Dramakil (tm)

Being a theatre person is a pathology. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it is true. There should be a medication for it. If there were a medication for it, it would be given to more children than Ritalin and Robitussin combined.

Shot of two white, upper-middle class mothers--a strawberry blonde in a teal cardigan and a brunette in a pink cardigan--having coffee on a patio as their two kindergarten-age children play in the backyard.

Pink Mom: It's great to finally see Josh and Lindsay playing together. You haven't brought him to the playground in weeks.

Teal Mom: I've been worried about him. He's been skipping around the house, doing little spins and dance numbers. Yesterday I thought I heard him singing "Don't Rain on My Parade."

Pink Mom: Well, maybe he's gay.

Teal Mom: I hope that's all it is, but sometimes I worry that he may be . . .

Pink Mom puts her hand on Teal Mom's shoulder.

Pink Mom: A theatre kid?

Teal Mom looks down at her coffee, a pained expression on her face: she's trying to be strong for her son.

Pink Mom: Don't worry. There's a solution. My Lindsay had the same problem.

Teal Mom looks up, hope in her eyes.

Pink Mom: Lindsay's grandmother got her the soundtrack from Wicked and she had been singing "Defying Gravity" for weeks, sometimes even at night when we were trying to sleep. I was so frightened that she'd have to live her whole life that way, but when I told her doctor, he told me about Dramakil (tm).

Teal Mom: Dramakil (tm)?

Pink Mom: Dramakil (tm) is a mild dopamine inhibitor that keeps Lindsay from experiencing the high of performing in front of an audience. She's still able to enjoy watching plays and musicals, but she loses the desire get onstage herself.

Teal Mom: No auditions?

Pink Mom: No auditions.

Teal Mom: No rehearsals?

Pink Mom: No rehearsals. Not even an interest in speech and debate. Just one Dramakil (tm) a day and all Lindsay needs is an episode of Glee to satisfy her interest in the performing arts.

Teal Mom: And it works on all kinds of theatre kids?

Pink Mom: Dramakil (tm) has been approved for musical theatre geeks, Shakespeare nerds, those weird boys who like David Mamet, even the freakshows who still think theatre can be avant-garde.

Teal Mom: Are there any side effects?

Pink Mom: Side effects are mild and include headaches, nausea, upset stomach, explosive diarrhea and drymouth. But I figure what's a couple of nights of cleaning up Lindsay's shit-tornados if it means she won't have to spend the rest of her life begging her friends on Facebook to see her play Maggie the Cat--

Both Moms:--IN A CONVERTED WAREHOUSE!!! (Laughing)

Teal Mom: You know, I'm going to call Dr. Davis tomorrow about Dramakil (tm).

Pink Mom: You should. Dr. Davis's son has been on Dramakil (tm) since he caught him doing jazz hands.

Teal Mom: Maybe I can set him up with Josh!

Moms laugh and drink their coffee as logo appears bottom right.

Voice Over: Dramakil (tm): Because face it . . . it's not normal.

YOU'RE WELCOME, PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES OF AMERICA!!! YOU ARE FUCKING WELCOME!!!!!

Taken for Grant-ed

Sometimes I think that bank robbery would be easier than grant writing. They basically come down to the same principle: you go up to someone and say, "Give me the money!" The only difference is that in one case, you actually have to prove that you're worthy of money. Threats of physical violence are, for the most part, inherent in both.

Grant writing is like having to write your college application essays over and over and over again. Central is the attempt to communicate a deceptively simple idea: I am awesome. I am so awesome that you should just give me everything I want. I have really good plans for the future and have done things in my past to make me ready for those plans. With you help, I can achieve, and in the coming years will bring glory to your organization. This should be simple. This should be easy. And believe you me, as a person who, for a living, helps high schoolers write their college application essays, it is like pulling teeth. Not human teeth. Cat teeth. It's not that the kids can't do it: many of them are excellent writers. It's that writing a few paragraphs about your best qualities and how you came to get them or how you use them to make the world a better place is like being dragged, slowly, face first, through ground glass for these kids. For all of us. Give me a teeth cleaning by a dental assistant with muscle spasms before you put me through the embarrassment of talking about my good points.

