it but may be enthralled nonetheless. I think you can extrapolate the meaning of the word trippy as suggestive of or resembling the effect produced by a hallucinogenic drug . To me, that indicates a non-linear quality, and multi-dimensional sort of trippy effect – oh, wow, I just circled back.

And our friend was right: it was trippy.

I’ll try my best to describe it. The artist took excerpts from William Shatner’s performances as Captain Kirk in Star Trek to present a dialectical about art and science. But each word was a discrete piece of dialogue that when edited for the whole sentence or paragraph created an entire lecture. Even syllables were edited together to create multi-syllabic words. The image is Kirk on a video screen in the middle of the stage rolled around by an “actor”, as if Kirk were moving about and pacing as he spoke. And the words were from different scenes and episodes so one word might have a peculiar emphasis in the new context in which the artist place it. This was a rather jarring effect, and it made me think about speech patterns and how much we rely on the types of intonations and emphases placed on parts of a sentence to discern the meaning of the sentence.

And it totally blew my mind. THR hated it. He’s the best art critic ever. “That sucked.” I think he should have his own column. Seriously. Because he has really interesting – and hilarious – ideas and insight about why something “sucked.” I love the conversations we have whenever we disagree on a work of art, performance piece, or play. We went to see STOMP once, and at intermission he turned to me and said, “I love this show.” I asked him what it was that he was liking about it. He said, “Because I know exactly what’s going on. It’s a bunch of people banging on a bunch of stuff. I get it.”

So last year, when STOMP came to town again, I took him to see his favoritest play ever!

Did The President Appoint You To That Post?

Soooo… last Sunday I got the local Sunday paper. Honestly, the main reason I buy it is for the Target ad insert. Yes, I know I can access it online. It’s just this thing I love about the Sunday paper on Sunday morning.

Annnnnd…. so I read Parade magazine. Seriously, how does that thing continue? Oh. Probably by people like me continuing to read it even though they know its worthlessness. It was their annual What Do People Earn? issue, where they have tiny profiles of folks in various jobs and what their salaries are. This edition was a big switch-up, in that they profiled a bunch of people and compared what they were making years or decades ago compared to what they make now.

I admit that I find this really interesting. I’m always really curious about what people do for a living. So the job titles ran the gamut, and the one that struck me was a woman who had been a realtor, I think, and now was a “Laughter Ambassador.”

I read that aloud to Total Husband Ron several times. I’m sure he was getting annoyed but I had to try and make it make sense for me!

So… is she a clown? Does she make rubber balloons? Does she represent the United States at official functions? Does she broach rapproachements between hostile emotions among people? Why would one refer to one’s self like that? To distinguish one’s self? A phrase that attracts the eye on a business card, and invites discussion?

Maybe one of my reactions has to do with the fact that I rarely, if ever, refer to myself as funny. You are just setting yourself up. It is so subjective, for one thing. It was a self-preservation mechanism when I started doing standup comedy, and people would ask, what do you do? “I’m a standup comedian.” Men would say instantly, “Oh, yeah? Say something funny.” Or, “Make me laugh.” Of course, you’ll never be able to make someone laugh who insists that you make them laugh to prove yourself to them. (Women, on the other hand, would invariably say, “Oh, my, I could never do that! How do you do that?!“)

And sure enough, when I consider it, the funniest people I know never declare themselves funny: “I’m funny!” They just are. It’s a state of being, it’s not a vest they put on. It’s the same with creative people. I know a lot of people who declare themselves creative, and throw that word into every description of themselves or ways of looking at the world, and it just feels forced or trying too hard. The most amazingly creative people I know live it in all they do, and they would never describe their interpretation or way of moving through the world as “creative.” That is not where the spotlight of their self-awareness lands. It is effortless, without thought, and comes from their very way of being. They simply embody their way of seeing the world, their eccentricities, their oddities, their interpretations. The creativity, the humor just is.

I trust that woman has found her niche, working at hospitals or corporate events or whatever the hell she does, because she made somewhat of a living off it last year, according to Parade magazine. But egads, I get a little anxious thinking of running into that person at a party and being trapped while she tries to laughter ambassador me.

Enough Is Enough – Whatever THAT means!

Here’s the word I’m grappling with lately:

Enough.

There’s hard sound to enough when you say. The f sound at its end, together with the short u just before it suggest curtness, a finality.

The word enough is loaded for me because it mostly associates with food. I often don’t know what is enough when it comes to eating. A lot of people have a governor that tells them when they’re done, when they’re sated, but I don’t. Or I’ve had food issues long enough that I’ve overridden the governor and it’s completely given up. Or maybe I’m ignoring it. Whatever I ate, whenever I ate was suspect in my family because I was born chubby and developed chubby. So I might have been consuming half of what my siblings were, but it was scrutizined, and then I’d hear “Haven’t you had enough?”

