Nature Abhors An App Date

I'm not sure this blog is creative, but I'm exercising my right to type on this $15 Logitech keyboard. That's what rewrites are for.  I used to GAF so much.  I just don't anymore.  (This is a big problem).

I sleep till noon and wake up, make coffee, and sit up in bed and read or look at my phone with the coffee (still in bed).  I feel like the Gods are punishing me by keeping men away from me.  (it's probably self-inflicted but God(s) is/are so easy to blame.

Other people get up on their day off and crush the gym.  They probably also do things with beings that have evacuated their subterranean private parts, and possibly go shopping. I don't know what people do.  I'm glad nothing ever fell out of my octopus and then ran around (and asked me for things).

Even if I got a book deal right now, I wouldn't care.  Who cares ?  What does it all mean ?  Is this all happening because my body creates less estrogen now ?

I will hopefully be going on an app-date soon.  But most of the guys seem like they suffer from mental illness.  One guy who asked me on a date looks like a gay tennis player from the 70s.  It's so ridiculous.  And then he proceeded to be abusive by text.  I blocked him.  The trying dating thing is just a hapless effort to avoid the stark reality that we all die alone. I re-joined three dating apps that I had previously deleted then uploaded, then deleted again from my phone. (or is it downloaded?)  If you were born under a rock or are just lucky in life and never saw a dating app, what happens is, divorce and a lackluster attitude compel you into some kind of action. You get to the point where you are completely demoralized by the whole universe, you throw your hands in the air and join one of these ludicrous matchmaking asylum "apps" and swipe through the inmates.

You swipe this way and that, and eventually you match with people whose craniums are of whopping proportion, and then you send texts back and forth like you're in middle school.  Some are serious questioners.  Everything is a question.  I don't write much in the profile, such as the fact that I'm an artist, because inevitably, it will provoke yet ANOTHER question, "what kind of art do you do ?" (insert gunshot noise).

I know it's hard to come up with something to talk about, when in fact, you're not talking, you're typing electronically with a stranger.  Young people don't even realize how odd this is because they've been texting since they were in utero. 

I don't particularly enjoy being interrogated by a complete stranger.  I grew up in the third layer from the sun and my art is about your mother's asshole.  Why the immediacy ?  If I tell you what kind of job I have, will that make the world any less likely to incinerate within the next decade by a meteor or an unhinged oligarch ?  Will starving mothers and children in third world countries suddenly be fed ? I don't think so Riddler.  Even if I answer all of your questions, you will still be lame (and probably bald).  We may all be charred embers existing in another dimension after the earth implodes, but by all means.. as we're floating out there in the atmosphere approaching Saturn, please, gift me with another one of your dire, acrimonious motherfucking inquests.

Too many questions is tacky, like a poof with a thin mustache. (reference to previous blog you can get here ).

UNREQUITED LOVE + DEATH DON’T MAKE GOOD BED FELLOWS

When you get to the point where you feel you were meant to be with someone, particularly after the devastation of divorce and they feel that way too, and then that doesn’t work out either, you find yourself fluctuating between despondency and being really angry.  Anger is safer than hurt.  It’s easier to feel.  The energy wants to get up and out of you.  It helps if you are a kick boxer.  Sadness is harder to feel.  It threatens to drown you and make you want to leave the earth.  It has been difficult for me on the planet.  I have had so many challenges and I hate that freaking word.  The only way to use anger wisely is to kick something, otherwise you get mad at things like words.

The person I fell for died.  First, you cry for six months.  Your life is suspended in the air while you have to grapple with an event so heavy such as death.  The other thing that happens when the person you love dies, is you have the luxury of pining over what could have been.  That will haunt you for a couple of years.  It’s also that splendid place in your mind where you can idealize how it would be for the two of you, now.  You will never know.  You also never got to see the person at 2AM sick with the flu or completely lose their temper.  You never see them grow listless from too much or too little responsibility, or say, forget the gym altogether or give up on their dreams.  As a result, you can immortalize their persona of how perfect they were as if frozen in time.  But of course, no one is perfect.  Perhaps this is why trying to get with someone post-divorce in your 40’s is difficult.  You have an unrealistic idea of what the perfect man is, to begin with.  It’s warped by time, by how it was when you were young.  Also the gene pool narrows and the only men that age well are gay and there is a statute of limitations for them too. 

