Minding the Hindenburg

There are mornings I wake up to the alarm and mornings I wake up to the alarming; confusion, severed thoughts, anxiety knocks, doubt is all drunked up and looking for a party.

The Hindenburg wants to fly.

Dreams had me wandering through mossy hallways, opening door after door, unable to find anyone who loves me. There are plenty who say they want me but that's a different matter. When I start to cry they laugh and go off to suck each other's bits in the corners.I worry in my sleep, obsessing about how much I have to do and how little time there is to do it.

I have a full and wonderful life, but my mind often doesn't think so. I feel fear floating all around me like jellyfish, one sting will paralyze all forward momentum. Then I will sink. I try not to think about the peace to be found in drowning. Some unhappy beast inside of me continues to pound the gong of doom. I feel pursued but when I look there is no one behind me; no headless man on horseback, no thirsty murderer. There is only the ephemeral hauntings of unanswered emails and phone calls that take on the shape of monster mouths wanting to swallow me whole. Saner voices wait to be heard, like people standing at a bus stop that don't really have anywhere to go. "It's just a phone call,' they say and smile. The calmest of them all sings his endless tune of perception altering wisdom. 'The only thing that's the end of the world is the end of the world'. I run past him, flipping the bird, cursing his normalacy, his innocent faith that what he says should make sense to everyone. This is a time when connections are what I need but I cut them off like a mad man with a machette; slicing the ropes that hold down the Hindenburg. And everybody knows what happened to the Hindenburg. I am not surprised to find myself in this place of misfired logic and bloated emotion. It has been a busy week full of creativity and stimulation and people. During such a week I gather everything I have done and everything they have said like snow around a rock. When it is done, the weight of it all tips me over some edge and I roll downhill. I gather more snow and then moss at the lower elevations until I find myself sitting in the middle of a public square. If they could see me, I would be an eyesore, not a building and not nature; a man made apparition that took the beauty of nature and twisted it's size and purpose. But they can't see me and that is the thing of living like this, of appearing normal when your mind is mad. I can't expect anyone to understand what's going on inside of me just be looking at me. I could take the time to explain things but that just seems to feed the unhappy beast who likes nothing more than to feast on the meaning of things until there remains no meaning at all. I dressed my body this morning and it took the clothes offered like it was just another day. But it is not my body that will run this day, it is my mind. I will have to watch it closely like a child left alone in a room of knives. I must keep the child amused and distracted. I must try to listen to my calm friends at the bus stop. I must keep the Hindenburg anchored to the ground.

Marie Claire Blais

I went to hear Marie Claire Blais read last night as part of the Vancouver Readers and Writers Festival. I would never have been able to afford to see her but an early birthday present took me where I could not take myself. As luck would have it we followed her into the reading. She was diminutive and wearing a black baseball hat over a puff of hair that deserved a bigger head. I was sure it was her but was too shy to say hello, overcome by a bit of fan energy and the fact that Marie Claire Blais was wearing a baseball hat. I was wearing a baseball hat at the time and somehow this suggested some incredible similarity between us. She didn't carry an umbrella. No. She wore a baseball hat in the rain, just like me. Thoughts like this insanely linked to other thoughts like, maybe there are other similarities to our heads, maybe words as fine as hers are in my head too. I just haven't found them yet. We followed her upstairs. Her tiny legs sprung off the steps. A peach bag slung over her shoulder, was held back from swinging by her arm. I tried not to notice that she carried a peach bag. I would never carry a peach bag. Why do we crave similarity with our heroines ? I focused on the baseball hat. In fact I jumped up on the brim and sat there, next to her head the entire time. I tried to hear what she was thinking but she was thinking in French which was so disappointing but true, the way things can be sometimes. She read nervously with a thick French accent and her hands were busy holding done the pages on the book and moving down the lines with a folding piece of paper. She seemed almost relieved when the reading was done and sighed into the questions. Her hands free she used one to articulate the shape of the thoughts coming from her. She is full of intelligent things to say and alive and 69. She has been publishing since she was 20. The only thing thick about this woman was the black eyeliner she wore. I couldn't ask a question. I just watched her mouth move with all these smart words coming out and I was so grateful to be there. I always feel strange seeing writers and being around other people who can afford to see them. As we were waiting for Maire Claire Blais to read, one shiny Platinum woman asked another shiny Platinum woman if she spoke French. The Woman parted her lips and flew out some French and impressed the woman who asked where she had learned. 'I studied at the Sorborrne in Paris'. The other woman sucked in her glee and said 'You're so cultured I can't stand it'. I am not cultured but I read a lot because I can. I come to understand books slowly in my own time, borrowed from libraries and savored like gifts, I can't believe I get to have. After the reading my friend got Marie Claire Blais to sign her first novel, Mad Shadows. I just said hello and thanked her for her work and then mumbled something about how my family lost their French when we moved to Alberta. She said, "That's Sad". But Marie Clair Blais is not sad even though she writes of sad, real things. She has a little head full of big French ideas and I wish I could hear them exactly as they fall from her marvelous mind.

