Female voice: It’s fun to play with. It’s a really sensitive instrument…
When I was living with John, every morning I’d get up, smoke a few joints, turn up the stereo really loud, and run around and clean the house. We had a lot of fighting about, like, I lived there and didn’t contribute enough to the housework and, in other words you know, he called me his ‘old lady’ and I didn’t do any of the things an ‘old lady’ is supposed to do.
Male voice: A woman, it’s more work because she has to take care of all these things, you see, the soup, you see, the paint, you see, mother has to do that.
Female voice: Very normal girl… I said to him, you know, you want me to be your old lady and what am I supposed to do, and he said ‘Well, like I’ll support you. You can stay home and paint all day. You can sell killer weed.’ And my feminism was all a bunch of shit, because what I was, said he, was an artist, and I was his old lady, and I was going to stay home and I was going to sell killer weed… and I was going to dust the coffin every morning…
Two female voices speaking at once: Painting helps me resolve a split between body and mind – from the skull, an actual object and combine it with the eye - This drawing is such a trip to do because - my skull and combined it with the eye – an actual object – from the skull and combined it with the eye – first time I’ve ever drawn from life – my skull and combined it with the eye – an actual object – from the skull and combined it with the eye.
Female voice: It’s because I feel so hemmed in that, like I have to keep myself free inside. You know what I mean? Yea, I know what you mean.
Self. I hear it after I say it. My head’s sort of more in flux. Like it’s picking up every inflection. Sometimes it’s not there at all. I putty, really putty, because I really change with the person I’m with, really, and I feel like I’m always running around after my head and I never quite catch up with it.
I wanted to throw it out the window and it’s good technically.
Male voice: It’s work you’re going to have and responsibility, see? So that gives you an idea of how a woman suffered. She actually suffered over the years what she had to do, you see, and you’ll do it, the same way. Many a day you’ll suffer, see, because you’re going to be doing the things that mother did. And, maybe it’s even worse than the time mother did it because food today is worse than it was years ago…
Male voice: What tragedy befell you?
Male voice: Ah you’re so goddamn ‘fraid of everything, ‘fraid of this, ‘fraid of that, in the meantime you fuck everything up.
Female voice: Hey hey, hey, hey, hey. My brother put one of his paintings in the bathtub. I was concerned. ‘Jeffrey’ I said, ‘what’s your painting doing in the bathtub?’ ‘Visiting’ he said.
Female voice: I’m me, and I know me. I’ve dealt with the people as me. I’ve charmed the pants off the world for twenty-seven years. Everyday I woke up, I feel guilty over ‘I didn’t do this, I didn’t do that’. Mentally I grew up much, much too fast, so fast, that I missed an entire childhood that I never felt free. But I know something about me. I carry a universal feeling in me. I never had the freedom, but I’ve always lived under my virgidity and it’s at this point that I now know what a freedom is. Aesthetically, it’s on the same vein. It’s enriched, it’s 3-D, it’s almost romantic. It is, you know, I’m a romantic. That’s perfectly justified to me. I don’t, I don’t feel guilty about one thing. It’s a very real freedom that I’ve worked towards, that I can finally believe in, a freedom that I have. I was very rigid, I consider myself rigid no longer. I’m not deluding myself, I’ve accepted myself for what I am, and I’m being honest. No more bullshit. But I think that people have looked at me being different from what I am. But I can only do the best thing. Otherwise, if I didn’t do the best thing, then I’d feel badly that I didn’t do the best thing, and I know when it’s the best, and I know when I’m not doing it. And that’s not coping. And that’s not coping, that’s living…
Female voice: But the biggest thing that I’ve learned besides accepting one’s self for what one is, which this is part of it – is we’ve been brought up in an incredible existence… It has… it’s been so intense, our lifetime, that we’ve lived a lifetime before a lifetime….
Female voice: I can’t see, I can’t see, I can’t see… So I covered my left eye with my hand, I can’t see… and I stared at the sun with my right eye…. I can’t see, I can’t see….
Male voice: You see, women go through hell, absolutely.
Male voice: You’ll have fight with yourself…and….work with mother, you see, because you’ll be doing these here, you see here, you’ll take your dishes, you’ll wash them away. You see?
Female voice: When you walk,through… Betzy, when you walk, through a storm, keep your head… when… OK…when you walk… Me and Nancy used to sing this song all the time. Shut up, if you just didn’t make me… Me and my sister used to sing this song because it was our contest who had the best voice. We’d either sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, or we’d sing… Oh God…. Right like this… Ready? Hit it….
Female voice: Laur came down to Maryland and one night we went out with Fat Frank who’s a friend of John’s who I’ve known for years, and this guy Smokey. And we were in the grocery store buying some beer and Laur goes to me ‘I’m going to fuck him’. She says, ‘You don’t know, when I get like this, I get crazy, I could fuck all these men’. And I said, ‘what am I going to do, I don’t want to fuck Fat Frank, he weighs three hundred pounds!?’ And so, like, we went to the apartment and we were getting high, switching stories around, and she took Smokey into the other room. And so I thought ‘Oh hell, what the fuck…’ So we stayed there and we did ‘ludes and we fucked for like twenty hours, you know,me, her and Smokey. And the next day she said to me ‘You know? Making love to a woman is like I always thought it would be. It’s like drawing… drawing…’
Female voice singing: When you walk through a storm keep your head up high and don’t be afraid of the dark…
