Ugh. (Patreon)

"Well friends, tomorrow is the BIG DAY. Tig Fong will be joining me at Birdhaus TO to film a demo of the act, and then I'll be editing what needs to be edited on Sunday morning and – "

That was the drafted opener to your update today, dear patrons. But it's Thursday night at 5:30pm as I write this and I'm levelling with all of you. Today was easily the darkest day of this process. The margin of error on this project has been so slim, and my heart was in my throat today wondering if despite my absolute best efforts, the obstacles that remain (or have made themselves apparent) are just .... insurmountable.

I was supposed to write you all an update about how beautiful the latex costuming is that Marika has been making, and share that with you. But I'm going to be very brutally honest today instead, because I quite simply don't have any energy or mental strength left to put the positive spin on this it needs. Maybe by writing it out and getting it out of my head I'll feel better. Here's the storytime I didn't expect to be writing you all today:

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It's been a weird week to begin with, outside of this creation process, with a lot of heavy emotional and mental demands that I've been trying to compartmentalize so I can stay focused and hit my goal with this project. Allow me to catch you up on what's been happening outside act creation this week:

(1) On Tuesday evening I received a cold call from someone highly respected in the stunt community, steamrolling their way into a conversation that demanded I speak to the "liberal silliness" of the ACTRA union trying to update a stunt award to have more inclusive language. 

"Seems kinda silly," he growled. The word 'trannies' and similar slang was thrown around. My stomach clenched with anxiety instantly.  "The stunt award is already gender neutral. What the heck."

If it hadn't been so late at night,
if I hadn't had the day I'd had with costuming stresses and dress rehearsal,
if I hadn't been anxious as all hell about an important appointment I was dreading the next day – maybe I could have politely drawn a healthy boundary at being unwillingly brought into yet another political maelstrom within the intolerant, ignorant intricacies of the stunt community, and bowed out of him trying to force me into that conversation. 

But he caught me off guard.
And so I found myself trying to untangle the verbal and ideological mess he – and apparently a committee formed nearly entirely of other cisgendered middle aged white guys - had worked himself up over. It was a degree of emotional labour that I simply didn't have left in the tank.

I did my best with that nightmare of a phone call, trying not to implode the fragile spiderweb of tenuous social alliances that constitute being a member of the unionized Toronto stunt community while correcting the ignorant things I could, and gently making suggestions – but it really took it out me. So, when . . . . .

(2)  I received my adult autism diagnosis on Wednesday, I really was in the weeds, emotionally and mentally speaking. (This isn't something I've spoken about anywhere publicly. Maybe I'll talk/write about that when this project is done.) 

I decided this summer to go ahead with an adult evaluation for autism spectrum disorder. Wednesday's meeting was the end result of many, many hours of interviews with one of the relevant medical professionals who does those sorts of things, and merits its own discussion.

To be clear – I consider this a good thing. (And, to those who are close to me, perhaps unsurprising). My immediate reaction was relief. The short version of the very long story is, this makes a lot of things make more sense about my life and why certain things are really difficult for me to do, or have been incredibly difficult in the past / growing up. And more importantly, I'm looking forward to being able to access care and information that can help me cope and adapt to stuff in my life that is still incredibly difficult, regardless of how excellently I have learned to mask it.

I've been incredibly anxious over the course of the drawn-out evaluation process and had to dig back into some pretty yucky mental health history memories for part of it. It hasn't been easy for me to do, but if I could get some answers that made sense of ALL the pieces of my life, instead of just selective ones ( the latter being what health care providers have done in past) it was going to be worth it, in my books.

So, it's worth it. All that uncertainty and anxiety has found a resolution.

What I wasn't anticipating was the tidal wave of ~f~e~e~l~i~n~g~s~ that showed up today (the day after my results meeting) about it all. 

It feels like I have a lifetime of memories to re-examine. Because the tools that I had before to make sense of my life (for example, looking at myself through the lens of being told I had serious psychiatric issues and believing it, for some time) are now gone. And I have a new one in its place. One that makes more sense than the other ones ever did.

The sensory difficulties that I have (extreme sensitivity to certain sounds, and sounds at a certain volume) were overly amplified today. My verbal communication skills went down the drain and I was lapsing into muteness at moments where I really needed to be able to speak. I found myself dissociating a lot. 

It was a messy day.

And the messiness of today did not help me when . . .

Marika's beautiful costume that she handed off to me turns out to have major flaws that are possibly insurmountable in terms of being immediately usable for this act. Worse, Marika left on a 10 day vacation yesterday. What we have is what we have. And a lot of what I have was handed over to me literally the morning-of her departure on her summer break. There's no recourse, no last-minute changes. This is it. For some reason, Marika mentioned offhandedly this week something about how we could continue to fine tune things after the Saturday shoot, in advance of Zurich. This makes no sense, of course, because there IS no Zurich without ... well, a shoot that looks polished enough to merit a contract offer.

• The underwear / thong (the very final layer of the costume) is microscopic. She didn't adapt her pattern in the way that I asked to make it reasonable to work with as an acrobat. I'm not just standing there upright, as a model. If I was, it would be fine. But I'm not, so it's not. Beyond sheer modesty, it presents a significant issue as well in terms of being able to hide the top of the stockings I have to wear underneath them.
  
