Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
It's the Pictures That Got Small
Yesterday I filmed a training video for the state LCB that will be shown to everyone and their mother in need of a server-of-libation license in the small wonder. Paid gig. Fun premise. Great script. Nice people.
Yesterday I realized that I am getting too old for this shit.
I rolled in on time (the only one) for the 12-hour shoot after a restless three-hour nap after a 12-hour whirlwind trip to NYC. The 8 a.m. call was for hair and makeup so I wasn't too worried about the extra bags under my peepers or my unstyled 'do. The script was a loose, amusing set of vignettes designed to clue potential bartenders and cater-waiters on how not to overserve one-too-many patrons at whatever local watering hole said barkeeps sought employment. My role was loosely defined as there were a few very specific parts (a silly British gent, a sunburned bro) and the rest were one-note stereotypes (angry working woman, nerdy just-turned legal dude) and I was told there would be a lot of opportunity for improv and fun. I was game. I was excited.
The company producing the piece has some good work under their collective belts. I felt confident that though this was scheduled as a fairly long shoot that it would be efficient. I don't define an 8 a.m. call for hair and make-up to mean you-have-time-first-one-here, so-go-get-your-own-coffee-and-later-breakfast, and actual-hair-and-makeup-will-occur-in-the-neighborhood-of-noon as efficient, personally, but then I am old-school.
Turns out, a little too old school. My shift in the chair resulted in making me look about 60 years old and possibly also a crack addict, which was not to be covered in the video. I am not sure what the young-ins in charge knew from tending bar. I am not even sure they were collectively old enough to be served at a bar in the first place, so this could account for the notion that making the older folks acting in the piece--especially the ladies, and by "older" I mean over 30--appear to be takes on a future LiLo mugshot for a 2048 DUI arrest was a good way to train drink-pourers to cut us off, since anyone looking the way we did would probably not be able to order a drink if ordering required being conscious. The men did not fare especially better from their stints in the chair, but in art as in life even the most metro of men don't tend to work with much more than they have got in terms of make-up and hair enhancements. In other words, some added dark shadows might make them look a tad ghoulish but essentially they look the same just with strange inexplicable zombie eyes. Which you don't tend to see in reality when bar-hopping--in my experience the gals (and guys) about town tend to begin the night looking their best and depending on the level of "overservice" may end up looking their worst. Point is, you start off with good intentions. The styling team for this shoot believed starting off with cruel intentions was a more realistic way of going about things.
Full disclosure, I am pretty vain. As I get older, I find I become vain about different aspects of myself, but also looser about my vanity. Age does bring confidence, and experience renders one perspective. To look at pictures I know bugged me 20 years ago makes me roll my eyes now, to think wow, I thought I looked bad then and how dumb to have worried over that when now I see how great I looked that day. Silly vanity, lesson learned, less Evil Queen and more clueless Snow White going forward, shall we? And this is just regular life lessons. When it comes to those learned upon the wicked stage (or green screen) I have different vanities, but similar experiences. I am fairly open to looking the part, particularly when the part is worth the effort. I have looked really great in some stuff. i have looked really bad in others. I regret none of it, not once.
So all that said, I had no "part" here, and I certainly wasn't under the impression that I would be playing Martha in Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? on this fine spring Monday. I was led to believe I would be "acting drunk" and that hair and make-up for film purposes would happen to me prior to the one-liners I would be fed throughout the day. Had I thought about it at all, I would have pegged the "look" to be some smeared lipstick, maybe some smudged mascara. Look-close-and-see-the-illusion-of-sobriety-belying-the-tiny-clues-on-her-face. I spend a great deal of my time in restaurants and clubs by trade, and I am well aware what drunk folk look like in these parts.
As an actor, I believe that my job in any piece is to create a person who might really exist in an alternate reality from my own. She looks like me, but something is off. She acts like I would act in this version of my life. Had this piece been called "Intervention", sure, make me look like a frowsy hooker drinking iodine to get high and then show that as a sobering PSA about the unhidden dangers of medicine cabinet contents in American homes. But this piece was ostensibly using humor to point out the inconsistencies of over-indulgers on a regular Saturday night, not a docu-drama about barflies at that bar no one goes into because it looks so shady.
I know what I look like. I know I have good days and bad days. I know lack of rest, a hormonal break-out aftermath face, and a make-up free early morning call do not me at my best make. I also know that I am not 25, when such paltry considerations just made me look poetically waify for a few hours. But what struck me after I exited the styling station and checked my visage in my camera selfie is that I was, for the first time, being targeted for being of a certain age, and a female of a certain age at that. As I pointed out earlier, the men (who varied in age from 30s to 50s) were given little thrift, some powder to blot out shine and some slight ruddiness or dark circles. They didn't look good but they didn't look bad. The looked appropriately funny-drunk-enhanced so they could do what they were hired to do, which is ACT a little over-drunk while out on the town. Their enhancements were designed to enhance their behavior. The women were made to look exceedingly bad. Bad hair, zits not only uncovered but actually enhanced (which makes one look less in need of Proactiv than in need of quarantine for measles), extreme saddlebags painted on, no blush but Rudolph noses, etc. We looked less like ladies who three-too-many-martinied lunch and more like sad, desperate alcoholics who had been overindulging since utero. The amusing vignettes become less amusing and entirely cringe-worthy when you can't see the acting for the makeunders.
By contrast, the gal playing the server was done up like prom night - perfect hair, perfect make-up. It did not escape me that she was 15-20 years younger than the rest of us. It all made me sad, and kind of pissed off.
As actresses, we are defined by how we look. It's no secret that it's a really tough industry, even in the microcosm where we ply our profession. But even here our faces, our bodies, are what gets us in the door and in part keeps us there. Our talents and training and abilities play a part, sure. But in an industry where being too blonde or too dark or too fat or too thin or too butch or too girly defines you before you even get a chance to open your mouth, you can only hope you look okay enough to get a chance to show how your abilities can transform your first-impression appearance. And it doesn't always work out that way, not by a long shot. But hey, you choose it. Even if it kind of chose you, you decide what you want to do with it. And you are getting work, so don't complain, right?
