Photosplaining 16:9

My recent exhibition 16:9 at Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland featured 18 untitled pixelated images, selected from a series of 24 (the total series published in the hardback catalog to the exhibition, available for purchase at www.chriskomater.com/catalogs). I provided no other information or guidance. I wanted my viewers to see whatever they wanted, to have an unmitigated visual experience. “What do you see?” I’d ask. They’d speculate half-heartedly, and then immediately ask, “Am I right? What am I really seeing?” I’d reply again with the question, “Well, what do you see?” My viewers became progressively more and more annoyed with me, like I was keeping meaning from them. While I do admit to being guided by some conscious exasperation with my audience’s general lack of engagement over the years, and perhaps even a mild feeling of contempt, I wanted this project not to be about me, but about the viewer. If they didn’t see anything, tough cookies, it’s not my fault that they have no imagination. But, as so many ended up just being frustrated, I’d like to tell you about the source imagery and what some of these images mean to me.

Like all of the images in the series, the source image for the photo above is taken from the film, “Vertigo.” Specifically, it’s of Madeleine (Kim Novack) standing by the San Francisco Bay’s edge at Fort Point under the Golden Gate Bridge, moments before attempting suicide by plunging into the icy depths.

Scotty (Jimmy Stewart) suffers from vertigo, and has been hired by an old friend, Gavin Elster, to follow his wife, Madeleine, around San Francisco.  Gavin’s afraid that his wife may kill herself.  She’s become obsessed with an ancestor, Carlotta Valdez, who killed herself when she was Madeleine’s age, and whose portrait hangs in the Legion of Honor, “Portrait of Carlotta,” which she visits in her wanderings. Madeleine, as we find out later, is actually a tawdry redhead named Judy who is hired by Gavin to pretend to be his wife, so that he could later take advantage of Scotty’s fear of heights in order to kill his actual wife. As Scotty follows Madeleine around San Francisco, he begins to develop feelings for her as he pieces together her story—or rather, the story that he’s been led to believe.

The moment captured in this image is the moment between Scotty’s growing fascination with Madeleine—as an observer—and his direct contact with her, when he breaks the boundary between the observer and the observed.  He becomes her rescuer, jumping in the Bay after her, and the two eventually make love, further complicating what their relationship was supposed to have been, planned of course by Gavin Elster, and what it becomes.

Much later, after he sees—or thinks he sees—Madeleine fall to her death from the tower at the Mission San Juan Bautista, and, following a nervous breakdown, he wanders the same streets, grief-stricken. He eventually bumps into Judy, the actual woman who disguised herself as Madeleine, and follows her to her apartment. Despite her protestations, he pushes until she gives in to him. He attempts to transform her into the form of his dead lover by buying her the same clothes as Madeleine and bleaching her hair the same color—an attempted illusion complicated by the fact that the illusion is actually the real thing… which was an illusion in the first place!

The still captures that wonderful moment before possibility and longing and desire and illusion give way to actual experience. The themes of reality and obsession in the film, of deception, duplicity, of characters seeing what they want to see or what they’re led to believe, are themes that reflect what I wanted to do with my 16:9 project. Do we see what we want to see, or do we see only what people tell us to see? Remember Plato’s cave allegory? Prisoners in a cave are chained to a wall and see only shadows cast on the wall, which they take as reality, but which are only representations of the real world.  The allegory deals with how we perceive reality and whether there are higher truths.

The source image for this pixelated work from the series is of Midge (Barbara bel Geddes), in a red sweater with her hands up in the air, grabbing the back of her head and exclaiming “Marjorie Wood… stupid! stupid! stupid!”  It’s the only time you hear the character’s full name, the name I gave to my online gallery, Marjorie Wood Gallery, which I ran in the early aughts.

