liveAudience

by Rebecca

Jackie – Spanky don’t you think we’re going rather fast?

Spanky – Nah.

 

The idea had been lifted shamelessly from the Little Rascals VHS tapes mom had found at Sam’s Club in Loveland and we had been eating it ever since. Bread and jam. It was genius. The black-and-white digitally-remastered version narrated by Leonard Maltin looked like white bricks dripping with black sauce. The children skillfully acted ravenous, spilling jam all over their adventure-soiled overalls. Our real life pieces were uniform and fluffy—white bread and smuckers with a thin layer of oleo to grease the fruit globs and keep them from adhering to the bread. If our mother had offered it we would have been repulsed but having discovered it on our own it was a windfall. Eating it with the rascals around made it downright delicious, all of us oblivious to our poverty. Our Depression: the 1990s with credit cards maxed out on velvet sofas and jams. Theirs: The Great One.

 

We had been performing the movie snack for some time before Dad came into the room where we were eating and watching.

 

We stayed perfectly still, quelling our jaws to tender nibbles and keeping our eyes fixed on the screen. We knew that when a parent caught you watching the television the best bet was to stay absolutely still— as if the stillness meant you weren’t actively perpetrating the crime.

 

Unfortunately, because my father was not a t-rex, this didn’t work.

 

Is This Our Gang?

No, It’s Little Rascals.

Yeah. That’s The Same. I Used To Watch This When I Was A Kid.

We were all a little taken aback that my father was also too young to remember the rascals themselves—we always imagined he would be about their age.

Did You Know That All of the People Died?

What!? Now we ignored the tv completely.

Yeah. I Mean, The Actors, They All Died Really Tragic Deaths.

 

There was a chunk of gooey bread in the back of my mouth and I looked over at my sister who surreptitiously dabbed at her mouth—we both wondered the same thing, afraid to swallow. Was It The Bread And Jam That Killed ‘Em?

 

We looked up at him for more information so we could make an educated decision about what to do next. Spit? Swallow? Some how the television was going to have to be shut off and we hoped that could happen magically. Somehow the revelation had activated the ghosts of rascals past and now we were vulnerable to attack. Our fun would be destroyed. The Rascals would have to be filed along with Jim Belushi, John Candy, the little girl with Crohn’s from Poltergeist. Scotty was no longer the adorable bare-shouldered boy looking for a flashlight to hunt for treasure. He was Scotty Beckett: possible suicide in a rehab center at 38 years old. Wheezer was now Bobby Hutchins, dead just a month after his twentieth birthday after crashing a B-26 Marauder at Merced Army Air Corps Field. Froggy’s fatal motor scooter accident loomed over him in every scene. Norman “Chubby” Chaney, it turned out, was tragically so. He died from a serious illness after surgery to correct a glandular problems. But the worst was Alfalfa— the freckle-faced ahoge most often compared to my brother. Carl Dean Switzer, who grew up to breed hunting dogs, was shot in the groin with a .38 during an altercation. This after sustaining a shot to the arm at a previous date and an arrest for chopping down fifteen trees in Sequoia National Park.

 

How could we continue watching the specter of death in the room? We began reading those episodes as specifically and fervently as teenagers read Sylvia Plath. We had to identify signs of future trauma. Maybe if we watching closely enough the dialogue would magically change and the characters would make a foreboding slip. Or better yet—realize they were on some arc toward tragedy and walk off set and into a better future. Maybe it should have been reassuring but all we got was the same, “Boy that jelly looks good. Sure spreadin’ it on thick!”

 

 

 

 

Grover

Swear to god the first time I ever saw a VCR it took two of us kids to help my dad lift it out of the back of the stout red station wagon. It was three feet tall, color blue, and rented from the library.

 

Nothing else to say about that, except that eventually we had our own personal VCR, and my littlest brother used it to record Saturday morning cartoons (mostly ghostbusters) over all our home videos.

 

Hencefore, I’

m dated. And erased. (ooh, two great topics).

