HAPPINESS IS
This past weekend Nkechi and I attended the Petit Jean Performance Festival in Petit Jean State Park. It’s a drive of several hours from Baton Rouge to Morrillton, AR, and for much of it, we wind our way through North Louisiana and Mississippi. Riding shotgun gave me a chance to think about performance and what it means to me.
My family tells me that I performed before I could speak. I would stand on a landing in a house I can’t remember in Norfolk, VA and give long loud gibberish speeches. The fact that my family allowed me to do this might be why I started speaking—and remembering—early. I wrote and performed in some plays at The American Cooperative School of Tunis along with the rest of my tiny class. My favorite was probably The Madwoman of Chaillot—or no! Our performance of Oedipus Rex at an old Roman Amphitheater somewhere in the Tunisian Countryside. I played Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes. I don’t know how well I embodied the character as a teen, but something about the authority with which he prophesied even as he was helpless to avert tragedy spoke to me. The thing I most enjoyed about those early performances was that moment when we kids would push through some invisible membrane and make contact with something outside ourselves.
The performance festival has been running continuously since 1981. It’s a small, intimate affair, mostly for students and professors in the academic field of Performance Studies. Kechi began attending as an undergrad and continued as a masters student, but before we attended last year, she hadn’t been back for some time. It was at Petit Jean that she was asked to come work in the Communications Studies department at LSU. She’d been performing consistently for years, but had lost touch with her academic studies in the field. Since I was slated to teach a guest semester of Graduate Fiction at LSU that Spring, we decided we’d move to Baton Rouge. The happiness we’ve found here together has a lot less to do with our surroundings and the trappings of our life together than it does with the healing we achieve, the continuing process of learning how best to show up for each other, to life each other up. It’s the deepest, most fulfilling happiness I’ve known—even more so than the happiness I achieved at 33 when I started doing comedy.
One thing that drew me to Nkechi was her basic magnetism. I hired her to take my author photos when I got my first book deal, and while I had heard about her standup and the moves she and her collective were making in the New Orleans scene, we’d never met in person. There’s a lightness, a joy about her that I’ve always found refreshing, and when she performs, she brings that to the stage. The very first time I did standup, in a shitty little black box theater on Burgundy Street in the Faubourg Marigny something clicked. I told exactly two and a half jokes, at which point I bungled my set-up for the third and beat a hasty retreat—but I got laughs. They hit me in a wave and electrified my blood. Afterwards, I decided I would say yes to every opportunity it was physically possible for me to take, and I can say that for the next three years, I was genuinely happy.
Knowing that happiness existed in the world and that I could achieve it without deluding myself or ignoring or downplaying the existence of darkness or pain changed my entire approach to life. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve found that at its best, performance removes the barrier between selves and disrupts mortality. It’s something I need. It’s what I seek to achieve when I perform comedy—or at least I seek to seek it. I am not as good a comedian as I am a writer, and I know that condition is what I reach for when I weave a story. Of course, it seemed natural to bring these two concerns together. I’ve written about performers over and over again, both in fiction and in non- so when I was looking for a subject for my new novel, that’s why I chose to write about a New Orleans comic struggling with grief.
As I continue to work on the novel, I’ll be sharing portions with paid members on my Patreon. Once that’s done, I’ll be turning my attention more fully to the poetry collection I’m. building. It’s entitled The Power Cosmic, and it looks at myself and my experience through the lens of past, present, and future. Like everything else I’m working on right now and in the near future, it will be informed by the experience of losing my brother this summer and nearly losing my own life the summer before. I’m excited to bring readers on this journey with me… and with that said, I’d better get back to work.