Just prior to the moment captured in this still, Scotty tells Midge of being hired by Elster to follow his wife.  Midge, a graphic artist living on Russian Hill (where I went to college), sensing that Scotty has become obsessed with Madeleine, and more than a little jealous, paints a portrait of herself as Carlotta Valdez, in a bid for his attention.  When he sees the painting, he gets upset and leaves the apartment, and here we see Midge in the scene that the still is from.  After the raised-hands-stupid-stupid bit, you get only a glance at the painting that she’s made. From a vantage point behind the canvas, we see her in front of the painting as the scene ends and she makes 2 strokes with her brush, one to the left, and one to the right, as if painting a mustache on her portrait. We don’t see the mustache, we just see Midge’s gesture. I think of Marcel Duchamp painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa and signing it as that of his female counterpart, Rrose Sélavy.

The still captures an excruciatingly painful moment for Midge, who has tried and failed to express through her art what she can’t with words.  My best friend Chris, my former lover, and I, who know way too much about this film and each other, have argued for years about which of us is Midge, and which is Scotty, each seeing what we want in her character.  

There’s just so much of me in that film, so much that has driven and fed my art over the years.  My project is an homage of sorts. Each still has tremendous personal meaning and significance, but only to me.  I’ve resisted telling people about the source images because I wanted the work to be about them, about what they think they see, and not what I’m telling them they’re supposed to be seeing.  There are no “higher truths” in the work, only my relation to shadows cast on the silver screen, and the hope that my viewer may make something interesting of the pixels that I’ve arranged for them to ponder.

But am I channeling Hitchcock, the director, my co-creator of these images, or am I channeling Gavin Elster, taking advantage of my viewer’s vulnerabilities and imagination?  Am I showing you a shadow of reality, or reality itself?

Kathleen King on 16:9 (07)

Below are a few words that Kathleen King wrote about my current show, 16:9, on view at Mercury 20 in Oakland, through September 3:

I bought this photograph titled 16:9 (07) from local artist Chris Komater. By (de)constructing traditional photographic images into colored squares on a 16 x 9 grid, Chris asks us to think about what we see.

In a funny way Chris is making a mysterious and even romantic image here. Part of the fun of this work is trying to decipher the image.

My brain saw the Golden Gate Bridge in this grouping of colored squares. Specifically, the view from the parking lot at Fort Point, which is the location of a famous scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a Hollywood movie set in San Francisco. Aptly, that movie explores truth and fiction in what we see and believe about what we are seeing. It also reveals how feeling is transmitted through vision and can be embodied in a person or place. I have so many feelings about the passage of time, my life and love in this place, San Francisco. My whole life kind of flashes before me when I see this photo.

On top of that, the digital pixilation technique foregrounds the changes that the last decades have brought to the “cool grey city of love,” especially the exodus of artists, musicians, lovers, seekers. There is a continuous narrative that history, the land and the Bay waters hold that can be heard by those who listen. Data seems to be replacing narrative for now but the wind still sings the message if current algorithm creators attune.

So glad to have this beautiful piece in my collection. This is the last weekend to view Chris’s marvelous show 16:9.

— Kathleen King

Lighting the Corners of my Mind

My dear childhood friend Susan recently sent me letters that I had sent her years ago, written in my mid-teens and twenties, a box full of them. The correspondence details experiences while away on high school vacations, my first explorations of and eventual move to San Francisco, first dates and intimate encounters, falling in love, my obsessions and aspirations. I’ve read only a few and I don’t recognize myself at all, or actually remember much of what I wrote about. I don’t even have any cells left in my body from that time–who was this person? I’m slowly cracking open these narrative chestnuts and unraveling the mystery of this strangely unrecognizable person who was me–or, who is me?