Maybe you have a type.  Tall and stalky or tough or athletic.  The kind of guy who has a lot of knowledge about obscure shit with a motorcycle or a Republican who likes to scuba dive or the guy who has a trike who’s into art.  <--- actually I don’t think those last two go together.  You come up with a lot of qualifications that if the person lacks become deal breakers.  “Well, he asks weird questions like how was your weekend? and I won’t live like that,” you think to yourself.  The staggering disappointment of losing something that seemed completely impossible to get in the first place sets you back.  I’ve developed permanent armor as a result.

Friends are not helpful.  They say “well you just really need to get laid.” 

So then you take personal inventory.  I don’t want to be toiling away at my career any more is part of my latest thinking.  I should be in the Hamptons yelling at the help.  “Everyone knows living room curtains go to the floor.”  (idiot).  I want an oblivious workaholic husband who’s never home but has five cars.  I want the house to be so big that I busy myself decorating and preparing for house guests.  I’ll design menus in my fabulous Cole Haan bathing suit, poolside sipping bubbly rose out of crystal flutes with the most gorgeous gay men in New York.  This kind of fantasizing is exquisite if you don’t want to feel.

I was so burned by the real one in the past and not just my marriage.  I mean when your heart is sensitive and shit just goes wrong, you’re left to deal with the fallout.  Growing up there was a suicide attempt, a divorce, a remarriage, moving to an awful suburb with an alcoholic step monster.  But the now is re-traumatizing me.  My parents have passed and I’m divorced.   I’m left on my own with a 49-year-old sibling who is developmentally disabled.  I’m talking death, disease, divorce and disability.  This is going to be the name of my one man show.  Or should I call it the one man show with tits.  Naw, that's too crude.  I'll think a somethin'.

                                                                             

SHUT UP AND LOOK GOOD

I started comedy a while ago.   A long time ago.  I was married.  It was different.  I’m a comic in New York now, I’m single, and I am having a hard time.  Well, wait a day and ask me, and I will say it’s great.  A lot of my perspective hinges on where I got on last, how much money I made this month and if my new stuff worked somewhere.  But generally, and in particular, this week, things are shitty.

I’m not a new comic, but upon moving to New York I became new again in a way, having been unfamiliar with most of what goes on in the New York comedy scene.  It’s par for the course when moving to another city.

But when I ponder my situation a little deeper, what’s frustrating for me is my gender.  There comes a time when you realize, people don’t take you seriously if you are female.  People used to say “oh you do comedy that must be so hard.”  At the time I thought they were morons for saying so.  I used to think doing comedy was great.  You go to a club and work out ideas that you’ve been banging around i.e. funny thoughts, jaunts and stabs at people that irritate you.  It’s an activity that makes all the messed up stuff in your life have a shred of meaning and you make people feel better, including yourself.  It’s symbiotic and so creative.  But in time, I began to see what those annoying people meant.  Audiences are reluctant to like female comics.  And then there’s everybody else.   

When I first moved to New York a comic at Dangerfield’s said to me, “men in the Middle East have it right…women should be covered from head to toe in a berka and kept quiet.”  The same week another comedian gave me a spot at one of the clubs.  He was actually nice to me and happy to help me out, but the next night when I didn’t text him back right away, he texted, “Are you drunk or just a retard?”  Another time, in an effort to help me assimilate in New York, a friend of mine connected me with an established comic.  Long story short, the comic asked me to three-way with him and his girlfriend.

The problem starts when you actually want to make some kind of career out of it.  If you’re just doing your “sketches” at little dives here and there, it isn’t affecting anything.  You’re not challenging the status quo.  But when you have something to say, and when you want to be compensated for your work, now you are creating a wake.  In some cases, bookers don’t respect comics of the female gender, therefore, pay them less.  It is sort of known that back in the day, a now famous female comic was paid a lot less than all of the male headliners in Boston.  No wonder she left.    

