Saturday, May 08, 2004
From Head to Flit
Today’s entry is written in honor of this week in South Minneapolis, which is the
30th Anniversary of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater’s Mayday Celebration and the 19th Anniversary of Patrick’s Cabaret. I read this piece in the Friday night anniversary cabaret, one of 19 artists performing this weekend to raise money and celebrate the cabaret's 19 years. Our theme was “Taking Risks”.
I like to think of the word cabaret as a verb. The verb cabaret is tightrope walking on a wind-shredded clothesline, a book that hangs in the air like steam, young Liza Minnelli on the stage of the Kit Kat Club, her arms open to the spotlights, one mascara muddy tear running down her cheek. Come, Let’s cabaret.
The first time I cabaret-ed with Patrick was, they tell me, 1987. ( I don’t actually remember.) I was in my late 20s, it was the big hair 80s and if you had asked me then I would have said to take risks was to write about sex. Lesbian sex. It seemed risky enough then to just say the words. Words like Lezzzbeeeeaaaaan. Words that start with C and rhyme with Flit. Punt. Gum. Once upon a time I felt as if someone would call the police if I simply said those words aloud, but the latest incarnation of the cabaret is across the alley from the police station, and another show about lesbian gum? Ho Hum.
Is it risky to admit that those words don’t sound so risky anymore? Risk means to leap forth in spite of possible loss or injury, in the hope of good outcome. Risk can be more than a little crazy, like old age Liza Minnelli herself, trying out some new stuff, hoping for a good outcome, even if VH1 ends up canceling the show. The real risk is not just to say but to do, to keep on Flitting and Punting and Gumming, no matter how many constitutional amendments they pass telling us we aren’t allowed.
Last Sunday the annual Mayday parade cabaret-ed down Bloomington Avenue—as always blowzy, smart, and schmaltzy as a well-loved lounge act married to a trapeze circus.
It was a partly cloudy Mayday, hot when the sun pushed through, blustery when the clouds closed in. Linnea and I used to head out to Bloomington Avenue early. The parade’s at 1:00— better leave by 12:30. Better leave by Noon. Don’t wanna risk missing it. Seventeen years later we sit at our kitchen table with friends drinking tea and espresso until 1:00. 1:15. Don't want to risk having to stand around and wait. We live just three short blocks from the end of the route and don't need a Skycam to know the parade hasn’t even left its Franklin Avenue take off yet. By 1:30 half our group finally joins the throngs. My cell phone is in my pocket. We'll call the others when we hear it coming, but the scruffy boy hanging from a shaky tree branch over our heads reports there's no sign of it yet.
Mayday might also be a verb. Majestic puppets roil and wave, held up by minions in paper plaster masks, broad strokes of human faces in pain, in joy. Feathered stilt walkers step over clown-faced marching bands. Agiprop artists mimic our worst presidents as unnamed sculptures my friend calls “pinatas of mass destruction” dance around bare-bellied adolescents with pumped up petals in their hair, while hordes of flowers and bugs with children inside skitter between their knees. Linnea and I mayday to celebrate one of our wedding anniversaries. We have many. Mayday has become an anniversary minor since we flew to Vegas for our Elvis wedding. But before that time we made up dozens of little anniversaries. Who says we get to have only one?
The first year Linnea and I were together was one of sunnier Maydays, the first Sunday of the year we came home from the park with sunburned cheeks. We were young, in our 20s. Linnea was in graduate school. I was a proudly underemployed poet. This was so long ago there was still an ozone layer and we never considered sunscreen, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web and we didn't have any credit card debt. I don't remember what I was wearing, but it was probably tight and tie-dyed and I was likely wearing silly shoes so my feet probably hurt. I don't remember what Linnea wore either, but I'm sure it was sensible. White gym socks. Tennis shoes. Linnea can dress up like an snappy Italian gangster when she wants to, and now that she has a GOOD job she leaves the house every morning looking the dashing gentleman in her Marshall Fields men's department suits, but she has never been one to wear her wingtips to the park.
