With anticipation. Now reread that as if it's from the Rocky Horror Picture Show- all drawn out, hissing the syllables, and you are 13 again, and with your best friend Molly, and you are reciting what you think you know and you most certainly do not know.
Here. At age 41 I am revisiting these feelings. Waiting at the Walla Walla airport with a trigger painting that goes to Seattle. Construction for its future home is not complete, so this is just a preliminary conversation that will set the stage for a someday drawing.
Then onto a voyage across the eastern seaboard. The universe is collaborating to support and overwhelm. I'm traveling across the country to walk into another round of the "are you prepared and do you really know what your talking about?" game.
You know how it goes. It always starts with a nod that says, yeah sure, I know what your talking about.
Do I know Terry Oconor, the nineties dancer... Oh yeah, of course I do.
Wait, do I? Then racing home to triple check that I'm not crazy...
....Even though the nineties is definitely 20 years ago, you actually never forgot the night you sat there with your fathers childhood bestie. Timothy Smith, he who went from hairy hippy who played the tuba to be the slender, dancer/dance enthusiast book editor. Back when you were 20 living in NYC... it was really actually the entrance to Harlem, upper west side Manhattan - these things do make a difference to an city life's perception you know...We sat at the promising show in question. It was an important moment, this was "the" important young choreographer. Remember this, remember this. Store this. Let's be honest, does an impressionable forget the dance performance where Mikhail Baryshnikov sat validating the moment, and the dancer's promise?
Timmy clarified by a late night Facebook conversation:
"Tere O'Connor
Misha sat right behind us, with Rob Besserer who was in Misha's and Mark Morris's White Oak Project with my friend Katherine Graham.... "
Misha's? The ground breaking that was Mark Morris? Good grief that was many moons ago. None the less, I won this round, I did know the answer the nod was in truth. From the days of when I thought dance would be a part of my life and before it was a family joke. Back before now.
The engines are starting.
Here is the nagging feeling about the winter's preparation for the week's coming game. My work is not all equal. There is promise, and I am building my own place to stand. And yet, looking at the walls last night as I repacked, in my bedroom, in the room that serves as my winter studio, as the room that serves as a giant closet. There was a reason the paintings and photographs have found their way back to my hands. They often fall in two categories. First, when a artist, better then I, saw a simple work, she called me out. "That is an ease for you and as a result, it's not interesting. It leaves me with no questions." Or second, the shrill horror I feel when I realize a piece's immaturity. Looking at a painting that refused to be bought. Those strokes look like middle school, like I was 13.
The plane is lifting.
Here is what I do like. The process of the trigger drawing or painting, as I am travel with today. The project embodies both the moment of conception and the passage of time between the first install to the second or even third. A trigger piece is an investment in the future. And a relic of the past. My mark, almost always, is getting better. It gives me a chance to rebuild an idea.
This trigger painting that is sitting in the cargo riding over these snow capped mountains is part II of the Welcome to the Garden Party series, from last fall's show at Studio Two Zero Two in Walla Walla.
After spending the last two winter weeks on Welcome to the Garden Party, part I, installing it in a guest house, I am very familiar with the curves and lines that were started last summer. This coming summer the drawing, that will take place, will be the third and maybe final time I construct my walk under the water birch.
The lights of Seattle are in view, and I'm still journaling like I did in my teens and twenties on paper for what I thought would be private. In fact those pages became amusing fodder for my sister and mother, as they stored the boxes that held my youth. Tears of hilarity, as they read my scribbles trying to make sense of my love affairs, and my growing mind.
Now I insist in marking my passage, posting my progress and checking my facts for anyone and in particular, my children. Maybe it will help them in their games to come. My week to come, I will be checking facts in bathrooms between conversations, forgetting important people's names, nodding to things that I know nothing about - as often as I absolutely do know everything about. Hm, I will play the game, and document the voyage into the fog that lays between me and where I am going "with annnnticcccipaaation."