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Clothes

Why did shoulder pads go out of fashion?

There’s such power-as a person living in a woman’s body- in putting on an article of clothing that expands my shoulders, my chest, my heart-center, the place where the energy pours out of me

I put on my oversized well-worn shoulder-padded blazer and I become Patti Smith making a pilgrimage to her sacred cafe or a sea captain about to voyage on turbulent waters into the unknown

And I put on my 6-dollar back shelf black hat and it widens the place where my thoughts and intentions enter and exit and I become a troubadour, some Bob Dylan or a Shakespearean fool wiser than the men he’s destined to play servant to

With these large dark objects I hide more of myself so I can reveal myself as I’d like to be seen

To crack out of the place slim shoulders or long blonde hair would otherwise trap me in

And into the world of my chosen costume

The world I weave with woven garments

At once both outside and within the masculine and feminine and that delicious infinite in-between

Transforming and evolving and becoming

I remember masks from school, how the act of studying the creases and expressions in the molded plaster was as intimate as studying one’s own image in a mirror

How their shapes changed the shape of the person wearing them

Then with that the creation of a whole new person, the shared hallucinations within the studio walls, then the daze of re-emerging from the room with one’s own face still very much attached but somehow very much shifted

Masks, clothes, reflections, refractions, it’s all kind of the same right?

If I’m fully honest with myself, my origins of becoming an actor are simple: I wanted to dress up.

On its surface that answer sucks, especially in an interview. Can you imagine a Very Serious Actor on Inside The Actor’s Studio responding to the “why did you become an actor?” question with “I wanted to play dress up?”

Ridiculous.

But is it, really? Who can deny the magic of wearing a particular something and feeling viscerally changed on the inside? Surely everyone has felt that. Surely that is a universal feeling. And isn’t art at its core all about Universal Feelings?

I don’t know.

I do know I’m going to keep wearing this old blazer and this arguably ugly hat

Until they are faded and threadbare

And then maybe I’ll mount them on my wall as trophies

A monument to this particular era of selfhood, having boldly served their purpose as conduits of something true, something transcendent

But to be frank

I’ll probably lose the hat on accident somewhere or other. But I hope the future wearer will find some whisper of me there and with it some holy secret

That will remain between me and that future stranger

And the hat of course

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Back Home

Here in the winter I return to the center, the eye of the storm from which I was born.

It’s Christmas Eve-Eve and I’m borrowing my Mimi’s car, the sky is a little leaky and a strange color and I’m driving to some old haunts. I feel that overwhelming heaviness that is at once sweet and painful that comes when I’m back in my hometown, especially in the wintertime, especially when I’m alone. I pop out the CD in Mimi’s car and there’s a banana on it. It’s my band’s album. It strikes me that I’ve never listened to it in a car, or maybe I have but I’ve certainly never listened to it in a car alone. There’s a difference.

I play it. I rediscover it. Though I’ve lived with these songs for so long it feels like I’m listening to someone else. They feel like they come from another part of me, especially out of the context of the city, driving down roads I’ve travelled hundreds of times. I pay special attention to Back Home.

Back Home was written largely by Adrian while I was away in Seattle two years ago. He sent me a recording of it while I was gone, I came back and wrote some more lyrics for it, we strung it together then forgot about it for a year, then after much prompting from Regina and I it was resurrected.

Driving down the familiar highways and backroads and landmarks, I get the unnerving feeling it was written to be sung back to me right then and there, in the version in which it exists on our record, a live and breathing call from a tall far-away hallway, raw and unfiltered, the echoes bouncing like rocks falling in the valley between two blue ridge mountains.

After we made the record I obsessed over getting the word out, I made a display of holding it above my head like Rafiki in the damn Lion King so the whole animal kingdom could witness: “LOOK! Look at the thing I made!” but I didn’t really consume my own product. I didn’t listen to the record much. It felt too close. But on this day I press repeat again and again on Back Home, as if I hadn’t heard it a million times, as if there were a secret message to be uncoded to me through the sound of my own voice. I found myself fishing out memories that I didn’t even know were at the back of my brain. I found myself aching at the way the sun was hitting the dew on the windshield the way it did the first time I rode home half-hungover and elated and electric the morning after my first house party, found my eyes searching along the roads for familiar cars, though mostly everyone I knew here doesn’t live here anymore, and I’m shit at cars anyway so I doubt I’d recognize a familiar one if I saw it.