 

Instead of rolling out that old visibility carpet, the willing of existence, I’

m going to talk about: 1. Job Searching and 2. My Cunt.

 

 

Right now I’

m listening to Sweet Honey and the Rock on National Public Radio, sitting in these odd short-ish black boxar briefs that my ladyfriend insists looks hot on me, yet make me feel a little like an androgynous lesbian swimsuit model, which makes me vaguely uncomfortable. Clearly I like to push up against uncomfortable places from time to time because tonight I am wearing these underwear.

 

I just finished a resume and cover letter for a job working with teenage girls to prevent teen pregnancy and run teen empowerment programs. It’s the fourth of July and I couldn’t afford the gas to the homosexual firework-hot-tub-ing so I decided to write a cover letter instead. I set my sights to chasing down health insurance with concise words. It’s the Fourth of July and I’m at my desk in underwear that make me vaguely uncomfortable and I just sent off my resume to a job that I want, but will (as the nine month trend suggests) not get. I almost didn’t apply to this job, because. Well. Because. Well. Here’

s a list:

 

1. exhausted (see the nine month duration)

2. can not lost more days off for interviewing (see second-interview above, combined with hourly-paid temp job) (see also inability to pay for gas)

3. feel totally emotionally unable to deal with any insinuation that I am unfit to work with teenaged young women because I am a very butch dyke.

4. papa’

s tired of the run around of the job hunt, the thank you cards, the cardstock paper at 27 cents a sheet, the polite emails.

 

So, cry little man. Let’s talk about underwear. But first, know that on my to-do list is an exhaustive resume of all-the-jobs-that-are-unfit to print. I’m trying to keep the hairline balance between resisting class-based-oppression and class assimilation. Lists like this keep things in perspective. It feels pretty ick that more than ¾ of my work history is considered worthless, that only certain kinds of jobs prepare me to do “good work.” It’s all a bunch of horse shit. I want to send them a ten page document, a list, that at the end says “And I’m still here. Of course I can do your fucking job.”

 

Now back to my androgynous lesbian swimsuit model underwear. I’m still wearing it, mostly out of laziness, and my cunt (I told you I would) is ick. I tried beating off while trying to watch a movie with subtitles (my TV apparently cuts off the bottom inch of the screen, hence, no subtitles). I didn’t come because I rarely come while beating off, because I am repressed or because I am a survivor or because I am just fucked in the head but after ten years of sex education, I’ve agreed to just accept it. No coming while jerking. Still I try, and afterwards have this icked wet-cunt feeling that sometimes throws me into a raging disassociated tizzy. If I get turned on but no action before bed I have to jump up and dry my cunt, else I sit agitated yet frozen all night long. This is true and I don’t know why I am choosing tonight to publicly unload something I’

ve told maybe two people in my whole entire life, but I believe in unloading if it works for you, and it works for me from time to time.

 

Cunt. Ick. Feminist. Yes. So I try to love, try to own it, to sit with it and la la la all those things one learns, to leave on the vaguely uncomfortable underwear because sometimes out of this comes a type of body acceptance. There’s something about these underwear that feel like the great challenge of the day. Not the resume. Not the room I just painted or the large under-exercised dogs I just walked, but the underwear are the great challenge of the day. I want to leave them on, to walk in the room and see ‘fucking hot’

like ladyfriend sees when I slip my jeans off.

 

The radio keeps eulogizing Jesse Helms, and this also makes me feel ick. Makes me feel a valid resistance in my underwear-challenge-of-the-night. A clip of Jesse Helms plays.

 

 “Homosexuals are disgusting.”

 

Oh? What’s that. Find the mirror. Stop, pop. “Hey, G, not bad.”

Fake-it-till-ya-make-it try again.