A healthy self-awareness of our attributes is vital to working this system, and even that isn't always successful. Recently a friend of mine got some buzz slash notoriety for social media posts of boudoir photos celebrating her 40th birthday. The camps fell into pretty even divides, the you-go-girl side and the you-ain't-all-that-white-privilege-non-mom side. It was fascinating and not unexpected that it went down that way. But she was proving some point, at least. Sure I am older, sure I am genetically predisposed to rock a decent body at this allegedly scary age without a ton of effort on my part, sure there will be haters but also who the fuck cares cause this is me, and what I look like in good light and good get-ups so shut up anti-women world, cause age really ain't nothing but a number. It took guts and it took narcissism. But that is her job. And she is advertising herself by controlling the message. Which is also her job.
I once spent an evening looking like an asshole in a Norma Desmond get-up at a fundraiser. I didn't even get paid (didn't know that at the time FYI, but that is s tale for another blog) to walk around making hideous grimaces and having no hairline and wearing so much exaggerated make-up I made RuPaul look like an amateur by way of contouring know-how. But the look was part of the performance, and every bit of it enhanced mine. It was about showcasing a character. It wasn't designed as a snap judgement to stick my tired face in a box called "middle age" and for no real reason (i.e. part to play) make it look as hideous as humanly possible. To thy own self be true, and all that, and I truthfully know how bad I can look after a bout with flu, or a weekend of hard partying, or an all-nighter. But playing a part loosely defined as "drunk-enough-to-become-a-potential-liability-for-a-server-but-deceivingly-may-not-appear-terribly-intoxicated" did not equate being made to look, and subsequently feel, the way I did when I left that chair.
And now, footage of me looking like the ugliest, oldest alkie in the tri-state area and beyond is being edited to be played out all over social media and in staff lounges and local tv. I didn't get to do work that made me proud to compensate. I got to spend most of 12 hours looking like that while sitting to the side doing crossword puzzles and feeling like the biggest reveal to come out of this gig was that I am looked at and judged by this particular company not as a decent-looking woman of a certain age but as an unattractively aging throwaway. My sole consolation (besides the paycheck which I better be getting) is that I was not alone in this feeling yesterday. But really that is cold comfort.
I wonder what the ethics are here. To introduce ethics into a conversation about the most narcissistic profession we have is perhaps a lost battle at its core. But I am going to soldier on. I have learned that I am my own commodity, and as such I need to protect that commodity. I am pretty careful in some respects about my choices, especially in light of the social media whirlwind we live in nowadays. I am fairly loose in a lot of ways, partially for the same reasons. My experience on this particular shoot made me super-reflective (duh) and curious as to what the preferred way to deal best should have been. Okay, so it was a gig. I knew enough going in, by my standards, to agree to it. My expectations were clearly unmet on a few levels. But what should I have done? Every course of action seemed destined only to gain myself a difficult reputation, which you don't want in a small town with limited opportunities, and I don't want as a general rule in any version of this industry or my life. And again - nice people! good work! paid work!
So here were my choices. Walk out because this wasn't what I thought I was signing up for? Complained nonstop (and my fellow actors and I commiserated muchly amongst ourselves with our level of dissatisfaction)? Pulled the busy director aside and asked for some clarity on my role here, or expressed dissatisfaction with this look, the process? Demand to be re-made-up to my satisfaction? Accept that maybe I was overreacting to how bad I looked and/or felt? Accept that I am not as good-looking or young-looking as I thought I was? Accept that maybe I am those things but younger hotter models have edged me out of that ring? Embrace looking awful for no discernible reason and throw myself into the little performance opportunities afforded me? Go back in time and spend a week prepping to look as perfectly lovely as possible when I showed up to thus negate any chance of being taken to be the ugly one deserving of the worst make-up job? Suck it up and be cheerful and joke about the look, or suck it up and act as though I was fine with how i looked because it didn't occur to me that it was bad?
To have done none of these things, expect to suggest at one point that perhaps starting at 60 without showing 0 wasn't the best for any of us on this shoot, makes me wonder if I did a poor job of protecting my sole asset - me. I was so not ready for my close-up, but I got one. And if you are hoping to get hired at Applebee's in the near future, I apologize in advance for the added insult of having to see me at my beyond-worst, without knowing the toll that took on my self-esteem.
Yesterday I realized that I am getting too old for this shit.
I rolled in on time (the only one) for the 12-hour shoot after a restless three-hour nap after a 12-hour whirlwind trip to NYC. The 8 a.m. call was for hair and makeup so I wasn't too worried about the extra bags under my peepers or my unstyled 'do. The script was a loose, amusing set of vignettes designed to clue potential bartenders and cater-waiters on how not to overserve one-too-many patrons at whatever local watering hole said barkeeps sought employment. My role was loosely defined as there were a few very specific parts (a silly British gent, a sunburned bro) and the rest were one-note stereotypes (angry working woman, nerdy just-turned legal dude) and I was told there would be a lot of opportunity for improv and fun. I was game. I was excited.
The company producing the piece has some good work under their collective belts. I felt confident that though this was scheduled as a fairly long shoot that it would be efficient. I don't define an 8 a.m. call for hair and make-up to mean you-have-time-first-one-here, so-go-get-your-own-coffee-and-later-breakfast, and actual-hair-and-makeup-will-occur-in-the-neighborhood-of-noon as efficient, personally, but then I am old-school.