That first Mayday together we scrambled up one of the shady slopes of Powderhorn Park and huddled together, knee to knee. I slid off the big malachite ring she had given me and slipped a matching ring off her bigger, squarer finger and I shook them in my hand like dice, blew on them like Lady Luck. We slipped my ring on her pinky, her ring on my forefinger, for just a minute or two, then we took our rings back and kissed, right there outside. It was the first and riskiest of our many weddings, not because we were touching outdoors but because it was the first time we promised out loud to be WITH each other. Hearts and Punts.
Since that time we go to the parade on Mayday with just ourselves, or we caravan. The first year we brought Linnea's redhead Italian mother she whooped and tittered and took pictures and shouted Oh My God whenever the craggy face of a 12-foot-tall puppet swayed her way. The year we brought our nieces and nephew from the exurbs of Wisconsin a contingent of masked actors were draped in mourning gray, hunched and crawling down Bloomington Avenue—the Spring just before we all got used to being back in a perpetual state of war. It was chilly that year, no sun at all and our 10-and-12-year-old nieces faces were attentive and unreadable. Later we couldn't get them to say what they learned about war at school. To mayday is to tell it loud. Mayday! Mayday! War is grief!
This year, far too late to find a seat, I lean against a wooden fence along the parade route sidewalk with two of our friends. Behind us two milky and tricycle-sized dogs, looking like they are made entirely of muscle, whine and strain on their leashes whenever a hippie dippy Mayday dog leaps past. I ask the old man with the white whiskered chin sitting behind the fence with the dogs if I am blocking his view. He growls and shrugs as if to say he don’t need to see this damn stupid parade anyway. It will be a few more minutes until I get it that he’s drunk. As we wait for the puppets, the bow of the tree above us creaks as the boy shouts “I see SOMETHING, I don’t know WHAT” and one friend, who I’ve known now for only a couple years, remarks that he'd once walked in this parade. The tree creaks and time accordions. I probably once watched that same friend swaying under the weight of some puppet, not knowing I would know him some day.
The boy in the tree sways and gasps. He opens his mouth to the air and swallows. He climbs down and back up the trunk like a French acrobat. He leans forward across the road, holding on by his fingertips and toes, shouting back down to his mothers. He’s laughing and also risking his neck, just to see if the puppets are coming. I worry about the boy. My other friend worries about a dog pulling another boy past on a skateboard and we both think we hear the drums. The bristle-chinned man behind us shouts out that his straining dog is a PIT BULL, but not really, because he’s AKC— just as the boy shouts out from above. “It’s the police cars. I see them. It’s really coming.” I call Linnea and she’s here in a minute with a slim neighbor dressed in layers of t-shirts and denim, because it’s one of these days that’s hot then cold then hot again. It’s 2:00 but the parade hasn’t arrived.
Later we will talk about the cleverness of the kids cricket costumes—or are they grasshoppers—hinged back legs that seemed to hop as they walked, and we compare notes about the drunk in the yard behind who turned out to be some kind of Nazi. Did he really shout out “WHITE POWER” at Mayday? We heard him call his dog Himmler, right? And did everyone notice the guy’s quiet son, smooth and muscled as a pit bull himself, his mouth a twisted smirk?
In the street before us the puppets of Spring are shrouded in gauzy white cloth. “What’s the point, What’s the point,” Himmler’s papa shouts. The theme of the parade is LEAP this year. Children break away from the curve, get in line to leap through the wheeled hoops, and Himmler’s papa is at it again. “The point dammit. What’s the point.” His family doesn’t bother to answer him so finally our slim friend mutters loudly over her shoulder, “For god’s sake. The theme is LEAP,” loud enough for Papa Himmler to hear. The boy in the undulating tree moans and careens. He LOVES this parade. I think again that to mayday is to be that boy in the tree along with Sally Bowles at the Kit Kat with a little bit of Tammy Fay whipped in, caberet-ing from head to flit, bare and dangerous on the stage while Nazis outside are congregating. Children whip like flags from the trees and chirp down the Avenue in crooked cricket costumes. Linnea takes my hand. We are still touching outside, no matter how many warmongers with mean dogs line up along route. Thank you. Thank you. I wave madly from the treetop. Fat tears smear down my cabaret painted cheeks. I love you all. No matter the outcome.
__
If you would like to send me comments, or ask to be added to my e-mail list announcing new blog posts, please go to my Web site, www.barriejeanborich.net, and use the GUEST BOOK feature.
