My husband, bless his heart, is a cultured human. He is an anthropologist, an environmentalist, a supporter of humanitarian causes, and despite all of that, he perseveres in his belief that anything remotely connected to the subject of “poo” is the gold standard of comedy.
He is actually a very sensitive man, being raised along-side three sisters in a very stable, middle class, Midwestern family in the small town of Mayville, Wisconsin, and he is actually somewhat of a renaissance man. Saul played football, basketball, and ran track in high school; he camps, hikes, and fishes; he reads fiction and non-fiction from a wide variety of authors; he appreciates all forms of music and will attend all manner of concerts from heavy-metal to classical; he loves realism to abstract art and adores strange and obscure movies; he has a masters degree, works in a museum, loves beer, small towns and the land just as much as wine, cities and new technological innovations.
This being said, poo brought my husband and I together. I don’t know what this says about me, but one thing is for sure… I married him.
We had a demure courtship. Not by my choice. I would’ve been all over him like a groupie on an aging rock-star, but somehow he felt he wanted to take things slow in order to “get to know me”. Now, in earlier times, I might have felt this tactic was reserved for men who were using me as a cover for their gay life-style or had a festering sexually transmitted disease to hide and unleash upon me once my feelings had been secured. Not Saul. What he had in his closet was much stinkier. I would only find out about after 3 months of furtive glances, tension-heavy non-touching-talk-sessions in the driveway, and two-four public meetings where he would buy me a couple of drinks with his hard-earned minimum wage, always sitting a respectable distance away while I consumed them. I think I touched his arm a couple of times, but after receiving no positive response, I resorted to desperate measures. I complained to his friends.
Now Saul and I hadn’t known each other before we started dating. I was a single girl in Milwaukee and my Minneapolitan self couldn’t figure out where the decent men in this city were hiding themselves. It was so much easier in Minneapolis. Minneapolis, that small but unassumingly glittering city replete with theaters, jazz clubs, museums and dance performances; all things that a girl can use as a safe excuse to meet men on a Friday night. After all, if the dude looks or smells funny, you can always just turn your head back to the obscure performance piece and ignore away. In Milwaukee, I was devoid of options. Young people did not frequent artistic events in Milwaukee and I had not yet discovered that Milwaukee was, in fact, otherwise known as “Brew-City” and therefore any self-respecting young-in of proper age was, and will always be, frequenting any number of the city’s many breweries and their tours. I was at the mercy of my co-workers.
I was in town for a total of 6 months and had a few self-inflicted and unsuccessful runs-ins with a Hippie, a Rock-Star-Former-Heroine-Addict, and a Stalker-ish Architecture Student. It was time for a real date, this time not set up by myself at the bar. But, as a newcomer and a Minnesotan, I was not well equipped to meet people. All the education a Minnesotan gets in this realm is “stick to the people you know”. Well that’s as helpful as cat stuck in your pants when your circle of acquaintance happen to be unavailable or have proven themselves to be hopelessly toxic in relationships - let alone their questionable “bed-side manner”. Besides this, I was hampered by the fact that I was an artist situated waaaaaaay left of the acceptable rock-musician-type and my new acquaintances did not know what to do with me. To be fair, these were servers at the restaurant I worked for and these generally consist of simple folk. To be unfair, we worked the small café at Milwaukee’s Art Museum and all the servers and bartenders were musicians, poets, and artists. So they should’ve known better.
“You’re a dancer? Like, exotic?” they’d say.
“No”, I’d reply for the hundredth time, “Modern Dancer”.
“Like Hip Hop?”
“No, like Contemporary Dance… On a stage… All artsy and crap like that.”
“Huh” was the only blank-stare, mouth-breathing answer I could ever expect.
Which didn’t really matter anyhow because they had ceased to care about three and a half sentences back.
I once made the mistake of performing for an art opening at the museum we all worked for and the café was catering. Thank the good lord I quit shortly thereafter, because no one wanted to ask me what the piece meant, why the dancers were rolling on the floor covered in black mossy material and why I was wearing pants on my arms. This coupled with the fact that I had the habit of fashioning my hair into little sculptures often featuring little nests made of hair with life-size birds, feathers and eggs stuck in (believe me, the old ladies who frequented our café loved it, but the poets thought I’d lost it) and I had a quite a task convincing this dubious crowd to find an appropriate date for me. They were the sort that drank until 5 am and stumbled into work at 8am; they were the crowd that slept around and bragged about it; they were the bunch that frequented poetry readings, underground rock concerts and wore vintage clothes they deconstructed and re-constructed into hats and leggings; but I, who danced in the Modern way and dared to eschew their company and venture out to bars alone, was the one who was “weird”.
One Friday evening as we were closing up after a catering event and I was faced with either another evening alone or a mind-numbing string of bar hopping I verbally exploded at my co-workers, “One of you… one of you must know someone hot that I can hook up with!” It went something like that anyway. And miracle of miracles, a server piped up. “Ross has a roommate, Saul. I’ve seen him and he’s pretty cute.”
I turned on Ross, advancing with dangerous speed, “Ross, this roommate of yours, is he cute?” Yes, I know, what a stupid question for a hetero-boy to be faced with, but I was desperate for information.
“Um, yeah, I guess so.”
“Does he have a college degree?”
“Um, I think he’s finishing his Masters.”
“Really? In what?”
“Uh, I think its Anthropology.”
“Okay… does he like the arts?”
“Uh, I guess so.”
“Does he like nature? You know, hiking and camping.” At which point Ross got a little more confidence.
“Yes.”
“Is he tall? I like guys who are 6 feet at least” At which point Ross lost all of his confidence again.
“Um, I think he’s my height, like at least 5’10.”
“Well, that will do. When can I meet him?” At which point Ross totally got nervous and only gave in once I badgered him to promise me that he’d get Saul to come out to a bar the same time I did and to text me the minute he’d set the thing up.
Weeks passed and I was getting annoyed. The servers described Saul as very nice and having a clingy and dour ex-girlfriend that they’d like to offset with my presence on his arm. The principle difficulty seemed to be that he caught wind of the scheme and refused to be set up with a stranger. And, evidently, my nuanced and inventive personality had been described to him with only one adjective: “weird”. Thank goodness Ross had been especially loquacious that day and he also assigned one other adjective to me: “hot”, or the meeting would have been totally out of the question. As it was, the event was taking too long to come together so I took matters into my own hands and enlisted Ross’ girlfriend Annie. Annie, working on Saul’s softer side, got him to promise to come to see Ross’ band play and promptly gave me the word. I had a mere 30 minutes to change into my man-catching attire (jeans and a t-shirt that failed to meet each other halfway), attach a few feathers to my head and I was out the door.
