Dang it all

One year we did this song "You Don't Want to Know" which was of course about what Jell-O is really all about: offal. It is made from cow hides and hooves, and etcetera, so we like to just pretend that is not true. It was a really fun song, a Led Zepplin parody, and here is a photo of me singing it:

That was 2015.

Then last summer I forced my family to watch our last show video out of a deep need to be patted on the head by them, and as I looked at it from an outsider's view, they commented that it looked like a lot more fun for us than it was for anyone watching. Which stung, but was essentially true. The reason it is fun for our audience and the public is just because they decide it is, and enjoy catching our enthusiasm and delight and willingness to just get up in public and be silly. None of us really want to know why it is fun, we just want it to be fun.

It's serious business to do that, of course, and takes a lot of effort and preparation, but ultimately it is a lot of fun in general and sometimes fun in specifics. Today it isn't.

We have very little time left until the show, and I've got nothing. No Jell-O, no plans to make any, and no script. I did write one, giving up a precious Saturday last week in the snowy isolation to write it, but it died of its own weight last night. It was just too complex and nobody really cared about the Hero's Journey and our political and environmental future and the need to advance a positive one. That is work for another day, not March 30th, if the Angels group is correct. I'm not really upset about losing that script, as it wasn't really workable at all, just a piece of writing I did out of the desperate need for a framework. Editing it wasn't going to work as I had hoped.

Of course I feel that things are far too critical to not address our future, but it is more our job to give people a break from that for 20 minutes in a 3-hour event, than it is to give them any tools to craft it. We just have the same damn tools, music, art, and silliness. We end up doing the same show every year, some version of Jell-O Art is the only thing that matters. Sometimes it saves the world, sometimes it just occupies a gallery.

So I have no real reason to be upset today, except that so many of the Angels have found reasons to drop out of this non-show, including some of our best singers, and now we have no script and people don't even really love the songs we chose, which have no lyrics, most of them. And it's my job to put something together, as soon as possible, and this time it has to be right because there is just no time left. And of course I am totally depleted and discouraged.

So I write. Since this is supposed to be a promotional blog for Jell-O Art, I figure if I expose my deep anxiety and despair, it will just come off as drama and add to the mystique and eventual delight when my personal hero's journey completes itself with some denoument onstage. As if! I want to quit too!

What if there were no performance, or I just went back to not being in it? This will only be my 7th year of being in it. Other people used to write the scripts and do the slogging. Are they not doing it because I came along? Is all of this my fault as well as my responsibility? It is not easy being Queen.

I'm eating lunch as I write this because stuffing my face is about my only joy. I have been getting zero exercise this winter and making zero income (okay, I made $97.50 in the first two months, not counting my pitiful amount of social security) as I am immersed in this big archiving project for Saturday Market. I am passionate about doing it and am making progress (I'm in the 90s now) but I just sit and read every day and night and I am severely out of shape. I don't even have time to get outside except to hang my laundry out in the rare sunlight when we get it, or walk to a meeting. I still have meetings and minutes to type for them. I hate my life in a lot of ways right now. Mostly because it is not healthy to eat mostly bread and canned soup and get no exercise. That is a proven way to make yourself sad and have aching joints and a fuzzy head. But regarding Market, now I know too much and I have assigned myself the impossible task of interpreting the history in a useful and positive way. I should find myself a network of historical writers who have faced these issues of how to describe the warts without damaging the host. It seems a tricky task and at this moment I am definitely procrastinating.

I also watch meetings on  livestream, OCF Board meetings and City Council meetings. OCF just imploded and pretty much burned to the managerial ground, in case you didn't know. I'll try not to say much about it although I'd like to do a full-on rant. If no one affords either the managers or the Board members any respect, there is no center to hold there. The members can sure mess it up, but the people who are doing the actual jobs of governing and managing need to be granted some damn authority and trust! It is a two-way street, trust. Right now I'd like to walk away from that, too.

But I won't. There's an important lesson in there for me to learn about how to be a longterm member of a membership group as your role shifts as it must. There's too much invested to walk away, there's no certainty whatsoever that you will play a future role, and although you have the perspective of seeing the cycles and pitfalls as they dependably repeat, you can't really prevent them from doing that or add much to the solutions when they do. What worked then is probably not going to work this time (though it might!) and you yourself might be a bigger part of the problem than the solution, which is why the young ones always want the old heads to go away. Just retire and let us make some new mistakes! Well, if I could I might. There really isn't a retirement choice built into my life. About my only power is keeping my mouth shut and obviously that is not a skill I possess.

I do have some work to do, that might be fun, making the t-shirts for the Jell-O Art Show. I'm planning to use an image of St. Aretha of Franklin, whose photos online are very jellogenic. You could do almost any of them with a Jell-O mold hairdo or outfit. I don't know what I'll do to her image, yet, but it got me a little excited to go look at her photos and listen to a few of her songs. We're going to do Chain of Fools in the show, just so you can share the anticipation. It's about as political as we will get I suppose. The first photo would be easy but she would look like it was just her head on top of a plate. The second one is pretty Jell-O-rific
but I wouldn't be able to use the arms anyway, although I might try. It's a fun distraction.

So, as you can now see, I am well on the way to putting aside my despair and disappointment and moving into a more adaptive phase. It's what all the true Jell-O Artists do. I am still not going to make any Jell-O though, at least not today.

Have I told you I will be doing a workshop? It will be on March 23rd, at MKAC, just a little session of Ask the Queen. Not the Queen of Soul, the Queen of Jell-O Art. I plan to wing it mostly, as I have no real time to plan anything except a costume. I'm committed to that, so whatever happens with this current drama, that's on the table. See you there!