I have never felt I could fast. I heard of it first as a young kid – maybe about Gandhi and other peace activists using it to help their causes – and I instantly thought “NOPE.”
But I didn’t really know why I had such a strong reaction to the idea of fasting.
I think I know now, though. Because of my migraine brain, I really couldn’t do such a thing without triggering a pretty severe migraine. Were I to fast, I’d just be writhing in the dark. I mean, pretty quickly that intentional fast would turn into an unintentional one – because if the migraine got bad, I for sure wouldn’t be able to eat anything without throwing up.
So. I would not fast. Not on purpose, no.

I’d rather not.
But I will if pushed too far.
It takes a fair amount of pushing but once it’s happened, my little repressed “something dangerous” will scare me more than anyone.

I woo’t.
I woo’t weep a lot.
I have been thinking about this quite a bit recently. I started to wonder about how often I weep. I weep at almost any release. I weep during Awareness Through Movement Lessons all the time – when I soften my chest, when I lengthen my side, when I let my breath go, when I give over to the floor. I didn’t use to weep like that when I was in training but I think it was mostly because I was surrounded by dozens of people.

I wept the other day while re-watching an episode of Slings and Arrows – the one at Oliver’s memorial service, when Geoffrey eulogizes not just Oliver but what he once believed about the power of theatre. Tears were streaming down my face while he talked about regimes being toppled and love re-kindled by the power of a show and the recognition that it was a silly idea really.

Anyway – I woo’t weep a lot, really. And I sometimes wonder about that. To the outside world, I know many see me as a happy, joyful presence. But maybe I’m able to project that because I also give myself permission to weep and weep and weep and weep. Even for silly ideas like theatre.

Hamlet! Getting salty! ‘Swounds! Zounds!
AND making a contraction to form “thou’lt”? That is also fairly salty somehow. I mean, it’s as simple as you’ll but seems much saucier, somehow, than you’ll. Feels like you might as well say “Thou wilt” – because thou’lt is a little tricky on the tongue. But Hamlet’s getting salty here. Swearing at a funeral. In front of a priest. And the royal family.

Whatever you do for a dead woman, you do too late. You could write her a poem or carve her a sculpture but she will never see it. Anything you do for a dead woman, you do for the living – which is not to say you should not write that poem or carve that sculpture.
We need monuments to women. In New York City, there are five monuments to women. I have seen one of them – just by chance. I stumbled upon the sculpture of Gertrude Stein in Bryant Park. I did not know it was there and was so delighted to suddenly see her. I wish there were monuments to Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Madam Restell, Victoria Woodhull, Susan B. Anthony, Zora Neal Hurston, Josephine Baker and dozens and dozens of others.

This is a real shitty way to declare you love someone. I mean. On one hand, it’s got just the extremity of high numbers and hyperbole that we expect from lovers.
It’s got some quality of Juliet’s love being as boundless as the sea. Love is big! Love is out sized! Love is forty thousand times love!

But it’s not just the standard hyperbole of lovers – it’s comparative. It’s saying my love is 40,000 times bigger than yours, Laertes.
Which is just dick measuring but with love.

Did you, Hamlet? This is the first moment in the play wherein it feels as though you did. Pretty much the rest of it you’ve been a complete and total cock.
And actually now, too, to Laertes and everyone else here who came to mourn her. Leaping into her grave? Fighting with her beloved brother? There are men who love like this, I suppose. The woman herself is inconsequential – it’s the men around her he must prove himself to.

This is a strangely blithe way to talk about fighting over a dead woman’s body. I mean – I guess I understand why Hamlet wants to fight on the theme. He wants to prove he loved Ophelia. Okay. But to talk about eyelids waging just seems a little silly. Wagging being most associated with the tails of dogs. The next most associated might be heads wagging – up and down – but again that has a sort of overly enthusiastic quality. And I think of Helena talking about waggish boys. So to have this boyish dog-like image connected to the eyelids makes it feel like Hamlet is perhaps not taking this fight seriously.

Note to self: The next time some random dude gropes me or gets a little too close to me, I would like to have this line at my immediate disposal.

One of my favorite podcast hosts has recommended saying, “Not cool!”
I like that one and I imagine it’s effective in a visceral way and easily understood but I think a loud, “Hold off thy hand!” might have a nice disorienting authority – it might invoke a little Hamlet-y danger – it might access the “something dangerous” within that Hamlet mentions.

I’m not sure Hamlet’s understanding of himself is accurate. He well may be splenitive and rash. He did, after all, murder Polonius rather rashly. He did rather vent his spleen on Ophelia in that nunnery scene and also on Gertrude in the closet scene.. So…it’s not so that he’s not splenitive or rash. Though he does absolutely have something dangerous in him.
And I think, I myself am not splenitive or rash and I have something dangerous in me as well.
But maybe I am, like, Hamlet, only partially self aware. Maybe I am more rash than I know. Or maybe I have no danger in me at all.