THAT MORNING

Work on a soft sculpture, the Mertiger, a nearly life-size soft sculpture of a tigress with a furry dolphin tail. She has a mane of dreadlocks now, but I sew some more short ones for the front; I think she'll look cuter with bangs.

THAT AFTERNOON

In the afternoon, go with friends to see Shakespeare's The Tempest in Hinkel Park, Berkeley. