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When Social Media and Short Fiction Intersect

Great piece in the Toronto Review of Books about social media and short fiction, mentioning Everyone Remain Calm.

“The recent work of writer Megan Stielstra is an emblematic example of the hybridity that characterizes new short work infused with online elements. Although Stielstra is based in the U.S. her debut book, Everyone Remain Calm, was published by an alliance between two Canadian entities, Joyland and ECW Books. The book is only available electronically, which lends visibility and a means of distribution that flout international borders. In the collection’s captivating short story ‘I Am the Keymaster,’ Stielstra’s protagonist uses a distinctly digital mechanism—Craigslist—to approach a thoroughly corporeal problem—a need to secure affordable birth-control pills.”

Thank you to Shawn Syms!

Research in Necessary Fiction

This essay was originally published as part of the Research Notes series at Necessary Fiction. I love, love, love this site, and am thrilled to be included in their work. Thanks for having me, Steve!

The Right Kind of Water

The first hour is great. I’m in the bathtub, submerged to my neck. The water is warm and lovely, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in months, and the best part?—what I’m doing here is work. It’s rewriting. It’s research.

While finishing up final edits on my story collection, Everyone Remain Calm, I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that one of the stories, “One One Thousand, Two One Thousand, Three,” wasn’t right. It was missing something. I read it over a thousand times and couldn’t pinpoint what bothered me, which is the fucking worst. If I can name the problem, I can fix it. I can go to my bookshelf, pull down the Marquez, the Tolstoy, the Hubert Selby or James Baldwin or Dorothy Allison and figure out the literary gymnastics necessary to make the damn thing work.

Here’s the gist: a 13-year-old girl, Eliza, is skinny-dipping in a quarry in Southeast Michigan. She thinks she’s alone, but turns out there’s a group of high school guys nearby getting drunk in the woods. They discover her. Threaten her. Trap her in that quarry like a cage and demand she get up so they can look at her. Like a lot of  fiction—mine, at least,—this is based on some assemblance of a true experience, and what interested me the most as I wrote it was the tension. Would she stand or wouldn’t she? How would they react when she did or didn’t? How would she react to their reaction?—and on and on.

I teach creative writing classes, and what finally cracked the issue was a discussion my students and I had around a scene from Don DeGrazia’s American Skin. Alex, the main character, boards the el, all hell breaks loose, and then he gets off. “How much times passes between the on and off?” asked one of my students. “Like five minutes? How does the reader see those minutes passing?” and all of a sudden—I knew. In “One One Thousand,” the story starts when Eliza gets in the water, and ends when she gets out. But how much time passes between the two? I didn’t know. Later, rereading the story, I saw certain clues I’d placed unconsciously: at the beginning, the sun is high, warming the water, and by the end, it’s freezing and the stars are out. So that’s—what? 3pm to 8pm? Five hours? That’s a lot of time for somebody to be naked in the water. What happens to a body when it’s submerged for that long?

This is the point where, historically, I hit the library. I’m the stay up all night/drink too much coffee kinda girl, finding esoteric details in random books. Even now, with the internet, I still stalk libraries, milking electronic reserves for all their worth.

But.

I’d recently published a story set in a greenhouse. I wrote that greenhouse from memory—blah blah plants and trees,—adding in fancy-sounding names pulled from the 25th Anniversary Edition of The Book of Plants. And then, not long after, I stopped by the Gethsemane Garden Center and realized my description had been totally, completely, utterly wrong. I’d forgotten the tropical temperature. The hoses full of pinpricks, spraying everything with a fine, hot mist. The ceiling of green, like a jungle, and I knew then that I needed to up my research game. If I could go there, I’d go. If I could do it, I’d do. If I could live it, I’d live.

So.

With no quarries in the immediate vicinity of Chicago and the late-fall chill already here, I decided on the bathtub. I would sit in the bathtub. For five hours. iPhone alarm set to count down the minutes, journal on the nearby toilet to take notes about my skin, my fingertips and toes, my teeth (chattering?). I had very vague, very naïve, very uninformed ideas of what would happen, and a silly sense of pride in what I was doing.