Our eyes only had to meet once and we already doubted ourselves. He looked like a young Luke Wilson to me with his shaggy brown hair and round blue eyes (not to mention that his ironically hip t-shirt featuring either a bass or a bear or a bear catching a bass stretched across his chest in juuuuuust the right way). I had never seriously dated anyone who looked this steamy. Sure, I’ve made out with my fair share, but I didn’t get into relationships with them. My smallish amount of confidence and fair amount of cynicism required that there be a wide berth between my attractiveness and my mate’s. I had to be the princess and they had to be the frog. It’s not that I was afraid of their leaving me for someone more beautiful, it’s that I was afraid of their leaving me for someone more beautiful. After this humbling start, we managed to chat merrily about our Masters Theses, look longingly in each other’s directions half a dozen times and ultimately departed with no numbers exchanged. Only after plying Ross for more information in the following week did I learn that he was just as smitten as I was and I eagerly gave him my phone number to give to Saul.
We began slowly, as I previously mentioned, and met in public places. Saul and I talked about our lives but did not kiss. We met again and bantered about our various interests but did not kiss. We our exchanged anecdotes about our friends but did not kiss. We even discussed our futures and finally touched each other’s arms, but still, did not kiss. This agonizing courting lasted for weeks until I could stand it no longer and in a moment of desperation… went right back to Ross and told him to tell Saul to get on with it. Yes, I realize that I sound all of 13, having to transmit my messages through an intermediary, but that’s how we’re brought up in Minnesota: no direct confrontation. Deal with it.
Ross talked to Saul and informed him that it was time to take our dates from prim meetings filled with longing looks and tension-filled silences to make-out fests. It was like the floodgates, all of that pent-up sexual energy we had built up over the weeks of disbelief as to whether I actually liked him/he actually liked me, were loosed and we kissed... I’ll spare you on that point, but then something else happened, the floodgates of Saul’s mouth opened and it all came out. He sat me down on the couch, brought a box from his room and set it in front of me. “I have some things to show you”. Hoo, was I in for it. He opened that lid and inside was hundreds of photographs. We poured through the pictures under the dim light of his modest living room as he meticulously described each grainy and intermittently shocking image. I won’t tell you what was captured in each of those small rectangles of time, but I will say that any mischief you can imagine a young man with time on his hands can get into was probably pictured therein amid throngs of common landscape and group images.
Along with these pictures came stories. Stories featuring the various ways he has embarrassed himself and many of which featured poo prominently. As a first kissing date, I’ve never been confronted with a date’s detailed description of how he was embarrassed in various ways in front of friends and family by poo. I’ve never laughed so loudly and honestly in my life. I was also perplexed. Saul had been so chaste and reserved and I naturally viewed him as a man who’s life followed suit but I was suddenly confronted by a man who, in the wake of letting down his physical boundaries, was now quickly felling any illusions there might have been between us. He put it in simple terms, “my friends will tell you anyways, just to embarrass me, so I thought I’d just get it all in the open first”. I put it like this: the time we spent getting to know each other was just that, getting to know each other. The subsequent stories were Saul in a nutshell: a man operating on simple truths. If you are a friend, you get him as a friend with no illusions. If you find his embarrassments hilarious, then awesome, if you don’t, then oh well, he’ll give you a chance to tell your stories and he’ll probably laugh right along with you. How refreshing.
I knew right away that I could trust him. I wouldn’t be surprised months down the road when it was revealed some duplicity or a dark secret because he’d already proved that he held no secrets. His friends did, indeed try to out him with all of his poo stories hoping to shock me into revealing my reserves about Saul, but I was undeterred. I had heard it all already. I, in time, shared my many stores of humiliating, laughable and sometimes triumphant stories and although they didn’t involve poo, a lot of them were certainly “crappy”. He’s laughed and sympathized right along with me even if the story revealed a side of me I wasn’t proud of. It all comes down to what’s in all of us and whether we’re okay with it enough to share it. I had to grow up a lot in order to really confront my “crappy” side, and I realized almost instantly that I wanted Saul by my side as I did that growing. It’s not necessarily a romantic story, but it’s a truthful one and yes, it’s true, in more ways than one: poo brought us together.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
GRIEVANCES DELAYED BY PURPOSE
Stop telling me that my feet are flat and my legs are funny and I’m awfully sturdy, no wonder I can jump high, too bad I don’t look like what you want. Ok, ok, I’m done. I happen to think my legs are pretty hot and let’s not get me started on my arms. They could rip your arm right out of its socket. I’m just saying…
Part of being a dancer is learning when an audition is about your dancing, your skills, or your looks. You can have style, you can have ingenuity, you can have skills; but if they’re looking for someone to fit a costume they’ve already had made… you’re sunk. I don’t take those personally. It’s not about me. But when I’m NOT at an audition where the principle object is to find ladies who look good in a thong, I happen to take it personally when after taking a glance at my feet the aging dancer and her paunchy associate remark on “what a pity it is” that I have feet that “resemble yoga-blocks”. Well, fine, and your shirt looks a bit tight over your stomach just now, and you should really have that vein on the back of your knee looked at.
It’s bad enough that I’ve had the world-wide reality of plastic surgery slapped across my naïve Midwestern face since I moved from Wisconsin to Florida, but to have my 30-some-year-old body held up against 20-year-old bodies by 40-year-old instructors who say “20-something, don’t be impressed with 30-something because look at her… just look at her. You might not be able to jump like that, but would you really want to get all those ugly muscles in order to do it?”
Or when I caught the flu and came back to class 5 pounds lighter, heard “You look good! Lost weight?”
“No, well, yes, but not intentionally. I got horribly ill for 5 days and had to take another week off to recover.”
“Oh, but you have a wedding coming up. Did you get sick so you could fit into your dress?”
“Um, no, I just got sick.”
Upon my return, from my wedding, I was completely well and that 5 lbs of wellness had made its way back to my life. But my mind had some catching up to do after I was hit with, “Oh, you’re looking bigger. Did you keep the weight off long enough to fit into your dress?”
“Uh, um… It was a great wedding… I am so happy… Just glad to be back dancing now.”
What I didn’t say was “You know, I could, with my sturdy body, drag you forcefully into the 21st century.” Or, I could just go home and write snarky little things about you. My choice, I guess.
