08. Give Me Cake or Give Me Violence!!
I have a love-hate relationship with cake (and myself).
Two things:
I have a (very real, not kidding) sexual fetish for cake.
The August before last, I almost died.
Second, first. TL;DR, two Augusts ago —
I passed out four times in a row.
I hit my face on the side of a house.
My neighbor called 911 because she found me on the ground outside (it was her house that accosted my face).
An EMT scooped me up fireman-style and loaded me into an ambulance that screamed through Los Angeles to the ER where my shriveled raisin of a body was IV-pumped with liquid ‘til I turned back into a grape.
(Un)fortunately, I’m a writer. So, everything is material. I took all of the little glass shards of my near-death experience and fashioned them into a mosaic—an essay, called “Dead Girls Don’t Eat.” Read it if you wanna fill in some of the details I’m leaving out.
Spoiler alert: I almost died because of my bad relationship with food, my bad relationship with myself, and my bad romantic relationship at the time (which only infinitely-mirror-reflected and exacerbated my bad relationship with myself).
The essay was cathartic but it wasn’t cathartic enough.
So, the following October, I refashioned that essay into a one-woman-short called Cake & Violence. I wanted to take the essay off the page, so that I could live inside of it. Move around in it. Get physical with it. Maybe that would be cathartic enough. Maybe that would help me work through my problems, more wholly.
In the short film, I smash a bunch of cakes and talk about my body and your body and about how we should all feel more present in our bodies.
It’s funny and it’s not.
I had a screening of the Cake & Violence short in Los Angeles and another in New York. At the Los Angeles showing, one of my best friends, Mike (hi, Mike — I KNOW YOU’RE SEEING THIS, MIKE) stood up during the Q&A and asked me: “Do you think you got better after making the movie?”
Air left my chest. I said: “No.”
I hadn’t. I made the short to show myself how ridiculous it is, how terrible it is to not love yourself. But, then? After purging the short from my very soul, after pulling all of that hurt up through my esophagus—I swallowed it again. I didn’t come away loving myself any more than I had before the whole painstaking process.
Another best friend, Loz. She told me after watching the short that it was great, she loved it, it was so refreshingly weird—but frustrating. SO frustrating. Because the character (me) in the short never learns her lesson. Spoiler alert: She (I) never eats the cake. I tell her: The story is circular, that’s the point. The character begins and ends in the same place. She never learns her lesson, because I hadn’t.
Loz, out of love, challenged me: What if you did learn? What if you… ate the cake?
The following August, I refashioned the one-woman-short into a one-woman-show to perform live, also called Cake & Violence. I performed it every night for two weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I added an audience participation section where a lucky volunteer gets to smash cake with me on stage. Something about performing the show live—I could really start to feel it; the material, the lessons I was supposed to be learning by making the frickin’ thing in the first place. I made myself cry. My parents came to the show three times and they cried. My grandma Sharon came to a show and she never cries and she cried. My brother came and I don’t think he cried, but I forgive him (I guess) for not being absolutely MOVED—
I’d tell you if I actually eat the cake in the live show, but I’m going to perform it in Los Angeles in the coming months so, sorry babies you’re gonna have to wait to find out.
By doing a lot more stand-up lately, by watching my fellow performer-friends work through their own demons on stage, by prepping Cake for its first run in the States, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Why. Why make anything? Why perform anything?
It’s public therapy, I guess.
In vain, sometimes.
It’s vain, sometimes.
But I think — I think I’m getting closer to some kind of truth. Some kind of healing. Maybe I’ll find it after smashing a few more cakes. We’ll just have to wait to find out.
x
nat
Please do another New York show!