Research!

I was so totally a writer!

*

In the second hour, my hands and feet are, predictably, wrinkled. The water is cold and draining slowly, down from neck-level to just below my breasts. More than anything, though, I’m bored. Usually, when I take baths to relax, I either read or prop my laptop precariosuly on the toilet to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer free-streaming on Netflix. But this?—here, in the bathtub?—this is not relaxation. This is research! Serious research! I’m experiencing what Eliza experienced, feeling what she felt, living what she lived! That’s what I tell myself, at least. The reality is that I’m safe at home in my bathtub and can get out any time I want. In order to really experience what Eliza experienced, I’d have to enter a situation in which I also feel trapped.

I’m fascinated by writers who engage experientially in research. I admire their commitment and worry for their safety. I think they’re profoundly courageous and batshit crazy. Whenever I bring this up, someone asks if I’m talking about Hunter S. Thompson—the drugs. The Hell’s Angels,—but my personal case-in-point is far less well known. In fact, I have no idea if he ever published anything.

Again, the gist: I was at a techno club—black lights, strobe lights, relentless beat—and some guy asked if he could buy me a drink. I was a first-year Philosophy major (don’t ask) with a newly purchased fake ID. It was my first time in a real, grown-up bar. I ordered an Amaretto Stone Sour and as I took the first sip, he asked if he could be my slave for a week.

I asked him to please repeat the question.

“Can I be your slave?” he said, and, in response to the look on my face: “I’m a writer. I’m writing a collection of essays. In each one I’m someone’s slave for a week and I write about what they make me do.”

“What do they make you do?” I asked—and yes, I know, I was gullible as all hell and probably he was lying through his teeth, but who cared. It was the best, craziest, most awful story my eighteen-year-old self had ever heard. One woman prostituted him to her gay friends and kept the money. Another made him clean her house wearing only a saddle. A suburban couple filmed him setting fire to himself—“They made me pour lighter fluid in my hair,” he said, “like it was shampoo or something.”

“Why do you do all this stuff?” I asked, aghast. “Why not just imagine it?”

“You mean like fiction?” he said, like it was a bad word. “People don’t want fiction. They want the truth—the blood and guts and piss and shit.”

I didn’t have the wherewithall then to tell him how, for me, fiction is truth. I hadn’t yet lived enough, read enough, or dealt with enough writers in bars to be able to explain how a story—when it’s done right—can help you find yourself in others, share realities that can’t possibly be real, show a person or people or world that you never before imagined. Blood and guts and piss and shit?—sure, but joy and courage and hope and understanding, too.

The kicker is the when it’s done right.

Which is why I was sitting in the fucking bathtub.

 *

In the third hour, the water has drained below my hips, my knuckles and the soles of my feet are cracked like spiderwebbed glass. My dad is a fisherman in Alaska now and I think of the dead fish he pulls from the water, bloated and eerie blue. I think of all he taught me about appropriate wilderness behavior back when I was growing up in Michigan, camping and hunter safety and taking the canoe over waterfalls on the Shiawasee River. If he saw me now, sitting in this icy water for no discernable reason, he’d think I’d lost it entirely.

“It’s for a story,” I’d tell him.

He’d try hard to be sensitive. He’s a big reader, although one time he got pissed at Tom Wolfe for making a character go quail hunting with buckshot. “Does it have to be five hours?” he’d ask, rational and reasonable. “Can it maybe happen quicker?”

Could it? I thought of when the Eliza story actually happened to me, some two decades ago around my sixteenth birthday. The day was so beautiful, the water warm, I floated on my back, listening to my own breath underwater, in and out, in and out,—and then suddenly they were there, first just one and then he called for the rest, six, maybe? seven? all standing at the edge of jagged rock, looking down at me trapped in a fishbowl below them. Instincively, I locked myself into a ball and moved towards shallow water, low enough so I could stand by still high enough to shield how naked I was. God, the shame! When you’re sixteen! I’ve had so many relationships with my body—it’s been a source of power, hatred, pride, life—but that day in the quarry is the first time I felt shame.

