A Hooker’s work is never done

…unfortunately didn’t involve getting a chance to sing…although I would have. Steve and I had our slip in for a duet on “Take Your Mama”, and I was gonna go solo on “Gin and Juice”. BUT we had to leave before our ticket came up, because some random girl from our hotel was waiting outside in the car for us (she was only 18).

In other news that doesn’t involve partying in Louisville, I went to a seminar on Digital Imaging for the Scenic Artist, a Fellows address that was surprisingly moving and inspiring, a get-together held by a magazine for painters that I never knew existed, and a Mingling Thing for NCSA students, alumna, and faculty. I spent my extra time wandering around the Stage Expo and looking at Stuff…new innovaiton in lights and sound, mainly, but also costumes, scenery, automation, rigging, and props. There’s also design work on display, educational and professional…some of it horrible, some of it exciting and beautiful. All in all, a really interesting experience so far, to be surrounded by Thousands of people with similar interests that are all really happy to be here and really excited about what they’re doing. It’s a small world, this professional theater world, and most of the community is Right Here…that’s fun…you never who that person standing next to you in line for the buffet may be…or what kind of job they could give you because you made them laugh during the three minutes you waited together for miniature quiches and hunks of melon.

Sometimes I get claustrophobic in crowds, that’s a nice twist for all of the fun and business happening around here. But it IS fun and I have met some interesting people that will likely be colleagues at Some Point in my career, so I’d say that this has been money well spent.

That, and getting the extra week off of school to hang out in Louisville, I mean.

Louisville is proving to be a really fun city…I’m pleasantly suprised. I wish there was a little bit more happening in the actual downtown, but the architecture is amazing, and the view is good, and if I had more money, I bet those restaurants are really tasty eats.

We discovered Bardstown Rd. today, in the Highlands area…SUPER cute. I found myself thinking, “I could live here…” I know I’m just being romanced by the fun and excitement of exploring a new city, but I really dig it. There seems to be plenty to do, the theater scene seems strong, it’s an aesthetcially pleasing city, the people are nice and helpful…a good combo.

The conference is going well…we went to a too-long speech early this morning, but we got to hear one of The scene designers of this century speak, and that was interesting. Steve and I went to a lecture about Priscilla Queen of the Desert and the effectiveness of the fantasy costumes employed…pretty interesting. The woman was well-spoken and cute.

We proceeded on to a seminar called Queer Nation…it got cancelled, and I have to say, that’s fine by me. There was a white girl with corn rows and a middle aged man with clear braces…I might be queer, but not That Kind of queer.

Later, an all-conference party…I ran into my dear friend Heather on the street…so happy to see her! We absorbed her party, and strolled down to the Kentucky Arts Center on the waterfront for a big reception. I secretly hate crowds, and as such, had no real inclination to shove through Lots O People to get to the bar, so we ended up leaving and heading back towards the hotel, and back towards the gay bars, having heard that there was an underwear party at the bar across the street. We had a twenty year old with us ,though, and we couldn’t stay. Alas…the boys weren’t that cute, anyway.

We went to another bar, to a drag show, but unfortunately, this was not the bar where our teacher and fellow classmates were partying…I’m not used to having to factor in people that can’t get into bars. Makes me feel old…

Conferences are fun.

They mess up the aesthetics with their irritating flashing. I’m disappointed in you, Friendster.

Louisville is neat…I didn’t know that there was a waterfront district, much less a happenin’ waterfront district. Our hotel room is a couple blocks off the river…good location.

The conference goes into full swing tomorrow…I think I’m going to go to a couple seminars–one is called Drag, Gays and Priscilla; the role of the scene designer. The other is called Queer Nation. I don’t know what either are about, techincally, but they sound interesting. And maybe a good place to ‘network’…

The drive to Kentucky was suprisingly pleasant and went by fairly quickly. West Viriginia gave the appearance of being an industrial armpit, and Virginia wasn’t much different. I hope the states vary more than the view from the highway. Kentucky with it’s acres and acres of horse pasture was a nice change of scenery. Who knew that Virginia was only 45 minutes away from Winston Salem?

There is a Makers Mark factory fairly close by where you can go dip your own bottle in wax. Sounds like fun to meeee.

