humor

What are you afraid of?

/ StaceyRose / Leave a comment

When I was a kid, I had asthma. The kind of asthma that kept my school nurse’s itchy dialing finger pointed toward the phone in anticipation of having me carted out of the school via ambulance … again. I breathed thin and narrow. One wrong move. A twitch, an overly ambitious fit of laughter could send me into the throws of throat narrowing brochospasmodic suffocation. My childhood existence was racked with anxiety and the fear that my next asthma attack would be my last.

As I got older, my asthma got better, but my fear never strayed too far. Most of my young adult life through my early 30s, I lived my life based on fear and made all decisions accordingly. Change is indeed possible though, and growth is necessary if one is to survive a fear based existence. Much of my “healing” came through art and written expression. My Poeish existence did serve to enhance my imagination and to some degree has made me the theatre artist I am now. A fairly cool trade off I must say.

Tomorrow, if you are anywhere near my fair city (Charlotte, NC) you can check out the programing at The Mint Museum of Art as some of my favorite arts folk (John Hairston, Antoine Williams, and Quentin Talley) answer the question “What are you afraid of?” through visual and performance art. Enjoy! 🙂

Rosie.

(oh did I mention it’s FREE)

;

Singapore Girl

/ StaceyRose / 3 Comments

I’ve been a lil silent here lately. It’s mainly been because I was locked in crippling fear about my future.  Now that I know to some small degree what the next few months hold for me, I’m paralyzed in fear.  At least when I was crippled I could wiggle around a little bit.

Okay, I’ll stop being vague now.  I was accepted into the Dramatic Writing Program at NYU‘s Tisch School of the Arts … in Singapore.  The idea of me relocating to Singapore was not some grand pre-existing life path I’d put my self on. It actually thinly presented itself to me as a simple check off box in my NYU Tisch New York application.

“Would you like to be considered for Tisch Asia?”

“Sure!”

I thought.

“Why the fuck not? Since I’m applying to grad school why not just balls it all the way out!”

I check the box, complete the application and submit all the required hutzpa by 11:59 pm 12/1/11. Then I proceed through four months of self induced torture, applying to grad school after grad school only to have my spirit swallowed whole and shat out by the  Ivy’s, The “First Choice” school, and even my shit kicking “safe school” (those bastards rejected me FIRST – there will be blood.)

The only institution left was NYU, and it wasn’t looking too promising.  I’d sent the app four months before and heard not word the first. Then …

“Dear Graduate Dramatic Writing applicant,

Greetings.  Your application has been selected as part of a small group of semi-finalists under consideration for the M.F.A Graduate Dramatic Writing program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Asia in Singapore.  We would like to request an interview with you regarding your admission to our program.”

My sphincters tightened. My mind raced. I hadn’t even sent my materials to Singapore as the application had called for. I was confused. It was an interview though, and after having endured a grad app process reminiscent of 300, some redemption was in order.  On March 9th 2012, I interviewed  and it was fantastic.  They liked me.  They really liked me. More important, I liked them.  It seemed as if the program was made for me and had been placed in front of me randomly because, quite frankly, I’m a coward. The idea of attending school abroad is slightly horrifying.

I then began to consider Singapore, for real this time.  I did a little internet digging and discovered the beauty of the country and how doable the transition from here to there would be. Still, after the slaughter I’d been through, I didn’t allow myself to explore much further.  I went back to life as usual.

Then I began to notice the calendar.  Days eeked by. Hours. Minutes.  I scoured the grad forums for answers.  The ones I received only made me desperate for more.  I swore the forums off, then went back five minutes later.  We were tortured souls yearning, burning, dying to be liberated from purgatory! Then it hit me.  I could call!  So, I called NYU New York and got the most loving caring rejection I’d received all season. I was reminded to keep Tisch Asia in mind and that their decisions were just around the corner.

Gently let down, and still quite defeated, I attempted to go on.  I threw myself into work, and in the back of my mind lingered thoughts of Tisch Asia.  I’d almost resolved that I wasn’t going to get in this round until …

“Dear Stacey,
 
Congratulations! You have been admitted to the Tisch School of the Arts.”

I came completely unglued, interrupting every business deal and break up chat at the Starbucks I was in.  Baristas came to check on my psychological well being.  It was fandamtastic.

Since then, the black fog of fear has settled in for what I hope is a brief stay.  Among the shit storm stirring in the fog are the thoughts:

“Yeah, you’re scholarshipped, but it doesn’t nearly cover everything.”

“Bitch, it’s Asia.”

“What are you gonna do with that boy?”

