November 7, 2007

Funny and Sick...Sick of being Funny?...Lauging at being Sick....

I flew to Chicago today - the first flight I have taken since having what I thought was a bad cold. What wasn't a cold was actually strep, compounded by the chic new affliction this season: mrsa.

So in the thick of our physical rehearsals in the studio and the efforts of a lot of good hardworking people to get this blog up and running and enticing enough for the general public to drop their individual stories onto the site I have not been myself - or all myself.

This flight today:  I went to a place that is probably the polar opposite of my funny uncle self. The role I play in life as a not-quite-dad-or-older-brother to the Dance Exchange, to my niece who's not quite adopted in Mexico, who can't cross the border into the states, the roles I usually play on stage usually leans more toward where the humorous, the facilitator, the narrator, the translator. I am usually good with this.

But today I realised I have been running on empty, a bit depleted  - and, just like the thin chocolate covering on on of those Cadbury Eggs, from a distance I am that sweet, chocolate-y outside, cheery, functioning. But on closer inspection, the chocolate skin is cracked and oozing sweet goo all over, and not able to contain it.

I have had the pills and am on my way to getting healthy, so this is not a pity party. But it is an apology for not being more upfront with this public forum. Really, if I had been more up front with myself, I could have been more up front for this writing.... and probably more true to what I think Gumdrops and the Funny Uncle is trying to say.It may just be part of what makes me a funny uncle that I am in a bit of a denial.

We are as individuals and families multi-faceted, we are extremes of all things, not the confined definitions that we are fed from outside ourselves. Can I allow myself to be as full ranging, and as honest with you all in the process? I hope so. 

So as I reread the entries that our great attendees at Busboys and Poets Blog-A-Thon made, I applaud them for their quirky, honest, poignant nature. And I want to live up to their example.

AND

I want you to feel free to write whatever makes sense when it comes to family, blood-born or chosen versions: no need to white wash, no need to share only the examples of fun funny uncles.

In the original monologue I wrote called "Funny Uncles" I delved into "unfunny funny uncles": these are the guys like in the Alfred Hitchcock movies- Tony Perkins playing his own mother and doing-in Janet Leigh in the shower. Or like Vincent Price.  These are unfunny uncles in technicolor.

There are day to day examples of the funny, odd, quirky people in our lives, who by their actions teeter on that fine line between absurdly hilarious and aburdly painful, inducing tears.

One example: A woman in our home town, who came to be of a circle of friends, that came to be because these women were still alive: their husbands had died, their children moved away. My mother was among this circle, too, and they all sat at the same table in the Iron Horse Diner, down near the train station in my home town, every morning.

Mabel had never been married, had been a loner for many years. In the '60's and '70's Round Lake was not by any means the bed of high fashion, but Mabel's outfits, her car even, spoke more 1940's than the age of Aquarius. She worked for the phone company as a telephone operator, and it was if Lily Tomlin used her as a model for Ernestine. She maintained the puffy shouldered blouses and shirt dresses of an earlier era, her hair sat like dark died black honey-and-cinnamon buns on the side and top of her head. She was friendly but people held her at bay in the early years - she wasn't part of the circle at the diner until much later, after the husbands had all died.

Mabel was also pretty spendthrifty- - my sister was her waitress for many years and was lucky to get a 4 or 5 % tip on most days. Then, something shifted in the late 1970's: we all remembered the time because it was the height of the disco era. We never knew why, but Mabel traded in her 1953 Ford for a brand new red Chevy. The dark blue and white polka dot dresses became blue jeans (Oh my God!) and a white linen gauze shirt  - with the tails out! Tied at the waist! She began to wear lipstick. It matched her new Chevy.

Mabel let out a few more details about her life as she sat closer and closer to the circle of friends in the diner. As if the change from a hemline to unhemmed jeans equated to looser lips. She had never been married, but as we found out, she liked to have a few cats as pets (we figured that). What was even odder was that she often would leave all the doors and windows in her house open, without screens. She'd sprinkle nuts and seeds around the house in an effort to lure the neighborhood squirrels in the house. At first she would lie very still so as not to scare them.