What is also fun is the fact that spring break continues….!

Jason Mraz’s song “Bella Luna” may be the most romantic song I’ve ever heard. It makes me want to be in love, late on a clear summer night. lying on a blanket and watching a meteor shower. Or something equally cliche’ and totally cute. He’s got the sweetest voice…It kills me. The song almost makes me want to sleep with HIM, it’s so good.

I’m a sucker for those cheesy, physical humor comedies of the mid to late eighties…National Lampoon’s Vacation a notable favorite of the genre. Steve, Kaylan and I watched it NLV today; Kaylan had never seen it, and we were all tied to Steve’s couches, I with a stack of CD’s to burn, and they with Steve’s newest hair-do. He had to get a new checkerboard for USITT…

So, I’ve seen this movie a million times…it makes me laugh really hard like an idiot every time. Today, a thought finally came to form, after years of knocking around in my brain…funny that Chevy Chase helped the epiphany out of bed. It goes like this: As funny as I find Chevy Chase’s movies, I take issue with the message this film, and others like it, send. Clark W. Griswold has a decently lucrative job, a hot blonde wife, two typical teenagers, the whole American Dream set-up. The strangest part of the deal is that his family stands by him…he’s insensitive, self-centered, constantly flirting with women other than his wife, losing large sums of money, humiliating his family, and generally fucking up in indecent and morally objectionable ways.

Maybe I’ve read too many of my feminist magazines, but this time, the movie wasn’t as funny. Because I realized that this Male Figure isn’t just an institution of the 80’s…it’s everywhere, this image of the loveable fuck-up that really, truly only has his family’s best interest at heart when he goes out and buys a gun to force his way into the amusement park, or gets slobbery drunk and gambles the family’s money away. It’s the Simpsons. It’s the Family Guy. It’s most sitcoms on during Prime Time…the man is always this bumbling schmuck that can’t do right, except when it comes to sweet talking his family. I dunno…it bugs me. I really like laughing at Chevy Chase and all his counterparts….they can do slapstick like no other. But why this ridiculous format of incompetence and moral decay? I actually had the thought that the most decent male figure I could think of in television history was Dan from Roseanne…he was portrayed as a real stand-up guy. Yeah, he had his faults, and in the later years, he did have an affair, but Roseanne was at least more realistic in the portrayal of everyone else’s reactions to his mistakes. I guess I’m bothered that the women in so many films are written to put up with alot of bullshit and still put out at the end of the evening cuz their husbands just too cute and caring to turn away. It’s the whole dominant male paradigm playing out in the media and the entertainment industry. Or something.

Speaking of dominant males, I watched the first episode of Big Love, HBO’s new series about polygamists. Pretty interesting stuff. I’ll definetly watch more.

Registration tomorrow, and a whole bunch of other beginning of term paperwork, and then to Louisville! I’m very antsy to get on the road and start the second leg of my two week spring break…yowza!!!

Jack Daniels has a distillery close by that gives tours. That spells trouble with a capital W (for whiskey, and hopefully, women).

Listen to me!! I spent three paragraphs discussing why I dislike the way woman are portrayed in film, only to slip up at the end and make myself look like the type of person that objectifies women when I get a little whiskey in me. I ought to be ashamed of myself! I’m not, though…. ; )

Kaylan and I went to see Walk The Line tonight at the $2 theater. Man, do I love a good $2 movie! It almost feels like a present to see a cheap movie that’s not shite.

As such, I’d like to give a shout-out to Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon for absolutely blowing my mind with the extraordinary jobs they both did in this film. Holy shit, they sounded Just. Like. Johnny and June. I’ve been a big fan since someone gave me a cassette tape of Live From Folsom Prison, in particular the songs that J and J sing duets on…they’re amazing. Reese and Joaquin perfectly captured the chemistry and energy, in addition to their eery vocal impersonations. At several points, I had to shake my head to try and clear it because my brain couldn’t very well handle seeing a Phoenix boy and hearing Johnny’s voice coming out him. It’s truly uncanny. Whoever did vocal training or direction or whatever it’s called, is a Genius. I had a hard time believing they’d done all of the singing, but I read an article about the extensive vocal training both had to undertake well before filming started to prepare for the roles. It paid off, lemme tell ya.