“BITCH, it’s Asia.”

“Will you have to work?! Shit, you can work and go to school in Charlotte!”

“BITCH IT’S ASIA!”

All of this while trying to live a semi-normal life over the past three days.  The good news is I know I’ll survive. The not so good is that I’ll have to re-live my middle school/high school emotions during the process. There is a hell of a lot of grown up work for me to do and it’ll suck having to do it while still feeling like a chubby wheezy nerd that Jake Ryan will NEVER ask to the prom.

Yes, a new chapter in the life of this completely sane lunatic has begun. Pull up a chair, grab some concessions, and join me.  This shit outta be good.

Rosie.

*Update:  I’ve set up a fund to help pay for my trip over!

“Throw Stacey On The Plane!”  make it rain please.

gracious thank yous!

Oddly this was one of my favorite commercials when I was a tyke.

Someone to watch over me.

/ StaceyRose / Leave a comment

Yesterday I spent most of the beautiful 75 degree day in my bedroom tearing it apart in order to reorganize.  I do this mainly when I’m wrestling with emotions and I don’t want my mind to eat itself.   Fast forward to 11pm last night, not much but the destruction part had  been done as I’d left my house at 2pm intending to get food and ended up staying gone for the rest of the day. As I stood looking at the remnants of my space and thought about the monumental task of putting it all back together again, I began to cry.

This wasn’t a regular cry. This was one for the record books. Huge crocodile tears filled my eyes and plopped down to the floor. One of those Viola Davis Doubt*, streams of snot ran down my nose.  My body shook.  I even got those crying kid hiccups, you know the ones they always try to talk through but end up sounding like they have a severe stutter. I was deeply sad, and I let myself be there until I could figure out why. My eyes were  just at swelling, and my gullet jam packed with Mike and Ikes when it occurred to me that in that moment, I wanted someone to take care of me. I wanted a male somebody to come in and make this shit right. I then did the other thing I do when faced with an internal crisis (I mean beside glutting myself with dime store candy), I wrote.

My writing put me in touch with something I didn’t know was there.  I’m tired of being the strong, smart, independent one.  The one that puts things together, or figures things out. Compound that with me not being one of these dainty little women that men tend to want to take care of and on most days I feel like a female Grizzly Adams.  I didn’t have a father, while I love my brothers dearly they are fairly useless in the area of handy-mandom, my romantic relationship … what romantic relationship? Anyway, the bottom line is that the times in my life when I felt protected and cared for by a man were few and far between.

So I stewed for a bit, swallowed the sticky wad of Mike and Ikes and tried to “activate my faith” (phrases like that tickle me ^_^).  I thought about times that I had been loved and supported specifically by men, in ways that were non-sexual. What I discovered is while those times are scattered, they are there. I have been loved and wonderfully cared for by men in my romantic relationships (even the sucky ones) – in my family (my Grand Pa always came through with a happy meal when I needed it most and my brothers  effectively kept me dateless through my teens for my own safety.) –and in my male friendships (these are men who have “dated” me, danced and laughed with me, given me emotional and financial support without  any expectations).

The more I wrote and thought and cried and chewed, the more I realized how skewed my perspective is. There is nothing I can do about my past life experience. Nothing. So there is no need to let it make my current existence  miserable. My history with men is just that, HISTORY.  I can make new choices, shift my perspective,  find new mistakes to make and  new lessons to learn. I can only do these things if I choose not to fall back into old patterns, which is what I was avoiding by destroying my bedroom in the first place. See. Full circle. Don’t you love how life works? I know I do.

Rosie.

*the magic happens at 1:11.

The “Wrong Side” of 30

/ StaceyRose / Leave a comment

I am 36 years old today. I will not now nor ever be one of those people who run from my age.  I earned every damn second of this life I have. I won’t discredit it by monkeying with the numbers.  Notice I did not say that I wouldn’t have my yearly ceremonial breakdown.  It usually has something to do with not being betrothed and knowing that the possibility of another child is ebbing out to sea. Who am I kidding? Do I really want another kid? (See: all posts labeled The Zion Chronicles) Am I really ready for a committed relationship? (See: Living like a wife, Loving like a mistress)

My requisite breakdown is probably based on that universal sense that we should have done abc by xyz, and is based in nothing relevant to my actual life situation.  My life is pretty awesome.  I have a lot to be grateful for, and have lived through things that have killed countless others. It’s those things I focus on when in I’m in the bowels of despair leaning into my friend’s bosoms and adding the salt of my tears to the fried pickles on the table. As to being on the “wrong side” of any age, the only wrong side is the side that equates to me not being alive. As long as I have another day, I have another day to craft the tale.