Talking, or in this case, writing snarkily after a particularly harrowing encounter with the exceptionally tactless population of Miami never fails to remind me of a man who managed to throw a little thick skin over my shoulders in my mid 20’s.
At an imposing 6’4”, Tony is always finely shaven and has a penchant for designer duds befitting a truly worldly gay man. Tony could tell you who started each House of Fashion worth mentioning and the procession of successors who continued the line in their awe-full and terrible wake. His style isn’t limited to merely dressing for success; every day is a sensation waiting to be made by fashion. If we were faced with a busy Saturday night at our restaurant, Tony would dress for battle. He would stride through the door at 4:30 sharp in tall lace-up black leather boots, a kilt by Burbury, and an exquisitely matched Tom Ford top set off by a black leather wrist-cuff. On the first day of true winter in Minneapolis, he’d flourish a Helmut Lang jacket taking care that the buckles on its dominatrix-inspired straps would clatter on the table and announce his presence. Tony could tell you every place to get high fashion at full and discounted price in Minneapolis and would, if you were worthy, take you by the hand and introduce you to the people who would memorize your style, size and means to purchase and from thenceforth never fail to give you a little jingle if something came in befitting of your personage. Tony, and Tony alone could instantly rally the troupes to throw a French Brasserie-style dinner party at his home complete with furniture spirited away from cafés by willing servers and managers, bohemian statues driven over from friends’ bibelot shops, absinthe and wine brought by bartenders from their own stocks, food bought at cost from a restaurant owner and a chef tending the kitchen all out of the goodness of their dark little hearts. Oh yes, such events can be thrown together easily for a few thousand dollars by any person with ready money, but Tony could manage this all with little to no cost to himself because people wanted to do it for him. .
The best thing about Tony is that he always has a ready word for those who dare to meet him with adversity and it is always, astoundingly, a good word. “This woman came up to me calling me an ‘idiot’ for telling her a table would be available in 15 minutes when she’s been standing around for 16. I just looked at her and told her ‘What a lovely blouse you’re wearing!’ and she couldn’t help but smile, the bitch.” Yes, Tony is a man for whom appearances seem to mean more than a child’s life and his sordid past reeks of hedonism and idle trouble, but what I learned from him over the years under his wing was more that how to meet a disparaging remark with a compliment. It’s that you must enjoy the visual and physical pleasures in life while working like a dog and behaving like one as well. Even if the man you’re leashed too has just kicked you, you still greet him with a wagging tail because if it doesn’t make him a better person, you will still be the better for it. Oh, yes, go ahead and let it all out later, it can’t be healthy to keep it bottled up inside just don’t let it get to you in public. Delay your airing of grievances until you’re among friends because what an angry person wants right now is a fight and only you can deny them the pleasure.
I’ve never met someone with more regard for the seemingly frivolous fashion and gossip of the world, but I’ve also never met someone who held such sway with his staff and co-workers. He hired misfits and artists who cared more for their drugs and tight jeans than selling you a plate of pasta, but they worked like slaves for Tony because he would do the same for them. I’ve lost track of him over the years, but the words that fall off my tongue each time I encounter a person utterly devoid of tact and decency, will be all Tony’s.
The last time I saw him was when he came to a show of mine, the first time he saw me dance and one of the last times I performed in Minneapolis. It was two days after the I-35W Bridge in downtown Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people and injuring 145 more, and he related his account of the event. He happened to be riding his bike under the bridge at the moment it began to collapse and narrowly escaped serious injury from falling debris. Tony then nonchalantly remarked that he turned back to the rubble in order to pull people from their sinking cars in the river with, I might add, no evident regard for the Prada sneakers and Dolce and Gabbana Man-pri’s I knew he routinely wore while biking. Well, of course. Tony had purpose, he had class and above all, he had great timing.
Part of being a dancer is learning when an audition is about your dancing, your skills, or your looks. You can have style, you can have ingenuity, you can have skills; but if they’re looking for someone to fit a costume they’ve already had made… you’re sunk. I don’t take those personally. It’s not about me. But when I’m NOT at an audition where the principle object is to find ladies who look good in a thong, I happen to take it personally when after taking a glance at my feet the aging dancer and her paunchy associate remark on “what a pity it is” that I have feet that “resemble yoga-blocks”. Well, fine, and your shirt looks a bit tight over your stomach just now, and you should really have that vein on the back of your knee looked at.
It’s bad enough that I’ve had the world-wide reality of plastic surgery slapped across my naïve Midwestern face since I moved from Wisconsin to Florida, but to have my 30-some-year-old body held up against 20-year-old bodies by 40-year-old instructors who say “20-something, don’t be impressed with 30-something because look at her… just look at her. You might not be able to jump like that, but would you really want to get all those ugly muscles in order to do it?”
Or when I caught the flu and came back to class 5 pounds lighter, heard “You look good! Lost weight?”
“No, well, yes, but not intentionally. I got horribly ill for 5 days and had to take another week off to recover.”
“Oh, but you have a wedding coming up. Did you get sick so you could fit into your dress?”
“Um, no, I just got sick.”
Upon my return, from my wedding, I was completely well and that 5 lbs of wellness had made its way back to my life. But my mind had some catching up to do after I was hit with, “Oh, you’re looking bigger. Did you keep the weight off long enough to fit into your dress?”
“Uh, um… It was a great wedding… I am so happy… Just glad to be back dancing now.”
What I didn’t say was “You know, I could, with my sturdy body, drag you forcefully into the 21st century.” Or, I could just go home and write snarky little things about you. My choice, I guess.
Talking, or in this case, writing snarkily after a particularly harrowing encounter with the exceptionally tactless population of Miami never fails to remind me of a man who managed to throw a little thick skin over my shoulders in my mid 20’s.
