I Am A Very Sensitive Person

what I've been thinking about

2010-12-14T14:42:00.000-08:00

Oh, hi.

So I've been on blog hiatus (blogiatus?) for the last six months. I went on a big camping trip in July and after I got back I could not bring myself to spend more time on the computer than necessary. I mean, reading Dooce and Fluent Self and Penelope Trunk and Mark Bittman and the Pioneer Woman is necessary, lord knows. And how could I tear myself away from facebook. But blogging didn't make the cut.

And I'm still not sure if blogging is good for me or a waste of time. But lately I'm feeling the pull again, so we'll see how this goes.

Lately I am really feeling Loretta Lynn, Edith Piaf, Judy Blume and Beyonce.

When I was 16 my heroes were Tori Amos and Sylvia Plath. Like every other sensitive sixteen year old girl, I was really into despair and the beauty of unending sadness. Then I got sick of it. I can still remember what it felt like to be obsessed with them -- and they have an undeniable power:

But right now there's something about the sense of purpose and pluck and fierceness and positive thinking (ugh - I hate the phrase POSITIVE THINKING - it's so demanding and unrealistic, more on that later) that does it for me.

And damn, Judy Blume never ceases to blow my mind:

On Being Messy

2010-06-06T00:20:00.000-07:00

Oh my god. How is this woman seeing into my head and writing my personal mantras on a daily basis?

First there was this which I wrote about over on the H2M blog.

Then today I read this: real life is messy.

Exactly what I have been mulling over in my head the last two days. I know some people manage to combine wild creativity with spotless order but for me it's heads creativity, tails messy house. (Like Heads Carolina, Tails California but without the dude wearing overalls and no shirt. Unfortunately.)

On good days I tell myself that messy = fun = active life = spontaneous = free = strong woman etc. But some days it can get kind of overwhelming and starts to feel more like messy = disorganized = scattered = lazy = bum = get your shit together = ewwwww.

Isn't it funny how something so simple as your living space can have such wildly divergent associations?

And the truth is actually somewhere between those two trains of thought. Which is why it's awesome to hear someone else articulate the reality of being a living breathing human being who occupies space, that it "waxes and wanes… gets messy then neat…out-of-control then serene and collected, and back again. Real life and making and doing is a wild business: work…. in…. progress…."

HELL YES, sister.

I Ching: the creative.

2010-05-20T00:58:00.000-07:00

In what I hope will be a new regular feature, I'd like to share with you the I Ching reading I got the other day.

For those of you who don’t know, the I Ching is the Book of Changes, an ancient system of Chinese divination that offers various subtle descriptions of situations one might encounter in life and how best to handle them.

My Mom has always been really into the I Ching, and when I was a bratty 16-year-old I would grudgingly go along with her readings. Then one time in college I borrowed her book and the reading it gave me was so eerily, exactly appropriate to my situation that it gave me pause. Since then I’ve taken it pretty seriously. And lately I’ve started adding this to my morning routine (since I’m currently unemployed I have the luxury of crafting a morning routine that isn’t ‘jump in the shower and grab a bagel on your way out the door.’)

Critics might argue that the answer is not found in the book at all, but in yourself –- and to this I say: BINGO. The book is a tool for sorting through your perceptions and getting some perspective and figuring out what to do. Something you can’t always figure out for yourself.

Anyway. All of this is to give you some context for this bit of wisdom I received the other day. I got the hexagram “the creative” which is the very first one in the book of changes. (The second one is “the receptive.”) It told me this:

The course of the creative alters and shapes beings
until each attains its true, specific nature.

RIGHT ON, I Ching. This mantra has been sticking in my head. It makes me think of the things I’ve learned through creative projects –- things that taught me about performance, sure, but more importantly made me who I am. (And of course, the I Ching isn’t talking about the creative in terms of art but in terms of the most basic life-giving principles.)

Specifically, I immediately thought about these three creative experiences in the last five years, and what they taught me:

BLUE on tour in Poland, 2004 & 2005:

How to sing and be heard outside. How to hold attention and throw focus.

How to push past limitations. How to keep going when you are exhausted and the situation is fucked. (Like: there isn’t enough power for lights so we’re going to have people turn their car headlights on. Or, a dog has wandered onstage and is peeing on the set. Or, the set is on fire. I could go on and on.)

Taking the sheen off the idea that skills can be transferred to you magically upon contact with a “master”. The real training, what makes you strong and reliant, is in doing difficult things.

How to teach when you can’t rely on language. How to adapt exercises to meet my own needs and the needs of the group.

How to be a good host. How to make soup in 15 minutes.

Undine (2008-2010) (this makes it seem like Undine is a short-lived friend of mine) (which maybe she is):

How to withstand pure terror. How to withstand a panic attack. How to do something when you really, truly think you can’t do it.

How my voice works, how to make it strong without pushing too hard.

The curative properties of BEET BLAST.

How to make decisions. Lots of them.

Why sometimes the best thing you can do is be brutally honest with someone about what you think, and sometimes the worst thing you can do is be “nice” and gloss over the fact that you are not in agreement.

Repeat After Me (2007-present) (now it’s like I’m writing a resume):

The strength of impure sources, impure training: the strength of a mutt.

How to be super physical & vocal without hurting myself. (Of course this was only learned after a prolonged period of being super physical & vocal and hurting myself).

The thrill of doing the thing you fear the most –- the liberation that results from doing it. That’s how you become fearless.

The liberation in getting a truly bad review. The liberation didn't come right away, of course -- first there was the jaw dropping and the stomach churning. But later there was the sick pride that comes from being loathed for your work.

In general, the thread I see running through these three experiences is:

Working with your body & voice, with strength and purpose, without pushing too hard

Withstanding fear, panic, exhaustion and failure, and how this makes you stronger.

Relying on yourself and trusting your gut when it comes to learning, teaching and growing.

Learning how to do something by first learning how NOT to do it.

And that’s pretty interesting.

THANKS, I CHING!

Work in progress

2010-05-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

Hello friends.

I am in the thick of it. Opening our new work in progress show on Friday, which is always a peculiar mix of terror and thrill and humiliation and pride -- clearly a mix of emotions I'm drawn to though every time we hit this part of the process I question my devotion to the art form, and question my judgment and mental health and clarity in general. You've got to be a bit of a masochist to embrace showing your work when it is purposefully -- nay, DEFIANTLY -- undone. I guess this fits in with my theme of late, thwarting perfectionism, but damn is it hard. And not for everyone.

Yesterday was actually not too bad -- we were all so tired we hit the slap happy zone which was a blessing. That's the only way to handle the extreme stress of a room full people all trying to weave their separate threads into a beautiful crazy quilt at light speed in 36 hours.

If only I could enter that slap happy zone every time I reached the exhaustion point! You just never know when your sleep deprivation will lead you down a path of giggling silly dancing stupor and when it will send you crashing into furniture or crying over a burrito that is not to your liking or snapping I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING in response to someone's concern over your mishandling of an electric drill.

All imaginary examples.

Anyway: we're always writing and rewriting the show constantly up to the last minute which means we never run it fully until 3-4 days before we open (which is pretty stressful for the actors and the director but REALLY stressful for all the designers and tech crew we work with). I've experienced this vertigo countless times in the last ten years, so at least when I feel that panic I can call it what it is instead of associating it with the show itself and with doom and failure and self-doubt.

I know that the day before we run the show in full (and sometimes the day after) I always ALWAYS have a crisis of faith (double meaning acknowledged) and think that this time we're going to crash and burn. And every single time it pulls together in the days after that, and the show may vary and we may want to change 75% of it, but it will be a show. And I can remember the worst case scenarios, and recognize that this scenario is a much better one and rationally know that it's going to be fine.

Still, every time that peculiar, gaping fear hits me: that we will stumble blindly about the stage in un-unified chaos until we shuffle and mumble off the stage leaving the audience in stunned, horrified silence. And every time I console myself by saying this has never come to pass. (Unless we wanted it to).

It's never come to pass... YET.

Because that is the thing: for all my confidence based on past experiences, every time the terror is fresh, because every time could be the first time it's ever happened. Maybe THIS is the one we can't pull off!

Anyway. I could go on all day about it. But we've pulled above the clouds now, we've reached cruising speed. I think this sucker can fly. I once was blind but now I see. I believe the children are the future. You gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em. Etc.

Perfectionism in Space

2010-04-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

So as you know, perfectionism and the way it can stop you in your cold, dead tracks (did I just mix metaphors or invent a new one?) has been on my mind.

Then today I came across this post on IttyBiz which basically nails what I in my meandering way have been trying to get across. The topic is starting an online business (something else I’ve been edging towards in my sidelong fashion), but it is equally applicable to creating a solo performance, making art with a group of people, marketing your work… basically any activity you might do, alone or with others. Well almost any activity. Let’s keep this clean, people.

I love this section:

Let me put this another way: In my experience, if you want to do business online, you’re going to have to be willing to do your thing to the best of your ability even if it doesn’t feel like you’ve defined yourself and your value proposition and your website perfectly enough yet. You’re going to have to accept that the way you’re doing things in six months may well be totally different from the way you’re doing them now. You’ll need to realize that just because you’re writing about how much you love explosive pies today, you may be organizing courses to train explosive pie disposal units in half a year. That has to be okay with you. You have to go with your gut, and go where the market seems to be taking you. You have to let your voice and your method of operation evolve with time.

This really gets to the heart of the quandary: what I’m working on is always far from “done” but I have to put it out there sometime. Ready or not. And I have to be okay with what people say, knowing that they will be legitimate to criticize it for not being fully realized. And in fact, that is the only way it can grow into its strongest, fullest form – by putting it out there. Before it’s perfect. Because if you wait until it’s perfect, you’ve waited too long.

This is the course Hand2Mouth has always followed, and that I have followed as a solo performer. It’s how I’ve learned everything that really matters as a performer and creator and (god help me) marketer. But it’s still hard to do, and hard to articulate.

God, speaking of marketing – I have such a love / hate relationship with it.

I’m trying to think of “marketing” as another creative outlet, a positive thing, an HONEST thing. On the love side I’ve got this and this and this to back me up. On the hate side: this (more on that here).

Maybe I should follow Havi’s lead and come up with a new term for the m-word (she calls it biggification) so I don’t feel like a sleazeball who’s trying to autohypnotize people.

Could I call it creative describing? That’s a terrible name. Creative telling?

What it comes down to is: telling people what you do in a way that condenses it and gets the feeling across. Right? Especially important for H2M since we can’t invite everyone to just come to a rehearsal and watch how we work (not that we haven’t tried), and there aren’t too many influences we can link ourselves to that people instantly recognize (saying our influences are Forced Entertainment, the Wooster Group, Teatr Usta Usta and Radiohole often leads to neverending explanation which is not the best way to communicate excitement and adventure). (not to be confused with The Neverending Story which IS the best way to communicate excitement and adventure).

How about creative space & time travel? Hello, I am the director of creative space & time travel. No, it’s too bulky. Creative communication? Well that kind of says it, doesn’t it? I’d still like to work space and time in there somehow though. Creative interdimensional communication?

Oh, as you may have guessed I’m in the midst of “creatively communicating” the new work-in-progress H2M show, Uncanny Valley (talk about being comfortable putting your work out there in an unfinished state). That probably explains why I want to work time & space into my marketing. The number one thing this show has taught me is that any concept, any theory, any activity of any kind, is VASTLY improved upon when launched into space.

Well. As often happens I’ve gotten off track. I’ll have more later on the many angles of perfectionism. And space. And creative interdimensional communication. And possibly my neglected little business plan.

Battling Perfectionism

2010-04-21T22:21:00.000-07:00

I think of myself as a recovering perfectionist. The clearest insight I had about this came when I was seeing a therapist two years ago (back when I could afford the luxury of mental health) and told her that I struggled with perfectionism, but not really, because actually I wasn’t doing anything well enough to qualify as a perfectionist.

Wait, she said. So what you’re telling me is you would be a perfectionist if you could just do things a little more perfectly?

Well… yes.

Yeah, that still counts as perfectionism.

