So This is How it Feels

Chapter 8

Next Time

8 So This is How it Feels

When pretty song lyrics describe an ugly divorce. Comparing being emotionally shattered to the artistic forms of patchworking and kintsugi. Wabi-sabi and used books as aesthetic ideals. How to channel trauma into the craft of acting.

Chapter 8

So This is How it Feels

6:45
And the sun has cut the sky and the clouds are still bleeding
As meanwhile I

I line up three metal shot glasses in a neat row in front of me, uncork an empty tequila bottle with a “th-punng” sound, and mime pouring invisible shots into each of the glasses. Behind me, three different groups of three movement artists enact various images with their grouped bodies as I speak. 

I drink alone outside the bar at the end of the world

This was one of many rehearsals for a dance/theatre production called I Miss My MTV. It was cast with a pool of about a dozen performing artists, all of which were required to not only be able to act and be highly skilled dancers, but the rehearsal process included the performers themselves composing theatrical movement vignettes in adherence to various prompts (for example: Breakup Song; a Song That Saved Your Life; setting literal choreography to illustrate the earnest lyrics of pop hit ‘The Promise’, etc.). The result of this slow creative process was a beautiful, strange, eclectic show that felt reminiscent of sitting in front of MTV in the ‘80s for an hour. 

So this is how it feels

The work we did was called Moment Work—the directors would assign the cast either to go into breakout groups and create a Moment right there in rehearsal, or we’d be assigned Moment Homework, and bring our work back for a sort of show-and-tell the next time we met. All of this got thrown into a big performance art cauldron of sorts, various gems of which the directors would pick out and keep, and rearrange, as we built the show from scratch together, during the several weeks of composition and rehearsals. These days, there’s a new term to describe this genre of performance: it’s called ‘derived theatre.’

Amongst the myriads of Moments being shuffled around and experimented with to slowly piece together the whole, there was a longer pivotal piece, which centered around me. 

The directors told me they hadn’t been sure they could find a performer who could pull this monumental Moment off when they had first conceptualized the show. But then they watched my audition closely, and later, when some of my other Moment work started entering the mix, they cast me in this big section.

About 2:05
I'm still alive
But as the papers have assured me, I won't be for long

This piece was called The Bar at the End of the World. In it, I spoke a long poem made from song lyrics¹ and the other performers, arranged behind me, illuminated the words with shared group poses made from their own physical Moments that would melt and shift like turning a kaleidoscope, with each verse, line, or theme. This became a sort of beautifully shifting living sculpture garden behind me: part acro yoga shapes, part mime, part silent film style physical illustration of my spoken words.

And there's a girl with cold eyes but her stockings are running

The emotional world I was immersed in at the time of these rehearsals was one of the main reasons why they put me centrally in that piece. There were other reasons, too—that I could handle difficult text like most actors can’t, mostly because of Shakespearean training. Also that I was one of only a very few in that cast who was actually a teen during the time period of this show’s attention, and so had real remembered experience of the era.

So this is how it feels

Mainly, though, my state of mind was what it was because I had just agreed on a divorce, still living with my husband because of my dire financial situation. I never knew when I’d be going home to all my belongings laid out on a table waiting to be divided up, or weepingly being begged not to leave him. Or to a fight that hinged this close, but not quite, to violence. I had asked, a week earlier, trying to hold back tears, my cast members to let me know if they had any ins for inexpensive rooms to rent in Boulder. Which of course, as sympathetic as they all were, nobody did. It’s Boulder, and few places are more costly to live in. In every sense of that word.

So this is how it feels
To stagger from the undergrowth
And rediscover emptiness
Dancing on the beach

When you watch a mountain waterfall for a long time, sometimes the continuous movement blends into a sort of still image in your brain. Sometimes each crash of hard spray against each rock is a visceral and separate action of the whole. Sometimes it’s a softer looking, cloudlike view of the bottom, rolling and puffing out mist, and if you’re lucky, a rainbow will pop out like in a National Geographic photo. 

My whole inner life at that time was in constant shift and movement—I can never cry on stage when I’m planning on it, but I’d often crack into tears during those rehearsals. Cutting the sky till it bleeds was a reference to the time I held a pocketknife in my hand, liminally upstairs in the loft window, while my girlfriend and husband were downstairs together. The girl with cold eyes was her, but also me. My stockings were always running, but she never wore them.

