Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

FREEWRITE: If my life were a performance, how would I script it? What would the audience be doing? Performance art? Or straight theatre?

In my performance, there would be lots of smoking and lots of worrying about other people.

I think it would be hysterically funny.

SCENE ONE:

I would be on stage, alone, smoking. A monologue about cigarettes. Followed by a monologue about ... Paris. Costumes would include my Paris polka-dotted orange lace-striped cocktail dress, the light blue farm hand suit from Norway, the rose-gold sari from India (and an ensuing monologue about how simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable a sari is, because there's always this untraceable fear that the sari will fall off your shoulder and expose your choli-clad breasts and incite the Indian men to stare and stare and stare).

Props: a teddy bear, a journal, a pack of cigarettes, a cell phone, a trapeze, and a giant body ball.

Also, there would be a unitard.

And a middle school dance scene. I tower over everyone; men, women, teachers. I dance straight-armed with John Gorny to Sarah McLachlan's "Angel" while my friends giggle uncontrollably behind me, which is fine because I know they would murder small animals for the chance to dance with John.