I mentioned Sunday in the Park with George in my last entry; there is a line in that musical in which Commander Data (yes, it's Brent Spiner playing a different character, but if you were even a slightly nerdy kid in the late 80s, he is Commander Fucking Data from now until the sun explodes) sings, "Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself." Well, yes and no. Art is work. It is labor. Failing to recognize that is, I think, an inherent problem of our society. Yet it is also work that feels satisfying in a way that nothing else has been in my life. I don't know if that stops it from being work; I think that anyone who owns their own business feels a similar sense of satisfaction. The work is your own: when you see the thing that you made, you know that it is yours. I feel like there's a powerful Marxist analysis to be done here, especially when you think about how many more artisans we used to have making things that have become industrial products, but that would require a lot of time and research and oh, that's right, I have a grant to write.

If you can't tell. I am procrastinating. But rather than doing that, I am going to try to tell a story.

I came back to Austin at the end of 2006 with something inside me barely alive, something that I have left Berkeley in order to save. One of the first things I did was meet up with some old friends who were participating in the First Night Parade for New Year's Eve. They were friends that I had known from my days at the Rhizome Collective, an anarchist community where I had done theatre during my first stint in Austin. It was a place of very happy memories. The first time I had come to Austin, I began doing activist theatre with the Rhizome and had more fun than I had ever expected to have while waiting to go to grad school. I created experimental theatre pieces from scratch, for the most part with people who had no theatre training, and I was hugely proud of what I had done, and made very dear friends doing it. And yet I had left: some awful, horrible, lying, frightened voice inside me said it was time to grow up, that I had to leave that behind and be an adult. So I went to graduate school and was back two and a half years later, trying to get back something of what I had given up.

What I found was giant butterflies. Giant moths. A giant bat with a face like something out of a Jim Henson movie, and if you know me you know that "like something out of a Jim Henson movie" is a pretty huge compliment. I looked at these creations and marveled. I marveled. It so rarely that we get a chance to marvel, particularly at something that we can actually touch. And in my head the vision came. All the people who had been part of this world I'd loved and given up, the radical punks coming out the trees into the big open fields of Zilker Park on dozens of bikes, beating on buckets and cans and other pieces of garbage turned into drums and bells and tambourines, pouring out around a giant monarch on one end of the park, a giant moth on the other. At the helm of the butterfly, a tall, imposing Oberon; on the moth, a wild-haired Titania. And between the two, racing around on a Henson-worthy bat, tumbling and turning cartwheels, I saw Puck. It was a play I had never wanted to do before. It has been done thousands of times, and the story is nowhere near as interesting to me as that of Twelfth Night, or Anthony and Cleopatra, or The Taming of the Shrew or any other Shakespeare plays that I've thought of directing over the years. But the bikes called out for these characters to ride them, or the characters cried out to ride these bikes. I still don't know which of those two is more true, or more important, or if it matters. A Midsummer Night's Dream on a stage still held no interest for me. A Midsummer Night's Dream in a field, in a park, at a huge scale, with the energy that my friends brought to their work and their life, THAT is a play that I wanted to see. That is a play that I wanted to direct.

And then four years passed.

Well, we thought about it a while ago. We even had some sketches going. But then the artistic director said ten magic words to me as she was leaving our meeting: "And then next year we can do Alice in Wonderland." I said, "Wait, what? Sit back down." There are few stories as important to me, as loved, as formative as Alice in Wonderland. It was the first "big" book I read, the first one that didn't have pictures on every page. It was my literary gateway drug. And it made total sense. The giant snake bike could be the Caterpillar. The Caucus Race could happen on bicycles. And the best part was that the structure was episodic: as long as I had a willing Alice, the rest of the cast could commit to smaller rehearsal schedules. For that matter, we could make those episodes into radically different things: dance numbers, comedy pieces, etc. A few months later, we had Wheels of Wonderland. It is one of the things that I am most proud of, not least because I was crying myself to sleep the night before it opened wondering how the fuck we were going to make it work. And yet we did. It was wonderful. We had juggler creating the Rabbit Hole, a silent movie scene for the White Rabbit's house, burlesque dancers for the Garden of Live Flowers, a bike joust between the White and Red Knights and yes, a giant snake for a Caterpillar and a Caucus Race on bikes. More than that, though, we had a story. We had an arc. Alice was an adult, traveling down to Wonderland to try to figure out where she went wrong in her life, trying on the identities of a hero fighting the Jabberwocky, of a predatory Cheshire Cat, of a madwoman at a Tea Party before finally learning how to stand up to--and above, by a good five and a half feet--the world that tries to tell her who she is. People got that. They said so. Without prompting! Pretty good for experimental theatre.