At an imposing 6’4”, Tony is always finely shaven and has a penchant for designer duds befitting a truly worldly gay man. Tony could tell you who started each House of Fashion worth mentioning and the procession of successors who continued the line in their awe-full and terrible wake. His style isn’t limited to merely dressing for success; every day is a sensation waiting to be made by fashion. If we were faced with a busy Saturday night at our restaurant, Tony would dress for battle. He would stride through the door at 4:30 sharp in tall lace-up black leather boots, a kilt by Burbury, and an exquisitely matched Tom Ford top set off by a black leather wrist-cuff. On the first day of true winter in Minneapolis, he’d flourish a Helmut Lang jacket taking care that the buckles on its dominatrix-inspired straps would clatter on the table and announce his presence. Tony could tell you every place to get high fashion at full and discounted price in Minneapolis and would, if you were worthy, take you by the hand and introduce you to the people who would memorize your style, size and means to purchase and from thenceforth never fail to give you a little jingle if something came in befitting of your personage. Tony, and Tony alone could instantly rally the troupes to throw a French Brasserie-style dinner party at his home complete with furniture spirited away from cafés by willing servers and managers, bohemian statues driven over from friends’ bibelot shops, absinthe and wine brought by bartenders from their own stocks, food bought at cost from a restaurant owner and a chef tending the kitchen all out of the goodness of their dark little hearts. Oh yes, such events can be thrown together easily for a few thousand dollars by any person with ready money, but Tony could manage this all with little to no cost to himself because people wanted to do it for him. .
The best thing about Tony is that he always has a ready word for those who dare to meet him with adversity and it is always, astoundingly, a good word. “This woman came up to me calling me an ‘idiot’ for telling her a table would be available in 15 minutes when she’s been standing around for 16. I just looked at her and told her ‘What a lovely blouse you’re wearing!’ and she couldn’t help but smile, the bitch.” Yes, Tony is a man for whom appearances seem to mean more than a child’s life and his sordid past reeks of hedonism and idle trouble, but what I learned from him over the years under his wing was more that how to meet a disparaging remark with a compliment. It’s that you must enjoy the visual and physical pleasures in life while working like a dog and behaving like one as well. Even if the man you’re leashed too has just kicked you, you still greet him with a wagging tail because if it doesn’t make him a better person, you will still be the better for it. Oh, yes, go ahead and let it all out later, it can’t be healthy to keep it bottled up inside just don’t let it get to you in public. Delay your airing of grievances until you’re among friends because what an angry person wants right now is a fight and only you can deny them the pleasure.
I’ve never met someone with more regard for the seemingly frivolous fashion and gossip of the world, but I’ve also never met someone who held such sway with his staff and co-workers. He hired misfits and artists who cared more for their drugs and tight jeans than selling you a plate of pasta, but they worked like slaves for Tony because he would do the same for them. I’ve lost track of him over the years, but the words that fall off my tongue each time I encounter a person utterly devoid of tact and decency, will be all Tony’s.
The last time I saw him was when he came to a show of mine, the first time he saw me dance and one of the last times I performed in Minneapolis. It was two days after the I-35W Bridge in downtown Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people and injuring 145 more, and he related his account of the event. He happened to be riding his bike under the bridge at the moment it began to collapse and narrowly escaped serious injury from falling debris. Tony then nonchalantly remarked that he turned back to the rubble in order to pull people from their sinking cars in the river with, I might add, no evident regard for the Prada sneakers and Dolce and Gabbana Man-pri’s I knew he routinely wore while biking. Well, of course. Tony had purpose, he had class and above all, he had great timing.
MS. CLICHÉ
“Hold on tight to your dreams”. More like, I was clinching desperately to my cliché’s. Actually in 2004, I was in a coffee shop hanging posters for this show I created and I saw a sweet little poster with three Indy-Rock guys. Each held a fuzzy little kitten in his arms above a caption (in happy, spring-green lettering) that intoned, “Hold on tight to your dreams, but not so tight that you crush their little ribs” and I thought, “oh. How strange that I am doing a show where my dream is to become a cat who never has to deal with people or jobs, or… people.” And, prophetically, I am faced with boys, who would like to hold my fuzzy little ribs.
I shouldn’t, but I’ll tell you just a bit about life as a dancer. Here it is: Boys and men who don’t know they are boys, like to dream they have dancers as girlfriends and wives, because they feel it would be so nice and fun. No one has told them about our feet, late rehearsals, mood swings pre and post performance, our insatiable need to “create” things that will never make money (ever, no matter how much you hope and dream, just stop it already!)… All they really want is to have this sweetly ideal life where the dancer holds the place of that fuzzy, fragile kitten, only of use when they are small and sweet. The catch is that once they realize that they care nothing for dance as a subject, the whiskered creature becomes boring. “All it does is ‘mew’ about this ‘dance’ thing… blah, I’d rather have that other girl over there”.
Anyhow, back to it: I was so excited for my first apartment in college, but can you guess what happened? But of course you know because life is so depressingly predictable. I didn’t read the lease all the way through because I was 19. What 19-year-old from a comfortable, white, middle-class, suburban household reads every little thing? That’s right. We think we’re smart, but we’re not. I lost the security deposit, my roommates were less than desirable and the apartment was falling apart… That endeavor, wholly fueled by the need to make myself more independently attractive to the men of my college, was not my first indicator that I was not seeing, acknowledging, and processing the many winds and curves of dating life that were largely writ across society in no small print, but LARGE, BOLD cliché’s that I was all too willing not to read. Here follows my first indicator…
When I first got to college I was so awestruck by the boys. I went to a nice little private Lutheran college where there were all these inspiring couples who were going to “wait” until they got married. I mean WAIT! How amazing! These men were really wonderful. They listened, they walked you places, they noticed if your mood changed, and I couldn’t HAVE them right away, so, of course, I wanted them all “right now”. Some of the more attractive (righteous), upper echelon boys (the ones that other girls would claw your eyes out for if they heard you “messed with” any one of them) were even going wait to kiss their brides until they got married! Well, long story longer, all I had to do was WAIT until sophomore year, when all these guys turned out to be, amazingly, gay.
Let’s not even talk about guys not calling because that’s too cliché…
Ok let me tell you this one, because it’s not REALLY about guys not calling, sort of. So I had this great boyfriend post-college when I was working at a bar. I would get off of work after 2, clean up and drive home (home was downtown Minneapolis) and park my car where I would proceed to walk three to four blocks home to my crappy little apartment at 3am. This was all accomplished with me dressed just how a cocktail waitress should dress if she wants to make ANY tips from the dirty cheap-skates at the bar, I would be followed by people, cars, and one particularly ominous truck that raced around the block and up the one way street to catch me as I darted in-between buildings to escape. After my fearful flight, I’d run into my apartment and call my boyfriend on the phone and cry about being a frightful little scared-y-cat. Well he said “oh honey, you call me when you drive home and then I will come and pick you up at your car and drive you to your apartment so ‘my precious’ will be safe because I care so much about you.” Well, that happened all of two times. I was undeterred. I just simply decided that I should wait until 4 o’clock in the morning to call him and describe my walk home. Jack-off. But, really, I should’ve seen that coming too.
