This Piece Isn’t About Her
Posted by Heather Woodbury on 2/25/2009
Strikes me that a blog is sort of like the performed version of a diary. I always joke that the dark secret of the daily journal I keep is how deeply dull I am. Thus, as I prepare for the performance of my latest solo piece - The Last Days of Desmond ‘Nani’ Reese: A Stripper’s History of the World, my actual quotidian writings revolve around making lists of sections that need extra rehearsing, to get the timing right, or the tangled lines smoothed out and then natttering over what snacks I will feed myself as reward, how much exercise I can coax myself into doing, etcetera. Yes: truly, madly, deeply dull. So, here’s a “performed” entry instead, a trifle less dull, one hopes.
I’m in Starbucks. I pass a grim NY Times head-line about people, not Americans, in terrible hardship.
So, why, I ask myself, in this globally severe time, why a piece about an academic feminist in the near future interviewing an irascible, half-mad ancient ex-stripper show-girl prostitute in her bramble-covered shack over-looking an L.A. freeway?
No direct connection. Hmm, but Last Days is about the lives, especially female lives, that happen in the margins of history and about the lengths some women go to, in order to survive. It’s a burlesque of America’s story of itself, a stripper’s-eye-view of the 20th and 21st centuries, darkly humorous and a bit blue. March is Women’s History Month and as my feminist academic character, Amber, says to her dissertation subject, Desmond ‘Nani’ Reese “It’s history! Without it we can’t understand where we’ve been, where we’re going.”
“Nothing to understand. We’re just waiting to die. Wait to die, wait to die,” replies Desmond. Somehow, these characters hopped out at me a few years back. There was a woman in my neighborhood here in LA who was reputed, among other things, to’ve been a “show-girl” back in the day. The teenage girl living next door, the elderly former show-girl’s only friend being the girl’s mother, recounted to me how she found this woman’s body, several days after her demise.
Her house soon became an object of fascination for neighbors, for real estate hounds - she’d painted fish and mermaids in the interior of home-made cement pools around the property, and inside were crammed six foot high stacks of papers, photos, knick knacks, a loom. I myself scavenged an urn, a cane chair, and vintage Christmas lights and then was haunted (loud taps and thumps at night) until I apologized and stopped talking about her. Lest I be haunted again, let me just say this piece isn’t about her. However, it did get me thinking, as did a strange shack, half boarded-up but still occupied, on a steep incline, overlooking the 5 freeway, in the wild park where I walk, “Who lives there?” And that led to ruminating on lonely, confused ends, from King Lear on, and how can one redeem these sad closing acts? Particularly the solitary deaths of eccentric, peculiar women who might not have made the choices most people expected them to make and who have paid the cost of that, how does life add up for them? Because I do believe many lives, despite huge mistakes and detours, cruelties and injustices, are redeemed by examination. There is meaning there in that life: ingenuity, wit, the odd tender moment, a scrap of glamour, maybe even the glint of heroism.