lightbulbheart childhood, Easybake, mental health advocacy, roadtrip, workshop

Easy-Bake Draft 1 – Durham, NC

27 JULY 2018

Danielle Chelles, Emily Hill, Jessica Flemming and I were joined by 23 audience members for the first draft of There’s An Easy-Bake Oven Where My Heart Should Be. We presented 30 minutes of material exploring how and why children play (playing at being adults, learning to jump rope, self-soothing), why they stop (shame, grief), and Emily threw a whopper of a tantrum that makes me grin whenever I think about it.  I took feedback on construction paper while everyone partook of childhood snacks (goldfish crackers, string cheese, fruit snacks, and juice pouches).  I’m so thankful to those 3 and those 23, and to fellow Summer Sisters Cheryl Chamblee and Sharon Eisner who contributed writing and Rachel Klem who helped shape the group scenes. I’m really proud of what we developed in such a short amount of time! Some of the material will go back to the drawing board, other things will be lovingly scrapped in favor of Ontario-based stories, and some bits were really magical and you’ll have to pry them from my easy-bake heart with tweezers before they leave the piece.

I am notorious for being too present in the moment and not taking enough photographs. Draft 1 was no exception. I have video for review purposes, but completely spaced grabbing a pic with my amazing artists! Please enjoy this freeze-frame…

Easy-Bake Draft 1 - Durham, NC
From the section “Skipping” in Draft 1: Jessica Flemming, Amber Wood, Danielle Chelles, Emily Hill

Now that I’m back in Ontario, next comes unpacking the emotional parts from which the piece derives its name. I received my 1978 Easy-Bake Oven while I was still in NC and to say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement. So light, so small, so insubstantial. Not at all the thing I remember from my childhood. A to-scale-with-adult-sized-Amber papier-mâché recreation may be in order.

And it should talk. 

lightbulbheart childhood, Easybake, mental health advocacy, roadtrip, storylady, workshop

Please approach the blue mat and throw a tantrum

27 JUNE

Stephanie Judkins gave me a tour of the Heifer Learning Center at Heifer Ranch. The Ranch is an incredible place and the people there are doing some seriously compassionate education. Of course, I couldn’t leave the Ranch without purchasing a kid’s book about farm animals…We retired to Stephanie’s tiny house and I read to goats, chickens, guinea hens, and her delightful three-legged dog, Chaplin Sue. I remain smitten with Plushenko, pictured below with Giggle Giggle Quack, by Doreen Cronin.

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One of my reading companions for today! #easybakeheart

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28 JUNE

Pyramid Art, Books & Custom Framing (glorious source of my new favorite book – If You Plant a Seed, by Kadir Nelson), Mosaic Templars Cultural Center (excellent), and the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library & Learning Center (books! bees! free breakfast and lunch for kids!) before I drove out to Jackson, MS.

29 JUNE

Shannon and Joe Frost took me to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. The MCRM offers a good example of spacial hospitality (that soft place to land). Each section is a semi-circle fanning out from an open central area with comfortable seats and soft, slowly changing lighting emanating from a swooping ceiling sculpture. Gospel music plays, allowing for an emotional reset for the museum-goer before launching back into the exhibits.

30 JUNE ***WORKSHOP at BELHAVEN UNIVERSITY — 1PM-4PM***

Joe Frost graciously gathered 6 of his alumni and an incoming Freshman: Connor Bingham, Ginny Holladay Jessee, James Kenyon, Laina Faul, Lauren Tobin, Lydia Lippincott, and Nina Frost. They were So Game and threw themselves immediately into play. We tackled experiencing primary emotions while exploring an array of toys, books, and paper.

I had them do the adult step of the Who/What/Where Adult v. Child Self-Care exercise, then asked them to turn their paper over and draw how the opposite of all that goodness made them feel. One of the participants later said that the air was sucked out of the room.

AND THEN THERE WERE GLORIOUS TANTRUMS

One by one, I took their drawings and asked them to approach a blue gym mat and throw a tantrum. They were beautiful in their similarities and differences. Some were long, loud, and took up lots of space. Others were quiet, contained, and utterly terrifying. I asked for a tantrum coach and they guided me through a workplace scenario so I could have a constructive, adult tantrum with a piece of construction paper (which, btw, led directly to a scene I wrote this morning…).

