Don’t Say Maid in Tennessee (in Boston)

I’ve been living in a luxury hotel for the last 40 days and 40 nights. There are routines here.

I am in a play. The setting of the play is a hotel room. Our production is site-specific. I live in the hotel room where we perform the play twice a night, five nights a week. So half of my home is covered in army netting, bamboo, tropical plants, a crushed velvet tiger painting and houses 28 chairs for audience members. It’s lush. There are fruit flies. The sheets have big flowers on them. Pink, Red.  I watched How to Marry A Millionaire here on Netflix Instant and Marilyn Monroe kept calling things Creamy.

Yesterday I was sick with a gross cold. I was in the other half of the suite. It is bleach white and charcoal. Plates on the wall. Faders on the light switches. The deepest bath tub in America. I spent 32 hours in a king size bed with a pile of dirty kleenexes, a casio keyboard that me and my sister and brother got for christmas one year, a sack of clementines, and some really slow wifi energy charges inside of my laptop computer.

I heard a maid come in. I heard her walk through where the audience sits, past the bed where I pretend to almost have sex in front of an audience eighty times a night Wednesday thru Sunday, and then I saw her peek her head around the corner to where I was lying with my kleenexes.  I muted the episode of Smash I was watching on Hulu. She wanted to know if she could clean the room. I didn’t know. Could she? Is it her job or my job to clean this up? If I’m sick, isn’t it my mom’s job? Could I go somewhere in my pajamas? Or could I just lay in the bed while she changed the sheets? Am I a quadriplegic?

We both had these “honor thy mother and father” looks on our faces like we were about to get the shit kicked out of us if we did the wrong thing.

“I’m sick,” I said. And laughed a tiny bit to let her know that being sick is…funny?

When should she come back to clean, she wanted to know.  In my congested nasal passages, the answer was Never, but I didn’t want to get her in trouble with mom and dad. I made up a time. 5pm. But I knew how Groundhog’s Day that would be. She’d come in at 5pm and walk past the chairs, the ferocious tiger painting. She’d turn the corner and see me still trying to stream Smash on Hulu at 240 pixels per second, but this time it would be obvious that I had eaten some microwave oatmeal.

So I backpedaled on the 5pm thing. And we hovered in anxious silence. Sad giggles. Neither of us spoke the other’s language.   I wanted to be honest with her. (And with everybody I would ever meet.) And once I remembered that, I knew what to say. I pointed to the phone.  “Oh, I’ll just call down when I’m ready?”

Our faces changed. It was like we were giving each other secret back rubs in another dimension.

“You just call them.”

Now we knew the things to say. We said them.

She walked back through the Tennessee Williams set and was gone.

Until the next day at around the same time.

August 27, 2011

Once again, I leave used up eyelashes everywhere.  It’s cold here and I’m sleepy.  Last night in the make-up room, getting ready for the thirty-girl live-on-the-internet lingerie pyjama party, me and Gia and Aidenn and Brande and Pony sang along to Belinda Carlisle and curled each other’s hair and shared beauty tips and it was like my ten-year-old self had imagined it all into being.  I’m old now, a real grown-up, drinking espresso on Saturday morning and writing post-wedding thank-you cards.