Late that night I am at a neighborhood bar, not the usual one because it was too crowded (IMAGINE!) and I am sitting with childhood friends at a bar. They are siblings and I am between their ages. The elder is married and has lost none of her childhood shine, she is like a human glass of champagne, all bubbles and sparkles and I feel so far and close to her at once. The younger is living a west coast mirror of my life, starting a band and cannonballing himself into the artist experience. The bar becomes busier and I am surrounded by other ghosts of high school past– those who left and ventured out into the wild blue yonder as well as those who stuck around, content to dig their roots deep into the Carolina blue.

The wild thing about this era of young adults is we all sort of know each other on a surface level thanks to our online alter egos, but I was still shocked to hear that they knew of Bandits, and so touched when they said they’d heard the record. I would never have dreamed that these folks would care about what I made or that I’d be able to talk with them so freely– in high school I was that weird brand of an introvert who wanted to be seen, a sort of self-manufactured outsider. I think I operated under the flawed assumption that I (and my small circle of comrades, my fellow misfit toys) dreamed more wildly or had more hunger to escape than my jock or popular peers. I know now how ridiculous that is. Almost everyone yearned to get out, in one way or another. Some of us did. Some of us didn’t. There’s no real right or wrong answer to how to do any of this, escape and transformation can happen right where you’re planted, but most of us need to switch up our backdrops a bit to get there. At any rate, we are all Home For The Holidays,™ and we small-town expats all find ourselves breathing similar sentiments into the simplest terms we can muster: “it’s strange to be back”.

Now it is December 27th and I am back in my Brooklyn apartment, back to an altogether different kind of ache. This is home, there is home. I found so much beauty and peace in this brief pilgrimage down south, but that moment in the car keeps whispering through these most recent memories of family warmth and best friend reunions; that private reckoning between my past and present life. Back Home, like some Ghost Of Christmas Past, emerged from its time capsule and transformed from a song about missing a lover to a song about return, about landing softly in the place that created you and taking stock of what’s gone and what’s been left behind. I’m grateful for this ghost, I think a good haunting can teach me a thing or two.

 

 

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Out of the Dark

Well, hello again.

There are a few reasons why I let this blog fade into almost nothingness. The first I guess is that it’s completely within the spine of my personality to begin a new project or idea, be excited about it, and then abandon it. Another reason is that I’ve been an avid keeper of notebooks for almost 10 years, and when that itchy habit to write strikes it usually gets pinned down in a notebook and stays there. It’s not really as natural for me to use a computer. And another reason is that the world seems to be cracking wide open and spilling over with issues that are far greater and more important than whatever I could possibly have to say. Writer’s block by way of self-deprecation.

I lost my notebook. I usually go through about 2 a year, one filled by the summer and the other filled by the winter. But my winter notebook, my little silent confidant almost filled to the brim, has completely gone MIA. Maybe someone found it on the street and is trying to make heads or tails of it. Maybe it’s at a farm upstate somewhere with all the other little runaway notebooks. Maybe it’s a bed for a rat now.  In any case, I’m mourning the loss of whatever useful thoughts or insights I haphazardly scrawled in there, and I realized that my little corner of the internet has been atrophying, and what better time to jump back in?

It’s a weird time. Everything feels shifty and oozy and a little blurred. My barista friend Rachel observed that everything feels alive. I think she’s right. There are those stagnant times where everything feels stale and a little droopy and like nothing will ever change again ever. There are those bright and crackling thrilling times where you feel new and wild eyed each day and like you’re living the life that your childhood self would cry with joy to see. Then there’s times like these. These shifty grey swirly times where everything is sort of under the surface, and you’re following the trail of breadcrumbs into the forest and have no idea where they lead and the trees are whispering to you in their own language and you’re not sure what is benevolent and what is luring you to the edge of the cliff. Or if the breadcrumb path is just endless and may lead to Nowhere.

