The Talk
“Baraye” by Shervin Hajipor is a song about how oppression by men costs the life of a beautiful young girl.
Back at it, huh? What can I say? Some days, if I can see a keyboard, we’re gonna dance. Never enough is a recurring theme in my life.
Recently, a friend said I should paint more. “How Much?” I asked. “Every day.” She said.
She might have been kidding, but it’s a legitimate theory about creativity. Knowing something of how she was educated, I can say with some certainty that she’s been exposed to the theory before. There’s a good chance we were both exposed to it by the same teachers, possibly even in the same moment. The more you do, the more you do. Both Bradbury and Asimov were proponents of this. As peers and friends, they often reflected each other’s ideas and perspectives. That’s very common among artists.
As much as I loved Bradbury, I’m probably more like Asimov. Bradbury liked to enjoy life and enjoy his friends. If Asimov could see his IBM Selectric 1 or 2, he was on it. Of all the writers I know, he and Rod Serling come the closest to my output. They’re both gone now. Serling used to smoke five packs a day and turn in one TV script before lunch and one before dinner. I suspect it was the filterless smokes that got him, not the Selectric. I wouldn’t recommend insatiable as a writing style to anyone I cared about, though. Mostly, what you feel is an unquenchable thirst.
Bankers, businessmen, lumberjacks, politicians, athletes, and administrators all compete. Artists collaborate. It may seem like artists compete, but when they collaborate, there’s often an initial struggle over whose vision will dominate the process, but that’s not competition. That’s cooperation.
I love working with Brent more than anything. One time, he was the director and technical director for a play called “Who’s Happy Now?” He asked me to design the makeup, design the lights, and play somebody who doesn’t kill anybody, which was unusual in my career. “Pop” was such a great part.
The plot of the play is a philandering husband who finds his way back to his wife. Larry plays the husband. Gabby plays the wife. Nicole plays the harlot. (not type casting, I swear.) The end of the play has Gabby and Larry dancing while their son delivers a fairly long monologue explaining that it’s a memory play. To me, the through lines were “memory” and “love.” So, I presented my lighting plot to Brent.
“What the hell is this? Do we even have lights that can penetrate gels this saturated? This isn’t amber. It’s fucking yellow! What’s with the chocolate backlight? You know it’s not really chocolate, don’t you? The gel looks like chocolate, hence the name, but the light itself is a sort of warm purple.”
There’s a method to my madness. Gabby and Larry, very good friends, had the same palette. Olive skin and chocolate colored hair. Being English and Mediterranean, His hair was curly, being half Vietnamese; hers is perfectly flat. Backlight is often called “hair light” because it reads through the actor’s hair and defines their contour. A “sort of warm purple” backlight will make chocolate hair look even more chocolate. The difference between them becomes an issue of height and hair texture, male and female made he them. I was taking a risk, but I figured Brent loved me enough to take risks with me, although he would cuss me pretty much the whole way.
Brent and I agree that we’ll go with my choices for tech rehearsal, and if he just hates it, we’ll pick new colors together. Brent keeps a yellow legal pad to make his notes on. When it came time for performance notes, he read them off like a checklist. He’s very easy to work with. When he gets to me, he just says, “Goddamnit. I hate it when you’re right.” The colors stayed. See, that’s collaboration, not competition. We struggled, we reached a tentative agreement, and in the end, without competition, I was right, and he was wrong. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it?
I don’t compete with Jason Jenkins, Wyatt Waters, Ellen Langford, William Goodman, or any of the other dozen or so artists that work in Jackson, but I keep a close eye on what they’re doing as I have a fairly good idea of how they do what they do, and why. We don’t compete, though. They’d kick my ass.
The Everything Kid and I have reached a stage in life where we can be bone-level honest with each other about just about everything. I keep saying she’s a child. She keeps saying she has two college-age children. So it seems.
We have a conversation about a mutual acquaintance who has become something of an actual menace to women. There was a time when I would have said he was just a nerdy, awkward, horny kid. Awkward and horny often go together, especially with boys. Most guys find their footing and find their way out of that stage. If they don’t, and if their ego gets to them, they can be a menace.
My solution to the sex problem was to remove myself and my ego from the equation. If I really liked somebody, I wouldn’t touch them. A surprising corollary to that is, by removing that pressure, other women began to sense a certain “safeness” about me, which, surprisingly, meant they were more comfortable expressing themselves sexually. It also meant that a few of them felt like they could exploit me romantically, but although that happened, it wasn’t fatal.
My only reservation about telling that part of the story is that some people might feel like, “So, you didn’t really like me, huh?” I don’t know if I should apologize for that. I don’t know that I was obligated to fall in love every single time, as long as I didn’t lie about it, which I never did, although there were a few times when I finally just said, “What is it you even want from me?”
I’m getting to a place in life where I need to have a long talk with the daughters of at least five friends. A talk about men. In most cases, you’ll probably say, “Their daddy will do that,” and in most cases, their daddy very likely did do that, but the problem is, girls often dismiss their Daddy’s advice. They go out in the world saying, “I’ll just find somebody like my Daddy.” Then come home after a while and ask their mom,”Where the hell are all the men like my Daddy?”
Part of the answer is that Daddies aren’t born that way. Holding your baby daughter can mature a fella by about seventy years in an instant.
I know that Little Bird’s daddy tells her she’s beautiful. So do I. She tends to dismiss both of us, even though I’ve made drawings to prove my point. The point is, though, that I’m not a “man.” I’m Momma’s friend, and even Little Bird’s good, possibly best friend, but it’s not the same. There have been times when she was handled roughly by boys. I wasn’t aware of it, or they’d be ex-boys. She says she’s satisfied being a little old lady with a little old cat. I, however, am not. Well, I am for me, but not for her. That’s the plan. Things have to get a little bit better with every generation. I would move the earth and capture the sun for this child, but I cannot find her a man. I can, however, make sure she knows about the wrong men and how to identify them.
“Look for men who love you for something other than your mortal shell” is my first advice. Being beautiful doesn’t mean you’re only beautiful, although there are those who will act like that. Find men who love you for the things you love. Find men who love you as I love you, but a lot younger, and not in love with anyone else. Men will lie and say you’re their only. There are ways to test that, but it takes time. If the men aren’t willing to take that time, then they fail the test.
I met The Everything Kid doing her makeup for a play. She was all of a bold eighteen, possibly nineteen. My first thought was, “These boys are gonna eat her alive.” She was so young and so beautiful. She had a model’s bone structure and stars in her eyes. After knowing her for about an hour, I amended my opinion to say “those boys don’t stand a chance.” She was roughly handled by men, too, and again, I wasn’t aware when it happened, but I am now. She wasn’t a princess. Brent gave her a powersaw, and that was that. She’s still a lady, though, and some of the way men handled her was bullshit. Had I known, things would have ended differently. Now that I do know, that changes things too. I have zero problem with her ever telling some loser, “ya know, Boyd and I discussed this.” I would rather that happen than have her let her husband handle it. He loves her enough to catch a charge because somebody tried to hurt her.
Chivalry demands the protection of women. Feminism demands that “we don’t need your bullshit protection. Men are the problem.” This might be a spot where collaboration is called for, not competition.
When I lived in the cave, I went grocery shopping at three am so I wouldn’t see anybody, but the Everything Kid found me. I think she’s always been able to see through my bullshit. Everybody else’s too.
There’s very little more important to me than the hearts of little girls, sometimes broken on the spikes, rocks, and terror of a cruel world.
Baraye
