NoShame!

I've been working with Harvey on ShameNoShame! for about what... a month?  With Harvey, we've met two or three times per week for the past four or six weeks.  We've rehearsed at her apartment, on Great Highway Boulevard right in front of Ocean Beach, out in the yard.  We've rehearsed in my dinning room, to the bewilderment and amusement of my roomates.  They would walk in the kitchen and see us, Harvey holding a Breadman puppet with an erection, and myself wearing pink high heels and a tutu over my jeans!
The process of ShameNoShame! has been such a fabulous experience!  For one thing, it's undeniable that Harvey and I found an amazing partner in each other.  We're both freaks, queer, crazy.  She pushes gently on a lot of my boundaries...

ShameNoShame! is about sexuality and acceptance.  Harvey began working on it several months ago as part of her residency at The Garage.  I saw her first showcase one night, and the next week we were working together under the direction of Dan Griffiths.

Originally, I would say that her play explored the tragi-comic realities of a sex worker looking for true love, and the path to recover one's sense of wholeness in a culture where pleasure and judgment seem to perpetually collide.  Sex is sin, sex is sold.  Sex is learned, and stolen.  Sex represent one of the most vulnerable and intimate subject in one life.  Sex is present in everyone's life, in one form or another.  Yet sex is taboo.  And we have much to learn.
What is most fascinating about this experience, is that the play Harvey wrote has transformed and evolved greatly over the past 6 weeks.  The incorporation of my character surely helped move the story as a new dialectic unfolded.  Harvey's clown is pre-verbal and all appetite; she is libidinal.  My clown appears as the ring "mistress"type, a cross between the dominatrix MC and the drag Queen that I can be.  I am at once sexy and grotesque.  I seek control and power, but I too have my limitations.  And that's beside Harvey always messing with me.

This process has been a blessing.  I've spent about 10 hours/week rehearsing, and there is not even a dollar at the other end.  We have two shows this weekend, and that's it.
Well it doesn't have to be it.  If I decide to go to Germany it seems that Harvey and I could very well find some work.

But it's insane! Going to Berlin to work on clown theater that actually puts a mirror to some real social taboos?!  The thing is, that I don't know how much I want to do this.. I mean this character is a trip!  I would've never thought I could do the things I've been doing on stage.  It is sexy, explicit... gender-bending... it is sexuality affirming.  That's why it has been such a growing edge!  ShameNoShame! has allowed me to explore my relationship with sexuality (I hope it creates a similar effect in our audience!) in a way I could never have.  For some reason I cannot yet say that it has been healing (although it certainly has too) for the reason that I am still quite uncomfortable and have a lot of questions about a lot of what comes up in the play and in the process.

But that's what it's all about.  I feel that I am exactly where I should be, doing exactly what I am meant to be doing right now.
So I praise the All.