Bendy

Alone

2010-09-12T23:29:00.000-07:00

I am slowly discovering what it means to be alone with your dreams. I haven't been this alone since my early 20s, when everything was tortured and simple and wrought with danger and possibility. So much has changed within me, but mostly time has passed, my time, and I can feel each day like the running down of a meter. My life.

I am not afraid of the alone. I like it. I keep my own unpredictable hours, my idiosycratic habits, my wet towels and stone cold mugs of over-steeped tea. I am never bored, and not really lonely. But sometimes the vastness of my own life looms cavernous around me and I am cowed by all that I am, all that I must do, and the fear, of course, of missing that gold ring as it comes around again. How many chances do we get? Will I even know it when it comes? What is it? What am I here to do?

I have run from this mission for so long. Hidden in the warm, uncomplicated embrace of past loves, most of them unworthy. I knew on some level all along that they were mostly there to protect me from myself. The enormity of this space in which I now sit. I did not have the tools to navigate in the dark, I had not submitted to the tyger. I would have done anything to hide from myself.

But no more. I want to be here. I want to be here in this difficult place and I want to find out what it is, what it really is. I have to focus, breathe, be here. I have to discover what it means to live in the forest of the night.

I hate rules

2010-09-11T01:12:00.000-07:00

Just saying. I may be frequently inappropriate and pay only passing consideration to social morays, but wouldn't the world be a better place if we let go of those ridiculous games, those rules, and just said what we think?

Back

2010-07-09T00:28:00.000-07:00

I'm back.

Back from the extended dreamland that was the last eight months of my life. I feel like Keats as the nightingale disappears over the hills leaving him standing, dazed, in the summer darkness.

I don't know anything. I don't know where I am going, or what my life is going to be like, or what I will do. I just know that the decision I made was no decision. I could have tried to compromise my heart and my soul but I could not have sustained it. I would have become increasingly insufferable, betrayed by my own flesh that would have risen up in revolt against my feeble capitulation to comfort.

"The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul and walks smiling at its funeral." -Khalil Gilbran

I choose love, always choose love first. But it cannot be love that owns me, restricts me, prescribes itself to me like a self-medicating doctor diagnosing me with his own illness. Because I can't, no matter how much I might desire it, be confined in the safety of a loving cage.

So it is off to Los Angeles again. One less ligament in my hip, a few more months on my body, but still able to sit on my own head and making remarkable progress with those cursed handstands. It's time to open up all the way, cast off all doubt, plan, believe, and be free. I am not fearless, but I will rest in the palm of my fear and feel the warmth of its skin and know that I am alive, for now, and I will not be crushed.

Drinking Vodka on the Rocks

2010-01-24T20:57:00.000-08:00

is something I should not be doing right now.

But I don't know how else to cope with what is moving into me, through me, right now.

Tomorrow, nice and early, I will be submitting my source of my power, the center of my strife and struggle, to scrutiny under Magnetic Resonance Imaging. My hip. My darling hip. It shakes, it quivers, it bends and undulates. Why does it betray me now? Why this pain? Why does it make me stop?

What will I do?

How do I cope with this? What do I do with all that is inside me, clamoring to escape? Who am I, without my movement? Who am I without my dream? Who am I if no one understands the depth, the profundity, the pain, of what it is I am losing?

A painter I heard about quit painting because he said that no one cared if he kept painting. Six months later he started painting again because no one cared that he stopped.

No one cares about what I do except me. But I care so much it is tearing me apart. My dreams are me, and I am them, and they are the reason for my sentence in this slowly deteriorating flesh. If I can't pursue them with every fiber of my being, I do not know what will become of me. Except vodka. Vodka on the rocks.

Hip Troll Sighting

2010-01-11T15:54:00.000-08:00

So I just got back from seeing the superduper grand poo-bah of injured hips at Stanford. He immediately dismissed my vastly inferior x-rays and had me get a set of new ones. Much to his surprise he found a small troll crouched atop my femur gnawing irritably on the bone and making rude gestures at the technician. This explains the problem, of course.

The troll is in the shape of an impingement. That means that I was born with a little trolly knob on the head of my femur (see, it IS all my parent's fault) that, in most normal human beings, probably would sit unperturbed into my decrepitude. Alas, because I am crazy (that is definitely my fault) and insist on doing improbably things with my joints, my ligaments, particularly on the right side, have loosen up like overused bungee cords and now the femur is rattling around in the socket and the troll is gradually wearing away at my cartilage, labral tissue, nerves, and other important and tragically fragile bits. This is more pronounced on the right where the ligaments are sadder, but I also have the problem on my left hip, along with some calcification (baby trolls?).

While physical therapy may help by supporting the joint with muscle instead of the sad ligaments, if I want to resume my normal abnormal range of motion and avoid the long term risk of arthritis or (ack) hip replacement, the troll has got to go. This means surgery. The extent of the surgery will be determined after a really unpleasant MRI in which they inject dye into my hip using a needle that makes me flinch just imagining it. Recovery time is 4-8 months depending on how much troll has to be scraped off the bone.

I think I can still do handstands throughout. I'm going to start training handbalancing with Angelo next week. Hopefully the troll with not object overmuch and it will keep the tyger from gnawing at other delicate bits for the next... how many months?

Grrrrrrr....

2010-01-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

Says the tyger. It's been long enough.

Long enough spent resting, eating, feeling safe and cozy. Now I can feel the pacing beast inside me and it occurs to me, not for the first time...

