Mirror, reflects back only what we allow it to…

The holiday season is rough. Very rough. I put on a good show, big smile, but there’s a obsidian hunk of legacy pain, immovable, solid, speaking volumes in its stubborn silence. I re-affix names and faces on its surface. Its still, at its core, the basic, primal absence of my mother. While I fight and rearrange, every time, she moves murkily and soft across its surface. She seems out of reach now, not a wailing wraith that might snatch me and drag me down into terror once again. She seems smaller, lighter, lost, a piece of a puzzle in her hand, trailing more pieces behind her, eyes white with cataracts, her breath raspy hiss. She seems frail and I mostly feel ashamed and sad. Under all my anger at her, my flinging and pushing back, there has always been this very real need for a mother.

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I have a love of musicals - Chicago, Auntie Mame, Gypsy, Victor Victoria, Cabaret…the ones with real sass and bite, a nod to the seedier side but a rise up from it all. A biting, scratchy, clawing climb and celebration of lustfully attacking life.

I’d like to create a bizarre, surreal musical film with the performers I work with all the time. Something quirky, silly, an exuberant tale with some teeth. Eye and ear candy deluxe. Legs kicking, air filled with song, lights, smoke machines, glitter, all the visual action my cameras can catch. And I’ll be able to fulfill my desire to sing and direct myself in something bordering on technicolor dreams. Matthew Barney meets Bob Fosse…I want people to see what I create and blurt gems like “pow! that’s entertainment!” - sweep the crowd off their feet, dazzle them, draw them a new vision of a slice of my world.

If I could bring back that sexy cabaret, vaudeville aesthetic, all the better. Why let the bump and grind, the toss and shimmy, the belt and wink wither into the past?

All that jazz and more…

:) melissa

How do you eat an elephant? Bite by bite.
Ajamu Abraham, 2004

You know when you hear something, then you keep hearing it, you agree with it theoretically or just know its common sense but its still not sunk in yet? And then, the right words, or place, or time, or person, or some combo of all of those things comes together, and you finally hear it right and KNOW it. I think that’s the moment growth spurts are noticeable. The growth might have started before this moment, with the first seeds of a concept trickling in your ear. And the growth will continue after, perhaps change direction even. But there’s that right moment when you see you are changing or learning or finally getting what it is you’ve been struggling or ignoring or crying over. That’s when you stop leaning against the change and pull back into knowing that’s the way things are going. That’s when the flow moves with the current of things, not pushing against the rocky outcroppings in the way. When you can ease along the rough patches a little more, and know there’s more work but its going well.

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I sometimes wish I wanted less from my career, my art, myself, my life. I could settle. I could make do. I could hunker down and grind out a long, adequate life.

I call that mediocre.

I’ve always dreamed big, even if I kept it a secret, not sure if I deserved to see the world through a lens of magnificence.

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