Much of the memories of my childhood are not memories at all. When I say that I remember something from my childhood, I’m actually saying that I remember the picture of it, from my dad’s slide shows. His slides begin in 1951 with my parents’ honeymoon in Niagara Falls, and their first few years in Germany when dad was stationed there as part of the occupying forces after WWII. The documentation continues through the births of my siblings, their childhoods, my childhood, up though my graduation from high school in 1984 and beyond. I and my brother Mark picking blackberries. Me snuggled on the couch with Sue. Our dog Zachary. My actual memories are a bit hazy, and are more associated with sensation: the feel of my dad’s mustache, going into convulsions with a 103 degree fever, the silent dark warmth before a tornado, kissing Kim on the trampoline…

On my first visit to Europe in 1988, I didn’t take any pictures. I wanted nothing clouding or mitigating my experience, nothing between me and my rendezvous with history, seeing Titians, da Vincis, Caravaggios with my own eyes, walking the streets that Atget walked, strolling along a canal that Rembrandt tossed pistachio shells into. I wanted those experiences to be in my head, only in my head. And I suppose that they are–somewhere in there–just not very accessible anymore. Now I take pictures of every pie I bake, every work of art I see, everyone I love, everywhere I go. My memories are now timestamped and embedded with GPS information. I couldn’t tell you if something happened 5 years ago or 20 without a picture of it.

Yet here are my own words, written to my best friend and confidante with no restraint, handwritten with no editing, nothing between brain and pen. I don’t remember seeing Psycho for the first time. Oh wait, I do. On TV, in 6th grade. And there was a commercial break in the middle of the shower scene, could you imagine? Anyway, I don’t remember what it was like to be the sum of only a few years of experience, with so much ahead of me, encountering so much that was new. I shared all of it with Susan. Reading these letters is probably going to be a lot like seeing Psycho the second time, years later, in the theater, Hitchcock’s vision suddenly and shockingly complete.

April, New Work & Meaninglessness

It’s April already. Soon it will be fall again… and then Christmas… and then, soon enough, I’ll be 60… and then dead. My mid-50’s are defined by a heightened awareness of the swift and ceaseless passage of days, the earth seemingly spinning on its access and revolving around the sun faster and faster and faster as I cling to my little corner of it, trying not to be flung into the abyss just yet. Can someone just make it stop?

I’m working on a new project. It’s tentatively called 16:9. The images will be small, maybe postcard size, the resolution 16 x 9 pixels. 16:9 is the aspect ration of widescreen cinema, the medium that has inspired most of my work and framed how I experience the world. The content–or lack of it–is inspired by a renewed affinity with the Dadaists, the meaning of their work derived from its meaninglessness, that meaninglessness shaped by the collapse of their world and the horrors of World War 1. With Republican apathy obstructing any meaningful attempt to prevent the world from overheating and overpopulating, people believing the most preposterous of lies, Putin invading Ukraine and the rest of the world scared to do anything lest their gasoline prices rise, my own days numbered… I’m finding it hard to find meaning in any of this. So I’m making some photos about nothing for my 9th solo show in as many years at Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland.

Over these 9 years I’ve spent enough money on printing and framing to buy a small house on an island in the Cyclades, where, frankly, I think I’d rather be right now, tan, fat and bald and spitting watermelon seeds into the Aegean with my Greek fisherman husband. I’ve sold a few pieces over these years, but instead of my island retreat, I have a basement filled wall to wall and floor to ceiling with the beautifully framed output from this intensely productive period. So, out of necessity, out of a lack of funds and further storage space, out of despair, out of diminishing faith in my fellow humans, I find solace in meaninglessness.

I consider this body of work to be a gift of sorts to my audience. Let’s forget about my desires, my anxieties, me trying to articulate something of my private experience through a universal visual language. You won’t have to try to figure out what I’m trying to say–whatever you want this work to be about will be what it’s about. Whatever you see is what you’ll be seeing. And whatever will be will be. Que sera, sera.

untitled 01, from 16:9 series

The Power of the Dog

Yesterday during my film group, while discussing the ending of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, I was caught off guard by how everyone else in the group saw the ending—that is, how it actually ended, which I somehow didn’t see. It’s implied—well, ok, not actually implied, but made fairly explicit—that the lisping effeminate medical student had killed the closeted toxically masculine never-bathing tormentor of him and his mother.