Maybe I'm one of those people who will never "grow up". I talked to my mother on the phone today and she is shoving writing jobs down my throat, assuring me that I just have to find the right job, something really interesting, and I will be excited and passionate about it. She sounds a little desperate when she says it, desperate to convince me, desperate to believe it herself?

But I don't believe it. I may end up working some job type job for a little while right now to facilitate the healing of the hip, but passion? For writing about other people's lives, other people's dreams, for other people's publications? I used to think that being a journalist would be such a fabulous job, but that was before I found this life I have now. And I can't go back.

I can deal with many of the recent changes. My gym for instance. Only a few months ago I was aerobicizing away amidst herds of lanky models, carefully tanned actors, and grizzled producers. The Hollywood sign floated tauntingly outside the massive plate glass windows and everything was gleamingly fluorescent, new, painfully trendy. Up and coming DJs set up their rigs to spin dub step and mash ups for the hip hop and stripper pole classes taught by professional dancers. Half the breasts in the changing room had surgical assistance in maintaining their buoyancy.

Now the creaky hand-cranked windows in my gym look out onto a quaint bagel shop and a used electronics store with a broken neon sign that flashes intermittently. My fellow fitness-seekers are mostly dumpy Chinese housewives and retired cops on crutches. The one set of loudspeakers was, during the brief moment I removed my earphones, playing Lionel Ritchie. The pace of the average workout taking place around me is desultory that I frequently wonder why they come to the gym at all. As usual, I stand out a bit, which isn't necessarily a problem, but when combined with my broiling frustration it makes me feel a bit like the high school kid I used to be. Testy.

I love my home now, it's beautiful. It is far more beautiful than anyplace I anticipated living in the near future. I have a boudoire, and I sleep in a bed fit for royalty.

So I find it odd that I am so restless. Who wouldn't want what I have? And yet deep inside the tyger paces and growls and I have to get back to work soon. I have to get back to the struggle, the birthing. It's the only way I know to get this thing out, and if it stays inside me it will chew its way out through my ribcage, eviscerating me along the way.

Dreams Composted

2009-12-23T15:44:00.000-08:00

Bless me reader for I have sinned, it has been almost two months since my last blogfession.

I am sure you are out there, disgruntled, muttering, "And what kept you, eh?"

All two of you who even know about this blog that is.

Well, bugger, I'm not even going to offer you an apology. Life over the last two months has been like a high speed luge ride. You try typing when sliding down an icy maze and speeds so fast they make your hair hurt. Not that things have been bad, mind you. Just full of rapid unexpected change.

There's an oxymoron, unexpected change. The very thing that we should always expect, regardless of any other belief or hope, is change. And yet, still we toil away building our sand castles beneath the breakers and profess such outrage when our moats and turrets are swept away.

So here I am, bewildered but not beaten, facing a whole new set of challenges. Yippee.

Because I am sadistic and capricious I'm not going to go any further in describing the mundane circumstances of my changed fate. Instead I'm going to write about a dream I had about a week ago that has been lingering about my semi-consciousness in hope of more attention. I should mention that I frequently dream in Gaudi-like worlds of fantastic beauty, terror, and overabundance. Often my dreams barely tilt their hat at the confines of what we like to call"reality" and instead take off into a Jungian, Campbell-like world of symbols and grandeur. Sometimes I am not myself at all, but a spirit hovering about the life of another person in another time, watching as they meet out their days on this earth from cradle to grave.

This dream was somewhere between the two. As you will quickly deduce, it is heavily based on my own life, and yet not my life, not this world. I love it.

Here goes.

I was born and raised in the circus. Nature and nurture combined to make me a superlative performer, skilled on multiple apparatus, and a riveting showperson (was I male or female, not sure). I loved my life, my rising stardom, the glittering world of show in which I was something special.

Then one day I fell. Just an accident. The kind of thing that isn't really anyone's fault but makes people shrug and say... "sometimes these things just happen."

It happened to me and I was damaged, permanently. All my hard work, all my dreams, my entire identity was gone. Having no other skills or knowledge of the world I was largely unemployable, but my friends at the circus had pity on me and employed me has the janitor at the training facility. All day I mopped floors, cleaned up sweaty towels, fixed leaky toilets, watching the young and able-bodies aspirants around me as they hoisted their bodies into divine positions, over and over again. The younger ones did not remember my days of glory, and ran by me without a word. Some whispered stories about me behind my back, others talked to me with that barely concealed impatience that is reserved for those who everybody knows is without use or purpose in life. I was numb.

Then, while cleaning out a back room one day, I came across an old album of clippings, photographs, and writing. Limping off to a secluded corner I began to read it. I was clearly the property of Alberto, a Mexican stiltwalker who was a good friend of my father's).**

I did not know my father well, he had left when I was still a small child and gone to perform in Europe. We never heard from him again. Going through Alberto's book I found pictures of my father taken long after he had left, pictures of him with Alberto in a colossal and exquisite theater, somewhere in Europe. At that moment I know that I had to go find my father and restart my life elsewhere. I could not continue to be defined by this injury that I was allowing to shape my body and my life.

How I arrived in Europe, and which city I went to, are both unclear. Something my imagination will have to fill in should I decide to further work this story (which is clearly why the story came to me in the first place). I disembarked to find the city decimated by a new drug that had hit the streets and spread through the region like the plague. It seemed to be something akin to Ayuhuasca or San Pedro. It stripped away all ability for pretence, making people raw. One would expect a city of barbaric animals but the drug also gave people the ability to see the divine. They were living between worlds, surviving on grace alone, wild in the streets which had broken through with plants, trees, and jurassic vines that embraced buildings, lampposts, and the skeletons of unused motor vehicles.