This wasn't just experimental theatre, though: this was experimental theatre for the whole family. Normally, when we think of experimental theatre, we think either of something gritty and raw with lots of sex and violence and cursing, or something so esoteric that no one under the age of 18 would be willing to sit through it, much less understand it. This was neither, and yet it was still unusual, something that pushed the audience even while giving them the familiarity of Lewis Carroll's world. It was, in short, the kind of theatre that I want to do, that I love to do, that I fell for during college and had convinced myself, by the age of 24, that I couldn't do anymore if I wanted to be an adult. Well, if that's what being an adult means, give me my underoos and Go-Gurt, because I am going to go stage a production of Alice in Wonderland on bicycles, and I intend to do so well into the next decade, and hopefully the one after that.

Only now it's A Midsummer Night's Dream, or Midsummer in Motion, as we're calling it. It's been a long time coming. And it needs money. Lots of money. Money from rich people. I am sick of funding my friends' theatre projects and having them fund mine: I want other people to fund us, so that we can have more money. I'm happy to hear that the Austin theatre community is coming together to figure out how we can do that. But until then, it is time for my to put on my biggest smile and tell some rich people all about just how gosh-darn brilliant we all are. It is the work I do for others, and surprisingly enough, it is still art.

Just Stritch It

Early in 2009, I was working on the first musical I had been cast in with a singing role since I was 12 years old. It is probably just as well that I wasn't writing this blog at that point, because I may have been tempted to express certain frustrations I may have felt with the experience, but as is, least said, soonest mended, so I will just say that there were many travails in the process. One of the hardest, for me, was my solo, because this was a hard solo and I am not a good singer. I am a decent singer. I am one of the best singers in my family, and this is saying absolutely nothing, because when I was a baby I would actually put my hand up to my mother's mouth whenever she tried to sing me a lullaby, as though I knew even then that something was distinctly wrong. So imagine me, someone who had never sang outside of a shower, a car, or a burlesque show (where the singing takes third place after comedy and stripping, no matter what Christina Aguilera might have you believe), trying to nail a great big solo number with notes held for sixteen counts.
As if that weren't enough, I was surrounded by extremely talented singers, people who had been doing musicals for years, decades if you counted college. I was intimidated as hell. This was not what I had bargained for. I had auditioned for the company, not the show, and the company did experimental theatre. I love experimental theatre. I can do that. What I could not do was make this song work.
It took a really great director, music director, and the support of the cast to make me realize something: I didn't have to sing it. I was sitting in a coffee shop one night before the rehearsals when two of the immensely talented leads came in and sat with me. I told them that I was worried about my solo, that I felt like I couldn't do the song. One of them said, "Rudy, I couldn't do your song. It's long, it's complicated, and it's a list song." List songs, for those who don't know and can't guess from the name, are songs that, rather than telling a story, simply offer a list: think of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. List songs can go really wrong really fast. I needed to bring variation. I needed to bring out the camp and the comedy. In short, I didn't need to sing it; I needed to act the shit out of it.
Or, to put it yet another way, in the words of my music director, "Just Elaine Stritch it!" I knew just what he meant, and I thought I did.
Last night, I realized that I did not Elaine Stritch that song. I saw Elaine Stritch herself Elaine Stritch a song, and what I did couldn't hold a candle. If Elaine Stritch is tiramisu and espresso in a cafe in Rome, I was Chips Ahoy and Mountain Dew in a basement apartment in Jersey. When Elaine Stritch cracks her knuckles and Elaine Stritches a song, the world stops spinning and you are left alone in a room with Stritch, or maybe you're just inside her head, a person she imagined to tell her story to, a story so intimate that it couldn't possibly be told to a real human being.
The song that Elaine Stritch Elaine Stritched was "Liasons" from A Little Night Music, a musical that I performed in during college. Now, I know you're thinking that either I'm a dirty liar or have begun an early descent into senility, but while I was in this musical, I didn't have a singing role in it. I played Frid, Madame Armfeldt's personal valet who wheels her around in a wheelchair throughout the show and who, in the second act, gets to sleep with Petra, the shamelessly slutty maid. Lest you think I had only been cast in a small role that semester, it was a part I took on at the last minute. My roommate was directing the show, and I was wrapping up my own directorial project for the experimental company (See! I told you I could do that!). He needed a Frid, and I asked if I could take the role. After having me audition, he cast me, and we jokingly discussed how funny it would be that I, an out, loud and proud queer who was well-known around campus for being an LGBT activist, would be kissing a girl.
Ha ha ha.
On opening night, I went upstage before we had even officially opened the theater to find my mother waiting for me, a complete surprise. She said her conference at Princeton had let out early and so she had driven to Philadelphia to see me perform. I told her it was a very small role, but she said she didn't care: it had been a long time since she had seen me do anything on stage. After a first act of me doing nothing but stand and push, the director came up to my mother during intermission and assured me that I had lines in the second act. I didn't just have lines, though. I actually came onstage in hot pursuit of Petra, my collar undone and a bottle of champagne in my head, at which point the entire audience erupted into the hoots and hollers of a crowd ready to see just how convincing a heterosexual I could be. They were even louder in their approval when I kissed her passionately and then began slowly working my way down to her hoo-ha as the lights went down. They laughed, they cheered, they applauded, and as the noise died down and I was almost off-stage I heard, "Oh my goodness!" This started the riot again and was neither the first nor the last time that my mother upstaged me.
The next night, our crowd was dead, laughing at virtually nothing. Then I came out with the champagne and everyone woke up screaming. When we got offstage, the actress playing Petra whirled around and asked, not without a sense of frustration, "Rudy, does EVERYONE on this campus know you're gay?!" Another actor, a hetero male one, said, "Yes, everyone on this campus knows that Rudy's gay." To prove him right, I made out with him a few weeks later.
Because of this and so many other wonderful memories associated with the play, I decided that I wanted to see A Little Night Music before it closed. I had wanted to see it with the director and the actress who played Madame Armfeldt, two people that have remained good friends of mine to this day. Unfortunately, balls were dropped in terms of getting tickets, and so in the wee hours of New Year's Day I found out that the show was sold out. At this point, I had a decision to make: cut my losses and just spend some extra time with my friends, or try to get a ticket by hook or by crook.
I didn't have to think long. Had this just been A Little Night Music, I would have saved my money, but this was Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch.