How much time passed that day? Truly, I don’t remember. It could have been five minutes. It could have been five hours.

“Stand up,” they yelled. “We just want to see!”

“Stand up. We’re not gonna do anything to you!”

“Fucking stand up! Are you fucking deaf?—stand up!”

—but I didn’t. I was frozen. I was terrified. I was ashamed. It was so much bigger than five minutes.

But five hours?

After five hours, I’d surely remember the water growing cold. My feet, split and cracked. My skin blue like fish. Wouldn’t I remember?

*

In the fourth hour, I panic. The tub is nearly drained and my face is puffy, my hands swollen, my body heavy like a wet blanket. I’m remembering bits and pieces of biology lectures, articles from Scientific American, things dad said on the boat, out on the ocean where being smart might mean your life. What had he said about hypothermia? Didn’t I read something about Trench Foot? Muscle Atrophy—what was that?  And didn’t David Blaine do this and his skin like peeled off?

This is stupid, I decide. Even for me, and I’ve done some stupid shit. I did acid one time at the opera. And now I’m counting down the minutes, shivering in an empty bathtub? A bathtub! It’s not even the right kind of water! Eliza’s quarry is full of organisms! Minerals! The setting sun changes the water temperature! She is thirteen-years-old, I am thirty-five, and sixteen, too; all of us were in that quarry, the story changes with every telling, and—like Tim O’Brien being unable to remember the smell of the mud in Vietnam—I can’t for the life of me remember what happened to my skin that day in the quarry.

*

By the fifth hour, I’ve given up. I’m on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. My body is too heavy; my head too light. I feel better after the first hot water and bourbon. Better after the second. And the third.

After a while, I get my laptop and google BEING UNDERWATER FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME. Then I start my research.

Guest editing at Coudal

For the month of February, I’ll be guest editing for the Fresh Signals section at Coudal, which means, in a nutshell, I get to contribute links to mind-boggling awesome stuff to their ongoing feed of links to mind-boggling awesome stuff.

I’ve been following Fresh Signals for a few years now, ever since I met Claire (love you, Claire!) through her series Funny Ha-Ha (love you, Funny Ha-Ha!) and she introduced me to this crazy filmmaker Steve (her husband, incidentally) and when I went home and told Christopher (my husband, incidentally), he was all, Yeah, Steve Delahoyde from Coudal. I love that site at which point Coudal became one of my main go-to’s for – how should I phrase this? – really good shit. The kind of shit that makes you want to rush out and make something, do something, like paint a barn or stage a play or steal a van and fill it with dancers and choreograph a dance inside a van ’cause for years you’ve been thinking about it, for years you’ve been all, Dammit, someday I’m to choreograph a dance set in a van, and also I’m going to have a theatre in warehouse and a circus on the second floor and on the roof there’ll be a garden where I’ll grow my own corn in order to survive when the zombies come but of course you haven’t done it yet, ’cause it’s risky, it’s scary, it might fail, plus who has the time? You have a job and a family and, like, commitments! So the dance in the van remains a dream you dream during some soul-crunching meeting, a file filed under Someday.

Coudal is the place that says Someday is right now.

Last July, I went to Creative Mornings to hear Jim Coudal give a talk called What Are You Afraid Of? It made me want to kick down the walls and quit my job and save the world, but instead I went home and had a little meeting with myself about my time: how was I using it, and what was I using it for?

He said: “When somebody says, ‘Oh I have this really great idea for a croched beer cosy and I’m going to start it in six months’—the problem is the six months. What that means is, ‘I’m afraid.’”

He said: “The problem with doing a project that’s important to you in your spare time is that there isn’t any.”

He said: “What are you afraid of?”

I’d been hearing about Creative Mornings for while. For the Chicago kick-off, last July with Coudal, online RSVPs filled within two minutes, and Christopher was lucky enough to snag a couple. It’s a simple, lovely idea: creative people meet over coffee and hear someone awesome talk for twenty minutes about whatever they’re most interested in. Everyone in the audience fills out these icebreaker name-tag things, answering a question about the topic of the talk that can then serve as a jumping-off point for conversation with all these coffee-drinking strangers.