They had no problem with Mabel. The squirrels came to stay. For close to thirty years, Mabel lived among the squirrels, all doors open. She became part of the circle of diner friends - and the squirrels became as normal as Mabel's having cats and my mother having a cocka-poo.

She died in her late eighties. The police got a call from the waitress at the diner when Mabel hadn't shown up for a few days (the same waitress and the same police who rescued my mother a few times). The doors and windows were open and while a niece came in from Chicago to hold a funeral for her Aunt Mabel, the wake had already taken place: the squirrels and cats had guarded the body for the two or three days until the police, and then the volunteer fire squad came to reclaim the body.

Another entry soon...more comments on the entries made October 31.... and a PLEA to get your stories out there for everybody to read...

Posted by Peter Dimuro at 9:36 PM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 12, 2007

You're Invited to Funny Uncles Blogging Party in DC on October 31st

My dog, Madeleine - who some of you may have seen performing as Cupid in one of our recent works, the VSA-commissioned "The Farthest Earth From Thee: A Suite of Sonnets" - is asleep at my feet. We have a great tradition. Well, maybe tradition is too strong a word. She's only ten months old, so it hasn't been that long we have been doing this. But it has been almost her whole life, so in those terms, it has been a long time.

Madeleine in the Studio

Whenever we're in the car, she will sit on the armrest between the two front seats, which puts her face level with mine. And there she'll sit while I drive, leaning against me for balance. Every now and then, if I lean my right cheek forward and toward her and say, "Kisses!", she plants several wet licks on my face. And then she resumes her watch from her perch, watching the world and all its other dogs go by.

A moment for our Funny Family File.

I am watching Jay Leno, and Ross the Intern is on TV. How far funny uncles have come! They have sent Ross to cover a Texas football game. He kids around with all the folks - very down-home Texans who don't seem to care about who Ross probably "is". In another time, either Ross would have been made fun of, or he would have come off as superior to the country locals. When Ross meets the Redneck Queen of the Sooner Schooners, he quips something about how he'd make a fine Redneck Queen. No cowboys recoil.

A moment for Funny Uncle Forward File.

In Funny Uncles, we equate modern dance to being the "funny uncle" of the art form. And during the process of making the work we ask series of questions that relate to aspects of our subject matter. Like:

What is your funniest family ritual?

A time when you were odd man/woman out? The third wheel?

A time when humor eased a moment in a good way?

Your oddest, funniest, most eccentric Holiday custom?

The most unholy thing you or your family does on a holiday?

Describe a meal where all was aligned: sense of family, good conversation, well-being?

A time when you, though geographically far from family, felt close to family?

A time when you, though geographically close to family, felt far from family?

Describe a time when family unexpectedly stood up for you.

Are there people who are not blood-relations who you consider to be family? Why?

If blood is not the connector to some who you consider to be family, what does connect you? How do you come to be connected?

Attach the best picture of your pet in some kind of drag.

(Or yourself in drag, or your uncle or aunt in drag....)

Show us your funniest face.

The face you think is your sexiest, but friends think is your funniest.

Attach video snippet of a funny walk, a funny encounter, an odd grouping of things you would not expect to be together....

Funny Uncles Family

Come to Our October 31 Event in DC

This all leads me to our October 31 event at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC.

We would love for you to post your responses to our above questions, which you'll be able to do in upcoming posts--or, you can start below. But we also know its good to see each other face to (fun) face. So we are hosting a blog-a-thon with some available laptops and a video camera. We'll also have some entertainment on hand: Regie Cabico, performing poet, himself his own brand of funny uncle, Lorraine Gailliard, sings in foreign and non-foreign languages, some of the Funny Uncle cast will dance. And there will be a few other surprises.

But its YOU who will be the main ingredient: come rub elbows with the rich and the weird, the sane and eccentric.

Posted by Peter Dimuro at 12:03 PM - Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)