come to the cabarache, old chum

Made a little performance the other night at a beautiful cabaret improv evening hosted by the lovely Marlène Colle in seedy cab-savvy Berlin – I read something almost unbearably sad among the expressive dances and unrenovated bar sounds in a place where the two barkeeps were thanked by their name. The green room was German with long benches for stowing our bags and a hospitable cut loaf of dark black bread, white butter and salt. I said, You know you’re in Germany when you’re offered black bread in the green room and a fellow performer, from Finland, said tolerantly, “That bread is not very dark at all.”

Not compared to a place where it only gets light every 25 years for a half hour one sunstroked afternoon… no.

In between I had been lying on my couch wondering could one literally die of heartache and it felt so good to take something I had made of beauty out of all this intolerable and endless sore grieving and throw it up in the air like a pigeon caught in the fireworks. I threw it very gently. I caught it when it came back down. Four women and one man came up to me afterwards hand on their heart to say, almost inaudibly, thank you, because we are a sexist intolerant culture and do not speak enough about the sorrows afflicting women.