I read In My Heart: a book of feelings, by Jo Witek, aloud and they played while experiencing the emotions associated with the words. We rolled primary and secondary emotion dice and played in the resulting combined emotional states, then wrote four-line scenes corresponding to the combo-states we felt most at home in. 

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All of the above was really fruitful, and my favorite part came when we took out pictures of our tiny selves and adopted those poses to find a) how we felt then and b) how we might wish to feel now as adults.  That’s me in a 20-month-old version of a herkie. My words: open, curious, seen. After a pose was demonstrated and described, the rest of us matched it before moving to the next person. The best roadtrip phrase so far came from this activity: “airport pooping.” Genius. Thank you, Ginny!

By the end, everyone laid on their bellies or sat cross-legged and decorated a large cardboard box. It was marvelous.

01 JULY

Much needed downtime with the Frost Family.

02 JULY

Birmingham, Alabama
I am still processing the 16th Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park. The Park is home to the Freedom Walk, a series of sculptures depicting police dogs, water cannons, and children imprisoned for marching for civil rights in 1963. After viewing the church and walking the park, I sat down to try to read selected children’s books aloud and started weeping after reading the first sentence of Let the Children March (Monica Clark-Robinson, Frank Morrison illus.). I chose, instead, to self-sooth by reading the books to myself: The Golden Rule (Ilene Cooper, Gabi Swiatkowska illus.), If You Plant a Seed (Kadir Nelson), and The Rabbits’ Wedding (Garth Williams – the book was banned in Alabama in 1959 for “integrationist propaganda”). 

Cleveland, TN
Stacey Isom Campbell! Also, I bought a 1978 Easy-Bake Oven in working order 🙂

03 JULY

Writing and resting and real tacos and lemon pie and parallel play with Stacey. A good day.

Tomorrow – on to Charlotte, NC

lightbulbheart creativity, Easybake, mental health advocacy, roadtrip

Here in my tower

I’m sitting in the third-floor tower of a gorgeous Victorian home in Louisville, KY. Below me are my wonderful friend Bethany and her beloved Chris. In front of me is a google drive of easybake workshop materials and a copy of Kali Quinn’s I Am Compassionate Creativity. Above me is the sound of a million raindrops on the roof and Eva Cassidy’s magical voice fills all the space in between.

How do you self-care?

 

 

 

 

 

lightbulbheart Easybake, mental health advocacy, performance, roadtrip, storylady, workshop, writing

some things take decades to bake

1979. El Paso, Texas. I stress eat Easy-Bake Oven cake mix in the quiet dark of my childhood bedroom closet. Far more of those salty-sweet chemical concoctions make it to my mouth dry and straight out of the packet than would ever see the inside of a tiny baking pan and heat of a single light bulb.

2017. Hamilton, Ontario. I stress eat Lindor chocolates in my car. The quiet, aloneness, and compressed space of my Honda Civic feels familiar and ancient.

I took a writing workshop last February that involved an outline of my body on a sheet of butcher paper and free-association drawings that evoke formative life events and dead people I have loved. A disproportionate amount of real estate is dedicated to 10 lbs of sunshine yellow and chocolate brown plastic. There is literally an Easy-Bake Oven where my heart and lungs should be.

Tiny Me understood some things about how she was made. She loved the things Now Me loves. Quiet. Being outside. Rain. Books. Swingsets. Stories. Observing people. Making things. I want to honor the choices she made that brought us both life and joy and give her grace for the choices that still give me grief.

So…I gave notice at my job and will spend June and July in my Civic, working my way through the midwest, gulf states, and central and eastern south with the following goals:

  1. See old friends and read to their new tiny people (I am also considering setting myself up in parks with a sandwich board promoting story times, so if you have ideas for Mobile Storylady names, let me know!).
  2. Have big conversations with people about creating interdisciplinary art communities and hospitable audience spaces.
  3. Workshop stuff with a few theatre makers on the ideas of self-compassion and the innate wisdom of our tiny selves.

I’ll be documenting highlights here as #3 makes its way (hopefully) into something that more people than just me can eat. (People, places, blog roll from roadtrip here)