Turns out, a little too old school. My shift in the chair resulted in making me look about 60 years old and possibly also a crack addict, which was not to be covered in the video. I am not sure what the young-ins in charge knew from tending bar. I am not even sure they were collectively old enough to be served at a bar in the first place, so this could account for the notion that making the older folks acting in the piece--especially the ladies, and by "older" I mean over 30--appear to be takes on a future LiLo mugshot for a 2048 DUI arrest was a good way to train drink-pourers to cut us off, since anyone looking the way we did would probably not be able to order a drink if ordering required being conscious. The men did not fare especially better from their stints in the chair, but in art as in life even the most metro of men don't tend to work with much more than they have got in terms of make-up and hair enhancements. In other words, some added dark shadows might make them look a tad ghoulish but essentially they look the same just with strange inexplicable zombie eyes. Which you don't tend to see in reality when bar-hopping--in my experience the gals (and guys) about town tend to begin the night looking their best and depending on the level of "overservice" may end up looking their worst. Point is, you start off with good intentions. The styling team for this shoot believed starting off with cruel intentions was a more realistic way of going about things.
Full disclosure, I am pretty vain. As I get older, I find I become vain about different aspects of myself, but also looser about my vanity. Age does bring confidence, and experience renders one perspective. To look at pictures I know bugged me 20 years ago makes me roll my eyes now, to think wow, I thought I looked bad then and how dumb to have worried over that when now I see how great I looked that day. Silly vanity, lesson learned, less Evil Queen and more clueless Snow White going forward, shall we? And this is just regular life lessons. When it comes to those learned upon the wicked stage (or green screen) I have different vanities, but similar experiences. I am fairly open to looking the part, particularly when the part is worth the effort. I have looked really great in some stuff. i have looked really bad in others. I regret none of it, not once.
So all that said, I had no "part" here, and I certainly wasn't under the impression that I would be playing Martha in Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? on this fine spring Monday. I was led to believe I would be "acting drunk" and that hair and make-up for film purposes would happen to me prior to the one-liners I would be fed throughout the day. Had I thought about it at all, I would have pegged the "look" to be some smeared lipstick, maybe some smudged mascara. Look-close-and-see-the-illusion-of-sobriety-belying-the-tiny-clues-on-her-face. I spend a great deal of my time in restaurants and clubs by trade, and I am well aware what drunk folk look like in these parts.
As an actor, I believe that my job in any piece is to create a person who might really exist in an alternate reality from my own. She looks like me, but something is off. She acts like I would act in this version of my life. Had this piece been called "Intervention", sure, make me look like a frowsy hooker drinking iodine to get high and then show that as a sobering PSA about the unhidden dangers of medicine cabinet contents in American homes. But this piece was ostensibly using humor to point out the inconsistencies of over-indulgers on a regular Saturday night, not a docu-drama about barflies at that bar no one goes into because it looks so shady.
I know what I look like. I know I have good days and bad days. I know lack of rest, a hormonal break-out aftermath face, and a make-up free early morning call do not me at my best make. I also know that I am not 25, when such paltry considerations just made me look poetically waify for a few hours. But what struck me after I exited the styling station and checked my visage in my camera selfie is that I was, for the first time, being targeted for being of a certain age, and a female of a certain age at that. As I pointed out earlier, the men (who varied in age from 30s to 50s) were given little thrift, some powder to blot out shine and some slight ruddiness or dark circles. They didn't look good but they didn't look bad. The looked appropriately funny-drunk-enhanced so they could do what they were hired to do, which is ACT a little over-drunk while out on the town. Their enhancements were designed to enhance their behavior. The women were made to look exceedingly bad. Bad hair, zits not only uncovered but actually enhanced (which makes one look less in need of Proactiv than in need of quarantine for measles), extreme saddlebags painted on, no blush but Rudolph noses, etc. We looked less like ladies who three-too-many-martinied lunch and more like sad, desperate alcoholics who had been overindulging since utero. The amusing vignettes become less amusing and entirely cringe-worthy when you can't see the acting for the makeunders.
By contrast, the gal playing the server was done up like prom night - perfect hair, perfect make-up. It did not escape me that she was 15-20 years younger than the rest of us. It all made me sad, and kind of pissed off.
As actresses, we are defined by how we look. It's no secret that it's a really tough industry, even in the microcosm where we ply our profession. But even here our faces, our bodies, are what gets us in the door and in part keeps us there. Our talents and training and abilities play a part, sure. But in an industry where being too blonde or too dark or too fat or too thin or too butch or too girly defines you before you even get a chance to open your mouth, you can only hope you look okay enough to get a chance to show how your abilities can transform your first-impression appearance. And it doesn't always work out that way, not by a long shot. But hey, you choose it. Even if it kind of chose you, you decide what you want to do with it. And you are getting work, so don't complain, right?
A healthy self-awareness of our attributes is vital to working this system, and even that isn't always successful. Recently a friend of mine got some buzz slash notoriety for social media posts of boudoir photos celebrating her 40th birthday. The camps fell into pretty even divides, the you-go-girl side and the you-ain't-all-that-white-privilege-non-mom side. It was fascinating and not unexpected that it went down that way. But she was proving some point, at least. Sure I am older, sure I am genetically predisposed to rock a decent body at this allegedly scary age without a ton of effort on my part, sure there will be haters but also who the fuck cares cause this is me, and what I look like in good light and good get-ups so shut up anti-women world, cause age really ain't nothing but a number. It took guts and it took narcissism. But that is her job. And she is advertising herself by controlling the message. Which is also her job.
I once spent an evening looking like an asshole in a Norma Desmond get-up at a fundraiser. I didn't even get paid (didn't know that at the time FYI, but that is s tale for another blog) to walk around making hideous grimaces and having no hairline and wearing so much exaggerated make-up I made RuPaul look like an amateur by way of contouring know-how. But the look was part of the performance, and every bit of it enhanced mine. It was about showcasing a character. It wasn't designed as a snap judgement to stick my tired face in a box called "middle age" and for no real reason (i.e. part to play) make it look as hideous as humanly possible. To thy own self be true, and all that, and I truthfully know how bad I can look after a bout with flu, or a weekend of hard partying, or an all-nighter. But playing a part loosely defined as "drunk-enough-to-become-a-potential-liability-for-a-server-but-deceivingly-may-not-appear-terribly-intoxicated" did not equate being made to look, and subsequently feel, the way I did when I left that chair.
