I know people thought perhaps me and Kate Durbin were the same person, because we rarely appear in public together. This is photographic proof that we are in fact two individual people. (I'm joking, it's become my running joke that Kate and I are twins because we obviously look so much alike, but it's one of those jokes where noone else laughs but I still think it's funny).
These photos make me happy and I'm trying to be happy today, and trying not to lay around moaning and sobbing like a kiddie contestant on Toddlers and Tiaras (substitute not wanting to start a rewrite with not wanting to put on my sparkling dress and baby-platforms). So I thought I'd show them here. Kate, hope that's okay. Today I'm listening to St. Vincent on repeat and walking around my front yard with the gorgeous autumn leaves and waving my hands in the air, like I did as a child, when I thought I was perhaps Mother Nature or an emissary of Mother Nature, and I am eating orange marmalade on toast. I am trying today. I am trying to be okay.
I am talking in almost every picture. At the reading I talked about how I felt such a kinship with Kate that in a way mirrors the kinship Ruth feels for Agnes in Green Girl, especially around film. There's a scene in the book where Ruth is at a nail shop, and she wants to ask the manicurist jokingly for "Tiger Red" a reference to George Cukor's film The Women, but she feels only Agnes would get that joke. I know Kate would get it, especially since her famous gold lame hot shorts costume is called the Crystal Allen, after the Joan Crawford femme fatale-shopgirl in the film.
Kate read from her amazing meticulous slow-down of The Hills, collected in E! Entertainment, and had various people read the dialogue parts, further highlighting their painful banality as well as the real pathos of everything. This is me and Kate's friend Sam. I really love my dress, even though I'm realizing looking at these pictures it isn't the most body-flattering dress in the world. But I still love it. My affection and love for my individual garments often transcends whether they're actually the most ideally flattering on me.
For some reason during my reading of the bartender scene in Green Girl I began to feel two rather warm flags of red on my cheeks. I think it's because I brought sparkling wine beforehand for the audience to drink, and I drank a cup, even though I have been trying not to drink lately, as a)it makes my digestive system super fucked up and b)even a glass of something makes me unbelievably depressed the next day. It looks like blush. I told this to Amina Cain afterwards. She said something like, I thought you were just really into it. Although I was really into that passage, which I like reading even though sometimes I can tell audience members dislike it or it makes them uncomfortable. It's really surprised me how much I love reading from Green Girl, even though it's not as performative of a text as O Fallen Angel. Although I read some from O Fallen Angel at CalArts, as well as Green Girl and Heroines, and I was surprised how much I missed the rhythms of that book, the rapid-fire way I do Mommy, the painful eye-rolling deliciousness of Maggie.