There followed a virtual parade of boys in various cliché forms including: The Clingy Doctor, The Virile Dancer, The Melancholy Actor, The Opera Star, The Rock Star, The Dirty Hippie, The Jaded Hipster (don’t mistake these two, they’ll never forgive you even if you state loudly and clearly that you have never cared for their opinion), The Boy Next Door, The Misunderstood Bad Boy and finally, The One Your Parents Like Best.
I could tell you vexing anecdotes about each of these boys, but I’ll save that for another time. Let me just tell you that I had seen my fair share of cheesy movies aimed at teenagers with their obvious characters watered down to a single attribute (The Jock, The Nerd, The Prom Queen… you know) but I still failed to recognize that these characters MUST have been modeled after traits found in, dun dun duuuuuunnn… human beings. It blew my mind to realize that they were out there and that I was dating them. But it takes two to tango so (horror of horrors!) that must mean that I myself must be a walking cliché!
I’ll sum it all up now: You think that your life will be more unique, original, complicated, populated with delicate shades and hues not found in homogenized pop-culture and social media, but the truth is that we are the stuff that pop culture is made of. It’s made of people! I too am that poster in the coffee shop. I too am a cheesy teen-flick. But, thank the green grass outside my boring apartment complex, I too am foreign policy and I too am art, I too am culture and I too might have a happy ending.
I shouldn’t, but I’ll tell you just a bit about life as a dancer. Here it is: Boys and men who don’t know they are boys, like to dream they have dancers as girlfriends and wives, because they feel it would be so nice and fun. No one has told them about our feet, late rehearsals, mood swings pre and post performance, our insatiable need to “create” things that will never make money (ever, no matter how much you hope and dream, just stop it already!)… All they really want is to have this sweetly ideal life where the dancer holds the place of that fuzzy, fragile kitten, only of use when they are small and sweet. The catch is that once they realize that they care nothing for dance as a subject, the whiskered creature becomes boring. “All it does is ‘mew’ about this ‘dance’ thing… blah, I’d rather have that other girl over there”.
Anyhow, back to it: I was so excited for my first apartment in college, but can you guess what happened? But of course you know because life is so depressingly predictable. I didn’t read the lease all the way through because I was 19. What 19-year-old from a comfortable, white, middle-class, suburban household reads every little thing? That’s right. We think we’re smart, but we’re not. I lost the security deposit, my roommates were less than desirable and the apartment was falling apart… That endeavor, wholly fueled by the need to make myself more independently attractive to the men of my college, was not my first indicator that I was not seeing, acknowledging, and processing the many winds and curves of dating life that were largely writ across society in no small print, but LARGE, BOLD cliché’s that I was all too willing not to read. Here follows my first indicator…
When I first got to college I was so awestruck by the boys. I went to a nice little private Lutheran college where there were all these inspiring couples who were going to “wait” until they got married. I mean WAIT! How amazing! These men were really wonderful. They listened, they walked you places, they noticed if your mood changed, and I couldn’t HAVE them right away, so, of course, I wanted them all “right now”. Some of the more attractive (righteous), upper echelon boys (the ones that other girls would claw your eyes out for if they heard you “messed with” any one of them) were even going wait to kiss their brides until they got married! Well, long story longer, all I had to do was WAIT until sophomore year, when all these guys turned out to be, amazingly, gay.
Let’s not even talk about guys not calling because that’s too cliché…
Ok let me tell you this one, because it’s not REALLY about guys not calling, sort of. So I had this great boyfriend post-college when I was working at a bar. I would get off of work after 2, clean up and drive home (home was downtown Minneapolis) and park my car where I would proceed to walk three to four blocks home to my crappy little apartment at 3am. This was all accomplished with me dressed just how a cocktail waitress should dress if she wants to make ANY tips from the dirty cheap-skates at the bar, I would be followed by people, cars, and one particularly ominous truck that raced around the block and up the one way street to catch me as I darted in-between buildings to escape. After my fearful flight, I’d run into my apartment and call my boyfriend on the phone and cry about being a frightful little scared-y-cat. Well he said “oh honey, you call me when you drive home and then I will come and pick you up at your car and drive you to your apartment so ‘my precious’ will be safe because I care so much about you.” Well, that happened all of two times. I was undeterred. I just simply decided that I should wait until 4 o’clock in the morning to call him and describe my walk home. Jack-off. But, really, I should’ve seen that coming too.
There followed a virtual parade of boys in various cliché forms including: The Clingy Doctor, The Virile Dancer, The Melancholy Actor, The Opera Star, The Rock Star, The Dirty Hippie, The Jaded Hipster (don’t mistake these two, they’ll never forgive you even if you state loudly and clearly that you have never cared for their opinion), The Boy Next Door, The Misunderstood Bad Boy and finally, The One Your Parents Like Best.
I could tell you vexing anecdotes about each of these boys, but I’ll save that for another time. Let me just tell you that I had seen my fair share of cheesy movies aimed at teenagers with their obvious characters watered down to a single attribute (The Jock, The Nerd, The Prom Queen… you know) but I still failed to recognize that these characters MUST have been modeled after traits found in, dun dun duuuuuunnn… human beings. It blew my mind to realize that they were out there and that I was dating them. But it takes two to tango so (horror of horrors!) that must mean that I myself must be a walking cliché!
I’ll sum it all up now: You think that your life will be more unique, original, complicated, populated with delicate shades and hues not found in homogenized pop-culture and social media, but the truth is that we are the stuff that pop culture is made of. It’s made of people! I too am that poster in the coffee shop. I too am a cheesy teen-flick. But, thank the green grass outside my boring apartment complex, I too am foreign policy and I too am art, I too am culture and I too might have a happy ending.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
FAME
I’ve always known that my perceptions of reality are a little off. Whatever I’m most convinced of, or most sure of always turns out to be completely the opposite.
When you’re me, you find out that the fun-loving gay man that you took for a cuddly, Judy Garland-singing compatriot of the arts will only end up showing up early for work one day so he can appear to be “getting a jump on things” for the boss, but will really be planning to catch you alone, in a corner by the coffee-maker, with no witnesses. Thus cornered he will spit out in stunted, rapid fire bursts, “Do you think you’re smarter than me? Really? With your ‘education’? You know, just because I didn’t go to ‘college’ doesn’t mean I don’t ‘know’ anything. You think you can do my job? Are you trying to get my job?”.