And now, footage of me looking like the ugliest, oldest alkie in the tri-state area and beyond is being edited to be played out all over social media and in staff lounges and local tv. I didn't get to do work that made me proud to compensate. I got to spend most of 12 hours looking like that while sitting to the side doing crossword puzzles and feeling like the biggest reveal to come out of this gig was that I am looked at and judged by this particular company not as a decent-looking woman of a certain age but as an unattractively aging throwaway. My sole consolation (besides the paycheck which I better be getting) is that I was not alone in this feeling yesterday. But really that is cold comfort.
I wonder what the ethics are here. To introduce ethics into a conversation about the most narcissistic profession we have is perhaps a lost battle at its core. But I am going to soldier on. I have learned that I am my own commodity, and as such I need to protect that commodity. I am pretty careful in some respects about my choices, especially in light of the social media whirlwind we live in nowadays. I am fairly loose in a lot of ways, partially for the same reasons. My experience on this particular shoot made me super-reflective (duh) and curious as to what the preferred way to deal best should have been. Okay, so it was a gig. I knew enough going in, by my standards, to agree to it. My expectations were clearly unmet on a few levels. But what should I have done? Every course of action seemed destined only to gain myself a difficult reputation, which you don't want in a small town with limited opportunities, and I don't want as a general rule in any version of this industry or my life. And again - nice people! good work! paid work!
So here were my choices. Walk out because this wasn't what I thought I was signing up for? Complained nonstop (and my fellow actors and I commiserated muchly amongst ourselves with our level of dissatisfaction)? Pulled the busy director aside and asked for some clarity on my role here, or expressed dissatisfaction with this look, the process? Demand to be re-made-up to my satisfaction? Accept that maybe I was overreacting to how bad I looked and/or felt? Accept that I am not as good-looking or young-looking as I thought I was? Accept that maybe I am those things but younger hotter models have edged me out of that ring? Embrace looking awful for no discernible reason and throw myself into the little performance opportunities afforded me? Go back in time and spend a week prepping to look as perfectly lovely as possible when I showed up to thus negate any chance of being taken to be the ugly one deserving of the worst make-up job? Suck it up and be cheerful and joke about the look, or suck it up and act as though I was fine with how i looked because it didn't occur to me that it was bad?
To have done none of these things, expect to suggest at one point that perhaps starting at 60 without showing 0 wasn't the best for any of us on this shoot, makes me wonder if I did a poor job of protecting my sole asset - me. I was so not ready for my close-up, but I got one. And if you are hoping to get hired at Applebee's in the near future, I apologize in advance for the added insult of having to see me at my beyond-worst, without knowing the toll that took on my self-esteem.
Saturday, May 17, 2014
Paltrow Productions
Running a small theater company these days (maybe all days since the days of The Globe, if Shakespeare In Love is to be believed, and I believe everything about that film, including the now-quaint notion that Gwyneth Paltrow was once delightful) is akin to wondering why one is at a certain age still single.
Being perpetually without a mate, it's an incessant question-answer session with your therapist brain. You look good. You work out. You have a decent career. You have loads of friends, and interests, and a great dog you walk to the park dutifully every Saturday morning hoping to find yourself in a meet-cute situation that will inevitably lead to rom-com hijinks and a triumphant traipse down the aisle. You are open to encounters with your preferred sex, be it online or on the karaoke circuit or as the obligatory non-plus-une at a wedding or in line at the grocery. You read advice columns in the glossy magazines at the doctor's office, you take advice from well-meaning friends, family, and casual acquaintances, you advise yourself late at night with book and beer in hand--all the while wondering, how is it is that you, whose dance card is always full, whom everyone and their mother insists you are good and smart and funny and handsome and talented and nurturing and just an all-around Goop-style catch sans the snobbery, remain consciously uncoupled?
Being perpetually without full houses during a run, it's an incessant back-and-forth conversation with everyone. You put on a good show. You cast people with talent to light up the stage, and more talented folk to aim those lights. You have 20 years of experience perfecting what makes your productions stand out in a crowd. You have built up an audience, you vary your content to suit all kinds, you tirelessly pursue rights for the next-big regional thing that will catapult your troupe into a happily-ever-after of sold-out houses and supersized donations and a company that isn't just about numbers but about living the good theatrical life. You willingly embrace new works and old chestnuts, deconstructing them to breathe artistic life into great works. You educate yourself on similar models, you study and learn from colleagues and patrons and supporters, you explore at cast parties and in front of the laptop post-run, you post and you hashtag and you chat it up at every opportunity--all the while musing, how is it that your company, which works its collective fanny off to engage, contribute, and discover, which everyone buzzes about season after season as being fun and interesting and hard-working and respected, why is this particular production not being enjoyed by the masses?
You have had good relationships with lovers and audiences alike. Like Gwynnie you have garnered high praise and broken hearts and lost your own, you have put your foot in your mouth and you have staged just the right comeback, you have reinvented yourself to suit yourself and then to suit someone elses, you have come out on top in terms of running the show on your own terms, critics be damned. It feels good to age into yourself, to be good in your own glowing skin, to enjoy your own company and your carefully collected best mates from over the years, to be honest about the work it takes to have this body and this body of work. But the hook is this: that niggling ticking following you everywhere you go in your own home, annoyed and confused and ultimately hapless in your efforts to find that sweet spot of success. The sliding doors of choices made, the what ifs, the unapologetic stance yet behind-the-facade worry over is this the right thing, was that the wrong decision, when can you just sit back for one night (or nine) and exhale in the glee that comes with hard-won success in life and in art?