I saw grand society ladies huddled around campfires with thugs and grizzled warriors. They looked right through each other, into each other, and saw each other's past lives like reflections in a pair of mirrors, only changing slightly with each repetition.

The city made me feel alive like I hadn't felt since my accident. More alive. The ground beneath my feet was breathing and I slipped through the streets, between the phantasms that were the city's residents, in an ecstasy. I knew that I was in pursuit of my destiny, the reason for my existence.

With the help of an old map I found the theater. It was towering, seats covered in napped old red velvet stacked in tiers up into the darkness of the distant domed ceiling. Somehow trees had grown up within and around the theater, replacing its walls and part of the roof with towering trunks and canopies the size of a city block. The scale dwarfed even the tallest man, and yet it was the perfect stage, rigged with vines and lit by speckled spots of light from the distant sun or moon.

I knew that my father was here, somewhere, still at work creating spectacle, leading the people through this underworld journey. I just had to find him, and find my part, the part written for me.

**Note: My father actually did have a friend named Alberto from Mexico who I believe became a politician in his home state. He helped my parents replaster the ceiling of my childhood home by walking on stilts instead of relying on a ladder.

Cigarettes and Shady Agents

2009-11-05T03:09:00.000-08:00

Hollywood. Sometimes I love it for its dirty glamour, sometimes the glamour wears like worn lamé and all that's left is the dirty.

On Sunday I drove back down from SF for a private party, a dear friend celebrating a decade of teaching belly dance. While I was very much looking forward to seeing friends, having a relaxing evening, and wiggling about in my scanties in front of a crowd, I couldn't suppress some inner grumblies regarding the lack of sufficient remuneration in such admittedly pleasant activities.

Part of the problem with doing what you love for a living is that when you love it, you must do it, whether or not someone is willing to pay you for it. Almost by definition, work is something that you do because someone pays you to do it. Why should they pay you if you want to do it? For a much more complete discussion of this topic read "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde.

Fortunately, shortly after arriving back in LA I was presented with an opportunity to do something decidedly unpleasant, for money. I was slapping on my war paint (just got a new foundation from Makeup Forever that I luurrve) when the phone rang. It was a fellow calling from V*** Casting regarding a belly dance gig that I had applied for on LA Casting over a week ago. The gig started at 10pm that evening, could I do it. The guy sounded a little desperate, and more than a little stoned, so I talked his price up by 75% and agreed to run over there after my friend's party.

It was a 3 hour promotional shift for a certain unnamed cigarette brand that frequently employs belly dancers because of their North African themed mascot.

Now, working for cigarette companies contains within it a morass of ethical dilemmas which, in my college years, flush with scholarships and a lucrative writing gig, I would have debated with gusto. However in the last year or two those debates have been trampled by the stampede of unpaid bills, and I'm sorry to say that this was not my first stint for this particular cigarette company.

I myself do not smoke, have not smoked since high school, and personally loathe cigarette smoke. Yet I had agreed to stand around in the smoker's tank of a hip Hollywood nightclub for three hours in my belly dance gear to attract potential smokers to the nook where company reps were giving away free packs in exchange for the victim's personal details (name, age, home address) delivered by a convenient scan of their drivers licenses. Were I to dwell for too long on the fundamental yuckiness of this situation, I would not be able to play the part. So no dwelling, just smiling.

The three hours passed relatively uneventfully. There was one other chick on the job as well, a "burlesque" dancer with some distant belly dance training who had actually been forced to audition for this shitty gig. Even worse, she didn't seem to think the gig was all that shitty. She grew up in LA and I think she felt "cool." Never the less, we kept each other company.

The first club we worked at was on Hollywood Blvd, not far from Vine, in the heart of Hollywood hipsterville. The smoker's section was a midsized room blocked off from the rest of the club by large panes of glass. It rapidly filled with smoke, and the smokers moved about like fish in an algae-infested aquarium. Fish with very stylish haircuts, cropped jackets, skinny jeans, and designer footwear. Each of them walked, sat, talked, and leaned against the wall with careful casualness as if auditioning for the part of "smoker" in the nightclub scene of a Hollywood hipster movie. One bouncy Peruvian with a belly full of booze tried to talk my phone number out of me, but for the most part these characters were far too cool to have anything to do with a chick in gold sequins. The cigarettes attracted them to us, rather than vice versa. Which was fine with me.

For the last hour we walked around the corner to another Hollywood hangout. It was a reggae/dancehall night and the crowd could not have been more different. Most of the crowd was black, quite a few were older and elegantly dressed, and everyone appeared to be stoned. Joints were being passed back and forth in the smoking section, which was a tall white tent outside the front door, and the whole place was so packed that we were squeezed into a corner behind a girl in a mini skirt who was swaying back and forth with her eyes closed and singing along to all the songs at the top of her lungs. I felt like a backup dancer with the wardrobe from a different show. A couple of the older gentlemen came over to dance with us but they were so flowery and courteous in their lilting Jamaican accents that I hardly minded, and it helped the time pass faster.

About ten minutes before we were supposed to finish up our employer appeared, the agent who had called me earlier in the evening. Apparently the cigarette company had hired V*** Casting to supply the belly dancers, and he had hired us. A pox on middlemen. He was light-skinned, wiry, with thick modish glasses and the jittery energy of a speed freak. I disliked him immediately. After checking to make sure that we were dancing he ran off again and didn't reappear until we were packed up and had blown up his phone for about ten minutes. He looked even more wired.

