i went to devil’s point strip club empty and came home full.

many several days back now, i traversed the I-5 corridor to the land of SE Portland for a 4 day intensive artistic residency at PerformanceWorksNW. 'twas an enriching experience all around, i must say. rehearsals brought new insight and inspiration, art events attended brought new connections and further inspiration, and outside extracurricular activities brought even more insight and, no, well, just insight really.

specifically, my sunday night late night outing to devil’s point for striparaoke (sic) (the points they lost in the not so sexy portmanteau, they made up for in. . . other ways.) striparaoke is, to clarify, your regular run of the mill karaoke, but held at a strip club. you stand in the far upstage left corner of the small, 3-poled stage and don’t budge in inch and sing while fancy lady in not much clothing does her thing on the 97% of the stage that is not occupied by your nervous, little, fully clothed with sensible shoes body while other patrons of this art hoot and holler and drink and rid themselves of low denomination paper money. not what you would think to be a hotbed of personal growth education, but let me assure you, many things about herself was learned by me. for example:

lesson one - i love me some efficiency. 

strip club AND karaoke bar??? in ONE convenient location!! AND there were food trucks literally across the street! and not even across the busy way, but the low key residential way. 

lesson two - there is no such thing as sharing a stage with a stripper. 

i could have been standing there wearing a full body banana costume singing jingle bells with a helium affected voice and no one would have even noticed. given the option between staring at a modestly dressed thirty-something year old stoic-ly singing the 80’s classic ’99 luft balloons’ and staring at a tall twenty-something year old with nary an article of clothing on that couldn’t fit in the palm of my hand while she spins and teases and whatever else she was doing that i missed because i was staring at the karaoke screen, pretty much everyone except for that one woman from tacoma chose the latter.

 lesson three - of all the things i enjoy sharing with a stripper, a stage is not one of them. 

when i step onto stage, i am doing it for two reasons. 1 - as a stage hand to do stage handy things, or 2 - as a performer to do performery things. for me to step on stage as 2-performer only to be have the level invisibility that i can only dream of as 1-stagehand was nothing short of, well, kinda annoying. in like an Oh Look I Have Feelings And Expectations Around That kind of way.

and so, a week now has passed since that trip transpired and my library of self knowledge still sits bursting at the seams. so if you’ll excuse me, i have some metaphorical digesting to do. in the meantime, someone tell me why, when i took the careful time out of my schedule to update the wikipedia entry on ‘Serendipity’ to share the details of my journey so that others may benefit, my photographic documentation* keeps getting rejected as 'inappropriate'?? how am i to fully elucidate my learnings without an image of my teacher? she was instrumental in my learnings!!! sigh. some battles are just not worth battling, i guess. never fear, my dear Serendipity, your image stays alive in my heart always.

*jk there’s no photography allowed inside. mad respect for my one-on-one life coach.

acute artistic therapeutic therapy

share time. sometimes i get down. not like Cutting A Rug getting down, tho certain conditions do allow for that particular phenomenon to occur, but the particular seasonal fog of My Particular Body + Change In Said Body + How My Perception Of That Is Wired In My Particular Brain getting down where no amount or combination there of of coffee/cat time (probably would help if i had a cat to have time with)/netflix+cereal/ok fine i'll go for a walk around the block/talking with roommate Beth Leppard will cut through. sigh. 'twas even a semi recent moment when i looked at my phone, simultaneously wishing it and thanking it that it did not have the capacity to dial for me just from me looking at it, wondering if i should call my erstwhile therapist to see if her plant/sensible shoes/corner of the room over her right shoulder would be available for me to stare at while i talk to the rest of the room and oh she just happens to be in there listening and repeating things back to me in a learned way. 

that moment quickly passed. 

and in the wide open field of that next moment, a new option presented itself to me in the form of a text: what are you doing sunday? (nothing.) do you want to be a russian dancer for CHWS? (yes.) details to follow. (ok great!)

details being the requisite time and place, sign this waver. oh, and bring a dance belt. uh. . . . scanning the email list and realizing i am the only female bodied individual cast in this fictional ballet company. . . uh, excuse me, costumer? i must clarify. . . ah yes, no worries? dance belts will be provided? great. . . that was me saying YES to being filmed half naked while in the snag of a body image issue hick up. well, ilvs, how bad could this be?