Because I was going through my actions as if there were a level of perfection that it was possible to achieve. Because I was comparing myself to mythical people (or the real people around me who I was remaking in my head as more perfect beings) and finding myself lacking. Because I was beating myself up all the time for not doing things the right way, the better way, the more thorough way, the more organized way. The perfect way.

So that Perfectionism -- damn, is she a tricky beast. She invades your thinking without you even realizing it. One day you’re taking notes at a company meeting, the next day you’re hunched at your computer taking an extra thirty minutes to get the font right so people can read it, the next day you’re taking an extra hour to organize everyone’s action items at the top of the notes even though nobody reads them (of course there’s a nice dose of Martyr / Victim Complex that always seems to crop up alongside Perfectionism. They’re sort of like that mean girl in elementary school and her super sweet best friend).

(Wait, except Peppermint Patty isn’t really a perfectionist, is she? Well, you get the idea.)

Anyway, in my epic struggles to not let Perfectionism boss me around, I have found a few techniques helpful:

Leaping into things before I’m fully prepared -- leaping past that urge to be “prepared enough” (which is impossible) by jumping in when I know that I am in fact not fully prepared. A sort of “fuck you” to perfectionism.

Laughing at the things I have done perfectly and not taking their supposed perfection seriously. As in: look at these amazing gleaming golden NOTES I took at the company meeting. Aren’t they perfect? Aren’t they an incredible shining example of what notes should be?

Admitting right away when I don’t know how to do something or think I may have done it wrong. In effect, thwarting that perfectionist desire to know everything and hide all failure by being openly, publicly honest about my mistakes and what I don’t know.

Remembering that a completed imperfect task matters more than a task that comes in late because I needed to know more, prepare more, edit more, etc.

Caveat: one undesired outcome of these techniques is that I sometimes overcompensate and use this as an excuse to NOT PREPARE. Which is not the same thing at all, and only gives the Inner Perfectionist fodder for telling me what an incompetent, lazy, unbaked fool I am. No: the trick is to prepare -- to take things seriously -- but to also leap in no matter what when leaping is called for.

I must admit, though, there is one aspect of Perfectionism I haven’t yet figured out how to handle, and that is other perfectionists.

Again I turn to Peanuts for inspiration. Of course Peppermint Patty isn't the Perfectionist, it's freaking LUCY! Watch, she's basically my Inner Perfectionist in cartoon form, and Charlie Brown is her poor misguided Martyr / Victim aka my SENSITIVE SOUL:

In the same way that recovering alcoholics find the company of practicing alcoholics to be the most challenging, and in the same way that recovering alcoholics can’t expect other people to change their drinking habits -- I have to figure out how to interact with people who display perfectionist tendencies, without giving in to perfectionism myself and without expecting them to change.

Because maybe they don’t have a problem with perfectionism. Maybe it works for them. I imagine that some people take great comfort and pride in their drive for perfection. In fact a lot of things in this world would not exist were it not for perfectionists. So I’m not knocking it. But for me it’s toxic.

So what I need to figure out is how to tolerate other people’s desire for attaining perfection, without letting it trigger my own toxic desires. It’s pretty tricky. Maybe I need to find the equivalent of AA for Perfectionists.

Hello. My name is Faith Helma, and I am a perfectionist. It’s been three days since I gave in to a desire to be perfect. (Ok, fine: three hours) (Ok you got me, I am actually obsessively editing this post RIGHT NOW. Fine, I’ll just post it.)

There you go.

Variations on Causa a la Chiclayana

2010-04-08T00:56:00.000-07:00

Alright, well since nobody cares about my sensitive business plan, I’m going to start writing about food. Not to say that this is a “food” blog. It is still a “sensitive person with crazy impossible business ventures” blog. But damn it, food is something I love to prepare and eat and think about. And in fact the more seriously I take the rest of my creative pursuits, the more I recognize that cooking is just another creative outlet. Plus it satisfies the other need of mine, to be of use to people.

So I’m going to start writing down some of my cooking experiences. And I’m not going to take photos yet because I have a camera phobia.

I fall in the improvisational camp when it comes to cooking. I love to read cookbooks and food blogs (my favorites right now are The Pioneer Woman and Bitten -- though Mark Bittman has now been absorbed into the Diner's Journal so we'll see if my love continues). I consult recipes for reference but I can’t bear to cook something exactly the same way twice so I usually start to tinker with them right away.

For instance: I found this 1950s Latin American cookbook which is fascinating (it translates Salsa Cruda as “uncooked spiced tomato sauce”) and actually has a wealth of recipes I’d never encountered before. I found a recipe for Causa a la Chiclayana (seasoned mashed potatoes with fish and vegetables) that intrigued me, because instead of mashing potatoes with milk and butter and serving them with gravy, you mix them with lemon juice, chopped onions and olive oil. I made this meal and was blown away by how simple and mindblowingly delicious the potatoes were – still potatoes, still comforting and starchy and filling, but also light and spicy and piquant.

Now I make them at least once a week, and can’t go back to the regular kind of mashed potatoes. I also can’t help but add in variations. Here’s the recipe from the cookbook, and then some variations:

Causa a la Chiclayana:

And now for the variations:

Variation #1: I like to let the onions sit in lemon juice & salt for a while before adding the olive oil, making them essentially into lightly pickled onions.

Variation #2: I started using dried chipotles instead of fresh chiles. You know what, you should go find dried chipotles and start using them in everything. You can chop them up and cook them in butter for fried eggs, or add them to chili or any beans you’re cooking… anyway I won’t go on and on about it, just understand that they are divine.

Variation #3: I started adding in fresh parsley from our garden, which is the only thing that keeps on growing through the winter.

Variation #4: I realized if you didn’t mash the potatoes and instead roughly chopped them you’d have an incredible potato salad. I am waiting for the right summer party to appear so I can bring this. I bet it would be awesome with hard boiled eggs too, and maybe even chopped pickles.

Variation #5: This week I was boiling the potatoes and had made the lemon onion mixture, and I decided to also make a kale salad my friend Judy showed me how to make (using raw kale, but you massage it with your hands so it breaks down almost like it’s been steamed). While I was massaging the kale I had a flash – I should mix it in with the potatoes! So I did! And it was awesome. Kind of like colcannon but less hearty & creamy, and sprightlier because of the lemon and chiles.

Variation #6: my favorite variation: you can fry up the leftover potatoes (if there are any) in the morning for breakfast.

Look at all those variations! Basically that one recipe opened my eyes up to a huge revelation: that mashed potatoes are incredibly versatile. My favorite thing to serve with these potatoes is a big pot of beans, with fresh tomatoes chopped up and spooned on top (when they’re in season). Imagine that! Before I encountered this cookbook I would have thought lemony mashed potatoes topped with fresh tomatoes was the wierdest dish ever.

Anyway. So that’s my cooking lesson for today. A very sensitive cooking lesson. Let me know if you end up cooking this and come up with variations of your own!

Business plan: Tangible Feelings™

2010-03-30T23:43:00.000-07:00

Previously I have written about my business plans of opening a creative space / kindergarten classroom for adults or becoming a palm reader. Neither of those plans have progressed much (though I still like them), but now I’ve got another one.

The other day I read that cosmetics companies don’t sell lipstick, they sell feelings. Hope, fantasy, desire. This is not news, everyone knows that Mary Kay is selling eternal youth not skin cream, and Levi’s is selling Portland hipster dreams, not jeans.

Still, it got me thinking. If what most businesses are actually selling is feelings and desires, then why not sell that directly?

I’m all for paying $7 so you can apply long lasting color to your lips. But I also know that the pleasure found in lipstick is fleeting. And if what people want is hope and encouragement and a reason to feel good about themselves, is there a way to give this to them in a more satisfying way? For a similar price?

I think maybe I can. So I present to you: TANGIBLE FEELINGS™ (note: I realize this is a terrible name. Can anyone think of a better one? Someone suggested FEELINGS BY FAITH but that makes it sound like a Christian rock band).

Some things I might offer:

TINY BIT OF HOPE. $7.
A short message tailored to your situation, to lift your spirits and get you feeling good.

SEXY SEXY SEXY. $10.
A passionate exhortation on what it is that makes you incredibly sexy and what you can do to expand on your natural sex appeal.

BIG RAY OF HOPE. $15.
A personal pep talk written just for you, including your favorite quotes, heroes and inspirations, and oratorically delivered and recorded so that you can play it any time you’re feeling low.

JOY JOY JOY. $20.
A song composed and recorded just for you. It’s yours to do with as you please. And you can tell everybody, this is your song. It might be quite simple but, now that it’s done, I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind that I put down in words how wonderful life is when you’re in the world.

IMMORTALITY & ETERNAL YOUTH.
Still in development.

So. What do you think? Am I crazy? Would this be something anyone would actually pay for, ever? I am half-serious about making this into an actual business.

Rant #3: Speaking in Accents

2010-03-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I like to talk about something that makes me spitting mad. And this article on the NY Times arts blog got me thinking about my #1 pet peeve in theatre: the pointless mastery of accents.

I can’t imagine a bigger waste of time than having a broad range of accents and dialects at your disposal. And yet many actors spend their precious life energy -- time they could be using to learn judo or tap dance or something else that actually enhances your stage presence -- learning how to do just that.

I know many people think that without someone speaking a perfect Irish accent the audience will not enter into the world of The Lieutenant of Inishmore. But I have found the opposite to be true. And I just don’t get why you’d care.

Actually I do get why you might care. That’s why it bothers me. Because when I was in college I spent hours listening to British and Southern and Irish dialect tapes. It was something I could easily master and write down on audition forms and display at parties as an example of Something I Know How To Do. And if I was cast in a play I could spend all my time focusing on the easiest, most graspable aspect of it: the accent.

In my present life, I don’t need to master an accent because I do not act in plays that require them. (I act in plays that require you to be yourself with quotation marks, which I’m sure some people find equally annoying). But I do still watch plays in which actors are speaking in accents, and I always find it distracting and I always wish the director had decided to not bother with it. Good accents have never made me love a performance. In fact there is nothing more annoying to watch onstage than an actor who has effortlessly mastered a dialect (except of course for an actor who is painfully butchering one). There’s a flair and a self-consciousness in their delivery that says LOOK AT ME, I’M SPEAKING PERFECT BRITISH. Or South African. Or god help us, Russian.

It’s just a waste of time, in my opinion. For everyone involved. And then to justify that waste of time, actors inflict their mastery on innocent people at parties, people who are just trying to have a conversation and don’t want to hear you launch into guv’nor, fancy a bite to eat, what for NO REASON AT ALL.

Honestly, I’m trying to think of one reason why speaking in an accent would improve the quality or depth or intellectual merit of a play at all, and I can’t. The only reason I can think of is to show off. And if you want to show off, I’d much rather you dress head to toe in sequins and sing me a show tune. Well… as long as it isn’t this show tune. (that is another pet theatre peeve: fifteen year old girls singing On My Own at musical theater auditions. But I can’t in good conscience rail against that since that’s how I spent my adolescence).

UPDATE: see, the Guardian agrees with me.

Inspirations

2010-03-09T23:41:00.000-08:00

I know I talked recently about being inspired by bad art, but that doesn’t mean I’m not inspired by good art too.

I want to mention some awesome things that have been inspiring me. BLOGGY STYLE.

Jenny the Bloggess and her funny ass descriptions of social panic and confidence wigs. Oh my god, I love her so much I want to show you her picture:

And speaking of social panic, I love this post over at Mommy Melee about freaking out at BlogHer. I love it when people are honest about their struggles with high pressure social situations. It’s always a surprise when you hear it from someone else.

You’re like, “what? But you have your shit together and you’re so articulate!” And they’re like, “what are you talking about, I’m having a panic attack right now!” And you’re like, “wow, that’s the classiest panic attack I’ve ever seen!”

I think that’s a beautiful thing for us neurotic introverts to aspire to: classy panic attacks. It worked for Greta Garbo.