The chick who was running things for the cigarette company handed him a check, and he turned to the other dancer and I and said that we were to get our cars and meet him at an ATM where he was going to cash the checks so that he could pay us.

Now, for those of you who might be thinking that this could be a bad idea, I agree. Who is this character? I know nothing about him. I could walk to my car and never see him again and then how would I get paid for three hours of lung-polluting drudgery? Or worse... he could be crazy or violent or just another pervy, entitled LA industry pig.

I asked him for a business card, I figured at least then I would know there was some sort of legit operation behind this hustle, and that's when he started to get angry. He began to berate me in a loud voice, still in the middle of the club and in front of the cigarette crew. He demanded to know why I was being "difficult" and why I didn't appreciate how lucky I was that he chose me out of all the thousands of girls who wanted this job. Typical. How is it that these guys don't realize that they are walking clichés? How can anyone live with being so blatantly unoriginal?

At this point the cigarette chick, who was as tired and cranky as I was, stepped in and asked what the fuck was going on and why he was yelling and carrying on in their place of employment. I told her what he was up to and that I thought it was seriously shady, and to my relief she agreed.

This is what pissed me off the most. The other belly dancer decided to get involved to tell shady agent that she had no problem and would go with him to the bank. Honestly. This is why people think they can treat us like chattle. Because for everyone one of me there are fifty of her, desperate little girls with the self esteem of a wadded up tissue who will roll over for any man with an ounce of power, or just a Napoleon complex. They both disgusted me.

However, I did have cigarette chick on my side and she was not having any of this. When we both announced that I was not going to the bank with him, he then suggested that I accompany him to his car to get a personal check. Then he wanted to know where my car was, and began to yell at me again when I wouldn't tell him, especially after I suggested that perhaps he should have brought his checkbook from his car since he knew in advance that he would have to pay us.

Finally cigarette security arrived at the request of cigarette chick and it was decided that they would all wait with me in front of the club while he slimed off to his car to get me a check. The other belly dancer left with him. Part of me wants to look her up and make sure she's okay, but she didn't even turn her head as she walked past me and I am convinced that she was working her way into his good graces by denigrating my ungrateful manners as they disappeared into the darkened streets.

Whatever. We have already established that my ethics were compromised five hours earlier when I wasn't angry and exhausted. She wants to treat herself this way I can't save her. I'm no fucking superhero.

I was heartened, as I waited for shady agent to return with his checkbook, by listening to cigarette chick's impassioned monologue delivered into a pink iPhone about the disreputability of shady agent and how this particular cigarette company will never work with him again.

Finally he reappeared and scrawled me a check in childish hand, post-dating it by three days. When I pointed this out he whined that it was my fault for being so difficult... if I had just come with him to the atm I could have gone home with cash... blah blah. He then proceeded to grab the arm of cigarette chick and launch into a tirade: "I have thousands of girls, much better girls than this one. Next time I'm going to send you a really good girl... " His voice was raised in thinly veiled desperation. I saw for a moment the shabbiness of him, the glamour worn thin, his twitchy eyes inadvertently telling a story of glory long gone.

We walked away from him, leaving him to scurry back to whatever dank life he led and whatever satisfaction he could wrest from lording it over the other dancer. Perhaps their relationship was more symbiotic than I had suspected, feeding each others' illusions of the glitter world. But not me. I wont play that game. The glitter world is fun sometimes, but it isn't the real world and I wont sacrifice my pride or my safety to gain entry.

The next day I took my check to the bank where a perky teller wearing false eyelashes and a giant hairpiece sympathized with my story and allowed me to withdraw the funds early. It was a good thing, she told me, since he barely had enough in the account to cover the check. Now I can afford to dry clean my belly dance costume which reeks of cigarettes.

Me and My Psoas

2009-10-19T03:55:00.000-07:00

The psoas is an under-credited muscle that runs from the middle of the spine down the back and wraps around to attach at the top of the leg inside the thigh. It is part of the hip flexor family of muscles, and is one of the largest and strongest muscles in the body. While you may not spend much time dwelling on your psoas, you could take this moment to appreciate how it helps you stand up, bend forward, walk, and do all manner of neat things with your legs, torso, and pelvis. Heck, your probably using it right now.

The thing about the psoas that I find most interesting is that it is one of the primary muscles that engages by the fight or flight alarm. Some predator leaps out at you, all fangs and death, and the psoas leaps into action to help you react. This means that the psoas is one of the most likely muscles to store trauma and stress. Overstimulated, the poor psoas winds itself up like a winch, tugging on the lower back, pelvis, and leg in a fashion that can become most unpleasant after not so long.

My psoas is seriously overactive. We have a rocky relationship, my psoas and me. I do appreciate the way that it hoists my legs up in the air, and allows me to keep my torso upright, but like a meddlesome maiden aunt it wants to be involved in everything I do, all the time, and manages to make a terrible mess of an otherwise straightforward situation.

From an early age I have suffered from lordosis, otherwise known as a sway back. Kids used to tease me and say I was pregnant because when I was in grade school my comfortable way of standing was with my back so arched that you could have balanced a teapot on the base of my spine. I was brought to you by the letter 'S'.

Of course, it didn't hurt back then. But the more mileage I put on these bones the more my overenthusiastic soas tugs on me. When I poke at it through my abdominal wall I can feel it like a steel cable. If I sit for too long, say on my regular SF-LA commute, it contracts to the point that I am in constant pain until I go into some deep contortion stretches.