At first I was aghast that anyone could have read it that way, but then all the overwhelming evidence that I had suppressed started popping up in my head. (By “popping up in my head” I mean “gently explained by my dear fellow-cinephiles.”) It’s funny how I chose to completely overlook all this stuff, I think because of my naive belief (or projection) that a film with such antediluvian tropes could no longer be made—at least not by such a sensitive and intelligent artist as Jane Campion. Hadn’t she read Vito Russo? Another effeminate psycho killer? And I use “effeminate” here through the antiquated filter of the film’s perspective, not because I find Peter’s affect to be at all feminine, but an expression of masculinity commonly and culturally misattributed to the opposite sex. I saw the ending through my own revisionist lens, a film about grappling with one’s sexual identity, rising heroically above societal rejection, moving past tragedy and learning from it, rather than creating it, and without ending up a lisping bachelor living with mom after getting away with murder.

Or maybe Campion is toying with us, using our deep discomfort with difference to make a point about stereotypes? In that case, then of course Peter didn’t kill Phil. They were just starting to get along. Mom would have adjusted. It’s a hopeful story about fate, a tragedy, an allegory. I actually liked the film a lot better before being challenged to rethink my interpretation, so I’m going to stay with my ending.

Ends

Detail of Geophagia, 2021, by Andy Goldsworthy

Ralph and I went to visit For-Site’s Lands End installation at San Francisco’s Cliff House on Friday. The Cliff House, perched on a bluff at Lands End, with stunning views of the Pacific Ocean and Seal Rocks, for years was the restaurant that one brought one’s parents to when they visited town, but has been sitting vacant since the end of 2020. The For-Site Foundation has taken up temporary residence with a series of site-specific art installations decoratively aestheticizing the human impact on climate and what’s left of the natural world.

Installation view of migration (empire), 2008, by Doug Aitken

All of the work is beautiful and beautifully installed, each piece framed by the architecture and views. Doug Aitken’s single channel video installation, migration (empire), features various examples of migratory wildlife filmed inside vacant hotel rooms. The video allegorically and poetically references humankind’s steady seizure of and intrusion into the animal kingdom.

Andy Goldsworthy coated a single long table and adjacent dining booth tabletops with a thick layer of white clay. As the show has progressed, the white clay tablecloths have cracked, like dry riverbeds, or overbaked meringues, our current drought conditions in California rendered as conceptual frosting.

Also… well, there are many other wondrous works of art, and it’s an entertaining show, well worth seeing, but with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin now determining the destiny of our planet’s climate, it seems hopelessly pointless. Antarctica is melting.

Inside the Camera Obscura, Ocean Beach, San Francisco

Ralph and I met years ago, at a party at my friend Sarah’s house. I was immediately attracted to him. He’s an artist, a creator of interior spaces that blend whimsy and sophistication. His own home is a micro-museum of homoerotic imagery, photography, and tableaux of taxidermied animals, figurines, and other found objects, arranged in such dense and numerous sculptural installations as to make it almost impossible to take it all in during any one visit. I’ve never experienced such an environment, so much meaning and invention packed into 800 square feet.

Following a few exploratory romantic excursions, I told him a few days ago that I’m not feeling up to dating. I frankly don’t know exactly why–and did you ever think you’d hear me say that? He’s sexy and stylish, a fuzzy ex-New Yorker, engaged with film, art and design, just the kind of guy who ticks off a lot of my boxes.

Over the course of 20 years, my friendship with BC has evolved into a comfortable and loving companionship that has weathered exchanges with outside suitors, lovers, and wanna-be boyfriends. During the pandemic we’ve spent days in our respective homes, and nights together, me snuggled with our pups d’Auggie and Zoobie in his guest room on Twin Peaks. My frantic multi-decade search for a perfect companion has yielded only frustration, yet somehow, without trying, and despite years of resistance, a structure of domestic harmony has settled upon me, despite myself. At 56 I can’t imagine trying to know someone as deeply as I know BC, or, indeed, to give that up. In The Odyssey, Homer describes an ideal of like-mindedness in marriage, homophrosyne. After so many years of wandering, my Penelope awaits on Twin Peaks?

