Jackhammers and Supermodels

Updated on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 at 3:21PM by Elena Taurke

I listen to podcasts to drown out the relentless jackhammers that infuse NYC with painful reminders of impermanence, disrepair, and probably incompetence. When they pause for lunch it's likely that the leaf blowers will rise up, as if conducted by a villainous maestro determined to bore holes through my brain. 

Not that I concentrated enough to really take it in but Kara Swisher very supportively interrogated Emily Ratajkowski, a super model and instagram 'influencer' on the matter of profiting from the male gaze. She's written a book. She wants to be taken seriously. And she defends the right of women who use their beauty to make money. 

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Everybody has Something Going On

This is how I sit zazen now. I need it for this convo. photo by Leor. my daughter's feet and my breathing hose gesture supportSitting in my wheelchair in the park, a neighbor who in all my encounters with him has never asked one question about myself approaches:

Neighbor: so, how are you?

me: ok...

Neighbor: but...[gestures, meaning, why are you in a chair?]

me: I have a kind of ALS. 

Neighbor: what?

me: Lou Gehrig's.

Neighbor: OH!

me: it's lower motor neuron only, so I'm getting weaker; it's hard to breathe and talk, and I'm dying.

Neighbor: Well, everybody has something going on.

[I could stop there, really, but it goes on.]

Like. my wife...after the pandemic, decided she wan

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How Healing Happens

Last week I wrote about how trauma makes it harder to empathize because we organize to defend against danger. Then on Sunday at a little gathering at my house a vivid counterpoint blasted through decades of suppressed shame. 

I was wearing my neck brace, unadorned, with a ruffled collar in the style I favor. Several weeks earlier my friends had helped sew a cover for the brace because I felt the silicone brace to be obscene. The problem was that the cover was super hard to put on and take off, so on this day I defiantly left it bare. My daughter's girlfriend, who is a trans woman, whom I had not met before, whom I will call xo, exclaimed, "I like the medical aesthetic." 

What? There is a medical aesthetic? And then we embarked on a lively discussion of prosthetics. It was a bit like coming out.

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Mommy!!!

"Primal Scream! :)" by Dplanet:: is licensed under CC BY 2.0In the apartment next door there is a toddler who is unceasingly protesting life itself. The screams rise up, swallow the universe, and persist, persist, persist. I am thinking of his mother, a professional, now alone at home with this seeming agony. Where is her mind? 

I saw her at the elevator and said, "It must be hard being quarantined with a toddler." She responded that I was the first to notice such a thing, admitted the truth of it but then prevaricated, saying it is easier now that he can talk. Maybe so. One of the axioms of my former profession is that we might feel what our clients cannot. Maybe this toddler is expressing what she cannot. 

Mothers are really not allowed to complain.

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On the Move

At last the dreaded appointment with the rheumatologist. My heart races from the exertion of preparing to speak, dressing, calling a Lyft, stepping over the snow with my legs and walking sticks; it races as I sit in the cab and notice there is no plastic barrier. I screw up my courage and ask the driver to open the windows. He does, and I notice I've called him by a slightly wrong name. He forgives me and explains how "--deep" is part of many names in his country. I bite. Which country? India. 

I'm vaguely worried about talking in such close quarters but I can't resist. The driver is intelligent and articulate, explains Indian psychology and politics.

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Sculpt

I'm excited to finally offer this little 6-minute vignette of the work of the PsychoZen Mixed Messages ensemble. Here we are playing with a format that I designed from the family therapy technique of sculpting. One person begins by arranging two people into a shape that expresses a relationship between mother and daughter. It could be her own relationship or an imagined one. Then the players reveal the sensations, emotions, thoughts and desires that arise. The director modifies the flow and the sculptor continues to shift the tableau according to what is happening, what is needed. It enables us to move and shift trauma, and emerge with freedom and love. 

November 2020

Who Was She? Part One

Womanhood: three generationsMy mother died on February 17th after refusing invasive medical treatment for several weeks. I was ill at the time with the thing that landed me in the hospital later, yet I travelled to California twice, once before she died and once after. We were able to have a conscious final conversation, for which I will always be grateful.

At the gate to the other world she finally saw herself as what she was, divine woman energy. "I'm not just crazy mixed-up me, I am a great woman, I am womanhood." Later during our vigil she revealed how she wanted to be a boy when she was young. I remembered her as a woman aspiring to appeal to men, whom she valued over women. "Dress for men," she would say, "women's fashion is ridiculous," or something like that.

