THEATRICS tour diary part 2
I know it's late but why not?
Week one can be read about here
AUGUST 9 RICHMOND
THE SHOW IS IN A TUNNEL
I wake up next to Jessica. I’m sad to leave one of my best friends. I never know when I will see her next. I try to female manipulate her into getting into the car but she is too strong. You know when you have a friend that can see you all the way through? Like can see all your little tics and read your face so easy? That is Jessica.
I drive towards Richmond. I see three separate car accidents. I buy cigarettes. The gas station only has blue menthol capris. The cashier keeps explaining that is the only type of capri they have because that is his favorite and he is the only one he knows who buys this type. Ok so we are connected now through the menthol capris.
Myla has organized the show and I know them through Baltimore life. We all went to Baltimore together. They have been throwing renegade raves and are moving to Spain.
The show is in a tunnel by a creek. Hikers walk by while we carry down the heavy generator and PAs down the path to the tunnel.
We set up the tunnel.
Myla and Miles play the trumpet and a bassoon in the tunnel and it feels like a happening. I really appreciate improvisational music and performance. Myla and Miles have contributed to my understanding of performance and experimental music in different ways. Myla and Miles are in a band called MEMS, which is an amazing improvisational down tempo band who were also on tour recently on the east coast.
Next is Vermin, who is a clown! He is dressed in a rainbow of colors and a mohawk bicycle helmet. He runs up and down the tunnel playing music on his child-like keyboard. Then he pulls out a big suitcase and inside is a comically large clown like cigarette prop that he begins miming smoking and it makes a clownlike shaking sound.
My friends have arrived with their new baby who is 99 days old and whose name means desolate earth. There are probably 10 people total at this show. There is also a dead turtle about 20 feet away. Ben texts me that the turtle is the last life you live in samsara before reaching nirvana. So I like to think the turtle is in a better place now.
I perform next. I bruise my left knee very badly but the red light in the tunnel frames me perfectly. Someone from the parking lot yells “what is going on down there?” The clown yells back “a show!”.
After me is Starship Truth. They have multiple media set ups, candles, a key board, a record player. They collage disparate club and noise sounds with records. Bits of Sun RA and Leon Thomas’s words blister through mixed in with thumping and ticking. The sun sets but the moon is so bright it feels like eternal dusk.
Desolate Earth glows in the red light of the tunnel and looks like a little oracle. We play peekaboo.
Our next move is a rave, dj DIV PRO is playing at Material Room, it is a fundraiser for Gaza. We get to the venue and DJ NBPHOBIC is playing and Myla, Miles and I dance together. We make funny faces at each other and really throw our bodies around. Time is such a funny thing. It feels so good to dance with people who have known me for the better part of a decade. It feels so good to be nowhere and no one and dance. My face is smeared with fake blood and my teeth are blacked out with my performance make up and I’m shaking my ass. DIV PRO plays a lit ass set, all this deep UK dub. In the parking lot people are talking and we meet some people who traveled from DC for tonight’s event. There is also a rapper doing a raffle for someone to win a tshirt. Myla and I both pay $5.00 to be entered to win.
We tire ourselves out and head back to Myla’s. We talk about group therapy and liberation and the future and pass out.
AUGUST 10 DURHAM
EVERYWHERE YOU GO
In the morning we share coffee. Myla gives me a crystal heart to hang on my rearview mirror.
On my way out of town. I talk to Blush on the phone for an hour. I drive to Durham and get myself a fat bowl of pho. I get to the venue early. I load in and I am so tired I could almost cry but then people start filtering in and the returning excitement I get before every show comes to me. I get my camera out and start interviewing people for my tour documentary. I am obsessed with staying present and capturing the moment. The organizers of Paradiso, a reading series, are Laura and Marta. I’ve been in communication with Marta. I came to learn that I read with Laura, who has a book with Future Poem Press, In the summer of 2017 when I did a mini poetry tour down the east coast with some friends. We read in a pool together.
First on the bill is Cambria Storms. She is a trained ballet dancer and also the organist at a church in town. She performs a fifteen minute long improv danc-ish piece to an organ track she produced herself. She twists her body into painful stances and it feels clown,ballet, and tortuous at the same time. The organ track is so optimistic and tragic. The movement feels the same.
The next person on the bill is the poet CJ Martin who reads poems from the perspective of different people in a town, he calls them his attempt at “cartoons”.