Here’s to the next 365! Forty, I’m coming for you bitch, and it won’t be pretty!

Rosie.

And remember kiddies … Always stay young at heart!

http://youtu.be/veN2gyCEj8s

Precious be still.

/ StaceyRose / Leave a comment

My dearest companion Eric is a never ending well of comedic insight. His latest moment of round about Zen goes as follows:

He and I had been toiling away for most of the day in front of computer screens, eyes melting, caffeine fueling our every keystroke. We’d wrapped for the day.  He dropped me off at a meeting and went to pick my son up from class and drop him home. (He is a loving and considerate thing I tell you.) Anyways, by the time Eric picks up my son and drops him home, he is ready to “eat his fist”.  Eric is currently watching what he eats for health reasons, so naturally he chooses to go to Captain D’s, like any health conscious person in the world would.

To his credit, he decides on the baked fish and rice meal. Sensible. Down right healthy. The she chimes in:

She is his inner Precious. The living breathing manifestation of his insatiable hunger. (Which I like to picture sitting in the passenger seat right beside him.) Inner Precious (IP) alerts him to the the fact that the baked fish and rice meal was indeed not enough and that he’d better damn well re-up on a south style fish sandwich, it was only 99¢ anyway. He fought with IP a little and eventually caved. He ordered the greasy delectable, drove to the window, payed for his food drove about 500ft then stopped. IP suggested that he check the bag. Sure enough, no greasy delectable. The drive thru was completely barren and he could have easily gone around again, picked up his sandwich and drove off, but IP decided that this problem needed a personal touch. She sent him inside.

After some mild aggression, and an apology (I’m taking dramatic license here based on how I think the interaction went), Eric got his sandwich, got in the car and drove off.  IP decided that it would be a good idea to eat the sandwich on the way home. He stood his ground, and the southern friend fishy snack remained in the bag. (It is here that I like to picture him slapping IP on her chubby chocolate hand as she makes repeated attempts to free the sandwich from it’s wax wrap binding).

The two make it home, and Eric decides to take one last stand against old IP.  He eats his baked fish and rice. He’s sated, and comfortable when:

*****DRAMATIZATION******

He says his inner precious leans in and says to him, “You know you want that damn sammich”.  Her bearesque aggression renders him useless. He proceeds to devour the artery clogging masterpiece in a few short bites. His stomach is heaving. His head is pounding and IP is staring at him …

… basking in the after glow of her conquest.

The take home lesson or what I saw to be useful from his experience, at least for me, is that we have to name our demons. That way we know what we’re up against thereby making it easier for us to see them coming. The next step is to embrace them. The old adage “you get more bees with honey than vinegar” applies. It takes so much more effort when I combat my demons as if at war, than when I embrace my IP’s fat ass and tell her lovingly “No bitch, we don’t need a sweet potato pie with that salad.”

Rosie.

Foxhole prayers and Giant dreams.

/ StaceyRose / Leave a comment

You would think I’d be a football fan.  My brother and his classmates were the pride of our city in 1983. They were Elizabeth High School Minutemen. State champions. College bound. Full ride scholarships and all. Except, my brother is 10 years older than me which means I was 8 … and a girl. I was over football by the time I was ten. Oddly though it was my mother’s plight that sealed football’s fate in my young psyche.

My mother was a DIE HARD Giants fan. She has the ulcer to prove it.  (Seriously) Season after season I would battle for my mother’s attention with various variety showesque routines. I would sing, dance, or story tell my heart out  as I stared into my mothers thick round spectacles hoping to divert her attention from the blood bath unfolding at Giant’s Stadium or wherever they happened to be getting their asses kicked that day. No luck. The only thing worse than when they were losing, was when they were winning.  This is the only time in my childhood that I recalled witnessing my mother praying … sort of.

She would get on her knees and lean off the side of her bed, hands firmly clasped. I’d watch play after play unfold in reverse across her lenses as she muttered that age old mantra I’d become intimately familiar with “Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. DAMMIT!”  (She also used said mantra when her ’74 Duster wouldn’t start in the mornings. It had a 50% success rate.) Years of this roller coaster ride with the boys in blue proved not so good for my mother’s gut. She went through a period where for a year she could barely eat anything at all and lost a tremendous amount of weight. Now granted, I’m not naive enough to believe that my mother’s illness was completely the doing of the New York Football Giants, but dammit they were at least accessories to the crime.

