The things I have tolerated from good performers!
And almost always the male ones.
“I need them!” I think.
“He said he’ll show up.”
“He said he’d be there.”
“I know he’s an asshole but he’s so talented!”
“I had a feeling about him but I think it’s going to be fine.”

It almost never is.

The stacks of headshots we’d get in the mail would break our hearts.
The pile of women would be measured in feet.
The pile of men – in inches.

Men with credentials that would get them tossed to the side if they were women were called and auditioned.
And some of them, we cast.
And some of them were great.
But some of them were not.
And I let them fool me
Because I was desperate.
And then they made me crazy.

 

The journey of a life feels like a kind of coming and going. At first, there is only the coming to mother – because there is only mother. There is no self.

Then you pull away, to start to understand you are someone different.

It is a rubberband independence wherein you walk away only so far before you spring back again.

As we age, it’s not that we lose the rubberband – it’s just that it gets longer and longer. We can wander farther.
Or for so long it may seem as if there were no rubberband at all.
But you will return. In one way or another.

I saw an article on the internet about a sign on a gym entrance that asked, “Do you want to be a whale or a mermaid?” Presumably this is designed to be motivation to lose weight but someone posted a response.

The centerpiece of it was how awesome whales are and how mermaids don’t exist.

Our whole lives we’ve been led to believe that being called a whale is an insult – which is not only insulting to us, but also to whales.

After reading that little rant, I will, from henceforth, take being like a whale as a compliment.

They are intelligent, gentle, kind and social creatures. And they sing beautifully, too.

I have very little sense of what an actual weasel is. It’s an animal that gets much more play as a metaphor than as an actual animal.

Is it like a ferret a little bit?

Or is ferret another name for a weasel- weasels having developed such a bad name.

How did weasels become weasels? Are weasels particularly weasely? Are they sneaky and duplicitous? What did they do to deserve such an unsavory reputation?

I’ve been thinking a lot about camels. I’m writing a book in which a camel plays a significant part. I have a sense of what a camel is like because I’ve seen photographs and video. I have seen camels on screens, if not in person. I’ve put together a camel in my mind from books, TV shows, movies and cartoons.

But where did Shakespeare get his sense of camel?
From books?
Paintings?
There weren’t camels in England.
Or Denmark for that matter.

I suspect that camels got a lot of the attention they got mostly from the Bible. They show up there. . .so camels take up some space in people’s imaginations – despite never having seen one.

The shape of a camel likely became quite significant to those who went to church.
It makes a real animal somewhat mythic, I would think.

The shape of a camel always seen as a painting or stained glass or illumination or drawing. A unicorn might be as real in this scenario.

I have a Feldenkrais client who doesn’t really get it. She doesn’t feel anything when I give her a Functional Integration lesson and wonders what she should feel. There’s something about her questioning that makes me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. It zooms past my experience with her and out into my whole identity as a practitioner, then as a person.

Then today, I had a client who, the moment I touched him, began to thank me and did not stop the whole rest of the hour. Everything I did seemed to him just the right thing and he let me know, affirming it all with words.

This is generally a bit of overkill. It’s not up to my client’s to give me affirmation. But today – it was much appreciated. To have such a graceful accomplished gentleman find everything I did to be remarkable, went a long way toward repairing my shaken confidence.

For the most part, I’ve mostly played string instruments – those with frets, especially. Once, in an art class, I made a mandolin out of tin can. I had to build the neck myself. I  made the frets out of nails that I cut and then hammered into the wood.

Frets are so much a part of my sense of how things are organized, I may have missed the double meaning of this entirely. I thought only of someone running fingers over frets – I didn’t even consider that fretting someone might also be to upset them – to cause them to fret, as it were.

My mandolin made from the olive oil can was called a Candolin. I still have it. It’s hanging in my mother’s music room. It’s hard to pack and move. There is no case for the Candolin.

Also – it doesn’t play like a mandolin. The tuning is such that it is unpredictable. The frets aren’t placed precisely enough for predictability. So the Candolin is not a particularly useful or tuneful instrument. I cannot really play much upon it. Pretty much only clown songs.

‘Sblood is such a good swear. It’s just fun to say. It’s not so great once you work out where it came from and why it’s a swear. I mean.. . His Blood. . . like, it’s invoking a religious figure and stuff in his body, which is a little bit holy.
Which is why it’s blasphemous to swear with it, of course – just like Zounds – which is His Wounds.
It’s all a little bit gross and morbid.
But if you don’t think too deeply about these and just SAY them with vigor, then, they are just wholly delightful, linguistically. It helps to be one syllable. It gives you a lot of places to go with it.
But – of course, here, they’ve punctuated this so it has the feeling of starting a sentence with “Goddamn it. . .” which is, of course , essentially what we’re dealing with here.

One of the benefits of being a puppeteer is that you make
Almost anything speak if you have to.
It’s not always the right voice
And not everything SHOULD have a voice
But you can always give it a shot.
Salt shaker
Sock
Bulldozer
Tissue
Cardboard tube

Making objects talk is almost always entertaining.

There’s a Kids in the Hall sketch that features a tiny oompa band. I don’t remember what happens – but the tiny oompa band is very vivid in my visual memory. They’re about mouse sized, with tiny instruments.
There’s also that joke about the 9 inch pianist. I imagine a little organ as much the same size as the oompa band in the sketch. It features a tiny organist as well. And it’s a tiny PIPE organ, also.
The tiny organist wears tails, which he flips out of the way when he sits at the organ. He plays classic horror film tunes and dramatic arpeggios. The pipes of the pipe organ are such that it looks like it could be played like a pan flute.
It’s very handy to have around when you need some foreboding chords played.