In New York, it’s competitive.  Male comics will use their yang prowess to try and intimidate people they deem as inferior, I guess in an effort to stroke their own ego.  Either that or they’ll hit on you.  They’ll insult you.  At Times Square Arts Center, one of the comics said to me “I would never put two female comics on in a row…”  He really should just be embarrassed.  They also underestimate your  intelligence.  I don’t give a fuck what skinny, loser comics who are high have to say.  They are going for the easiest target which makes me question their intelligence and just screams insecurity.  They are trying to make me feel bad.  Look frightened little boy, it’s obvious you are steeped in self-hatred and exhaustion from having to suppress so many secret homosexual urges, that your shame only elicits intense insecurity, I’m here to tell ya, the rest of society takes care of my feeling bad about myself.  Women experience this constantly with sexist, objectifying images in advertising, in conversations and inappropriate glances.  Do you think your stupid comment is upsetting?  You’re just a buffoon, who’s clearly threatened by the possibility that a female comic will steal your shitty $25 dollar spot at a dump in the theatre district.  At the time I didn't respond.  

When frustrated with standup, I used to say “I should have been a dancer,” probably because society values women by their looks.  They really want us to just shut up and look good.  We are socialized to believe that women are second class citizens.  Female comics have to work hard despite this.  I think some women are confused about where their gender fits into performing.  They dress up too much.  They dress provocatively.  A lot of skin showing.  They look like a friggen peacock.  I like George Carlin.  He dressed in all black.  Like an artist should.  If you are a singer or a stripper, then by all means, wear the dress.  I just don’t see the connection with comedy.  You see minimalist theatre and they are in all black.  They’re not stuffed in a dress, in heels with their arms showing.    Everybody acts like I’m wrong because I want to be valued for my intelligence and talent and everything but my looks.  If I felt I was good looking, I wouldn’t be doing standup in the first place and female comics who use their looks are not into the craft and probably want to be an actress.  

This is a bigger issue than I thought.  Because a baby comes out of our person, we are somehow deemed as less than?   When you see a guy comic two years in, who automatically receives more credibility from the audience than your 14 years, it’s disheartening to say the least.  side note: I did read Gloria Steinem books when I was seventeen, followed by Camile Paglia, among others.  I blocked it out for a period of time.  I think for a while I chose to look the other way, for fear that I would be miserable if I was always thinking about this.  However, now that I do standup, and I’m a lot older, there is absolutely no escaping the staunch reality of sexism and inequality.  It only magnifies with time.

People have gone out of their way after a show to say “we don’t usually like female comics, but we really liked you.”  A booker of a big club in Boston said to me while we were backstage about a comic who was on stage, “she’s not that funny but she’s nice to look at.”   

Another time in Boston a booker told me right to my face that “all these paid comics are hacky…”  He was only referring to some of the funniest comedians ever on the planet.  He also mentioned my then husband.  Why would you say that to someone’s wife?  Was I supposed to be impressed by a guy who never paid comics upstairs from a Chinese restaurant?  Maybe people just think that my entire gender is dumb. 

[The word cunt doesn’t offend me at all.

Most of the time when I use it, I’m referring to a man]

-Tweet from me:  @stacykendro

Often society’s message is we’re just arm candy.  How quaint.  A large part of being female (and this is deep in the psyche of most women) is the need to ingratiate yourself to people.  That’s the hard part – being so dam agreeable.  We are socialized to make others feel comfortable, which means if you are a jerk to me, I will smile.  Sometimes, that is the thing for someone with manners to do.  However, don’t mistake my politeness for passivity.  Now I’m talking about New York.  In an effort to take the high road, or to make you believe you didn’t really get to me, I might not retaliate right away.  But just know that I’m Albanian.  I will be planning your demise.  Well, at least I will go home and write about you, but take heed because if you catch me on a bad day, who knows.  Even though “vendetta” is an Italian word, just ask people in the Bronx and they’ll tell you which nationality is scarier.

originally published 12/10/17

WHY DO I ALWAYS WANT TO MOVE BACK TO BOSTON?

I’m writing all this out because it helps me sort out the lunacy of being a creative person in New York.  I got weepy on the plane coming back from Florida which makes no sense (I don’t really do that).  I felt I wanted to move back to Boston.  I think that coming to New York because you’re a creative person is a great, yet terrible idea.  I think I take one step forward (just performed at the Friars Club), and three steps back (I drink more now than I ever did).

I still have this issue where I don’t want to emotionally commit to comedy. 

