Saturday was one of my most intense and rewarding days yet as a performer, and the first time I've had two gigs on the same day. Being beautiful and sunny and windy, it was was also a cowboy hat day. Keeping the sun out of my eyes was a tad more important than showing off my dye job.

The two pieces I read at the Anna Akhmatova reading in Washington Square Park were the aforementioned "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" by Dylan, and Chapter 14 of The Prince by Machiavelli, subtitled "That Which Concerns A Prince On The Subject Of The Art Of War." (Lookit me, bein' all politically relevant 'n stuff!) I'd practiced them every chance I could get during the week, and a ran through them a few more times before the reading started.

I hardly ever rehearse my own material, even with new stuff, but these were someone else's words, not optimized to my voice or delivery. The Dylan piece in particular is easily the most challenging thing I've ever read, and something I did not want to screw up. The only other time in recent memory that I've rehearsed was for Maddy's Morbid Curiosity reading. In that case I was reading my own words, but they still hadn't been intended to be read aloud.

The conditions were far from ideal, but that was part of the adventure. The wind was whipping the paper around and the microphone didn't want to stay in one place, but if I didn't have my mouth practically on it nobody could hear me. Dealing with those variables while still giving a reading with some feeling while speaking clearly and not rushing (as I am wont to do when nervous) was, if I may use this word again, challenging. Normally I like to make as much eye contact with the audience as possible, but every time I looked away I risked getting lost and breaking pace, so I had to keep it to a minimum. Of course, it was all quite a rush, and Maddy tells me that I actually did a great job, that I did justice to what I read.

Compared to that, the One-Handed Reading at the Jon Sims Center was a cakewalk. In spite of what a long day it had already been and that by all rights I should have been exhausted, I think it was one of my smoothest readings yet. I'd read two of the three pieces a few days earlier at Poetry Mission, but for some reason they flowed better this time. Felt that way, anyhow. Being introduced by Carol Queen was no small honor, either. She even picked up a couple of my chapbooks. I almost felt like one of the big kids.

Before the show, a Jon Sims Center (employee? worker? volunteer?) asked me if I'd be interested in participating in a reading this Friday about queer marriage. She said that she's seen me around, would like to get a trans perspective on it, etc. (Based on what she told me about the lineup, there's going to be a lot of different perspectives, including probably the most vocal anti-marriage queer I know.) I told her I'd be happy to, since I wrote a lot of notes on the day Maddy and I got married (once we got in out of the rain), so it was good to have an actual deadline to make something out of them. The punchline: it turns out she didn't actually know I'd gotten married. She just wanted me involved. How weird.

On Sunday Maddy and I took an impromptu trip to Santa Cruz. Mmmm. Sushi from Pink Godzilla. While at PG, a painfully cute gothpunk girl with a hair and makeup aesthetic not unlike Dax entered. She walked with a cane, and both of her legs were in what looked to me like big furry boots but were surely some sort of medical apparatus, complete with a metal brace of some kind on her left leg. Maddy and I both flashed on Rosanna Arquette in Crash. Later that day, we saw another girl, this time on crutches but without the boots; rather, she had a more complex metal brace on her leg. We agreed that if the gothpunk girl had the cane and that particular metal brace, but not the boots or the crutches, it would have been perfect. On some level, what we were doing was probably very wrong. That isn't the level on which I exist anymore, though. (Besides, I'm still tossing around the idea of Crash as a stage play. So that makes it all right.)

When we discovered that Shrek 2 was playing at the drive-in, we knew it was going to be a late night. While neither of us were that interested, we saw the original in that very same drive-in three years ago, so, being selectively sentimental, we decided we simply had to go. It helped that it was in double feature with Mean Girls, which Fametracker liked. If Shrek 2 hadn't been playing we wouldn't have gone at all, though, since on the other screen was Troy and Van Helsing. Um, never, okay?

A few notes on Shrek 2 from an overly intellectual, no-sense-of-fun perspective. I don't believe these qualify as spoilers, since they're minor details which are almost certainly revealed in the trailer.

1. After drinking a potion which makes one "divinely beautiful," Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy) is happily transformed into a white stallion. In a film which is allegedly about subverting stereotypes and standing convention on its head, why not, say, a black stallion? Is only white beautiful? He's disappointed when the potion wears off, and seems especially unhappy when his mouth and teeth revert to their original form. Lesson: ethnicity is undesirable.
2. Though not strictly evil, the character of Prince Charming (Shrek's nemesis) is portrayed as a vain and effeminate buffoon who, among other things, wears lip gloss. In addition to being able to make the character one big fag joke—although I don't read the character as actually gay—I suspect that if if he was overly masculine, he would be too similar to the film's titular (heh heh) hero. In the end, he not only doesn't get the quote-pretty-unquote girl, he gets sexually assaulted "The Ugly Stepsister," a burly, unshaven tranny with Larry King's voice. Again, the character is not really evil, just a foolish, passive pawn, but he gets his what's coming to him after all. Lesson: gender variance is punished, especially if flaunted. (As usual, Xtian Spotlight on the Movies misses the point entirely; to them, any depiction or hint of queerness is a plea for tolerance. I'd love to see their take on Cruising.)
3. Pinnochio...fuck it, I'm just going to cut to the chase: gender variance, even if it's a secret, is punished.

