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.