There is something about a naked, fully unedited, bathroom/laundry room/cat feeding station online tour that is enough to make this author’s mother go pale.
“Jennnnnnn,” she said, in a pitch somewhere in the garden of a plea and a whine and a mortified whisper, “PEOPLE ARE SEEING THIS. AREN’T YOU WORRIED? DID YOU HAVE TO ADD, ‘I LIVE LIKE A PIG?’ YOU DON’T ALWAYS LIVE LIKE THAT!”
I thought about that. This is where The Box comes in handy. It’s my one-work gallery hanging on the wall of my blog, with the collection changing very frequently. Do I live like a pig?, I mused, as we drove out of the Rite-Aid parking lot where she had asked me that question.
I was a studio art major as an undergrad. Once, for an individualized study project (how’s that for a term?), I had my boyfriend at the time pose nude as all the letters of the alphabet. I liked saying, “Drop and give me a Y!” That was a nice letter. I translated what he was doing into the quality of line that you see in Egon Schiele’s work. Fascinating stuff, both technically, and…uh, yeah. I was good. A+ on that project, for sure. Visual Art Street Cred.
Later on down the line, I received my MFA from Sarah Lawrence College with a double major in Acting and Playwriting. 4.0 GPA. I got plenty of street cred there too as a Theatre Arteeste, is what I’m saying. I went straight from there to NYC, baby, where I worked crap jobs by day and worked as an actor by night. The outlandish “art” I worked on? Sometimes it got covered in the Village Voice. And a play or two that I wrote was reamed out by The New York Times (if you’re going to be impaled on a stake, you might as well be impaled by Vlad the Impaler, is how I liked to think about it, when I wasn’t hiding under the mattress).
Fast-forward to this life. You’re more familiar with this one. Familiar. Like family. I like that. You know I’m a writer. You know about the divorce, the bipolar, about my great kids. You know me less as an artist.
The genuinely interesting and intimidating thing about outing myself as bipolar is the question: Is THIS where the fear really begins? Unlike a visual artist, whose brushstrokes are more difficult to interpret, is everything I do or say or write going to be taken at purely face value? And God forbid, used against me in some way, as further proof of illness, and not creativity?
Slippery stuff, no? Particularly difficult for a mother fighting for her own life—and trust me, kids, that ain’t drama. I am a mother fighting to show her daughters that she has some life left in her, and isn’t living just for them.
I wish I danced. Art with no words! Can’t touch that! Bliss! No “HONEY, DID YOU HAVE TO DO THAT PLIE INTO THE ARABESQUE? PEOPLE WILL TALK” in the Rite-Aid parking lot.
I wish I felt called to draw, to work with charcoal and pastels again. Go on. Point to the single brushstroke that says I’m really nuts and that I’m not trying hard enough. Take your time. I’ll wait.
Right now I am drawn toward the absurd, toward performance that plays with the absurd, the words that stir a sticky pot of honesty—but when the spoon comes out, it’s something different altogether.
I think a gal who scored a big fat 4.0 in her theatre MFA can pull that off, baby.
I think I am working on something.
Something fearless.
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