It took time, but gradually my mom got better.  She never quite cheered the Giants in the same way.  I watched her as tonight’s game approached.  I could sense her underlying excitement about the whole business, but she couldn’t bare to watch. To be honest, I kinda missed the intensity with which she adored the G-Men. I’ve not seen her quite as excited about anything else ever since.

Rosie.

Satan thy name is Bill Parcells!

Emotional Herpes

/ StaceyRose / Leave a comment

Here’s a neat way to look at your past relationships!

Yes, even yours grandma!

You ever feel like you’re always dating the same douche  in a different body?

You ever find yourself  stuck on the proverbial one that got away, sure you’d missed out on the single opportunity for happiness life would ever offer you?!

Then you’ve got a raging case of emotional herpes! Valtrex won’t help this, you’re actually going to have to figure out your:

Father issues!

Mother issues! (biological or religious)

Your sex issues! (yep, go ahead and figure out who or what you want to be doing it to.)

while you’re at it you might as well delve into your internal issues about:

Your drug/alcohol problem.

The job you’ve been on for a decade that you despise.

That mole on the back of your left ear.

Your cellulite.

That weird uncle who always demanded you pull his finger.

The fact that you pulled it every time he asked.

Your unnatural attraction to your 2nd cousin.

…AND WHEN YOUR DONE!

You’ll probably still date that douche in a different body again. You know why? Because we’ve ALL got emotional herpes. It’s a world wide epidemic since … ummm … I dunno … THE DAWN OF TIME?! When whatever it is that you are supposed to learn kicks in, when enough truly becomes enough, something incredible happens; The universe slathers you with emotional herpes valtrex.  All the blisters and legions of the past heal, and you move on to your next “lesson”.  Least that’s what I’m hoping ;).

Rosie.

A note of inspiration

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Once upon a time before text messaging, email, and God forbid facebook; students would make great sport of sneaking messages scrawled on haphazardly ripped pieces of notebook paper to their fellow classmates.  The messages were called “notes”. Constant care was taken to navigate the note through the right channels, e.g. you did NOT want to pass the note to the kid that picked their nose, or the one who was too much of an airhead to be discrete, and definitely not the one who was always kissing the teacher’s ass as discovery and exposure was assured.

Call it nostalgia. Call it me getting old, but damn kids now just don’t know how to have a good time!  We lived and breathed to push information behind enemy lines during that french class while Ms. Whatserface (yep the memory loss is already setting in) would slash out french verbs with violent vigor, silver hair jostling to the rhythm of her wiggling body, only to have her protruding belly render them a smudge of chalk simultaneously. Looking back, most of that covert information was utterly meaningless. It was all about connecting. Getting what you had to say to someone else without anyone else finding out. It was a gratuitous ritual of our time. Which is alas, gone. *sniff, tear*

Being the fantastic semi-pro hoarder I am, I happen to have kept one of these precious relics.  This one was special and one that I have referred to over the years whenever I needed a tiny dose of confidence.  It was written about me by James Blair, a boy who waited on the school bus with me everyday while I was in elementary school. It’s always make me chuckle a little. Here, have a look … but don’t tell anybody, it’s top secret!

 

 

 

Rosie.

 

Prayed and Kanyed up.

/ StaceyRose / 5 Comments

Warning: This post is not for the religiously or spiritually closed minded. Any attempt to debate me on the validity of the content of this blog will be promptly met with a Kanye Shrug ( :/ ) and utter indifference.

I have struggled with the concept of God for most if not all of my life.  Most people do. Even the “faithful”.  No judgement though. Like pimpin’, faith ain’t easy. It’s reliance on the fact that no matter what, everything is as it should be and will be done in some type of divine order of which no one quite knows the essence of. Scary shit no matter how you slice it. It’s no wonder that people who claim to “have it” right down to the whos and whats, and how comes will fight you to the death over whether their version of the divine truth as the right one. Because if there is anything that loosens a string on the cardigan of their faith, then the whole damn thing unravels. That’s no way to believe in my opinion. It’s risky to put all your eggs of hope in one basket.

Why can’t faith be dynamic? The answer: It can. It is. It always was. We’re just the ones that try to capture it in a bottle, store it away as our own until the light dies out like summer time fire flies. If we are really honest with ourselves  we know the things we believe in, the things we have faith in, change dramatically over the course of our lives. From the tooth fairy, to Santa Claus, to our parents. Yes, even our parents. It’s been devastating for me to find out that so many of my mother’s parenting techniques were deeply flawed. I was quite a mess when that cardigan unraveled, let me tell you.

