nd when a pal of mine who works for OkCupid** offered me a comp ticket to a Queer Women's Mixer at the Dalloway bar (the newest lez bar in Manhattan) that was exactly one month to the day from my break-up, I thought it was a sign I should try something new. So welcome to post number two in my Untapped Cruising Territory series! Three years later.
May is coming next week and I can hardly believe it. I'm really excited about what I have planned and I wanted to give people a head's up if they wanted to plan to travel into NYC for any or all of these events. (Hint: the answer is yes, you want to plan travel.)
Sometimes you go to the theater and you look at your friend during intermission and you say, "This is happening in real life." New York City, where all dreams are possible and all artistic visions have a chance, is the birthplace for the next great musical parody, and that parody is Showgirls! The Musical!
Early in March I had the opportunity to attend two gigs with Heels on Wheels at a couple of colleges in the Northeast. I have known about HOW since its inception, mostly because two of my besties (Heather Acs and Damien Luxe) conceived it. Much like the Sister Spit tour, I always wonder what it would be like to "get in the van" and bring my work around. I'm lucky that part of my income comes from going to colleges to do workshops and performances, so I get a bit of that, but never in the big group. Getting to do those two gigs was a little taste of the road-trip-meets-art-adventure without ever having to forsake a shower because there were too many people and too few showers available in too little time (the greatest road show complaint I hear from everyone who goes on any tour). Ever relentlessly documenting my life, I made a little photo essay of our trip to Hampshire College to present a workshop on confidence (Femmepowerment--from the stage to the street) and perform as the evening entertainment for the Five Colleges Queer Conference. I had a really great time and it was an honor to be in such extraordinary company for our 16 hour adventure.
My mission in life is to make the world safe for people to love themselves. One of the ongoing projects I keep is very dear to my heart, which is a performance art series celebrating the radical act of self love. It is definitely very radical to love yourself in a society that tells you that you aren't worthy of any love or appreciation, or conditional love and appreciation (like, if you lose 20 pounds, etc...). One of the things I love most is to hear how artists have used their differences to become empowered. That's what I curate in this series. I'm super excited to have Ivan Coyote, the dreamy professional storyteller, author and multi-award winning bad ass, in NYC from Canada and featured performer at the upcoming Cupcake Cabaret.
In helping other heartbroken and healing folks out there, I made a list of strategies I am using right now to get through when the only way out is through. My friend Elisabeth told me last week, on a particularly bad day when I listened to too much Taylor Swift (she helps until she hurts), "Lean into the discomfort and breathe." Much easier said than done, but I know it can be done because I am actually doing it right now.
Sam Rosenthal asked me to take a look at his new, self-published genderqueer erotica novel called Rye. It is a really awesome method to love your body and reclaim your sexuality by consuming porn, erotica and images that reflect your body, gender and sexuality. Rye features a genderqueer main character as well as a polyamorous relationship, both things that aren't depicted in mainstream sexuality. I did a Q and A with Sam about the process of bringing Rye to life! Enjoy!
Part of being camp counselors is participating in a lot of non-consensual woo. I totally didn't identify it as woo at the time (and balked at all forms of religion and spirituality), but having been a lifelong Girl Scout, I really knew how to plan rituals and ceremonies chock full of meaning for our girls. Spunky and I used our current spirituality and past Girl Scout training to design a ritual recently that I thought might help some of my blog readers who are interested in getting energy unstuck.
A few weeks ago I embarked on another journey into New York City to look at possible party venues. My friend Emily (who runs Hot Rabbit and is my co-producer in the new Sweet Fox / Rebel Cupcake joint venture into First Thursday awesome) took me to a couple of places she was excited to produce at. First stop was the Manderlay bar at the McKittrick Hotel. "You know, the Sleep No More venue," she said. At this point, the only thing I knew about it was that my dear friends Miriam and Victoria were planning to go and had told me their understanding of the show. Experiential theater, where you arrive at a reservation time and are unleashed into a world created to support a play loosely based on Macbeth. I knew you could walk around the sets, open drawers, read books and that it was an interesting place to roam. Every now and again you would see actors performing a scene and you follow them from room to room piecing the story together yourself. And that it is impossible to see the whole thing in one visit.