But contortion is where the psoas really messes me up. While a short psoas and lordosis can lead to a nice bendy middle back, which I have, it eliminates the possibility of bending in your hips or lower back. How can I lengthen the front of my hips when they are clamped in place by this psychotic muscle?

When I stretch my lower back I can feel the psoas straining against me, and I can't seem to get it to relax. If I push through it I feel as though I am pushing into the very depths of the netherworld. My vision blurs, a ringing in my ears clangs as an alarm bell... turn back now it says. I get queasy and I am filled with an overwhelming urge to run, and a sharp certainty of immanent death. It's no fun.

However I do it, five days a week, over and over again. I pull on that psoas muscle, releasing its load of primal panic into my system, and taste the underworld in my mouth. I've been pushing in particularly hard for the last month or so because its hampering my handstands by contracting at random times and pulling me off balance. I'm trying to stretch it into submission.

Sadly, I've been feeling a lumpy pain in my right psoas and I have a feeling that the stubborn creeper has yanked at the tendon with a tad too much zeal and I'm a bit strained. Now I have to back off, apply ice, and wait it out.

I'm not giving up though. Once the strain has improved I will once again venture into the dark reaches of the psoas, and it will stretch. It will.

Lights up: Lights out

2009-10-17T01:46:00.000-07:00

One of the exciting things about life is having new experiences. I've always abhorred the idea of doing the same thing every day, never pushing into unfamiliar territory, never taking a risk. But the downside of living life always one or two steps outside of your comfort zone is that sometimes you take one step too many. That's what happened tonight.

I performed at a fundraising event held at the circus school where I just started to teach a stretching class. It is run by some former Cirque du Soleil performers and so far it is the most welcoming and positive environment I have found in which to do my bendy thang in LA. This is the first time I have performed for these folks and, even though it was a low-pressure "ambient" performance, no choreography, I wanted to bring off a good debut.

Being a late blooming performer, and an unlikely contortionist, I suffer from a meddlesome inferiority complex. I am always surrounded by people who have been in the circus world for far longer than I have, who have impressive skills, and are sometimes too young to remember when Guns N Roses were good. So get insecure. Most performers are insecure though, so I try not to let it overwhelm me.

But in situations like tonight, I really want to prove that I deserve to be included in the ranks of the "real" performers. So tonight I debuted my new contortion table.

I am very excited about my table. The first time I ever performed on a table was the first time I ever performed contortion, my debut with SB. I have never been more terrified of anything in my life, including when I was stranded in rural Brazil with no money, lost in a blizzard in the desert with a sprained ankle, or being interrogated in a Cuban jail. I would have happily gone back to that fetid cubicle with the surly soldier to avoid having to get up on that stage, on that table, with a top tier contortionist, surrounded by fire, in front of my whole community both friends and frenemies, and try to bend. For a week prior to the show I spent most of my time standing on the table and crying, trying just to do a backbend to bridge without having a panic attack. The day before the show I could still barely do an elbow stand, elbows precariously close to the edge of the table, without hyperventilating. I sincerely hoped that I would be hit by a car, bitten by a viper, anything to escape that performance.

I am forever grateful to both M and SB for insisting that I go through with it. SB just wouldn't hear my protestations, insisting that there was no reason why I couldn't do it. Her faith in me seemed lunatic, but it helped to pull me through. Then one night while I was lying sleepless and jittery M said, "You don't have to do it, you can back out and she can do it as a solo. But then you'll probably never do it again because it will just get harder."

I knew he was right. Certainly more practice would have made me more comfortable on the table and more certain of my tricks, but the fear would have won that battle, gaining ground against me. The next battle would have been more difficult. I could have lost the war. So I performed.

Tonight was nowhere near as terrifying. Truth is I wasn't really nervous at all. A little excited, but I've worked on other tables before and I wasn't going to do any new tricks, so I saw no reason to anticipate disaster. It wasn't until I was warmed up backstage and ready to go that I made the Bad Decision.

I should know better. I do know better. I just wasn't thinking clearly. I know that whenever you are performing on stage, the adrenaline and stage lights and the energy of the audience combine into an intoxicant more potent than vicodin washed down with Jack Daniels. You feel no pain, no limits. Pre-show fear evaporates into the laser-sharp focus of movement, energy, and balance. I know this.

When I taught fire eating I always cautioned my students against trying anything new on stage. Only one stupid thing at a time, I always told them. Performing counts as one. New things count as another. It is dangerous to try something new when you are high on show. Why, oh why, didn't I take my own advice?

At the last minute I decided to add in my new finale move. I have not practiced it very much yet because you need a table to do it, and I have not had much time with my table. From pretzel you slide your feet off the edge of the table and let them dangle in the air while your butt happily squishes against your head. It is challenging mostly because the absence of a floor under your feet means that there is extra weight pulling your back into a deeper bend, but working on the bench I've lowered my feet all the way to the floor with a spot so I thought I'd be fine. I did it once backstage right before I went on, no problem.

This was going to be my big finale, my deepest bend. The rest of the act went swimmingly. I moved confidently and relatively smoothly through all of my regular movements, interspersed with some belly dance. The table felt nice and solid, very little wobble, and even though I took out the leg scale because my hip is tight and tweeky and I didn't come into full contortion elbow stand because my hips were tightening up too much and I thought I might lose it backwards off the edge, I felt good. Just the last move. No problem.

I did my backbend, grabbed the edge of the table behind me for support, pushed my feet out into the void, and...

nothing

sound. lights. faces. buzzing noise. confusion. where am I?