I’m excited to perform for them. I do my bit. I crash my car. I read my monologue. I stick my fingers in my mouth. I beg God for money. Afterwards I get to connect with all the beautiful freaks! I meet a band called Wetness. I meet performance artists and poets. We all go to Queeny’s after and commiserate. Laura Jaramillo and I connect over our love for Lisa Carver as I detail Blush and mine’s first date being a Lisa Carver performance.
We take it outside to smoke cigarettes and talk about our zodiac signs. Marta and I are tired so we head to her house and crash.
AUGUST 11 ASHEVILLE HARMONY HARMONY HARMONY
I drive in and out of rain showers and fog in the mountains.
Tonight the reading is at Harmony Wine Shop/Bar, a wine bar above the restaurant Neng Jrs. Both are run and owned by the power couple Silver and Cherry Iocovozzi. Cherry greets me, we move around some tables, set up the space, then go to his house to chill for a second. He has a tiny chihuahua named Pinky that I adore. We grab oysters before the reading.
First to read is Cherry who reads a piece about the dance of harvesting grapes and then turning the grapes into wine. The dancers smash the grapes, being in sync with the process. Next is Emma Ensley who will also be doing a book tour for her book The Computer Room. She reads the title story from the book and I almost start weeping. I need to read the whole book, her writing is so sharp and tender. Next is my dear friend Glenda Rom. Glenda reads beautiful poems about the earth, resistance, detailing what living in Asheville was like after hurricane Helene. In one poem titled Jerry Williams Wrote Eight Children’s Books, Glenda recounts the time she spent with Jerry William’s kid in the wake of William’s brutal murder by Asheville police. I start crying. There is a lot to fight for always. We are all connected. Oftentimes since moving north I hear people’s assumptions about the south and get so frustrated. There are tons of people here, fighting for a better world, struggling, making valuable art.
Niina Pollari, who reviewed my book, was in the crowd tonight. She wrote so kindly about my book and her review really captured the essence of what I was trying to do. I’m excited she gets to see all these plays she has read be performed.
I have known Glenda for so long, she read at the Miami show on my 2018 tour. A lot of this tour feels like a time loop in some ways. Reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in years but it is still so warm. I am grateful to perform in a city (Asheville), I temporarily lived for 4-6 months before I moved to New York in 2023.
Last is my friend Josie’s music project Rotogator. It’s a noise collage of all these layered tracks, pedals, synths. The sound envelopes the whole room and closes us out. As friends trickle out and leave, Gelnda, Josie and I help Cherry clean up. Putting chairs and tables back to how they were. Silver has begun cooking and I walk down to an empty Neng Jrs. to take out container of pork and rice and green onion with chili oil with a side of cold tomatoes procured with jalapenos. Cherry pours me a ginger seltzer elixir. Silver makes food for him and Cherry while Cherry polishes glasses. I love being in an empty restaurant at the end of a long night shooting the shit with other service workers. We swap service industry stories.
The last time I was in their house I was pregnant and so sick with drugs I spent the night on the bathroom floor. We sit on the couch and they gossip to me and then we watch Trisha Payta’s ASMR videos where she is a bar wench and we are the weary travelers.
Silver and Cherry’s sense of hospitality is so comforting. I sleep deeply for the first time in a long time. In the morning Cherry makes me coffee, fried eggs, and bacon. I head for Atlanta.
AUGUST 12 ATLANTA
FRIED OKRA IS MY FAVORITE
The drive from Asheville to Atlanta is five hours. I always hit traffic in Atlanta. When I get to Gray’s house I collapse on the couch. I can’t stop saying “I’m tired” . I have to tell myself to shut up. In Asheville I couldn’t stop saying “I’m fine with whatever”, as much as I wish this was a helpful statement it is not.
Gray’s house is beautiful. It is one of my favorite houses to be in. They and their partner are both artists and have added their touch to everything. The sconces in the hallway are colored with stars on the shades. Colorful quilts are draped over the couch. Gray has three large fluffy cats that are comical to look at. Harbo rests his head on my feet.
Gray and I used to live together in Baltimore. They are one of the first people to ever go on a poetry tour with me. In 2016 we drove from Baltimore to Oakland. In Texas the car broke down and we had to abandon it. We saw the Grand Canyon together. Like many poets I grew up with in Baltimore, Gray is extremely talented not just with words but with sculpture. They show me their loom and the weaving they are creating. We eat potato chips and gossip and I close my eyes for an hour.