I had loved Bernadette Peters for so long that I can't even remember when I first fell in love with her; it took some time with the IMDB to figure out that it was probably Annie, of all things, where I first saw her. I loved her in pretty much everything, especially Into the Woods, of course, but it was only this year that I fell for her performance in Sunday in the Park with George, only at the age of 30 that i really began to understand both her character and Mandy Patinkin's. Last year I was briefly in a relationship; for those who don't know me, this falls somewhere between "full moon lunar eclipses" and "Halley's Comet" on the astronomical scale of rare events. For reasons that I vow never to go into on this blog, I ended the relationship. Bernadette Peters singing "We Do Not Belong Together" is one of the things that got me through that break-up. Her performance perfectly captures the rage you feel at the world when you realize that the only way forward is to step away from the person that you love and the rage you feel at your lover when you know that they won't follow you when you walk away. She feels the despair of that moment but she also finds the hope, and pulls herself out of despair hand over hand via that hope. I needed that.

I needed Elaine Stritch a few years ago. She famously says, in her one-woman show, that it's rather ridiculous for women in their 40s and 50s to sing "I'm Still Here:" "Where have they been?" she asks. She, in her 70s, then knocks the song out of the ballpark. If It is ridiculous for a woman in her 40s to sing that song, then it is ludicrous to the point of pathetic for a boy in his mid-to-late 20s to sing it, but that's what I was doing when I was 26 going on 27. It was one of many songs that I was singing along to in my car when I came back from Berkeley, where I had spent two-and-a-half years in graduate school and where I had slowly felt the life-force drain out of me. You're not supposed to talk about a job or a time in school as a low point in your life--these things are supposed to be an inherent good, while addictions and bouts with disease are inherent evils that make perfect memoir fodder--but I hope that this blog does just that. I want to develop a VERY carefully written show about how we stay on career paths because we feel we have to, leaving our dreams on the side of the road and then arriving at our destination only to remember that this wasn't where we wanted to go in the first place. We can step off of that path, and go backwards, and find those dreams right where we left them, and even as the world screams at us that we're making a huge mistake we can shove a middle finger in the air and prove them wrong. When I put on Elaine Stritch back then, I didn't know that all this was true, but damn it, I hoped it was, and singing along to her line, "I got through all of last year" made me look back at a year of depression and choices made out of fear and let go of it.