It’s hard to commit to anything, emotionally.  I think it’s funny (or not) that men have a hard time committing to women.  I resist committing to my career because that’s way scarier than giving someone half the house.  It’s a huge gamble.  A lot of people are doing it (in New York at any given time there is a free comedy show somewhere, several, even, on a single block). 

New York is a gamble and apparently I’m Ginger from Scorcese’s Casino cuz I’m rollin’ the dice baby.  Men don’t want to commit because it might ruin their life.  That’s the same reason I resist pushing with my career.  It’s fear.  Ah, that little bugger.  It also depends on what day you catch me on.  When I used to work Vegas twice a year, I was, in my mind, in show business for reals. 

Comedians are an interesting faction of show business, because we work the hardest and get the least respect.  We are like boxers.  We take all the risk.  We are the writer, producer, editor, performer, booking and marketing person.  So, No, your wife could not be a comedian.  No wonder I want to quit often.  But I’ve only felt that way since moving to New York so I blame the Yankees. 

We get the least respect because we are alone on stage so we get heckled sometimes, and the bookers are all frustrated performers with fickle personalities, who are just looking for an excuse not to book you.  I think I’m going to a Met game.

When I got booked in Vegas, I worked at the Riviera.  You got a pink hotel room overlooking the pool and comped dinners.  Let me tell you something, two shows a night for seven days, I woulda ate Chef Boy Ardee, I was so happy.  But the reality of a day job is enough to make you want to die by some epic, old school way like consumption or sticking your head in an oven.

This double life is what is getting to me.  (And I sort of get fired a lot).  I come back to the day job after Vegas, back to the meaninglessness and futility of it all, and it’s hard to take.  No wonder I drink too much.  It’s all garbage.  That is why I cried on the plane.  First of all, I am a New Englander.  Being in the 80 degree weather of Florida in December and then parting from it is reason enough, but as I find I am scrawling this out in an airport, I’m thinking there are other reasons as well.

Everybody who is in the arts, specifically in New York City has this feeling I suspect – even if you’re crying, wanting to quit, fearing failure and/or fearing success).  But there is something that we're getting as payoff.  I suspect that it is the satisfaction that we are forging our own way in a city that many don't have the balls to move to, never mind navigate the pot hole laden thoroughfares.  New York demands the best out of an artist.  That is a good thing.  It requires an amalgam into what we aspire to.  We have to grow into that person which requires shedding old parts of ourselves.  Ultimately it’s what we want.  We want to be changed.  We just didn’t know it was going to be this hard.

DEAD INSIDE/Rob the Mob

The only upside of getting sick is movie watching.  I seldom read when I’m ill.  Although I love reading, somehow when I have the flu or whatever, I afford myself the luxury of binge watching.  It is something I never do because my television isn’t hooked up and because I like to do creative things with my free time, oh ya and I’m weird.

At any rate, I watched this movie about a tough guy.  Tough guy is different than Bad boy.  I grew up in the 80’s where “bad boy” meant a metal or a rock guy with fucked up hair who drank & drugged.  Not my type.  I had rough boyfriends who always had weapons tucked away in various locations and had dubious ways of making money and dangerous friends, but never did I date a guy who listened to Metal.

In the movie, the guy gets out of prison.  His girlfriend picks him up.  They’re young-ish.  They get drunk, they have sex.  Next, he hashes out a heist.  They’re in love.  They’re in Queens.  They smoke a lot.  He gets a gun and they drive their giant Chevy Impala and act out their plan of holding up mafia social clubs in the neighborhood because he figures out that they have a lot of cash lying around these joints.

In act three, he looks at her and says “Florida is nice.  We should go there.  Marry me.”  This is the point of the movie where a girl tears up.  Me=nothing.  Nothing happened.  No moisture developed in either eye socket.  Doesn’t matter if you’re a broad from Boston or not.  There’s nothing like when a man softens enough to say that.  And these were great actors.  I mean they nailed this scene.  He is brutally handsome and the camera loves his face.  She is unconventionally pretty in a down to earth way.  She said yes.  I should have been balling.

But, nothing.  Am I dead inside ?

