A Weirdly Sentimental Update

I began already, but it was lost. How many new years can I fit into one human life? How many eons can I ignore in one youth? Perhaps I’m afraid I’m a fraud, and the only way to prove that to myself is to try and fail. If I don’t try, I think, I can’t fail. But the truth is if I don’t try I have already failed. Failed a gift that promised to storm once in my life. Failed a passion that gave me comfort and meaning when absolutely nothing else touched me. Failed a mind that promised to be sensitive and beautiful surrounded by stone walls or grassy plains. A mind that could and would follow horses. I'm talking about writing.

I find I have to remind myself that I am more than this bag of bones and muscle. I was afraid of this, and I don’t know why. Having chosen the most difficult career I could imagine, perhaps that’s why I felt I would be absolved from writing. But the following of one dream does not a negation of the others make. “When you choose something, you do not choose something else” is an apt phrase, but it is not very encompassing. When you choose something, you take responsibility for all of your other choices both conscious and unconscious. I have chosen to let this rot in myself. Now I am choosing to stop ignoring that fact.

“I can write” is not the same as “I’m a writer.” John, as usual, points out the obvious I’ve been unable to see.

Many hours later…

After a grueling 4.5 hour rehearsal with VdV for a show on Saturday (leaving Sunday for home) I have a vague idea of a costume I need to build for the pin-up section of the show, which is followed by paper dolls, monkeys, flaming swords, and strippers. In that order. I think.

Here’s the part of Shaun on Patrol: the extended version where I get…distracted. I wander off in my mind to do depraved things in the land of Rachel Pretends Shaun is Here. During Vau de Vire rehearsal when all the acrobats are slinging flaming whips of fire and swordfighting, I had to slap myself in the face. Twice.

I obsess over a song from Twilight and fantasize that someday Borders will carry book 3 again. Don't judge me. I go blues dancing and unleash myself on strangers in small, contained increments. Since it’s under the guise of social dancing, I usually get away with it. There are exceptions who call me out, but not many. And the ones who do still dance with me. Twice.

I feel almost sick with wanting, sick of myself for being unable to process and absorb the excess, and somehow also grateful that I can’t.

Before I know it the world will be stripped of its glittery holiday dressing and I’ll wish I’d been more involved. Well, the lovely Shredder’s



















(hoop artist extraordinaire, aerial and otherwise) birthday skating extravaganza is Tomorrow night, so I'll be showing up to a veritable brothel of wig-donning freaky coworkers to celebrate the fact that Shreddie exists. It is a very good thing to celebrate, trust me.

And now for something completely different:

Meet pretzel. This is what it's supposed to look like, modeled by the ineffable beloved herself:














And my sad little attempt:













You realize of course, this means war on gravity.
Or, rather, war with gravity's help. That is all.

Game On: The Shit that Didn't Storm

LA is a strange place, and from my very brief time there seems to be everything you hope and fear it will be. It was surreal to be driving down Hollywood Boulevard, a street I've seen and heard depicted umpteen times in my life. The fact that it actually exists and people live there was a new experience. The first night there the ladies agreed we had to go to Hollywood for dinner, since A) it was 11:00pm and we hadn't eaten since San Francisco, and B) I had never been to Hollywood. It was the perfect excuse to do a tiny thing I wanted to do since I was a little girl; wear really red lipstick out in public without feeling like an asshole:














Honestly, I don't know why we're doing that. It's a natural inclination. Living up to expectations that we are going to offend people by taking our clothes off, perhaps.

Anyhoo, the shoot was a lot of things I wasn't expecting. The dancers were wonderfully varied and skilled, a true representation of belly dance mastery. Well, except for me, the interloper. But I'm a good faker. What's more, the bitch meter didn't go off. Everyone was professional. Cream of the crop indeed.

Favorites:

Unmata, a hard-working, aggressive hip-hop belly fusion troupe based out of Sacramento, and the hard-asses of the belly dance world (in my limited understanding of it). Powerful and coordinated choreography, excellent chicks backstage as well.

A male dancer named Steven, dubbed "the most beautiful boy in belly dance," who made a slack-jawed and instant fan out of me with his superlative skill and captivating stage presence. Wonderful. Does it sound like I'm being paid for this review? I'm not.

And of course, the glitter-tastic celeb-status Princess Farhana:














I also want to say that Elizabeth Strong, the newest BDSS member, acts nothing like a superstar. She is one of the warmest, loveliest people I met all weekend, and a damn fine dancer.

And then there was us.


















Bollywood, meet belly dance, meet circus.

Freaks.

Pre-Game

It has been too long to be cohesive here, and three days can see me around three extremes of states of mind, much less nearly three weeks. I've written much in my head- on buses, trains, collapsed into shivering piles of circus flesh, and other gross moments. I come home late, too exhausted sometimes even to write the Sailor, much less pound out something worth publishing online.

Whatever, excuses are boring. Days pass when I wonder if my ability to write will someday forsake me when I have so often forsaken it. But it won't. It will die as it was born; with me, under my inscrutable and tyrannous thumb. Or maybe it's the other way around.

It's probably the other way around.

Anyway, so to catch up, there was Thanksgiving, in which nothing was burned and three people cooked a 15 pound bird:























Then there was Boho Carni and Vau de Vire-ness, which the Guardian did a feature on. Apparently it's no big thing to have your name in the Guardian, but I'm from Monroe North Carolina, goddamnit, and my picture's in the fucking Guardian. That's good times to me. And luckily, the picture has enough bokeh (that was for you, Coop) that you cannot read what the medallion around my waist says. And the picture is not online, only in the flesh and blood newsprint now lining BART stations from here to Fremont. And I get to be a part of that. I am proud, and not even being sarcastic.

And only mildly tampering with anxiety. Or severely, depending on the day. Today it was severe, mostly out of an inability to create more hours from the hours allotted to me by the sun, common knowledge, and the need for sleep to perform up to my standards.

I'm going to LA tomorrow with my beloved Nekyia ladies for a belly dance video shoot on Saturday. If some of that sounds out of place, stare blankly at your screen. Yes, I studied belly dance, but my technique is quite shit. Kristina and Rebecca are both proficient, experienced belly dancers, and have come, in some ways, from the belly dance community.

Now I want to make this perfectly clear. The belly dance community bears a serious grudge against the Nekyia for the blatant use of sex appeal in our choreography, coupled with the fact that we are associated with belly dance.

I just want to clear this up...I am not a disgrace to the artform of belly dance because I do 3/4 shimmies in a copper bra.

I am a disgrace to the artform of belly dance because my 3/4 shimmies are deplorable.

In any case, perfect isolations are not my main concern. The lines of the body, the integrity of the presentation, and the strength of the performer are my concerns. So anyhoo, I've never been to LA and I'm feeling very small-town back-woods-yeehaw about it, so bring it on. Will get back to you soon about whether or not the shit did, in fact, storm.