Maybe it's the vegan-unfriendly references to meatloaf stroganoff. Who the hell knows.
Being perpetually without a mate, it's an incessant question-answer session with your therapist brain. You look good. You work out. You have a decent career. You have loads of friends, and interests, and a great dog you walk to the park dutifully every Saturday morning hoping to find yourself in a meet-cute situation that will inevitably lead to rom-com hijinks and a triumphant traipse down the aisle. You are open to encounters with your preferred sex, be it online or on the karaoke circuit or as the obligatory non-plus-une at a wedding or in line at the grocery. You read advice columns in the glossy magazines at the doctor's office, you take advice from well-meaning friends, family, and casual acquaintances, you advise yourself late at night with book and beer in hand--all the while wondering, how is it is that you, whose dance card is always full, whom everyone and their mother insists you are good and smart and funny and handsome and talented and nurturing and just an all-around Goop-style catch sans the snobbery, remain consciously uncoupled?
Being perpetually without full houses during a run, it's an incessant back-and-forth conversation with everyone. You put on a good show. You cast people with talent to light up the stage, and more talented folk to aim those lights. You have 20 years of experience perfecting what makes your productions stand out in a crowd. You have built up an audience, you vary your content to suit all kinds, you tirelessly pursue rights for the next-big regional thing that will catapult your troupe into a happily-ever-after of sold-out houses and supersized donations and a company that isn't just about numbers but about living the good theatrical life. You willingly embrace new works and old chestnuts, deconstructing them to breathe artistic life into great works. You educate yourself on similar models, you study and learn from colleagues and patrons and supporters, you explore at cast parties and in front of the laptop post-run, you post and you hashtag and you chat it up at every opportunity--all the while musing, how is it that your company, which works its collective fanny off to engage, contribute, and discover, which everyone buzzes about season after season as being fun and interesting and hard-working and respected, why is this particular production not being enjoyed by the masses?
You have had good relationships with lovers and audiences alike. Like Gwynnie you have garnered high praise and broken hearts and lost your own, you have put your foot in your mouth and you have staged just the right comeback, you have reinvented yourself to suit yourself and then to suit someone elses, you have come out on top in terms of running the show on your own terms, critics be damned. It feels good to age into yourself, to be good in your own glowing skin, to enjoy your own company and your carefully collected best mates from over the years, to be honest about the work it takes to have this body and this body of work. But the hook is this: that niggling ticking following you everywhere you go in your own home, annoyed and confused and ultimately hapless in your efforts to find that sweet spot of success. The sliding doors of choices made, the what ifs, the unapologetic stance yet behind-the-facade worry over is this the right thing, was that the wrong decision, when can you just sit back for one night (or nine) and exhale in the glee that comes with hard-won success in life and in art?
Maybe it's the vegan-unfriendly references to meatloaf stroganoff. Who the hell knows.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Apply Liberally
What does it mean to be an adult of a certain age and to so entirely not have your shit together? And how did we get here from there? And does it matter to anyone, least of all to oneself?
Many of my peers have gone down the path of least resistance. Soul-sucking job in some partitioned room beneath florescent lights. Been there, done that, couldn't do it anymore. So I traded it in for something a little more highbrow. Only to fully realize years later my soul is still being sucked dry by a windowless unpartitioned office beneath the dim and unforgiving buzz of florescent lights. I protect her in the off hours, to be sure. But I think someone else is always getting to Scotland afore me.
Time doesn't fly in the workaday world I inhabit. It crawls like a lazy tick. And I am conscious almost every second of every day of the life force being leached out of me. I feel it in my marrow bones. I know it is a rotten situation for me. I know it's time to hit the road, Jack. But the road less traveled is still the one I set my sights on. And this is where time starts playing tricks. Because this is the part where I start to feel conscious of it running out. That the road is too tough to hoe.
I push colored pins into the map of my existence, tracking my journey throughout this mortal coil. I know where I've been. I know why I am here now. But what I cannot do is plan my trip to get to the next destination, anywhere.
I imagine my peers aren't aware of their lost souls. Or they are better at compensating for the damage done by the peeling of the ozone layer that once protected it, by the rip in the fabric of their time. They own homes and have the latest in babies, cars, vacations, kitchenware. They have a plan for what happens when they pack a box of office detritus and slap on their gold watch and head out into the golden light. I have never been one of them and it's obvious I am unlikely to ever be. I am glad I don't live on that street.
I am less glad that I am not one of their higher-minded kin, the do-gooders on the avenue, the ones that managed to cocoon their souls by studying and learning and working in careers that offer a sky-high SPF and a circle to travel in that nurtures rather than destroys, and eventually they too have their families, and their lives, and their sense of satisfaction in themselves.
I live somewhere on a boulevard all to myself. Mostly I took the road less traveled by and the difference has been--that I am crippled by fear and anxiety about this business of being--for it is a business. The sun shines on the art of the soul, not the commerce. But here the bank account is low, a girl's gotta grift as good as she gets, she better know how to poor. And sometimes the UV rays punch through to remind me that I want the other things too. But it's too hot to go look for them now.
It's tiresome to feel one is doing more wrong than right. It's tiresome to know one's wiring is faulty in the grid of the way it's supposed to be. And it's tiresome that at this age, responsibilities and dreams come crashing through at the speed of light, scorching up everything in their path on the way in for a landing, and leaving behind burns that scar even as they heal.
And that's how I feel about this fixed point in time.
Many of my peers have gone down the path of least resistance. Soul-sucking job in some partitioned room beneath florescent lights. Been there, done that, couldn't do it anymore. So I traded it in for something a little more highbrow. Only to fully realize years later my soul is still being sucked dry by a windowless unpartitioned office beneath the dim and unforgiving buzz of florescent lights. I protect her in the off hours, to be sure. But I think someone else is always getting to Scotland afore me.