  It's such a small aspect of the costume, and I think Marika just didn't consider it to be a 'threat' in terms of design obstacles and left it to the last moment and now she's gone on vacation for 10 days up north. I can't swap it out with something else; it matches the cone bra and all the other elements. Custom pearl-silver latex undergarments are neither something I can find off the rack, or craft myself. 
• The GORGEOUS finished harem pants? It seems like there's less material in the legs than there were in the practice pants  – so every time I bend my leg to a certain degree of flex, the magnets separate on the leg and the costume comes apart far too soon. I can take some rubbing alcohol to the surface of the garment where the magnets are and try to clean off some of the silicone latex shine in case that's adding to the problem, but I can't make my quads smaller by Saturday afternoon.
• The magnets holding the straps of my sleeves together? I asked that they be snaps, because the magnets constantly were coming undone in practice sessions. Marika just doubled up the magnets, thinking to make it twice as strong but – they're still coming undone.
• The cone bra should have been a complete re-design. I had provided a source photo of Barbette's costume from the Man Ray photo series and that's what Marika went off of – but I didn't know, or think to plan for, the weight that memory foam inserts in the cups of the bra would have. The thin little straps of the bra don't anchor the cups well to my chest at all. It should have been a wide chestband, or a long-line bra, even. It moves around far more than it should, as I perform. My only hope of it being even remotely acceptable is via the 10 ft rule (as in, looks ok from 10 ft away)

The messiness of the above also did not help me ace my verbal communication and problem-solving skills when --

My videographer, Tig Fong, was pulled back into not one, but TWO different TV shows projects they have a coordinator position on, so their previously "free, wide open!" week is now absolutely overflowing with a million location scouts, tech surveys, ZOOM production meetings, and short notice calls to set.   

We managed to scout Birdhaus together yesterday afternoon for lighting and technical requirements, but it was bumpered end to end with film/tv-world phone calls and requirements in a way that makes me feel like I'm being shoe-horned in to an overfilled schedule, with no space leftover in the margins for the kind of space, question-asking, and calmness that live work demands. 

I know what TV/Film world is like; I know what the *feeling* is on set for a professional, unionized production. I feel like - after today - I also know that superimposing a TV/Film world approach, attitude, atmosphere, to the world of circus and live performance makes me feel panicked. It doesn't work. I couldn't get into character. It didn't feel like there was space being held by everyone present in the room the way that helps you Make Art. You just can't translate these things directly onto each other and expect it to be a good fit. They're different beasts that require different sensitivities. 

Tig is the very best at what they do in film and television, but they have limited exposure and experience with circus and live performance and very little extra space and capacity right now to shift in the way they operate. 

When the costume mishaps mixed in with my emotional overwhelm and mental fatigue, along with my reduced-to-poor ability to communicate to Tig what it was I needed from them differently about how they were going about things yesterday, that made it EXTRA intolerable when...

I had put on all the costumes (tearfully) – which was no simple thing, because when I bent down to pick up my fans to take my place for the start of the song to do at least one run of the act, I felt all the magnets pop open along the sides of the (too small?) pants. The sheer size and structure of the hoop skirt meant that I couldn't simply bend down to fix it myself.

Meanwhile, the neighbour in the unit next to Birdhaus – who lives illegally in a commercially-zoned loft there – decided to get day drunk at 2pm and blast club music at volumes loud enough to rattle the crystals in the chandeliers in our room. The space manager at Birdhaus spent the better part of my 45 minute warm-up going over and pounding on the door to get them to turn the music off; they ignored her after the first discussion at the door and proceeded to blast Cee-Lo Green's "Fuck You" through the wall; the building managers were brought into the fray – it was a mess.   

If this is what a Thursday at 3:20pm is like, and they know they're not supposed to make noise during 'working hours' – what on earth is going to happen on Saturday? A day that isn't part of the 'normal' work week? God help me.

I finally took my place at the front of the room. The track started to play.

I tried to feel beautiful and graceful. I tried to find the confidence and attitude that had helped me achieve solid runs of the work in previous rehearsals. I tried to lift my chin, remember the quality of movement Roberto had coached me to find with my arms movements, with energy going all the way out to my fingertips, with awareness of the space behind me and to the sides of me. 

The firsts few measures of the song sang through the air. I lifted and moved the fans mechanically. Feathers never felt so heavy. 

I felt my breath catching in my chest. Don't cry. That's not going to help you. Can you even remember your choreo right now?

And then –  a couple screaming sirens suddenly burst, wailing, into existence from the fire hall that exists directly across the street from the building. The sound hit me like a physical thing in the centre of my torso and I felt every clear thought leave my head in an instant.

I dropped my fans to the floor, fumbled at the snaps of the ridiculous giant skirt get me out of this get me out of this get me out of this and sat down on the couch and just ... stared at the floor and let the tears roll silently down my face.

* * * * *
Thursday/Yesterday was a No Good Very Bad Awfully Cruddy Day.

I don't know how I'm going to make this work, dear patrons.

I know that on Thursday/yesterday the cards were really stacked against me. I know I was running on close to empty. I know that I probably should have 'called it' and not tried to rehearse at all. But it feels like all the pieces outside of my control, the pieces I've tried so hard to corral or nurture or protect or will into existence –  are falling apart in my hands even as I try desperately to hold them together.

I've come so far with this act. I've put so much into this. I'd be a fool not shoot it on Saturday. As my friend Jen Crane said to me, "You lose nothing by shooting it".  But it feels like success is but a slim chance now, and not the all-but-guarantee that I was working so hard to create. I feel so far from the mindset that I know I need to bring into the studio with me on Saturday to at least have a fighting chance at a good recording of this.

I know this isn't the resounding triumphant home stretch we were all wanting to read at this point in the proceedings, but it's the honest truth of the matter. Making art is ugly sometimes, I suppose. And I'm facing what feels like the very real possibility of failing at this lofty – perhaps impossible – goal I set for myself just shy of 2 months ago. 

If that's what happens...well...I'll cross that bridge when I get there. But for now – there's about 32 hours left between now and when it all needs to somehow come together for me.

I'm going to keep pushing.

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