There was a time not too long ago when I would have been loathe to share the above video. My whole life, I’ve been self-conscious about my gait, except in bars, where, it’s been reported, I immediately take on a comfortable-in-my-skin groove walk upon entry that a friend once described as “like a cat.” Most places aren’t bars, though, and body-comfort has, for most of my life, been inextricably entwined with comfort in every other arena, meaning that if my life feels like it’s falling apart or otherwise not cooperating, then I don’t like my body either. If all is well in my rapidly-shifting planet, then I’m one hot motherfucker, no question.
I say that. But it doesn’t mean that watching this video didn’t feel like therapy: I still remember, more vividly than I’d like, being that little girl with the long red hair who was horrified by her full-body reflection, the rhythm of a walk on my tip-toes. (Being born with cerebral palsy meant I was a toe-walker, until the surgeons did their dubious deeds [that were confirmed to be the best course of action at the time]). That little girl could not imagine her walking being filmed by anyone on purpose, let alone an artist and visionary like Addie Tsai. She might have conceded that the fishnets took the edge off — I got into those when I was only a few years older than that little girl — but even still. The notion of being voluntarily known by the movements of my body — by anything, in fact, other than my long-sanctioned words, that safe safe realm of disembodied communication where we can create anything in the presence of anyone without giving a second thought to muscle or limb — would have mystified every self I’ve ever been.
Every one but this one, this new one, the one that finally got my hair dyed exciting new colors, the one whose line of work takes that whole fantasy-and-words thing and makes of it a wild erotic planet where anything can happen and gets paid to do it, typically by who-knows-who from who-knows-where, but I know their voices. And they know mine. They don’t know how I walk. But I don’t hide it. They’ve never asked.
When Addie told me I looked like a badass navigating the fragments of New Orleans’ Uptown streets with ease even as the pavement more or less undulated beneath me, cracked and grown over and blasted apart by all manner of vengeful flora, made into concrete islands by decades of aggressive municipal neglect, I was surprised. I talk like I see myself that way, and occasionally I do, but rarely when walking.
This video serves as an accompaniment to a just-published essay about disability and fashion in Just Femme and Dandy magazine. It was one of those pieces that started as something I thought I’d been ready to write, but turned out to have rushed through and glossed over and ultimately run from in the first draft. Addie’s questions and guidance were essential to drawing out my purpose for the damn thing, as well as helping resolve some residual layers of the issues I’d been skirting when I banged out that first overconfident incomplete draft.
Now, funnily enough, it feels like a whole life has been lived since I wrote Depth Charge (a title that inadvertently described what the editing process called for). It’s replete with photos, but they don’t look like me. I have too much hair. And I don’t look solid. The fact is that I spent most of my life concocting different ways to, more or less, float away from here. Addie shot a video of me with my feet on the ground, and happy to be on the ground: That’s new.
With the streets in the shape they’re in, a fall was almost inevitable. I did take one, a nasty one — I almost can’t remember my elbow without this deep red creator of a scab that’s taking its sweet time to heal. This is where masochistic tendencies prove useful, because while I certainly do not consider falling to be kink-fodder, I have an abiding appreciation for marks on the body that are redolent with pleasant experiences. It was not pleasant to faceplant by the oaks. But that week itself? Best of my life thus far. By a whole whole whole whole lot.
It’s Mardi Gras week, and I’m half-seriously considering breaking out the spiky mace-like pasties I got at a little shop in the French Quarter called No Rules. It’s strange to think that where I come from, next week is life — everything closes, schools, banks — so that the city can parade, and transform by way of magnificent costumes, and go to balls and anti-balls for all manner of glamorous debauchery. All this in the service of getting alllllllllll the way down in them earthly delights before Lent heralds the moment of sacrifice.
I want a slice of king cake. I want my grandmother to send me a newspaper clipping telling me who the queen of Mardi Gras is. I want some fucking beads, enough of them that I don’t have to wear a shirt underneath because my chest is covered in gifted plastic jewels (like this iconic lady I saw when I was 14 and will never forget). I want to sit on the steps outside of our duplex on General Pershing — it’s still ours, damnit, it’s still ours, it’s still ours — and watch parades go by with their colossal, wildly colorful, sometimes obscene floats.
I keep saying this, I know, but...I want to go home.
In this instance, though, I’m not sure that I’m actually overcome with a desire to experience Mardi Gras 2023. What I really want, just for a few hours, is to go back to the last Mardi Gras I was home for. When the street between our house and the synagogue filled with people dancing to Sublime’s “What I Got” as the music blasted out of a truck. The truck was made up as a float, with an elaborate red velvet throne, and we all took turns sitting on it. “Whose truck is this?” I finally asked. Nobody knew.
I didn’t go as anything in particular that Mardi Gras, just wore my prized black velvet corset and black velvet miniskirt + black velvet boots with an elaborate red and gold mask. When strangers tell you “happy Mardi Gras!” and hang beads around your neck, it’s in a different spirit of giving them any other holiday. We’re not just celebrating together, we *are* together. It’s why a little girl I had never seen before could come up to me on the parade lines, introduce herself, climb into my lap, and shout-sing the Mardi Gras Mambo until her parents came back.
That may have seemed digressive, but honestly, we’re right on theme: no better time to celebrate our bodies than Carnival.