I told my best friend Taylor about the breadcrumbs. She says the breadcrumbs will lead to amazing things. I trust her for a million reasons, especially because she is a mom now and she’s always had a good intuition but something about motherhood just bumps her up to this goddess-level magic and it’s like a have a fairy godmother who is also my same age and makes poop jokes. I hope everyone has someone like that.

Anyway, the breadcrumbs have lead me many places this year. I’ve slept in more different beds than maybe any other year in my small but rapidly lengthening lifetime. I spent the better part of a month on a floor in New Orleans in January, most of the summer in upstate New York and its surrounding neighbors, much of the fall in homes throughout the southeast, and this coming spring I’ll be who knows where bouncing about Europe because we Bandits somehow convinced a competition that we were worthy to be flown to London to record a song that we miraculously cooked up quite literally in the kitchen right before the deadline.  In between I’ve worked on a handful of new musicals and plays, many of them with cello and tow and many  of them with well-written female roles and some of them even passing the Bechdel test. When I write things out this way it makes me feel OK.

But that’s not the whole picture.  It’s been a year of crippling doubt and inspiration that has come in fits and starts. It’s been a year of making ends meet by working 3 day jobs at a time and hearing the words “you look tired” more often than ever.  It’s been a year of folks asking if I’m still an actor, of promises  and plans fallen through, of painful memories resurfacing, of disappointment and questioning and far too much comparison with other people’s stories. Of feeling like I’m on the hamster wheel watching the dangling carrot dance just out of reach. Of waking in the middle of the night to sands of an hourglass hissing through the night, of knowing there will never be enough time. 

Both of these experiences twist around each other simultaneously like some weird gordian knot, the spaces in between occupying their own worlds, this knot of mine coming into contact with everyone else’s knots and getting tangled together and fraying apart and building new knots. What a tangled web, amiright?!

I shared a video from and old Intensive Arts piece with Adrian, a mask piece for my song “Shy”. He noted that my old songs had an innocence and an optimism and a cheeriness, and now my material tends to lean a bit more towards the darkness; and when they’re not dark they’re more tough. It’s funny how as artists we can clock our changes by the work we’ve created. I think it’s lucky too. That we can look at something that came out of us at 19, then look at something that came out of us in our 20’s and say “Oh shit. This is different.” or “Oh shit. This is still me.”

There’s a relatively new Bandits song that we hardly ever play because I’m afraid it’s too moody called The Corner of Dark and Light. I’m going to try and be less afraid of it. This thought may be a post for another day, but I think I’m coming to terms with the kind of art I want to make, and I don’t think it’s pretty or clean or polished.  That’s probably why I’m drawn to Stevie and Janis lately and am slowly amassing  and cherishing comparisons to these women in writing and performance style. They understand that marriage or rawness and skill, of feminine and masculine, heartbreak and power. Corner of dark and light.

Whatever the case, I’m back to the bloglands, and to whoever is peering into this virtual notebook, thanks for canoeing with me down this stream of consciousness. Beginning again is always messy, right?

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On Time

I’m in love with a man who loves to take his time.

He isn’t slow, that’s not the thing, he just moves through time as if it’s this expansive, gooey, delicious, molasses-y thing. It’s really quite lovely.

And infuriating when it comes time to get somewhere.

Me, I dig luxuriating in stretchy seconds as much as the next gal, but when it comes time to do a thing, I immediately scrunch up my minutes and chop them into colored blocks and place them carefully in order, so that each block is snugly fit to the next and the next like perfectly cut stepping stones, which I proceed to stride over with brisk efficiency in a timely fashion.

Then I glance back and he is strumming away on a new tune or sharing a joke with our bodega friend and I am exasperated. And I am exasperated with myself for being exasperated. No one likes a Punctual Paula who lives her life following those two little clock hands as they inch their way to eternity! Come on you cool dreamy thing, that ain’t you!