I know I’m about six months late with this lil review, but I have to play catch up during breaks, as I don’t go see movies in real live theaters during school.

Speaking of reviews, I started reading this great book yesterday, by Zadie Smith, called “On Beauty”. It’s an interesting story told in very eloquent, engaging prose. One line (from the intro, no less) has been running through my head all day long… “Time is how you spend your love”. Something about that line really resonates with me…I mean, time as we know it is really just an arbitrary system of measurement, so why not quantify time with a Love Bank of sorts? It’s just as plausible as anything else…

And now you all know I’m One Of Those Nerds That Reads Intros. Oh well…cats outta the bag.

Another thing that’s been stuck in my craw lately…How is that the moon controls menstrual cycles as well as the tides? If someone can explain that to me in laymen’s terms, without astro-physics equations OR new-age mumbo jumbo, I’ll tell you all the secrets of The Red Shoe Zen. Fair trade, right?

Not as fun as it sounds, unfortunately. Grace and I went out to harvest some bamboo for the paint shop today, taking my dad’s Serious Bamboo Saws with us to do the job. Of course, because I’m graceful like that, I cut myself simply removing the saws from the cab of the truck. I bled like a motherfucker for a while…it was only a nick, half an inch long on the tip of my ring finger…not that deep at all. I realized after we’d gotten down to the bottom of the hill and I’d grabbed a bamboo trunk and starting sawing that blood was coarsing into my glove. So gross!! I guess because I was using my hands at the time, it was just gushing…I eventually had to rip a piece of my shirt off to wrap around it so I could continue without a slippery grip on this Really Sharp Saw. Presently, the cut is throbbing in that fashion of a cut deep enough to be uncomfortable if it gets infected…which I’m hoping to avoid.

The bamboo run was fun, though…It’s something I don’t do everyday, and it was Outdoor Work, which is good. The thicket obviously housed homeless people that want to sleep or smoke crack…or, as trace evidence seemed to show, eating pigeons out of rusty pots. At least they cooked it, right? Once, when I was about twenty feet deeper into the thicket than Grace, I had one of those loud, Almost-Subconscious thoughts that I was being watched. It wasn’t necessarily scary…I had a Large Sharp Saw on my person, and there were two of us. Maybe it was just like I sometimes watch pedestrians on the street below my house, not in a scary way, more like something moved into my field of vision and caught my attention. I could have imagined it all, due to the pigeon pot, but still…I felt like a visitor in a strange, foreign city. Noise doesn’t penetrate quite as well in the middle of a bamboo thicket, so the outside world is eerily muted and nature noises are audible. Which, I guess, is slightly uncomfortable in the middle of a city?

Really, I went and got the bamboo to score some serious brownie points with Howard (it’s self-serving ass-kissing, I assure you…I’M the one using the shitty paint poles currently…I wanted new ones is all) but he’ll be pleased, all the same.

Later in the evening, I got to thinking about some old friends from high school who have gone reclusive and potentially insane… I was really good friends with this man and woman, but seperately…they weren’t lovers or even friends back when I knew them. They’ve ended up in a trailer on the side of a mountain, off of a large but still rural highway, outside of Asheville. They married about five years after graduating high school, and seemed like a good match. I’ve seen them three times in the five years since..

The first time, I got lost driving to their trailer, and finally arriving, was greeted with snarling wolves. That’s right. I know there was Some Dog in them, but they were more than half-wolf. And they did NOT like me being in their living room. I had a dog then…I thought that their hatred sprang from his scent on me, but come to find out, I was only the second person these three year old wolf dogs had ever met. I don’t remember anything else about that visit, aside from being terrified (they had to be restrained from lunging if I moved a muscle…literally) and the woman telling me she was pregnant. I left in a hurry, and called her to later to tell her she had to get rid of those dogs if they thought they were going to raise a child.

