I grew up in a fish store. My best friend/nanny was a bag lady whose name was Udasha. The following is a small excerpt from a 40 min. performance piece I do called ‘Drowning is Fun’. I will be performing the entire piece this autumn at Musideum.
Udasha is a bag lady and lives no where and sometimes stays with us. Udasha shows up and then disappears
and we never know when she will do either.
Daddy says Udasha is a little bit kookoo nuts in her head.
Udasha is the colour of fresh rye bread without the caraway seeds!
She has a big clowny face just like the two clowns she always brings with her that are on the brown paper shopping bags that say
‘its fun to shop at honest eds its fun to shop at honest eds’.
The first thing the 3 clowny faces do is go up stairs.
Udasha sits herself down on the kitchen chair and sets the clowns on the floor one on each side of her and then she picks up her big skirts way above her chubby knees.She wears band-aid coloured old lady stockings that come up to her thighs and are held up with wide elastic. In these stockings Udasha hides her most important stuff – stuff that she doesn’t want to lose and now that she is safe inside she can take all her treasures out and that is just what she does.
From one stocking she takes out:
-a package of buttons (wrapped up with a cloth tied up with an elastic)
-a bunch of safety pins – all sizes- safety pinned together (wrapped up with a cloth tied up with an elastic)
-an envelope of streetcar tickets (wrapped up with a cloth tied up with an elastic )
-a bunch of elastics all elastic-ed together (wrapped up with a cloth tied up with an elastic)
-and most important a little wooden stick with a hook
called ‘crochet needle’!
From her other stocking she removes bits of string that she has collected – string collected from the street or the park and mostly from daddy’s stinky fish garbage.
She ties them together to make a long piece so she can crochet
and she starts crocheting and she starts telling stories…
She makes little circles that turn into hats for my doll (when my doll had a head ) or she just crochets little circles that get bigger and bigger…she crochets until the string and the stories run out…and when the string runs out, she undoes all the little circles and starts all over again…circles and stories (the same circles and the same stories).
