Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 01

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There’s a Tori Amos song from Boys for Pele called “Marianne” that is a partially fictionalized account of a girl that Tori used to be good friends with. The song portrays Marianne as a suicide, but to hear Tori tell the story she was just a beautiful girl who was too engrossed with the wrong people and eventually succumbed to some sort of overdose while she was still in highschool.

Recently a large discussion on Precious Things erupted over the details of the situation … people wanted to know who Marianne really was. While their interest was rather non-threatening at first, some members of the community kept on pushing … when the overdose was mentioned by someone who is familiar with Tori’s hometown community some people immediately wanted to know what the overdose was on and the circumstances it was under, and i found myself thinking … Is that fair? It’s none of our business who this girl was, and we only know anything about it because Tori decided to divulge something about her so that the song could be viewed fully in the context of what occurred in actual life. But, just because Tori wrote a song about Marianne doesn’t make her life public record, despite what some of the more obsessive fans seem to be thinking.

It’s like… i’m reading a book about a woman that Goethe wrote a novel about, and it’s all about how everyone hounds her over forty years later because of what they assume her to be from Goethe’s work, when she never intended to be written about in the first place. It’s one thing to open yourself to close examination by making yourself famous, but that doesn’t give the public a right to scour your entire life for the people who have motivated and inspired you – and to impose upon them similar treatment. It’s not quite the same with someone who’s passed away, because they don’t have to endure the inquisitive public but they do have to suffer the constant pressure against the memories people have of them.

I don’t mind the plotting out of my own Behind the Music, but i don’t know if i’m comfortable with the idea that every album of songs i write opens up the door for someone to track down the person they’re about decades later… it’s especially unfair when that person doesn’t even know what sort of inspiration they’re causing. Oh well… something for all of you overly chatty storyteller songwriters to think about…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2685854/

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What wasn’t quantified was how many songs you reap from love, or, to take a pessimist’s point of view, from a heartbreak continually in progress. Because, what is love except for your heart constantly shattered and getting pieced back together over and over again – either growing eventually unbreakable or becoming to weak to sustain the slightest chink in it’s weary armor. I don’t think there’s a limit on those songs… which is where all the good heartbreak albums come from…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2684593/

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Each heartbreak supposedly yields three good songs… i don’t know who said that, but it was some famous songwriter-y person and i’ve yet to find a reason to disagree with him. There are surely three gems to be found in the rubble of a crumbled heart, but in all the ruin you’re likely to find nearly an entire album’s worth of okay songs which could be compressed like coal down to one meager diamond of a song if you could do that with emotions the way you can with coal. But you can’t. I think a lot of my favourite albums suffer from those excess heartbreak songs … where the big three are singles and the rest are filler. But, an album made up just of heartbreak can be a rather trying experience for the listener.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2684573/

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The snow today is like static. The view from here is all blurred and white, and walking around yields the snaps and cracks you would hear between teevee channels. I don’t remember having this much snow in recent years … it’s strange. It makes me feel as though i’m living in a wholly different city than the one i spent high school in. But, i’m still here, aren’t i?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2642161/

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I’m always preaching about how i find beauty in imperfections, and there were three distinct beauty marks on my part in the show. Two of them were ugly and misplaced, but one of them was shining and perfect – it reminded me of that mole on Cindy Crawford’s lip.

The first mess-up that mars my memory of the show is my classic blunder on opening night, where i totally forget the second verse of my solo song. Normally i love to make mistakes while solo on the stage, because then it’s solely my job to fix them, but in this situation i was trapped because my accompaniment was a taped piano. Even though i made up a whole verse on the spot, and even though i hardly ever broke character in the process, i felt trapped by the piano pounded forward while i was still spinning my mental wheels in the mud.


The second blunder was totally the opposite. In our sneak preview Laurel started a scene with the wrong monologue … one that came later in the scene after i made a crucial entrance where my hand would be injured for the whole of the play. With half the cast on the stage, we were sent into a panic. The intelligent thing to do would be to wait Laurel’s monologue out, and then replay the part of the scene that came beforehand, but with so many people present we could hardly communicate our intention. As it was the scene just blundered along without me, and i was left to my own devices to get my hand injured onstage and then get my ass to center to talk to Laurel. Everything got done, but it was sloppy and could have been pulled off without a hitch if everyone had thought it through better.


My favourite mistake was with Laurel, and it happened twice. There are a handful of scenes … three or four short exchanges … that hinged solely on Laurel and I. We would have total control of the stage on which no one else could intrude until we resolved our lines. In one instance i dropped a line, and in another she dropped hers, but both times we maintained eye contact and fixed things. Once i had to go back and redo a line so the audience would hear it, and Laurel stood ready with her response. The other time the ball was in Laurel’s court and i let her know that i wouldn’t say a thing until she gave a line to let me know where the scene stood. Both times the transition from lines to mistake to fix to lines was so smooth that the rest of the cast had to ask what happened afterwards.

Laurel never loses control of the stage; it’s a skill i could stand to learn a bit better.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2636091/