On Being Pretty

I have spent a lot of my life working really hard to be "pretty".

I have tried to buy clothes that are "flattering".  I have thought about how the "style" might "work for me".  I have tried to make my hair make sense in a world where wavy hair with fifty thousand cow-licks doesn't really make any sense.

I have struggled over favorite colors, perfumes, deodorants, shaving or not shaving, tattoo placement, lip gloss, make-up or lack thereof, and how to take the perfect selfie.

And last night I stood at a technical rehearsal for the experimental theatre ensemble I'm a part of with three of the most beautiful women I know, and we all stared in the full length mirrors of the dressing room and talked about the things that bother us about our bodies.

You know what?

I'm kinda done with that.

I've said this before, but now I think... I really might mean it.

I've come to a place where I actually like myself.

Not the person I think I should be, but the person I actually am.

I like purple.  My second favorite color is green.  I like sweaters and boots and scarves.  I like nail polish in weird colors.  I am bad at clipping my nails and remembering to groom certain parts of my body.  This morning I decided to shave my pubic hair into a weird shape.  I want at least four more tattoos.  I don't care if anybody else thinks they're cool or pretty, because they're for me.  Not them.  My eyes are just brown.  My hair is brown with streaks of blonde and grey and it is unruly and my husband cuts it for me at home.

I have ceased to be interested in pretty.  I am interested now in just being me.

I don't want to stand in front of the mirror with my three gorgeous friends talking about how much we hate our bodies.  They are beautiful.  I am beautiful.  And so are all of our flaws.  All the fat in the wrong places and the weird eyebrows and the armpit hair and the broad shoulders and the bubble butt.  Flaws are neat.  They make us who we freaking are.

I like to make weird faces.

I like to play character parts and dress in suspenders and newsboy hats and Doc Martens.  I like ripped up jeans.  I like vests.  I like swing dancing and little black dresses and silver eye shadow and painting random shapes on my face.

I don't know...  I feel like...  now that I get that just being yourself and living that out is one of the major points of being alive, I just want to get to it.  I'm so tired of hiding behind the things everybody else thinks I should be.

I've probably blogged about this subject here a hundred times, but I felt the need to blog again today because I think I've turned some kind of magic corner.  The other day I got an Instagram, and I posted a bunch of selfies today of me.  Just me.  Really tired me.  I was up til 2AM.  And I made a weird face.  And it wasn't pretty.  But it was great.  It was me.

To my female theatre friends (and the male ones too) ;-)

Check this out.

Special thanks to my friend and theatrical colleague, Deborah Harbin, for the nod to the above story.

Caffeine has always been my muse.

Today is one of those days where I feel like I wish to feel all the time. It's strange because my most creative self is a little on the depressed side, but not to the point where all of life feels like a movie and I can hear the soundtrack blaring as I walk down the sidewalk in the rain and my heart feels like an empty shell in the middle of a prison and I'm surrounded by thick fog and my senses are dulled to nothingness... No. This depression is just the edges - the twinkling of the twilight, the fading of the sun giving way to the stars, the pink at the top of the silhouetted mountain...

I feel this way in the spring pretty much all of the time. There are days when I sink lower, let the fog surround me and pull me under until I'm struggling to the surface, gasping for breath, and then I let myself swallow the water and sink slowly, sullenly to the bottom, but today was not one of those days.

Today was a creative self day. Today poetry poured from my fingers like Greek columns and cappuccino steam and ebony braids down the back of an Asian beauty. Today my mind was my writer's mind, my photographer's mind, my actor, my painter - I saw muses all around me and my heart was full and overflowing with love for beauty and God's creation.

The morning was chilly and raining. My favorite sort of weather. I dream of moving to Seattle sometimes so that I can have rain most every day, covering the grass and flowers, turning everything a more radiant shade of green. Thunder rumbled over the normalcy of jet planes and military helicopters. The sun of the afternoon cast a brief shadow on my day just before I headed to rehearsal. Yes. Read-through. Read-through for that play: Butterfly.

I confess that when I admittedly skimmed it after downloading it and printing it on the government's tab I found myself disappointed. I had expected the characters to leap off of the page and perform for me right there in my kitchen. When they merely sat and looked at me and didn't dance I was dismayed. Was I putting myself on the line for nothing? Doing this piece that my parents would surely dismiss as rubbish on a whim? Were they right?

But then at read-through...

It was in the library. One of my favorite places on the planet. The smell of books, the steam of coffee, the ticking of eager brains hunched ravenous over papers, notes, blackberries, and books... pure human energy and beauty. It's almost as good as the art museum in Philly - I would move there if I could - but I digress.

After logistics discussions, we read the play.

This time they danced. A magnificent ballet of colors and light. At the end everyone was crying but Trish (the writer) and me. I looked up expecting actors who were now finished reading and saw human beings with tears streaming down their faces. I thought I'd missed something and then realized that my character was dead and couldn't feel anything. Senses dulled. Eyes closed. The end of him.

The play was previously performed in San Francisco. Trish has had plays performed Off-Off Broadway in New York. I wish if she moved back she would take me with her. Maybe that's where we should move, after all.

After rehearsal I was supposed to take Jonah to a movie.

We went, but the sound was so loud he began to cry. He's highly gifted and hightly sensitive to auditory stimulation. I don't say that to brag. I say it to state a simple fact of my family's young life. He cried. We left.

I took him to the coffee house in San Souci. We had tea and vanilla chai and a bag of Utz plain potato chips and discussed the making and growing of coffee beans, the fashion sense of the college females at the table before us, and why they would hang mirrors on the walls too high for anyone to see their reflection.

Now I am home. It felt good to walk here in the cool wind, to feel it on my scalp: a new sensation. To hear my son tell me he wanted to go back to the coffeehouse again, "Mommy, I like coffeehouses."

snagged the part

So I am officially playing Emily/David in the original play, Butterfly, by Trish Cole. It's an intense drama about a woman who kills her trans-gendered daughter after she makes the complete transition to a man, David. The woman reflects on these things from her jail cell. She's out of her mind a bit, she has determined that she killed David, not Emily. That her daughter, who she calls "the butterfly", was killed by David and she was avenging her little girl by killing this man. It will certainly leave the audience questioning just about everything on their way out of the theatre. Whatever you think about the trans community, would you kill your child? How would you react to a daughter or son who went through this change? It's very intriguing, and though it is morally interesting for me personally to play such a role, I think it will be really good for me and the community to be a part of this piece. All things are for a purpose, and all things work together for good for those who are in Christ Jesus. I think that I was meant to be there, at that audition. I was meant to shave my head, to have these experiences, to meet people, to be cut from Sweeney Todd, all for this particular opportunity. I am honored to be a part of such a beautifully written piece, and interested in the sort of response it will receive from the community. Should be an adventure.

androgyny

Last night I was given a card by a director/playwright because she thought my look was a good one for a one act she is directing locally and I can only assume she has written. She said "The character is kind of androgynous, and you've got great hair for it..." she said it as a compliment. That I could be androgynous. I thought it strange that I felt a little flattered. The audition is today. The director is a lesbian playwright who has had work produced in New York. She's working toward publishing a book about her relationship and journey with a woman in transition. I'm not sure if the work is about her current partner, who was with her last night, but I found the woman very tall, chic, very beautiful, regardless.