1. God, when was the last time the words "Produced by Lorne Michaels" wasn't a sign to run screaming? Brain Candy? Hell, maybe even then.
2. At some point, a reference to Heathers would have been nice. I'm honestly not accusing this movie of being derivative—a dozen of movies could be made about teenage girl cliques, all with something different to say—but some acknowledgment would have defused some of the obvious criticism. Maybe on a teevee in the background, like how characters in horror movies always seem to be watching horror movies.
3. I'm glad Lacey Chabert is finally old enough that I can consider her a hottie without feeling all icky about it. Although I have to admit I prefer her Lost in Space look a lot more, when she was dressed from head to toe (I'm not big on skimpy clothes, on me or anyone else), had messy hair and unglammy makeup. Of course, she was a tad...um...underage at the time. Bad me.

One of the cast members said that someone has a crush on me, but couldn't remember who. Gah. How cruel is that?

Poetry Mission went well. Rimma and Embeth were both there, which really meant a lot. The audience was fairly small, but they were lively and responsive; I can usually tell within a few minutes whether or not I have a crowd, and I definitely had them. Not only did Elz not have to ask me to write up a bio when I got there, she actually memorized most of the one on my root page. She obviously looked at the chapbook page, too, commenting that she didn't find "autogynephilia" in the dictionary. Wow. All that, and she spelled my name correctly in the promotion. Seriously impressive.

Of course, the best part was getting to feature at all. I'm always honored when asked to read anywhere, since the Bay Area is not lacking in writers and poets. But like K'vetch, Poetry Mission has a strong sentimental value for me—even if, as Elz kindly observed, I haven't actually been for well over a year. Okay, I admit it. I'm embarrassed. David West was the feature one of the last times I went, and as he was trying to figure out after the show what to do with the donations collected from the audience, I thought about how nice it must feel to get to that level. (Being one of the most kind and generous people I know, he distributed it amongst homeless people.) Not that it's about the money—it can't be about the money, because there ain't nearly enough. Nobody can't get rich from this sort of thing. (It ain't slam poetry, after all.) (Kidding! Joke!) Even if the amount is so small as to be symbolic, just enough for a round of drinks or cabfare, getting paid for what you love to do is a wonderful symbolic gesture. It's why performers at Wicked Messenger get paid.

A common problem with my readings lately is that I get a little too amped up, and tend to talk too quickly. I wasn't on anything, though I'd turned down an offer to smoke out at The Dark Room earlier in the afternoon. (The timing had been all wrong; I needed to get some writing done in my few hours of free time before the show, and that would have nicely annihilated my attention span.) I just get naturally wound up. Sometimes I think it's only a matter of time before I snap.

I did finally manage to make a fly0r for the next Wicked Messenger. That's kinda like being productive, right?

The listing for my almost-birthday reading at Modern Times is on their events page, which is pretty cool. There'd been a bit of confusion over their original name for the event, which I found rather misleading, but I like the new one quite a bit. Y'know, whatever it's called, I'm reading at fuckin' Modern Times—and on, or at least very close to and in honor of, my birthday. Oh hell yeah. Can't beat that with a stick.

Mostly, I've been doing a lot of rewriting. I always resented the concept of drafts when I was in school, right up through graduating college. When I was done with a paper, I was done. The thought of going through it again was distasteful at best, and insulting at worst. What, my first attempt isn't good enough? Bite me.

These days, of course, I realize how important editing and rewriting and multiple drafts and all that can be in order to produce something which doesn't entirely suck. The net result is that I'm finally beginning to see my diary for what it is: five years (and counting) of extremely rough drafts. Very little of what I've revealed about myself as a person embarrasses me (and if you have to ask why I would reveal something potentially embarrassing in the first place, you probably won't understand the answer); it's the way I've revealed it which is downright shameful.

Even beyond the awkward sentences and extreme overindulgence in adverbs, there's the spelling. Oh, lordy, the spelling. Well, okay, not spelling so much as typos; ninety-five percent of the time, if I'm not absolutely certain how a word is spelled, I'll look it up. But my fingers and powers of immediate observation are both a tad treacherous. I randomly selected a page and found myself re-reading the entries from my last day at CNET, and there one was, second paragraph first sentence, as plain as the nose on my ugly little primate face. How did I not notice that at the time? The same way I'm not noticing the typos in this entry, no doubt. (and maybe because you didn't have any sort of spellchecker back then, you twit?)