Every line was a reference, and I had rich places to go inside for each one. I’d never been to an ocean but I’d seen the sound garden in Seattle in the time before I’d met my husband, and that became the emptiness on the beach. A regretful one. Gray and green and beautiful and haunting. I used to wish that I could rewind time and go back there, make different choices, not marry him, change my path. But that’s not how life works.

And anyway
She’s just the end of a melody that sings to me of you

“Why do you let him do that to you?” I was finally asked. Not having an answer was a major turning point in the ending of my marriage. Also a big seed of what would become my shame.

But the repeated line So this is how it feels, didn’t catch hold. It became a question, when I wasn’t speeding through it. What is it that I’m feeling? Is this how it feels? How what feels? 

The director kept needing to ask me to slow down each time I said the line. So this is how it feels. I would rush through it, be asked to slow it down. It was a cycle, like the waterfall. 

I’m good to work with, though, so every time I was asked to slow down, I did. This meant I couldn’t escape any of the words in the sentence. So. This. Is. How...

My entire adult life was spent attached to one person, who isolated me, cut me off from my earlier friends, my fraught family, until literally he was the only one in my world. Now we were both dating other people, though still legally tied to each other. Shackled, in iron. This is how it feels. My whole adult life cut into tatters—everything I had, the whole world of the one or two things I was allowed in my prison: broken, light streaming through the cracks. A leaking ceiling. How do I escape the dripping, that water torture? So this is how it feels…

I really can't pretend
That the end feels like anything more than a joke
So this is how it feels

The director tells me, again, to slow down as I speak the next stanza, and I have to call for a line, as I don’t remember what time stamp the next one is supposed to start with. I take a breath, both to slow down and to calm down, and also to tap into that emotional gathering technique I had learned about twenty years earlier in acting school, in college. 

Nearly 4 am

So this is how it feels

When you feel strong emotion onstage as an actor, you have to have at least a small fraction of yourself lifted free of it, so that your voice continues to be audible and understandable, so that you can execute things like blocking or other more complicated choreography, so that you don’t collapse into a wet rag. You learn (messily, painfully, like drowning and then being yanked out of the water and vomiting yourself back to life) to use those bleeding shards as an ingredient in your art. Breath training, physical conditioning, all that helps. You even learn how to crack yourself, on purpose, in particular artistic ways, so the shards look just so, for your performance. 

And if you’ve experienced extreme emotions stemming from real trauma, heartbreak, damage, all those things that crack humans into pieces, all the better. All the more grist for your mill. And, hey; you’ve probably learned something about dissociation.

So this is how it feels
To throw your past onto the floor
And smash it beneath your heels

The Japanese really know a thing or two about aesthetics. I learned this during my immersion in Japanese martial arts, first and foremost, but have long been impressed with the Japanese way of streamlined elegance, of minimalist beauty, and of their strange and sometimes kooky mastery of combining the ancient with the bleeding-edge new. 

The concept of wabi-sabi is one such aesthetic that’s famously hard to define, let alone translate into English and Western culture. The basics of what wabi-sabi means has to do with an appreciation of an imperfect beauty—a beauty that comes from rustic flaws, perfect imperfection, and the patina of the natural passage of time. Art types will talk about the earth tones and sepia palette of a work done with a wabi-sabi sentiment, while sculptors and potters will tout the non-symmetry of works as being the most beautiful. I love the story of what many think was the first iteration of wabi-sabi: that of a gardener to the emperor combing and arranging a zen sand garden to mathematical perfection, and after? he shook the branches of the cherry trees above it, scattering the petals across his finished product haphazardly, making his work even more perfect.

I Miss My MTV was very much about honoring the strange and imperfect past, making it a lovely example of a contemporary piece of wabi-sabi. It was a non-ironic and yet non-nostalgic work of 1980s appreciation, and the fragmented Moments that we fused together into the whole show was a theatrical version of one of my favorite wabi-sabi practices: that of kintsugi.

Kintsugi is an art form of patchworking, in the artistic realm of ceramics. It’s gotten to be a wistful trend lately, you’ve probably heard of it: Instead of trying to hide the cracks and gaps in a broken piece of pottery, they’re fixed and filled with gold—thus emphasizing the flaws and making the piece more valuable and more beautiful than it was when it was unbroken. 