So it was no contest. I went online and, although the tickets were expensive as hell, there were premium seats available, and I had Christmas money I had intended for just such an occasion. The next day I was on a train to New York, hoping to god there were no major delays. Sure enough, I arrived and walked then ten or so blocks to the theater. I got my tickets and held onto them like they were my life savings. I went to a bar across the street, not wanting to risk being even a minute late, and had a lovely conversation with the woman next to me, who was, like me, seeing the show alone. Funnily enough, when we took our seats at the theater, there was just one chair separating us. Did I mention we were 4th row center? We were 4th row center. I was so excited that all worry about the money was out the window: this was my first Broadway show since Avenue Q in 2004, and I was doing it in style.

Then came the show. If I am going to be totally honest, I will say two things. The first is that I have seen a couple of shows with famous leads where you get the sense that the director spent too much time on the leads and not enough with the supporting cast. There were some weak and annoying performances in this play. One performance that was strong and enchanting, however, was Leigh Ann Larkin's as Petra. As someone who feigned sleep onstage when a Petra performed her solo, "The Miller's Son," which is about unrepentant sluttiness (something I stand behind totally), it was nice to finally get to see it from the audience, and Larkin made it the liveliest number in the show. Holding your own against two living legends is no small feat.

The other thing I will say is that neither Stritch nor Peters are in their vocal primes. I expected this from Elaine Stritch, but it was a bit disappointing not to have a Bernadette Peters delivering her full belt. These women are, however, in their acting primes, and have been for decades. Both of these women have Judy Garland's capacity to let their eyes well up with approximately 26 gallons-worth of tears and yet keep them there, making their eyes sparkle with barely contained heartbreak. Both of these women bring intelligence and strength to the women that they play. Nevertheless, between the two of them, it was Elaine Stritch saying, "He could have been the love of my life" that hit me square in the chest and got my own tears flowing, and if I could have one song from that show to live again, it would be "Liasons." As with her classic, "The Ladies Who Lunch,' she turned that song into a three-act play. It's about a courtesan recalling her former lovers, the luxury of her life and the way she played them all for money. Yet she is never venal. What made Elaine Stritch the perfect Madame Armfeldt is the same thing that made her the perfect Joanne in Company: her warmth. Underneath all the cynicism is a profound warmth that she feels for the men she's been paid by, as well as a deep love for her daughter and granddaughter. She is revealed as a woman who has carefully avoided heartbreak over the years by never letting herself love, and it is only now, at the close of her life, that the pride she feels is tinged with regret. And as if all that weren't enough, she throws in a moment of absolute hilarity, punctuating the line about the King of Belgians deeding her a duchy with a "Woooooo!" of triumph worthy of a Super Bowl winning touchdown. That, my friend, is a performance to remember.

It's also a performance to learn from. There is nothing like seeing Elaine Stritch Elaine Stritch the shit out of a song to remind you that there is no room for weak sauce onstage. This is a woman who is still getting up there every night well into her 80s and showing everyone else in the cast how it's done. We should all be so lucky. We should all work so hard. And for those of us, like me, who are not the best singers in the world, we should all figure out how to turn every song into a three-act play, and brace ourselves. and Stritch.

Concerning an Antique Picture Hidden in a Collection of Latino Plays

As part of my attempt to kick the upcoming year in the ass, I am going to begin writing every day, perhaps in this blog, perhaps on my larger material. But my friends who are far better and more successful at the art of writing than myself insist, rightly so, that you gotta clear out a lot of crap before you get to the good stuff. It has certainly been true for me: it was only after a month of writing mostly crap that my first one-man show finally started coming out, and this time around I don't have a year of editing before my next big show. I need to write, and fast, and I need to write about a subject I am not terribly comfortable about: my race.