I don’t know. Have I? What’s it supposed to be?

Part of it is, I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like. I know what stuffed feels like, and I do not like that. I know what hungry feels like, and for me, more often than not, it’s not just that I want to eat, my vision gets blurry and I get headachy and crabby and deaf and cannot concentrate and completely unreasonable.

And there are some foods that I look at and I know, intellectually, that it will never be enough. As I heard someone wise once say in a perfect paradox that describes it for me: one bite is too many and thousand bites are not enough.

Enough.

It means to occur in such quantity, quality, or scope as to fully meet demands, needs, or expectations. Interestingly enough, Merriam-Webster’s ancillary site for those learning English puts a finer point is put on it: equal to what is needed. IE, Have you got enough money? There’s enough food for everyone.

The word “equal” is interesting to me in that context. “Equal to what is needed.” What is implied is no more, no less.

And maybe that’s what’s at the heart of it: am I meeting my body’s needs? Or feeding its expectations? Expectations that have been muddled and muddied and confused from food issues in my family of origin. As I continue my eating career, I’m trying to be aware of that, and know that, and have the word enough not have such a harsh sound to it, but rather a peaceful connotation.

Go on. Flap her. You’ll laugh.

The other day I was having coffee with a friend who was recounting a recent performance schedule, a performance for which he was just under the wire in writing the piece itself. I listened to him describe the sequence of events, the logistical considerations for the performance, and trying to finish writing – and then memorizing – the piece just days for before the performance. His demeanor as he spoke was calm and rather on the reportorial side.

I said, “You are really unflappable.”

And then I got distracted by the word “unflappable.”

It means not easily perturbed or excitable or upset. It is marked by calm and composure, persistently steady, a sense of self-possession. And that’s what I witnessed in my friend, who was thus as he described the situation, and he has been thus unflappable in the actual situation.

I admire that in a person. I often feel at mercy of my emotions or drama or incidences in my life. And when I’m describing such incidences or telling a story, I can feel my emotions recreate themselves.

I like that word. It’s fun to say, and it has a sort of visual quality, or a 3-dimensional quality, if you will. One of my sources indicates an original or early traceable usage from 1958: from un- (1) “not” + flap (v.) + -able. Originally used in ref. to Harold Macmillan, British P.M. 1957-63.

I can only speculate as to its origins. I think of its ostensible antonym, “flappable.” It made me envision an agitated chicken running to and fro, creating an audible flapping sound with its wings. The other chickens would get a kick out of this, and remark to each other, “Yeah, Charlotte, she’s easily agitated. Start talking to her about the best Dr. Who, and just wait till she makes her wings flap like crazy.”

And then that evolved to Charlotte being utterly flappable. When a new, calm, Zen hen joined up, they couldn’t get the same rise out of her, and thus, she was said to be “unflappable.”

Well, that’s how I imagine it all went down.

WHAT IS SAID; WHAT IT MEANS

So my parents do this thing to food.

They do this thing called “doctoring up”. They will take some sort of food item, and add things to it to ostensibly improve upon the original. For instance, frozen pizza. Husband and I were visiting them over the holidays and they took a Kirkland (that’s Costco’s product line; their kitchen is virtually furnished in Kirkland foodstuffs) frozen pizza, and then they put additional Kirkland/Costco products on it, like extra cheese and extra meat like salami and all manner of stuff.

The time they did it while we were visiting over the holidays was extraordinary.

My Mom had said, “Let’s just stay in for dinner – we’ll doctor up a pizza.”

“It’s soooo good!”

I was kind of fascinated by the labors, the loving intensity and pride with which they so carefully, so methodically made a not very good thing terrible. And then burned it in the oven.

The phrase doctoring up was so commonplace in our house when I was growing up, it never occurred to me that other people didn’t doctor up their food. To me, the phrase, if you take the word “doctor” alone, in its verb form as “doctoring up” implies, suggests a correction, a healing, an improving upon the previous condition. One definition I found on line reads: to give medical treatment to; act as a physician: He feels he can doctor himself for just a common cold or to restore to original or working condition; repair; mend: She was able to doctor the chipped vase with a little plastic cement.

So you think it might be a positive thing, that one’s ordinary frozen pizza might be just tweaked enough to make it edible.

On the other hand, there are these definition: to add a foreign substance to; adulterate: Someone had doctored the drink or doctor alter and make impure, as with the intention to deceive; to adulterate, dilute, debase, load, stretch – corrupt, debase, or make impure by adding a foreign or inferior substance; often by replacing valuable ingredients with inferior ones.

Ahem: Adulterate.