Other inspiring things:

Shiva Nata, this crazy kind of yoga I heard about through Havi Brooks over at Fluent Self. I’ve been practicing it most mornings for the last five months (give or take a few weeks where I got frustrated and dropped it altogether) and though it is many times bewildering and seemingly pointless, I totally credit it with getting my mind out of a dark place post-NYC in August, and changing some of my habits without me even thinking about it. Of course I still have a lot of bad habits I’d like to get rid of, so that I can be a gleaming golden ice bodied icon of perfection. But my brain probably realizes that would actually be horrible. And honestly: the number one habit that trips me up lately is Perfectionism. Oh perfectionism, you cold-eyed, diabolical taskmistress. That is a topic for another day.

But let’s move on and talk about a lovely taskmistress: Dooce! This was the first blog I ever got hooked on. Whenever I check in on Dooce, I feel like I’m catching up with my cousin or something. And more often than not there is something that makes me laugh out loud, and then my husband looks over and I say, “Dooce poured bacon fat into a plastic bowl and melted it!” and he gets that concerned/horrified look on his face that means he thinks I’m spending too much time on the internet (he does not believe in using the internet for anything except finding artist residencies in Berlin. I think he thinks Dooce is my imaginary friend. Which... wouldn’t be all that far off, I guess, since we certainly aren’t real life friends). Anyway, I just love Dooce.

Jeff Hylton Simmons’ internet radio station. I just met this dude a few months ago and of course because this is Portland it turns out he knows every third person I know. He’s got broadcasts from people all over the world. Big dreams, big ideas. It's awesome.

And one more thing before I say goodnight, dear internet: the ultimate inspiration. I can remember my brother sitting rapt, 4 years old, in front of the TV watching this performance of Michael Jackson on the Grammys in 1988. I DON'T CARE, I CAN'T GET CYNICAL ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON! I just can't.

Manifesto update!

2010-03-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

I was thinking it would be a good idea to check in on my manifest declarations and see if they still hold. Because I’ve noticed that often when I passionately declare my opinions, I’m talking out of my ass.

For instance – my last manifesto was all about doing it yourself and not fetishizing teachers into gurus and just getting on with it and learning stuff. DARE TO BE A PIECE OF CRAP, I believe I said.

And the example I used was how I was going to learn how to play piano on the old keyboard I found in my basement.

Yeah. Well here’s the thing: as it turns out it’s really HARD to learn piano that way. And I’ve been plunking away every morning for 5-10 minutes and then I go do something else. Which is fine. But it’s become clear to me that I’m never really going to learn piano that way.

So daring to be a piece of crap isn’t the best mantra for me to use if I want to dare to learn piano. Maybe DARE TO GET YOUR ASS IN MOTION AND FIND A TEACHER would be a better one.

Anyway. As for the items in my first manifesto:

- Still don’t want to work for anyone, but my unemployment runs out in a month or so and with it my noble intentions. I’m hoping I can hold out for a boss who isn’t insane.

- Still think we shouldn’t make excuses for Roman Polanski just because he’s a great artist. Though I have to admit I’ve moved a little into Michael Jackson territory with Roman: I’m not making excuses for his appalling behavior, but I can’t help feeling sorry for him. I don’t know if this makes me a good empathetic humanist or a bad feminist. Or both?

- Still love beets with every fiber of my being. In fact: I have developed a variation on my beloved Beet Blast: so you’re boiling the beets along with some carrots, celery and onion in a big pot of water, right? Well after 45 minutes you can remove the beets, chop them up and eat them with the broth! Or by themselves! I always thought they were too mushy after that much boiling but I suddenly realized – hey wait a minute, beets take a long time to cook. So 45 minutes of simmering and you’ve got a beautiful bright red broth, AND beautiful tender beets!

Also speaking of beets (I should have a weekly post devoted solely to beets), I just remembered this opening passage from Jitterbug Perfume which I have always loved, even before I had tasted a beet:

The beet is the most intense of vegetables.

The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

- Back to the manifesti: still a cryer. That is never going to change. In fact I’ve been thinking more and more about how useful & cathartic crying can be. Case in point: back in October we were rehearsing Everyone Who Looks Like You two weeks before opening, which is to say we were madly swooping and careening and wheeling in circles. I was trying to write a song based on screaming (oh, I see I’ve mentioned this before) and I’d gone through at least three distinct versions and every time people didn’t quite like it and I was getting more and more frustrated and in the middle of rehearsal I just burst into tears, cried out I’M SORRY THAT’S THE BEST I CAN DO and ran into the bathroom. It was so embarrassing. I stayed in the bathroom for a while, not sure what to do, and then walked back out expecting horrified silence. But instead everyone came up to me one by one and gave me a hug and apologized! And they hadn’t even done anything! Somehow by letting people see I was overwhelmed, we were able to let go of the tension that had built up around that stupid song, and I was able to see that in fact the pressure wasn’t coming from anyone except me (and after that we figured out how to fix the song, so it was a win win all around).

Of course, if I cried every rehearsal, that would be a problem. But once in a while, it’s a good idea to let your feelings roll over you, come what may.

So that’s where I stand. Looks like half of my convictions still hold water, and the rest have run out of steam (to mix my metaphors). Stay tuned for NEW random passionate declarations, coming soon.

On Being Inspired by Bad Art

2010-02-25T12:58:00.000-08:00

Most of the time people talk about being inspired by good art, and being bored and turned off by bad art. But what about bad art that inspires you to make good art?

Maybe it sounds facetious but I’m serious. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s true of any genre. Some of my best ideas have come to me when I was sitting through an endless monotonous play, or listening to a one note, cheesy singer-songwriter, or walking through a lame gallery with timid paintings and no guts on display.

In fact, one of the breakthroughs that allowed me to have more confidence as a songwriter was when I suddenly realized how many bad, boring, tuneless songs exist. I mean if you listen to hot country on the radio (which I love by the way) -- most songs aren’t even complete sentences or an actual melody. It’s a dude in a low voice speak-singing phrases that are shorthand for American country pride.

Like this:

Oh, and you have to listen to International Harvester. Actually I think this song is kind of good:

Oh god or this one. Trace Adkins is such a douche. They won’t let me embed the video but I highly suggest you go watch it so you can enjoy a totally racist and sexist video. Oh man I’m watching it now. The Asian dude strikes out, the pitcher does a karate kid move to make fun of him, then Trace gets up to bat and hits a home run and beckons to the slutty lady they’ve all been trying to impress. Then she tries to hit a few balls and can’t even hold up the bat. Wow. CLASSY, Trace.

Okay I’m getting off track. Point is, does that even count as a song? The answer is YES IT DOES. And once I realized that I didn’t feel like such a fake trying to write my own.

But since my field is theater and performance, I have to say that the bulk of my bad art inspirations come when I’m watching a horrifically boring play. Usually one that’s three hours and I can’t leave at intermission so I know I’m stuck there. Something about this distressing state of lockdown makes my mind go to a different plane. Solutions that had previously eluded me appear before me whole, something that wasn’t quite a song gels, an image of how whatever I’m working on could begin is suddenly clear. And little dancing chipmunks bring me cocoa and pie.

Now, this also happens when I’m on a long hike (the inspirations, not the dancing chipmunks). And I’d rather be on a long hike than sitting through bad art. But it is useful when I find myself trapped there with no escape.

Random Manifesto # 2: Dare to be a piece of crap

2010-02-23T18:45:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: this manifesto is part of my ever-evolving list of random things I stand for.]

I believe that life is too short to perfect things.

Lots of people say this but actually believe that you should get the right training before attempting to do it yourself. Training is great – but there are so many things that I will never learn if I wait around until I can do it right. So when in doubt, I’m in favor of just doing it.

Take piano. Yes, it would be easier and better to learn if I found a good piano teacher. But it’s cheaper and easier to buy a book of gospel piano chords and dig out the stupid moldy keyboard from the basement and tinker with it while I’m waiting for water to boil.

The point is: it doesn’t matter how you learn, as long as you learn. The point is: why are you learning? So you can DO something with it, right?

I mean, take cooking. You could say, “I won’t cook until I’ve spent a year training with a master chef or with my mythical indigenous grandmother.” Or you could check some cookbooks out from the library and start cooking. I believe it’s better to just start cooking.

Ten years ago when I was first learning about physical theater I came across a lot of people who felt strongly that you needed the right training. An MFA was okay but what you really wanted was to have spent time abroad, preferably learning from a master. And there was a pecking order: oh, you spent a week training with The Royal Shakespeare Company? That’s cool. I just spent six months as Jerzy Grotowski’s personal assistant before he died. Really? Because I spent three months learning bunraku puppetry from monastic ninjas. That kind of thing.

Americans especially love to believe in this idealized master-student relationship, like in kung fu movies. Nobody I met in Europe or Mexico idealized training with Piezn Kozla or Gardzienice or Diego Piñon this way. They knew you’d learn a lot, they knew it was hard and crazy and intense. But it was mainly Americans who seemed to think that mystical certainty would be passed down to you if you spent enough time with the right art star superbeing.

It took me a long time to realize that these people were full of shit. That they were more interested in playing status games than making art or taking a leap or growing as a human being.

I mean, it certainly helps to have a teacher. I’m not saying that if you have a chance to learn from a wise teacher you should pass it up – by all means, sign up, seek it out, travel to the desert to sit at the feet of the master if that’s what your heart is crying out for.

But what bothers me is the fetishizing of teachers and the waiting around for the perfect circumstances for pure, unsullied learning. Here’s the thing: you can spend a year training with an amazing teacher and still be a crappy artist. No matter how, where, with whom you’ve trained, you still have to do the work yourself. What matters is WHAT you learn, and what you DO with it.

Anyway...

At times like this I look to Neil Young for inspiration.

Neil Young has a beautiful voice and he takes risks and his voice wavers, and I love him. He plays with Crazy Horse who is not the most proficient band in the world, but I love their raw clunky power. I love all of his songs even though some of them are duds. If he didn’t take risks and make some duds, then we wouldn’t have some of the most delicate, heartbreaking songs in the world like “Harvest Moon” and “After the Gold Rush."

In fact, one of my favorite albums is Sleeps with Angels and I love it because every other song is beautiful (like "My Heart"), and every other song goes on too long or is too monotone or is just plain crappy. Like, “Piece of Crap." He puts it all out there. He doesn’t polish it or fix it up – and some songs would be better if they’d been edited, but some would have lost their crazy shambolic glory.

So, that’s my manifesto. Especially applicable to recovering perfectionists like myself. Don’t wait until it’s perfect. Don’t wait until you’re ready. Don’t let people talk you out of what fascinates you. Just do it and see what happens. Life is too short to wait for mastery.

Dare to be a piece of crap.

Staying Up Too Late

2010-02-19T02:29:00.000-08:00

I have this pattern that has played out at least since high school: when left to my own devices, I will stay up as late as possible.

If I need to get up at 5am the next morning, I will stay up until midnight – later than that is bound to mess with my mind. Of course it would be better in that case to go to bed at ten. But I never do that.

And now, being technically unemployed with no morning commitments, what I would LIKE to do is go to bed at one and hop out of bed promptly at nine, bright eyed and bushy tailed. But that is not what I do. I stay up until 2 or 3 and sleep in until 11 (or 12:40, which I am ashamed to say was my waking time this morning).

There’s nothing wrong with this, really. As soon as I have a morning commitment I will adjust accordingly. But it bothers me that I fall into this pattern and can’t seem to change it. Especially since I’m often staying up late for no reason. I mean, right now I’m staying up to write this post, but before that I was watching back to back episodes of LOST (I got caught in a hopeless addiction two months ago and have made it to midway through season 4 in record time), listlessly surfing the net and checking facebook. Why do I feel the need to do that until the wee hours and then sleep away the morning?

I could blame my mom, she has this trait too. Buuut… I’m 32, and theoretically capable of making my own way in life. And too old to be blaming my own behavior on my mom.

I could say there is this quality of absolute quiet that I like about night time, that is different from the morning. I guess that’s part of the reason. But there’s also a very nice quality about early morning that I miss. And the day passes so quickly when you don’t rise until noon.

Hm. Well, that’s it, folks. Nothing more than that. I guess I can't even pass it off as a side effect of being a Very Sensitive Person. It's just something I do.

Palm Reading

2010-02-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

While I was in NYC, I performed an impromptu palm reading session that surprised me because, though I was mostly bullshitting, (a) I found myself taking it seriously as I was talking, and (b) others found it satisfying, even though they knew I was mostly bullshitting.

Bear in mind, all I know about palm reading I learned from some book that was sitting around my house when I was fifteen. Probably this one.

But I do kind of believe in palm reading. I notice the lines of my own hand changing as I grow – and it’s hard not to think this means something. Right?

On the other hand… it’s silly. Once I paid a lady $10 to read my palm and she told me I would be a teacher and a doctor. And I am neither a teacher nor a doctor. (Unless you count “theater artist” as teacher and “palm reader” as doctor).

Today I did some serious (really really serious) research about palm reading on the internet. And it struck me as silly.

And yet, I am drawn to the idea of being a palm reader! Which is not really that surprising as I am drawn to sudden drunken insights and random fits of inspiration. I am an American after all and we basically invented the idea of satori – sudden blinding enlightenment. So I roll my eyes at this desire of mine, to stumble upon insight with no effort whatsoever.

On the other hand… many good things in my life – the big steps & AHA moments – have come about this way. So there is a reason I take it seriously.

Two examples:

+ As I’ve mentioned before, I moved out to Oregon on a whim with my best friend, Aryn. We both had a strong, gut instinct to get in the car and drive, and maybe settle down somewhere along the way from Michigan to Oregon. All I knew about Oregon was that it had a climate like Ireland’s, that my Aunt Diane lived there, and that Portland was a cool town. Ten years later I’m still here.

+ I joined Hand2Mouth on accident after I met some guy at a party who said he was going to a meeting about teaching in schools. I was so eager to meet people that I found out where the meeting was taking place and drove there on a dark rainy Tuesday night. Nobody else was there yet, except for this guy with intense blue eyes named Jonathan. The dude I’d met at the party never showed up, and in fact the meeting was not about teaching in schools – these people had been invited by Jonathan to discuss starting a theater company. I immediately knew that this was the group for me, even though they were all badasses and the only theater training I had was doing community theater in Lansing, Michigan. Ten years later, everyone who was at that meeting (except Jonathan) has gone on to other things but other people have joined and it’s become an even stronger group than I could have imagined, one I still feel so lucky to be working with. And somewhere in there I fell in love with Jonathan and we got married. Who would have seen that coming?

So... I don’t know if this means I should go into palm reading.

But if anyone out there knows someone in the Portland area who is a respectable palm reader, introduce me. I’m curious.

Question

2010-02-04T14:06:00.000-08:00

Why can't I ever, ever remember to bring my reusable shopping bags INTO THE GROCERY STORE WITH ME? So that I might actually USE them?

I have three bags by the front door at my house, in plain sight, and I have a bag in the car in case I decide without planning to stop for groceries which is what I usually do. I even have a note taped to the front door of my house that says BRING BAGS.

And yet... I never remember to bring a bag in with me. I always find myself blithely shopping with my cart and not thinking for one second about the bag until I get to the checkout. And stop. And ask myself, Did you forget to bring the bags in AGAIN?!

My brain just seems to have been permanently set to bring nothing in with me save purse, keys and a grocery list. Maybe I should write my grocery list on the reusable bag.

Thank you for listening. Advice welcomed. Unless the advice is, "stop ruining the environment, you selfish idiot."

Embracing the Diva (or learning how to be a better sensitive person)

2010-02-02T18:57:00.000-08:00

I wrote about my lovely experience performing Undine in Seattle over on the Hand2Mouth blog. But I wanted to write more about one aspect of it here that relates to being a Very Sensitive Person.

I know I have hinted and talked around this topic a lot here, but to address it directly: the last six months I have basically not been sure I wanted to continue with Undine at all. After doing it in New York in August, I just felt burned out and used up and unable to get excited about it anymore. I thought I might be done.

As I mentioned in my last post, being in New York last month restored some of my hope & energy – and at the very least made me realize that the issue was not the city of New York.

This weekend made me realize that the issue is also not performing Undine.

I think what has been going on is this: I needed time to figure out how to handle the rigors of performing alone, and the particular stress it puts on my body and mind. It’s much more difficult than performing or rehearsing a H2M show, where there are built in support networks and ego checks. With Undine, though I have incredible collaborators, it’s still a lot more pressure falling on me directly, and it feels more personal. I needed some time to get my strength back up to the point where I could face those pressures.

One thing I’ve realized in this time of reflection is that I have to pay very, very close attention to my body and mind-space after the show, and I can’t expect too much from myself. I get into trouble when I want to be the life of the party, or for some reason think other people want me to be. I usually don’t have the energy for this, and nobody actually expects it of me anyway, but for some reason it’s been hard for me to demand the right to not talk about myself or the show or field questions from strangers. Or try and impress important people. Dear god.

One way to do this has been to embrace my Inner Diva.

A lot of people think being a Diva is all about gigantic ego. But I think it’s more about needing to shield yourself from attention and demands. And the more you put yourself out there on stage, the more you open yourself up to attention and demands offstage, and to (some) people wanting a piece of you, or wanting you to be who you are onstage.

That is, for me, the most difficult part: handling what people read into my personal life & character based on the show. I’m not blaming them for doing this – I purposely blur the lines between reality and performance, so it’s a fair assumption – but sometimes this makes talking after the show, or just being around people after the show, weird. So I’ve learned I have to be super protective of myself and what I need.

Maybe Diva needs to drink a hot toddy in the corner booth flanked by friends who protect her from the hordes. Or maybe Diva would like to speak to her public. Or maybe she would rather go out dancing.

Diva doesn’t need to be consistent. And Diva doesn’t need to apologize.

Anyway, this weekend was an amazing way to get back on the Undine train because the audiences were warm and receptive and actively supportive. I remembered that it’s FUN to do this show, that for all the energy I pour into it, I get a lot back. And I ended up having a great time talking to people after the show. It was not difficult at all – but a lot of that was because I’ve learned to not be mad at myself for having limits and reaching them. I was ready to leave whenever I felt like it, and I had people I loved & trusted around me to read my signals and support whatever I needed.

Maybe these insights seem obvious... but man, not for me. It's taken me a long time to figure all this out. Not to suggest that "all this" has been by any means figured out.

The Importance of Shoes

2010-01-23T17:42:00.000-08:00

I have never considered myself a style conscious person. Which is to say, I like to pretend I live in a realm outside such petty concerns as clothing and status and how one presents oneself, though I’ve come to realize that no such realm exists and that when I say I “don’t care about how I look” I am carefully choosing to align myself with a certain segment of bohemian society that rejects consumerism, but actually cares WAY MORE than your average soccer mom in middle America about how they present themselves, so it’s all bullshit.

Which is all a longwinded way of saying… hello, my name is Faith Helma, and I have a sense of style. It may be a style that is one part goodwill jeans, one part monochrome t-shirt, and one part unraveling sweater – but it is a style. And lately I’ve been realizing that most important component of one’s style is: shoes. I know this is not news to anyone but me. But it’s been a big insight: if you have a pair of shoes that make you feel awesome, it has an effect on every other aspect of your life.

Kick ass shoes = kick ass life. That’s my new philosophy.

I will give three examples to prove my point.

The sandals I had the summer I was seventeen. I remember so clearly being with my mom at a shoe store, and that these sandals were expensive. I even remember how much they cost which reveals a lot about my warped sense of morality/frugality (aka morgality*): $35. She insisted on buying them for me even though I stubbornly maintained that I was fine wearing clogs made out of old bathmats. And thank god she did because those sandals and that summer are fused in my mind. In fact I don’t even remember much about what exactly happened that summer – I just remember that it was fun, and that I loved those freaking sandals and wore them every single day and kept wearing them for years until I wore out the leather. They were beautiful and delicate and strong, and they made me feel that way which, let me tell you, was a sensation that was sorely lacking at that point.

The hiking boots I wore when my dear friend Aryn & I road tripped across America. I felt so strong when I was wearing them. They embodied the kind of tough woman I wanted to be. They made me feel sexy even though I was greasy and smelly – they made me feel sexy BECAUSE I was greasy and smelly. I was still wearing them up until last winter when the soles literally fell off. And whenever I wore them I remembered: oh yeah, I can kick some ass in these boots. As I’ve said before – you can’t kick ass in flip flops. Or in spindly high heels (unless they’re those gladiator ones and if you can kick ass in those, more power to you).

The sneakers I bought the day before I flew to New York a few weeks ago. My old sneakers were fine, but they were slightly too small and I was always happy to take them off (a sure sign you are not wearing the right shoes – if they’re the right shoes, you’ll want to sleep in them). Anyway, I was at my secret-favorite store, Ross Dress for Less, and chanced across some sneakers for sale. And bought them even though it seemed frivolous, and morgality* still burns within my breast. Well, I’m glad I did, because I can’t believe how much better I feel AS A PERSON when wearing them. They are my style. They make me walk with more confidence. I feel light on my feet, but also savvy. I don’t know why. But that’s why people wear what they wear, right? So they can present themselves as they’d like to be to the world. I didn’t even realize it until I bought these new shoes, but the old shoes were making me feel pinched and knock-kneed and kind of frumpy. Now I feel like a superhero! All because of my new sneakers!

Thanks, America.

* oh, and you’re welcome for coining a new word.

NYC, Take Two

2010-01-21T00:58:00.000-08:00

So you know what’s really weird?

Last time I traveled to New York City, I felt totally overwhelmed and freaked out. I just wanted to get away from the noise and the people and find some green space.

This time I had the opposite experience. I didn’t find the mass of people overwhelming at all. In fact it felt like less people were there somehow – even though that can’t be true. And it felt quieter! Maybe because it was winter? I have no idea but I was not bothered ONCE by the noisiness of New York.

I went in prepared for the worst – I even brought my I Ching for emergency consultation, and wrote a list of “things that make me feel good and less freaked out,” a list I did not have to consult once. I’m just blown away by how easy it was this time. I didn’t have to try to have a good time – I got up every morning excited and walked out into the street and gained energy and momentum with each step. And this despite going to bed every night at 4 a.m!

And the weirdest part is: somewhere during this trip I got my desire back for working on Undine. A desire I kind of lost after performing in August (which is weird in and of itself, because the performances went well and I loved working with the people at the Ontological and sharing space with Helsinki Syndrome – so I’m not sure why it was so hard exactly). Anyway, I woke up yesterday morning, my first day back in Portland, and immediately dived into work on Undine and didn’t even have to make myself do this – I wanted to.

I am honestly baffled by all this. And thankful. I am chalking up my different experience this time around to:

+ Being there with the whole H2M crew. It was so much easier to be able to share the pressure and burden of performing with my fellow artists. And it’s just more fun to be on tour with H2M. It’s like going out dancing with your best friends versus going dancing by yourself. Even sharing a small living space (and one bathroom) with 7 people wasn’t too bad. There were lots of chances to talk over what was happening, to process and vent and give support and make each other laugh.

+ Wintertime. I think I just like NYC better in the winter. It’s sunny and bracing, the kind of weather that makes you want to go to museums and drink coffee and educate yourself. Even when it was super cold I enjoyed it. Maybe because I got to wear sweaters and scarves and cowboy boots, which served as armor to insulate me from the noise. And in general, boots make me feel more capable. You can’t kick someone’s ass in flip flops (though I’m not sure if I could kick someone’s ass regardless, but I’d be more likely to if I was wearing boots).

+ Knowing the city better – and going in ready to be proactive about figuring out which subway lines to use. I still got lost, but I wasn’t as anxious when I did because I could ask people how to get where I wanted to go, and understand the directions they gave me. This sounds so blithe and breezy but it is a new thing for me.

Other things that struck me as awesome on this trip:

+ Goddamn it, the food! Korean, Polish, Japanese. The soup options alone are dazzling. And you know how I feel about soup. And so many things you can eat late at night. And bagels. And things to eat with bagels like pickled tomatoes. Offered up by the two sweetest men on earth, Larry Krone and Jim Andralis. Larry's bathroom was an inspiration, filled with books by such luminaries as Rue McClanahan, and I’m pretty sure a Dolly Parton action figure.

+ Halfway through I took a day to just putter around the apartment and make borscht (I mean BEET BLAST) and read my lowbrow books. You know what I’m really coming to realize? This is not a searing insight but lowbrow books are fun to read. Especially on the subway or when you’re trying to fall asleep at 3:30 a.m. after a night of shouting about theater over bar noise. I love smart, fierce, complicated books – of course – but when you’re trying to relax, nothing beats The Shelters of Stone.

+ Oh man – I got to see a lot of shows, from companies I admire, like Banana Bag & Bodice, Wax Factory, 31 Down, The Debate Society and Vivarium Studio. Highlights for me included BBB’s Beowulf (they had me at the trombone section and backup singers) and the little booklets that Vivarium Studios were handing out – gems of subtle, gentle absurdity that expressed the nature of the company’s work as much as their show, L’Effet de Serge, did.

+ Oh yeah, and our show. We had a great time performing it. We got pretty solid crowds and good feedback from everyone who came, and we will likely be back next year having learned a lot more about how to prepare for a run in NYC. Unfortunately, no reviews (we were, after all, competing against every other theater performance in the entire known world). But I did get an email today from someone who came and saw the show, who said:

I just wanted to tell you that I thought your show was beautiful. Really so beautiful. I rarely feel as touched or delighted by theater, and I rarely laugh that hard out loud. So I just wanted to say thank you, because watching the wonderful work of theater you created makes me want try to create wonderful things as well.

And really, that’s all you can ask for.

So thank you, New York! And I’m sorry I blamed you for my nervous breakdown back in August.

Beet Blast!

2010-01-03T21:34:00.000-08:00

The time has come, to give the world my recipe for BARSZCZ. That’s Polish for borscht (you can read about the variations on barszcz/borscht elsewhere).

Some background on my Borscht obsession.

People of non-Polish or Jewish descent never get excited when I talk about my fabulous borscht recipe, so I call it beetroot soup. But that doesn’t really get people excited either. So now I’m thinking about calling it BEET BLAST.

I’ve seriously been considering starting a company where I bottle up my special BEET BLAST and sell it as a miracle cure for colds and hangovers*.

Because, no joke, that is what it is. In the last year I have made up a big pot of BEET BLAST at least once a month, and I’ve only gotten sick once – and that was over in a day.

I originally tasted this soup when I was in Poland, land of endless tasty soups (including pickle soup). Just about every restaurant and bar mleczny offered the delicious red barszcz (pronounced badly by me as BAR-shuh-chuh). At train stations you could pay like a dollar and get a styrofoam cup filled with steaming red broth.

I loved it but didn’t even think about making it myself because I assumed there was some complicated soaking/extracting/fermenting process involved, and anyway I’d never eaten a beet before or held one in my hands so I had no inkling of how to cook with one.

Flash forward a couple years, and our beautiful, mad Polish director friend Luba is staying with us while she directs a play. I learned a lot from her but the most profound, simple thing I picked up was her approach to cooking. We would come home after a long, grueling night of rehearsal and whereas I might throw a frozen pizza in the oven, she would pull out lentils and carrots and celery and onions and toss things in a pot with water and before I’d even taken my shoes off she’d have a delicious, thick lentil stew bubbling on the stove ready to eat.

One day we had a party. I think we were barbecue-ing, and everyone came bearing six packs of beer and hot dogs. While we sat around the kitchen table gossiping and drinking beers, Luba calmly filled a gigantic stock pot with water and threw in carrots, celery, onion and freshly scrubbed beets. At the end of the night she cut lemons in half, squeezed them into the pot and announced that the barszcz was done. Now, I don’t remember how it tasted that night – but I do remember the next morning when we all woke up and stumbled into the kitchen. Luba ladled rich ruby red broth into mugs and passed them around, saying, “Here. Polish cure for hangover.” OH MY GOD. It restored order to the world.

So, flash forward some more. It is a week before my solo show opens and my throat is sore and I can feel sickness coming on. I need my voice for the show. I panic. I am pacing the aisles of the grocery store late at night throwing garlic and oranges and cough drops into my basket when I wander past some beets in the produce section. The memory of Luba’s delicious soup comes floating back to me, and so I buy them and take them home and boil them up in a big pot of water. I squeeze in some lemon, and then I drink the broth.

People, I have tried the various “cures” for colds – popping vitamin c, gulping cayenne, lemon and honey in hot water, chicken soup with ten cloves of garlic. I’ve always gotten a cold anyway. But after I drank down this elixir, the oncoming cold was GONE. And this despite a punishing schedule of tech rehearsals and neverending singing!

So, I am a believer. I am a proselytizer, even though I know that preaching about something is the surest way to turn people away from it. I can’t help it. I WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW ABOUT BEET BLAST.

Here is my simple, lazy, very untraditional** recipe for…

DELICIOUS MAGICAL BEET BLAST

+ Fill up a big old pot with water and set it to boiling on the stove.

+ Take 2-3 beets. Scrub them clean, and if they’re especially gnarly, peel them. Cut them into quarters and toss them into the pot. The water will immediately turn dark pink or red… if it’s more pink than red I might add another beet.

+ If the beets have greens attached, wash those and toss them in as well.

+ Chop up onion, carrot and celery. One each is good, but if you have less it’s ok. I just use whatever I have on hand. And don’t chop them pretty – you won’t be eating the vegetables themselves.

+ If you have parsley, throw in a generous handful. And throw in a clove or two of garlic.

Honestly, that’s about it. If you’ve got other bits of vegetables around you want to throw in – potatoes, turnips, mushrooms – anything you’d add to a regular vegetable stock will taste great.

+ Let it simmer on the stove for at least an hour. The house will smell so healthy and delicious. Then take a lemon, cut it in half and squeeze both halves into the broth. You can use lime in a pinch, though I don’t think the flavors mesh quite as well. Taste it – you may need to add more lemon.

+ Add salt and pepper. And then you can either drain out the mushy used up vegetables (saving the broth, of course!) or just let them sit in the bottom of the pot while you ladle out the broth. Luba said if you leave them there the flavor will get more intense each day. But some people get kind of grossed out seeing the vegetable parts floating around in there.

What I do nowadays is make a big old pot of this stuff, freeze half the broth and drink the rest over the next 2-3 days. Then you’ve got some on hand if you get sick and can’t get out of bed.

* This will fit in nicely with my kindergarten classroom/karaoke lounge/therapeutic dance party business.

** Supposedly the traditional Polish way to make this is to let the soup naturally ferment and sour (as opposed to adding the lemon). I’m not badass enough to try that yet, though.

The Dangers of Oversharing

2010-01-01T12:32:00.000-08:00

Don't worry, this isn't going to be like Emily Gould's 12-page oversharing analysis of her history of oversharing in the New York Times (though if you're reading this, NY Times... I am available). But I do want to talk a little bit today about oversharing. Which is sort of like writing about writing or singing about singing (i.e. usually pointless). But here I go.

So. What is oversharing? Being too honest, being too vulnerable. Opening yourself up for criticism. Spilling the details of your life to any old stranger you meet. Telling your mom too much about your sex life. Risking that people won't like you, will feel uncomfortable, will avert their eyes.

Like high school gym class – when being uncoordinated and self-conscious was not charming or funny. When you walked into the gym for the 80th straight day of kickball and tried to play it cool and pretend that kickball was beneath you, that you didn’t care, but you could hear people muttering and sighing. Well... I guess that's not really an example of oversharing so much as it is an awkward memory. But whatever, it feels the same.

Like wearing the wrong thing to a formal event. Or wearing something too fancy – equally embarrassing.

Like the guy at a party who gets out his guitar and won’t stop playing and doesn’t seem to realize that he sucks. He just sings song after banal song, clueless that he has brought the party to a grinding halt. Like if I opened my journal and started reading it out loud and didn’t stop even when the giggling faded and the room got dead silent.

That is the danger of writing a blog. These are the images that flash through my mind as I decide to make my blog public. Not that someone I know will find it and be offended – but that they will be quietly embarrassed for me and look at me differently when I see them in person. Since it’s in this weird amoral aphysical space/nonspace called the internet, the BLOGOSPHERE – there is no way to read in someone’s eyes if I’ve said too much. So I just have to plow through and hope my instincts about what to say and what not to say are on target.

I guess you could say I’m a professional oversharer. I’m a prude in my private life but onstage I stripped naked to Proud to be an American. I dread the idea of crying in public but in my solo show I crafted a huge, awkward, embarrassing meltdown in front of the audience. So clearly there’s something about oversharing that appeals to me.

But with performing, there is a clear line between onstage and offstage – even when you’re making weird performances where you are playing “yourself” – and the lines are different with blogging. And I don’t know where they are yet.

So I guess what I’m saying is: hello, world. This is my blog. Please don’t hate me because I suck at kickball.

Oh yeah: and happy new year!

Holiday Stress, relieved

2009-12-29T16:02:00.000-08:00

Update time. OPERATION HOLIDAY FAMILY FREAKDOWN IN TEXAS went swimmingly, as in it went the (b) route. Worth it.

Even more worth it because -- joyful surprise! -- Jonathan and I got two ticket vouchers in exchange for volunteering to get bumped to a later flight to Austin. We arrived within a couple hours of our original arrival time, and we got to fly first class (which these days isn't as dazzling as one might imagine but still, not bad). So we can now plan a special trip wherever we want, whenever we want, however we want. Amazing how that perked up our spirits and took off some of the we spent $1200, and for what?! pressure.

The other tangible outcome of all the stress was that we had a frank discussion with my family about holiday traditions and the need for change. As in: I told them we will be celebrating Christmas in Oregon next year, and they are welcome to visit me if they want to. It was a good, hard conversation, and I think they more or less understood. As our friend Debbie so wisely pointed out, you can’t create new traditions for yourself until you stop trying to hold onto the old ones. We're adults now, and it's time for us to buy our own tree and make our own goll-dang traditions.

Other highlights:

+ Hearing Jonathan's grandparents tell stories -- I am always reminded, when I'm around them, of where Jonathan gets his incredible gift for spinning tales and holding court with grace and charm. This is a trait that I admire in Texans in general (and I am not just saying this to suck up to Jonathan's family).

+ But as long as I'm sucking up, Jonathan's family bought me a wonderful gift: cowboy boots! I'm like a little kid, I want to wear them all the time.

+ Of course I ate the most incredible, tender, smoky BBQ I have ever had the pleasure of consuming. Complete with pickled okra and hush puppies. Mmmmmmmm.

+ My parents gave us a food dehydrator which maybe doesn't sound that exciting but trust me, it is. We can dry our own mushrooms and tomatoes. Which is going to help us with our grand goal of living entirely off our garden produce year-round.

+ Though we only saw my family for one day in Austin, it was a delightful jam packed day, featuring chilaquiles for breakfast, pho for dinner, dominoes, happy hour, a hot tub, an engagement announcement and new year resolutions. Plus my mom half asleep and giggling on the couch.

Now we're back in Portland preparing for our grand escape to NYC which alternately thrills and terrifies me. But then again pretty much everything in life alternately thrills and terrifies me.

Holiday Stress, and other cliches

2009-12-17T21:17:00.000-08:00

So. I am experiencing holiday anxiety. Also known as a BEING A LIVING BREATHING ORGANISM. You can tell I'm anxious because I'm expressing most of my emotions in ALL CAPS and use the word FREAKING a lot. Though if that's my criteria than I guess I'm anxious all the time.

Point being, I have not bought a plane ticket yet and my family is cheerfully expecting me to be in Dallas in five days.

Dallas is where my sister, my aunt and her family live. My parents are driving down from Michigan to convene upon it.

And Jonathan’s family, down in Corpus Christi, are expecting us on Christmas Eve.

Every time we visit Texas I forget how FREAKING HUGE it is, so once again I blithely thought we could fly into Dallas, swing down to Corpus, hit Austin on the way, drive back up to Dallas – everyone would be happy. Awesome, road trip! But I forgot that Corpus Christi is a six hour drive from Dallas.

So the reality is: we will fly into Dallas, spend two days there, on Christmas Eve drive six hours down to Corpus, spend two days there, then drive back up to Dallas, stopping in Austin to see some old friends, then fly out early in the morning so we can be back in Portland for a rehearsal. (oh yeah, we’re flying to New York on January 4th). Are we even going to have time to stop at a BBQ joint? Side note, I love writing BBQ. I wish more long words had 3-letter abbreviations. Like, instead of full-blown panic attack I could just say I’m in the middle of a FBPA. Wait, that’s just an acronym. How about HYPVN8 intead of hyperventilate? It’s not the same. BBQ is in a class of its own.

Anyway, the real reality is, (see opening sentence – I’m on a continuous loop) I haven’t bought the tickets yet, and they’re insanely expensive, and I am engaging in what is the most extreme case of denial yet in a long and storied career of practicing denial.

I know, I’m sounding whiny. And this is the most boring post ever. But right now tickets to Dallas are around $700 and it’s way cheaper to fly into Austin. But if we fly into Austin… oh dear lord. That adds a three hour trip that looks something like this:

Austin --> 3 HOURS --> Dallas --> 6 HOURS --> Corpus Christi --> 6 HOURS@#%&$%!!! --> Dallas --> 3 HOURS --> Austin (in time for a 6am flight).

THAT IS MADNESS. But if I tell my parents this is too expensive and complicated for me to handle this year, they’ll alternately shout and sob hysterically about how the family has fallen apart and life will never be the same and what’s $1400 compared to SAVING THE FAMILY?

When will the day come where people come to me for the holidays? I know, I know. When I have a baby. Which sounds less complicated right now than trying to figure out all these travel details.

UPDATE: ok, I just talked to my parents and we came up with an alternate plan where they meet me in Austin on the 26th. And they did not shout or sob hysterically. So I was just being a big old stressball for no reason.

UPDATE #2: Did I mention that I have not bought (or lovingly handmade) any presents yet?

UPDATE #3: I bought the tickets. The thing is, I don't know if in 7 days I will be (a) rolling on the floor laughing with my sister saying THANK GOD I BOUGHT THOSE TICKETS or (b) on the road exhausted and too broke to buy a taco saying WHY IN THE NAME OF SWEET JESUS DID YOU LET ME BUY THOSE TICKETS. To my poor long suffering partner who is asleep on the couch right now. He was so happy an hour ago when he thought I'd decided, screw it, not worth it, this time we're staying home for the holidays.

Anyway, I'll let you know in a week whether it goes direction a or b. Unless it swerves madly in an abab bcbc cdcd ee pattern in which case I will express my feelings in the form of a sonnet.

Criticism & Negative Reviews

2009-12-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

This topic is always on my mind, since (a) I have a hard time being criticized, and (b) I am a performer, and part of being grown up and professional and classy means being able to take it in the chin. [correction: ON the chin. Not sure what taking it IN the chin entails but it doesn't sound very classy to me.]

In August when I went to New York with my one-woman show I knew it was going to be a struggle. We would be lucky to get any reviews at all, so I had to be ready for negative reviews, and I had to be ready for them to get personal.

HOW DID YOU DEAL WITH IT, FAITH?

Well, let me tell you. I handled it the one foolproof way I know: by not reading them. Which was good, because I got five reviews in all – two were mostly positive, two were mostly negative, and one was vaguely snarky. I know this because I did have to read them eventually.

There’s a weird thrill that comes from reading a bad review about your work. Maybe it’s the thrill of someone finally punching you in the face after long-simmering tension. There’s catharsis in that: finally, someone told me the truth, that I suck. The danger is that you will take it too much to heart. “Sophomoric and angsty” = IT’S TRUE, I AM SOPHOMORIC AND ANGSTY, what is wrong with me, why am I so immature, why do I suck so much, I should just give this up and be a schoolteacher except I probably suck at that too, etc. etc. etc.

I think it is possible to reach a point where you take the punch but it doesn’t stop you. Where you say, ok, maybe my work is sophomoric and angsty. WHAT ELSE YOU GOT? Or better yet, you take that criticism and use it as promotion. COME SEE FAITH HELMA “DOG PADDLING IN CABARET.” (That is advanced level badassery though, and a topic we will tackle another day: how to reclaim negative criticism and use it for self-promotion).

And you know what, praise is actually trickier to deal with, because if someone says “she is doing the best work of her life,” what do you do? Sit back and say, yes, I am doing the best work of my life? In that case the only thing I’ve figured out (though no one has said I’m doing the best work of my life – so I haven’t had to work too hard) is to allow the praise its brief moment to happy dance with my ego, then tell it to pack up its things and play with someone else.

Maybe that’s something you could do with the negative too: let it flourish and drip inky doubt into your psyche, then push it out the door and say, it’s time to go home now.

So, that’s my method for dealing with reviews. But what about the rest of life, when your criticism doesn’t come in the form of published articles that you can easily avoid or hold at arm's length? AHHHH. Yes. That is much more difficult.

WHAT DO I DO ABOUT BAD REVIEWS OF MY LIFE?

I don't have a clue. But Sarah over at Make Great Stuff talks about taking in feedback as a visual artist, which is fascinating to me – I spend a lot of time thinking about how hard it is to be a performer and how easy it must be to be a visual artist – but of course we’re all putting our hearts and beliefs and risks out there for everyone to see, and that is haaaaaard hard hard.

And over at Fluent Self, Havi talks about the concept of sovereignty a lot – not letting someone else’s shoe-throwing (aka, criticism that comes out of nowhere) throw you off balance, learning how to step back and say, that is your deal, this is my deal, I am going to listen to what you’re saying but not fall into a weeping puddle of self doubt and recrimination.

Well – I have to say I’m not quite that sovereign yet – I am still liable to get tearful if someone calls me out directly. Or if I manage to not show it on the outside, I’m feeling it in the form of a raging hole inside. But it is a helpful image and word to keep in mind. Sovereignty.

And I always love Penelope Trunk. She lays the events of her life out with spare, unrelenting honesty, and if someone tries to tear her down, she ups the ante. An example: family members of the man she was dating were doing searches to find her most salacious posts, and forwarding them to other family members. She mentions this, and then says,

“Wait. You are wondering, right? What they’re finding? Here. Here’s a list of some links.”

And links to the three most salacious things she’s written. Which means she is in control of her story, and not letting other people get hold of it. She’s not hiding – she’s putting it out there even more. I admire this. I think it’s smart, and fucking hard to do.

IT ALL COMES BACK TO BARACK

This may be a weird comparison, but I am reminded of Barack Obama. When a scandal comes out, instead of denying and denying and running and hiding, he uses that opportunity to lay his cards down and speak directly and honestly. When the Reverend Wright scandal first broke, he responded with a beautiful, difficult speech about race. This week, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize (a perfect example of positive praise sometimes being worse than negative praise*), he directly addressed the awkwardness of accepting a peace prize just as he’s going deeper into war:

But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries -- including Norway -- in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Still, we are at war, and I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

(Read the entire speech here).

Most politicians these days (maybe always) avoid being honest about difficult topics. But you know what they risk by not talking about the difficult things? They risk the story getting away from them, and I think Barack Obama is incredibly smart to take hold of the story at the beginning, to put his cards on the table and articulate the issue in his own words. To do otherwise is to let secrets take hold, to let the gossip whispered behind backs gain power. You need to be in control of your story, warts and all.

So, that is what I am mulling over today and trying to learn. How to talk about my life and my art and all the mistakes and confusions and slings and arrows, without shame or fear.

* wait, I just realized I may have coined a term: negative praise. Is that when someone praises you for what you're not, like, "oh she'll be fine, she's no dummy" or "he's never been late a day in his life"?

Random Manifesto #1

2009-11-30T02:00:00.000-08:00

So this is ironic. I had this whole ongoing list of items for my manifesto, and I was waiting until the perfect time to post it. Then through a series of complicated actions still unbeknownst (doesn't that seem like a fake word?) to me, I just now accidentally erased the entire thing.

So I think that’s a sign. It means – life is too short to effing POLISH your manifesto. Manifestos are not masterpieces. You dash them off and move on to ACTION.

Now that I am forced to start with a clean slate – what do I care about, right now? What will I stand for and what will I not stand for? What items from that list can I even remember? Here goes:

1. No more crazy bosses. No bosses at all. I don’t know how I’m going to make this work but I don’t want another crazy boss.

2. No making excuses for artistic geniuses. Like Roman Polanski. You know what, I’m not even convinced he’s a genius. The Piano was okay. Wait, his movie was The Pianist, right? Not The Piano. Which was in my opinion a terrible film. I would support packing Jane Campion off to prison even if she didn’t rape a child, just to stop her from making more overwrought movies about pianos and people’s fingers getting chopped off and Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel getting it on. Wasn’t her last movie about Meg Ryan and boxing and weird sex? That sounds like a good premise but I bet it wasn’t.

But we were talking about Roman Polanski. The Pianist was ok but not as great as everyone said it was. And the reason this is on the manifesto is: I don’t care how effing great his films are, doesn’t excuse his actions. His wife was horribly murdered and that is sad, but also not a good excuse for nice-raping* a twelve year old. Sorry.

* nice rape: a term I just made up, to describe a scenario where it’s definitely rape but the guy was super sweet and drove you home afterwards, and maybe had a bitchin’ hot tub and bought your mom a car. In case my sarcasm isn’t reading: this is not a serious term and please do not start using it. God. Now I sound like I’m minimizing rape. Sorry about that.

3. NOT sorry! Goddamn it. No more apologies. You don’t APOLOGIZE in your manifesto.

4. I guess this means I can’t make excuses for Michael Jackson, either. True, they did not prove he was a pedophile, but it doesn’t look good. Especially now that the one kid’s father killed himself. Hm. Well, I’m not making excuses for him personally, but the fact that he may have been a pedophile doesn’t mean I don’t love his music.

5. Beets are a magical food and I don’t know why they have such a blah reputation in the U.S. Boil them in water with onions, carrots, celery and then squeeze in lemon juice and you have a magical, delicious elixir that wards off colds and sore throats.

6. You know what, I’m a cryer. I believe in letting it all out sometimes. Sometimes everything is not okay and the only way to feel better is sit down and feel bad about it and have a good old fashioned cry. All together now: it’s all right to cry. Crying takes the sad out of you. It’s all right to cry – you just might feel better!

So, to sum up my life philosophy as manifested here, right now I stand for crying, Michael Jackson and beets, and I do not stand for Roman Polanski, Jane Campion, apologizing and crazy bosses. Huh.

I'm different, different, different

2009-11-17T12:59:00.000-08:00

I posted this over on the Hand2Mouth blog, perhaps you'd like to read it?

On not being different from everyone else

I drew a picture of my business plan and it looks like a kindergarten classroom

2009-11-11T00:49:00.000-08:00

Hm. I guess the title kind of says it all there, doesn’t it.

So I read about this exercise, where you draw a picture of what your business plan looks like. Here is my problem. My business isn’t really a business. It’s a weird combination of artist haven / social service agency. It looks like a kindergarten classroom, if kindergarteners had an amp/mic/delay pedal station. And a waterless shower where they get to sing their favorite songs and shout imagined rants / visionary speeches.

Problem: it didn’t really answer my basic question, which is: WHAT AM I SELLING?

I am selling dreams and rainbows and story time and a place to talk about your fears and practice becoming the badass you already are but don’t know it.

Yeah. Um… is that something I can sell? What would make me qualified to provide that? Can I just say I want to do that, and it’s cool? Will anyone buy it? Am I wacky enough to pull something like that off?

Two years ago I went to this women-in-theatre conference in Denmark that blew my mind. Not in the ways I expected. There were a lot of women doing solo work there and I came away thinking, “the last thing I want to do is make a solo show” which apparently subconsciously translated into “I will immediately start making a solo show” because that’s what I did. But that is a topic for another day (I’m going to keep mentioning my solo show but always say it’s a topic for another day and then never get around to discussing it straight on. FYI.)