Time doesn't fly in the workaday world I inhabit. It crawls like a lazy tick. And I am conscious almost every second of every day of the life force being leached out of me. I feel it in my marrow bones. I know it is a rotten situation for me. I know it's time to hit the road, Jack. But the road less traveled is still the one I set my sights on. And this is where time starts playing tricks. Because this is the part where I start to feel conscious of it running out. That the road is too tough to hoe.
I push colored pins into the map of my existence, tracking my journey throughout this mortal coil. I know where I've been. I know why I am here now. But what I cannot do is plan my trip to get to the next destination, anywhere.
I imagine my peers aren't aware of their lost souls. Or they are better at compensating for the damage done by the peeling of the ozone layer that once protected it, by the rip in the fabric of their time. They own homes and have the latest in babies, cars, vacations, kitchenware. They have a plan for what happens when they pack a box of office detritus and slap on their gold watch and head out into the golden light. I have never been one of them and it's obvious I am unlikely to ever be. I am glad I don't live on that street.
I am less glad that I am not one of their higher-minded kin, the do-gooders on the avenue, the ones that managed to cocoon their souls by studying and learning and working in careers that offer a sky-high SPF and a circle to travel in that nurtures rather than destroys, and eventually they too have their families, and their lives, and their sense of satisfaction in themselves.
I live somewhere on a boulevard all to myself. Mostly I took the road less traveled by and the difference has been--that I am crippled by fear and anxiety about this business of being--for it is a business. The sun shines on the art of the soul, not the commerce. But here the bank account is low, a girl's gotta grift as good as she gets, she better know how to poor. And sometimes the UV rays punch through to remind me that I want the other things too. But it's too hot to go look for them now.
It's tiresome to feel one is doing more wrong than right. It's tiresome to know one's wiring is faulty in the grid of the way it's supposed to be. And it's tiresome that at this age, responsibilities and dreams come crashing through at the speed of light, scorching up everything in their path on the way in for a landing, and leaving behind burns that scar even as they heal.
And that's how I feel about this fixed point in time.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
The Unpretty
It starts out small--a niggling sensation at the back of your throat, a word you can't quite grasp on the tip of your tongue, a not entirely unpleasant prickling feeling where a blister is forming at the back of your heel. It grows to a monstrous size in no time to speak of--the gross and lingering sinus infection, the crazy-Internet stalking for that damn bit of vocabulary lost, the skin erupted and blood staining your shoe.
It's the curse of The Unpretty.
I have noticed that The Unpretty generally follows a bout of Extreme Prettiness, the latter defined best as the bloom upon the rose, the glowing reviews, the picture-perfect self. These periods are also rare, but oh so divine. The same cannot be said for its rival.
Extreme Prettiness is when all your clothes hang just right on your neatly proportioned frame (and match, and are clean, and fit, and were purchased in this decade, and came off hangers in the closet rather than from the unfolded pile from the floor of freshly laundered fashions from ten years ago.) Extreme Prettiness is when you expertly line your lids and subtly paint your mouth and dust on some shimmer in thirty seconds flat and the result is a dewy, doe-eyed, sweet bird of youth (not a splotchy, shiny, haggard hot mess whose heretofore minimalist hippie-chick routine appears to be no longer an option.) Extreme Prettiness is when you are so in love that everyone knows it at a glance from the after-glow look permanently emanating from your every word, gesture, and smile (instead of the good people of the world recoiling at your clearly woman-scorned-and-soured-on-the-male-race-screaming-drunk-karaoke-anthems-like-Bobby-McGee-at-your-horrified-friends.)
Extreme Prettiness is when you can stay out all night and party like it's 1999 and at dawn still look like you did when it was actually 1999. The Unpretty is when you wake up with your split ends floating in the toilet and a purple rim around your chapped lips.
The Unpretty is like The Mean Reds in the sense that suddenly you are ugly and you don't know what is causing it. Sure there are signs. The jeans that now come with a side of the dread muffin top. The zit that won't quit now spawning a little family of cysts on your cheek. The haircut that acquaintances comment on having happened without the requisite complimentary follow-up. The lipstick that looked lovely at cocktail hour now half-gone and what's left is spitting little flecks into your coffee cup at dessert. These little vanities taken one at a time are conquerable. But sometimes they wreak havoc on your physical being all at once and you join the ranks of The Unpretty.
Equal to the physical confusion that wrecks my concept of my looks when I find myself one of The Unpretty is the lightening-quick paranoia that sets in and consumes my every waking hour. I imagine everyone I know is secretly commenting on my appearance and what they are saying ain't good. I feel as though I have overnight gone from having a healthy sense of self to having no sense of self at all, if said self is now a hideous fat and wrinkled Jabba woman-monster formerly known as me. There is no perspective to be had.
Dressing whilst mired in The Unpretty becomes a tactical nightmare best left to donning a Snuggie 24-7 and completely giving up on all matters sartorial as well as social, as leaving the house and unleashing one's Gummo-ness upon the unsuspecting populace will not make one feel better. Unfortunately one can't call in sick indefinitely, so one assembles an outfit after several tries that manages to be as universally unflattering as it is constricting and possibly a little smelly. Mirrors are best avoided during The Unpretty but in the vain hope that things have significantly improved as quickly as they deteriorated one must go through the looking glass as often as possible, which leads to the discovery of new and devastating flaws (Is that a hair growing out of my forehead? Has that tooth always been a different shade than the rest? Did this shirt have a big hole under the arm this morning?)
The Unpretty leads to tears and recriminations and great wailing and gnashing of teeth, which as you might imagine does not go far in making the situation any better and in fact adds puffy eyes and a cherry red nose and another soupcon of crazy to the mix. Like Miss Havisham before her, in the throes of The Unpretty one retreats to the dusty corners of one's mind while sporting a moldy dress, recalling the good old days of one's great expectations [last week], when one was a sparkling dynamo of It Girl fascination invited to all the best places and breaking all the best hearts with wanton adorableness.