Human Writes Wrestlers

THE WRESTLERS:
The Scared Black Dragon, The Blue Mangler, The Purple Ungraspable, The Ultra Violet Tap Dancer, Silver Mask,The cool blue silent Spirit, La Exterminadora Roja, The Violet Pentuka, The Yellow Gung Ho, The Red Mad Mongolian and Crimson "Killer" Congo

The first play shop for Kickstart Disability Arts was held last night. participants each invented a wrestler and wrote intriguing and hilarious background stories for each. Next week we will write monologues for the wrestlers about what they're missing in their lives, what's in the way and how they'd be irrevocably changed if they got what they wanted. A presentation of the work will happen on April 29th at 8pm in the Cineworks Studio. Email Jan if interesting in attending.

Trouble, Trouble that's Pope -A-Matic Trouble !!

Last week, on his first visit to Africa, Pope Benedict said that "[AIDS] cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

The Pope's statement is at odds with the research on AIDS prevention, and a setback to decades of hard work on AIDS education and awareness. With powerful moral influence over more than 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, and 22 million HIV positive Africans, these words could dramatically affect the AIDS pandemic and put millions of lives at risk. Worldwide concern is starting to show results and a willingness by the Vatican to revise the statement - sign our urgent petition asking the Pope to take care not to undermine proven AIDS prevention strategies:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/pope_benedict_petition

Dance Marathon

Thank you to all the student actors and writers at the Vancouver Film School for working so hard on creating and performing the original play, Dance Marathon. Devised and directed by Jan Derbyshire and Andrew McIlroy. The whirlwind creation happened in five days between February 16-20. It was the fifth play building through improvisation class led by Jan and Andrew. This type of collaboration brings out the best or the worst in people. Lucky us, nothing but the best was to be found in the VFS studio theatre for this long and productive week. Alumni can continue to build improvisational story building skills at The Myth Sisyphus Club - Workshops led by McIlroy and Derbyshire, running Tuesday nights through VFS starting March 17. vfs.com for more details.

Sm(all) acts of saying so...

I feel sexy when I travel through the world with my own eyes. When I see things as they are with my camera, with my pictures on the covers of magazines. My pictures of sexy have never matched the pictures they take as sexy. Sexy isn’t a looking. It’s a feeling - the electricity of being fully alive and present. When I am with my own experience, I feel sexy. Seeing myself with my own eyes and not caring what other people see, removed from the disapproving or the need to be improving. Sexy is the freedom of not needing to deal with the made up thoughts I think other people maybe thinking about how I’m looking. Sexy is rejecting the Object view, the sum of my object parts.

This is to say, I usually feel sexiest when I am alone.