I loved it, of course. A big part of our mission at 2nd Story is finding connections between people through shared stories, and to spend a morning meeting new people via what they were afraid of was pretty goddamn profound. It also challenged me to really consider what I was afraid of. I’ve been working on this novel for a while now – what do I need to do in order to finish? What kind of time commitment do I need to make? What exactly is getting in the way?

All this is a work in progress, of course (i.e. I still watch too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer free-streaming on Netflix, damn you free-streaming on Netflix, I love you free-streaming on Netflix) but in the meantime, I’ve been a regular lurker at Coudal’s site, searching for inspiration, like this recent video they made for their new line of red Field Notes, which made me cry and then order like five hundred red Field Notes. Anyhow, I’m super excited to be contributing to Fresh Signals, and hope that my little additions can give folks the same kind of food for thought and inspiration and brain-explosions that I get everyday. Thanks for having me, Steve!.

Best review ever

“I bought your book. The first sentence gave me a boner.” – Samantha Irby

I am in love with Samantha Irby. I wrote her a fan letter one time but I was too shy to send it. Sometimes, though, I hate her pretty, shiny guts ’cause she writes this stuff at her blog Bitches Gotta Eat that makes me pee. Like, in my pants. I’m saying that aloud on the internet. She makes me pee in my pants and then I spend the whole day with wet pants, cursing Samantha Irby and her hilarity and profundity and spot-on truth, seriously, this girl is so honest that the rest of us should immediately attend therapy and work out the things we’re not admitting, an unexamined life is not worth living, right? Right? Anyhow, I got to meet her last month at The Paper Machete and I was all, Samantha, I love you, and she was all, Talk louder, I can’t hear you over this bourbon I’m drinking, and I was like, Sometimes you make me pee, and she said, There are diapers for that, and I was like I am going to JCPenny to buy one of those heart necklaces that crack in half and you give half to your best friend and I’m going to give half to you, and she said, Or we could just make out? and I said, OMG yes.

It was awesome.

And then, then, then she wrote to tell me that my book gave her a boner, which is totally the best review I’ve ever got in my whole life except for the time I asked my friend Amanda from 2nd Story to blurb my book and she wrote, MEGAN STIELSTRA POOPS GLITTER.

That was really nice, too.

CBS Chicago and I might pass out

Everyone Remain Calm is an Editor’s Pick on CBS Chicago’s Best New Chicago Books! Also, this review is so nice I might die. Thank you, Mason!

“Those who know of Chicago author Megan Stielstra are probably more aware of her 2nd Story readings: amazing theatrical readings that are usually held at Webster’s Wine bar. Check them out. Megan’s performances are intense, composed of a powerful cadence of speech and strong storytelling you won’t find anywhere else. Somehow she has bottled the presence of her performances and sprinkled a little bit on each story contained within Everyone Remain Calm. Each story has a presence that is similar to the intense Megan Stielstra sitting a few feet away from you on a stage telling you a really good story. So check it out.”

Literary Friendship

This essay was originally published at The Nervous Breakdown, along with both versions of Oscar and Veronica. Here’s mine; here’s Jeff’s. I’d like to thank Gina Frangello and Leah Tallon, two women made of all things magic and awesome.

The OMG We’ve Got To Write About This Look

When I found out my story collection was being published, the first person I called was Jeff. He’d been there from the beginning: the writing and rewriting; submissions and rejections; and, most importantly, all of the living that inspired the stories in the first damn place.

We met up to celebrate. We drank champagne. “What did your editor say?” Jeff asked, and then, gleefully, “You have an editor!” We giggled, drank more champagne, and talked about the stories. Jeff had been my first reader on all of them—all except one.

“So,” I said. We’d killed one bottle and had ordered another. Celebration! “There’s a story. In the book. It’s about… us.”