photo by Michelle Tea

In Akumal, it was nesting season, and the turtles came up on the beach at night like tanks with dinosaur heads.  From twenty feet away in the dark, you could just make out their big flippers flinging sand up and across their own backs, with a rough thwacking sound like in a movie gangster digging a hole for the body.  The CEA with their red flashlights kept everyone back and quiet, until one night when the turtle had stopped digging and been only a still black shape for at least ten minutes, and the man with the red flashlight waved us in close.   A dozen tourists from the US and Italy and northern Mexico moved in quietly to flank the nest, and the turtle became slowly visible, three feet wide, her shell crusted with sand and red-brown curls of seaweed that seemed to be rooted and growing there.    The man with the flashlight touched the turtle’s front flipper, shone his red light on the numbered metal tag there, and then moved around to her backside and used his arm to push the banks of the nest out wider so we could see right in.  The turtle didn’t move at all, just continued to lay her eggs and we watched them drop – a pile of sticky ping-pong sized tapioca balls deep in the damp sand.  We stayed there watching for thirty minutes or an hour, who could tell how long?  And the woman next to me held her little telephone out in front of her with its lights off – she could not possibly have seen an image on its little screen – making the world’s most boring vacation video to prove that she’d been there.   All of a sudden, seeing something we could not, the man with the red flashlight waved us all away, and we stepped back before the turtle began to move again.  Maybe she was tired or just careful – she moved a little sand into the nest with her flippers (like a child making angels in the snow) and then paused for an entire minute before repeating the motion.  Warm damp air, black beach, our skin sticky, the waves continuing to rush in and out, and this ancient animal slowly, slowly, burying her secret nest.  Finally she must have decided it was well-hidden; she began to turn around, clockwise, a few inches at a time, until she faced the water.  Then, her back still heaped with sand, like something out of a myth, she walked back into the ocean.

Back in San Francisco, Brande glues my lashes on one more time.  Next week she’ll go back to Los Angeles and I’ll go back to New York and last night was just one more party at which fifteen new girls learned how to wear a glitter dildo.  Next week I’ll return to my schedule of ten mid-air hours a week, doing my homework at 30,000 feet, and all of this seems like a kind of mythology.  Art-making and naked-on-the-internet and Hollywood movie stars acting out lines I’ve written.  Not to mention hurricanes in Manhattan and famous NYU faculty at the welcome reception eating grilled shrimp on a stick.  Last night there were nervous girls in bright lipstick and daring girls in bright lipstick and both of them reminded me of me.  Reminded me of being a grown-up, still pop sing-along, head still turned by ribbons, post-adolescent and still eyelashes everywhere.

Sugarland 2009

Early one morning, we heard shouting on the beach and ran down with our coffee cups and sleep-crazy hair to see Elyo, the head of the red-flashlight turtle-keepers, helping the new-hatched baby turtles out of the sand to keep them safe from birds.  They were small as plums.  Flat plums with strong legs and perky little faces, and when he let them go into the sea, two or three at a time, they scrambled like wind up toys, were turned over by the first waves and then got back up to try again until they finally got past the edge of the water and caught the current – tiny, determined creatures riding out into the wide water.

the opposite of I-don’t-care-to-belong-to-any-club-that-will-have-me-as-a-member.

I didn’t drink or do drugs or have any sex in high school. I was compulsively extracurricular. I was in every play. I was an editor of our newspaper. I was president of the Thespian Club. My best friend was president of the Latin Club. Not Latin as in Latino but as in the Latin language almost all western languages are based on. I was studying Spanish. I was jealous. But not because Spanish is just a beauty mark on Latin’s pretty face, but that she was in a club that I was not in. I liked the idea of being in “clubs.”

I always took a voluntary extra early morning class too. Nobody was forcing me and I didn’t even really want to. It just felt like I should always be at school. I was at school from 7am til about 9pm every day. When I wasn’t at school I was hanging out at Kroger. Which is a grocery store chain in the South. They had a campaign called “Dare to Compare” which allowed you to compare the tastes of, say, Snyder’s hard pretzels to the taste of Kroger brand hard pretzels. Me and Natalie would shut our eyes and dare each other to compare. In a blind taste test, the name brand always tasted better than the Kroger brand. And we felt really smug about our scientific process of finding that out. If the price hike was simply about money spent on Chips Ahoy’s ad campaign, then YUMMY.  Those commercials are delicious. And all you have to do to find that out is close your eyes, stick out your tongue and trust your best friend. Not a problem.

We decided to do a Kroger photo shoot. We had to do it in aisle that didn’t have a lot of traffic. Paper products. Not as beautiful as canned goods or produce for a photo shoot, but it bought us time. Natalie pretended to run over my body with a grocery cart. Garrett snapped the photos. I tried to make fake pain look different each time. Natalie had to change her motivation for running over me each time. Sometimes she feigned malice, sometimes it was a tragic accident, sometimes she was heroic. Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” played over the PA.

