An Old Skool Blog Post (as opposed to Self-Indulgent Tirade): Apocamon rocks! Thanks, Tyler.
Okay, that last post was way too glib and intellectually sloppy to be of interest to anyone. I could delete it, but I’m in the mood to humiliate myself.
WARNING: PSEUDO-INTELLECUTALISM AHEAD
So, I’m sitting here in my office, minding my own business, when my precious little buddy and favorite drag king, Alana, drops me a line. It seems that some of her compatriots on a dragking listserv have “issues” with Hedwig. Apparently, they see it as anti-Semitic and offensive to transgendered folks and generally oppressive.
This makes me angry. Not angry that the play/movie has been misinterpreted; it’s kinda complex, and not everyone’s gonna get it. Nor am I angry that people have issues with the play; I mean, I think it’s freakin’ genius, but whatever, everyone’s entitled to an opinion.
No, I’m angered by the fact that middle-class white kids who’ve obviously got a liberal arts education under their belts could be so goddamn stupid and literal.
Here’s the deal: Hedwig is a story. A fantasy. Entertainment. At times, really good, engaging entertainment, but entertainment nonetheless. When we leave the theatre–“we” meaning “we, the people,” anyone in an audience–we understand it’s a story, it’s not a piece of propaganda, it’s not something we are supposed to intellectually internalize. When we walk out, we take away some good memories, but by and large, the world of the play gets left behind.
What I’m getting at is that after years and years of hashing these sorts of things out across conference tables from coast to coast, my personal take on all this PC “it’s-mysogynist-it’s-homophobic” rhetoric is that (a) phenomenologically speaking, we are programmed to understand the theatre as a place where fictions are told, fictions we can enjoy but soon forget; and (b) your average viewer is smarter than you give her/him credit for. I mean, Gone With the Wind is full of stereotypes and such, but you can’t honestly think that when Joe Blow watches it, he’s going to start thinking to himself, “Well, maybe slavery isn’t so morally reprehensible after all.” If Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon could learn this vis-a-vis porn, the world would be a better place.
More to the point, just because Hedwig invokes Hitler’s name and there’s a comic swastika used in a slide, that’s no reason to call the play anti-Semitic. It’s like Springtime for Hitler in The Producers. It’s camp, it’s funny. Laugh a little.
Nor do I think it’s offensive to the transgender community. Hedwig is not your typical transgender. Her operation’s botched. She would much prefer the clarity of being either a man or a woman, but she’s been denied that possibility. She is a fracture, like the song says, located in-between man and woman, German and American, aggressor and victim. She doesn’t stand in for anyone; you can’t take her story as commentary on the plight of anyone but herself.
To me, it sounds like the critics on the listserv are textbook, bourgeois white liberals–perennially bitter whiners who’d be perfectly happy if the movie hadn’t been so hyped, but because John Cameron Mitchell is suddenly the nation’s media darling, the crabs feel obligated to knock it. I say, if you’re going to knock a movie, knock something like Planet of the Apes that’s as big a piece of poorly written–and I use that term loosely–crap as I’ve ever seen, yet it’s funnelling truckloads of cash into the pockets of its already-wealthy producers. At least the money Christine Vachon and John Cameron Mitchell are making will go back into the production of good art. We hope.
Alana echoed my sentiments in more articulately than I could ever have done:
In terms of audience, I really think that anyone paying the ticket price to see Hedwig live or making the trip to their local art-movie house to see the film is probably gonna be savvy + aware enough to see the work for what it is (be that entertainment, queer fantasia, glam spectacle).
She did, however, bring up the question of Eminiem and where we draw the line–when we have to stop being flip with our “it’s only a movie” and get angry. It’s a complex issue, and like anything, it’s a matter of degree. But in the end, Hedwig clearly passes muster. If my hands weren’t cramped from a day’s worth of typing, I’d tell you why. Lucky you.
Okay, I feel vindicated. Who wants pizza?
Unrelated to anything: If you haven’t been keeping up with the Japanese children’s market–and I’m guessing that damn few of you have–you should know that there’s a relatively new line of characters being marketed by a company called San-X, and they’re pretty friggin’ surreal. It looks like the company’s a spin-off of Sanrio, but the only info I can find is in Japanese, so I can’t tell. All’s I know for sure is that Ken and His Musical Afro are really disturbing.
And along with the letter, I included some pics. Yet more navel gazing.
Don’t worry. I should get bored with this fairly soon.
I’ve written the letter. It’s not perfect. In fact, I think it’s really off-base. But I don’t know what else to say and I just wanna get this part of it over with and I can always explain things later, can’t I?
Of course, that’s the way I deal with most things. New software? Screw the manual. Just put in the cd and I’ll figure it out as I go along…. But I wonder if this shouldn’t be a little different, more thought out.
Nah.
It’s official: I’ve been called “dumpy.”
Yeah, the guy was joking when he said it, and I tried to play it off like I really believed he was just horsing around, but, honey, I went to a liberal arts college, and you know what that means: Sociology 101.
Joking relationships are notable for the way in which they allow each member of the relationship to “let off steam.” Each may attack the other under the guise of play, thereby expressing true feelings–at least in part–in a non-confrontational manner.
In sum, the guy meant I was dumpy.
Now, I maintain that I have never had a particularly fat-free body. Even at my skinniest, I wasn’t skinny…and that’s fine, I’m comfortable with that. I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m, uh, fleshy.
“Dumpy,” though. The connotations run beyond the mere fact of pant size. The implication is that I’m 10 pounds overweight and I dress like a midwife. And I’m intellectually lazy. And my hair…well, there’s all kinds of implications about my hair. Some of them are based in fact, others on rumor alone.