The things that get us through, per what I believe, are sent to us when we need them. My belief in God/Higher Power whatever you choose to call He, She or It is this:  It is a collective force made up of people, places, things, experiences, art, and just about whatever else you can name, that are placed before you to guide, protect, or motivate you forward in your life’s journey. (Process that anyway you need to. The shrug awaits your judgmental gaze … :/ ) I’ve come to this conclusion over time and an ass load of experience.

Today my HP appears in so many random manifestations I just choose to call it life. My life lately has been inundated with grad school apps and fear of rejection to said grad schools.  My stomach knotted. My mind froze for words when attempting to write letters of intent with 750 max  words.  A writer, applying to a writing program, couldn’t conjure 750 words to explain why I wanted in to said program. I once again (as I often do) began to doubt if writing is for me.  I stopped blogging (obviously). I obsessed. I compulsed.  Both of which I’m highly skilled at. Then Life sent me an answer. In a word…well two: Kanye West.

I’d always shied away from Kanye because frankly, he got on my damn nerves. All that ego.  All that mouth.  All that audacity.  All that over the top…shit, that I really needed a piece of, just a tiny piece of, to grow the balls I needed to just get the damn apps done and move on.  I had not prior to November of this year owned any Kanye West music due to reasons listed above.  A dear friend of mine would debate me on the necessity of Kanye in my life every time he had to sit through another of my sensitive artist bitch and whine sessions. “What if they don’t like me?” “What if I’m not good enough? It is Brown University?”  What a sad sack I’d been.

This friend suggested that I get on a “Kanye Self-Esteem Work Out Plan”. He gave me every Kanye CD in his car and sent me off to listen, to mainly Kanye for the duration of my grad school app process. The results?  Well the long term effects remain to be seen, but I tell you what; because I stayed open minded, because I followed simple directions even while skeptical … the app process got easier. In fact, the College Dropout  album allowed me to take the power I was giving to these institutions to dictate my validity as an artist, back.

Was it all Kanye? Nah. Of course not. As I’ve said faith is complicated, uncertain, and dynamic. However, in that window of time Kanye’s ego, human frailty, and unapologetic hypocrisy was a higher power’s way of letting me know that it is okay to be exactly who I am with or without the validation of anyone or anything. He’s still working for me (Kanye that is.) I’m sure the day will come when he doesn’t, and I’m fully accepting of that. I will simply stay open to what life has next for me. In the meantime I will finish my apps (last one due 1/15!), and “throw my hands up high”, knowing that “ghetto people” of which I am one. “got this.” Life … got this. We just need to keep the faith.

Rosie.

Now go work it out…

…and remember “most of all, we’re at war with ourselves”

http://youtu.be/uHZiWE_l9j8

As Is

/ StaceyRose / 3 Comments

I’ve been on a bit of an unannounced quest to figure out what my blog’s focus should be. Some ideas have been crazy juicy, almost guaranteed to get me an audience based on scandal alone; e.g. focusing the blog on people in my city’s scandalous tidbits submitted anonymously via a “hot box” placed in varying locations. Other ideas are just far too boring to remember. The only reason I started this search at all is because I was still floundering trying to figure out what exactly I should be writing about. By not having a specific focus I felt, and sometimes still feel, like a bit of a charlatan. All writers have a specific focus right?

Well, thanks to two conversations I’ve had over the past week, one with Carlton Hargo (former editor of Creative Loafing Charlotte) and  another with my loving theatrical enabler Eric Paulk (current Managing director of On Q Productions); I’m embracing the literary floosie in me.  Essentially, I just would like to declare that my blog henceforth is about nothing. Not a damn thing. In fact I discovered simply by reading my own “about” page that I wrote that this blog is a “peek in the into the life, mind and heart of a completely sane lunatic.” Boom. Mission accomplished.  Ain’t it always the way? We find the answers where we least expect them…right in front of our faces. Why can’t we just leave ourselves the hell alone? Well, I should have said “I”, but if this relates to you too, cool! If not, hang tight and watch the crazy train roll through.

Es verdad, I’m extremely hard on myself at times, and it is almost always unjustified. It seems I seek to reach some level of “there”-ness and in the process piss all over the progress I have made. I’m already “there”! Right damn now. Locked and loaded on my key board hammering away at 75+ words a minute getting all these rambling thoughts out while they make sense and saying, “Fuck it, I’m going to write anyway!”, when they don’t. What an awesome feeling to just be, without you or anyone else fucking with you!

So, just call me Seinfeld, or what seems cheesier, and therefore even more awesome; The black female Andy Rooney.

Like…

Dontcha hate it when?

What?! If I grow my eye brows out a year (or five), I’m THERE!

Rosie