The brain gets irritable when deprived of blood.

I am sitting on the floor next to my table SBY is next to me saying "you just got a little dizzy." Of course I instantly know what happened and feel like a total asshole but I am a performer first, and asshole second, so I spring to my feet and take a bow and walk off stage.

Fuck. I blacked out on stage. How terribly embarrassing.

SBY and AG are immediately backstage with icepacks and water but the truth is that I felt fine. Just irritated. How could I let that happen? How could I do something so stupid? Damn damn damn damn damn. One step too far outside the comfort zone, and I fell off the cliff. Or the table. Same difference.

The one thing that made me feel better is that, other than the circus performers, no one knew I blacked out. Apparently I am quite graceful when unconscious. I just rolled sideways and landed in a gracefully seated position beside my table, and, if I hadn't had that dizzy, bleary look on my face, I probably could have pulled it off as an unusual dismount. Luck? Years of dance training? Who cares. I can pass out like a pro.

Ouch

2009-10-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

Third day in a row doing real training wish SB at the school. When I am on my own in LA I do try to push myself to the point where all I want to do is vomit, cry, then slip into a merciful coma, but it's just not the same.

There is no one to stand on my oversplits until my butt lands gently on the floor like a diver touching down at 100 feet.

No one to say "You can't go home until you do a successful tuck-up" and then hold me to it as my arms shake and I continually knock my head against the wall when they give out.

In LA there are no other contortionists at the gym, so hanging out in pretzel with my feet on the floor is impressive to all the aerial students, and I get to feel like a bendy rock star. Even when I know I could push myself further, no one else does. So sometimes, just a little, I cheat. I only stack up two mats for oversplits, when I know that I should stack up a third since the mats are so squashed from years of pounding bodies that I can easily sit on the floor with only two. I don't always do my full pretzel routine, pushing my hands forward so that all of my weight is on my chin and neck, because it makes my breathing difficult and I get panicky. As a result, I am not pushing hard enough into those areas of my body where the fear is hiding.

I can point to the things that scare me:

Wrapping my feet into my armpits to prepare for push-ups, when all of my weight is on my chin and I have to use my abs to push my butt forward, squeeze my knees in, and not fall over.
Snake in pretzel with arms up, again with the weight on the chin, off balance, total compaction of the upper back
Dangling my feet off the edge of the table in pretzel
Catch ankles, just because some days my lower back will not go and I feel off balance, and because it hurts my lower back and shoulders like they are full of gravel
And last, but certainly not least, those damned handstands

Training with SB makes me appreciate how much harder I need to push, so that when I am up here it doesn't feel like such a big stretch (no pun intended). Today, after four hours, I was a spot on the carpet. Still, I do hold out hope that I can train my hips to relax, my body to balance, and one day achieve some beautiful handstands and, the holy grail, mouthpiece. Yes, one day, mouthpiece.

Why am I awake?

2009-10-01T03:12:00.000-07:00

No seriously.

I'm still kinda snurgly, especially due to the fact that yet another chunk of LA is in flames, spewing carbon residue into the atmosphere and polluting my delicate bronchioles. I finally hauled my carcass to the circus gym to teach a class and do some desultory training that only confirmed how hopeless I have become after three entire days off from training. My hip flexors feel like piano wire and my lower back feels like it full of rusty ball bearings. All squeak and crunch, no bendy bendy.

I did enjoy teaching. Teaching people how to stretch is different than teaching dance. I do enjoy teaching dance when I have students who actually want to learn, rather than bitch about how difficult it is and how they just want to look like Shakira (good luck chubs). But stretching is more of a self-selecting bunch. Stretching kinda sucks. It hurts. It's scary. It's intense, emotional. You quickly discover that the gates to heaven and the gates to hell are closer together than you might expect. You want to stop. Now.

And going into teaching this class, I tell myself the probably most people will stop. They do with SB, after a semester or two, or just one class. Hell, I stopped a couple of times when the pain and frustration was overwhelming me. But like me, there are people out there who know that on the other side of that pain there is something beautiful. Is it freedom? Self-knowledge? Some featherlight touch of the divine? I'm still not sure, but it keeps on pulling me in deeper, sinking into the maw of the bend. I like the idea of initiating other people into this weird-ass journey. Maybe it will help me to better understand why I do this to myself. Why after every contortion performance I have to sit and cry hysterically, not from fear or pain or sadness, but something else. A profound release. A crazy river.

Plus I think I'm pretty good at teaching this. And I like being good at stuff, because I'm no zenned-out guru, I'm just another neurotic artist.

So anyway, after the gym I came home and ate a frozen dinner (shut up, it was Trader Joe's so it must be healthyish) and was almost ready to retire when a flurry of text messages called me out to Jumbo's Clown Room.

For those of you gentle readers not familiar with the LA uberhip, Jumbo's Clown Room is a hipster strip club. The girls don't get naked, and most of them have tattoos and no obvious surgical modifications, and there is clown art, all of which make it "cool." You can hang out and have a drink and imagine yourself in the nightclub where Alex (Flashdance you fools!) got her start, and you can tell yourself you aren't a perve 'cause its kinda artsy. The girls are all attractive, my friend being the by far the yummiest and one of the few that had any kind of facial expression beyond the typical stripper moue: mouth half open, lips hanging slack, eyes drooping in an indifferent stare that burns a quick passage through you, through the bar, through the dusty floorboards and the autographed pictures of porn clowns on the walls into a world without sweaty, crumpled dollar bills. Or a world with more sweaty, crumpled dollar bills, a lot more.

