Finding the tribe

I kind of can't believe it's already July.

An amazingly busy May culminated with 5 days in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend, for the 2006 Miss Exotic World Pageant. As a Boardmember of the Exotic World Burlesque Museum I was a central part of the team that made the whole 3-day event happen, and at the end of whole thing I can honestly say that I've never been more completely exhausted physically, mentally and emotionally-but combined with absolute exhilaration! Jen and I came home motivated to finally make a long-gestating project happen this summer. We're working on our first stage production, which I'll be writing a lot about the creation of as it moves farther along. At the same time as we dove fully into that project, the spring curatorial deadline season hit, and waiting for me when I got back from Vegas was a letter from a great gallery in Brooklyn telling me that I made the first cut in an open call, so there was a feverish week of getting artists together....

The thing is, I felt sort of disconnected from the art scene when I got back from Sin City. After being so immersed in Exotic World, I had a tough time adjusting to getting back to concentrating on work, and on curatorial projects. I was still feeling disconnected when Luke and Laura, my fellow EW Boardmembers who have temporarily relocated from NYC to Vegas while the Museum works on finding a new home there, came back to the City for a couple of weeks. (there's a lot of backstory here, I know. If you want to know more check out the Exotic World site) The three of us went out and spent a night debriefing about the Pageant weekend, and all of the other big things happening with the institution, and the various characters in this community that I'm just getting to know-it's not every weekend that you meet Satan's Angel, one of the great burlesque performers of the '60's, now a woman in her 60's who got on stage and twirled flaming (literally, on fire) tassels-and gave me a big, drunken kiss on the mouth every time she saw me all weekend.

It's quite a crowd to find oneself a part of. I was telling L&L about the new number that Jen was working on, an homage to Axl Rose, that includes pasties and a g-string that look like the cover of Appetite for Destruction-you know, the skulls in a cross that look like the band members-and starts with her chugging from a bottle of Jack Daniels. So, we had spent much of a weekend with me gluing sequins on pasties and her making break-away pants, all while drinking a bottle's worth of Jack and Cokes so we could empty the damn thing and fill it with iced tea-not that we would have ever considered just transferring the contents to another container. And Laura laughed and said, "You've found your tribe."

And it's true. and thinking about it on the ride home that night, I realized that all of the things I do that I'm passionate about aren't separate, they are all defined by communities of self-driven, incredibly creative people who support each other's ridiculously ambitious projects, and there's no point in trying to define artistic communities by discrete labels-definitely not in New York! In this metaphorical game of Twister I have my hands and feet on a bunch of different circles, but they're all in one game (Wow, I really forced that image. I sat here way too long trying to think of a good way to put that. Sorry.) And the key for me in making happen all the things I want to make happen is finding the ways all of them overlap.