You will stutter out a response, mainly consisting of excuses that you haven’t even had your first cup of “joe” yet, hopelessly attempting to lighten the mood, your mind swimming as to how you are going to work all day with this psycho-path not two feet away from your desk… not working on his job, but gleefully chattering away about where he and his partner will take the camper this weekend and what “awesome” new mango-margarita mix they will use for the evening parties.
Equally harrowing are nights I spend alone, and in shame for harassing the few decent humans during the day. Those perfectly lovely people who I assumed were dull, stuck up, snobbish, or silly are now, at this moment, having delightful evenings out with their many devoted compatriots while I stay home and watch Pride and Prejudice… again… without any sense of irony, because I have yet again proved myself unworthy of being trusted with that rare jewel of simple friendship. So yes, my first impressions are consistently and dreadfully wrong and I’m always second-guessing the reasons why I’m doing things… but I supposed that’s human nature and I am a natural woman.
Given that, it’s only natural I should have a penchant for misreading or mistreating social situations. Far from being a personally unique attribute, the genetic nature of my malady reared it's head one Christmas at Midnight Mass when instead of solemnly reflecting on our mortality and the simple gifts of life, both my sister and I found ourselves choking back peels of laughter and unbridled snorts over our misinterpretation of the lyrics found in Oh Holy Night which inevitably earned us a withering look from the pastor. It’s not that I cannot feel deeply or glean the importance out of a solemn situation, or a Jackson Pollack, or the French cinema, it’s just that I’ve generally completed the task earlier and my mind feels at liberty to present me with abnormal considerations regarding the event and I feel I have no control over how deep or shallow these may be. This could be a character flaw… “Perhaps,” you say, “perhaps you could show some self –restraint”. Well yes, I suppose, or I could let my wanderings have their liberty and let it reveal to me the deep-seated truths of my own nature.
One particular nature-defining story of my mental wanderings took place when I was in middle school. I went to church youth group a lot and like most middle-schoolers, it was for purely social reasons. Well, we were sitting in a circle one evening talking about how we wanted to die. I have no idea how we got on the subject, but I was thinking really hard and I wasn’t listening to anyone else’s answers because I was so busy racking my brains trying to think of what I was going to say, so when it came to my turn… I sucked in my breath, lowered my eyes, and slowly (in what I thought was a reverant tone of voice) said, “ I want to die saving someone else”. I was so proud of my answer and so proud of the response it got. I just wanted people to think that I was someone interesting, you know, a something-more-than-what-I-thought-of-myself-at-the-time type person. And that’s how I knew… I wanted to be famous.
When you’re me, you find out that the fun-loving gay man that you took for a cuddly, Judy Garland-singing compatriot of the arts will only end up showing up early for work one day so he can appear to be “getting a jump on things” for the boss, but will really be planning to catch you alone, in a corner by the coffee-maker, with no witnesses. Thus cornered he will spit out in stunted, rapid fire bursts, “Do you think you’re smarter than me? Really? With your ‘education’? You know, just because I didn’t go to ‘college’ doesn’t mean I don’t ‘know’ anything. You think you can do my job? Are you trying to get my job?”.
You will stutter out a response, mainly consisting of excuses that you haven’t even had your first cup of “joe” yet, hopelessly attempting to lighten the mood, your mind swimming as to how you are going to work all day with this psycho-path not two feet away from your desk… not working on his job, but gleefully chattering away about where he and his partner will take the camper this weekend and what “awesome” new mango-margarita mix they will use for the evening parties.
Equally harrowing are nights I spend alone, and in shame for harassing the few decent humans during the day. Those perfectly lovely people who I assumed were dull, stuck up, snobbish, or silly are now, at this moment, having delightful evenings out with their many devoted compatriots while I stay home and watch Pride and Prejudice… again… without any sense of irony, because I have yet again proved myself unworthy of being trusted with that rare jewel of simple friendship. So yes, my first impressions are consistently and dreadfully wrong and I’m always second-guessing the reasons why I’m doing things… but I supposed that’s human nature and I am a natural woman.
Given that, it’s only natural I should have a penchant for misreading or mistreating social situations. Far from being a personally unique attribute, the genetic nature of my malady reared it's head one Christmas at Midnight Mass when instead of solemnly reflecting on our mortality and the simple gifts of life, both my sister and I found ourselves choking back peels of laughter and unbridled snorts over our misinterpretation of the lyrics found in Oh Holy Night which inevitably earned us a withering look from the pastor. It’s not that I cannot feel deeply or glean the importance out of a solemn situation, or a Jackson Pollack, or the French cinema, it’s just that I’ve generally completed the task earlier and my mind feels at liberty to present me with abnormal considerations regarding the event and I feel I have no control over how deep or shallow these may be. This could be a character flaw… “Perhaps,” you say, “perhaps you could show some self –restraint”. Well yes, I suppose, or I could let my wanderings have their liberty and let it reveal to me the deep-seated truths of my own nature.
One particular nature-defining story of my mental wanderings took place when I was in middle school. I went to church youth group a lot and like most middle-schoolers, it was for purely social reasons. Well, we were sitting in a circle one evening talking about how we wanted to die. I have no idea how we got on the subject, but I was thinking really hard and I wasn’t listening to anyone else’s answers because I was so busy racking my brains trying to think of what I was going to say, so when it came to my turn… I sucked in my breath, lowered my eyes, and slowly (in what I thought was a reverant tone of voice) said, “ I want to die saving someone else”. I was so proud of my answer and so proud of the response it got. I just wanted people to think that I was someone interesting, you know, a something-more-than-what-I-thought-of-myself-at-the-time type person. And that’s how I knew… I wanted to be famous.
I WISH… I WAS… A CAT
Desperately cling to what you once thought was important. It may come in handy one day. Or it might turn around and bite you on the … but what I am trying to say is that even if you had the impossible dream of lying in the sun all day forsaking the responsibility of meeting people and caring about the world, that dream may lead you to a new realization. This is why I was a cat, used to wish I were a cat, and still wish it.
There is a strange duality about life that allows us to wallow in the quagmire that inevitably crosses our path, and at the same time, be happy about it. We are hard-wired to think that the dental floss we have stuck in our pocket because our mother or dentist told us it was the right thing to do, (floss our teeth, I mean) will provide the strong rope to pull ourselves out of the pit in which we were always destined to fall into.
I secretly think this is the deeper meaning behind the success of that awesome TV series “McGyver”.