Three months later, they’ve gotten rid of one of the dogs, the more aggressive one, and I go visit again. This time, it was much more chill…the remaining dog took treats from me and let me pet him, and we actually had time to talk. The talk we had was of a government conspiracy centering on the husband, since early childhood; alien abductions and experiments; secret societies and ancient religions still functioning in the shadows. You know, your run of the mill Catching Up kinda thing… They spoke very passionately and still very rationally about all of these things, that was the unsettling bit. I KNOW these people, or I knew them, at least, and they’re not crazy Like That. Before I left, the woman loaned me a book and made me promise to read it. So I took it, and I read it. Government conspiracy regarding some strange super-child experiments done in the 50’s up north on an island….Breeding (stealing?) children to be super-adults with chilling capabilities once in place in the military and government….Maybe a bit of genetic tinkering and lots of brain-washing… The reason they wanted me to read the book is because they believe the man’s parents, more precisely his mom, was one of the Test Subjects. I can’t remember why…I didn’t want to get sucked into their extraordinary conspiracy theories, honestly.

The last time I saw them was in the hospital, after my sweet friend had given birth to her daughter three and a half months premature. The daughter survived and is healthy as a horse these days (…or so I hear through a very convoluted grapevine). The doctors blamed the brain tumor they discovered in the woman’s head, which was the reason behind her decreasing vision and constant menstrual cycle. She hadn’t had the tumor when she was first checked out after becoming pregnant…and three months after the daughters birth, the tumor had begun to shrink on it’s own (she couldn’t have treatments until she’d stabilized or something like that) and her symptoms had disappeared. Mysteriously.

So, to make a long story longer, I was talking with Grace about this tonight, and really examined what they’d told me, maybe for the first time, and I remembered how I’d seen with my own two eyes how the Very Official Men would occasionally visit my high school to see the guy–I heard rumors at first and then I saw a mouth swab once, with my own two eyes, right in the school library–I assumed the guy had gotten in some Big Trouble and was having random drug tests or something. Grace said, when I’d finished telling the story, It sounds like maybe they’re right. It sounds like they might not be crazy at all.

Here’s the very scariest part to me: the guy, more anti-establishment, more anti-government, more anti-authority than anyone I’ve ever known…he joined the Navy two years ago. The wife called me once last summer, asked me to come visit, told me she was lonely since he’d left for training. And I told her I’d try to make out and see her and her daughter, but that I was really busy…which wasn’t even kind of a lie, preparing for my transition to school and still working 45 hours a week at my day job and doing theater at night. But I didn’t go see her…mainly because she kinda creeped me out and I believed she’d gone crazy in that little dirty trailer with just her TV to keep her company. Tonight, though, I was struck with the thought that maybeThey’d Won. They, those Very Official Men, finally got what they wanted…after years of their relentless presence and annoyance, they’d worn the man down enough that Their Option seemed like the best choice for his family, his tiny daughter and sick wife. They have money now, and they’re healthy, and apparently they’ve moved. Or so I hear, because the number I have doesn’t work anymore, and I think I’m too frightening to try really hard to contact them, because then I would have to acknowledge what I didn’t want to know these last five years…that they aren’t necessarily crazy because Things Like That Really Happen in this world, and this is the only time I’ve ever brushed up against it.

I mean, I’m paranoid and distrustful enough that this shit really gets me thinking. And now that I really think about, I can clearly remember hearing the clicks on the phone when I dialed in, and the comments about how They’re Listening Right Now don’t seem so crazy anymore. This leaves me to wonder if I haven’t seen the best example of a Catch-22 in my life…Living under constant watch and sounding crazy when you try to convince people that you’re not would, surely, eventually, drive anyone crazy, and that, folks, is what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy gone wrong. It’s perfect in it’s simplicity, really. People have no stomach for the Outlandish, myself included.

I have to smile (and cringe) about how I’m a wee bit nervous to post this right now. I’m enough of a believer, after reading Orwell, that I can’t help it…

Phew.

All went well with my dad’s ass today.  He got home just as I was leaving to go meet my mom for lunch, and although he was a bit wobbly on his feet, he was alert enough to relay this tale:

In order to perform colonoscopies, apparently the doctor has to pump you full of air, to insure ease of passage for cameras and such.  So after they’ve gone up the ass and down the throat with all sorts of Stuff, you’re all full of this excess air.  And, enter The Fart Room.  There is literally a room where all the colonscopy patients go to "release air".  My stepmom says she walked in to be with my dad and there were several rows of tables with patients lying face down, farting away.  The sound effects that Jeana and my dad made really add to the story, but I’m sure you can imagine what a chorus of farts sounds like.  Who knew an entire room existed for farting at the hospital? 