It’s this weird battle in my being, this raging war between my Alice and my White Rabbit.

I used to heavily identify with Alice and in many ways I still do: constant bewilderment, insatiable fascination with people far more interesting than me, a baby face that has followed me into my mid-twenties and just won’t quit, a curiosity that has yet to kill the cat but hey, she’s got nine lives and it’s still early in the game.

But in the past few years, as Adulthood has seeped its way into my consciousness, it’s been feeding carrots to my inner White Rabbit, replacing “Eat Me” cakes and “Drink Me” questionable liquids with leafy greens and hearty vegetation and making the damn rabbit and his opinions on the nature of time grow bigger and stronger.

“No time to say hello, goodbye.”

No time. Isn’t that everyone’s greatest fear in one way or another? Running out of time? Running out of time before we find purpose, find love, vision, clarity, find the perfect damn cup of coffee? There’s so much call and need for motion, for going, for getting, that it can sneak up and paralyze you.  I wake in a sweat some nights, on that cusp of being unsure where I am but certainly sure that I’m running out of time. It’s a dark place to be, and the more I peer into the rabbit hole the deeper it becomes. I don’t like entering the places in myself that fear the loss of time, the places I enter with eyes glued to a clock that seems to go faster and faster as my feet grow slower and my voice feels fainter and I feel my face fading into dust and obscurity and Time becomes a cruel god, dangling my freedom close enough to make my mouth water but just a bit farther than an arm’s reach or a rabbit’s hop. Come the morning these images become bleached by the sun and a bit brighter and more bearable, but the feeling is still a ghost in my throat, a reminder of what the dark tells us when we remember our own mortality and gaze down the dark straight road to oblivion.

Of course some science and some mysticism suggest that time doesn’t move in a straight line at all. That point A does not lead to point B does not lead to point C, but all of the points are sort of jumbled together and dancing and becoming each other and doin’ their thing all at the same time. I wish we could feel it that way. I wish we could all bathe in time-mush-soup and create and destroy ourselves simultaneously on and on, and maybe somehow that’s what we are doing but our brains are just not sophisticated enough to register it. I know mine certainly isn’t.

But, I digress. Honestly I’m not even sure what I’m gress-ing about in the first place.

This is all probably to say in my meandering way that getting tense when time feels tight is probably a fruitless use of energy. Time’s gonna take us, so we ought to just take it right back. Alices and rabbits eventually end up the same place, so we may as well stop and talk to a few kings and bird-brains and wise sad turtles and painted roses on our way there. 



^Alice and the Rabbit. Dali made this.

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An open ode to a fleeting moment at my temp job:

“Haven’t seen you on this floor in a while”
The Shirt and Tie says to me with an absent, polite smile.
“Oh I’ve been–pretty busy” I say, stocking my umpteenth can of Diet Snapple into the company fridge.
What I wish I could say
What my heart says what my soul screams is:

“Since you saw me last, I said goodbye to my kids.
The little ones I taught for the past 5 months, the difficult ones, the brilliant ones, the ones who memorized their songs without prompting, the ones who peed their pants, the ones who banged their heads against the desks repeatedly to the rhythm of the Moana song they had sung so joyfully the week before in a fit frustration and unspoken rage. I left some with hugs and a few tears, I left others with very little ceremony at all.

Since you saw me last, I found myself in one of the most exciting theatrical projects of my life, a too-short reading in a room with Broadway giants, playing lovers with my real-life love, singing songs from my favorite era, songs my heart has been obsessed with since I can remember.

Since you saw me last I returned down south. I ran through green utopias with my mom and stepdad taking in the
intoxicating smell of homeland nature, I glided across waters with my dad and for a moment felt the freedom of a mind with no inner voice but the wind, I held my best friend’s child in my arms and saw the face of pure beauty and love and eyes of the most startling blue smiling back at me, I saw this friend as a mother for the first time and remembered her as The Bakers Wife in our school play and marveled at the synchronicity of life, I sat on a floor and giggled with my mother as we painted our nails and created our own adventure when the rain kept us inside.

