Today my partners and I brought our TMI Project monologue workshop to an awesome LBGTQ teen conference. Julie started things off with “Football Princess,” her awesome and hilarious monologue about her gender identity. Then she did some improv exercises with the kids, and I was amazed at how they just jumped right in - so different from the adults we work with, who tend to be so timid about doing improv games. From there, we gave them some prompts I came up with, and they wrote for just ten minutes. I am amazed at what they produced in that short time. There were pieces about coming out, being raped, abortion, being bullied and called names, being rejected by parents and peers, being self-conscious about dancing in public, wanting a different body… The stories were moving and sweet and some of them were hilariously funny. We were so moved, and hope we get to work with teens more often.
Permanent Brain Damage
So here’s another weird thing: I live two doors down from the post office. Because they don’t deliver mail to Main Street (long story), I have to have a P.O. box and pick up my mail every day.
Sometimes I stop there in the car, on my way home from errands, especially when it’s cold out. I can’t tell you how many of those times I then forget I drove there, and walk the two doors home, only to have my heart stop - uuuhh! - when I realize: MY CAR IS MISSING!
For that split-second, I feel sure it has been stolen, like when I borrowed my mom’s car to go to a wedding on Rhode Island in 1993 and it got stolen overnight from Central Park West and 75th Street.
Never mind that I have lived here now almost seven years; EVERY SINGLE TIME, I think the car was stolen, even though it is sitting there, two doors away, in perfect view of my driveway.
No, seriously - do not read this if you are related to me in any way.
In Which I Have My First Piece on This Recording…
Okay, but please don’t read this if you are at all related to me? Thanks!
I wrote something that’s going to run next week, in which I mention thirtysomething. Now I’ve got that show on the brain. It had a huge influence on me when it was first on, back when I was in my twenties, and again, when I’d watch reruns of it in my thirties.
I went through phases where I identified with one of three characters. First I was totally Hope, the prissy writer/wife/mom - although I never got to the mom part, but that is a whole other story. (A series of stories, really.) I was in my first marriage (I was married from 23 - 26. Insane! Please, young tumblr folks, don’t ever do that! ), and I had a cute husband who dressed a lot like Hope’s husband Michael Steadman did, and kind of resembled the actor, Ken Olin. Same gene pool, anyway.
But then, when I was 25, the marriage started falling apart, and I started identifying with Nancy, who was having marital problems with Elliott. The tv couple worked their shit out after she got cancer. In real life, my husband and I split up. And I became…
…Melissa, the artsy-funky single photographer who hews toward vintage men’s clothes in a sort of punk/art school Annie Hall way, and dating men who are unavailable, including Michael’s best friend Gary, the hot, roguish English prof. I had a Gary for a couple of years. That was how I described him to a friend. “He’s kind of like Gary from thirtysomething, but with brown hair.”
Even though I’m married again, I still feel kind of Melissa-ish, if only in that I sort of always have to do everything my own weird way, and I don’t have kids, and I’ve always been out of step with fashion, and with my own age group, and I have weird hair that makes people from my home town on LI describe me as “ahwtsy”…
One thing I have never been though, and probably never will be, is an Ellyn - the corporate go-getter who wears skirt suits with hugs shoulder pads. Yeah, that is so not ever going to be me.
Here’s something weird: I lately can’t find a place in my house that feels comfortable for writing. I have a whole office upstairs - second biggest room in the house - but I haven’t been able to station myself there for some time. I may have let it get too messy, and I’m not up for the nine million little decisions about what to keep, what to throw away, what to put where, before that space feels clean and clear for me, mentally.
I keep bouncing between the kitchen table, the living room, the den (there’s a fireplace in there, so I go there on the super coldest days and burn some wood).
(I’m making the house sound way bigger and fancier than it is. It’s neither big nor fancy. Very simple and kinda boho.)
Today I’m at the Kitchen table. It feels kind of okay - but kind of cold and lonely. it makes no sense, though, for one spot to feel more lonely than another, because wherever I am in the house during the day, there is no one else here with me.
The coziest, I think, is the den. Tomorrow I might bounce back there.