In spite of my inability to spell "representative," I was asked today if I would be willing to participate in an erotica event called the One-Handed Reading this Saturday evening. (Yep, the same day as the Anna Akhmatova reading. The poetry thing is in the afternoon and the erotica thing is in the evening, so it shouldn't be a problem. And, of course, feeling like I'm in demand does my eternally fragile ego a world of good.) Hosted by Carol Queen and Thomas Roche, all proceeds go to benefit the Center for Sex and Culture, the beneficiary for this year's Masturbate-a-Thon. How cool is that? The other readers are Loren Rhoads (publisher of Morbid Curiosity, and the person who suggested me for the reading), M.R. Daniel, m.i. blue and Simon Sheppard. It'll be an adventure, I'm sure.

Later, He came into my office. "Do you know Thor?" No, I don't know him. "What's your home number?" Again, that tone I know very well: He was trying to bust me, catch me in a lie, prove I'd done something wrong. Because the fellow with the hammer's number is a digit off from mine, or we're next to each other in somebody's phone list (just because My Boss says He got the number from Thor doesn't make it so) or just pure dumb stupid luck, My Boss ended up calling my number this morning. Since His observational powers are as sharp as ever, He didn't notice when the outgoing message said You have reached Sherilyn and Madeline. It could have then said Thor does NOT live here, and we don't know how to get in touch with him so don't even ask, and, lemme tell ya, it wouldn't have made a difference.

Finally, the clincher, the way He'd prove that I was up to no good, that I was ripping Him off: "How did you know I left a message on your voicemail?" Unspoken: "You weren't...checking your voicemail on company time, were you?"

Dealing with Him always makes me anxious, especially these days, and now I was starting to feel downright panicky. I hadn't done a thing wrong, not a goddamn thing, but there's something about being interrogated which makes one feel and subsequently sound guilty anyway. Maddy stayed home from work today, I stammered, and she contacted me when she heard your message. Ha! Contact with the outside world, which him and I had agreed was unfair to him! I waited for him to come down on me for that, to tell me to pack up my desk and get the hell out (which would have really sucked because I'd just successfully installed Linux on my computer and was looking forward to getting to know it). Thankfully, I'd reached the end of his attention span. Whew. So close. Won't be so lucky next time. As absurd as it sounds, I think the fact that I was vague about how she contacted me is part of what saved my hide. Or not. I can't really say.

I'm going to Lit at the Canvas now, and I'm going to rock. He can't get to me there. Even if He walked in, I would still be untouchable.

10:27pm

I did pretty good, I think. Not my best night, but far from my worst. The crowd was sparse and inattentive even by Canvas standards, so in addition to getting their attention, my goal was to drown out the clatter, crash, clack! of the noisier-than-usual kitchen. It helps that the Canvas is a yuppie hangout, so it's especially fun to be loud, especially when you're talking about rude things.

One of my major flaws as a peformer is my tendency talk too fast between pieces, to babble and stammer my intros. Must. Relax.

Once again, I was referred to as a poet. Maybe I'll write some poetry one of these days. (Actually, I've tried. It's difficult for me.)

I've been making more chapbooks this week at the cute little print shop in Sausalito. (Joanne's at 2000 Bridgeway. Tell 'em Sherilyn sent you.) I'm still using a copy machine like before, but I'm paying half as much per sheet and not dealing with that weird level of stress which seems to hang over Kinko's when there's more than three customers. Though they're fine for the actual pages, neither of Joanne's machines could quite make the cover of the Sublimation quite as sharp as I would like, and especially not the back cover. I resigned myself to the notion that I'd probably not only end up at Kinko's, but I might even use their highfalutin' color copier, even though it would be nearly a dollar per sheet rather than the nickel or so I was currently shelling out. It would be worth it to make them look really nice, right?

So I went to Kinko's. The color machine was open, but my aversion to spending money was kicking in, so I gave the regular one a shot. The first machine apparently didn't want to accept my credit card, spitting it back out at me. Fine. Be the way. I moved to the next one. It only spit my card out once. I made a test copy. Looked pretty damn good, all things considered. Glanced over at the card reader. Hrm. Didn't register that a copy had been made. I then made forty copies, all looking equally damn good. The card reader still showed that no copies had been made, and, more importantly, I hadn't been charged. I found myself wishing I had other things to copy. No such luck. I gathered up my stuff, got my card back and vamoosed, feeling very punkrawk. Okay, sure, I'd only saved about four dollars, not exactly Sticking It to the Man, but still, if I actually sell these, I could make my money back. Ha! Yeah, that'll happen.