Embracing the Bay — A Creative Odyssey from Clown Auditions to Kink Parties in California’s Bay Area

Follow me — a 30-something aerialist — writer and instructor as I dive into creativity — self-discovery and eclectic culture

We wiggled on the ground as if we were emerging from primordial goo. Only push and pull. I wanted to look around and see what everyone else was doing if I was doing it right.

Thresholds I stand on. With my ass out, or tucked in. I thought I wanted to dress like a springtime fairy: a microprint of yellow and green flowers on a black thong leotard, underneath a sheer white calf-length skirt, stripes horizontal along the edge, and a wide waistband, pulled up to my actual waist. Large fairy ears with multiple piercings.

I push with my arms. I pull with my feet. My butt may be getting dirty on this hardwood floor. Are they going to pick me? Am I human soup for the soul enough for their liking? Are my moldable? Am I bold? Do they find me sincere? Are they looking for sincerity?

It is nighttime and it is cool. I feel like suspenders. A multicolored button-down shirt. A one-piece sheer snap crotch bodysuit, black with burgundy cups.

We all die. And one of us rises. Become something with the ability to move from side to side. We are all now side-to-side movers. Then we die again.

It turns out, I don’t like receiving electrical currents but I do like to electrify Fuzzy’s homemade welding pipe and chain flogger and smack them with it.

Am I wiggling correctly? This is not the point. I told myself to come here and have fun. This is the process of putting myself out there more. Not expecting to be the best or even wanted. But I can’t help but want those things, despite my intentions.

He was there, but I didn’t see him. We talked last time at the BYOB bar in the red room with the amoeba/nipple paintings on the wall. He sort of faded away and disappeared last time, letting me know later it was because he wasn’t feeling himself, not because he wasn’t feeling me.

Now one of us was moving their head in the direction of the sun. Sun-seeking is a life-preserving behavior. But of course, we all had to die, yet again. The death was a welcome relief to some. A rest between tryings. I was anticipatory, worried about getting it wrong, and not sure what they were looking for in the person who self-selected to be the one who survived and rose again alone, first, on a particular display.

Did I want to try some rope play together sometime? Fuzzy asked me. Sure. He said he likes to lab with people and with people he feels comfortable with he says, he is cool with some sensual rope play. I like how that is laid out. How the movement into shared spaces and props is intentional, slow, and boundaries.

We became salamander-like, amphibians, all the way up to mammals and humans. We died over and over and then the game came to an end.

I check my phone a couple of times, to see if he has written me back. He said he would be at this party. That he was hanging out with his mom, also from New York. We had discussed pizza last time. His laugh was really cute.

I liked the flocking. We were only 3, and the other two women were soft, silly, dancers, one tall and one short. Both graceful. My face contorted. My desire to be noticed. We were together, we were following. We were leading.

Today he sent me a message. I think you left your water bottle at the venue. I did, I say. I was going to retrieve it and I got caught up in the ongoing battle of the chips. One guy wanted to put all three types together into one massive bowl. Barbeque, Sour Cream and Onion, and Cool Ranch Doritos. I said absolutely not and the BBQ went on their own in a squared bowl, since I like them least, and the other two into the big bowl with the chip bag skin of the Sour Cream and Onion Stuffed with two small paper plates devised as a border. Fuzzy pointed out that someone had removed this ingenious solution and now they were starting to touch.

We had to please the Majesty. I became a cat. When I started to scratch another player’s back antagonistically, and she yelled.

“Off with your head!”

I had to roll off stage.

Sorry, I missed you. Would you like to try and get together on our own?

We had seven minutes to create a four-person scene. There was something to be buried, some sort of problem, and a conclusion must be reached. Two of my flocking people were in my group again, along with a jittery woman I found very funny and sweet. We negotiated. I suggested we be dogs. She suggested we speak in dog form.

“New Butt!”

“Squirrel!”

We would be departing the liminal space, the container, relying on our skills and lacks, in wide open space. Sure. Let’s try.

The ex of an ex-friend was at the audition.

As we got our shoes on, he said:

“Now we all go to lunch!”

Four of us did. We ate hot Thai food in the hot California almost summer. He talked too much about himself. Another of the women turned out to be an aerialist, studying under the same person I did about eight years ago, we missed each other by a matter of half a year. She said when she saw me moving, she moved like an aerialist. The broad shoulders. The engaged abs.

At the Kink party, I saw an aerial friend, with her partner. A guy walked in with a tall, mostly naked woman. I saw him through the courtyard. I was sure he was the guy I was texting with earlier, whose house I slept at last night, who sweated a pond into the ocean water sheets under the coral shell comforter and had left my last barrage of texts about a reading nook in his place being more punishment corner than comfy and how I could fix it with a hooded bunny blanket, maybe, unanswered. I felt a sinking feeling at him being here with another woman. My texts were left unread, about him not inviting me to the corner nook to be his fuzzy little bunny. But it wasn’t him. It was his quieter, nervous-er doppelganger who probably felt a bit uncomfortable at how much I had started to figure out that it was someone else.

Two hours after crossing into a studio, where the ceilings were high and the people were colorful and disheveled, ready for play, I exited. But brought some of the play with me, into my day. Got a little more into things with the 2–5 year olds I taught later that day. Under the ladder, propped up by two blocks, was a green mat that one boy declared a pond. The bean bags were fish. I decided the red mat nearby was a lava hot tub and made bubble sounds. The fish got hot in there and we had to send them back into the pond to cool down. A girl dipped her feet in and took a nap on the block rocks that held up the ladder. She covered herself in a translucent scarf.

The night and the day were a series of circles, closer and farther away. People overlapping from here and spritely appearing there, when first seen somewhere else. A community expanding and Venn diagramming itself in front of me. Discovery, entering and exiting doorways, wandering the rooms of what was within, seeing what came with me when going back out.