Anyway, conference: the thing that blew my mind was having conversations with women of all ages, backgrounds and nationalities – all of whom were making crazy, groundbreaking theater nd all of whom were having the same struggles, triumphs and failures I was having. I bonded with women from Sweden, India, Egypt, England, Peru, Spain – women in their fifties, thirties, twenties – with or without babies, with or without careers, with or without money. Amazing.

One of the workshops I did was with this Australian artist, Margaret Cameron. At first she was so woo woo that I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. But halfway through she won me over. She had these great mantras – she would have us walk around and hug each other and say, “what if where I am right now is exactly where I need to be?” Then she’d say, “I know it isn’t… but what if it was?”

She kept asking over and over and it finally sunk in: what if I stopped doubting myself for ten minutes? What if I believed that I was on the right track? What if everything in my life has prepared me for this exact instant?

Maybe this sounds trite – but the thing is, as a woman (maybe for men too, I don’t know) I struggle with these doubts and fears EVERY DAY. It seems radical to think of going even one day without them.

And I would love to get to where I can embrace my own wacky, woo woo, stumbling dreams. That is what I want: to believe in myself enough to go there, to lead people in wacky, crazy workshops where they spend half the time thinking it’s total bullshit and then have a breakthrough. To have a space where I can work on my stuff and other people can too. Where they can show up and I’ll make them a cup of tea and we’ll sit on a big old rug in the middle of the room and I’ll pull out a book and read from it and we’ll put some music on and dance out the stress. I mean, if a space like that existed and I could pay $10 and spend an hour there, I’d go. But maybe I’m alone in that. And maybe that’s a silly way to approach business.

Well, we'll see. I need someone to take me from the kindergarten classroom drawing on posterboard to the part where it's an actual business. Maybe I can partner with a therapist who already has a practice and would like someone to be out in the lobby sitting on a rug singing songs and making tea and stuff.

ARE YOU A THERAPIST WHO NEEDS A WACKED OUT ATTENDANT? If so, call me.

How to Rock at Karaoke

2009-10-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

Since I'm on a "how to" kick. And since singing is occupying too much brain space. I present to you: my SEVEN STEPS TO ROCKING AT KARAOKE.

Actually - I don't know that following these steps will guarantee that you become a karaoke star. They're really just my arbitrary, iron-clad rules for how one should approach karaoke. Are there other metals you can be clad in, if you're not absolutely certain? If so, I'd rather call these rules copper-clad.

COPPER-CLAD! If I ever form a clog-dancing a cappella women's celtic singing group, this is what we'll call ourselves. Not, as my dad suggested, LOVIN' COVEN.

Now, I should say before I go into the SEVEN STEPS: I am assuming that you are going out to sing karaoke with a group of good friends who will stand up and applaud you no matter what you do. God help you if you go by yourself. That is madness (though, scroll down to read the craziest karaoke story of my life, to find out what happens when you go karaoke-ing by yourself). It is much easier to be crazy and stupid if you have good friends around you cheering you on. AND BY GOD, I WANT YOU TO BE CRAZY AND STUPID. It is your inalienable right.

Step 1: Do not give a fuck. Attitude is the most important thing. If you have a crazy hat or scarf or some other costume element, wear it. The crazier the better. People will love it. Seriously, this trumps singing ability any day. You can be a great singer and bomb at karaoke by having no presence. You can be a terrible singer but rock out by being flamboyant. Presence is way more important than hitting the right notes.

Step 2: Pick a song you know backwards and forwards and love with all your heart. Say, “A Little Less Conversation, A Lot More Action.” There is a reason someone always sings a Neil Diamond song at a karaoke bar, and it’s because his songs are very easy. Same goes for anything by Phil Collins, Nancy Sinatra and Jimmy Buffett (bless his heart). But you’ll be fine if you pick something you sing along to on the radio or in the shower. Don’t think about it too much, just pick something. And word to the wise: be careful of Pink Floyd, Tina Turner and Janis Joplin. They are harder than you think.

Step 3: Sing it with gusto – but not so much gusto that your voice cracks. Keep a tiny bit of yourself pulled back so you can hear your voice and how it sounds.

Step 4: If you can do it without looking at the words, work in some basic moves – turning your back on the audience then whipping back around, laying down on the floor with arms outstretched. Again, it’s not precision that counts here, it’s guts and enthusiasm. Which is why people get drunk.

Step 5: Read the crowd. If you’re in a country bar, this might not be the time to bust out your favorite Mary J. Blige song. Are there a lot of old drunks at the bar? They might appreciate some Hank Williams. Do you find yourself surrounded by drunk frat boys? Dear god, this is not the time to sing Tori Amos (or maybe it is… I am a fan of the “sing a ‘fuck you’ song and walk out the door” technique, myself).

Step 6: Don’t repeat a song that you already rocked the shit out of the last time you were out. You will likely have a diminished effect. It’s better to move on to new terrain, and come back to that one when you’re in a new situation – a new crowd, a new town, after a 6 month absence. If you do the same song every time… I don’t know, it just feels like cheating. I recommend this formula: one new song, one core song.

Step 7: What to do if you bomb. Well, you know what? It happens to everyone. You don’t have any control, so you’re likely to bomb once in a while no matter how good a singer and performer you are. So bomb big. If you realize in the first 3 notes that you don’t actually know this song, sing it loud and sing it proud. Ask the crowd to help you out. Stop singing altogether and launch into a ridiculous dance routine. Go into the crowd and give the mic to the person who is singing along the loudest. Sing horribly, gleefully off-tune. Or you can always try speak-shouting with passion, that works sometimes.

Things to remember: some of the worst karaoke experiences I have had involved songs I thought I knew backwards and forwards. Some of the best I’ve had are with songs I was totally unsure about going in (or didn’t know at all). Of course, some of the worst were also songs I realized with a sinking heart upon hearing the first chords that I didn’t know after all. But whatever, the point is, either way it’s done after three minutes and the crowd doesn’t care that much.

And a story to bring this all together, entitled My Craziest Karaoke Experience:

Once I was at my favorite karaoke bar – Chopsticks III, the How Can Be lounge – and someone was celebrating a birthday with a huge party of friends, with a huge birthday cake sitting untouched on the table. A man walked in, and when his name was called he put a chair on the dance floor and proceeded to do a seriously bizarre version of “A Little Less Conversation, A Lot More Action.” He started out sitting in the chair and ended flailing around the room, screaming the song at the top of his lungs. When he was done, he put down the mic, grabbed the cake and walked out the door. Five minutes later the bartender asked if anyone knew who that guy was, because he’d smashed the cake on someone’s car and driven off. That has nothing to do with rocking it, it’s just a weird story. But man, even though that guy was genuinely crazy and he ruined that poor girl’s cake, it is the best karaoke story I have.

How to Write Songs

2009-10-30T00:03:00.000-07:00

I didn’t write my first song until about a year and a half ago. I had thought of myself as someone who had no talent for songwriting for so long that I didn’t even realize that I had written a song until two months after the fact. People kept asking me, “who wrote that song?” and I would say, “oh, this friend of mine helped put the music together, and then I put some words over that.” And then they’d say, “so, you wrote it,” and I’d say, “oh no no no, I just took the words from this old fairy tale and rewrote them a bit.” Finally a musician friend of mine told me that this COUNTS AS SONG WRITING.

And so it started to dawn on me that I could write songs.

Like every other person my age, I can play 3 chords on the guitar and had tried my hand at writing songs before. They always sounded clumsy and too rhyme-y and embarrassingly sappy so I decided I didn’t have a talent for putting words to music.

But this was different. I’d set out to cover songs and make a weird performance piece – and somehow because I wasn’t trying to write a song, a song emerged.

Once I’d done that I realized that it was in fact quite easy to write a song. My favorite method – since it’s what got me started – is to take a line from a poem or song you love. Let it worm its way in your brain out of context, like a mantra. In my case it was this line, from the German fairy tale I was basing my performance on: where did you come from, enchanted girl?

So, I wrote a whole song called, “Enchanted Girl” with that line as its chorus. I stole all the words from the crazy fairy tale. I took the trippiest phrases and mashed them up out of context and changed things around to make it rhyme and work rhythmically with the music. Voila! A song. Turns out that’s totally legitimate!

Here's a picture from the book, by Heinrich de la Motte Fouque, illustrated by Arthur Rackham:

And here's a picture from my show. I'm just giving you some visuals here so you don't get too bored by all the blathering on about songs.

In general, I find copying a song you love to be a great place to start. Here is the great paradox: if you set out to make something original, it’s going to sound like a copy of someone who did it better anyway. But if you SET OUT to copy someone, people will notice your originality. Or compare you to someone you didn’t even know you were copying.

In my case, people keep talking about the influence of Bjork and PJ Harvey on my songs when here I thought I was ripping off Stevie Nicks. And to be perfectly honest PJ Harvey wasn’t really on my radar before people started comparing me to her. Then I had to find out so I wouldn’t sound like an idiot who didn’t even know which album I was ripping off.

Another thing I’ve learned: the less words, the better. Words in songs are a blunt force. They just need to grab you. For years I thought a song had to be all complicated but if you start with the most basic, simple point – say, I AM FEELING SAD TODAY – or maybe WE WILL ROCK YOU – it will get more complicated and nuanced the more you work on it. Usually. Or if it doesn’t you can keep it to yourself. I wrote a song, "Black Valley," which I thought was blunt and powerful but finally realized was only powerful to me. To everyone else it was just repetitive and boring. So I stopped performing it.

Anyway. Point is: I wish song writing weren’t so shrouded in mystery and that more people talked about how to do it.

Though it’s ironic that I’m writing about how easy song writing is today because at the moment I am struggling mightily with a song I’m trying to write for the new Hand2Mouth show, Everyone Who Looks Like You. It’s an attempt to capture the kind of frustrated yelling that comes out of a family fight. In, you know, song form. We’re calling it the Yelling song or the Screaming song but unfortunately right now it sounds more like the Groaning Zombie song or the Polish Funeral song. And all I can think about is how impossible it is and how little skill and experience I have as a songwriter. So… yeah.

Rant #2: Emerging Artists

2009-10-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, you know what drives me crazy?

When people say things like: you are lucky to be an emerging artist. If you were a big old established arts organization you’d have all these PATRONS and FUNDERS and MILLION DOLLAR BUDGETS dragging you down. You are light and free! You can do whatever you want! NOBODY TELLS YOU WHAT TO DO!

You know why that is? Because we (by we I mean the crazy performance troupe I’ve worked with for ten years) are our own bosses. So we’re telling ourselves what to do. Except we don’t know what to do. How do you retain audiences? How do you split up the administrative work? How do you market your work to the people who will like it most? Who are those people? And how do you get those people to bring their friend who inherited a family fortune and could maybe give you some MONEY? And oh yeah, how do you do these things at a pace faster than GLACIAL?

We have figured a lot of things out. We’ve hired consultants and we’ve been smart and frugal and we know more than we did ten years ago, yes. For instance: do not put a nineteen year old pyromaniac in charge of fire for your touring outdoor spectacle. That is something we learned the hard way.

But we still don’t know how to pay ourselves anything near a salary. And it is getting harder and harder. We work our asses off, and for what? It is fun and we are free to do whatever we want. But… come on! We aren’t 24 anymore so we need some effing money! Isn’t there a middle ground grant, for when you reach your 30s and you’re not an art star genius yet but you’re doing pretty good? Could someone please support me while I figure out how to jump to BADASS PROFESSIONAL from the current spot I’m in, which is MUDDLING THROUGH SOMEHOW AND OH BY THE WAY I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A BABY?

So, point is, I’m not feeling very LIGHT AND FREE at the moment. Not feeling like we can do whatever we want. Not feeling drunk on freedom and artistic integrity. I’d like less integrity and more MONEY. And maybe some health care. Which maybe sounds kind of blasé and hip but trust me, it’s just weary and boring except I’m not 86 yet so I can’t wear an old lady turban and smoke endlessly while talking about the daggers of life. I’m 32. If I try that I’ll just look like an asshole. Which would be fine if I had money but no one wants to hang out with a poor asshole with a victim complex who can’t even buy them an effing beer. (Unless she's wearing a turban... note to self: TIME TO START ROCKING THE OLD LADY TURBAN).