Or Midge. Once BC and I had an argument after watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I remarked how like Midge I thought I was. He scoffed, completely perplexed, insisting that HE was Midge, and that I was Scottie. Midge was an artist, lived near the Art Institute, bubbly, cute, sassy, driving a sporty little car. I was totally Midge. Midge and Scottie had dated, in the past, just like us. Years later I asked BC why he hadn’t seriously dated anyone else since our breakup. “You know there’s only one man in the world for me, Johnny-o,” he replied, quoting Midge. In the film, Scottie frantically chases after an illusion, while Midge watches, helpless, eventually fading into the shadows as Scottie struggles to give form to his obsession. I’m Scottie, for sure, and if BC’s not my Penelope, he’s definitely my Midge.

So it seems that my Dating Game has wrapped up another season. Like an enduring British sitcom, maybe there will be future episodes, rehashing old themes with half laughs and treacly sentiment. Or maybe I’ve jumped over the shark too many times already?

Davide

Me & Davide, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, June 2003

My friend Davide was found dead yesterday, the cause as of yet unknown. He lived in New York, and I don’t know any of his friends there, so details have trickled down to me through a meandering stream of distantly connected acquaintances and lovers. I met Davide in Paris in 2003. He was in his late-20s at the time, very much into skateboarder culture and the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai. He had the physical posture and world-weariness of someone significantly older, his head bobbing up and down as he spoke, shoulders slumped forward. We bonded instantly over the films of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s “Kids.”

He was born in Modena, Italy, “where balsamic vinegar comes from,” he told me, unironically, his own sweetly acerbic manner gradually revealed over the course of our friendship. I adored Davide. He didn’t know his father. His mother, with whom he had a very close relationship, committed suicide a few years ago. His depressing family history, the depressing emo pop culture he immersed himself in, his depressing demeanor, were all components of a very stylish and sophisticated character who would have starred alongside Monica Vitti in an early 60s Antonioni film.

When he moved to the States, he stayed with me for a few months, while he found work and a place to live. We shared an interest in the same type of guy: middle-aged, furry, bearded, husky. While I engaged with a few of these same guys in very complicated emotionally-draining exchanges, Davide bedded them all. I was in awe, he followed his desires with no dawdling between attraction and connection. He had a few more serious relationships, complicated and demanding in ways that his ephemeral connections were effortless.

I’ve seen Davide only a few times over the years since he moved to New York, and was looking forward to his visit here in February next year, to hear of his latest loves and frustrations, to talk about film and music and art. He was my Italian brother, someone with a shared experience and intimacy that bridged great gaps in time together. I speak a little Italian, far from fluent, but Davide would sometimes lapse into gusts of Italian, me looking at him with that deer-in-headlights look, the momentary lapse in communication indicative of a deeper understanding of how we were connected. Part of me has known that this was his destiny, that he just wouldn’t be here at some point, but as one of his great loves Tim said of his tenebrous facade, “It just seemed like part of his charm.” And now Davide’s gone, my sad little brother lost forever.

A Trip to Alcatraz

BC’s family visited last week, so we all went to Alcatraz, the former maximum-security prison located on a rocky wind-swept island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. It was my umpteenth time to visit—the first time the weather wasn’t windy, cold and damp, but actually sunny and pleasantly mild. We watched the Clint Eastwood flick, Escape from Alcatraz, the night before, filmed on location on the island. The film is based on an actual escape in June 1962 by inmates Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin. They made papier maché sculptures of their heads and placed them in their beds to fool the guards, while they scrambled to uncertain freedom through an unused utility corridor, down to the water, and across the frigid bay on a raft made of bound-together rain coats—to who knows where. They were never heard from again.