I had this marriage that ended badly.  I’ve learned over time, you can’t hold on to how you wish things could be.  (I used to have a line in my act, “I just want to go to my gay boyfriend’s house, listen to Peggy Lee and cry over what could have been.”  These days I'm less fag hag, more John Goodman.

Now that I’m older I see how you can’t long for the you that was lost in that time period, that elusive "you" that you can’t get back.  BUT, I’m also stuck.  I’m not dating.  It’s like I’m blocked.  Like a giant black box is covering my heart completely. 

I can’t help feeling there is something missing.  As if there is some seed within me that hasn’t been cooked yet that needs time before I am ready, really ready, to address the black box.  I sort of hate personal growth, gurus and motivational speakers.  I hate shrinks, I hate mediation and I hate the notion that we all need “fixing.”  Shrinks I hate because at the end of a session you feel awful and then you go, “here’s a hundred bucks.” 

Maybe it’s exactly what I need though.  Life is nothing if it isn’t paradox.  

I used to cry at episodes of Mad About You.  That was the young me.  It was a really well written sitcom about a married couple where they respectively resolved all the dilemmas that plagued their lives in under twenty minutes.  Not really sure why that did it for me, but it did.  I didn’t even cry at Casablanca (because boo hoo he’s gonna die). <--- that makes me seem shallow and vacuous, but I think romance like that plain doesn’t exist.   

Maybe I’m not dead inside but the old self in me is dying.  Am I headed for a re-birth?

THIS IS A TOUGH ONE

The short version=I got a divorce and I haven’t dated. 

The longer version=

My tough girl shell is thick.  Recently I heard something on the radio that was describing men as distant and unemotional.  I grew up with my dad so I have taken on many male characteristics like drinking and watching boxing, and what they mentioned.

Writing about what is happening right now is really intimidating because you gotta be honest and junk.  It’s not that I want to remain a mystery (I suspect that is exactly what I want), but I will go as far as to say that I don’t like people knowing more about me than I want them to.  This is all me just prefacing.

I haven’t even gotten to my career and my situation.  I’m still prefacing.  (Is that a verb?)  I am aware that I am guarded.  The most incredible human (this guy Michael who passed) told me so.  I don’t like anyone.  It’s kind of a problem.  So I’m writing this to figure out what is going on, so that I can get some insight and then maybe get passed it.  I have a feeling that the act of writing is going to assist me. (insert gunshot noise)

I love to go around the world with my ideas before I get into what is true, the core stuff, which is the meat of it all.  I should always be trying to go for that, because I am an artist.  Growing up with a sick mother who left, and a dad that was working and drank and then married an alcoholic monster, I learned to pretend everything is ok to such an exquisite perfection that half of the time, I don’t even know what I’m feeling.  I’m getting better at sorting it all out.  I’m figuring out that the stuff that is buried is where the gold is.    

I do stand-up comedy.  Kinda weird.  It sets me apart from the ordinary human inasmuch as I am a being, who writes and then performs what I write, and then people give me money for it.  Simply put, this is not a traditionally female thing to do (not my opinion and/or not me being sexist, it’s more of an observation of society and I’m trying to get to a hypothesis as to why I’m still single).  On stage, alone, on the proverbial soapbox, saying my plea to the masses is sort of what it is.  In old times vernacular they called it an orator.  It is not something that is yin energy.  It is yang/male energy.  Because I’ve been around comedy a while, I’m here to tell you that when a male person is doing the aforementioned type of performance, it is extremely attractive to women.  Not quite rockstar status, but in the same way.  Because, I guess, the person is taking control, they are performing, it’s creative and thus, a turn-on.  But when a woman is on stage, it does not have the same effect on men.

All of that is true, which is convenient if you are trying to sort of hide from your own sexuality.  (I wear men’s Adidas pants only, and lately I sexually identify as a janitor).  I don’t want to give my failed marriage the dignity of writing about it.  I want Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for that chapter of my life.  That was that movie where you could go to a place and they would erase all your memories from a relationship. 

It’s just that my divorce was so Shakespearean.  People used to ask me about it and I didn’t even know how to respond.  I was so traumatized by it.  If we had parted ways maybe two years sooner, it still would have sucked, but it wouldn’t have been so epically tragic.  (I kind of want to write this whole thing over again). 