Then I come home, and still I'm awake. Isn't all that enough to tire me out?

Wait, I think I just got sleepy. Could it be? Yes! I'm yawning and my eyes feel a bit droopy. Gonna get on the next bus to the other side.

TV Game Show Purgatory

2009-09-30T00:58:00.000-07:00

Now that I've primed the pump, time for a real bloggish type post.

I must write about this experience not only because it is amusing, in retrospect, but because writing about it may enable me to suck some sort of value from an otherwise appallingly worthless day.

Being as I am here in LA for the week, another underemployed performer swimming upstream in this dismal economy, I have spent unseemly amounts of time surfing lacasting.com and CL in search of some gig that doesn't suck and pays enough for me to avoid insulting myself by applying for it. Or, even if I am insulting myself, I will at least be able to fill the mini up with gas and stop by the local TJs for my carrots, humus, and iced tea.

So I found a gig as a paid audience member for a game show. The game show is called Catch 21 and is a combination trivia game and card game, the rules of which are irrelevant to my story and certainly not worth explaining. It is shot in a studio in Hollywood, and pays just more than minimum wage for a supposed 8 hour day. Desperate for some sort of nibble on my line, I applied and was hastily accepted. Too hastily. I should have known.

For starters, you have to call in to a recorded message to get instructions for the following day and the instructions include "don't show up with a hangover." They should have added that you may want to bring a rusty spoon to scoop out your eyeballs after the first five hours.

The call time was 10am on Sunday at the lot in Hollywood, but they asked us to get there early to park (street parking) and check in. Of course, when I showed up there was no one around except a couple of what I like to call "The Bambis," the leggy prom queens recently arrived in Hollywood and bewildered by the fact that they have been in town two weeks, given three blowjobs, and still don't have an agent. There was also one haggard-looking guy with severely gelled hair who would not stop talking to his baby-faced neighbor about the "cold hard truth" of the acting business. I really wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up because clearly none of us should be dispensing advice, as we're all standing on the sidewalk getting ready to pimp ourselves out to the lowest form of entertainment on television.

Finally a disheveled young man shows up with a clipboard and starts herding us into clumps based on which casting agency roped us. More people trickle in, most of them holding Starbucks beverages of various sizes. Because we are in Hollywood, and this is after all a television job, most of them are exceptionally good-looking in that made-up, played-up way. Do I look like that? There was a large herd of teeny-boppers who were way too excited about everything, two guys who look like they thought they were auditioning for a movie about the Rat Pack, a girl with a huge afro reading "The Sound and the Fury." My favorite was a makeup-free eastern European woman wearing a camel colored cardigan, a sun visor, and a fanny pack who relentlessly harried the clipboard guy because she wasn't on any of his lists. I liked her because she was so clearly out of place, I had to salute her tenacity at talking her way in.

When we were all checked off and accounted for, and the sun visor lady had managed to be added to our ranks, we were lined up on benches much as I imagine the Nazis lined up their victims for the gas chamber. More people with clipboards, headsets, and Carharts were walking around with that special, production crew swagger that says "I'm union and make more in one than you pretty fuckers make in a week."

As we were filing in I heard one of them quip, "Oh you'll be screaming all right... in agony."

The studio itself looked like every other television studio. Equipment worth a king's ransom abounded, balanced out by a chintzy, day-glo set that would not pass muster in an off-the-strip Vegas casino. And the ranks of tiered seats, to be our prison for the next ten hours, ranks around the open floor, menacing in their plastic austerity.

As soon as seats were assigned a clear hierarchy became apparent. Certain seats were on camera more often than others. Those seats were given to the prettiest people. There was a second tier, and a third, rippling away from the epicenter of screenworthiness until you got to the back upper corner where they stuck the families of the contestants. These were mostly the kind of people that you imagine would actually watch a show like this. Doughy, excitable, unaccustomed to the basic tools of self-grooming, like tweezers. However the pretty people had to be rationed so that the devoted regulars of the show didn't notice the same doe-eyed beauty with a blonde weave smiling behind the host in one show, and the dealer in another. So we were shuffled, like the cards, between every taping. And, like the cards, we were stacked.

I was shuffled in and out of the first and second tier, primarily the second because I lack the bright-eyed enthusiasm of the high school pep squad girls. That's what they were, a pep squad out for a field trip. For the first taping I ended up between a girl who was purse-texting at every break (cell phones were forbotten so she was trying to be subtle) and an aspiring comedian whose dream was to host one of those whacky Japanese game shows where the contestants all end up in the emergency room covered in mud.

The fluffer came out and introduced himself. Joe, another comedian, bulging and sweating and clearly having to dig deep from the get-go. He did his best to get us pumped, with the assistance of Mac the DJ spinning pop hits from the back of the house and the pep squad girls who had clearly never done anything nearly this exciting or glamorous in their entire lives. I felt for Joe, even liked him a little. He, like the rest of the crew, knew that this was a craptastic little show and we were mostly just there because we were broke and it was Sunday and life is cruel. He did his best to entertain us by forcing audience members to tell jokes and perform stupid human tricks in exchange for prizes clearly purchased at the local dollar store, or perhaps from a guy selling stuff off a blanket on Hollywood Blvd.

Joe coached us on how to cheer, when to cheer (at pretty much every stupid-ass thing anyone did), and that we were supposed to plaster on a smile at all times. Especially those of us in the hot seats, where the camera was focused most often. Don't let that smile slip, don't slouch, don't gaze off for a brief respite of daydreaming. Don't pick your teeth, your nose, or your ears. And above all, don't shout out the answers or heckle the contestants. Easier said than done.