This is a tricky moment in the life of a writer. Let’s call it… The Talk. Historically, The Talk has referred to asking whomever you’re dating whether or not they want to be exclusive, but for a writer, it’s what happens when you’ve written about somebody close to you and you want their permission to publish it. It’s a nerve-wracking thing: You squeezed your heart into this story! It’s a great opportunity for your work! You changed the person’s hair color and made them from Novia Scotia!—still, you care enough about the relationship to discuss it first.

For the record, I knew Jeff wouldn’t care that I’d written about him. Not because I’d done it before (I had), and not because I’d disguised him enough that he’d never be recognized (I hadn’t); rather because hegets it. He, too, has done it. He, too, is a writer.

See, my friend Jeff is also J. Adams Oaks. J. Adams Oaks, author of Why I Fight with his speaking engagements, his YA awards, his Author Page at Simon and Schuster, but just then? Sitting across from me, pouring champagne? It wasn’t J.Adams Oaks. It was Jeff, and when I told him I’d written a story about us he said, “Okay. Which part about us?”

“It was forever ago,” I said. “We were living in Wicker Park, and we played that game called—“

He cut me off. “Oscar and Veronica?”

“Yes!”

“You wrote the Oscar and Veronica story?” There was something nervous about his voice, like how he sounded back when we were both interested in the same guy (this happened a lot). Or when he told me that the guy I was dating was actually gay (this happened three times). Or when he told me that he was gay (this happened once, fifteen years ago, back when I was hopelessly in love with him).

“Is there a problem with the Oscar and Veronica story?” I asked. “You know I’ve written way more personal things about you, like the time—”

He cut me off. “It’s just weird, that’s all.”

“What?”

“I wrote the Oscar and Veronica story, too.”

*

Here’s how it worked: If Jeff called me Veronica, or I called him Oscar, it meant there was a cute guy within earshot so we had to pretend to be brother and sister. The act was to appear natural, but be loud enough for the cute guy to overhear. “Did mom call you?” “Dad called last night.” “Remember when we were six and our cousin Johnny ate that lightbulb?” It was silly and ridiculous and an absolute necessity because wherever Jeff and I went, everyone assumed we were together, thus contributing to all sorts of awkward situations and complicated emotions—the stuff that makes good stories.

To hear Jeff tell it, some ten+ years ago we made a pact that each of us would, someday, write the Oscar and Veronica story. I’m sure it could’ve happened that way. Jeff and I have made pacts to write a thousand different things: the time I told off his ex-boyfriend at a hotdog stand; the time his very fabulous roommate used a loaf of French bread to teach me proper blow job technique; and on and on. The thing is, over all these years, all these stories, all these seemingly secret moments when we’d give each other the OMG we have got to write about this look—up until now, we’ve never actually done it.

*

When I think of literary friendship, I think of the heavyweights: Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis. Emerson and Thoreau. Their relationships are full of inspiration, of arguments, of jealousy and letters and reading and late-night talks about life and literature. Are Jeff and I like that? Sometimes. I hand him drafts of stories I’m sure are done, and then he asks a single fucking question that keeps me awake for weeks. He’s the one who put Gabriel Garcia Marquez in my hands, to this day my favorite writer. When his editor asked for yet another rewrite, we spent hours in front of my bookshelf, trying to figure out how exactly writers pull off this whole writing thing.

Every week, we sit in restaurants around Chicago, drinking champagne or coffee, depending on the hour, and typing from opposite sides of the table. Sometimes we talk—I know Jeff’s fictional characters better than I know some of my real-life relatives,—but, more often than not, we work. We type. We Ass in Chair. If I feel stuck, if I feel like walking away from the computer, I look up and he is there, hard at work, and I will not let him beat me! I will order another coffee and keep at it. Whatever it takes.

*

If I’m really being honest? All his literary influence is, to me, secondary. Forget literary friend—he’s myfriend. He’s my son’s godfather. He gave me away at my wedding. He and my husband, Christopher, have weekly movie nights.

In another lifetime, we’d stay up all night drinking bourbon while one of us cried and complained (me) or spoke very elegantly and poetically about how our current misfortunes influenced our growth as human beings (Jeff). When I’d introduce him to guys I was dating, he’d say, “What about that guy Christopher?”