 

Jessee Helms nursed up a whole generation (or two) of unabashed racists and homophobes. I’ve met these dudes (and dames) that buy his hate (guised as stances) hook-line-and-sinker. They’ve chased me in their cars and sat proudly with their smug racist one-liners as they discussed public policy (and mind you, their massive amounts of privilege will catapult them to creating and administering these policies more quickly than you or I). Helms has left the earth, can no longer touch me, but his spores are out there and I will wear the underwear, grow more fabulous and loving. Positive thinking won’t get me health insurance, won’

t protect a queer getting beat in the back of the empty classroom, the prisoner strangled by cops in his jail cell. It is not these things but it does facilitate living. Each night I sleep, then rise again. 

 

by Drew

1.

All smiles and enthusiasm, Risa asked me if I wanted to write and perform a mime scene for Oregon State Thespian Competition with her. Of course I wanted to.

 

We began working on the blue-carpeted stage in Trisha’s classroom, figuring out the plot and what actions could make sense (“You have to remember to get your feet over the ‘invisible’ window sill! Maybe you should start opening the window from lower?”). The basic plot is this: The main character wakes up, realizes he’s late to work, drives to work, gets yelled at by his boss for being late, realizes he’s late to meet up with his girlfriend, drives to her cafe, and proposes to her. The “twist” was that the day doesn’t go as he planned. Along the way he is killed by a burglar, is thrown out a tall window by his boss, dies in a car crash, and finds out that his girlfriend hates him, has a secret lover, and thinks he smells. I was the main character. Risa was the burglar, boss, and girlfriend.

 

It came together when we realized we could press both the play and rewind buttons of my tape player at the same time in one deck, and record that “rewind” sound in the other deck. Music played through most of the piece, punctuating our gestures, but whenever something horrible happened to the main character, we and the music froze. Then, in sync with a snippet of “rewind” sounds, we reversed our movements, quickly sending our bodies back through a series of motions. The “rewind” sound played for only a few seconds at a time–just long enough for the story to go back to a place before the horrible event began. Then the forward action would start up again, this time without the (often fatal) interruption.

 

It garnered laughs beyond what we anticipated. Even the simple silliness of miming led audiences to smile. We took it to competition and on the final night, with all of the competitors and teachers watching, we were awarded first place: a couple ribbons, the chance to take the piece to the International Thespian Competition, and–immediately after receiving the reward–the opportunity to perform in front of everyone there. We were all smiles.

 

2.

At the end of that year, I went to the International Thespian Conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, not to perform the mime piece with Risa at the competition down the street, but to meet and audition for college faculty from numerous theater departments from all around the U.S. (and from Japan). Taking a break from all the networking and auditions, I stopped in at one of three rounds of mime competition.

 

After two rather sad, somber pieces, a small boy with a backpack jumped on stage, put a cassette in the deck and lay down on a table:

 

The boy wakes up to “Morning Mood” from Peer Gynt, and, realizing he’s late for school (cue the Lone Ranger section from the “William Tell Overture”), rushes to put on his clothes. He gets into a car, drives too fast, and…

 

…right then I spoke aloud: “What!?” This was the exact same beginning to our piece! Even the same two pieces of music! With the same transition! There was no burglar to sneak in through the window and kill him, but other than that it was exactly the same!

 

Nearly all the audience (three or four people) threw glares my way. Speaking is particularly shunned during mime performances.

 

A barrage of questions and doubts came my way: Was this ‘wake up’ routine common among beginner mimes? How many people around the country saw similar pieces over the last few months for this same competition? Was our piece just obvious? Why was ours funny if it were so obvious? Why do people laugh at mimes, anyway?

 

In retrospect, the “rewinding” of the action was a big difference. But I was a stubborn high school kid who thought he had helped recreate the wheel. Seeing so much of an “original” idea reanimated by someone else scared me to death. When I returned home from Nebraska, I threw out my white face paint and hung up my black leotard. Never again would I mime.

 

by dg

We spent the rest of the drive that night trying to think of the word “banal”.

Countless planks of lumber being hauled down to California.

The highway, flanked by groves of tall dark trees, led our way to the bed and breakfast where instructions on “how-to-make a-fire-in-your-fireplace” greeted Two (clutching lumpy, quickly-packed bundles and toothbrushes).

LIVE BURLS
PUDDING CREEK 
CHAINSAW CARVINGS
UKAIAH
BEAR PEN UNDERCROSSING

Organic scrambles and home-grown, squeezed-by-hand fruit juice jumpstarted the journey in the morning. Summer wildfires spread low smoke out to the shoreline, filled gullies and gulches. I squinted and tried to focus on each individually: ferns bend in diffused orange light.

Now it’s a diorama. 

 

 

by Lynn 

I don’t know what we thought we would discover by repairing that cracked up cassette tape we found in the woods, but we were certain of one thing—it held great promise. Kristen Daddario and I lived at opposite ends of Wild Duck Rd—she at the end and I at the beginning. Somewhere just around half way was the Wild Duck Reserve—an extensive nature preserve made up of mostly unmarked trails and giant boulders. Oh, and the most important thing: builders couldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. If well navigated, this large piece of land could take us all the way to Jillian Kulbeida’s house—an eight-mile drive by car shortened to three by foot. We walked home from Jill’s through those woods once in a snowstorm at sundown. This was probably one of the more foolish things I did as a kid—unmarked trails, a foot of snow and still falling and rapidly approaching darkness. Fortunately, we sidestepped all three of these critical ingredients for fairytale tragedy. 

In the spring that followed that winter, Kristen and I came across a small pile of abandoned objects on a boulder in the reserve. There was an empty bottle of hard liquor, cigarette butts and a busted audiocassette with no label It could only be one of three things 

a) A sacrificial altar of offerings to the classy party gods
b) The scene of a small high school get together immediately following an officer-inspired hasty departure
c) Or both

It was all so mysterious. All so reminiscent of a Nancy Drew story. And I didn’t even read Nancy Drew. We felt magnetically pulled to this puzzle. Called to solve it, destined to solve it. There was no discussion about it—we would pursue the missing pieces of this case and our work would start immediately. 

The audiocassette was going to be our greatest, and most exciting, clue so we set ourselves to the task of re-membering the damaged tape that had been exposed to the elements. The cassette shell itself was almost completely shattered so we figured a reel transplant would eventually be necessary if we wanted to hold onto any hope of ever playing the tape. We took great care in handling the tape and mending its fractures with tiny pieces of clear Scotch tape. I had seen my brother once salvage a stereo-butchered Police cassette with just patience and meticulous care—I know it could be done. 

I think I always imagined that once restored, the tape would reveal the events leading up to—and hopefully including—the alleged/supposed/imagined bust. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense considering the absence of any output sound equipment at the scene of the abandoned altar but nothing could be ruled out. Keep in mind that this is before the hype—and eventual catastrophic let down—of The Blaire Witch project, before we had a set visual standard of what a wooded mystery around missing youth (and their companions) would look like. This was something new. Something unique. And we were graced with the honor of discovery.

Our shared obsession with what we did know and what we could imagine to be possible drove our secret mission. At points during our diligent work, we feared—legitimately feared—what might happen to us if the wrong person spotted us taking those parts of the altar. I’ll be honest; Wild Duck hardly had such a reputation. But how were we to know that this was not something extra-ordinary? Something greater than us? Something from beyond our comfortable/familiar/safe Wild Duck reality?

Ultimately, we accomplished what we set out to accomplish. We mended that tape like a fucking broken wing and the successful reel transplant—which required great dexterity—allowed us to finally place the cassette in a player. BEHOLD! Truth before us!

As it turned out, the tape was in fact a product of the outside world: Manhattan to be exact. But this particular slice of Manhattan was one that we on Wild Duck could access via any FM transmitter. And this left Kristen and I with two solid questions: Who records the radio? And why listen to a tape of the radio if you can just listen to…the radio? 

 

 

by Alex 

“Sing a cheesy love song,” she whispered to no one in particular. It was, in that moment, all that she wanted. It wasn’t because she was in love or experiencing some tragic heartache. She just felt like hearing a cheesy love song and hoped someone would sing it for her. Of course, no one did. Her whisper was barely audible to herself, let alone to the rest of the thirty-some middle-aged customers sitting around her in the French bistro she had decided to treat herself to tonight.