Today’s entry is written in honor of this week in South Minneapolis, which is the
30th Anniversary of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater’s Mayday Celebration and the 19th Anniversary of Patrick’s Cabaret. I read this piece in the Friday night anniversary cabaret, one of 19 artists performing this weekend to raise money and celebrate the cabaret's 19 years. Our theme was “Taking Risks”.
I like to think of the word cabaret as a verb. The verb cabaret is tightrope walking on a wind-shredded clothesline, a book that hangs in the air like steam, young Liza Minnelli on the stage of the Kit Kat Club, her arms open to the spotlights, one mascara muddy tear running down her cheek. Come, Let’s cabaret.
The first time I cabaret-ed with Patrick was, they tell me, 1987. ( I don’t actually remember.) I was in my late 20s, it was the big hair 80s and if you had asked me then I would have said to take risks was to write about sex. Lesbian sex. It seemed risky enough then to just say the words. Words like Lezzzbeeeeaaaaan. Words that start with C and rhyme with Flit. Punt. Gum. Once upon a time I felt as if someone would call the police if I simply said those words aloud, but the latest incarnation of the cabaret is across the alley from the police station, and another show about lesbian gum? Ho Hum.
Is it risky to admit that those words don’t sound so risky anymore? Risk means to leap forth in spite of possible loss or injury, in the hope of good outcome. Risk can be more than a little crazy, like old age Liza Minnelli herself, trying out some new stuff, hoping for a good outcome, even if VH1 ends up canceling the show. The real risk is not just to say but to do, to keep on Flitting and Punting and Gumming, no matter how many constitutional amendments they pass telling us we aren’t allowed.
Last Sunday the annual Mayday parade cabaret-ed down Bloomington Avenue—as always blowzy, smart, and schmaltzy as a well-loved lounge act married to a trapeze circus.
It was a partly cloudy Mayday, hot when the sun pushed through, blustery when the clouds closed in. Linnea and I used to head out to Bloomington Avenue early. The parade’s at 1:00— better leave by 12:30. Better leave by Noon. Don’t wanna risk missing it. Seventeen years later we sit at our kitchen table with friends drinking tea and espresso until 1:00. 1:15. Don't want to risk having to stand around and wait. We live just three short blocks from the end of the route and don't need a Skycam to know the parade hasn’t even left its Franklin Avenue take off yet. By 1:30 half our group finally joins the throngs. My cell phone is in my pocket. We'll call the others when we hear it coming, but the scruffy boy hanging from a shaky tree branch over our heads reports there's no sign of it yet.
Mayday might also be a verb. Majestic puppets roil and wave, held up by minions in paper plaster masks, broad strokes of human faces in pain, in joy. Feathered stilt walkers step over clown-faced marching bands. Agiprop artists mimic our worst presidents as unnamed sculptures my friend calls “pinatas of mass destruction” dance around bare-bellied adolescents with pumped up petals in their hair, while hordes of flowers and bugs with children inside skitter between their knees. Linnea and I mayday to celebrate one of our wedding anniversaries. We have many. Mayday has become an anniversary minor since we flew to Vegas for our Elvis wedding. But before that time we made up dozens of little anniversaries. Who says we get to have only one?
The first year Linnea and I were together was one of sunnier Maydays, the first Sunday of the year we came home from the park with sunburned cheeks. We were young, in our 20s. Linnea was in graduate school. I was a proudly underemployed poet. This was so long ago there was still an ozone layer and we never considered sunscreen, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web and we didn't have any credit card debt. I don't remember what I was wearing, but it was probably tight and tie-dyed and I was likely wearing silly shoes so my feet probably hurt. I don't remember what Linnea wore either, but I'm sure it was sensible. White gym socks. Tennis shoes. Linnea can dress up like an snappy Italian gangster when she wants to, and now that she has a GOOD job she leaves the house every morning looking the dashing gentleman in her Marshall Fields men's department suits, but she has never been one to wear her wingtips to the park.