Since you saw me last, I found myself in an artist heaven in Massachusetts, staying in a gorgeous farmhouse mansion filled to the brim with people of insane talent and inspiration, playing a role I’ve been working on on and off for the past 3 years in one of the most moving shows I’ve known, being cared for and fed by the sisters who the play is written about and for, hanging with the coolest dog I’ve met in quite a while. Breathing in green, breathing out music, being a part of a long evolution of a beautiful piece of art.

Since you saw me last, I retreated with my art partners to the most lovely Middle Of Nowhere place I know, incubating new songs, getting very serious and getting very silly, joining in a cinematic rave with just the 3 of us and approximately 3 million fireflies, building fires and dreaming and watching and falling under the spell of our fellow music makers beneath an impossibly open sky, each a unique voice with such important songs to sing.

Now I’m back. On your floor. I am your Temporary Kitchen Assistant. I take out the trash and I set out the food I make the coffee and I re-re-re-re-stock your sodas. A few minutes ago I got reprimanded (kindly and rightfully, I admit) for reading during lunch, a book about the character I played a few short weeks ago, because in the Real World in which I mostly feel like a visitor, occupying one’s mind while one is supposed to be doing the task one is getting paid to do is a no-no ( I’m instantly reminded of my friend’s job behind a drugstore counter, the self-described “petri-dish for madness”, it’s no easy task to demand a creator’s mind to be still.)

In the past month, Shirt and Tie, I have lived a thousand little lives in this cosmic nano-blink of time in the Goddess’s great green eye. I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing a year, a month, or a week from now, but chances are likely I’ll wind up on your floor again sometime. And if you should chance to press further, and ask that age-old baffling bastion of small talk question: “What have you been up to lately?” I’ll return your polite smile through all the emotion, the sadness, the excitement, the frustration, the hope, the immense overwhelmingness of sewing a life together, and reply in that most wicked and mysterious and complex understatement of my formative years: “Oh, this and that.”

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On Oneness

Each night I dissolve
Each morning I stitch my atoms back together
It is a painstaking process

I walk through the day a little rearranged
The hours glide or flicker or speed or loiter
And inside these moments of allotted consciousness
I am constantly collecting myself or letting myself spill over in droplets on the floor or sparks flying against the wall

When you are learning to Be A Person they don’t tell you that sometimes your soul just
Colors outside the lines of your body
And in those moments you don’t even understand what Personhood is
You think that maybe you are a thought
Or an idea or a dream or a yelp of pain
Or a moment by the sea years and years ago
Or the absence of space

But sometimes you sit in the belly of a hammock
And let the soles of your feet kiss each other
And let the corners of your mouth stretch north
And the song of the afternoon is the duet between the you and the I
And the sun and the earth don’t give a damn what you are they’re just pleased you’ve joined in
And THEN then the nameless YES enters and in between your ribs is
Every desert and every lush green thing and by god they GO together!

But this waking drifting, this cat nap transcendence — trance ‘n dance
It never stays for long
(you can’t grow roots in the belly of a hammock)

So what I do — I scoop up what I can
To add to the tapestry
Of tomorrow’s atoms
And it’s still a bitch
To put me back together again
But at least there’s a wild lovely new
Thread or two.
That should do for a while.

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Preface

Before we dive in, I feel I should explain myself. Namely, the name of this venture. Names are important and valuable, and you have the right to know why what you’ve gotten yourself into is named the way it is.

The scene:

In a little yellow dollhouse suspended in time, sit 3 young humans in one straight line.

I am sixteen. He is seventeen. The other he is fifteen. I am wedged between the two, and we are sitting on a couch like a chronological stepping-stone portrait, like a neat little row of teenage complexity and burgeoning identity stacked one after the other after the other. The quaintness of the portrait: 3 wild haired kids with giant brown eyes and even gianter imaginations on a couch surrounded by impossibly perfect chachkies and a very serene and wise dog named Doug, with the implacable scent of musky nostalgia wafting around our wee heads as we stare intently forward, by golly it’s like we could be a poster or a scene from a Wes Anderson movie or something!

