The Color of Theatre
Today a man was reading The Color of Theater next to me at Wooglins. It made me think of all the colors of love and how each house seat was filled for me in such lights. White reminds me of rehearsal, washed out and nervous, trying to desperate to impress someone with what you hope is talent and not just potential. Washed out with the need to hear the cue line, to say the cue line.
There were white lights on the cover.
Rainbow speckles, like her feet in worn jazz shoes that danced with paint brushes across our stage.
For us.
The title was in Rainbow and it felt like him and the scorn of directors notes. It’s hard not to fall in love with those titles and character and curtains and stage couches.
The fat man had sex on that couch, and the red head reupholstered it… we threw it away.
I fell asleep, spread eagle in the pink gels for Tenor- listening to Joni and trying to piece my life back together…
And falling in love.
Red was Annie’s wig- French maids, fake dirt and crowded tunnels.
Blue is the color of the woman’s hair in the picture beside me- it reminds me of your eyes.
You were red, even though you couldn’t love me.
You love… lots of other things.
I feel and taste to un-thingish on stage.
I got gold on my dress. And I’ve been kissed in yellow tinged wings and pressed against glossy, gray bricks.
The love for the balcony and light box is extinguishing, not consuming.
Too much like love.
The Color Purple captured my mind in fall’s Technicolor Coat on the apron in Jerusalem. Purple splattered my slide when I sang about my God- however absent.
I say death in too many colors today- it felt like this soft tumor in my abdominal cavity. Yogi Bear didn’t wear underwear but I got tangled in her bowels. Just like the wires in the poor women’s dressing room.
A boy of 18 had his feet imbedded in his head, a permanent crease in his ass. I saw myself in his drunken liver, glassy eyes and pooling and it washed over me like bleach and pink cleaner.
Like closing night.
She hung upside down on Pikes Peak- trapped in her car. She was so skinny, her skiwn was green.
Feeling whole is green. I used to green. Now I paint my fingers to seem whole.
The doctor smokes cigars with decomps, his puffs make fog in the pale light, reflecting on the flesh.
The fog machine se the fire alarms off once. Smoke is written in their lungs- like cigarettes in the tunnel to squelch opening night nerves.
Drugs are on tox- drugs like you and the feel of gels on my make-up’d face.
Booze smells sweet on the clotting blood and reminds me of lights though my lids, sushi laced with Bawl.
I can’t breathe at night. I can feel all those colors in my veins- underneath my skin. Running paths into my life.
I hope I don’t get a PE.
But they say I have too much heart and not enough tongue… to curve around speech and to write it all on my face. So I’ll stick to my dead bodies rather than and audience.
Cuddle with my scalpel instead of a script… instead of a boy.
I’ll make love to sterile instruments with the movements of my hands and open body cavities instead of the opening to lights.
Instead of the colors of the theater, I’ll live for the colors of death.
