BITS OF MY LIFE

By Diane Frank

Holiday Season is frenetic for everyone, but add trying to put on a face and fix your hair before you go out the door in 30 minutes less than normal time and it becomes truly an obstacle course. That eyeliner and mascara you thought you had put down right here, migrated to over there, and you are running out of your favorite eye shadow, and wait where did that blemish come from? Oh my, the matching hose has a run in it and I’m down to my last pair… oh fudge! And, this doesn’t include having the right thing to wear. It’s a hard life.

Just before the Thanksgiving weekend, I went with a friend from my book circle to see Fur: the Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. The late Ms. Arbus was played by Nicole Kidman with wonderful intensity. Now why is Diane Arbus of interest here? You don’t know her? I’m not going to put in the Wikipedia link here, but Arbus was an internationally known photographer whose oeuvre was pictures of the oddballs and weirdos in society. Us, among others. She was not attracted to pretty, but to the fringe. The movie suggests that her own discomfort with her compulsions (according to her unauthorized biography as a teen she… oh, read it yourself) lead her to feel more comfortable with the outcasts of society than with her privileged NY family.

Which gets me to my editorial point for the evening: To what extent do we stay in the closet or only hang out with other CDs for the same reason that Diane Arbus did - that our sense of being an outsider makes us uncomfortable being with “normal” people?

The usual story we tell is that we stay in the closet or go only to CD friendly bars and/or support groups because we are rightfully afraid of being out in public - of coming out and so on. But, maybe there is another component - that of finding people with whom you don’t feel like a freak, because they are freaks too. I think I went through a bit of this thinking eight years ago, when I first started dealing with who I was. I thought that maybe the demimonde of dark sleazy bars, where people stopped wrestling with their illicit desires, were where I could be comfortable. It turned out that didn’t work for me, so I had to find my way back into mainstream society, via Temple and my book circle. But I wonder how many stay because they feel most at home there, feeling themselves to be freaks at home among other freaks.

This Holiday Season continued with a bang, or maybe a shriek. Our own Chloe Prince led an expedition to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show – the live stage version - at Cleveland Public Theatre. I guess there were nearly 20 people who were lured out of their closets, their bars and perhaps their isolation by this venture. I couldn’t get a good count because as usual, we got there late and grabbed the first seats we could find. We stayed put because we had a good view. I was surprised that people tended to hang around their seats at intermission rather than meeting in the lobby, so we only got to say hello to Laura and Chloe, who of course go everywhere. I’m guessing also that we were the only people who recognized elsewhere in the audience, a certain former AO member, “CH” and her writing partner for a certain genre musical (in drab) and said hello. Where has our sense of history gone? And of course, someone wanted to get home, so we didn’t hang around afterwards. Still the accounts are that all had a wonderful time.

However, I wasn’t all that pleased with the production itself. Besides the glitches in the sound system, some of the actors were simply hard to understand even with the microphones working. And at this point, Rocky has lost the power to shock. The almost complete cross casting of parts was amusing but bland. And, missing was the audience participation. Yes, some people knew the lines to shout back, and the timing of the narration and some of the dialogue was clearly aimed at providing space for the ritual audience remarks that have grown with the cult status of the movie. But without an audience well grounded in all the interactive bits, the pace seemed off. Maybe another night with a better-prepared audience would have been a more engaging experience. This is however, the second production in a row where I think CPT has overreached its grasp.

The following day I was at Temple again. The senior group was having a cultural afternoon, and the program attracted me. I did get some ribbing from all these little old ladies and men about how tall I am. But nothing else. I really need to learn some more graceful comebacks for that sort of thing.

Tonight I’m just back from Book Circle, and besides getting a not-half-bad picture of myself with my good friend at her birthday party this summer… (there was a lesson there I was going to mention, but I’ve now forgotten.) That will have to wait until some other time. I’ll remember it eventually… and no! of course not. I’m not going to post that picture on the internet. But that’s also another story, as will be the rest of the Holiday Season. May all you and yours find joy and contentment in the season and the New Year to come.