Tomorrow, I’m taking my leave of Raleigh.  While I am not rushing to get out, I must say that the idea of sleeping in my own, grown-up sized bed is quite alluring.  Plus, Grace and I have a date to go harvest bamboo, and I have to pay some tickets and fines at school so I can register on Monday.  Also, I want to squeeze in going to see "V for Vendetta" before we leave for the conference on Tuesday morning.  I love a movie based on a comic book, mostly, especially if Natalie Portman has a dyke-y haircut.  Yum. 

OH! I went to the Art Museum today and saw the Rembrandt exhibit.  The entire exhibit was focused on beggars and street urchins…very interesting.  I was taken with the way in which Rembrandt portrayed his subjects; there was no sense of shame or filth, and one was moved to the realization that these beggars from 1668 were Just People with slightly tattered clothes and some bad teeth.  But that was really more of the norm than the exception back then.  I appreciated the fact that I didn’t feel pity for the people in the etchings…I smiled back at their drunken grins, and felt empathy when the images were those of hardship or hunger.  My only beef with the exhibit is that ALL of the images were smaller than 5"x7".  Most were closer to 2"x3".  Little, tiny etchings… And there were loads of old ladies clustered in that little room, hovering behind me, close enough that I could literally smell the mothballs on their sweaters.  I love the museum, though.  Since it’s free, there are always some FReaks mixed in with the art.  Going to the museum alone has become one of my favorite Raleigh traditions…I can wander through all those quiet, vaulted rooms and lose myself in the pictures, fixating for minutes at a time on the smallest detail in a painting, wondering How Did They Do That?  I can’t wait for the Monet exhibit that opens in May, that’s what I’m sayin…  Dad has an outdoor installation at the museum that coincides with the Monet exhibit opening, so hopefully I’ll get to do a bit of work on the installation and score some free tickets. 

Ooh, ER is on.  I haven’t had occasion or time to watch that in four years! 

I just typed a couple of decent paragraphs about how I had fun at the Jackpot tonight even though it is the same people drinking the same beer in the same bar as seven years ago.  There was a brief compare/contrast essay on the Stingray, which was the precursor to the Jackpot; Stingray was way cooler, and there was an ultra-hot, uber-sassy bartender that I like to remember as Laura of The Boobs. 

Then I marveled at how I had managed to come full circle to boobs again.  It’s fair to say, at this point, that I do indeed have a One Track Mind currently.  I am hoping that some random stranger at the conference in Louisville might cure that.  Or, actually, more specifically and more honestly, I’m hoping to catch the Ice Queen away from her Steven Seagal-esque girlfriend, and work my charms. 

But anywayzzzzz, I did not mean to take up more time and space with my desire to see some boobs. 

Raleigh has pleasantly surprised me this visit…I am not chomping at the bit to get out of here, which is unusual.  I’ve been occupied and entertained, and I’ve spent Real TIme with the people that matter to me here.  I haven’t run into anyone that I absolutely never wanted to see again, and all the Randoms from The Old Days that I’ve run into have been nice enough to see. 

My dad is having a colonoscopy tomorrow…a routine deal, but still, there is a little seed of worry in me that wonders, What If They Find Something Up There?  His dad died of colon cancer, and that’s the whole reason to do this precautionary exploratory mission up his butt, and while I know the danger is slim and that pre-emptive strikes like this are the precise way to avoid nasty battles with cancer, I’m still a wee bit nervous.  I guess being so concerned for my friend’s mother that’s dealing with uterine cancer has me a bit sensitive about The Big C.  My parent’s mortality is not something I love thinking about…

