Just Desserts

 I decided to post this in both of my blogs, this one and my personal one, Divine Tension. I figured my readers of each might as well know both aspects of me, which really aren't separate, of course.

 Hello, it's me. I can't sleep. I noticed, when I got up after trying to sleep for a few hours, that the lights are on in my neighbor's house, as well. I imagine there are many who cannot sleep and this isn't something new, of course. But it is dark out in the world, much darker than I, for one, am used to.

I'm not naive. I've been a radical thinker from an early age, and I pay attention. I care about justice. I care about things that are life-affirming, both concrete and abstract things, and these are some times when it is impossible to rest easy. I knew the future would not be pretty, but I did fail to prepare for how fast and how hard it would come down on us.

I have this little thing I do, that I've done for almost 40 years, called the Jell-O Art Show. I write about it in my other blog, Gelatinaceae, which gets a lot more readers than this one does, because it is about art, and joy. Jell-O Art is a particularly joyful art form, silly, beautiful, awkward, glorious, and many times, jiggly and slippery and super uncooperative. It's the reason I call myself an artist, when in my profession I am a crafter, a production worker, a screenprinter and not all that skilled of one, despite doing it for my whole working life. I'm self-taught, so I'm just a worker. I like work and I am diligent, and I've done well with it in a limited and sustainable way.

But Jell-O Art is different. Producing and being in the Jell-O Art show engages all of me. Over the years I learned how to be an artist, how to imagine and conceptualize, how to find the deeper levels, how to put my whole self in and shake myself about. Every year I spend the three winter months of January through March working more or less full time on the Jell-O Art Show. Not only do I work out some kind of personal piece, which is an expression of something about my life or self, but I have been lucky enough to work with a very dear group of people called the Radar Angels. 

The individual Angels have come and go, and while there are still a few of us from the beginning in the late 70s and early 80s, it's an ever-changing group. We work in a process that is purely collaborative, with everyone pooling their talents to make something out of what we all bring. We brainstorm for a few weeks about what we want our show to be about. We throw out tons of ideas, and gradually we coalesce into something we all agree we want to say, using parody songs and a type of melodrama that is generally only a little bit serious. 

You can go to my other blog for about 15 or so years of what that has been about. In 2012 I was crowned as the Queen of Jell-O Art in recognition of how seriously I take Jell-O, and how important it is to me, and that just fueled this deeper appreciation I have for it and brought me into the role of bringing that passion and creative force to the public in the form of the show.

Now I generally write the bones of the script, which we develop together, and we choose the songs to fit and write our lines and pick our characters and figure out our costumes and I make a lot of the props and set pieces and we all work for the last few weeks to pull it all together to present it. This Saturday is when we will be doing it. 

Because these times have been so dark, and we are all of a mind about them, we did something we have always made ourselves avoid for the most part: we got political. We had to. Three of us even decided to play a few of the current archvillains of our times. We chose three out of the many, many that we could have chosen, and for each of us, it is not easy to do. We don't want to come on stage as racists, nazis, psychopaths and evil men. We don't even want to play men! This year in a weird twist, all of our actors are women, and all of our characters are men. At least they start out as men.

One of the themes we wanted to work on was gender...we wanted to explore honoring multiple genders and the fluidity of them, to have a world where that was open for people to be free about it, and make our statement of acceptance of it, but as the show developed we kind of stopped thinking about it. We just acted like people...as if gender didn't even exist. It just occurred to me tonight that we did that. It's a metaphor really, that if there was that openness (WHICH THERE IS!) everyone would live like that.

So that's operating. And in coming on stage, generally, we Angels feel loved. Our audience is the best. They always approve of whatever we do, our mostly amateur singing and presentation, our ridiculous costumes, our dumb jokes and sometimes stale humor. Our obvious theme is always Jell-O saves the world, no matter how much we try to say something else. It just comes out like that. 

But this time, Jell-O is a very weak weapon against the world. We are coming on stage to be hated, the three of us who are playing the billionaires. Really hated. We hate ourselves even. Yet we will sing and dance and pretend at the end that we are transformed and we hope to leave the audience feeling loved and ourselves, at least as the people we really are, back to feeling loved.

There is not any hope that the characters will be loved, no matter how much they are transformed, because no, they will not get what they deserve, they will not be stopped or even aware of our little play and our sad and profound comedy. We will have our little moments of joy, our escape, but it will not be fully satisfying when we walk off the stage and back into the dark world we are living through.

That's life I suppose. As an old person, when I look back at the brief times when things were going well and the culture was opening and affirming, it was never that for everyone. Black people were still being killed by the police and racists, different people of all kinds were still being othered, poor people were still being starved and caused to suffer and being deprived of their humanity. It has never been a pretty world, except of course for the birds and trees and flowing waters and incredible kindnesses and soft hearts and all that everyone attempts to create and hold sacred for themselves and each other.

It's enough to keep you up late every night, isn't it? It's enough to make you dissolve in wonder for your whole life, and then when you get old, like I have, it's enough to make you weep for the wasted moments and lost opportunities and very short time left to have some more. 

This is my late night Jell-O Art world, friends. Maybe I can sleep now. Maybe I have had enough, for now. I am pretty sure the light will come back in the morning so I can work some more. I will never lose hope.