I was already completely convinced that I had made a grievous, terrible error. The air conditioning was cranked up to arctic conditions and goosebumps decorated my bare arms and legs. I already had a headache and the feeling that humanity deserved to exterminated and Armageddon couldn't come fast enough was making me grouchy. I decided to minimize my conversation and see this as an opportunity to exercise my cheek muscles.

The first three contestants filed up to their little podiums and tested their buzzers. Jim, Debbie, and Lakendra. All three of them were excited and nervous. Debbie could barely introduce herself (schoolteacher, mother of three, married twenty years, originally from Kansas). I found out later that most of the contestants were recruited on the streets by people whose job it is to spot a moron from a distance and convince them that humiliating themselves on national television would be a fantastic way to spend the weekend.

The host jogged out (a D-list celebrity, once played a supporting role on the Fresh Prince of Bel Aire), closely followed by the "dealer"(in quotations because the cards were the size of coffee table books and all she had to do was pull them up one by one out of a holder, then drop them into a slot). She was extremely petite with a face that paid for her surgeon's second Benz and long dark hair. She had to smile constantly too, but fortunately the surgery had assured that it was the only expression she could make.

Cameras at speed, and we all started clapping and cheering and smiling. I kept reminding myself that no one I know could see me, nor would ever watch the show and spot me in the background. Just play the part, play the part and you can go home.

I'm not the kind of girl that likes to cheer. I'm a shitty audience member in the best of circumstances. If I like something, I lose myself in it and often forget to make a noise until the end. If I don't like something I'll likely be the asshole making snarky comments and snickering. I will occasionally cheer if I feel like the performer really needs some encouragement and I want to throw them a floatation device, or if a particular moment rips the cheer from my unsuspecting throat, but in general I don't like it. At belly dance shows I will zaghareet, but I was 100% that, should a ululation warble across the studio, homeland security would show up and cart me off for unAmericanization.

But damnit, I tried. Woohoo, I cried with all the bop I could muster, clapping up by my face as instructed, because lap clapping doesn't look good on camera. I smiled, the smile stretched across my face into a hideous rictus of feigned enthusiasm. When the smiles flagged good 'ole Joe would shout, "Smile! Smile like this is the best day of your life!" His cry was like the cracking of a whip over our backs. Smile. Clap. Smile. Clap. Laugh. Cheer.

It was hell.

Smile and cheer when the contestants forgot the rules. Smile when they didn't know the name of the last president, or in what century Columbus discovered America, or that the Yangtze is a river in China. Smile when they answered multiple choice questions with a forth option of their own invention. To be sure, two contestants did manage to wrangle their way to the grand prize of $25k, and I'm genuinely pleased particularly because one of them was an animal rescuer and I imagined all of the puppies and kitties getting new beds and extra kibble. But mostly it was a long string of inane drivel that would have earned at best an eyebrow twitch and a humph (not even worth an eye roll and a snort).

Some time after the fifth hour Joe started handing out candy to keep us alert. After six hours we were allowed a lunch break, then back to the hard plastic seats for three more hours.

There were two things that saved me from faking an epileptic seizure to escape. One was a lovely lady who gave me a throat lozenge that helped to decongest me (been sick for the last two days thanks to those air conditioners). The other was that, on the seventh taping, my rictus must have grown too creepy because I and a couple of other "pretties" were moved to the ugly people section where the camera never ventured.

Suddenly it was like high school all over again. I slouched against the wall in the top row, occasionally batting my hands together in a desultory clap-like motion, finally relaxing my twitchy smile muscles into a comfortable glower. Joe could dance and cavort all he liked, I was safe in the back corner at last, with the two Rat Pack guys and a couple of other sour-pusses whose good looks couldn't overcome their bad attitudes. A skinny, unshaved queen in front of me shamelessly heckled the contestants while discussing his bulimia problem with everyone within earshot. The girl next to me rolled a joint on her thigh. It started to feel like home!

By the time we were finally released, all shell-shocked with aching bladders (no bathroom breaks, probably because they fear we would have drowned ourselves in the bowl), I could barely stumble to my car. All I could think was that I had finally answered the eternal question of where I would end after death if I were bad (and believed in such claptrap as heaven and hell). On the sidewalk in front of the studio we lined up to receive our envelopes of cash in small, unmarked bills, making me feel even more like a Medieval indentured servant or a cheap whore.

It is difficult for me to imagine a financial scenario precarious enough to induce me to return to Catch 21. However, should I remain in the swirling eddy of underemployed Hollywood talent and someday end up back in that studio, at least I will be prepared. Fake teeth, a mumu, and coke bottle glasses will ensure me a seat safely in the bad kids section where I can be my pissy self. Smile for the camera my ass.

First Post

2009-09-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

I'm home sick with the Los Angeles lurgy for the second day in a row. This is my third bout with the lurgy since moving to LA in April, and I am convinced it is attributable to the heavy, particulate haze hanging over the city. My lungs, like the rest of me, seem to be delicate and easily corrupted by life's little contaminants.

At any rate, I've been bandying about the idea of starting a blog for... longer than I care to admit. Today seemed like as good a day as any considering I have done almost nothing of worth since struggling into consciousness this morning.

I dread the first post, its emptiness, the expectation of pithiness. So, to relieve myself of the pressure, here it is. The first post.

And scene.