Shortly after the prison closed, Bay Area Native Americans lobbied to have the island developed into a Native American school and cultural center. After a few unsuccessful attempts to occupy the island, activists eventually succeeded in late 1969, representing Indians of all tribes, claiming that Alcatraz was theirs by right of discovery. They offered to buy the island from the federal government for $24 in glass beads and red cloth (the price paid to the Indians for Manhattan). The Nixon administration let things sort of work themselves out, and after the accidental death of organizer Richard Oakes’ stepdaughter, falling to her death from a prison stairwell, things deteriorated fairly rapidly, with the eventual arrival of armed federal marshals, who removed the few remaining holdouts. There is still graffiti on structures around the island from the time of the occupation.

My favorite part of the visit was the audio tour, which is a marvel of storytelling and sound effects. You’re guided through the main prison by several former inmates, who describe life in the prison during their time there, as well as the history of the island. The sounds animate the experience with a sense of being there with the inmates decades ago, bars clanking shut, guard whistles going off, voices grumbling, seagulls ka-ka-ka-ing…

New Work: Allegory of Inclination

I just dropped off the last of the photographs to be framed for my next solo show, opening in October at the Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland. It’s my 8th solo show there in as many years.

The project is called Allegory of Inclination, the title borrowed, well, outright stolen from Artemisia Gentileschi. Artemisia was commissioned by the great nephew of Michelangelo to paint a picture celebrating his genius at the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. Artemisia’s painting is an allegorical celebration of inborn artistic ability–the inclination towards genius.

My project gathers together various themes that have permeated my output for the last several decades, to create an allegory of aesthetic and sexual desire, the frustration of our voyeuristic impulses, and the quest to find beauty in the mundane and overlooked.

The imagery includes curtains, which both hide and reveal, flowers, furry bodies and big bellies. The picture above is the first image in the series, a photograph of a fragment of a painting by Caravaggio. Caravaggio used paint, shadow and fabric to theatrically frame and isolate his visual narratives and subject matter. Here I’m borrowing a curtain from one of his paintings to introduce the allegorical narrative to follow.

I’ll post more previews from the show as we get closer to October.

Mom

CHRIS: I can’t believe mom is gone.

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: What do you mean? Do you think something else happened to her, that she’s not dead?

CHRIS: No no, I’m not saying that… but, actually, I hadn’t thought of that. Great. More content for my already richly and imaginatively anxious dream life. I guess I’m saying that I don’t really have words for what I’m feeling. Of course I know that mom is dead, her ashes rest in an urn on my desk. Disbelief is perhaps something easier to relate to. I can’t relate to her not being here, to hearing her giggle in my head, to seeing her smile so clearly, to feeling my head in her lap. There’s a disconnect between what’s happening in my head and… well, what’s happening in my head. How can she seem so alive and present and not be here? And dad, too… and Sue. A third of my inner family, just gone.

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: This is life. Death’s an inevitable part of it.

CHRIS (rolls eyes): I remember when my grandfather died. I didn’t really know him, my grandparents lived in Chicago and I grew up in Alabama, and we had visited only a few times that I could remember. Aunt Joan called to say that he had died. I was maybe 10 or 11. I hadn’t experienced death before, and I just burst into tears. He wasn’t even a part of my life, but the idea of him suddenly not being around to even get to know wasn’t something that I had even thought about. He was always just, there. But dead? It was the first time I’d experienced real loss. When Manny died, I was only 27. I spent a year in deep mourning, but my goal was to get on with my life, and I knew I’d be okay, that I’d learn to live with his absence, that it would get easier. My grief was my job. But I had my whole life ahead of me, so many possibilities, maybe even another great or even greater love. Now, with mom’s death, it feels like the slow slide to the grave. I’m six of seven kids. Will I have to go through this again? And again and again and again and again and again?