well, ilvs, turns out not bad at all, once i got past the Am I Actually Going Pant-less On Camera? Yes I Do Believe I Am! factoid. follow up factoid: nothing, and i mean nothing, negates negative self image issues like wearing SOMEONE ELSE'S DANCE BELT for 3 hours in a chilly workout room with 2 walls of mirrors and 1 bank of windows that look over pike street, in the company of 8 sculpted male dancer friends, also in dance belts (their own), while your Not That Kind Of Lady Friend lady friend, dressed as a russian ballet troupe's mean queen bee, smacks your calves with a riding crop while yelling 'CALF!! CALF!!!' in a thick russian accent, all the while cameras are rolling on the set of your friend's web series to be viewed in the not so distant future by probably most of your friends and pretty much everyone else in the far reaching corners of your community. 

so, to wes and the cast and crew for both fully witnessing and fully documenting both my external and my internal growth, a big ridiculous, awkward, liberating, scintillating, challenging, heartfelt Thank You. who knew that's exactly what i needed?

lumi + ilvs 4ever

if she walks like a lamb and quacks like a lamb, she's probably an artist

for approximately Several Days last week, i sallied forth about the overcast and kinda rainy seattle city administering to That Which One Does When One Is Mostly Self Employed As Performer Of The Art much like any other Several Days save but for one noticeable detail: my hands were bright red. 

fortunately, 'twas not due to a You Need To See A Doctor 5 Minutes Ago medical condition. in blessed fact, it did not involve the pain or the harm to anyone or anything, myself included.

and so how does one find themselves with fire engine red extremities? well, in this particular instance, it was a direct result of a combination of not wearing protective nitrile examination gloves and waiting too long to use ACTUAL SOAP to wash my paws off after being tasked repeatedly to hands and knees it to the deck and sop up several gallons worth of RED using an astonishingly absorbent sponge. the RED being neither actual blood nor a corn syrup based liquid representation of vital fluid, but just plain ole water from the mop sink dyed the certain color choice of a certain ALICE GOSTI, whose art performance project i am at her technical beck and call for. the take away on my end of aforementioned duties being that i left theater von theater with palms and phalanges looking like a person who just committed some kind of ritual involving at least one but probably closer to many a sacrificed lamb. needless to say, it was noticeable. fortunately for me, other pronounced visual clues (walking around in broad day light with a retinue of artsy looking folk) and universal safe assumptions (i mean really, who sacrifices lambs these days?)(don't answer that.) meant that i, with my wildly out of place tinting, was read as not just AN ARTIST, but a WORKING ARTIST at that. 

never you mind that the presumptions were based off a pedestrian occupational hazard that comes with being a stage lackey, this clandestine outside validation from my fellow humans i will willingly take! (the smattering of jesty crime scene/slaughtered lamb Dad Jokes that tagged along with this misdirected recognition, i could pass on, thank you very much.)

and during those Several Days, while basking in my By Association Artist Aura, it occurred to me Several Times to instaphoto document the task at hand, but, lest i give all the members of my Virtually Assembled Via Some Overly Complicated Algorithm online community a heart attack upon seeing a photo of me covered in RED, i resisted.

instead, i give to you a photo of Cap'n Ron's hand crafting a BUTTER LAMB.

point your dreamy eyes to the upper left corner and you will see fingers slightly red. now imagine if the red were from RED and not poor lighting/extreme color incorrection, and that the lamb crafted was a lamb slaughtered and then you will begin to get an idea of what it would have been like to lay eyes on a photo of what my hands looked like in the moment.

speaking of moments, this one moment now now is a good time for me to preemptively field your question of: did you specifically googleimagesearch 'hand + lamb + art + would be gore'? or did you happen to be on Cap'n Ron's website and worked the blog plot in order to showcase a photo highlighting the how to's of the misunderstood art of butter sculpturing and your fascination thereof?

it's the latter, thank you very much. i love EASTER and it's just around the corner and i'll be damned if i am caught THAT SUNDAY with a bunch of rectangular sticks o' yellow laying out on the table with all those right angles and pointy corners casting harsh shadows and poking holes in my soft focus pastel ambiance. o yes, between the moments of sponging art gore and going about my other artistic ventures, research on the upcoming Big Day is being done. i know of no better way to spend the day/night/wee hours/crack of dawn. well, other than blogging about it, of course. 

till then.