When my mother was visiting Husband and me in Austin recently, she made spaghetti for dinner one night. It was doctored to this extent: she added powdered spaghetti sauce (the kind that comes in the little packet) and added it to the jar of spaghetti sauce she’d also purchased. She then added meat to the concoction: not just any meat, but Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage patties. She presented the bowl of spaghetti which was dotted with the patties, and explained how she’d “doctored” it.

My question is, why not just get decent food in the first place?

Cook, heal thyself!!

GOOD GRIEF

The word grief means keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow; painful regret, according to dictionary.com. Like so many explanations or descriptions or articulations of meanings of words, it hardly does it justice.

So I looked up keen, which is key in the description of the word grief: finely sharpened, as an edge; so shaped as to cut or pierce substances readily: a keen razor.

That seemed to me to put a finer point on it, if you will, as I experience grief these days. Someone very closed to me recently died, and I am preparing to go to Minneapolis for a day for the funeral.

The word comes from the Anglo-French gref. Some of its synonyms include anguish, heartache, woe, misery; sadness, melancholy, moroseness. It also says, “See the word ‘sorrow’.” I like that word to contain the depth and breadth of what one feels when one is grieving. It almost feels onomatopoeiaic, with a lowing feel to the word when you utter it.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is readying the fifth edition of its mental disease reference guide, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). There is discussion about including grief as severe depression.

This causes me consternation. Grief is a normal part of being human and to pathologize it, I think, is denying the depth and breadth of human experience. I lost my young nephew almost twenty years, and I remember that grief so clearly. It was over summer, and I remember walking around in a fog, or rather, a tunnel. For months, I could hear and see and feel life going on around me, but it was muffled and dark for me and all that activity had had nothing to do with me.

I never thought I’d have any perspective on it, of course, but when I recall that period in my life, it was… kind of amazing. Not happy, not wonderful, but I feel like it was transformative. It is easy to say an event can change you, because how would you ever know how you might or might not have been if the event had not occurred? But I think anyone who has grieved will tell you that you understand so much more about the human condition. Perhaps it better to say that you understand what you don’t understand about life.

Grief can take over your life; it runs you for a good while. And you putt-putt-puttt hrough daily activities because you don’t know what else to do. I remember being so furious about my personal hygiene because it was so stupid, good gravy, so stupid! My nephew has died, you idiots!! Who the idiots were, I’m not sure. It is frightening to feel it all, to be sure. We are not used to being helpless, me thinks, we Americans, and that’s what grief does. There is nothing to be done. We are a nation of can-doers, so surely there ought to be away to “solve” a death; or solve one’s distress.

If we are not allowed to experience profound anguish, how will we know joy?

I Survived

There is a quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Well, last night I did something that should take care of many, many days of scare. I did a new piece at FronteraFest, a fringe festival type of event here in Austin.

I was/am trying to create a larger piece around some bits that I’ve developed over the past couple of years. The bits are somewhat disparate, and I wanted to create some sort of… framework? Crochet it all together in a quilt? An narrative umbrella? I’m not really sure. I’ll know it when I see it.

And I saw a leeeeeetle bit of it last night.

And for me, everything seems like a great idea until it comes time to do it. I have a million ideas, and I have a million ideas for your idea, and I’m so excited… until push comes to shove. Until I have to deliver. And then everything seems dumb and stupid, and I’m dumb and stupid. And dumb too.

But in this case I had a commitment, a deadline. It’d been on my calendar for months, I’d applied for the festival months ago, and had gotten confirmation of the date months ago.

So I’ve been writing, but I’m never at a loss for ideas. It’s massaging, working, hoeing those ideas until they come together. And then the memorization. Sheesh. And this past week that’s all I did was memorize. But it felt like trying to contain water in a sieve. And it’s one thing when I do a Cinematic Titanic show. The script is in front of me, and if my line tanks, well, another one of the actors is sure to have a killer line in a couple of seconds.

I nearly threw up just as the stage manager walked us to our places. Mac Blake played my personal assistant and we’d had all of one rehearsal, due to to time limitations.

It was the most fun I’d had on stage in a solo (or nearly solo) bit in forever. The audience was lovely, warm and raucous and supportive, and they were having such a good time, I couldn’t help but have a good time. I really had to be present and paying attention, and at one point, I just had this feeling of giving over to them, the audience. It’s hard to explain, but instead of advancing my agenda of remember my lines and charging through them, I just had to breathe… and listen to the audience… I felt like hugging them. And I’m not a hugger. Not in the least.

HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE!

My friend, actor and comedian Joe Keyes, used to say, “I’m being dragged behind my life.” I think that’s the perfect way to put those times when you’re not just busy, you’re just… being dragged behind your life.