Tonight the show will be in the woods, powered by a generator. It is going to rain. It sprinkles for a second. We park and start unloading the gear. We are doing a generator show in Green Emerald Park. Everything is overgrown and it gives Lord of the Rings, rock tables and benches and even a fireplace made of stone surrounded by a canopy of trees.
Tonight the line up is Catherine Rush, who I read with on the 2016 poetry tour with Gray, then Gray Mantle, me, then the amazing noise artist and poet contra cueva, who is my latina sister, and then Addison and raf’s band Mini Screamers. Addison also performed at our Atlanta show in 2016! SORRY EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED FOREVER VIBES.
Catherine”s poems set the tone as she reads about love, sucking dick, acceptance, and shame. Gray’s poems are about the psychic knots of earth’s demise, dreams, and magic. When I perform I throw myself onto the dirt and thrust. When I am done I am covered in dirt. When I put my fingers in my mouth they taste like the chemicals from the bug spray and dirt. contra cuevas performs beats with poems, reading them off paper and I’m so thankful to meet a noise poet diva making it work in Atlanta! She has a new album out. I hope she remembers to mail me my copy. Last is Mini Screamers. It is dark now so they perform by candlelight in the woods. The two of them, Addison and raf move freely, thrashing about, collaging sound and then screaming, dancing, singing on top of the work. It reminds me of pop stars and camp and noise and unpredictability which is some of the best stuff you can get out of a performance.
After the show we eat. There are about twelve of us. We all swap stories. Catherine is fostering five cats, four kittens and a mom, and she has two cats of her own. Mari aka contra cuevas car is out of transmission fluid. One guy gives me some camping recs to check out in Florida.
I think tour can be really romantic and maybe glamorous to a lot of people from the outside but also a lot of tour is uncomfortable, tired, and almost never alone. It takes being open even when you don’t necessarily want to be, at least for me. I value connecting with other artists who live everywhere. I value sharing ourselves with each other. I value time. I do not mind being uncomfortable, sleeping on couches, having allergic reactions, being socially spent, because it is very very rewarding. I am connected to other artist and people. I am taken care of. I get to enjoy amazing art I may have never known about. I get to meet artist new and old.
We head back to Gray and Addison’s and we all gossip for another hour until I close my eyes.
In the morning Gray and I get breakfast with my friend Joey who is a writer and film maker. We eat fried okra, cheesy grits, jalapeno corn bread muffin, and pimento cheese. Fuck yes. We discuss AI and what it could be useful for or not useful for. I have to head for Tallahassee, I wish I had more time with Gray. I start my drive out of the city.
TALLAHASSEE AUGUST 13 UNDER THE BRIDGE AT THE SKATE PARK
I stay on a major highway for a while before I turn on to back road highways through southern Georgia and into northern Florida. I like driving through farmland and giant tents pitched off in fields that boast signs about southern baptist churches. I pull off to pee by the side of the road. I pass giant tractors when it is safe. I drive through a sun shower, when it rains and the sun is still shinning bright it means the devils is fucking his wife. I listen to suckdog. I eat peanut butter out of the jar and it drips onto the rotting leather seat in my truck.
Around 5:45 I get to my friend Tyler’s house. His neighbors collect rocks and make them into pentagrams in the backyard. We head to the skate park under the bridge where the show will be. Ryan is at the skatepark setting up with Sebastian, Mac, and Mitch. Ryan booked the show for me and Sebastian and the guys are setting up a generator situation. We have to fix the sound on the amps to be really loud. And then the amps blow the fuse of one of the power strips so we can only use one amp!
I catch up with Ryan and Tyler and my friend Annie who is also there.
Tyler, Ryan and I were part of the same friend crew when we were all ike 18-20 living in Tallahassee. We all got really close in the summer of 2014. Ryan and I have matching butterfly tattoos. I come back every other year or two and always make a point to see these two because they mean something to me. Something about knowing each other before a certain time in my life. Something about going to my first punk and noise shows with them and trying a lot of drugs for the first time with them, breaking into pools and drinking all night and feeling hopeless a little bit.
Annie I know because we did an art handling internship together where we were vigorously sexually harassed but we didn’t really understand what that was yet because we were so young. I remember our boss would take videos of me installing drywall and hanging art and say “that is soooo sexy” and he always wanted to listen to that band Jonestown massacre.