 

The food was delicious but unremarkably so. Everything was prepared perfectly and the wine the waitress had suggested complimented her fish beautifully. She paid the bill and left a twenty-five percent tip. Having been a waitress some twenty years ago, Evelyn made a habit of leaving generous tips for any waitress that reminded her of herself. Young, blonde, and friendly, but not too friendly. Not like those waitresses who immediately shared their personal lives with you and sat down with you at the table. No. That was too much. Evelyn had been an attentive waitress but knew the appropriate boundaries to have with her customers. They were there to eat their food and she was there to bring to them. That was it. A simple relationship. Her customers appreciated her. The men would smile at her, but that was something she was used to. Men smiling. Hah! The very idea that smiling men could be worth mulling over was preposterous and brought a touch of a grin to Evelyn’s face as she thought about it. Men. No, not men. Their smiles were so transparent. What had intrigued her most was how the women smiled.  The women’s smiles had always been different. The way they had smiled at her was probably quite similar to the way she had smiled at her own waitress tonight. Her female customers would see her face and hope they were looking in a mirror. That Evelyn’s face somehow reflected their own, despite the fact that they were usually twice her age, they didn’t seem to know or care in that moment. They smiled in subtle ways that tried to match Evelyn’s reserved, bourgeois decorum. It wasn’t that they were trying to match the courtesy itself, rather they were trying to match Evelyn’s face. Would it not have been considered entirely inappropriate, they would have asked Evelyn to join them for dinner to study her face’s contours and complexion. Instead, they attempted to engage her through semi-flirtatious smiles. If the right side of Evelyn’s smile went up, the right side of the customer’s smile went up. It became almost a game for Evelyn, seeing how she could reasonably stretch her face and have these women keep up. Sometimes she thought of her self as the Mona Lisa, with her mysterious half smiles and everyone coming to stare. The main difference between her and Mona was that Mona had sat before Leonardo and shestood before her customers. Evelyn knew there were other differences between herself and Mona Lisa, but she considered this to be the most significant.

 

by Heather 

“How to Make Potato Soup” 

 

We volunteered to make potato soup that week for the community meal.  We took a recipe from your great Aunt Agnes’ Irish Cookbook.  It was Thursday and the meal was Friday so we had no choice but to abandon our homework and head out in the snowstorm on foot to Devon Market, the local place with the exotic fruit and the signature yellow bags that we prided ourselves on going to.  The place where we were no longer college students roaming for beer and pizza in our bookstore hoodies.  We were local people.  I had an hour before I had to be back to school to take the freshman to the homeless shelter to make another meal so we walked quickly.

 

I am sure we had some fixed amount of money to adhere to but all I can remember is you reading out the recipe from some scrawled piece of paper in your gloves with the flip up mittens that you were always wiping your nose on.  You were frantic and smiling, throwing 10 lbs. of potatoes, salt and pepper, cloves of garlic, vanilla extract, bags of carrots with the greens still on them, green gleaming peppers, whole onions, loaves of bread and blocks of cheese in the cart.  We probably made dessert too.  I can’t remember now.

 

We filled the cart and watched as the bagger, some teenager working weeknights, kept filling those plastic yellow bags that when emptied we kept stuffed in the cupboard under the sink in the communal kitchen. By the end there were a dozen bags, weighing at least as much as a three bricks each.  In some accidental loaves and fishes, we had multiplied more food than we had baskets for.  You paid. Holy shit.  We went over the budget.  By double.  Fuck it, you said.  This will be good fucking soup.  We assured the bagger we didn’t need a cart as we twisted the yellow bags around our fingertips free from gloves.  Neither one of us owned a real winter coat then.  Something about solidarity. 

 

We reentered the now stronger snowstorm and started back towards the lake and the dorms.  We only made it a couple blocks before our hands went numb and cramped and we collapsed in an empty store front doorway to get out of the snow and collect ourselves and try to figure out what the hell to do with so much abundance and such a far walk.  I remember we were laughing.