And well, we are watching a Wes Anderson movie.

The Dickson Brothers are introducing me to Rushmore, and my oh my I am devouring it with gusto. I have recently met the Brothers, and in the short time I’ve known them I’ve acted in a play and sang songs with one and kissed and begun to fall in love with the other and danced to Bob Dylan with both of them on a roof in Dinkytown, North Carolina so this whole arrangement is really going well so far. Anyway, here we are, watching the colorfully curated world unfold on the screen, when THE SCENE happens:

Bill Murray is walking along with the woman he and Jason Schwartzman are in love with. They are walking outside through a class of young children painting outdoors.

Walking up to an impossibly adorable kid, Bill Murray points to his easel and asks “What’s that you’ve painted?”

The child does not look up, his eyes remain concentrated on the easel, and in this moment he must decide what the hell it actually is that he’s created.

Impossibly Adorable Kid: “That’s…ahhh..uhh a jellyfish.”

Now, it’s entirely possible that Impossibly Adorable Kid fully intended to create a jellyfish and merely experienced a slight moment of hesitation while presenting his masterpiece. BUT what I saw in this 6 seconds of cinematic genius is that the child was simply throwing paint to canvas and watching the image unfold in organic tandem with the movements of his unbridled brush, and when confronted with defining it, he had to ask himself the question for the first time. And when the answer came, the fact that it was a jellyfish was a discovery for all 3 onlookers, including the artist.

This is how I create. Impossibly Adorable Kid’s method is quite similar to my own. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I suspect many artists must feel the same way. We are constantly riding the line of technique and instinct, strategy and passion, and the best stuff usually comes out when we set off on the road with an unclear destination and a backpack with a couple of tools, determination, and maybe a snack for later.

All this to say, this is the first reason for why this blog (I’m writing a blog?!) is titled the way it is.

The second reason is because my alter ego is named Bonanza Jellyfish, a riff on one of my all-time favorite literary characters Bonanza JellyBEAN, created by National Treasure Tom Robbins in his novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. I read this book right before Bandits On The Run formed, and when we were discussing the Very Important Issue Of Choosing A Bandit Name, Bonanza Jellyfish came to me in a sunburst of inspiration and I knew in an instant that this is what I was meant to be called. I’m sure I’ll tell you about the origins of the band and the persona of Bonanza Jellyfish and the rest of the crew at some later date, as I’m sure this introduction is already incredibly lengthy by internet attention span standards. (Is it? I do not know, friends. It’s my first time!!)

The third reason is I’ve always identified with creatures with tentacles. I was given the nickname Squidney by my childhood best friend’s father, and many of my family and friends have continued to use this name because it’s cute as shit. I still have a stuffed squid given to me by a college boyfriend that chills on my bed, and that is saying quite a lot because I have quite the track record of losing objects (RIP Tigger, my mom’s stuffed tiger from childhood that I think was sucked into a black hole when I was 11). Jellyfish and squid are certainly not the same, but I love the idea of a creature with many arms because that is how my brain feels, that’s how my art feels and that’s how my life feels, arms outstretched in many directions, occasionally following one with a very strong pull for a while til the current tosses me in another direction.

The fourth and final reason is jellyfish are amazing kickass creatures and weird as all get-out. They have no BRAIN. They have no HEART. They are BIOLUMINESCENT. They can CLONE THEMSELVES. Some species are ACTUALLY IMMORTAL– Seriously, look that up: turritopsis nutricula can return back to their younger polyp stage in times of stress. This process can continue indefinitely. STAGGERING. SCIENCE.

So, welcome to the Jellyhouse. Your guess is as good as mine how this blogventure will unfold. But I’m pretty giddy about the whole thing. I’ve journaled for about 10 years now and I’ve always really dug stringing words together, and this is the first time I’m doing it for all to see, so thank you for sharing this with me.

This is Syd the Squid or Bonanza the Jelly (take your pick, they’re one in the same) signin’ off.