Here's the thing: I worry that I cannot write about my race, because I am not really OF my race.

Now, on the one hand, I know this is a ridiculous thing. I know that I am Latino. I have grown up knowing that I am Mexican-American, Chicano, Hispanic, Latino, whatever you want to call it. I am Latino and, for that matter, I am proud. Nevertheless, I often look around at a lot of representations of Latino culture and say, "You know what? That's not me. Some of that is; I recognize some of it. But it's not me. I did not grow up in a barrio; the neighborhood was predominantly white and suburban. I was not raised with any kind of deference to religion, particularly not The Virgin Mary. I was surrounded by machismo, yes, but it was never violent and, for the most part, I rejected it wholeheartedly. I see things that are supposed to depict Latino life, and the life it depicts is not my own.

So does that mean I am not Latino?

I actually went through this with my sexuality, in much greater desperation and with fantastic results. For much of my life, I took a look at the most predominant depictions of gay men and said, "That's not me. I'm not thin, and I'm not hairless, and I'm not athletic, and I am not manly, nor am I truly queeny in the more traditional senses of the word (according to a number of friends of mine, I am feminine in a very lesbian kind of way), and I am, despite appearances, not white." I was really getting freaked out and worried that I was the only member of my particular species of alien when I found the radical queer communities ensconced in the Appalachian woods, and had the Bee-Girl-in-the-No-Rain-video moment where I found my field of bee people, some of whom sucked my dick! It was the moment when I finally realized I was not just queer in my head, but queer in my heart. It was beautiful, and in the two years since I have kept having experiences that remind me that I may be a very particular kind of queer, but I am not alone, and I don't have to change.

I have not had that experience yet with my own Latinidad. It is, of course, different. The stakes are not so high: I do not need to be a fully self-actualized Latino to get laid. Or, you know, date or whatever. Also, I always felt justified in my feelings of alienation from the mainstream gay world: what I was alienated from was the sizeism, racism, misogyny and commodification of the gaystream, and what I found was something raw, radical, earthy and a hell of a lot more fun. I don't feel the same sense when I think about my relationship to my Latinidad: I worry that my sense of alienation comes from assimilation, classism, and internalized racism. And knowing me, I am probably right.

Funnily enough, I am more than happy to reject depictions of Latinos in mainstream gay culture. We . . . okay, every idiomatic expression I can think of for how Latinos are treated in a lot of gay media has all the wrong sorts of connotations: "We get fucked over." "We get the short end of the stick." "We get a raw deal." Yep, none of those are going to work. Let's just stick with the details: in everything from Love! Valour! Compassion! to Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss to Will and Grace to Milk, Latinos are turbo-sluts that come in two flavors: evil or stupid. And I may be a turbo-slut des temps en temps, but I am quite intelligent and, for the most part, a good person. Then there's the Philadelphia: the white man's devoted lover. It's not as bad, but as a recent viewing of I Love You, Philip Morris reminded me (SPOILER ALERT), the devoted Latino lovers tend to pop up around narratives of death, as Rodrigo Santoro, in the aforementioned film, plays Jim Carrey's lover who dies of AIDS. I could happily spend an entire hour, on-stage or off, bitching about my problems with the way that gay Latinos get represented.

But that's not what I want to do. Bitching about obvious racism is rarely useful. It's far more interesting, and much more difficult, to go after the hidden racism, the things that have been part of our field of vision so long that we forget about them, like buildings we pass on our way to work or class but never, ever enter. Racism becomes like the fields of Tuscany, fields that have been human constructs for so long that we assume it is what that part of the world is SUPPOSED to look like, and much like those Tuscan fields, there is sometimes beauty, the moments when a racial stereotype is wrenched from the grasp of the oppressor and transformed into a sign of strength, or twisted into a mockery of the oppressor himself. Is that beauty worth the cost? Can we ever separate the truth from what we expect or assume to be true? As an academic, I know the answer to that second question. As an artist, I have to leave it open in order to break through it.

Nevertheless, I have been an academic for the past few months (more on that later) and so I have begun with research. I am in Philadelphia right now, and on the way back from the SEPTA station and the grocery store I found a used bookstore and, being me, headed right in. I am never, ever one to pass up a used bookstore. Sure enough, I found things I wanted, including plays by Rick Najera and Cherrie Moraga. I figured that if I couldn't come up with my own material, I could steal from--excuse me, be inspired by . . . no, no I was right the first time, steal from--them.