The Unpretty strikes us all, yet there is no warning bell. Suddenly you are ugly and you don't know why. In the past I have noticed it stealthily creeps away only a trifle less insidiously as it crept in, and this gives me hope for the future (i.e., summer.) Although I do sometimes fear that someday it may become a permanent state. In which case I will need a Snuggie and a lot of wine. But until that day, dear goddess, deliver me from the vain pomp and glory of my self-absorption but let me look Pretty while doing it. Because I am nothing if not shallow (except right now, when I am mostly just The Unpretty.)
It's the curse of The Unpretty.
I have noticed that The Unpretty generally follows a bout of Extreme Prettiness, the latter defined best as the bloom upon the rose, the glowing reviews, the picture-perfect self. These periods are also rare, but oh so divine. The same cannot be said for its rival.
Extreme Prettiness is when all your clothes hang just right on your neatly proportioned frame (and match, and are clean, and fit, and were purchased in this decade, and came off hangers in the closet rather than from the unfolded pile from the floor of freshly laundered fashions from ten years ago.) Extreme Prettiness is when you expertly line your lids and subtly paint your mouth and dust on some shimmer in thirty seconds flat and the result is a dewy, doe-eyed, sweet bird of youth (not a splotchy, shiny, haggard hot mess whose heretofore minimalist hippie-chick routine appears to be no longer an option.) Extreme Prettiness is when you are so in love that everyone knows it at a glance from the after-glow look permanently emanating from your every word, gesture, and smile (instead of the good people of the world recoiling at your clearly woman-scorned-and-soured-on-the-male-race-screaming-drunk-karaoke-anthems-like-Bobby-McGee-at-your-horrified-friends.)
Extreme Prettiness is when you can stay out all night and party like it's 1999 and at dawn still look like you did when it was actually 1999. The Unpretty is when you wake up with your split ends floating in the toilet and a purple rim around your chapped lips.
The Unpretty is like The Mean Reds in the sense that suddenly you are ugly and you don't know what is causing it. Sure there are signs. The jeans that now come with a side of the dread muffin top. The zit that won't quit now spawning a little family of cysts on your cheek. The haircut that acquaintances comment on having happened without the requisite complimentary follow-up. The lipstick that looked lovely at cocktail hour now half-gone and what's left is spitting little flecks into your coffee cup at dessert. These little vanities taken one at a time are conquerable. But sometimes they wreak havoc on your physical being all at once and you join the ranks of The Unpretty.
Equal to the physical confusion that wrecks my concept of my looks when I find myself one of The Unpretty is the lightening-quick paranoia that sets in and consumes my every waking hour. I imagine everyone I know is secretly commenting on my appearance and what they are saying ain't good. I feel as though I have overnight gone from having a healthy sense of self to having no sense of self at all, if said self is now a hideous fat and wrinkled Jabba woman-monster formerly known as me. There is no perspective to be had.
Dressing whilst mired in The Unpretty becomes a tactical nightmare best left to donning a Snuggie 24-7 and completely giving up on all matters sartorial as well as social, as leaving the house and unleashing one's Gummo-ness upon the unsuspecting populace will not make one feel better. Unfortunately one can't call in sick indefinitely, so one assembles an outfit after several tries that manages to be as universally unflattering as it is constricting and possibly a little smelly. Mirrors are best avoided during The Unpretty but in the vain hope that things have significantly improved as quickly as they deteriorated one must go through the looking glass as often as possible, which leads to the discovery of new and devastating flaws (Is that a hair growing out of my forehead? Has that tooth always been a different shade than the rest? Did this shirt have a big hole under the arm this morning?)
The Unpretty leads to tears and recriminations and great wailing and gnashing of teeth, which as you might imagine does not go far in making the situation any better and in fact adds puffy eyes and a cherry red nose and another soupcon of crazy to the mix. Like Miss Havisham before her, in the throes of The Unpretty one retreats to the dusty corners of one's mind while sporting a moldy dress, recalling the good old days of one's great expectations [last week], when one was a sparkling dynamo of It Girl fascination invited to all the best places and breaking all the best hearts with wanton adorableness.
The Unpretty strikes us all, yet there is no warning bell. Suddenly you are ugly and you don't know why. In the past I have noticed it stealthily creeps away only a trifle less insidiously as it crept in, and this gives me hope for the future (i.e., summer.) Although I do sometimes fear that someday it may become a permanent state. In which case I will need a Snuggie and a lot of wine. But until that day, dear goddess, deliver me from the vain pomp and glory of my self-absorption but let me look Pretty while doing it. Because I am nothing if not shallow (except right now, when I am mostly just The Unpretty.)
Friday, July 29, 2011
Alfred J Prufucked
Ah, the siren song of the non-job-job. Its melodious notes waft over the office drone at inopportune times, lulling one into a dangerous dream of all that could be if only she could follow that haunting harmony into the deep waters off career satisfaction coast.
I hold a job-job wherein I have been asked to write up a so-called "informal evaluation" of life on the island of misfit academics. In particular I have been asked to list my accomplishments from the past year and my goals for the coming one. As I am bored silly by the slow pace of said job-job in the summer months, I started to work on this ignoble assignment only to discover that I have accomplished very little and hope to accomplish even less. It isn't that I am unhappy here--far from it. I enjoy most of what I do. I am a bit burnt out by it even as I am not overly stimulated by it, but that is the main reason I took this job. My life outside of here is stimulant enough to cure a coke fiend. So no, I don't wish to overextend myself in pursuit of reaching lofty goals so I can look down from the heavens of serious scholarship. I don't wish to travel far afield for meetings or seminars at my own expense, which is less than money issues than life issues (see aforementioned coke fiend cure.) All I really want to do (and my desire to do this wanes evermore) is come in, do a good job at my actual job-job, and go home and do my life-life. And as it is, and certainly if I am asked to do more, then I need my palms crossed with far more silver than they are currently.
