This Week's Guest: Mama Tits
This year's Thanksgiving seems like a particularly important time to reflect back on the good things in our lives, the positive advances we've made, and the people we love and trust -- in fact, times given what they are, our very sanity may depend on it.
Life's a balance of good and bad, and there's never so much of one that there's none of the other. My guest this week has certainly had his share of ups and down, going from an opera prodigy to Idaho's foremost producer of raves to living in a tiny room just upstairs from the off-Broadway debut of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Throughout his adventures, Brian -- aka Mama Tits -- has always been a survivor, toughening himself through the bad news so he could be ready for good news.
This Week's Recommendation: Party Girl
Thanks again to Mama Tits for joining me. And if you'd like to join her, pack your bags for Mexico: Mama now winters in Puetro Vallarta from November to May. Her new show Sweet Like Candy is every Monday and Thursday at Act II Stages. And while she's away, her drag troupe holds down the fort in Seattle every weekend with the show Mimosas Cabaret. Now through the end of the year, they're performing the fabulous original show A Boob Job for Christmas.
It sure is tempting to escape from real life into a fantasy world, now more than ever. And I love an escape as much as anyone, but as tempting as those fantasies may be, eventually real life has a way of intruding since it is, after all, where we actually reside.
For my recommendation this week, check out the movie Party Girl, a 1995 film starring Parker Posey as a free spirt named Mary who'll do anything she can to live her own life. She throws parties, takes drugs, and avoids work of any kind, just barely keeping everything from crashing down around her. But crash things must, and when they do, she finds herself evicted, jobless, and alienated from her friends.
And that forces Mary to take a long hard, painful look in the mirror at a woman she's been refusing to see: a woman capable of being responsible, taking care of herself, worthy of self-respect.
Taking a long hard look at yourself can be tough, a lot tougher than looking away. But if you're constantly looking away into some escape, that often means there's something wrong, a problem that only you can fix, a problem that'll keep chasing you in real life until it catches up and your fantasy can no longer provide a place to hide.
So as tough as it is, we all need to pop out of our escapes now and then, whether they're parties or movies or roles that we play. Look around, look at yourself, look at your real life -- and if there's something you've been avoiding, deal with it. So that way, when you disappear back into whatever your escape may be, you're doing it for fun instead of self-preservation.
Clips of Stuff We Talked About
Music
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/