Whitney caught up with the readers after, to find out more about their rituals and realizations. They dished on water conspiracies, bird rehab, horny authors, and Marxist tea. Social autonomy is so grotesquely linked to ownership and material circumstances. It kind of sucked the fun out of a lot of the ways I live my life, but also ironically informed my piece.
You beaded your text letter-by-letter into a friendship bracelet which you read from. I want to ask about the line "I don't want to be your friend anymore. It was sort of a futile sentiment. The catharsis of the performance was enough. The piece is a mosaic of a lot of people who have saved me the trouble of having to hold all my former selves at once.
To diminish their presence in my life would be to lose pieces of myself, quite literally. This past year especially I've been more grateful for those friendships. It seems as though we may be bound for life. I was so nervous. I was worried the friendship bracelet would tangle or break, and concocted plans for those scenarios, fantasized almost. If it broke, I was going to command the audience to collect the beads while I finished the piece from memory. I showed the bracelet to some people outside like it was a watch in my trenchcoat and it settled my nerves a bit.
My sisters were in the audience and that helped a lot. I still flubbed a couple parts but who cares. Culture and the allure of the subversive. At 16 my friend and I would jump on the Peoples Express from Buffalo to Newark then take the bus to the city to dance all night at Danceteria and the Limelight. After a couple of those trips there was no place on the planet I wanted to be more than NYC!
AA Pritchard, who used to do readings with Bukowski, loved my work and told everyone I was his daughter. Have you ever had a sudden epiphany that made you change your whole life? After being addicted to drugs for most of my 20s, I was told by a doctor that if I continued to use I was in jeopardy of losing my right leg.