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Well, yes… but…

CHRIS: But what? I’ll get used to it? I’ll live and enjoy every day as if it’s my last? And my sister’s last? And my brother’s last? And my other sisters’? And my other brother’s? And Big Chrissy’s? d’Auggie’s? Zoobie’s? I’m really not sure I can handle it.

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Chris, you have handled it. You did learn to live with Manny’s death. Remember at the time you really didn’t know if you’d ever feel even happy again, if you’d ever love again? And yet you did.

CHRIS (interrupts): Oh no… and Bob? I hadn’t even thought of that, Bob will die, too, the other great love of my life, my mentor, my guide… how could I live without him there… here?

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Bob is married to someone else, he’s happy, he’s a published author, accomplished, content, he’s had a good life, you’ll always have the memories of your time together…

CHRIS (interrupts again): Okay, don’t even go there. Mom told me many times in her final months that she’d never forget what I did for her, moving her in with me for her last year, taking care of her. I remember responding, jokingly, “Mom, you’ll be dead, how will you remember? When is this future time that we’ll be sipping a glass of wine together, reminiscing about these days that you’ll never forget? I appreciate what you’re saying, and this has been the greatest experience of my life, to spend these final days with you. I feel your gratitude now, and I am very grateful, too, for this time together.”

PAUSE

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS (lowering their heads and raising their eyes and bushy eyebrows above their glasses)

CHRIS: Oh. Right.

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Yes. You’re absolutely right. You’re still alive. Your siblings, dogs, Chrissy, Bob and all you friends…

CHRIS (interrupts again, shrieking): And my friends! I forgot about them, too, they’re all going to die!!

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Chris, focus… Your mom is gone. But those final days were among the finest you spent with her—you just said so—a really special time made all the more special and urgent by their impermanence. You’re at an age where death is going to be more prevalent…

CHRIS (interrupts again): But I lived through the AIDS crisis, when so many of my friends, boyfriends, my partner, fellow artists, all those gray faced men in my neighborhood carting around their oxygen tanks, they all died, so quickly. And Augustine, my sweet beautiful Augustine. If I hadn’t seen an acquaintance in 3 weeks, I’d be afraid to ask how he was, afraid that he, too, would be dead. I actually haven’t asked John West if his former lover, Chris, whom I last saw in 1993, smiling, still young, so vibrant and alive, but with that telltale gray skin… is he, is he dead, too?

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS (collectively, but quietly, and somewhat sympathetically, sighing): That was an insanely painful time, and you made it through. Just as now, just as what you were saying. You learned to live with death at a very early age and experienced more death than anyone should at that age.

CHORUS ABRUPTLY STARTS TO CRY

CHRIS: Sheesh, guys, brace up. I’m the one who’s supposed to be crying.

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS (sniffling, then sobbing loudly, cathartically): But we are you, we’re in your head, and we were there, we remember. How did you do it? How did we do it?? Don’t you remember Jesse Helms, the Moral Majority, all those people who didn’t care if you or your friends died, who called you names, who wouldn’t let your friend go to his own lover’s funeral???

CHRIS: Okay, guys, really, get it together. Listen… to the sound… of my soothing voice. And I’m paying for this session, remember? But see what I’m saying? It’s not as easy as just accepting that we’re strong, that death is inevitable, that we should live every day like it’s our last, carpe diem and all that shit.

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS (finally pulling it together): Helen Reddy said all that needs to be said here:

Oh yes I am wise
But it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong (strong!)
I am invincible (invincible!)…

SCENE FADES TO BLACK AS MUSIC SWELLS AND IS ABRUPTLY CUT OFF BEFORE HELEN CAN EXCLAIM LOUDLY AND PROUDLY “I AM WOMAN,” WHICH WOULD LEND AN AIR OF GENDER DYSPHORIA—NOT ENTIRELY WITHOUT ITS PLACE, BUT HERE, MAYBE IT WOULD GET A LITTLE CONFUSING

END SCENE