More people show up, Rachel who I kissed on the cheek the first time I did molly at a keg party for my birthday. Dori who read with me on the 2018 tour.
It is sunset now under the bridge and first to go is Balloon Knot and he starts mixing reality tv sound bites with beats. There’s a huge palm tree behind him under the bridge. I hear Tyra Bank shouting “we were all routing for you” then sound bites of “come with me to try panera bread’s new lemonade” stitched with news broadcaster quips on how a girl died from a heart attack due to the panera lemonade. Apparently Balloon Knot is called so because he also makes balloon animals. This seems more like a chill and vibe set because no animals are ballooned.
Next is me. The mic keeps cutting out but it works in my favor. I look out and see my friends laughing and I try to be louder than the generator. It has been sick as hell doing generator shows in different places and making shows happen like that when there is no venue to host it. It is hot as hell outside. I’m covered in bug spray. I’m sweating. I’m covered in fake blood.
Last to go is Ryan’s band Good Real Estate. There is a mix of electronic, punk and something else. One of the guys, Mac, wears a bug face on his head. Mitch handles the electronic part and Ryan rips the guitar. I love freako punks. I love being under the bridge with my co sexual harassment victim and the people I used to be so codependent alcoholics with.
It’s karaoke night and I show up covered in fake blood. The Bark is filled with college kids who are frightened by my fake blood and start asking me if I’m ok. I eat my tempeh salad and look for people I know and Dori and Rachel are here! I get tired so I head to Tyler’s.
Thursday is my first day off in like seven days. I played seven shows back to back and now I can rest. I grab coffee, run some errands, and meet Ryan, Dori, Rachel, and Mac at some apartment complex pool they’ve been going to lately. The cool thing about Tallahassee is like, it is just a ton of students there and everyone lives in apartment complexes with pools and you can just pretend to live somewhere and go swimming. God willing. I put my whole body in and watch dead bugs float around me while Ryan and Zeb talk about ketamine. We all walk to MidtownCaboose and sit outside and order wings and coleslaw. Then Tyler’s brother Justin comes out and I guess is the manager? And gives us free flan. Then we go to Dori and Sebastian’s house to play Clue. Sebastian wins Clue and it is something like Mr. Green in the library with some weapons.
There is a chipotle style pizza chain in Florida called Blaze pizza where for like 15 bucks you can make your own pizza with unlimited toppings and get a drink. Blaze pizza is very seductive to me. Tyler, his gf, and I eat our pizzas fast because we are going to the six o clock showing of WEAPONS.
Ok so Weapons really scares me and since I’m staying alone at Tyler’s I text Ryan to come. Sleep over. We stay up all night gossiping.
When we wake up we gossip some more and I’m like totally being codependent again and make him run errands with me and get breakfast with me and try to female manipulate him into going to Gainesville with me. Ryan has been witness to some insane points of my life. We have matching butterfly tattoos.
Ryan tells me about what punk is like now in the age of tiktok in Tallahassee and Gainesville. He says there is no such thing as posers anymore and all the counter cultures are meshed together because of tiktok. He tells me there’s such a swing back from woke culture that now hardcore guys go to the punk shows to mosh. He tells me the Gen Z kids are obsessed with money and don’t understand the punk money ethics of giving your cut of the door to the touring band. He says his friend booked a band who made the booker sign a contract she would pay them 40.00. He says that kids these days are romanticized by the idea of a band but don’t care to write their own songs so sometimes when he books a younger band they just play covers like it is nothing, all nonchalant.
Then we talk about hippies and the Ocala forest. People always go missing there and one time, The Rainbow Gathering, an annoying hippie group that throws festivals in state parks unpermitted, threw a fest in The Ocala forest. We talk about how many train hippie kids we used to know who used to be insane and stuff. We talk about our friends who used to hang in our crew.
AUGUST 15 FRIDAY IN GAINESVILLE DEATH TO ALL HIPPIES
I drive through the swamp prairie that exists between Tallahassee and Gainesville.
First stop is Pearls, a bbq place in a gas station in Micanopy, just south of Gainesville. I order the three rib platter, with collard greens and potato salad. I pick a table in the corner and almost cry. The meat is so tender.
When I finish I head to a cold spring.
