ABSTRACT
Rachel, I am sitting down to write you at more length because of my joy and gratitude about dbd and the dbd weekend. It really was a soul-scraping and soul-cleansing experience. It made me understand, deeply and in a new way, the power of the moment and of chance. (“Chance knows what it is doing” is unforgettable.) These things I knew intellectually-who doesn’t admire John Cage? etc., but I had never really tried them out, much less lived them along my pulse, as I was FORCED to (gracias a dios) at dbd. Friday and Saturday were agony for me! I felt clumsy and stupid, as my ego was scraped raw and white like an onion. I watched the lithe beautiful boys and girls do everything beautifully, I stumbled into the costume room to snatch minimal bits of costume, breathless and sure that I would make the wrong choices. I did what I could do on stage, mostly without my favorite tool for stage-dominance, language. No fake Shakespeare, no funny accents, and no TIME to prepare anything.
