Mastery!
“Looking ahead, I saw that my forties promised to be less a maturing than a kind of extraordinary goldening. I envisioned these as my Yo Yo Ma/Amy Tan years. This would be a seasoned, a leavened time of life when the artist travels around the country accepting lifetime awards and honorary medals from the President, the Queen, Bill Moyers. These would be the PBS years, the Lincoln Center years—‘Live from Wolf Trap,’ perhaps, would be a special Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa concert featuring readings from my early work before a chorus of one thousand white-haired tuxedoed singers. One would be inducted into the Smithsonian as a National Treasure, and it was now that one would be issued one’s own stamp, if not actually one’s own U.S. currency. Maya Angelou is an incandescent spirit, yes, irreplaceable, but at some point She will choose to gear down and younger female spokesauthors of color will be solemnly called into the wake of Her distinguished service.
“But what really happened?” I exhort them. “What really happened…to me?”
No one moves. Frankly, they have no clue. As is the case with most visiting professors, my bio is fuzzy to them.
“When I was twenty-two, I thought to be an Artist was to be like a Silver Arrow shot across a Magical Sky. If you could only express your true Self, your true Soul in the moment of flight, you would be bestowed the magical Amulet of—as regarded a book—actual publication or—as regarded any of the one-woman shows I was always working on—an actual booking. And this AMULET of external Validation would be as your magical cape, shield, eternal protection.
“And lo and behold, I actually had this miraculous experience. After ten years of, like any good Girl Scout, twisting and twisting my metaphorical pencil into a rock, trying to make a curl of smoke…at thirty-four it happened. My first solo show in New York, off-Broadway! Eight shows a week for five weeks!”
“Ah,” the room sighs, as together we inhale—we snort a line of—the dream.
I lower my voice, bend forward, striking the hammy pose of a poisoned William Shatner.
“But The New York Times review…It all hinges on The New York Times review…And my excitable director calls me at midnight from a newsstand, with three words: ‘Ben! Brantley! GOOD!”
Another crowd exhalation: “Ah!”
“And with that the Art Gates swing open! First thing the next morning, I spring down four flights from my tiny sublet-from-a-seventy-something-Dutch-opera-queen-with-a-Danny-Kaye-fixation apartment at Seventy-sixth and Columbus…
“I am Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, in white pants and striped tee, jeté-ing down the boulevards. All around me, New York City bobs up like a sparkling lake, like a luminous dream. Literally everything I see around me reflects the wonder, the goldenness, the rightness of my good reviews. On the newspaper kiosk, lines of festive New York magazines—I still remember the cover—white, with gold writing—gaily flap like pennants. Below, from the ground, rises a congratulatory stack of Variety. And there to the left, at the Tully’s Coffee window, sits the dark-suited and bespectacled forty-something Manhattan stockbroker, reading his New York Times. On the very next page, he will see my review! My review! Crossing the street, I step on something mushy. I look down. A New Yorker. Did it have—? Could it be—? Yes, I kid you not, unbelievably, even The New Yorker has a flattering little blurb about me, me, me!
“I am literally WEARING THE AMULET! And the magic cape! I am invincible!
“Of course, that was my FIRST show. Aliens in America.
“Two years later I return with my SECOND show, Bad Sex with Bud Kemp.
“Note to self: In future, do not place word bad in title.
“Which is to say I am now in my Second Act and this time, Review Morning…Well, instead of Paris in the spring, it is West Gaza in…well, presumably at any time of the year…I would check with the NPR people—they know when times are PARTICULARLY BAD in West Gaza. It was like a horror movie, starring Gene Kelly. All the bad reviews are like nail-bombs going off all around me, a hailstorm of shit.
“Ahead of me now bobs the newspaper kiosk, with one hundred derisively waving copies of Time Out New York, containing my small but EXTREMELY HATEFUL REVIEW. There to my left sits the stockbroker reading The New York Times, containing—desultory backhanded slap—NO REVIEW. I step down into mushy New Yorker… This week The New Yorker is kvelling about a new photo exhibit at the Natural History Museum, Yo Yo Ma going Appalachian at Lincoln Center, and—what’s this? A hilarious new one-woman show…! Starring the toast of the town…! A transgendered African-American rap poet who goes by just one name. Amid the standing-room-only opening-night audience at P.S. 122, Meryl Streep has been seen front-row center, doubled over in hysterics—that’s how funny and surprisingly poignant that other new solo show NOT MINE was.