Ok so I’m at the spring and there is a sign saying like “swim at your own risk no life guard and also watch out for aligators”. I wish I had taken a picture of this sign because many non-floridians can’t imagine swimming in the same places alligators do, but it happens all the time. I just would never swim at night or even late dusk or even early morning because that is essentially alligator time. Also if there are a lot of people in the water you are safe because that freaks them out too. So I’m alone but there are a ton of women here with their kids, and we are all taking dips in the spring and swimming and resting on our towels on the banks. It is so fucking beautiful here. The cold springs that sprinkle all of Florida are some of the best kept secrets of the state. “The Real Florida” a sign reads, urging us to vote against pesticide use. A lot of Florida’s protected state parks and swimming holes are being threatened by the state government.
When it starts to rain I start driving towards Wormhole Books in Gainesville. The bookstore is kind of in a storage unit but also is a store front?
It is a suuuuper heady bookstore with all mystical book vibes like “The Taos Cook Book” and not really organized by author’s name, just vibes. People start to arrive and the line up tonight is Phil, the owner, Barry, a comic artist, me, someone named Jordee who never shows, and a guy named Frog. Phil is kind to me, no shoes, drinking tea. Him, Frog. Frog starts telling me about how much he loves to use the Gemini AI program. I’m like “ok!”.
Anyways. Phil puts on a cool puppet show about how cities were made with the logistics of war in mind and how a lot of cities used to be forts for war. The cities in Florida named after forts (Fort Lauderdale, Fort Pierce, etc) were all military bases during the Seminole wars. He compares forts we make when we are kids to the forts of war.
Next is Barry who does a powerpoint slide of one of his comics.
I switch out the piece where I gag myself for my Vehicular Manslaughter in Ibiza piece.
Last is Frog and look I’m all for being free and open minded but even I guess I have a line and Frog does a performance that reminds me something one of my exs (the corny one) would do.
I want to start my drive to Daytona.
There is a thunderstorm outside.
After the show Phil trades me two of my books for two vintage Delany books and we get into it, both of us being Delany heads. But I’m like “ya I gotta drive to Daytona”. When I get to the car I call Patrick and I’m like….
Look I love men, I love humans, I’m open to the world, I love all types of outsider art…..but don’t piss me off! Maybe I’m just tired but I’m like Linda Manz’s character in Out of the Blue, I’m all “death to all hippies!”. Patrick talks to me and says I’m valid while I drive through the Ocala Forest to Daytona. It’s all rural backroads. When I get to my cousins I send nudes to Blush.
DAYTONA HAVE MERCY
The next day I tell Whitney about the hippies and she responds “it can’t all be miracles all the time” and she is so right. She encourages me to write about it and I like being honest with myself and her about hating some people’s art (Frog’s). I’m no saint! So I’m in Daytona visiting my cousin who is a Methodist minister at a church here.
Ok so now it is time for the beach. My cousin and I bob in the water and get smashed by the waves like we used to when we were kids. We gossip about our family that I no longer talk to and then we gossip about this momfluencer I am obsessed with that my cousin used to go to college with. The momfluencer loves beef and weight lifting while pregnant. We pass out in the sun.
We go to bed early. In the morning we have church.
Some people get handed already formed congregations, some ministers are placed in a city and tasked with growing a congregation. My cousin was placed outside of Daytona Beach and has been cultivating a congregation for years. She used to minister to Margaritaville (Jimmy Buffet themed retirement community) retirees, now her congregation meets in a we-work type space down here on Sundays. It is a collection of people that have come together over the years. Members of the LGBTQ community, addicts from local rehabs, and also conscious minded retirees. A lot of 20 and 30 somethings who are trying to learn how to survive, working families.
The sermon is on Mercy. Her church is tied to a social justice movement that is working on affordable housing and flood zone policies.
My cousin reminds everyone that we are all theologians, that to be a theologian is to study the word of God. We are all in the room now studying the word of God. Mercy means we are not the worst thing we have ever done. We must have mercy and know people have the capacity to change because if we do not think people can change then we do not think the world can change.
Anyways then she pulls out a question that asks “what is the difference between enabling and mercy?”. And everyone is like woooow, and the woman next to me is crying. My cousin reminds us she doesn’t have all the answers, maybe there is no one right answer to this question.
After we pack up the chairs and get ready to leave. I talk to a woman about addiction and I talk to a man about Zohran Mamdani. Since I have been in Florida people cannot stop talking to me about how excited they are at Zohran’s win in the primary. It gives them hope in a state where things seem impossible at getting better.