Is this for real? What kinds of tricks is my mind playing on me? I can’t believe these thoughts are even in my mind and I’m ashamed to even write about them.
This morning I was thinking about Shakespeare’s line: “The world is a stage and we are all just players on it.” I was considering the highs and lows of storytelling, the mix of the mundane and the magical.
And then the tricky monkey of my mind jumped in with something like, “Nothing you do will ever succeed because your dresses are too tight.”
I mean, are you serious Monkey Mind? I’m in the middle of some incredible full-throttle storytelling, directing my first film, and you are trying to push me into a pool of despair over my body? I mean, really people, I’m 54 years old. I have survived overpowering and devastating loss. I live on the wild edge of grief with a profound push to create. Am I really STILL worrying about the way my dresses fit? Have I changed at all since I was 16-years-old in my room with my waterbed, vintage lamps, and Rob Lowe poster turning sideways in a mirror to see if I could make myself smaller? Damn you Monkey Mind!
I go out on a brisk walk to see if I can speed up my metabolism. I turn on Proud Mary and go-go dance around my living room with so much gusto I have to put a heating pad on my neck from the hair-whipping and high-kicking. And still, my metabolism sits out on a smoke break in a pair of sunglasses flipping me the bird. I command my body to strike up the metabolism like a marching band in an old musical, and instead, it shakes it’s fist in my face like a soap opera villain seeking revenge. “I will NOT speed up for you! In fact, just because you asked, I’m going to slow down, way down. I, Marci’s metabolism, will now move at the speed of an old jar of honey turned upside down and shaken. In other words, I’m just going to sit here like a pile of golden sludge and not move at all! How about that?”
Damn you metabolism!
And so I try to accept my body the way it is. I decide all this body-loathing will just make things worse, and maybe I can positive-think my metabolism into speeding up, maybe if I tell my cellulite how much I love it, it will stop being stubborn and move along. So far, this hasn’t worked.
So I travel in my mind to a time in history where my type of body was the beauty ideal, 25,000 years back to be exact: prehistoric France. Those abundant breasts, belly, hips and thighs on fertility goddess statues found in caves, like Venus De Willendorf, are much closer to my own shape.
Sigh.
Why oh why can’t I just rock an over-50 body like J.Lo?
I really don’t know what to do about my villainous metabolism. I recently directed my first documentary, and when my interview subjects were literally shaking with nerves, I decided to jump on camera with them so they’d feel more comfortable. That way they could converse with me and forget the camera. I had a moment of thinking, “Girl! You can’t be on camera! You need to lose 30 pounds, you haven’t even looked in a mirror to check you hair and makeup, and that wouldn’t really help anyway since you can’t see a damn thing without your reading glasses.”
But that moment quickly passed because it doesn’t matter what I look like when I’m telling a vital story, a story of young women leaving their home country to blaze their own trail as performing artists; a story of courage and perseverance; a story that resonates with my own past as a young girl who grew up mormon and left behind those traditions and expectations to create my own life as a performer; a story of devotion and love between two sisters who dedicated their very beings to art and each other; a story that makes my heart ache with missing Kim.
So if I jumped on camera looked like a walking Venus de Willendorf, so be it. The only thing that mattered was telling the story.
And maybe that’s the true beauty ideal: capturing real and honest moments in all their gorgeous tattered raw authenticity… like catching fireflies in a jar, or catching powdered sugar on your tongue as you bite into a hot beignet while a guy with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth plays a dilapidated piano on the street corner, spinning pure magic out of a wooden box made of strings and keys, and even in my overly-snug dress, I step into the sun and dance.