“Please picture now, instead of the Gene Kelly sun of two years ago, a gray sky, and a lowering oily rain. I duck into a Broadway deli and, by hurrying midtown workers, am literally pushed into a waist-high stack of slightly damp New York Posts. My body is splayed—I think of the spread-armed stance of the helpless man in the Goya execution painting—across a low wall of damp New York Posts.
“My throat tightens as in warning.
“But I can’t help myself. As though hypnotized, I reach a hand down. Knowing this is a door I probably shouldn’t open—it hums and buzzes, foreboding—I nonetheless flap open…the New York Post. Flip through its damp pages and articles, featuring…
“‘TWO-HEADED BABY!’
“‘ELEVEN-CAR CRASH ON THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE!’
“‘DOUGHBOY SWIMMING POOL BURSTS INTO FLAMES!’
“And my review. Certainly, any artist who has worked professionally for any length of time will have some bad reviews. But there are some that particularly haunt, and claw. This one was by Clive Barnes.”
Dramatic, I reach into my fanny packet, remove it, and unfold it…my Clive Barnes review from 1998 that I always carry with me…like a grounding talisman.
“For those who can’t see all the way up here,” I murmur, like a dark sorcerer, “the headline reads ‘Bad Sex…with Loh.’ Below is a small awful photo of me, mid-expression, as though I am chewing a bit of gristle, looking, frankly, a bit crazy. And then underneath THAT photo is a blunt Gaza Strip caption, as though titling the scene of an accident, or a maiming. ‘Tsing Loh…Manic.’
“What Mr. Barnes very much wants the ninety-six million or so readers of the New York Post to know is that, for him, watching me perform onstage was an experience literally as painful as dental surgery. That’s the exact phrase he uses. ‘Dental surgery.’
“I am, clearly, one of the most annoying women he has ever witnessed trot across the boards, fatally unaware that no one could possibly care about my tedious life. Mr. Barnes describes me eagerly blabbering on and on, unstoppable, zooming manically about the stage ‘cute as a button.’” I take a beat. “‘A desperate button.’”
I raise my arm in the air, proffering the yellowed review like a trophy, or severed head—mine.
The girls huddle their dreadlocks in closer, cradling their hemp-tea socks and cruelty-free cinnamon buns, as though in protection.
“From a distance of six years now, I can almost laugh. ‘Desperate Buttons!’ It almost sounds like a back-stabbing All About Eve–like theatrical comedy about a glitteringly tattered cadre of aging forty-something Broadway actresses starring Kaye Ballard and Ruth Buzzi…‘Tomorrow at two and eight, half-price tix, laugh till you cry: Desperate Buttons.’ And in fact I do manage a few brave chuckles as I raise my gin and tonic with an almost too eerily sympathetic stage manager later that night, after the show. Which had been performed to a suddenly half-empty theater. Why? Because it’s…New York!
“But it is safe to say, my youthful confidence is…just a bit shattered. And in the years that follow that one magical Gene Kelly morning, I come to know my life in Art as not like a Magical Arrow shot just once, but a continuing journey fueled by two forces. Like the Good Fairies gathered around Bab
y Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, the good reviewers granted me a career. But the Bad Fairy—the late arrival—he haunts me now too.
“Because from this day on, it seems bad reviews follow me everywhere. I started to dread finding them slumped in the morning, like the body of Jimmy Hoffa, against my hotel room door. I started avoiding public transportation for fear the local alternative weekly would be lying open on a seat, to the theater section, and my bad review—which actually happened to me in Seattle! Everywhere I go he follows me—the spirit of Clive Barnes, the Bad Fairy! Even at home I’m not safe because hurled at our porch daily, like a missile, is the L.A. Times. Sometimes, via a PR person, you’re warned ahead that your Times review is going to be a smeller…I would literally lie in bed dreading the dawn, when, like a foul-odored red tide, the L.A. Times would wash up on every driveway in Los Angeles with…MY BAD REVIEW.