In a lifetime before that, we sweated over grad school and paying bills. When I’d introduce him to guys I was dating, he’d say, “He looks like a troll. You know those troll dolls? With the … hair?”

Before that was the fateful night where, after he walked me home from a late night class, I took a purposely long time looking for my keys, drumming up the courage to look up at him and say, “Would you like to have dinner with me?” I was twenty years old. I’d recently broken up with my high school boyfriend. I was brand new to the big city, brand new to my adult life, and Jeff had walked me home after class every night for months.

“I’d love to have dinner with you!” he said. “You know I’m gay, right?”

Looking back on it, this was the moment where I learned that there are different kinds of love. It’s a long, complicated novel, not a three-minute pop song, and, for me, that’s what Oscar and Veronica is about: letting go long enough to move on to the next chapter.

*

I recently read that Emerson owned the property at Walden Pond, and gave it to Thoreau to build his cabin.

Jeff? Are you reading this?

Hurry up and buy some land so I can build a cabin.

I’d prefer this land to be in Spain.

But I’m not picky.

Stories as gifts

This piece was originally written for the League of Chicago Theaters. WBEZ said it will “make you believe in the power of love.”

The Domino Effect

About ten years ago, I waited tables at a brunch restaurant in Wicker Park called the Bongo Room, known for its insanely amazing Chocolate Marscapone French Toast and the insanely large crowds of people waiting to eat it *. Every Sunday these guys would come in—we’ll call them Steve, Jim, Mark, and Chip. Steve, Jim, and Mark were cool: they talked about last night at the Hunt Club, dressed in head-to-toe Ambercrombie and Fitch, and tried to buddy me up for faster service.  “Hi, what’s your name?” they’d say when I got to the table; then, “Hi, Megan! We’re Steve, Jim, Mark, and Chip!” I didn’t bother saying they’d told me before, told me last week, told me eighteen thousand times so can you just get on with the pancakes and Bloody Marys ‘cause the wait for a table is over an hour, the guy at twenty-three is bitching about his benedict, I just got a nine-top on twenty-four, eight of whom want soy lattes—soy, for chrissakes!—and I don’t have time to yak it up so can you order?

But of course, they couldn’t.

“You see her?” Chip said, nodding at a girl a couple tables over.  She was perfect—shiny hair, great body, big smile; imagine a television commercial for toothpaste or hairspray—and I looked back at Chip and said, “Yeah?”

“Can you find out if she’s married?” he asked, and, right away, Steve, Jim, and Mark started laughing. I should point out that Chip wasn’t like the other three. He was kinda chubby, kinda balding, kinda boring—Like, if I say tax attorney, you might imagine a guy like Chip.

“You wanna date her?” said Steve, Jim, and Mark. This was always how they treated him—sometimes he was the punchline; sometimes the punching bag—and while usually he’d turn red and laugh along with them, today he gripped the edge of the table and said, “No, I don’t want to date her. I want to marry her.”

The reaction was immediate: That girl wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy like you, That girl eats guys like you for breakfast, an appetizer for the main course, know what I’m saying? Ha ha, jab to the ribs—and Chip looked at me and said, “Please.”

It was the please that did it.

I went by her table, planning on doing a quick left hand check—ring or no ring?—and then back to Chip with the verdict, but it wasn’t that simple. The girl was sitting with her left arm crossed over her stomach, her left hand tucked underneath her right armpit.  I watched her for nearly a half hour, and the whole time she ate, drank, and gestured with only her right hand.

“Well?” Chip asked.

“I’m working on it,” I said. Then I walked to her table and dropped a napkin on the floor, squatting down to hands and knees on the ground and looking up at her lap—no go.

“What are you doing?” asked my friend/co-worker, Molly, once I was back in the sevice station.

I told her.

“That’s so romantic!” she said, jumping up and down and clapping. “It’s like when you’re on the subway and you see someone, and you lock eyes, and it gets too intense so you have to look away, and when you look back, they’re looking away, and what I always wonder is, what would happen if you just kept looking?”

I didn’t know.

“We’ll never know,” Molly said, “because nobody ever tries!”

