Improv 1, Week 10

Actually worked my ass off a little on this improv. Feedback appreciated. Stole the idea behind Trethewey's piece as I had a similar sentiment this weekend.

Natasha Trethewey

Blond

Certainly it was possible—somewhere
in my parents’ genes the recessive traits
that might have given me a different look:
not attached earlobes or my father’s green eyes,
but another hair color—gentleman-preferred,
have-more-fun blond. And with my skin color,
like a good tan—an even mix of my parents’—
I could have passed for white.

When on Christmas day I woke to find
a blond wig, a pink sequined tutu,
and a blond ballerina doll, nearly tall as me,
I didn’t know how to ask, nor that it mattered,
if there’d been a brown version. This was years before
my grandmother nestled the dark baby
into our crèche, years before I’d understand it
as primer for Mississippi childhood.

Instead, I pranced around our living room
in a whirl of possibility, my parents looking on
at their suddenly strange child. In the photograph
my mother took, my father—almost
out of the frame—looks on as Joseph must have
at the miraculous birth: I’m in the foreground—
my blond wig a shining halo, a newborn likeness
to the child that chance, the long odds,
might have brought.




Blonde

I bought the wig the year before.
I untangled its golden strands for a one-time chance
at wearing a storybook character
before shelfing it in plastic until next year.
When I pulled its stringy tresses out for Halloween
it was long and tangled, matted and blonde.
I yanked my fingers through it,
and the knots that ringed loops around my nails
reminded me of my own matted locks,
nappy points of Hispanic islands
checkered with the crispness of a Southern black female.

But this wig was soft. This wig was whole.
It crowned tight wisps
of unbound ropes like shimmered sand. I stretched
the wig cap and swallowed my head,
my hair, my blackness in a sea
of blonde, and flipped the hair in a ripple
around my shoulders. Tonight I'd have more fun. I thought,
Tonight I'd glow. And at the Halloween party
a group of us bunched bodies for pictures
and my smile was real.

The room was dark, lit only by a dim oven bulb,
my sister and I hovered like amazons
in the foreground. Our heels peeped heads
over girls dressed in tans and skirts. My hair,
a frizzled dance of blondeness,
cupid shuffled around my face
and two-stepped my smile. We all smiled
and a fluorescent flash of light from the camera
lit the shadows in the room and the cameraman
glanced at his handwork. He snapped the air
through gapped teeth and tilted the happy faces.

It caught only some of you, he told us,
glancing sidelong at my sister and I,
as if we stole ourselves from his picture.
I froze, trying not to lose my pose, my smile,
my presumed need to pretend I wasn't me.

My sister laughed like she does, eyed me and said
that it must be because we're black. Of course
the picture lost me because of the browness
of my skin, because of the kinky hair I mask
under my wig. In this dark room we disappeared. It amused
her and the others around us laughed and joked
about the race card, and I was glad I did not say it
first. The lights came on, banishing darkness, blinding me
but as the man lifted his camera I remembered

what I had never seen. That first picture
like a glimpse behind who I am, so clear
I could trace the outline of a shadow
veiled in a waterfall of gold. A gown of blondeness.
A curtain of whiteness, the kind everyone else had
but somehow seemed odd on me.

Junkyard Quote 3-4, Week 10

Watching South Park. A couple lines I found quirky from the episode:

"A noble trait that seems lost on you 99 percenters." --Cartman, South Park

"the boom boom chubby choom choom school." -- Fitness Guy, South Park

Junkyard Quote 1-2, Week 10

Wow. Week 10 already.

"You want to piss a reader off, kill a kitten." --Dr. Davidson
"I recycled my sestina!" --Me