We must make ART.

I must make art. It would be easier to live without this condition for happiness. To spend my free time in mindless monotony. Busy myself with socializing, obligations and passive observations. But the trouble is...my passion to make stuff pokes at the microscopic puddles of my pores like sewing pins; swims like a pod of whales in my piss, blood, spit and soul. It bites at my tissue and bone like termites: MAKE ART, it demands, BEFORE WE SWALLOW YOUR SKIN AND SKELETON AND SHIT YOU OUT INTO A MOUND OF POWDERY GRAY MATTER. 

I thought I didn't want to make theater anymore. Thought I could outrun my infatuation with age, but this thing is more like real love. More complex than lust and far deeper than any crush or fleeting obsession. This is true. Admittedly, it is mean and difficult too. Theater isn't easy. The industry has abused me with disappointments. Starved me and confused me too. But my moments lit by tin can lights or rehearsal bulbs or the midday sun (on some outdoor stone stage) still enthrall me. I feel courageous up there with my lines of text and intention. My words fly / stab / sing / grab from my mouth to kiss the silences that sit on the edges of springy, velvet-sewn seats or metal folding chairs or patchwork quilts stretched over dirt and dry grass.  My body dances to the song, the story, of my characters. I love theater. I love the spit and wind of it. Love the raw unedited magic. Love the magnetic pull of poised, competent actors enunciating sharp poetry for a crowd of engaged onlookers. Oh yes, I love it so.

I've been searching for both distraction and action lately. Theater feels like an old friend who stands at the back of a cold church funeral. As soon as I see her, I weep and run, collapsing into her tight embrace. We laugh as she pulls me across the street to a bright dance party where the music is so loud and the lights and the people are so beautiful in their color and movement that I forget, for a little while, the tragedy I have just left behind. And even though, at this dance party, I must make sure not to embarrass myself and/or drink too much, I am reminded of passion. I am reintroduced to my own neglected joy. And I am served an entire pie of sweet sweet peace.

Since our nation's recent election, I have been feeling as if I were sprawled out across all the steps of grief [denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance], with a skyscraper on my chest and my back pressing jagged cement.  I'm mostly avoiding the news. It frightens me. This country and world appear terminally suicidal. Out in the corn fields, there is a plowed message, a tattoo on the arm of this "super" power, and it reads DO NOT RESUSCITATE.

I am seeking light.

A few weeks after the election, I am invited to perform in the staged reading of a marvelous play.  At night, after baby is in bed, I'd lie on the couch reading and re-reading myself into my character's body and story. [For actors are detectives and we spend much of our preparation gathering evidence so that we can understand the person we are trying to portray.]  This study is an old bliss of mine and I am grateful for the distraction. Even out in the stage lights, standing before the audience on the night of the performance, I feel as if I am catching the end of a long lost breath.

I want people to flee their TVs with me, even for just one night or for a few hours every day. To join me in a search for life. Come, I urge you, and turn off your cell phones. Silence them, and ignore them and your urges and addictions. Briefly or forever, abandon the noise of the Internet and all its false promises of entertainment and information and look with me to people, real people and to the art we make. Get dressed up and shout a song into a microphone or hide in a closet nook and make something. Sing folk songs on your porch / build a quilt / paint a portrait / dance in your living room / write a poem about the cracks in your mother's hands / write a silly novel about peach jam / write a love letter / stitch a dress / crochet a scarf / darn a sock / mix and bake a carrot cake / wallpaper a wall / go to a music shop and touch all the instruments, then take one home with you / sketch with crayons or markers or pencils or coal. Whatever it is, go on and make something.

Personally, my screens are burning me. I feel dry in my deprivation of skin and conversation and social interaction. I need a crowd, a cacophonous cafe. I need to go to town. Soak up the spoken word of strangers and suck in the stink of paint and clay, of wet cement and cigarettes, of candy shops and Indian food and messy book stores. I want to warm myself with body heat. Find friends, fliers and ticket booths. Gather on sidewalks and in bakery lines and libraries. I want us all to rebuild our world with stories / paint / glue / coffee and cake / yarn / ink / wood / tape / voices and voluptuous color.