My mom first showed me worm composing aka vermiculture when I was a teenager. I didn’t help much back then except to sometimes put the kitchen scraps in the bin, but it was really fun to see the worms enjoying meals that were otherwise waste.
Nowadays I’m living down the street from mom and helping her out with a fresh crop of worms! Vermiculture is a quality, fun family project!
Mom has used worm compost in her gardens on and off since the 70s. She has anecdotal evidence that the compost helps plants grow exponentially bigger than with miracle grow based on the results of her smaller worm composting last year.
Worm composing is essentially keeping worms as working pets. You create the right environment for them, feed them the correct scraps and in time have incredibly nutrient dense compost to put into gardens.
We have learned a lot in the past four months and I wanted to share some of our key learnings.
Plastic storage bins that are roughly this size have been most effective for us. We tried bigger bins and those didn’t fare as well as the more shallow bins.
Drill holes too small for the worms to wiggle out of about 2 inches apart so that air can get in and water can drain out. Holes on the bottommost part of the bin and around the top side of the bin are sufficient.
Lay down a layer of paper scraps, fertilizer and a bit of soil for grit, approximately 2 inches high total and well mixed.
Add in kitchen scraps. No citrus, meat or trash. Veggie ends, banana peels, coffee grounds (mom opens up her kcups and dumps the coffee out), tea bags made with paper filters, apple cores. Those kinds of things. I hold onto veggie ends for making bone broth but anything else ends up scraps for the worms. We learned that the worms did not like old bread or gluten free matzo. They loved the leftover flowers from dead hydrangeas but not the stems (they ate them clean like rib bones).
Next add in red worms. You can get them from a bait store or oder them online as my mom originally did. They multiply in the bins so start with 30 or so per bin.
Then a layer of leaves for insulation, and a layer of newspaper for insulation. Then a good amount of water so it’s damp but not drippy.
Set the bins someplace where they won’t freeze in the winter and maybe out of the light of the sun. Under a deck, in a corner of the garage or a shed are great spots. Set them on top of a tray (we used old plastic bin lids) so that you can catch the compost “tea” that drains out. This is great for adding nutrients to plants! We have many bottles of it after this winter.
You’ll need to visit the worms about every 3-4 weeks to add more kitchen scraps, more water, drain the tea off the drip trays and make sure the worms are doing okay (this is how we learned they were rejecting bread and matzo). Eventually, a few months later, you can go in and pull out the “worm casings” as mom calls it. That’s the nutrient rich soil.
It’s such a great opportunity to teach children about reducing waste, gardening, worm lifecycles and also it’s really fun and rewarding to have worms doing dirty work for you!
We’re using this time to expand our worm composting since, due to quarantine, we’re making the garden bigger. So as we go through and pull out casings for the garden we are creating additional bins and moving some of the worms into the new bins.
I didn’t get too terribly specific here since there are lots of resources and how to videos on the web and you tube. Wanted to share how fun and rewarding this project is and introduce you to this awesome adventure!
The other day my friend Matie asked whether Zoe’s Break-Up Survival Guide was still available somewhere. As is my practice when I know something’s on my blog I popped over, only to realize my website was down.
This is the sixth time I’ve had a catastrophic site is down issue with a WordPress site. (Hackers, theme errors, you name it.) I know now the value of a great webhost because DreamHost was able to help me get it back up and running from the back end and I still had my archives.
I had to leave my previous theme because those were the errors that shut down the site. Though I’ve correctly added a new header and customized this theme it’s still not working and the site still kinda looks broken even though it’s not fundamentally broken. (Kinda like my heart and my spirit this past year.)
I’m still here. The website is still here. I want to keep the archives up because I know this blog platform has helped folks on their journeys. I also still have some bloggin’ in me.
I can’t even begin to tell you how different my life is from the recent posts up here. I am now single, after planning a wedding pretty publicly. I now live on the Olympic Penninsula in Washington State. The short version is that I couldn’t afford to keep living in LA–I tried my darndest. I got a sublet down the street from my mom and am typing this while looking at the forest and some cute birds that are visiting.