This is my first memory of reverence.

I said to Natalie, “My future husband will have to sing this song to me.  And mean every word of it. And he will have to think of it on his own.”

I never felt so sure of anything.

Setting up nearly impossible rules for my romantic future. Only Natalie knew the rules. I drove Natalie and I to school every day and we would always play oldies. It was hard to get her to sing. (She was a stage manager theatre person.) But if you sang hard, she would forget herself and do the same thing. In my Volvo.

Right now I am in love. With somebody who seems like a husband. Strong. Short hair. Big dad kind of smiles. Freckles. We are trying to live together. We currently do not.  We’re trying to live in this one apartment with stained glass windows and no buzzer.

I looked up the etymology of “husband.” It’s a combo of the Old Norse hus which means house and bondi which means dweller.

It’s a much simpler idea than I thought it was. Everything’s always like that.

The Kroger photo shoot pictures were part of a surprise calendar that Natalie made for me for Christmas. One picture for every month of one year. When the year is over, the calendar no longer serves a purpose. I keep it in my bedroom at my parent’s house.

I am playing a newlywed right now in a play. She is covered in bruises and scratches and although the source of these bruises is the mystery of the play, I choose to believe that they are from her husband. I choose to believe that she feels lots of different ways about this, and one of them is turned on.

 

Good Weather For Cardigans

I remember when Lovefool came out on the Romeo and Juliet Soundtrack. I would shut my bedroom door. Lock it. Blast that shit. Watch myself dance in the full length mirror. Once, my friend Logan pretended like one of the posts of my canopy bed was a stripper pole and did sexy dances with it. to Lovefool. It was the craziest thing I had ever seen anybody do. I knew it was bad.  So I just quietly checked the doorknob. To make sure.

Last night, I got to be in a show with the singer of that song. Nina Persson. She wore a mustard yellow blouse and a grey pencil skirt and pretended to be a therapist while she sang the Bruno Mars chorus of Lighters. Everybody in the audience put their lighters in the air. But I don’t smoke.

So I held up a candle.

I doggone seen about everything.

I guess it really is Fall. I guess it’s Autumn. I guess this happens every year. But this elephant always forgets.

I am a sucker for Dumbo’s eyes. and Pinocchio’s.  I guess the thing they have in common, besides/because of the whites of their eyes, is that people want to exploit them as performers. In the circus, Dumbo has to dress up like a clown baby and stand in the window of a burning building. Top floor. While a bunch of fire department circus clowns “rescue” him. A clown dressed in elephant mommy drag histrionically screams “my baby! my baby! save my child!”  while Dumbo’s real mom is shackled to the inside of a car on the circus train. The car is labeled: MAD ELEPHANT. At the end of the act, Dumbo jumps out of the window (correction: he’s pushed and made to look like he jumps) to land on one of those fire department canvas landing pads. But the canvas is a facade. He falls right through it into a pool of whipped cream.

This sounds fun to me.  But you can tell it’s not fun for Dumbo.  He’s humiliated and scared.  The clowns/ringmaster were sort of banking on that feeling. They knew that’s what was thrilling about the number for the audience. the humiliation and the fear.

I feel very Phantom of the Opera fantasy mask about it. Like part of me is the ringmaster and the other part is Dumbo.  I can get into humiliation. I usually learn a lot about what my fucking problem is.

Tonight I’m going down to Occupy Wall Street for the first time.  So are a big group of Marines.

witch hunt

I was on gchat with Max earlier today.

“Wanna get coffee?” is what i said to him. He said he was blogging. Then he could get coffee. It reminded me of this blog. Of the feeling you get when you blog. I think it’s what Virgina Woolf was talking about when she wrote A Room of One’s Own. It is that room for 21st century folks who weren’t born into money.