That first Mayday together we scrambled up one of the shady slopes of Powderhorn Park and huddled together, knee to knee. I slid off the big malachite ring she had given me and slipped a matching ring off her bigger, squarer finger and I shook them in my hand like dice, blew on them like Lady Luck. We slipped my ring on her pinky, her ring on my forefinger, for just a minute or two, then we took our rings back and kissed, right there outside. It was the first and riskiest of our many weddings, not because we were touching outdoors but because it was the first time we promised out loud to be WITH each other. Hearts and Punts.
Since that time we go to the parade on Mayday with just ourselves, or we caravan. The first year we brought Linnea's redhead Italian mother she whooped and tittered and took pictures and shouted Oh My God whenever the craggy face of a 12-foot-tall puppet swayed her way. The year we brought our nieces and nephew from the exurbs of Wisconsin a contingent of masked actors were draped in mourning gray, hunched and crawling down Bloomington Avenue—the Spring just before we all got used to being back in a perpetual state of war. It was chilly that year, no sun at all and our 10-and-12-year-old nieces faces were attentive and unreadable. Later we couldn't get them to say what they learned about war at school. To mayday is to tell it loud. Mayday! Mayday! War is grief!
This year, far too late to find a seat, I lean against a wooden fence along the parade route sidewalk with two of our friends. Behind us two milky and tricycle-sized dogs, looking like they are made entirely of muscle, whine and strain on their leashes whenever a hippie dippy Mayday dog leaps past. I ask the old man with the white whiskered chin sitting behind the fence with the dogs if I am blocking his view. He growls and shrugs as if to say he don’t need to see this damn stupid parade anyway. It will be a few more minutes until I get it that he’s drunk. As we wait for the puppets, the bow of the tree above us creaks as the boy shouts “I see SOMETHING, I don’t know WHAT” and one friend, who I’ve known now for only a couple years, remarks that he'd once walked in this parade. The tree creaks and time accordions. I probably once watched that same friend swaying under the weight of some puppet, not knowing I would know him some day.
The boy in the tree sways and gasps. He opens his mouth to the air and swallows. He climbs down and back up the trunk like a French acrobat. He leans forward across the road, holding on by his fingertips and toes, shouting back down to his mothers. He’s laughing and also risking his neck, just to see if the puppets are coming. I worry about the boy. My other friend worries about a dog pulling another boy past on a skateboard and we both think we hear the drums. The bristle-chinned man behind us shouts out that his straining dog is a PIT BULL, but not really, because he’s AKC— just as the boy shouts out from above. “It’s the police cars. I see them. It’s really coming.” I call Linnea and she’s here in a minute with a slim neighbor dressed in layers of t-shirts and denim, because it’s one of these days that’s hot then cold then hot again. It’s 2:00 but the parade hasn’t arrived.
Later we will talk about the cleverness of the kids cricket costumes—or are they grasshoppers—hinged back legs that seemed to hop as they walked, and we compare notes about the drunk in the yard behind who turned out to be some kind of Nazi. Did he really shout out “WHITE POWER” at Mayday? We heard him call his dog Himmler, right? And did everyone notice the guy’s quiet son, smooth and muscled as a pit bull himself, his mouth a twisted smirk?
In the street before us the puppets of Spring are shrouded in gauzy white cloth. “What’s the point, What’s the point,” Himmler’s papa shouts. The theme of the parade is LEAP this year. Children break away from the curve, get in line to leap through the wheeled hoops, and Himmler’s papa is at it again. “The point dammit. What’s the point.” His family doesn’t bother to answer him so finally our slim friend mutters loudly over her shoulder, “For god’s sake. The theme is LEAP,” loud enough for Papa Himmler to hear. The boy in the undulating tree moans and careens. He LOVES this parade. I think again that to mayday is to be that boy in the tree along with Sally Bowles at the Kit Kat with a little bit of Tammy Fay whipped in, caberet-ing from head to flit, bare and dangerous on the stage while Nazis outside are congregating. Children whip like flags from the trees and chirp down the Avenue in crooked cricket costumes. Linnea takes my hand. We are still touching outside, no matter how many warmongers with mean dogs line up along route. Thank you. Thank you. I wave madly from the treetop. Fat tears smear down my cabaret painted cheeks. I love you all. No matter the outcome.
__
If you would like to send me comments, or ask to be added to my e-mail list announcing new blog posts, please go to my Web site, www.barriejeanborich.net, and use the GUEST BOOK feature.