She insisted I survive, called me a humanitarian, beeped my "pretty nose," said she wished I could have believed I was pretty. Later she bumped up against a disturbing memory. "Wasn't there something, something hostile when you were a teenager?" Oh, yes, there was something--so much rage the neighbors called the police, so much hurt that couldn't be expressed. Naturally I tried to brush past it, absolve us both, go back to the divine absolute love, but she stayed, wanted to resolve it so that she could let go. It was too big for that, but I gave her a morsel and it turned out to be enough.

Enough for her but not for me. Only after emerging from the nightmare hospitalization did I start to ask into what I had lost. What was this "crazy mixed-up" legacy? How could I reach her, touch her, so that I could let go?

My mother is a winding road
of pockets far from the center
My mother is a winding of whorls and eddies,
each teaming with tiny life
safer tinier far from the center 

Lost in the eddies that she
mistakes for the big life
No, not lost
She is hiding there 

June 18, 2020

Mixed Messages: Talk to Her

Ekin talks to her mother. The company participates. Are they supporting or hindering? 

A 15 minute set including this improvisation will be featured at Movement Research on Mondays at Judson Church. We are in good company. On the same evening, my daughter, Vita Taurke, will show her work, along with John Jasperse and Larissa Velez-Jackson. May 11th. Save the date!

Cinematographer: Traven Rice

featuring

Ekin Naz Demirok
Katelyn Atanasio
LaVeda Davis
Ara Fitzgerald
Katherine Ann Marie
Yuriko Miyake
ReW Starr

Directed by Elena Taurke

January 2020

Mixed Messages Medley, Chapter One

If you could go back and change one thing about your mother's life that would make a difference to your own, what would it be? How would it affect your life?

I'm working with older and younger women to explore this question through improvisation, to feed from it to understand each other, to confront what we transmit so we can be free. Here is a sampling from our first rehearsal. 

If it moves you please consider making a contribution so we can continue the process. Funds go to paying the players, the cinematographer, and for rehearsal space. Find me on Venmo (Elena-Taurke) or if you want to make an official tax deductible contribution, here we are on Fractured Atlas. 

Here are the cast and crew for this rehearsal. 

Cinematographer: Traven Rice

Players:

Ara Fitzgerald
ReW Starr
Elena Taurke
Barbara Thomas

Katelyn Atanasio
Katherine Anne Marie
Manatsu Tanaka
Vassilea Terzaki

August 2019

Your mother?

"Elizabeth Warren" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 White male says to me: "Elizabeth Warren? I agree with what Bill Maher says about her...she reminds everyone of their mother." 

Oh. Really?

And that is a problem because you would never elect your mother for president, right?

Why not, exactly? Because she nagged you when you didn't clean your room? Because she picked up after you when you didn't and perhaps hated herself for doing it, then suffered with low self-esteem because she was cleaning instead of writing/surfing/acting like she was born to do? Because she judged you? taught you right from wrong so that later when you chewed with your mouth open no one would say "Didn't his mother teach him manners?"

I get it. Women of that generation, my generation (a tad older but still, I see it coming) don't get much love. We had to make the difficult choice as young women, be a strident feminist or be a femme and manipulate the patriarchy. Neither role gets us points now. Younger women like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib can be fierce and beautiful, but if you are fierce and older, mockery follows, unless you are Nancy Pelosi, who unapologetically uses old-world style to keep her cool and keep the men in place. 

The New York Times In Her Words column recently skewered likeability coaching for professional women, and then reviewed gender judo, which is the practice of using a gender stereotype in order to gain power in surprising ways. Like, act like a helpful mom 95% of the time so that you can slice and dice on the sly. Hats off to Nancy Pelosi for mastering this practice. Those of us who are a bit less smooth careen off those likeability rails.

The other day I was walking along in the West Village and saw a clump of young adults bump into a woman my age. Apparently she made a sound because the group cracked up imitating her: did you hear that? “woah!. woah! woooaaah” hahahahhahah. They took turns bumping into each other and making this feeble sounding exclamation. There seemed to be something hilarious about the slight silliness with which she took offense.

How I wished I could have been a superhero at that moment. I would have given the woman shoulders to turn around, square off, and demand an apology. She had a right to take up space on the sidewalk. We're not done yet. 

August 2019