Tying bricks to your arms and legs and walking into a river is the inverse of the problem that Ariel had in The Little Mermaid. I guess it cost both of them, Virginia and Ariel, their voices. But If Ursula was Ariel’s sea witch, then who was Virginia’s land witch? The only person who can answer that is Walt Disney. Since he is deceased, I am going to ask this nun, Sister Dominica, my Aunt’s best friend, who passed away in her sleep on Thursday if she could talk to Walt about it.

It’s about knowing the right people.

joe is a drink named coffee

It was cold all night. I left my window open because my radiator is a temperature dominatrix and I like to let a window be a safe word.

I want to try a different coffee shop today in an effort to try a different life.  Maybe not even get a soy latte.  I heard there was a place that sold chicory coffee near me.

When I was moving away from Michigan, I had no specific plans or goals.  I gave myself two options.  New York City or New Orleans. Michigan doesn’t have the word “New” in it, so I knew i had to go somewhere that did.  I had visited New York City once before to perform a show at the Guggenheim. Sounds fancy, but we stayed at a YMCA in bunk beds and I got so drunk at an Irish Pub I woke up and found more than one tampon inside of me.  I guess that was the clincher.  I chose New York.

There’s a picture of Judy Garland in my bedroom and a calendar I made so I could give myself stickers for everyday i do a p90x work-out.

I made my bed this morning. I do that now in New York.

I didn’t know to want this.

When I was little,  my Aunt Pat gave me a a teddy bear dressed in a nurse’s uniform.  I looked at it and saw some kind of future.  I don’t mean that I explicitly thought I would become a teddy bear nurse or even a nurse, but that for some reason, i felt like a stuffed animal in an employer uniform was a weird hint. Aunt Pat was the only woman in my family who had a job.  My mom, Aunt Chris, and Aunt Ruth were all homemakers.  Aunt Jo was a nun, and that just felt like she was a different gender than the rest of the world, and that that was a job, and that  job meant having short grey hair, singing way louder than other people at church, and joyously playing Kings In The Corner with me and Granddad on Thanksgiving.

When you’re a kid, people want to know what you want to be when you grow up.  Given my options, I obviously wanted to be a nun.

(I think it’s important to note that a subletter in my apartment who does a lot of coke is doing what sounds like filing his nails really really fast in the room next door to mine.)

I’m not a nun. And I’m grown up.  I’m an artist who accidentally took the vow of poverty.

The difference between taking the vow of poverty as a clergy member and accidentally taking the vow of poverty as an artist, is that, as a clergy member, you get to make up a meager budget that covers all of your basic needs.  Rome pays for it.  Nothing extravagant.  Shelter. Medical. Food. Utilities. Car. Gas. Stuff like that.  You work related to what you specialized in, medical, administrative, etc. in the context of your spiritual practice.

Rome doesn’t pay for my art.

But here I am dressed as an elderly teddy bear. Reading a monologue at an art party. a few years ago.

twenty-three with seven years experience

This is officially my gayest birthday.  Danced at the historic Stonewall Inn to Lady Gaga while eating pink cupcakes and wearing a gold plastic crown jeweled with miniature plastic breasts (thank you Mare-in Markey).  Drank champagne from sippy cups and sobbed through not one, but two Broadway shows about singing queens.

Gender-nonconformists in sequined gowns just get me every time.  Not to mention songs about how a little mascara can really turn your life around.  These are themes that resonate.

You know what else gets me all choked up? You tube home videos.

Exhibits A and B:

“I can’t even think about marriage right now.”

I’m on a brunch-everyday kick. With Becca. Today, I cut the stalks off the greens.  De-boned them.  It’s as close as I’ll get to being a butcher.  When i was a bartender at the Dive Bar, the neighborhood butcher used to come in during the afternoon, get totally hammered, and then go back to the chopping block.  I had to ask myself whether or not I was responsible for the finger I imagined he would sever. When you’re 23 and you’re hired because you’re cute and the sight of you inspires liquor purchase, who should you protect at the bar?

One afternoon, he brought me a steak he had just cut and seared.  It was so good.