I’m having one of those weeks where my brain starts to explode a little from all the different things I’m doing.  It’s not just being busy, it’s being busy in so many different ways.  Here are a few days in the life, being a teacher, activist, artist and producer.  (I feel a little disingenuous telling you about this week because it’s been super productive and not all weeks are like this, last week I was sick and lazy all week.  Oh well.)

Let’s start with Saturday: My students had their ballet show, which I directed and choreographed.  A long day, but not really stressful because all the stressful work that I had to do already happened - by the time we get to the show it’s up to the dancers.  The soloists in this show are the students I’m closest too, so was really intense to try to help them through their emotions - falling on stage, crying, then finishing euphorically.

My mom came to see the 6:00 show.  We met Jess at James’s Gate afterward and had wonderful food in front of the fireplace.  I probably over-shared with my mom but I think she likes hearing about my dating life.

Sunday I hung out with mom, went to yoga, and worked with Rachel on our piece, “A Lifestyle Compendium for the Modern Sapphic Socialite.” Come see it at WIP on March 30!

Monday I got up early to do Femme Show correspondence, had breakfast with Jess, took ballet class, ran errands, came home to do more Femme Show stuff (looking for gigs in Providence, Baltimore, Philly and DC).  I worked on my new dance/theatre piece for Saturday’s Femme Show rehearsal and uploaded videos from some solos I created last summer to YouTube.  Then dinner and L word and drinking whiskey with your friendly neighborhood webmaster.

Yesterday I was up early to do email, then a dr. appointment, then because I am a procrastinator and couldn’t figure out what to say, I went to the BPL to write my testimony for the 1722 hearing. This is a bill that would add gender identity and presentation to the state’s non discrimination and hate crimes laws. The hearing started at 1 but we spent several hours hanging out in the hallway, waiting for space to open up in the hearing room.

Early in the afternoon I saw a lot of colleagues and friends from my days working on marriage - it was like a family reunion.  I was especially thrilled to see my old friend J, and trade gossip and giggle just like we used to do to get us through constitutional conventions.  We were comrades in arms - he used to come into my office, close the door, put his feet up and tell me who and get off his chest exactly who and what was stressing him out that week.  It was a close friendship, but the kind that thrives best in its own particular environment.

I was there for almost 9 hours  and when I left at 9 PM it was still going on.  I’d forgotten how easy it is to lose all sense of time when you’re in the windowless hearing room, waiting for your bill to come up or for your turn to testify or (like I was doing yesterday, cause I was bored) waiting for some crazy opponents to testify and say something funny. Most of the people there were supporting 1722, but there was also a lot of testimony early in the day on a victim’s rights bill and some testimony on reproductive rights issues and same-sex marriage.  Kris Mineau and Evelyn Reilly from the anti-lgbt, anti-woman Massachusetts Family Institute testified against 1722, for a 24 hour waiting period before abortion, against changes to the parental notification law, against repealing the 1913 law, against writing same-sex marriage in the statutes, and for changing the breast-feeding bill to protect not breast-feeding in public but specifically “discreet” breast feeding in public.  And I think I’m forgetting some. It was a delightful potpourri of misogyny, racism, transphobia and homophobia.

Kris is worried that men will pretend to be transwomen so they can hide out in women’s bathrooms and prey on women and children.  Also, he’s worried about preserving gender segregation in bathrooms, locker rooms, beaches (presumably he meant changing rooms at beaches) and bathhouses.  Bathhouses?! Why is our state’s leading anti-gay spokesperson worried about transgendered people in bathhouses?  Are there some bathhouses somewhere that straight women go to with their children where they’ll be vulnerable to attacks from scary trans people? We all had a good laugh about that.

I got home at 10, ate some banana bread, checked email and facebook, and uploaded some rehearsal footage to my computer that I need for this afternoon’s rehearsal for my solo.  Today I’m going to work early so I can practice my femme show stuff as well as a tap dance I’m working on in the studio.  People who live on the third floor can’t exactly tap in their living room, and when I try to practice Split Personality (the pointe show/Doc Marten piece) in there I’m afraid I’ll knock over the bookshelf and be killed by a stack of bad 1970’s lesbian fiction.

Tonight: phone meetings and more email!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under maggie's random blogginess, musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.