We were in Minnesota for a week over Christmas, visiting family and friends. We stay with my parents. They have a spare room in the basement, and it has what we call the “birth control bed.” It’s their old sleep number bed and it’s got two separate mattresses which comprise the bed itself. THR and I cannot sleep anywhere near each other in this configuration: the individual mattresses are not wide enough for both of us, without one of us being on the crack between the mattresses. When we’re each on our separate mattress, it feels like we’re in separate counties. We don’t sleep well or much.

And it’s never enough time. Is it ever? It feels like a week of nonstop blabbing, catching up with people, in ways you cannot do over the phone. I always tell THR, “I love going – and I love coming home!”

We come back home to Austin, and three days later I leave for Philadelphia for a Cinematic Titanic show at the Keswick Theater. It’s a great theater, and they treat us reeeeeeel nice! A great audience, making it all so much fun…

And the day I left for Philadelphia, my parents got in their giant pickup truck to drive to Austin. They were at our house when THR and I got home from him picking me up at the airport on New Year’s eve.

Good god, my parents have been here since LAST YEAR!!

HAAHAHAHAA!

I never tire of that joke.

My Dad and THR are rebuilding our deck. All week long I’ve smelled that familiar wood and sawdust smell and the sounds of Skil saws that I grew up with. My father is a relentless woodworker and carpenter, and it’s so wonderful to hear the rhythms of him working. Those sounds, the beats, the smells of his working with wood, the occasional sharp, punctuating “gottdamn its” that I know so well, only this time it’s in our own home.

I’M HERE FOR THE BIGGER THOMAS AUDITIONS

This week I auditioned for a play here in Austin. It was a show with a major professional theater, and I’d heard about the auditions the day before they were set to occur. Although I was familiar with the playwright’s work, I was not familiar with this particular play.

So I emailed a friend of mine whose knowledge of plays and theater is deep and wide. I asked him if he was familiar with the play, and if so, did he think such-and-such a part was appropriate for me?

He wrote me:

From what I remember, there’s a matriarch probably in her 70s and then three younger siblings who, depending on how they cast it, could be anywhere between 30-50. So I always tell people to audition. What’s the worst thing that could happen?!

I’m sure it was a rhetorical question, but ah…. yes… the worst that could happen…

Something like this:

I was about 20 and I went to a community theater audition for South Pacific. When I say I had no idea what the show was about, I mean I didn’t even know it was a musical.

But I was all, “Hey, I’ve been in plays in high school, show biz desperately needs me.”

The part for which I insisted on reading? That’s right, the middle-age Pacific Islander Bloody Mary!

The auditioner was very kind, and gently said, “You do realize this part is traditionally played by an Asian…”

I am big and blonde and blue eyed and very, very fair.

I had no idea what she was saying. Kind of like, “Your point?”

I just nodded and said emphatically, “Yep”!

Kind of like “Just wait til I show you my range!”

She added, “And that she’s more middle-age – ?”

Again I nodded chipperly. As if to say, “Right – but I’d like to show you how a clueless idiot with no training or experience but who was in the chorus of her high school production of Li’l Abner is gonna rock this role.”

I didn’t the part, then or this week.

I appreciate my friend’s sentiment and mostly I agree. I just like to do a little bit of legwork so, you know, I’m not showing up for a casting call of Topdog/Underdog.

For everyone’s sake.

Ah, Miss Pehl – welcome to KFC. Your usual table?

Total Husband Ron (heretofore known as THR) has told me that as a kid, he would dream of the day he would be a grownup, making his own money – and lots of it – and that would be the golden, shining day he could buy all the candy he wanted.

All the candy he wanted. Mwahahahaaaaaa!!!

I was thinking of this as I was scrounging up something for lunch today. I’d just gone grocery shopping and still didn’t have anything for lunch. Well, “anything” that I could make in a hurry because I was hungry and didn’t want to cook anymore that day, since I’d been cooking stuff to freeze for guests who’d be coming to stay with us a spell.

I remember dreaming that someday, when I was a grownup I would eat out every single meal. Oh, I’d dream how I’d eat at a particular restaurant every day for lunch, another for dinner, another for dessert and/or snacks. I wouldn’t mind having breakfast at home, of course, for, as a grownup, I’d have all the Cap’n Crunch With Crunchberries or Lucky Charms that my grownup self could ever desire.

But today, for lunch, I just wanted something from my cupboards. We eat out wayyyy too much. We’re on the road a lot, which means restaurants, fast-food, or convenience stores. Always on the fly, always on the go.

When we’re not traveling, it’s hard to keep the cupboards stocked. You’ve used up everything before you leave for a trip so stuff doesn’t go to waste or spoil. When you come home, the cupboards are bare. Because you tried to use everything up. And you don’t want to go grocery shopping. Because you’re so tired from traveling!

I’m still trying to figure it out. Because, man, oh, man, I thought going to Zantigo’s every day of the week was going to be it, man – the absolute be all, end all! Ah, how much I’ve learned…