Why is this so hard?  I feel like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in the City, except I’m having no sex and my articles aren’t published.  Although ironically, I recently met Chris Noth.  His friend was hitting on my girlfriend Laura hard at Mimi’s on Second Avenue.  At any rate, Noth is still hot, albeit gray, but he’s Greek (they’re the worst) and married.   

If you truly love someone, like for reals, with all your heart and soul, and you love spending time with them, you go before God and all, I’m here to tell you: it still might not work.  What the hell kinda fucked up shit is that?

Now the article has started.  This right here is where I’m stuck.  I never got my answer.  I decided it was God’s fault (since we got married in church in Southie, with the candles and the procession and everything).    

This is a tough one because I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to write about it.  I want to be like Woody Allen.  His screenplays are so honest and are nothing short of brilliant.  In Manhattan, Woody Allen’s character tries to run over his ex-wife’s new lesbian lover.  The ex-wife is publishing a tell-all.  He is so specific in characterizing neurosis.  Instead of furiously posting to my zero followers on blogspot, maybe I should write a play.  Or try to run someone over.

Well let’s close out this debacle of a blog so I can write a play about a vindictive Albanian princess who plots the untimely demise of people who have wronged her and Chaz Palmeinteri will play the sleazy villan.   

Divorce, Rhino Bed, Pall Mall Smoking Cat

I totally wrote this blog and then went to re-open the document; I got that crazy sound effect the laptop makes when you've made a fatal error and it wouldn't open. So now I have to remember what exactly I was thinking about - or what I wrote at all. Do I start from scratch?   I guess I have to. The divorce part is easy; I got a divorce, The End. (condensed version).

The Rhino part - well, at the time, I wrote a lot of weird animal stuff. For a while it was kangaroos. They have 3 vaginas. (look it up). They can be perpetually pregnant like a Catholic. It's amazing. Then it was pterodactyls. (see tweets below)

went to the store for peacock gloves and jarred pterodactyl queefs. found neither.

going to cryogenically mutate my uterus to house a small pterodactyl that I get from 

the future or maybe I'll just go to the store.

But the rhino part of the blog/part of my life was derived out of having to sleep on an inflatable bed that was enormous and when fully inflated you could bounce a rhinoceros off of it. PAM !

Divorce/Rhino/Pall Malls Part I

You get a divorce and then you have to start over. It's cool dawg. So you figure out how to go about life sleeping alone. There's a lot more to it than that but that's the jump-off. As a comic you'd think it'd be a great source of things to write about, but really, you have all this rage.

It's funny, you'd think it would be about your struggles to cook for one, or what to do with your time since you're not nagging or cleaning up after someone. But no. It's a death. So the first thing you face is failure. Everything that was in your psyche, your way of looking at the world is done. No big, you're just devastated. And then your friends/colleagues chime in, "you'll meet someone" or "you weren't happy anyway."

You begin to write all this angry material about those people. You think to yourself "what are they talking about anyway... I'm not looking to meet someone - I hate everyone, including them. Why would I be on the market to do it all over again?"

So then you move in with gay guys that cheer you up just because of who they are. Like, when they are ironing in the kitchen in their underwear, listening to Aliyah. They understand you the way a mother would. "You're fine girl, a fresh start is what's happening and you'll come out stronger in the end." You cook together and watch American Idol and things start to smooth out a little.

So you start to write some other stuff that's less angry, more funny. I began a steady track of getting on stage a lot. I drove out to weird parts of New England to do fundraisers to very receptive audiences. My vibration started to rise some. I became the house emcee and Nick's Comedy Stop in Boston. More progress and momentum.

I worked doing odd jobs. I house painted. I took care of my friend's chain-smoking mother, helping her with housework, driving her to the doctor and to get scratch tickets.

Eventually I wanted to really buckle down and get ready to move to New York. I had no savings, so I moved into my girlfriend's house in Saugus and worked a full-time job, while working as a comic every weekend. It was me, her and the cat. The cat meowed frequently and sounded like she smoked 4 packs of Pall Malls a day. The futon in Saugus was not good, so I borrowed my friend's gigantic, inflatable bed (yep, another inflatable bed) and dreamed of rhinos bouncing off of it.  I'm always going to wonder if the original Divorce/Rhino/Pall Mall Smoking cat was funnier, but I posted this, nonetheless.