“And further, I humbly submit, in the same way as there is no bad food worse than bad CHINESE food—even with bad Mexican food or bad Italian food, you can always find melted cheese—there is no prose more searing than when critics are given a forum to detail how much they hate…the one-woman show! Who doesn’t hate a one-woman show? I hate the one-woman show just thinking about it! So many opening lines of the reviews were like the pulling back of a feathered shaft on a bow, the twine singing with deliciously unreleased tension: ‘Let me begin by admitting I am not a fan of the one-woman show. For me? Nails on a chalkboard is the one-woman show. Even TWO women is better than ONE woman…Even THREE women! Eleven women! And, as everyone knows, I am a man who HATES women! And yet, as fast as I run screaming from a room of eleven performing women with their nattering, shrill, cacophonic keening, even more unendurable to me is a SOLO WOMAN, as in ONE WOMAN, as in a ONE-WOMAN…SHOW.’”
“Why don’t you stop READING the reviews?” Chelsea’s braid-over-the-top-of-the-head mother asks. She stands now in her mystical, white shawl, like Glinda of the Good, protector of young bohemian girls’ dreams. She is like a soft-focus Glenn Close in The Natural, or like some kind of wizard-like Gandalf figure, lifting a scepter in an attempt to ward off the evil of my tale.
“I did!” I exclaim. “Soldiering on, I continue to perform in ever new cities at ever new repertory theaters, eight shows a week. And I’m gradually starting to realize that most of the people you’ll find in theaters are eighty-plus-year-old Jewish subscribers—and God bless them!—who would prefer to be seeing Tuesdays with Morrie or even A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a cast of forty harlequin, leotardclad acrobats. But no, to their bewilderment, out you bounce onto the stage instead, a—Multicultural Female, that was the slot I was in—desperate button, blabbering…
“And there will always be this moment just a few minutes in, when you can see individual audience members start to realize that no refreshing second person will be soon joining you on the stage. No! You are it! And in slow-dawning horror—that’s the thing, you can see them!—they look first beseechingly at one another, then, getting no answer, they seek solace in their programs. They pick them up, page worriedly through them, hunting down some kind of explanation as to why it is YOU up there on the stage…
“And so I write another solo show—post–September eleventh—about worry, called I Worry. My theory being that we worry when we cannot STAY IN THE MOMENT…and by reading one’s program instead of watching the LIVE PERFORMANCE GOING ON IN FRONT OF YOU, well, that’s a metaphor for not being in the moment—! So midway through the show, to make this profound spiritual point, I plan to break through the fourth wall, the houselights will come up, I will rush out into the audience, totally Dadaesque…and I will locate some stockbroker with his head down in his program—or perhaps holding it up in front of him, STILL READING IT, like a magic talisman to ward me off—and I will grab the program RIGHT OUT OF HIS HAND and sort of…hit him over the head with it!”
The Kahlo Café crowd laughs, in relief. Sinead O’Connor Head makes a fist: “Givin’ to the stockbroker, yeah!”
I press on:
“So I’m premiering I Worry at the Kennedy Center, we’re thirty-five minutes in, the houselights come up, I rush into the audience…and I realize, in slow motion, that the usual left center aisle I attack—the section that we lit in rehearsal—is full of men scribbling busily on pads…
“It’s opening night and they are the critics! It is a fateful moment that hangs in time. And I think…Probably I should skip that row and go to the next, so the Washington, D.C., critics can keep making their important journalistic notes…But to change ANYTHING would destroy the intent, the mission, the MOMENT…
“So I attack! I RUSH the front guy, a bespectacled fiftyish man with his overcoat next to him on a chair, writing. I snatch his notebook out of his lap and heave it over the railing! I’m yelling at him: ‘You need to stop writing, sir! You need to…be in the moment!’ And the whole audience…erupts! It’s a circus! The man smiles but, head still down, he simply whips out another notebook, keeps writing. But I am committed. I rip the SECOND notebook out of his hands, hurl THAT over the railing! The audience roars again!
“Now I grab his coat—He really does not want me to take his coat. We wrestle. Afterward, I learn that the man was the theater critic for The Washington Post.”
“Oh!” the café crowd exclaims, charged up, kind of excited.