Before I could fully wrap my brain around that idea , I saw that Chip’s girl was standing up. She was reaching for her jacket. She was dropping her left arm down and—no, there wasn’t any ring—because there weren’t any fingers.  There was a hand. And some stumps of varying sizes where fingers ought to be but weren’t.

I went to Chip’s table.  “She doesn’t have fingers,” I announced.

They looked at me blankly, so I held up my left hand and folded my fingers into my palm.  “No fingers,” I said again.

Steve, Jim and Mark nearly died laughing. Leave it to you to fall for a— and Guess she’s not so perfect anymore— and The one time you have balls enough to— but Chip didn’t hear any of it.  He just watched as she left restaurant, and then, when the front door closed behind her, he did the last thing you’d ever expect from a punchline or a punching bag: He got up and ran after her.

About six months later, I was walking around the restaurant refilling coffee and there, at a two-top by the front window, was Chip—who FYI looked fantastic: he’d shaved his head, muscled up a bit, dressed more cutting edge, like if I say CEO of New Social Media Empire, you might imagine a guy like Chip. It was easy to see the reason behind the change, because sitting across the table from him was—wait for it—the girl. His beautiful, fingerless, perfect girl.

It took everything I had not to cheer.

They told me the whole story: how he caught up with her on the sidewalk; how he didn’t have know what to say because he’d never done anything like that before but, dammit, he tried; and how, when people ask where they met, they talk about the crazy waitress at the Bongo Room who crawled around on the floor.

Hearing that story, for me, was a gift. At the time, I was single, sort of bitter—just done with it. Have you been there?—and knowing that these two people were giving it a go—that they were trying—had a huge impact on me. Enough to start trying myself. Enough to tell this story over and over to friends of mine in similar situaions. Enough to write it for a storytelling series I work with called 2nd Story, where we tell our stories aloud in the hopes that they will inspire our audience to consider their own, and how—even as we celebrate our differences—there are still multiple connections in our lives.

For me, this is what theatre does: it gives me a story, like a gift (I imagine it wrapped in shiny paper with the bow, the handmade letterpress card, the whole nine yards) and in that gift, I find parts of myself that have been missing, parts of our world that I never imagined, and aspects of this life that I’m challenged to further examine. Then I take that gift and share it. In the work I make myself, sure, but the kind of sharing I’m talking about here is the domino effect: how I hear/watch/experience a story, and then tell everybody and their mother about it, and then they tell everybody and their mother, and somewhere in that long line of people is someone who, at this exact point in their life, needed its message more than we’ll ever know.

We do this all the time: “Oh my God, I just saw [Liza Minelli’s Daughter or the Brother/Sister Plays or Star Witness or Write Club or the Chicago Landmark Project or Fa$hion or The Ghosts of Treasure Island or Queertopia or Filet of Solo or El Nogalar or The Encyclopedia Show or 2nd Story or insert one of a thousand plays and performances and readings that Chicago offers] and it made me think about—”

What?

What did the last piece of theatre you saw make you think about?

Did it help you find parts of yourself that have been missing? Parts of our world that you never imagined? Aspects of this life that you’re challenged to further examine?

My God—what a gift.

And now, you wrap it up and give it away. Somebody out there really needs a good present. Maybe your friend, maybe a co-worker, maybe that random person sitting next to you on a bus, or maybe the crazy waitress at the that restaurant you go to every single day, the one who’s ready to crawl around on the floor if it helps you find the love of your life.

 

* For the record, The Bongo Room should not only be known for the French Toast. It should be known for the kindness and generosity of its owners—Derrick Robles and John Latino—whose friendship and business supported me while I put myself through school, made art, kicked off a teaching career, and generally figured out what the hell I was doing. I’d wager there are many theatre artists and literary artists and visual artists and artists who can say the same. So, on behalf of us all, I’d like to say thank you to service industry for helping us pay our rent and live our dreams; for allowing us the flexibility to audition and finish projects; for giving our audiences the space to discuss our art over yummy food; for our after parties (!); for coffee; for wine; and, most of all, the lifelong friendships.