Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Closing the gap

Just a quickie post tonight, since I'm on set all day tomorrow and I still have a million things to do for the burlesque act that I'm debuting on Saturday at Stage 773. 

I spend a lot of time carefully curating my Facebook page.  My real-people Facebook page, that is.  My sparkly alter-ego takes care of herself, and she is free to say just about anything.  But, at the behest of my mother, I comb through pretty much everything on my personal page to make sure I'm presentable to the rest of the family.

And the more I think about it, the more I wonder... why bother?  The people who love and accept me are largely going to love and accept me, and the people who don't... well, they either never cared about the real me in the first place, or they just don't understand the world I choose to live in.  Neither of those things is a crime, both are kind of a shame, in my opinion. 

It just seems to me that the people who should be the most aware of how you present yourself and what you do with your life are your family.  Why should I curate a benign false life to please the people I see at Christmas, only to have to dance around the truth and tell lies to their faces about what I do when I actually do see them? 

Like, yeah.  I'm an unemployed bum, Grandma.  I work on film sets as an extra so that I can eat and keep a roof over my head.  If you play Where's Waldo, you might see me.  I take my clothes off in front of strangers in the name of artistic expression.  Being a Stage Manager doesn't really pay me anything, but somehow I still keep suckering myself into doing it.  I have no friends, but I'm only bitterly lonely every once in awhile.  I cannot stand being within arm's reach of 99% of the population, but I can name a whole handful of people whose shoulders I desperately ache to lean on, and none of those can ever, ever happen without consequence.  That's a whole other post for a whole other day. 

The point is, I've been quietly trying to close the gap between my perceived reality and my actual life for some time.  And it can be summed up in the change of my profile photo from this:
to this:
(courtesy of Warren Perlstein.  Facebook version contains less, erm... decolletage.)



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