Hey there. It's been a long time. Five years, in fact. If, like me, you are an animal living under the national religion that is capitalism, you've probably heard this question before, "Where do you see yourself in the next five years?"
Five years ago, August 2019, I was in Hampton, New Jersey, and today, August 6, 2024, I am once again in Hampton, New Jersey. In between that time, I was living in Seattle, with no plans to ever move back east. I certainly would never have pictured myself living again in the majority white, bucolic farmlands and river towns of my birth. While I have been called psychic or sensitive before, I have never claimed to be able to see the future. Sometimes the way you see your life going just isn't how it goes. So, in the words of the beloved narrator of Jonathan Larson's Tony-winning Rent, Mark,
"How did we get here? How the hell?"
In the spring of 2019 I premiered my new solo performer musical, Lover of Low Creatures at Performance Space New York as a part of the Disabled Arts Festival i.wanna.be.with.you. everywhere. A few developments and three weeks later I was sharing the full-length, sold out show at Velocity Dance Center in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. On July 26th, 2019, my ex-husband Tony and I had our wedding ceremony at the University of Washington Botanical Gardens, and the following month we flew to rural, western, central Jersey for a second reception with some of our family and friends who were unable to make the trip to the West Coast.
In January 2020, Tony and I got legally married at a cabin in Wallace Falls, WA, with a small group of our queer family. This same month, I learned that I had been awarded a Dance and Choreography Fellowship from the Pina Bausch Foundation in Wuppertal, Germany. The following month, Tony and I flew to Germany so that I could receive the award, and spend time with my fellow fellows from 2019 and my year. I am pleased to report that the Pina Bausch Foundation and the network of fellowship alumni are still big parts of my life. I've made what feel like lifelong friends and collaborators, bolstering relationships I had made in 2017 when I first performed in Berlin at Hebbel Am Ufer. When, in 2011, I was watching the beautiful documentary Pina in the theater as a college student in Massachusetts, I couldn't have predicted that nine years later I would be receiving a dance fellowship in my idol's name. Being ferried around her old stomping grounds by taxi drivers who knew and adored her (Pina didn't drive), taking Wuppertal's famous Schwebebahn with other talented dancer-choreographers from around the world, sharing drinks with her lovely son Solomon, who founded the Pina Bausch Foundation, or seeing her company perform the incredibly moving Blaubart at the Wuppertal Opernhaus, where she had mounted countless boundary-breaking shows for decades, while she was the director of the Wuppertal Ballet. Sometimes, life's surprises are good.
Tony and I came home to the Coronavirus pandemic laying siege to our city, our state, our country, and our world. As a healthcare worker, Tony was on the front lines every day, and this stress and fear took a great toll on him. As I began to fall in love with someone else (Tony and I had always been nonmonogamous, but this year we opened up to the possibility of real feelings emerging in our relationships with others, as if we could have actually controlled this reality before), and explore the landscape of my neurodivergence (I have learned that I have ADHD and borderline personality disorder, conditions and superpowers that have been notoriously maligned, misunderstood, and underdiagnosed), Tony dealt with depression, loneliness, desperation, and began the search for his missing spark. I remember the eight of wands coming up in a tarot reading I did for him. A new sprout of spiritual and motivational transformation. Change. It always comes for us.
That year, our mutual best friend and housemate (and oft queer community-rumored third, haha) Sátchel moved out of our house to their own apartment (much to our dismay), and Tony and I folded into one another. In a way, it was the closest we've ever been. Although we had imagined loping into 2020 on honeymoon in Scotland, we settled for massive cuddles with each other and our dogs, Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+, pretty much any streaming subscription we could afford, socially distanced park walks with friends, groceries and medicine delivered via instacart and punk mail, and, as I described in an interview on the podcast F*cks Given, several batches of weed banana bread. I began drawing and painting more than I had in over a decade, learned to make vegetable ferments (real pickles!), and taught dance and musical theatre online to fellow traumatized Disabled creatives who were learning to ignore the cries of, "the pandemic will be over soon!" Several people we loved died, and somehow, we did not. More and more and more people began to identify as Disabled and to figure how to live this way. It was a rough and resilient time.
A year later, in the late winter of 2021, Tony and I adopted an eight-month-old kitten, whom I named Caravaggio. When Sátchel and their cat Mister Mu had moved out I had discovered that while I didn't really want to live with just my partner, I definitely could not live without a cat. Tony was hesitant, as he's allergic to cats and doesn't like how they can just "go wherever they want" in your house, unlike dogs, but he fell in love with Gigi as hard as I did. Co-raising our kitten that first year was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. Despite what followed, I have no regrets.
In May of 2021, my girlfriend broke up with me, and Tony met Sophie, with whom he is now coparenting a gorgeous baby, Wally Honey Rose. While the relationship began on casual terms, their flame soon burned bright, and its light cast a shadow on our marriage- the things Tony wasn't getting from me that he desperately wanted, and that I didn't seem to know how to naturally provide. Although Tony and I were together for a total of nine years, when we began to break up, we had only been married for a year. If I have any advice for fiancées who don't want to become divorcées, it's this: Have the wedding, the party, the ceremony, the beauty, the commitment, the fun, and wait on signing that marriage license. A year and a half after I gave up my Disability benefits and insurance in favor of spousal benefits I was living in an apartment on my own with my cat son, performing ParaOlympic-qualifying feats to get my bag of garbage into the apartment complex's communal dumpster, and struggling to pay rent and feed us both.
The painting that accompanies this post was my New Year's Boat for 2021 going into 2022. New Year's Boats is a tradition in my family that started with my mom's best friend (who died of ovarian cancer in 2011) Tyrrell. Her daughter Lumi is my dear friend and sibling, and I remember them and me, our moms, and other members of my mama's chosen family gathered around in someone's living room on New Year's Eve to draw boats filled with things we wanted to manifest in the new year. These boat drawings would go under our pillows that night, and the spell would be cast. I began sharing this ceremony with my own chosen family the year Tyrrell died, and it has bloomed since then. It's now expressed in any visual/tactile artistic medium, you don't have to put it under your pillow, and it can be as conceptual as you wish.
The painting I did on New Year's Eve 2021/2022, is of me as some sort of bright eyed alien, sinking my yellow, red-finned submarine down into the darkest depths of the unmapped ocean, where godly, prehistoric sentient plant life most likely lives. This was where I needed to journey to find the rest of my life when the life I thought I was living ended.
To be continued...