My childhood desire to be a cat without a care in the world was 3 fold: No job, no cares, no people. As a cat, I would not have to do anything I did not want to do. I did not care about doing anything more than I had to do, and I did not care about making the acquaintance not to mention my utter disregard for what they might have thought of me.
I tried so hard to be and really, for a couple of days, succeeded in being… a cat. I laid in sunshine, I ate, I thought of little or nothing. I could feel my soft, yet regal fur and my long, swishing tail. I moved like a cat, on all fours, and worked hard at pouncing like a cat. I still tilt my head and dance with a bit of cat left in me. Being a cat meant I just didn’t care and didn’t have to care… until puberty hit. Then I was resigned to the fate of mourning my lost glory of cat-hood.
How gloriously freeing it had been. But real people do care…too much. That is the evil and grace of our fussy little brains. Cat-hood transformed itself into more complex forms of “not caring” around age 14 and I became a devotee of fiction. Fantasy, historical, science, adventure, anything, anything, anything besides my small, mediocre life, I loved. It wasn’t so much that I was desperate to avoid a bad ending; I was just terrified of going on and on and on in mediocrity until it just… ended. That is why I infinitely preferred the lives I created in fiction entertainment. Movies were so fantastic and I glorified the people who completed the illusions to no end. Oscar Wilde was a particular favorite of mine and I held, with no sense of irony, a particular quote of his close to my heart. Through the uncomplicated lips of Miss Prizm, regarding successful fiction: “The Good ended Happily and the Bad Unhappily. That is what fiction means.” My mantra and rule in choosing those movies, books, fancies and other modes of escape that would keep my mind safely wrapped in cat-form.
This… this had become my grown up cat life. If I had knelt down and prayed at my bedside at 20, I might’ve said “Please let me be clever, pretty, rich, vindicated and married… please. Oh, and please resurrect Jane Austen from the dead so that she can write a screen-play about my transformed life and please make my thighs skinny enough so I can be cast as myself even though I don’t act, but I can learn because, after all, it’ll just be about my fascinating, NOT mediocre life!” That... was the only happy ending I could’ve stomached.
Who am I kidding? That’s what I sweat and keen for every day of my real life.
I still have such a time with my pretending. I used to be so confused through it all, but how many of us can say we truly have a grip on things? We’re always making things up as we go along. I think that is the adventure of it all… convincing others that we have a handle on things, and that we’ll be the ones most likely to pull some dental floss from our pockets, use it to whip up a handy rope ladder, and lead everyone safely out of the pit; even if, deep down, we can’t remember the last time we actually flossed. I might, ultimately, lead that dreaded mediocre life (ugh, that was hard to admit, even in writing), but my fantasies will ensure that it feels anything but mediocre.
There is a strange duality about life that allows us to wallow in the quagmire that inevitably crosses our path, and at the same time, be happy about it. We are hard-wired to think that the dental floss we have stuck in our pocket because our mother or dentist told us it was the right thing to do, (floss our teeth, I mean) will provide the strong rope to pull ourselves out of the pit in which we were always destined to fall into.
I secretly think this is the deeper meaning behind the success of that awesome TV series “McGyver”.
My childhood desire to be a cat without a care in the world was 3 fold: No job, no cares, no people. As a cat, I would not have to do anything I did not want to do. I did not care about doing anything more than I had to do, and I did not care about making the acquaintance not to mention my utter disregard for what they might have thought of me.
I tried so hard to be and really, for a couple of days, succeeded in being… a cat. I laid in sunshine, I ate, I thought of little or nothing. I could feel my soft, yet regal fur and my long, swishing tail. I moved like a cat, on all fours, and worked hard at pouncing like a cat. I still tilt my head and dance with a bit of cat left in me. Being a cat meant I just didn’t care and didn’t have to care… until puberty hit. Then I was resigned to the fate of mourning my lost glory of cat-hood.
How gloriously freeing it had been. But real people do care…too much. That is the evil and grace of our fussy little brains. Cat-hood transformed itself into more complex forms of “not caring” around age 14 and I became a devotee of fiction. Fantasy, historical, science, adventure, anything, anything, anything besides my small, mediocre life, I loved. It wasn’t so much that I was desperate to avoid a bad ending; I was just terrified of going on and on and on in mediocrity until it just… ended. That is why I infinitely preferred the lives I created in fiction entertainment. Movies were so fantastic and I glorified the people who completed the illusions to no end. Oscar Wilde was a particular favorite of mine and I held, with no sense of irony, a particular quote of his close to my heart. Through the uncomplicated lips of Miss Prizm, regarding successful fiction: “The Good ended Happily and the Bad Unhappily. That is what fiction means.” My mantra and rule in choosing those movies, books, fancies and other modes of escape that would keep my mind safely wrapped in cat-form.
This… this had become my grown up cat life. If I had knelt down and prayed at my bedside at 20, I might’ve said “Please let me be clever, pretty, rich, vindicated and married… please. Oh, and please resurrect Jane Austen from the dead so that she can write a screen-play about my transformed life and please make my thighs skinny enough so I can be cast as myself even though I don’t act, but I can learn because, after all, it’ll just be about my fascinating, NOT mediocre life!” That... was the only happy ending I could’ve stomached.
Who am I kidding? That’s what I sweat and keen for every day of my real life.
I still have such a time with my pretending. I used to be so confused through it all, but how many of us can say we truly have a grip on things? We’re always making things up as we go along. I think that is the adventure of it all… convincing others that we have a handle on things, and that we’ll be the ones most likely to pull some dental floss from our pockets, use it to whip up a handy rope ladder, and lead everyone safely out of the pit; even if, deep down, we can’t remember the last time we actually flossed. I might, ultimately, lead that dreaded mediocre life (ugh, that was hard to admit, even in writing), but my fantasies will ensure that it feels anything but mediocre.
TOYS R US KID
TOYS R US KID
At some point it became clear to me that I wanted nothing to do with the world and it’s people. I wasn’t a full-fledged agoraphobic, I just preferred to stay inside and, you know, watch a movie or something. I didn’t want to be a doctor, lawyer, a nurse, teacher a politician, a mechanic, a business woman, a sales clerk, a real-estate agent, or a secretary… When I was a kid, I truly, madly, deeply wanted to be a TOYS R US kid.
Something about life seemed doomed, even as a 9-year-old. I mean, why get a job? “You mean, when I’m not your kid anymore, I’ll have to buy my own food?” The stark realization of money, and rent, and retirement weighed down on me. But how will my life be spent… working? My inner and outer little self screamed “But I don’t want to work! I don’t want to do those things you suggest!”
