How to Love a Wolf: Corona, March 20, 2020

How to Love a Wolf: Corona, March 20, 2020

Tonight we had a Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak Board of Directors meeting. Our long-term president stepped down and a long-term friend and informal (now formal) advisor joined. This is a big deal. We had a good meeting. We always do. (In the wave of artists bemoaning non-profit structures I have remained steadfastly committed to the humans on my board: their guidance, humor, perspective, support. I trust them, and they trust me. There. I solved it.)

After the meeting I reconnected with one of the senior members of the board, calling him on his Los Angeles cell after disconnecting from the shared conference line. I stepped outside onto my porch in Ohio in my socked-feet, hoping to see deer. I reminded him, with a catch in my heart, about the time we spoke on the phone—it was a kind of deja vu— before he was a board member, of the shooting at Columbine. I recalled him asking me what I thought, how I was dealing with this break-down of our world. At the time I was oblivious, sort of. I was so wrapped up in my world of building this dance company, choreographing, understanding myself as an artist, that I only minimally grasped this assault to our way of being, to our humanness. Each shooting to follow, though, I paused with longer and longer dismay, paused with more reverence for the threat of complacency. Each time I thought of this conversation with Dan: I recalled the linen-y folds of my bedding, the pinks of the ricocheted outside light pouring into my small bedroom just off Devon Avenue in Chicago, the sound of the postal workers in the alley just outside my only window, the yellow of my old bulb screwed into a tall found lamp, painted to match my room, and the distant and earnest voice of my concerned friend.

Tonight it has been almost twenty one years. This friend—we survived high school in the '80s—has now been on my Board of Directors for more than a decade. We were discussing my University's response to COVID-19. I told him about the conversations with my classes today. The concern for the students from China. The emotional links to 9/11 and the sense of sudden change, immersion in the unknown. The feeling of an umbrella of the difficult-real cloaking the coming of spring; the coming of spring, the always of spring.

I opened my door and let the screen door hover, not quite closed.

I turned up the heat on my dinner of leftovers, the oils and garlic and crisp of salt.

I broke off a piece of leftover sourdough bread and tasted it, cold and satisfying.

I remembered the exchange in my office today with a friend and colleague who asked, "what do you think?" I replied, in spite of myself, a blurt, an instant: "I think, 'Don't fuck with me'."

The words were out before I could consider them. It was as if some intrinsic self-preserving force had taken possession and spoken for me. He laughed, sort of. He was surprised, not expecting that fervor. "That's not what I thought you were going to say." I said I meant it. I wanted to rush home, to my new home, my farmhouse, my temporary soft, my privacy, the space where I collect myself. I wanted to say, again and again, "don't fuck with me." I wanted to wrap everything, every breath, around everything that has ever mattered, and, snarling, muttering, shouting, heaving, to say: don't fuck with me.

But I don't know who I am talking to. I don't know who is not to fuck with me.

____

This afternoon, I logged onto Instacart.com and ordered apples, bananas, granola bars, four kinds of tea, rice cakes and other sundries to add to the pile of allergy-friendly snacks I had already set up for my dancers in my advanced class, stashed into the foot lockers in the too-small dressing room. I grabbed the hot water kettle from the faculty copy room and shuffled my way down the halls, with disposable cups balanced under my chin, knowing these students would claim a disposable cup and, likely, label it with sharpie with their name. I placed the dumb kettle on the carpet floor; I set it to boil, and watched the students tear into the tea (mint, ginger, english breakfast) and pour the scalding water for each other, each gesture a feat of limbs crossing limbs, delicate feats of not-burning one another, not tripping; a refill, a reboil: fill everyone's cup.

In time, we made it to a circle. We talked. In time, we made it to a dance class, one of the best. In time, we delved into details: all poetry, nonsense, precision, and laughter. The room smelled of mint, and ginger, and sweat, and tiger balm.

Don't fuck with me.