Ok, so, like all good rants this is not particularly coherent. All I’m saying is: don’t talk to me about the joys and glories of being an emerging artist. I've been emerging. I'd like to stop emerging and start GETTING SOMEWHERE.

Question

2009-10-21T00:55:00.001-07:00

Indefatigable: why does this word make me feel so tired?

Moving out to Oregon, wide open

2009-10-21T00:37:00.000-07:00

On September 9, 1999 (just over ten years ago!) my best friend, Aryn, and I got into my blue Honda accord in the driveway of my parents’ house in Lansing, Michigan and set off on a journey. It’s strange to look back on that moment. I was doing something adventurous and foolhardy – I knew it – and I was thrilled. We had just graduated from college that May, and we both had gone to school close to home. For me, it was a gut shot of lightning – if I didn't leave now, I never would. And if I stayed – I couldn’t see what I would do if I stayed.

I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know if I would come back. I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than write and find people like me. I wanted to find my generation’s equivalent of Greenwich Village in the 30s. I wanted to find where things were going on, which was most certainly not in Lansing, Michigan. So my best friend and I set off on a road trip. Classic. We had maps and sleeping bags and a tent and a car, and we’d saved up enough money to be on the road for at least two months before we’d need to find a place to live and a job. It seemed like a good plan. My parents and sister waved goodbye from the driveway, and Aryn and I set off on our vision quest.

It was, not surprisingly, hard. Not romantic roll up your sleeves hard, but chilly, self-doubting, running out of money and what the fuck am I doing hard. We were lonely and lost (we had maps but our inner compasses were spinning) and we quickly ran out of things to talk about. We had adventures, yes – but not the kind of adventures that lead to immediate self-knowledge. Or any knowledge at all, other than ‘driving through the Rocky Mountains during a whiteout is fucking terrifying,’ or ‘the entire state of New Mexico is haunted.’ I thought I would have dreams, grand dreams that would reveal my mission to me – but instead I kept dreaming about high school friends I’d lost touch with (dreams, by the way, that were trying to tell me something, just not what I was looking for – but that is a topic for another day).

We got to Portland after 2½ months, and stayed with my aunt and uncle in Yamhill for three weeks while we looked for jobs and an apartment (and thank god for them, because I don’t know what I would have done without their kindness & love). I got hired as a temp and spent the last of my money on work clothes (hiking boots and dirty jeans were not going to cut it) and an apartment in southeast Portland. Then we had to wait two months before we had enough money to buy lamps and furniture. It was December, dark and rainy. We didn’t know anyone in Portland and we couldn’t afford to go out and do anything so we would sit in our plain, carpeted apartment decorated with one Chinese medicine poster we’d bought at Saturday Market, drinking tea and listening to the radio. In the dark. Because we couldn't afford a lamp. During the day sometimes we’d go to a coffee shop and sit and listen to people and try to figure out how to meet them (because on top of everything else we were both introverts and very sensitive people).

For the first time in my life, I was totally on my own. And though I would do it over again, I don’t recommend it. It was terrible. I spent at least six months lonely and poor and cut off from the world and terrified. I flew home for Christmas and cried my eyes out. Then flew back to Portland and cried more.

Of course things did eventually get better. I met people. I got involved in some activities, slowly. I saved up money and figured out where I liked to hang out. After a year I had a wild instinct to move to Missoula, Montana and then a sober voice said – hm, and start this whole process over again? You’re just getting to like Portland. So I stayed. And now I’ve been here ten years.

When I meet other people who have just moved here, I am jealous of the ones who hit the ground running, who come with a game plan and some resources. And when I meet the ones like me I think, oh honey, why are you making it harder on yourself. But how could you know until you’ve done it? I wouldn’t listen to any advice when I was 22 anyway. And I’m not so different now – I still like to learn things the hard way, I still quietly and stubbornly believe in following my gut instinct even when everyone around me thinks it’s stupid. I guess you always look back and wish you could do things over with the knowledge you now have. As the great Rod Stewart says: I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.

Did you know that song is called Ooh La La? I didn’t. Here, maybe it will cheer you up:

RANT #1: Taylor Swift

2009-10-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

Hello. I would like to talk today about one of my biggest pet peeves: Taylor Swift. (Not to be confused with my other peeve: naming a human being Taylor.)

If you listen to country radio or read Perez Hilton, you know who Taylor Swift is. If you are my Dad, you don’t. For those of you who are my Dad, let me lay it out for you: Taylor Swift is a nineteen-year-old singer who has made a splash on the country charts and currently tours (I swear to god, I saw this with my own eyes) with an entourage of something like FORTY-SEVEN semi-trucks with her face splashed gigantically across them. But underneath all that, she’s just a little girl with a big smile, a big dream and long shiny hair. And long shiny legs and long shiny eyelashes and a fair-to-middling voice. (See: Miley Cyrus, Hillary Duff and the original Teen Exploitation Queen herself, Ms. Britney Spears).

As in previous models, what drives me crazy is not Taylor Swift herself but the Taylor Swift Machine. The Machine markets Taylor Swift according to the accepted formula: one part pretty little virgin songstress, one part sexy rocker hair, one part business woman.

I wish I could find the photo of Taylor getting doused by a waterfall onstage.

Here are some quotes from articles about Ms. Swift:

The world's biggest new pop star is a little bit country, a little bit rock & roll, and all control freak. What's behind her drive for success?

"While other girls were drawing their wedding dress, I was drawing stage dimensions," says Swift, whose 55-city tour turns her junior-high fantasies into reality: "We have giant turrets that raise during 'Love Story,' and elaborate costumes," she says.

As it turns out, Swift is a rare blend of goofy teenager and polished saleswoman, which has let her tap into a huge market of country-loving teens.

See what I mean? They love in profiles like this to take two opposite traits and smack them up against each other. Case in point: Taylor Swift loves pink and purple but she is also a tooooootal control freak, guys. Whoa, come again? CAN SHE BE BOTH OF THESE THINGS? A professional, and yet a little girl? I too have two opposite traits contained within my dainty form, and thus I love her.

Our society loves that shit. I admit, part of me is jealous because I would love to be able to rig up a live waterfall in my own performances. Goddamit! How come I can’t end my show with a fucking WATERFALL cascading over my nubile flesh? That’s what I get for going into weird performance art instead of hot country.

Even in the circles I move in, though, many people want to see you this way as a solo artist, to see a contradiction embodied. They want you to be a high art savant crossed with a tough as nails, take no prisoners, clickety-clack red nails and heels businesswoman. They want you to be Bjork but inside be Sigourney Weaver from Working Girl. Pretty pink on the outside, blue steel on the inside. Maybe they just know that you have to be both to succeed.

But back to Taylor Swift. I worry about her. Like other incarnations, she was plucked from obscurity not because of her songs or her voice but because there is something about her that people respond to, and basing a career off charisma and charm and likeability (not to mention virginity)? We all know where that’s headed.

But if we all know where it’s headed, why are we so drawn in? Why are we ever-hungry for more teen queen victims? Why is there always such an appetite for the newest sexy little moppet? It can’t all be from preteen girls, can it?

Whatever, my rant is losing fire. It just makes me tired. Maybe she’ll make it out okay. Maybe her sharp as nails business acumen will save her a la Madonna or Shania Twain.

New York City!

2009-10-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Am I the only person who still, when I see or hear the phrase NEW YORK CITY, thinks of the Pace salsa commercial where two cowboys incredulously read aloud the birthplace of an inferior brand of salsa? Sad, but true. I guess that was a successful ad.

Anyway, onto the topic at hand: my tumultuous relationship with New York City. I know I am not alone in this. But here is my perception, in Portland anyway: you are supposed to say, oh man I just LOVE New York, I go there as much as I can. You are allowed to shake your head ruefully or express your frustration or burned out-ness in relation to a recent trip to New York, or if you are from there originally you can say how much you prefer the leafy environs of Portland. But you are not supposed to say that you are freaked out and overwhelmed by New York. That is bad form. That is for rubes from the midwest – oh my stars, all the people, and the noise, and the CRIME! It’s possible that this is all a projection of my paranoid girl-from-the-midwest-trying-to-prove-herself mind… but my sense is that when I am honest about my last trip to New York people kind of look away and change the subject. Like… “huh, that’s weird. Hm. Well did you eat some good food though?”

And luckily I did eat some incredible food. But the fact remains, my last trip to New York (about a month ago) was difficult. Like, for the first five days I hid in the apartment where I was crashing and trembled with fear at the thought of setting foot anywhere by myself.

I think it came down to several key factors that converged to overwhelm me:

1. Fear of navigating the subway, of getting irrevokably lost.
2. Fear of strangers. It’s embarrassing to admit this.
3. Performance anxiety. I was performing my show. This is a topic for another day.
4. Noise and lack of quiet space.
5. Money. New York is fucking expensive.

So, all together, these factors = TOTALLY FREAKED OUT IN NEW YORK CITY.

I did eventually figure out how to handle these various stressors, and next time when I go, I think I’ll be better prepared. Here are some things that helped me get over my freaked-out-ness:

1. After studying a map, in a low stress (ie, not about to get on the subway) situation, and setting a simple journey for myself that I could successfully complete, it no longer felt like the entire city was waiting to gobble me up.

2. It’s a New York cliché, but after two weeks I found myself shutting people out, not making eye contact with everyone. It helped me focus on the people I wanted to focus on, and not take it personally when other people did this to me.

3. I still haven’t figured out what to do about the performance anxiety thing – I’ll let you know when I do.

4. I realized that parks and little oases are there for a good reason: to keep you sane. Also: Brighton Beach! Walking along the beach felt like magic.

5. I tried to buy groceries and not eat out every meal. I didn’t really succeed in this but maybe next time I will.

So, yeah. New York. Tough town, great salsa.

P-town

2009-09-29T02:08:00.000-07:00

I am originally from Lansing, Michigan but for the last ten years I have lived in Portland, Oregon.

Things I love about Portland: the neighborhoods, the fresh air and natural beauty, the mix of can-do optimism and wide-eyed inspiration, people I meet who are working on crazy creative projects and know more than I do about gardening or zoning laws or trippy bands or how to make a car out of used tires.

Things that drive me crazy about Portland: how alike we are in age and clothing and background, how small and predictable and incestuous the “arts scene” can be (though I know this is not unique to Portland), how freaking nice everyone and everything is. I find myself craving some grit and noise and grease and waste. I deal with these cravings by traveling a lot and making secret late night trips to Taco Bell. Please do not tell my friends.

My "mission statement"

2009-09-29T01:39:00.000-07:00

Actually I have this thing where as soon as I write a "mission statement" I divebomb it. It just feels so self help-y and/or corporate and/or self aggrandizing. But I feel like I should communicate with clarity and focus, and so a "mission statement" (I can't even write it without quotes!) it is.

+ I am and always have been a Very Sensitive Person. There are good and bad things that come with being a Very Sensitive Person. Good things: I can get on other people's wavelength easily, I can tell pretty quickly when someone is bad news, I live in a wondrous fairyland of imagination and possibility. Bad things: I cry every other day, and if someone criticizes my hairstyle I take it to heart, wondering if there is something wrong with my sense of style and my character and my humanity. So. I'll be talking a lot about holding onto balance and perspective as a SENSITIVE PERSON IN A COLD HARD WORLD. And I'll try to do this without being too earnest and annoying and self-obsessed.

+ I am interested in contradictions. I want to dig them up, spread them out on a blanket and see what they’re made of. And then maybe place them gently back into the earth to see what grows. And hope that what grows is not a 600-pound turnip/gorilla cause maaaaan I do not want to mess with a turnip/gorilla, I learned that the hard way.

+ I am a performance artist which provides a particular challenge for the sensitive person -- I clearly crave connection with others in the heightened world of live performance, and yet this world provides heightened blows and knockdowns. So I'll be exploring that as well.

+ I'll also throw out random manifestoes, rants and inspirations as I see fit.