Chapter 1: A Tone of Authority

GLOSS #2

Dec 07, 2024

[this is a GLOSS on Chapter 1, which has been re-posted in tandem, but also linked here for your convenience.]

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (but I usually don’t)

I wish to goodness I could remember this woman’s name—I tried to rack my brain again today and it’s just nowhere. I feel kinda bad, as we had a nice date and some nice text convos beforehand. But I guess it was only a brief meeting after all, so I shouldn’t beat myself up too much, huh? Okay, I’ll ease off.

After our date, we had a couple little trickling and sparse text convos but then when I got more direct and asked if she wanted to get together again, she let me know she wasn’t feeling it. I responded, Hey, no problem at all. I had a lovely date and feel free to text as friends if you ever have the desire. Thanks and have a lovely world. She was astonished at how nice I was in my reaction to the rejection. I was like, Look if you don’t feel me, you don’t. No worries. She was like, You are so sweet.

She probably had had to deal with too many butthurt rejected men, I imagine.

If I were to try and pinpoint my ‘types’ of men and women, I would say that in women, I’m most attracted to a thin, pixieish type, almost boyish. Non-binary attractions for me tend to fall in this same vein: not quite feminine but…like a Tolkien Elf. In men, I have tended to be most attracted to a James Bond type: tall, fair, dark hair. But those men I’ve had relationships with that didn’t look like that, the attraction was in their intellect, and in their movement. Masculine grace is a real kicker for me.

But then the real ‘type’ I’m most attracted to across the gender board, is the Unhinged Redhead. I mention this affliction briefly in ‘Red’, and I don’t know what more to say about that.

The Most Interesting Woman in the World

I met Sarah in a moment of bravery and self-advertisement that’s the opposite of the discomfort with self-promotion I discuss in this chapter. What I did was, I approached her in the audience of…um I don’t recall what play it was, except it was definitely a show I’d done some of the fights for. I just simply walked up to her and told her that she needed to interview me, because I did the fights for this show and I’m a very interesting person to write about. She looked at one of my websites for two seconds and said, ‘uh, yeah you’re absolutely right.’ She then followed me into one of my stage combat seminars I’d been doing—that one was at Drake Middle School, I believe. And she chatted with me in the car as well as did a recorded interview over at Corner Bar to conclude.

Thing is, I never got to see a draft of the article she’d composed from all that raw data (I guess this is normal for journalism?) and she got so many details of the play I was working on so wrong (that I had been talking to her about), that the end result is honestly kind of embarrassing. She got character events wrong, she misnamed characters in the photos of the play she’d gotten from the theatre directly, and pretty much got the violent scene I’d described choreographing to her so wrong I wondered if her recording had broken, or what conversation she’d heard. Because of this, I to this day hesitate to share it. (I’ve shared it in today’s bibliography for you anyway, though.)

There was another fact or two that might sound inaccurate, like the declaration that I was the only stage combat choreographer that also did intimacy coordination in Colorado, but I pretty much was at the time of the article. Now there’s a couple more professionals trained in both fields here, but at that time I was unique. I’m still unique in that I come to the intimacy field through the kink show and burlesque world, instead of the new-to-2018 intimacy certifications that are too connected to a stage combat organization I’d rather not work through anymore, so. That’s cool. She entered the article into a contest–wonder whatever happened with that.

A couple years after this, I met with one Caitlin Rockett, then of the Boulder Weekly, who had written about my variety show before, for a similar personal interview. This one was about my memoir, which was still unfinished at the time (I think? Or it had been freshly finished, I don’t recall), and my life in the fields of violence and under a gaslighting husband. It was a lovely talk, and she told me later that she’d made some relationship improvements in her life after talking with me about mine. I’d given her strength.

Unfortunately, her remaining time at that newspaper became tumultuous and then ended not long after, so that interview never made it to print. I’d be curious what it was like, if she ever had any drafts drafted, or. But even so, I was pretty chuffed to hear that my life story, even as yet unpublished, had already saved a life.

Blue Dime Cabaret

I’ve talked about Blue Dime Cabaret a few times throughout all my personal essay work here, and this is why: It has been some of the most fun, fulfilling, exciting theatrical work I’ve ever done. I’m so proud of it (to this day) and it changed my life. I have ever so much fun each month when we’ve got a show on, whether or not I’m performing. It’s done wonders for my body image issues, my disgruntlement about the theatre scene, and in so many ways brings me joy.

I’ve also had a couple features in local newspapers about this show, including one full headline and two-page spread in the Friday Magazine of Boulder’s Daily Camera, where the ladies who interviewed us decided to feature us instead of writing a scant paragraph or two, so in love were they with the Blue Dime vibe.

Toni Tresca, local theatre journalist, wrote a lovely article on us too, back around last year’s Pride month show (and more recently interviewed me on the OnStage podcast about the loss of our regular venue, and about our upcoming work.

"When we started out, Blue Dime was kind of a small, grassroots pop-up group in Boulder," Zuko says. "It was grungy in the best of ways, kind of a vaudeville sort of thing, but now we've gotten much bigger. We've had lots of different people in the very robust Denver drag and burlesque world audition for us; our casts have gotten bigger, and I realized we've actually gotten a reputation. When I first reached out to DV8 Distillery, they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we've heard of you.’ Which made us realize we’re not this tiny little bohemian group anymore; we're one of the more established groups now, so I have been getting used to that myself."

I don’t get impostor syndrome doing this stuff the way I do even in fields of my own expertise, like stage combat (the first organization I began that field with managed to belittle me even as they pumped me up, and their nagging little voices are here in my head to this day).

Impostor? I hardly know her…

Nowadays it’s a running joke that my partner is my PR guy–whenever we’re out together and there’s an opportunity to introduce me and my work to someone, he puts on his carnival barker / master of marketing hats and talks me up shamelessly. To be fair, I do this for him too.

You’d think I’d be better at self-promotion, having been a writer and an actor for so long, fields which demand that sort of thing, but. Yeah I’m still affected by the bullying and gaslighting and etc. of my past. Plus, I do suffer from what I imagine is a sort of Gen-X brand of self-effacement and aversion to ‘selling’ anything, including ‘out.’ Including myself. But I’m getting better—Substack helps, producing Blue Dime helps, and living with my partner and working on our relationship helps too.

I’m slowly beginning to learn the difference between modesty and self-silencing, between a healthy promotion of one’s good work, and an annoying slick snake oil type thing. It’s an ongoing lesson, and it is getting better. If you read yesterday’s vocab word re-post about speaking out, and my journey through my singing voice, you can see more of this concept percolating around in my brain. I’m getting better at it, really. At the self-advocacy, not the singing.

Well, I am getting better at singing too.

Valkyrie Rose and audience member, at DV8 Distillery, Blue Dime Cabaret, 2024. Photog: D20

This is an image, I think, that epitomizes this chapter pretty well (as well as yesterday’s Exeleutherostomize): In this act, I’m singing ‘Whatever Lola Wants’ to this hapless audience member. I take a couple of articles of clothing off (you can see the red lace in the girl’s lap), but it’s not a full strip; it’s more like how the number is in the musical where it comes from (Damn Yankees): a silly and fun seduction. I share this because it’s a combination of what I’ve been talking about: boosting my confidence in singing, and my beloved art of the tease. Side note: the theme of this show was ‘Lucky/Unlucky’, as it was on a Friday the 13th. Hence the occult symbols on my tights, and horns in my hat.

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