Hiking in the sierra Madre Mountains, just an hours drive outside of Los Angeles. It is July and hot and I am hiking, alone, totally fused up in the work I am doing down here, totally stressed. I fall back to a old, coping habit,get out of town, head for the the hills. The hiking trail is dusty and the fine, red brown earth sticks to my sweaty legs and hands and face. I walk in and out of shade and scorching sun. About an hour in, I come around a bend in the path and hear a river. I walk on and come upon a tiny waterfall. It looks like a Hollywood set, small, build for one, a ledge under the fall, perfect for standing on. I take off my hiking boots and socks and douse myself, singing bad opera like Bugs Bunny in one of his famous cartoons. I put my socks and boots back on and continue up the trail. The heat is so intense, my clothes are completely dry in minutes and the red, brown dirt sticks to me again like cinnamon. I think about going back to the cool waterfall and calling it a day but I want to reach the peak to take in the view of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. I am craving some sort of perspective on the city and it’s place in the world. I think a good view might do it. Half an hour later just as the heat becomes unbearable, I come across another tiny, perfect waterfall, just like the first. I let out a yell of fierce joy and stand under the water again. I have been working in Los Angeles for a month, living entirely in my mind, Cut off completely from anything visceral. I feel lonely and scarred. I am not enjoying the work I do. I am afraid to fail and more even more afraid to succeed. If I do badly I won’t be invited back for more work . If I did well they might ask me to stay. I didn’t want to turn them down but knew I would have to. I couldn’t imagine trying to work and raise my five year old daughter in Los Angeles. She was staying with my parents in Calgary while I fulfilled this contract, this chance of a lifetime people said. But what of this life ? What of this time ? I was filled with the racing thoughts of worry, weakened by a bone thinning stress, going through the motions, keeping up the professional mask to hide the amateur emotion. Very far away from myself. The waterfall tumbled water over me and brought me back to now, back to sensations of dirt, sweat, water, cool, clean. After second waterfall there was remarkably, a third. At the top of the hike I took a long look back to LA. It look diseased, spread out like it was and at the bottom of the a parfait of air pollution. In layers chocolate colored, deep brown and thinning out miles high to the color of faded butterscotch. I stood on a plateau, full of prairie grass. I flopped down and slept deeply for an hour.

I remember thinking on this hike. I feel sexy. Dirt, sweat, water, cool, clean. Dirt, sweat, water, cool, clean. Being in the moment with no eyes but my own. On the cover of my own magazine. Subscribed to by one. So maybe sexy for me is being here. Perhaps I will reclaim the word sexy, make it a synonym for here. I am sexy. I am here. I feel here. I feel no weight or worth in the eyes upon me. I feel worth in me. I feel here. I am sexy. I am here. Sexy is here.

This monologue will be presented at Sm(all) Acts of saying so, works in progress from the latest Myth Universe Project. March 8, 7-9. Herd of Women Studios 1000 Parker St. email colossalsquid22@gmail.com for more info or to reserve a seat.

In Service of the wife

In the end my parents were paper. That thin, that blank. There was nothing left for me to do but write on them. I took them from their beds and laid them on my desk. There was a breeze coming through the window and so I had to weigh them down with books. I anchored my mother with the dictionary and a thick tome on the History of French Canadians. My Father was harder to pin down. On each of his corners I placed a volume of my Simone de Beauvoir collection and for good measure the few books I’d managed to own on the subject of war. I had to let my pen make my parents up as I wrote. My mother immediately took to the ink , smiling like a baby being caressed by tender story hands. My father was not so easy to write on. He crinkled up, refused to allow the words to flow smoothly. He seemed almost allergic to the attempt and fought with the only thing he had left to fight with - wrinkles and creases.

All I had to work with was some vague memories that I didn’t trust and a cardboard box, full of photographs that used to hold Fabric softener. I wish that on the backs of these photographs, instead of dates and people’s names, diligently scribed by my mother, there were the actually thoughts that people were having at the time the photo was taken. They say a picture is worth a thousands words. For those of use who need words to make sense of anything, a few clues to the mysterious internal worlds of the people we stare at in photos would really help. As it is, each word of the thousand’s worth, must be pulled out of the dark mine. There is intensive labor and the excavated of guesses to find one or two gems that in the end maybe be worth nothing to anyone else but you and your hungry need to know. Photographs aare also guilty or lining up events in time, feeding the illusion that life happens in a straight line. When I think about my parent’s story, I am more inclined to think in circles, full circles rippling into other circles, that once started cannot really touch or escape each other. It is easier now to see why what happened in the end happened. But the precise events that started the ripples, the exact language exchanged between my parents, the actions they did or didn’t take, was buried when they stopped talking. What landed as pebbles, what landed as heavy stones ? I can only guess. And that guess is this story. My parents love story. It is probably wrong on all counts but I need to know some story about them, even if it’s wrong.

To be continued.