So I ask you: at this point in my life–when, according to the latest scientific evidence, I have already frittered away some 40% of my available days (give or take a percentage point)–am I ready to throw up my hands, put my PVC in mothballs, and slouch toward the racks of madras shorts in Wal-Mart’s men’s department?
Not without a fight.
Chunky? Yes. Fat? Whatever. Dumpy? Not yet, Mary.
The other day, I mentioned that I’d found my birth parents. Now I’ve decided I want to document the process–from the initial submission of the search application to the Big Meeting (which should happen in the next few months). Ergo, Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda: boring for you, I’m sure, but in the immortal words of Lesley Gore, it’s my domain, and I can navel-gaze if I want to.
Of course, I’d seen Eudora Welty’s house more times than I could possibly remember. Not that it was all that memorable, mind you: a dingy, two-story Tudor-style home set back from the street, with a yard that seemed covered in pine straw the whole year round–messy, but not in a trashy way. Well, not much. I lived just around the corner.
Every so often, she’d show up on campus, wandering around, probably brought over by one of the profs who moved to Jackson because she still lived there, in the same house she’d inhabited since she was little. She was never much to look at, even when she was young. Buck teeth. Limp hair forever at shoulder length. A sizeable hump on her aged back. If you’d been at church on a Sunday morning, you wouldn’t have given her a second glance ’cause she’d have looked just like every other lady coming out of senior bible study class, doddering down the hall toward the 10:30 service: apparently outdated.
I have two very specific memories of her: the first was the fall of my sophomore year. My fraternity did this food drive thingamajig where we’d send out brown paper bags to folks in certain neighborhoods–only certain neighborhoods, mind you–and then a couple of days later, we’d split up into groups of four and collect ’em. A good number of folks would have left the bags on their front porches, already stacked up with canned goods for the food bank so we didn’t have to ring the doorbell and bother anybody on a Saturday afternoon. Every so often though, we’d have to knock and explain who we were and what we were doing and listen to “Oh, I completely forgot!” or “Goodness gracious sakes alive, I thought that was next weekend!” then wait patiently on the stoop while they went inside and pulled together a few rusty containers of cranberry sauce and black-eyed peas.
She was one who had forgotten. I rang the bell–“She can participate just like everybody else,” I said to myself–and waited. And a few minutes later, she herself arrived at the door (no help on the weekends, I guess), bulky, yellow, too-big dishwashing gloves on her prized hands. I gave my pitch and she responded in kind and shuffled off and came back with a smile and some cans, just like every other man or woman I’d spoken to that afternoon. Just like every other one.
The other memory I have of her was about a year later. I was driving over to the Jitney Jungle after class to do some grocery shopping and to stop in afterwards at Parkins Pharmacy for a malt. (By and large, the whole pharmacy/soda-jerk thing was something my parents talked about but which I’d never seen, at least until I got to Jackson. Even then, Parkins was the only working soda fountain I’d ever come across. But the malts and shakes were particularly good there, and as I was a college student, I became particularly fond of them.) Anyway, I’m driving over to the grocery and this car pull out in front of me. It’s an ancient Buick Regal, like the kind many of my friends had driven back in high school–hand-me-downs from aunts or grandparents. I can barely see the top of the driver’s head, and I figure the reason the car’s going so slow is that the driver can only barely reach the gas pedal.
Well, needless to say, I was an impatient young man of twenty: I honked. Not loud or long, but I honked. The car didn’t speed up. It just kept creeping along, puttering down the same neighborhood streets I was, as if the driver were following me but had somehow managed to get ahead. This kept up ’till we reached the Jitney, when the driver finally found a parking spot and pulled in. I hit the gas and whipped through the lot, found my own space, and stormed off toward the store. And just before I stepped inside, I looked over my shoulder to see twenty yards away, moving steadily toward the front door leaning on one of Jitney’s orange and red shopping carts, a living legend: the greatest American author yet alive, the last of a generation, an accidental, effortless survivor, Eudora Welty. My remorse was sudden and painful. I should have apologized, but I didn’t.
I wrote a poem about her not long afterward. Looking back, I can see it’s really bad–not just bad, I mean really bad. I’d ridden my bike to the downtown post office, and it was such an amazing afternoon, early spring, the quality of the light, the color of the sky, crisp air. At the time I was enrolled in a course on Milton and in another in classical mythology, so naturally, in the poem I became an aeolian harp. The piece was mercifully short, in the Imagist style of Amy Lowell. The gist of it was that I was, metaphorically, a harp, played by the wind as I rode my bike to the P.O. I remember the feeling I had, being alone on a backstreet, with that big, beautiful sky above me, feeling really quiet and peaceful, but I fumbled when I tried to put it into words. Somthing she never did.
Goodbye, Eudora. Thanks for leaving so much behind.
It’s true: I’ve been pretty quiet this week–recovering, I guess. I’d thought that with all the extra folks involved in Hedwig, it’d get easier as we drew closer to opening night. Not so. Yours truly was rushing around ’till the bitter end, even after we went up Thursday night. That work, coupled with the incalculable amounts of nervous energy expended as I sat in the light booth and watched the show performed…well, by Sunday, I was exhausted. I spent nearly 48 hours in bed.
I’m better now, but I’d still like someone to take over marketing the show–my main duty now that the we’re up. Any takers?
Meanwhile, not much of note has happened chez moi. Since Monday, I’ve spent most of my time catching up on work and helping boyfriend clean for our delightful houseguests. (Boyfriend did most of the work, fyi.) Oh, and after 32 years, I managed to find my birth parents. I guess that’s something.
What, you didn’t know I was adopted? Well, more on that later.
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