I didn’t want to work most of my days trying to buy more things to keep my feeble existence hurtling towards boredom and more days of work and more days of paying rent. And being a TOYS R US kid didn’t sound like it was going to rake in the dough, so that is when decided to devoted a considerable amount of time to A: Trying to move things with my mind and B: Staring intently at the family cat and wishing myself into its body.
There was nothing I wanted more in life than to accomplish one of these tasks because if A: I moved something with my mind, then SURELY I would be able to travel the carnival circuit demonstrating my amazing abilities and from there, I’d be shuttled around the world performing for heads of state and pampered like a movie star where one day my quiet beauty would capture the wonder of some foreign prince (mind you, some cute, young one, not at all like the one Grace Kelley had to accept) and I’d spend my ridiculously lavish days buying toys for all the poor, unfortunate children who had none… and riding ponies.
Well, if B: happened, I could spend my days lying in a beam of sunlight, sleeping all the time, being petted sometimes, playing with toys a lot and never, never, never, never having to say, “hello” to intimidating strangers or unknown relatives because who expects a cat to be sociable?
But somehow, just somehow, I went on.
At some point it became clear to me that I wanted nothing to do with the world and it’s people. I wasn’t a full-fledged agoraphobic, I just preferred to stay inside and, you know, watch a movie or something. I didn’t want to be a doctor, lawyer, a nurse, teacher a politician, a mechanic, a business woman, a sales clerk, a real-estate agent, or a secretary… When I was a kid, I truly, madly, deeply wanted to be a TOYS R US kid.
Something about life seemed doomed, even as a 9-year-old. I mean, why get a job? “You mean, when I’m not your kid anymore, I’ll have to buy my own food?” The stark realization of money, and rent, and retirement weighed down on me. But how will my life be spent… working? My inner and outer little self screamed “But I don’t want to work! I don’t want to do those things you suggest!”
I didn’t want to work most of my days trying to buy more things to keep my feeble existence hurtling towards boredom and more days of work and more days of paying rent. And being a TOYS R US kid didn’t sound like it was going to rake in the dough, so that is when decided to devoted a considerable amount of time to A: Trying to move things with my mind and B: Staring intently at the family cat and wishing myself into its body.
There was nothing I wanted more in life than to accomplish one of these tasks because if A: I moved something with my mind, then SURELY I would be able to travel the carnival circuit demonstrating my amazing abilities and from there, I’d be shuttled around the world performing for heads of state and pampered like a movie star where one day my quiet beauty would capture the wonder of some foreign prince (mind you, some cute, young one, not at all like the one Grace Kelley had to accept) and I’d spend my ridiculously lavish days buying toys for all the poor, unfortunate children who had none… and riding ponies.
Well, if B: happened, I could spend my days lying in a beam of sunlight, sleeping all the time, being petted sometimes, playing with toys a lot and never, never, never, never having to say, “hello” to intimidating strangers or unknown relatives because who expects a cat to be sociable?
But somehow, just somehow, I went on.
SQUIRREL-SNIFFER
So, I was driving over by the University of Minnesota campus on a sunny, Sunday afternoon in February of 2005. Not a lot of cars of the road, just me, in fact. Well, I saw this well dressed man: nice slacks, long dress coat, blue button-up shirt and well-behaved nut-brown hair. He was French… or, at least, he looked like my ex-boyfriend Karl whose last name was French, who wrote poetry and had a ballerina for a mother (never underestimate the genetic stock of ballerinas), so I was totally taken in. I was smitten.
Being a Sunday morning, there weren’t any other cars around. Students didn’t live about this area of campus and the ones who did weren’t knocking about this early in the day and I took full advantage of their absence. I drove slowly down the road taking special care to fix the coyest of coy looks upon my face. I practically hugged the curb with my Geo-Prism so there would be a mere three feet of sod separating me from my side-walk dwelling dream stud. I took pains to turn my head towards him as conspicuously as possible thinking that he’d catch my eye, recognize me as the girl of his dreams and... I don't know what I thought we'd do after that, get married and make beautiful French babies who danced divinely, loved nature and were always smartly dressed? Anyhow, at this point he veered off the sidewalk into a little grassy knoll. I watched his sweet little meander into the grass thinking, “Yes, I too walk the path less trod. I too love the damp smell of the earth and the beauty of wild, planted and fertilized grass in the city.” When he stooped down and picked up a dead squirrel.
Yeah, I know.
I stopped at a red light at that moment (thank God, otherwise I would've crashed) and as I watched him with the dead, and it must be said, less than fuzzy squirrel, he lowered his head to his hand and sniffed it. He then put the carcass down on the ground and as if we’ve always worn our underwear on our heads or routinely solicited our close relatives for sex, he turned around and ambled serenely back to the sidewalk smelling his fingers. I couldn't believe my eyes. I looked all around to see if there were any other cars or fellow witnesses but the streets remained unjustly barren! I turned my attention to my now very green light and watched him, slack-jawed and mouth-breathing, through my rearview mirror as he fell back into the distance.
As I made my way to the Southern Theater, I felt one thing was certain. I must tell someone as soon as possible so that none of the details would fade from my memory. I accosted my choreographer in the parking lot first and once the shock of the first telling wore off, I gleefully repeated the story to all of the dancers once we had reached the theater. I must let you know that as I told this story, we were putting on our costumes for a performance that was to take place within the hour.
The show we were to perform that day was quite a troubling one; it dealt with the war in Iraq, death, patriotism and it all weighed heavily on our minds. Layered on top of our show, we had our own minor worries: relationships on the brink, cold sores, injuries, money troubles, relatives who were ill; things that you work hard to forget when you have to carry the physical, mental and emotional toll of a show for an hour. That Squirrel-Sniffer became the oddity that instantly banished all else from the dancers’ minds that day. Except for me. One small realization began to creep into my mind mid-show, form conclusions by the final curtain and had wormed its way to the front by the time we were greeting the audience in the lobby: if these people, these "squirrel-sniffers", are the ones I am attracted to… I'm totally doomed.
P.S.
As I have repeated this tale, it's always a question of “did he see me looking at him and sniff the squirrel for effect? Or, did he not see me and sniff if because he wanted to? “ Apparently I'm the only one who has had the privilege of beholding a Squirrel-Sniffer, but I have shared this experience with all of my dance students, colleagues, friends, and now you because I have had to get people on the look out. When or if you ever find him, please…for me, ask "why?”
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