I’ve been wearing my paint clothes all day.  There’s no reason for it, really.  I woke up today and realized I missed my favorite paint outfit, and so I put it on.  This outfit is kind of like a ‘binky’ for me…even if I’m not entirely comfortable in the city, I’m right at home in the clothes.  I suppose that there is a part of me that loves the fact that people can accurately guess what I do with my time…I’m proud of my work…but the Paint Clothes also serve as a decent Chit Chat Deterent…for some reason, people steer clear of me more often when I’m wearing my work clothes.  Maybe it looks like I’m really dirty and stinky, even though the clothes are freshly washed.  Maybe the old biddies imagine that I drywall with the Hispanics.  Maybe these clothes say Day Laborer, and the emo kids that frequent the places I like to hang out don’t have any use for someone that doesn’t work all night and drink all day.  I can’t know the reason.  People talk to me less in public, and some days, I like that.  I relish the ability to walk through an entire day in public without having anyone intrude on my mental soundtrack, leaving me free to explore all those random pathways in my brain that often lead me to inspiration. 

What the hell am I even talking about? 

I have a tiny buzz from my two beers at the bar, where I happened to play the best game of pool in my entire life; I picked up the stick and got all but one of my balls in, in that first turn.  I don’t play pool like that!  I don’t know what took hold of me.  The Magic of the Balls was with me, that’s for sure. 

I was thinking I’d leave Raleigh tomorrow and head to Asheville for a short weekend visit, but I’m actually really looking forward to hanging out with my brother some more…I don’t get a chance to spend as much time with him as I should, and we’ve been having so much fun together, I think I’m gonna stick around for a while.  I mean, one more day.  I’m ’bout cashed out on Raleigh, and I’m itching for my own bed, and the ability to freely look at porn, at the very least.  Spring Fever has me in it’s grip, for sure…

All my anxiety was for naught. Raleigh has proven to be so relaxing and enjoyable that I think I will prolong my stay a day or two. Really, I’m having such a good time with my little brother who I see far too rarely, that I see no reason to rush back to…nothing and no one…in Winston Salem. Plus, my dad is having some weird precautionary procedure on his colon tomorrow, and he’ll be out of it for a day or two, so Jeana will have her hands full with him…and I figure I might lighten her load and occupy Eli during that time.

Having an eight year old brother is really interesting. Some times when I visit, he seems completely indifferent to my presence, which invariably hurts my feelings. Other times, like this visit, he’s completely enamored of me and only wants to spend time. Which is almost too cute for me to deal with. He made a card which was stashed on his bed, which is my bed while I’m in town.

It read: Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Sugar is Sweet, and You Sorta Are. Love you, Suzy!

I mean, how fucking cute is that? It made me get tears in my eyes…I worry sometimes that the age difference is too great for me and Eli to be close, but then I realize that he loves me as much as I love him, and looks forward to seeing me just like I do him…I wonder often if he forgets that I exist while I’m off living in my self-absorbed world, but I’d like to think he thinks of me as I do him; the really cool sibling that lives in another city. I look forward to the day when he is old enough to come stay with me, sans parents, for a weekend, or a week. Sometimes, I am overwhelmed when I realize the fact that, as my parents are old for having an 8 year old, there WILL come a point where Eli’s care is in my hands. Granted (knocked on wood) that might not happen for twenty years yet, but he’ll be my age then, and I surely still call on familial help and support from time to time. I’d like to think when he’s thirty and I’m fifty, he’ll come spend holidays with me, and we’ll go galavanting off on adventures galore.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop from my youth, the one that kept kicking me out for underage smoking when I was 16…amazingly enough, the same 20 regulars from ten years are still here today. Some things never change. Except now I’m friends with the manager, and she won’t kick me out for smoking. I’ve known Kim for about seven years, but she was a bartender when I first met her…and she wasn’t nearly as hot then as she is now. I think that I Officially have Spring Fever. All the ladies are lookin’ good these days. I guess I probably just need to get laid.

So really…I’ve just been procrastinating on typing my resume, but the wonder of being able to travel with my computer hasn’t worn off quite yet, so I’m still enjoying the fact that I can be on the internet in a coffee shop on my own computer. Looking up useless info and updating my blog from a table in the smoky corner of Cup A Joes…good times. Technology is a wonderful thing.

I think the Unabomber just walked in…and of course he made a bee-line for the table next to mine. Yikes!!!