On Vanity
Time for a new profile pic since the other one was about a year old. Also I've been struggling with today's poem and thought a break might help. I need to turn the piece in to my classmates before I go to sleep tonight, which is probably why I can't write it. How silly.
The photo is a still from a video I did recently for NYC's Poem in Your Pocket Day (see also chap above.) The clip is mostly painful to watch. I'm just not comfortable reading my own work for an audience unless there's drinking, camaraderie, and diminished light. In this case, I had to read the poem multiple times in succession in a quiet room with a director, sound guy, cameraman, and obnoxious lights. After being told how to stand and where to look, it was all nervousness and zero charisma.
I don't know how I land myself in these absurd situations. A few years ago, when I was younger and somewhat thinner, I modeled wedding gowns at bridal shows for Priscilla of Boston. It was sorely-needed, easy money--but also intensely strange. I did my best to make stage fright and clumsiness look like fun as I pivoted, smiled, and tossed the heavy silk trains out of my way. But driving home with my scalp on fire from the stylist's hairpins, I became viscerally convinced that life is better behind the page.
There's no transcending the awkwardness with which I tumbled out of my mother's womb, and any attempt to do so only results in more awkwardness, if not outright disaster. See, for example, 1988: Year of the Satellite Dish Hair.
If I wanted to be anything like accurate, this would be my permanent author photo:
