May 15, 2015

The first thing you should know about me is that I am a machine. That’s how I think of myself. I’ve heard other words. Kinder-sounding words. Vessel, is one. Performer. Priestess. Healer. Artist. And, from time to time, I suppose I am all of those things. I’m whatever is needed...

May 25, 2015

"I don’t know anything about vampires," I told Bodi, testily. We were at our usual spot, the tourist place on the Square, one of the few places open and convenient to both of us at the butt-crack of dawn, when, if it's been a show night for me and an on-call night for him, we both get off work. So yeah, I was testy because it was ugly-o-clock in the morning. And because, dammit, just once I'd like the guy to make a pass...

June 01, 2015

I love sleeping in the afternoon. Or, more accurately, I love waking up from having slept away the afternoon. Waking up in the buttery, slanting light of the dying day. It's particularly satisfying in summer, when the afternoon heat isn't fit for man nor beast anyway. It's been many, many years now since I've been subject to the tyranny of alarm clocks, and I'm blessed to be able to wake up in my own rhythm. The first thing I do is tell myself I can go back to sleep if I want to, which isn't a lie. I don't do those. But I almost never choose to take myself up on my offer...

June 08, 2015

So Wednesday morning, very early, I was on my way to see Monessa. RITES had a show in performance at the time, a piece called Delphines, so there was no rehearsal Tuesday night. ..

June 15, 2015

"Well, it's private," Monessa said. “We have different… needs… different relationships to Blood. Sharing what those needs are… that’s not casual conversation.” 

June 23, 2015

"My name is Marie Delphine Macarty Lopez y Angula Blanque Lalaurie." Sometimes I'd say just that all night...

June 30, 2015

I don't remember how or when I first learned to do this. I'm not sure I learned at all. I'm not sure it wasn't natural – the make-believe games of childhood blending seamlessly into the work I grew up around. My Gran’s work. The work of sinking.

July 06, 2015

We were sinking. That fabulous, surreal moment just before backstage turns into onstage. Winched into my corset, my physical balance thrown into the past by the weight of the heavy wig and heavier skirts, I looked around at an expensive costume party...

July 13, 2015

So I was Delphine. And yet I wasn't. I was sharing space with her. This experience is the definition of a mystery. I can try to explain it, but my explanations will sound vague and bizarre to those of you who've never done it. And they will sound specific and right to those who have...

July 19, 2015

I honestly don’t have much of a grasp on the impression I’ve given you, of me, so far....

August 03, 2015

And so my life fell apart for a while. For no good reason. No good reason that anyone could see, anyway. Not even me...

August 11, 2015

I dreamt, that September. The puzzling, jagged hole in my psyche knitting itself up in dreams...

August 16, 2015

My clearest waking-world memory of that September is swimming up out of a dream of homecoming - out of a dream haunted by the cold of Gran’s grave in winter, and through which Dave's name chimed like a bell, cracking me open and flooding me with sugar-sick, nostalgic pain - opening my eyes with all that need behind them, and finding Bodi sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the loveseat in my sitting room where, hours earlier, I'd curled myself into sleep....

August 23, 2015

Gran died when I was seventeen. Sweated her life away on a high, hard, narrow bed in a dark corner bedroom....

September 06, 2015

The nature of heat is to fade. Even in this sultry city...

September 14, 2015

The annual RITES Dumb Supper is the company's major fundraiser. It's based on a tradition that the local Wiccans will tell you is a time-honored Celtic observation of Samhain, but there's better documentation of the practice in 15th-century Lithuania...

September 21, 2015

I live at least part-time in a community in which people change their names. I believe I've mentioned that...

September 28, 2015

I am drawn to endings. Always, always, my whole life, speeding through things to be done with them. It's neither the goal nor the journey for me, it's the closing of doors. It's putting goal and journey behind me, the fierce, sad, spacious feeling of goodbye...