It was while reading Rick Najera's work that I felt that familiar feeling creep over me, the feeling that this text was somehow calling me out for not being Latino enough. I wasn't a macho. My parents grew up working class themselves, but by the time I came around they were both fit snugly into the middle and were aiming for the upper. My friend growing up were the usual blend of predominantly white with a sprinkling of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American faces that you see in middle class neighborhoods, although being in Texas the Latino were easily the largest minority. I have never worked in a restaurant. I am not an immigrant. My parents aren't immigrants. My grandparents weren't immigrants; you have to go back to my great-grandparents on my mother's side to find family crossing the Rio Grande, whereas my father's family crossed the Rio Grande while both sides were still New Spain. Also, I use words like "whereas." The only accent I have ever displayed is a gay accent, and no, I am not fluent in Spanish, merely proficient. None of these things make me any less Latino, but they certainly make feel like a honky.

Then there's the counter impulse: the desire to assert that my family isn't like that, that someone else is getting things wrong, that any Latino writer who assumes that they speak for all Latinos is some combination of cavalier, presumptuous, stupid and cruel. The big time I feel this is whenever Latino writers talk about men hitting their wives, and how mothers of sons perpetuate this cycle of violence against women. Rick Najera does this, as does Gloria Anzaldua, and it really pisses me off. Now, I am not trying to say that there aren't a lot of Latino men who beat their wives. What I am saying is that not ALL Latino men or mothers do this. As a matter of fact, if any men in my mother's family had ever raised their hands to a woman, their own mothers would have been the first to rip them to pieces. The one time my father got really mad at me was when he heard me call a girl a jerk. This was in 8th grade, and I was totally being facetious, but my father was NOT having it. That's the respect for women that I was taught, and while Najera only mentions the phenomenon of women forgiving their sons for beating their wives in one monologue, Anzaldua, if I recall correctly, really takes some time in Borderlands/La Frontera to claim that this is an inherent part of Chicano border culture, which is the culture my mother grew up in. This pisses the bejesus out of me, because a lot of unwitting non-Latino students read that book in college and think that she's right, because this is the first exposure that they've had to border culture. I love Anzaldua's work, but that's always the part that makes me want to scream and yell and not do ANYTHING violent, thank you very much.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I found the picture.

The picture was hidden in the pages, perhaps as a bookmark or perhaps kept there in order to prevent it from being damaged. It was a black-and-white portrait of a young black woman; the style of photograph and the clothing suggested that this was the early 20th Century. This was obviously a valuable photograph to someone at some point, and it was an incredible surprise to find it in this book. Obviously, the photo most likely belonged to the last owner, but was this a family member or simply a photo they had found at a flea market and decided they liked. Was this woman's descendant reading this book, and if so for a class or for pleasure, and seeing as Rick Najera is not well-known outside Latino circles, did this mean that this woman's descendent was Latino? Did that mean this woman was Latina?

Because that's the tricky part: it's hard to tell from a photograph if someone is a Latino or not. It's not a race: it's a confluence of races and cultures that has come to both define itself and be defined as a race. This woman was a dark-skinned member of the African diaspora, but that describes a significant portion of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and a number of other Latin American countries. She could also easily have been Mexican, Chilean, or from any of the other Latin American countries that did not have large African slave populations. Even if a name had been written on the back of the photo, it would only have given hints, not answers. A Latina can erase her racial heritage by taking her husband's name and anglicizing her first name, while there are plenty of Lindas, Marias, and Dianas in the world that can sound Latina if they take a Latino husband's name. Had this woman been wearing an outfit that read as Latin, that might have given another clue, but even so it could have been a costume. As is this woman rested in between the pages, maybe Latina, maybe not.

This is the tricky part, and the problem I face: like gayness, Latinidad must be cued and recognized and can be hidden. I could give myself a French, Italian, Greek, Jewish or even just a plain old Anglo last name and no one would suspect, because those are all things people have assumed I am. I'm not going to, anymore than I'm going to try to change my voice and mannerisms and marry a woman, but I could. And while I am always happy to put on a pair of fishnets and a whole lot of body glitter to make sure people know what team I bat for, I don't really know how I can shout my Latinidad from the rooftops without it feeling somehow forced, or fake. Actually, let me rephrase that: I am more than happy to do that, but then this little voice pipes up inside my head: "Oh yeah? Prove it."