These facts do not a good self-evaluation add up. Also, said s.e. has no connection whatsoever with a raise of any sort. It's more like, let's talk about our feelings.
Here are my feelings. I think, no, I FEEL, why am I doing this? I feel now why, but really, why am I doing this? I have been working since I was 13 years old. I don't want to anymore. But I want stuff, and stuff costs money, so I have to exchange services for goods somehow. Fine. But I know that unless I get really really lucky with some windfall of fame and fortune sometime soon (or ever) I will always be poor as a churchmouse, so why aren't I doing something that makes me all the things a career should make one, and not worry about the financial gain?
Kids who come from money tend to beget more money in life. And presumably doing what they want to do. Not always true, but it's a lot easier to pursue certain careers like music or art or even do-goodering type of employment when you have the money to have hit the right schools and made the right friends and continue to have that bubble bankrolled while you intern at the Kennedy Center or traipse through Nepal or lived somewhere sans rats for grad school. When you just gotta pay the bills, it's tough to do whatcha wanna. But it gets harder, I think, to keep doing what you decidedly do not want to.
Two sides, one coin, really. Everybody's gotta make a living. I could make a way worse one, I could probably make a way better one. But therein lies the problem--I don't feel like doing any of it right now. I want to enjoy life, and have enough money to do things, and not feel like I am crawling out of my own skin as I sit behind a desk every day for not enough pay to do anything "extra" and even not enough to do everything "necessary." And I see so many around me struggling with the same thing. Being besties with mainly artists does that to a girl. But while we are no longer in the first flush of youth, but we are in many ways younger than our parents were at our ages. And we don't want to sell our souls to the company store, hold out for that gold watch, leave our big dreams and delusions of grandeur in the dust and replace them with prosaic realities and two-car garages. We want to enjoy our cake--the cake we baked and iced and served. And we should be able to. But the rich get richer and the poor get children--twins called debt and drudgery.
Where's the poetry in that?
I hold a job-job wherein I have been asked to write up a so-called "informal evaluation" of life on the island of misfit academics. In particular I have been asked to list my accomplishments from the past year and my goals for the coming one. As I am bored silly by the slow pace of said job-job in the summer months, I started to work on this ignoble assignment only to discover that I have accomplished very little and hope to accomplish even less. It isn't that I am unhappy here--far from it. I enjoy most of what I do. I am a bit burnt out by it even as I am not overly stimulated by it, but that is the main reason I took this job. My life outside of here is stimulant enough to cure a coke fiend. So no, I don't wish to overextend myself in pursuit of reaching lofty goals so I can look down from the heavens of serious scholarship. I don't wish to travel far afield for meetings or seminars at my own expense, which is less than money issues than life issues (see aforementioned coke fiend cure.) All I really want to do (and my desire to do this wanes evermore) is come in, do a good job at my actual job-job, and go home and do my life-life. And as it is, and certainly if I am asked to do more, then I need my palms crossed with far more silver than they are currently.
These facts do not a good self-evaluation add up. Also, said s.e. has no connection whatsoever with a raise of any sort. It's more like, let's talk about our feelings.
Here are my feelings. I think, no, I FEEL, why am I doing this? I feel now why, but really, why am I doing this? I have been working since I was 13 years old. I don't want to anymore. But I want stuff, and stuff costs money, so I have to exchange services for goods somehow. Fine. But I know that unless I get really really lucky with some windfall of fame and fortune sometime soon (or ever) I will always be poor as a churchmouse, so why aren't I doing something that makes me all the things a career should make one, and not worry about the financial gain?
Kids who come from money tend to beget more money in life. And presumably doing what they want to do. Not always true, but it's a lot easier to pursue certain careers like music or art or even do-goodering type of employment when you have the money to have hit the right schools and made the right friends and continue to have that bubble bankrolled while you intern at the Kennedy Center or traipse through Nepal or lived somewhere sans rats for grad school. When you just gotta pay the bills, it's tough to do whatcha wanna. But it gets harder, I think, to keep doing what you decidedly do not want to.
Two sides, one coin, really. Everybody's gotta make a living. I could make a way worse one, I could probably make a way better one. But therein lies the problem--I don't feel like doing any of it right now. I want to enjoy life, and have enough money to do things, and not feel like I am crawling out of my own skin as I sit behind a desk every day for not enough pay to do anything "extra" and even not enough to do everything "necessary." And I see so many around me struggling with the same thing. Being besties with mainly artists does that to a girl. But while we are no longer in the first flush of youth, but we are in many ways younger than our parents were at our ages. And we don't want to sell our souls to the company store, hold out for that gold watch, leave our big dreams and delusions of grandeur in the dust and replace them with prosaic realities and two-car garages. We want to enjoy our cake--the cake we baked and iced and served. And we should be able to. But the rich get richer and the poor get children--twins called debt and drudgery.
Where's the poetry in that?
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Ruby Red
I have been slacking on the blogging. Clearly this was bound to happen as I am une slackere in many areas of my life. Reasons for not writing would include, I have not much to say. Just been doing the summertime and the livin's easy thing. So far it's been a pretty swell summer. But a pretty hot one too. I have discovered that I can grow vegetables and eat them! I have been cast in a play that scares the shit out of me! I am getting to do three concert shows this summer including the terrifying debut of JT2! And I am in the love with the nicest boy! These are the things that July has brought, along with a nice beach weekend courtesy of my two mums, a miniversary tour of our nation's capital, lots of frustrations at work, and an adult swim night. I plan to wrap it up with a wedding (not mine) and some craft beers (all mine.) Not too shabby, to be honest. But also to be honest, not much to write home about here.
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