When I worked at the used book center of the big local bookstore in Boulder as a young woman, I learned some interesting things about what makes a used book desirable and buyable; the most surprising of which is the bookplate or inscription factor: if a book had a personalized inscription in the front, it upped the value of the book and made it more of a hot commodity. I was surprised by this, in that I thought anything that showed such brash signs of being used, made it damaged goods. Not so: an inscribed book is the more valuable, and any signs left by the passage of time makes it the more beautiful.

So this is how it feels
To catch your face in broken glass
And know that that’s what’s real

My mom is a more-than-competent seamstress: she learned how to make her own clothes as a teenager, and made not only my costume for RenFaire the year I wore the corset and dress, but singlehandedly constructed my first wedding dress from scratch: a Vera Wang pattern, a bolt of ivory colored raw silk, and a mountain of tulle. These were only the latest grand projects from a lifetime of making me everything from Halloween costumes to childhood outfits to satin pajamas which I literally wore threadbare as a teenaged Goth.

She taught me to sew, too, and though my skills today stop at the ability to replace a popped button, mend a hem, and repair a hole in a seam, I still have the knowledge in there, which with practice could blossom. I also taught myself how to embroider as a kid, which I did a lot of, cross stitching and satin-filling away like the daughter of a medieval manor lord.²

One thing my mom always taught me, about sewing and about uniquely fashionable clothing: she learned early on to purchase sweaters, buttondowns, coats, and the like cheap from thrift stores, and then also to buy antique buttons from estate sales and fancy fabric shops, then swap the cheap buttons off of the thrift garment and replace them all with the fancy ones. This makes for unique pieces, and pieces that look really cool. I didn’t have quite the appreciation for thrifting in the ‘80s as I did later in life, but it’s a good rule of thimbled thumb, and I still do this sometimes. The other thing she’d recommend is to mend a torn garment with thread of a very different color, and patches of different fabric. This made the garment look unique, and strange, and beautiful. I don’t think she’s ever heard of kintsugi, but this is exactly the same idea, and the same notion of emphasizing flaws to increase beauty. 

Broken is beautiful. Aging adds value.

So this is how it feels 
To walk upon the waves alone 
With nothing to conceal

My voice breaks. I swallow. The pause works well, because once I can smoothly speak I have to slow down yet again so the dancers behind me can catch up with the rich images I put in place with my voice, like a slideshow, or a scrapbook. A kaleidoscope, a waterfall.  Kintsugi.

So I take the emotional refractory period to settle the tremble in my breath and to get a good timbre to my voice. There is no music backing this piece, though the lines are song lyrics. I’ve never heard the song. The melody and the journey through the words is all from my voice, my exhausted breath, my shattered bits of heart.

I have to stop to breathe again. My colleagues all agree those breath spots are deeply affecting emotionally, for those watching, as well as useful for the dancers. 

I don’t know what to think.

I can’t hear myself. I keep speaking.

6:45

and the sun has cut the sky
And the clouds are still bleeding

The Bar at the End of the World never made it into the final production.

The bit where I poured the three little shot glasses stayed in, though, as a transition between other pieces. I wiggled my ruffly miniskirted bum (a full year or more before I ever attempted burlesque) to George Michael’s iconic “Faith.” 

Nobody in the audience, therefore, knew that the setting of that transitional shot pour took place at The Bar at the End of the World. But I did. Because it still was, for me. 

~

I’m still sitting outside at the bar at the end of the world, drinking. I have a mask by my side, just in case.

So. 

This is how it feels…

~

The Bar at the End of the World didn’t appear in the show, as I mentioned, but here’s a backstage shot of the piece that remained after: it consisted of me being pushed around, pummeled, and wrapped up in phone cords by some glamorous cowboys, to the tune of ‘Personal Jesus’ by Depeche Mode. This isn’t the best looking or clearest pic of this piece, but it best epitomizes the dynamic, and it’s the most wabi-sabi one I have, too.

1. All lyrics reproduced here from Firewater, ‘6:45 (so this is how it feels),’ The Golden Hour album.

2. The only time I indulged in my childhood embroidery skills as an adult was when, as we were both enormous Sherlock Holmes nerds, I made a gift out of my husband’s old coat by echoing the fashionable red buttonhole found on the excellent coat of Cumberbatch’s version of the detective. I made the lapel buttonhole on my husband’s black coat bright violet. It was immensely cool looking, but even so he didn’t let me wear the coat very often.