I'm working on it, little voice. I'm working on it.

An Open Letter to 2011

Dear 2011,

Greetings! So nice to get to know you. So far, you've been pretty low-key. I'm not even drunk anymore. Instead, I am typing this in my friend's basement, where I am crashing on a couch and currently letting an excess of cheese and champagne settle somewhere inside my intestines.

I am writing to let you know that I have no intention of letting you suck as much as the previous year has. Seriously, fuck 2010. It was, if anything, a year of disappointments and delays, a year where so many things that I wanted either got screwed up or postponed until 2011. That is the act you have to follow, 2011. You're like the comedian who has to follow Carlos Mencia: on the one hand, you know that you can do better, but on the other, you also know that a part of the audience's soul has died, and therefore getting them to laugh will be something of a challenge.

However, this isn't, of course, just about you. I know that I need to be part of making this relationship work. If I am going to expect you to deliver, I am going to have to bust my ass, and truth be told, I have not been busting my ass up until now. I have been sitting on it and allowing it to grow bigger. I have been giving it a steady diet of internet distractions and breakfast tacos, and while breakfast tacos are the blow job of breakfasts, internet distractions have managed to surpass religion and pornography (which granted, has a significant overlap with internet distractions) as opiates of the masses. And while I would never ask anyone to give up their faith or their porn, I think cutting back on Huffington Post and Gawker would be in the best interests of everyone, certainly myself.

With this in mind, I'm going to get up off my ass, and I am not talking about the gym. For a few minutes this evening, I turned to a New Year's Eve countdown show that featured Jennifer Hudson hawking Weight Watchers while singing the song "Feelin' Good" by Nina Simone. Now, I played this song a lot when I finally decided to leave graduate school, and even then I felt somewhat self-conscious as I turned this song of African-American liberation into my own anthem about deciding not to finish that Milton paper that was already 2 years overdue, but at least I didn't turn it into a song about weight loss. At least I don't cry out "Freedom is mine" when I am talking about how happy I am that I can fit into a smaller pants size.

No, when I say get up off my ass, I mean stop procrastinating. Get back to writing every day. Finish the fucking Bike Zoo grant. Get shit organized for the return of Camp Camp. Get the Lear script fucking edited already. Stop wasting time, because there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. A year ago at this time I felt like I was living authentically, in the way that Agrado describes it in All About My Mother; you are at your most authentic when you most closely resemble what you have always dreamed of being. This was the problem with 2010: I look back and, quite often, do not see the person I wanted to be. Was I okay? Sure, but in the immortal words of Dr. Frank-n-Furter, "Okay? I think we can do better than that!"

But I've got good news, 2011: for most of the past decade of my life, I have dreamed of being a director, and this year I will direct at least four shows: Cardigan, Lear, The Physicists, and Midsummer in Motion. That's a new play, a modern play with a number of avant-garde twists, and two experimental adaptations of Shakespeare plays. THAT is what I am talking about. But there needs to be room and time for writing and performing as well. Hence Footnotes for People Who Don't Speak Spanishand the return of Camp Camp. That last bit is important: I want to contribute to the queer world. I got to do so, a little, with Work Hard Stay Hard, but I want to do more. The person I dream of being works hard for his causes, so you better treat him right.

Consider this a warning, 2011. Don't fuck it up. And don't let me fuck it up. And 2010, let me revise the fucking I gave you earlier. I look back a second time, and keep thinking about all the people I met, the brilliant actors and technical theatre artists I've come to know and love. and realize that these are the people I am going to make art with over the course of 2011. That's something I am absolutely grateful for. Making art, after all, is like making love: when done right it makes you sweat, it makes you walk funny after, and it makes life worth living. Or, to return, as I so often do to the words of Dr. Lynda Hart: "Desire, like theatre, takes place in a fantasy that we create with others, and like any communal experience requires a relinquishing of control. We love, and we play, in order to learn how to survive letting go."

2010, I let you go. 2011, I'm watching you. I'll be back home in a couple of days. Keep the breakfast tacos warm for me.

Love,

Rudy Ramirez