Skin

Every time I look in the mirror, I examine my skin carefully and fretfully. There were inklings of the coming central-nervous-system clusterfuck at just about the time I hit puberty. We'd moved from the Big City- and by Big City I mean Brooklyn, NY, and during the 70's, which is now a mythical time when the young people had yet to build ethnically-themed bistros in their brownstones and the families that lived there had no fear that their children might fall in with the wrong crowd and become Hipsters- when I was twelve. Rotten time to move to a cowtown in beautiful and stupid rural NJ; to be fair, that's a rotten time for any twelve-year-old to move to anywhere. My skin felt this, right down to its' stem cells, and revolted by becoming revolting.

There was such nastiness that now I have legendary stories about lunchroom ruptures that will make other skin disaster survivors become silent and then say something like "ohmygod", their eyes wide with awed sympathy. I became obsessed with checking my skin for potential nastiness, making plans to just go ahead and wear a veil the next day because of an approaching outbreak, and unfortunately I still do this.

My face is kind of a wreck now, what with the ice-pick scarring and the pebbliness and the rocacea and the years of medications and Extreme Stress marathons. I think it looks awful...still, it's occurred to me that perhaps my idea of my skin should be re-examined and that there are people in the world that would look at me and then look at the food in my refrigerator and the roof above me and the lack of beatings in my life and find this perspective a mite trivial. They would be right. But still, it bothers me. To mitigate the moral discomfort I sometimes feel, and to keep it silly, I've decided that I'm going to make up a different history for my face...

When I was twelve my family moved from Brooklyn, NY to the Sahara Desert. We lived as nomads- white liberal nomads in Africa- who rejected the sexist belief system of the area while still enjoying tents, manitoc quiches, and toiletries made from Shea Butter. My skin became dry as I formed fast friendships with absolutely anyone I met.

When I was sixteen, our fortunes changed and we moved to Alaska to become Snow Crab fishers. The crabs were plentiful, and after a period of stinging adjustment, my skin tolerated the ice-needle spray of the ocean and the shallow claw wounds I'd receive pulling the delicious beasts from the nets (fyi: Shea Butter is a wonderful balm for either of those irritations.) It was a lucrative business and the long off-season was spent chopping wood, learning native board games, and forming fast friendships with absolutely anyone I met.

I packed up and went off to college as a double-major in musical composition and astrophysics. The music pulled me into a band; the band signed with a major label; I became a contract slave to the music industry. It was an international folk group, and the concert schedule was grueling, forcing me to play my lyre and pan pipes to wine drinking jet-setters in some small and tasteful venue four or five times a week. I became addicted to Adderal and herb cigarettes, which are hell on fragile skin systems.

This continued for some time, until we traveled to New York City and I, on a whim, auditioned for the Broadway hit, Cats. The producer and director called me the next day to offer me the part as The White Cat. I quit the band- it was a misty farewell to all of the fast friends I'd made while on tour- and began my stint on Broadway the next week. I jumped and danced and slunk around onstage for five years, During the precious dark days, when there were no performances, I went on day-trips with the cast to Coney Island or Connecticut and sang along to any street musician I saw playing on a subway platform (this being NYC, I was perpetually late to everything). I made fast friends with absolutely anyone I met. Despite the years of religious and intense facials my pores were permanently full of greasepaint (there is only so much that Shea Butter can do.)

Finally I tired of the shabby glamour and endless rehearsing of the working actor's life. I had heard of the American Fringe Theater scene, and since I was flush with Cats cash and in need of a difficult vocation, I settled down in Chicago to become a major American playwright.

Then I had a baby. I began putting Shea Butter on her, and her skin is beautiful.