Tag: Miscellaneous

  • I am from

    I am from

    From 2004 to 2016, I taught freshman/intro writing courses at UNCG, Elon University, and Guilford College in NC. Every semester, I’d begin with the same first assignment: compose your own version of Mary Pipher’s “I Am From” poem.

    The poem comes from Pipher’s book The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community (July 2003). It reads:

    I am from Avis and Frank, Agnes and Fred, Glessie May and Mark.
    From the Ozark Mountains and the high plains of Eastern Colorado,
    From mountain snowmelt and lazy southern creeks filled with water moccasins.
    I am from oatmeal eaters, gizzard eaters, haggis and raccoon eaters.
    I’m from craziness, darkness, sensuality, and humor.
    From intense do-gooders struggling through ranch winters in the 1920s.
    I’m from “If you can’t say anything nice about someone don’t say anything” and “Pretty is as pretty does” and “Shit-mucklety brown” and “Damn it all to hell.”
    I’m from no-dancing-or-drinking Methodists, but cards were okay except on Sunday, and from tent-meeting Holy Rollers,
    From farmers, soldiers, bootleggers, and teachers.
    I’m from Schwinn girl’s bike, 1950 Mercury two-door, and West Side Story.
    I’m from coyotes, baby field mice, chlorinous swimming pools, Milky Way and harvest moon over Nebraska cornfields.
    I’m from muddy Platte and Republican,
    From cottonwood and mulberry, tumbleweed and switchgrass
    From Willa Cather, Walt Whitman, and Janis Joplin,
    My own sweet dance unfolding against a cast of women in aprons and barefoot men in overalls.

    I loved how students would pour their hearts and souls into their poems, and reading them became my favorite tradition in the classroom. I would often write a version, too. While it feels like an anxiety-inducing amount of personal info to put online, my version is below. 

    Working on this poem every year It helped (and continues to help) remind me that all writing is rewriting: you start with something you know and then revisit it again and again on the page. That, and every good editor is worth 1000 good writers. Mine is awesome.

    Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall!”:

    I am from Susan and Stephen, Mary and R.L., Mary and Tom,

    From Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains and the sub-sea level cobblestones of Charleston,

    From nuclear summers never more than 75 yards from water.

    I am from eggs and toast breakfasts, sandwich lunches, and sensible dinners (3 times a day).

    I am from loyalty, grief, fear, and generosity,

    From stern, Depression Era caution and work ethic.

    I’m from “You’re pushing it” to “The morning doesn’t start until you walk in” to “No it was not a heart attack” to “Moose Man.”

    I’m from church every Sunday (but getting to eat out for lunch after) and strict tv allowance (but I could stay up to watch Golden Girls and SNL),

    From soldiers, scientists, lawyers, and wanderers.

    I’m from hand-me-down Legos to my own sets to a 1992 wax box of Donruss for getting good grades to a shared Nintendo that was very generously mostly mine.

    I’m from being in a pool every hour from Memorial to Labor Day and calloused feet from lifeguarding on baking pavement,

    From Dad on Orion’s Belt and stargazing after Lessons and Carols in December.

    I’m from an Ashley, a Cooper, and centrist Democrats,

    From sweetgrass and pluff mud on the breeze and mosquitoes the size of horseflies,

    From Mozart to McMurtry to “Meet the Beatles” (and no other album of theirs),

    My own solo performance set against a backdrop of love and sacrifice.

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  • A new show

    A new show

    One time in March 2019—two weeks before I debuted a new solo sketch comedy show at the North Carolina Comedy Festival—my mom died.

    It didn’t come completely out of nowhere. She had been battling metastatic breast cancer, tirelessly, for 15 years. But then, finally, she did what euphemists call “turning the corner.” This time, her doctors said, she’d likely be gone within six months.

    I let myself be swallowed in my new show. It proved to be a good distraction, balancing my learning about hospice care, how it works, and what it actually provides. The show kept me going when I learned the term “active decline” and saw what it meant firsthand. I was learning and being distracted in Greensboro, NC, while my mom was receiving excellent hospice care in my birth town of Charleston, SC.

    Still, I had six months, I thought. Six months to perfect my Jason Statham impression. Six months to sharpen my Foghorn Leghorn-esque accent for a re-imagining of the life of Rutherford B. Hayes as a Southern president (the inconvenient and unfortunate fact that Hayes happened to be born in Connecticut and served in Ohio was, obviously, not enough to stand in the way of a bit). Six months to buy or make better props and costumes. Six months to maybe even write a new sketch about writing a sketch while your mom is actively dying.

    If all went well, I’d even have some time after the show to incorporate feedback from the festival performance. Part of me was already trying to figure out how to get the show down to Charleston so she could see it after its debut. Or maybe I could try to bring her to me, so she could attend the festival. It would be a logistical nightmare, but I figured I could make it happen.

    But that last corner turned really quickly, and she passed two weeks before I set foot on stage.

    One thing to know about active decline is “months” can also mean either “weeks” or “days.” In my mom’s case it was weeks, the middle child of undesirable options. After one of her doctors told me “maybe six months more,” mom lasted almost exactly six weeks.

    We held mom’s memorial four days after she passed. Then it was time to go back to NC. Back to my 9-to-5 job in content marketing. Back to the comedy club. Back to festival prep. Back to the drawing board on the first sketch of my show, which, for whatever reason, I now hated. It was fine, I guess, but the first victim of my untherapized grief was a local events coordinator with a fun, quirky accent and obsession with the Pro Bowl.

    So, I furiously scrapped my show’s opening sketch. I needed something new.

    Some twenty years earlier, I took my mom to a Second City improv show, which was part of the annual Spoleto Arts Festival in Charleston. At that point, I had been doing improv for less than a year, but I knew all about Second City because of Saturday Night Live (a show I began watching at my mom’s suggestion).

    The show was great, and it ended with an improv game that turned into a rant about the pitfalls of capitalism. During the rant, the other players combed the audience for Blockbuster Video membership cards (it was very much the year 2000) and owners who would be brave enough to see their plastic skeleton key for cheaper Buncha Crunch get destroyed live. Sticking it to the man used to mean something; we used to be a proper country.

    Anyway, my mom and I shared a Blockbuster Video account even before we shared a cell phone plan. You had your name printed on the back, and I’m not going to lie, it felt like a big deal. Our bond over Friday rentals was sacred, but she looked at me and said, “Well, we have two cards, this might be fun.” Obviously I agreed, and we handed over one of our cards to be bisected live.

    As the performer destroyed the cards on stage to ring out solidarity for an anti-capitalist bit into the ether, he’d read out the names on the back of each card. He was so stunned at the number of volunteers, his proclamations got louder and bolder. “Jane Thompson is a brave soldier!” “Tom Jamison is a warrior poet!” And for my mom: “Mary C. Beshere is a badass motherfucker!”

    That was the last one he read, and the audience went nuts. In the middle of the cacophony, my mom turned to me and nonchalantly said, “You know? I’ve never been called that before.” Those words solidified in me a need to continue doing comedy.

    Back in 2019, it was only appropriate, then, that I begin the new version of my solo sketch show with a rant on Blockbuster Video.

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