I’m still teaching Fat Kid Dance Party Aerobics, the class I created to sweep the margins of mainstream fitness and make aerobics for anyone of any body. I have a lot less touring and in person classes to offer for lack of capital and financial support. I remain committed to my weekly online class and have a small group of regulars who send me sweaty triumphant post aerobics pics that I treasure.
I’m on Episode 20 of my podcast and through a lot of life tumult keep putting out a new episode every Friday morning. It’s a lot about self care and weathering the storms of life and sharing the wisdom of my incredible friends. I think of it as a party where I get to introduce all of my friends to one another.
Right after I moved my main email I use with friends (it begins with iheart) stopped working. Google won’t let me log into it to fix it even though I have the password. So if you tried to email me and it bounced back, that’s why. Try me at queerfatfemme at gmail (which also wasn’t working for awhile because of forwarding failure but now is back up).
I have to wonder if people have tried to email me and it bounced or tried to come to my site and it wasn’t working (no idea how long). Or tried to text me at my old New Jersey phone number and no response.
I assure you, in spite of technical difficulties, in spite of all the things. I’m still kicking. At least aerobically kicking.
Knock me down 9 times I get up 10.
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Love y’all. Thanks for continuing to show up. <3
For those of you who don’t already know, six months ago my fiance decided to end our relationship. It was a huge surprise to me, since a showy proposal 13 months before and a plan for a big wedding was already in the works.
Six months out and I’m still reeling from the change that comes from the break-up of a long-term partnership, the cancelation of a hotly anticipated wedding and making rent in a house that made sense when I lived with someone / I’m still looking for a roommate.
I know “this too shall pass” and I’ll talk more about the emotional fall out in the next epsiode of my podcast. In the meantime, I’ve been deeply reconnecting with my friends and my loved ones.
One of the best things about a break-up before a wedding is that I had already done the work to whittle down my closest friends into a “Bride Squad” (the cute designation I was using to refer to my bridal party). I dumped the traditional bridesmaids and maid/matron of honor for a gender neutral non-hierarchical group of folks who had been there for me throughout my young adult and adult life.
Having that Bride Squad? It was who was on SPEED DIAL during the last couple difficult months together and in the aftermath of the shock of a break-up. Originally they were meant to be there to support my transition into married life, but now they helped support my transition into my fresh singlehood.
This is the second time I’ve been engaged and not gotten married. I’m beginning to think playing online poker is more of a sure bet (and there is a lot you can learn from poker champs; Live Boeree’s TED Talk is an example).
Both times I was engaged I had to curtail the amount of folks in my Bride Squad due to my fiance and wanting to have even numbers on each side of the aisle. (I think we had 3 each for my first wedding to an introvert and in this past wedding we each had a dozen.)
To be honest, though, I think getting divorced or going through a major break-up you kind of need your squad more than ever. And it hasn’t just been my Bride Squad who has lifted me up these past few months, it’s dozens of my dear friends. Checking in on me, showing up for me, sending me cards, inviting me for dinner.
I got to thinking, what if instead of having a Bride Squad I just had a Bevin Squad? Folks who show up for me, whether they even know me in real life or not. I’ve had tons of support and cards from folks who only know me from the encouraging words I post on the internet.
And the truth is, I have a beautiful lodge with a deposit on it, Dollywood adjacent. My mom put down the deposit and she doesn’t have much and I’m grateful for it. I don’t want it to go to waste. Without the limitations of a wedding, I could throw a much more modestly budgeted but possibly more fun and exciting gratitude party for everyone who loves me and has helped me through this extremely difficult time. And, anyone can be in my Bevin Squad for that because I don’t have to balance the aisle!
Most importantly. I have been engaged twice but NEVER HAD A BACHELORETTE PARTY. This must be remedied. Honestly, I’d rather celebrate my singlehood/non-married life while I’m living it and focus on creating the marriage I want when I find the right person.
East Coast Babes: I’ll be having a sweet, self-care focused Bachelorette at the Glowing Goddess Getaway in the Berkshires, MA on Sept 13-15. West Coast Babes, I know I’ll have a pool party and a trip to a rage room to break some wedding china Late Fall.