“And STILL I say fine! I don’t READ reviews! As everyone involved with the production knows—the staff, crew, PR people—I keep telling them: ‘I don’t want to see any reviews. No reviews!’ And in the meantime, another performance art–y innovation I’ve put in I Worry is to have the audience write down their worries as they come into the theater…about Iraq, which was just brewing, about illness in the family, personal finances, about where they parked the car, or even their worries about, if you will, the evening. A young intern plucks out—and places into a hat—what he thinks are the funniest worries, for me to read aloud during the show. And lo and behold, onstage, mid-performance, the first Worry I pull out of the hat: ‘I worry that Sandra Tsing Loh’s one-woman show tonight won’t be funny because of what I read in yesterday’s Washington Post—THE BAD REVIEW!’ Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
There is a gasp, followed by a wobbly silence. Chelsea looks stunned. Then whispers: “It just never occurred to me that…you could get a bad review.”
The crowd is dispirited. Too many turns in this story have gone badly. When they came to “Women on Fire,” they didn’t actually have a sweating forty-something midlist artist on a flaming pyre in mind. It was supposed to be more: “Let’s get fired up! Let’s get rowdy!” Not gloomy!
The first pair of girls stand, pointing at their watches, apologetic: “Seven o’clock: Gender Studies Seminar,” one mouths.
But I must finish. My voice is a plea:
“And I realized, my youthful expectations had been so wrong. Fame is no magical amulet PROTECTING the Artist from harm. Indeed, if you actually get to Act Two, a modest measure of success may actually BEGIN to become a harm CATCHER.
“And that is why I quit theater. I guess at a certain point…it was wonderful to me to safely open the paper and know I would not see ANYTHING about myself. It was great to be invisible. To be free. I can’t tell you how DELICIOUS it is not to be working.” My voice gets shaky. “Motherhood has been such an unexpected GIFT. I love my two girls. They make me so happy. Many are the times I’ve said, midafternoon, ‘Come on, kids, time for your NAP!’ And two small, warm bundles will climb onto me, as I fluff pillows on the warm bed in the sunshine, and oh so sweetly…everyone will drift off. To the warm thump of the dryer, and the smell, thanks to my salt-of-the-earth husband, of baking bread.
“Chelsea’s mother?” I say.
“Yes,” she croaks.
“In raising Chelsea, you have already BEEN creative. EXTREMELY creative. Just those appliqués on your shawl—I can tell how much fun you had putting them on! I, too, have had SUCH creative fun mothering my kids. With children, like a temperamental New York director, yo
u can make all the wild artistic decisions you want and never get a bad review. Pink shoes with yellow socks? Paper-cutout hand turkey with green polka-dot head? I tell my daughters stories that MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL…There is no coherent plot, the theme is whatever, the characters are repetitive—One story last week had ten Barney dinosaurs, their only distinguishing characteristic was color, and three of those were yellow…We’ve left entire sets of characters, mid–tea party, cups halfway up to their lips, marooned on imaginary jungle islands that we have simply forgotten about. My stories go on for days, some might say they GRIND on…
“And here’s what…my daughters beg for more! Take THAT, Clive Barnes! Another favorite quote of my daughters’? ‘Mama, we love your big, fat belly.’ Good heavens—that unconditional love I yearned for? I found that in my children! I found that as a mother.”
More girls are leaving. I wave my arms.
“By contrast, when you’re an Artist…you never really arrive!
“Here is my template for Carnegie Hall.
“One: Congratulations! You’re playing at Carnegie Hall!
“Two: Exciting news—what a beautiful poster they’ve designed to put up all around New York, including the subways, and you know all the foot traffic THEY get, to promote your debut at Carnegie Hall!
“Three: This is Jennifer, publicist for Carnegie Hall. She is very excited about booking some local media coverage to drum up tickets sales for your upcoming date that is now fast approaching at Carnegie Hall.
“Four: The wrinkle is, no one as obscure as you has ever been booked into Carnegie Hall, and of course there is the depressed local economy to deal with. So that it doesn’t look too empty, as seat-fillers, we are seeing about busing some senior groups from New Jersey over the bridge to Carnegie Hall.
“Five: News flash—CARNEGIE HALL HAS BURNED DOWN.”
Now we’re down to half a Kahlo Café. There is some avoidance of eye contact going on. But like a bus without brakes, hurtling down a hill out of control, I can’t stop myself:
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 14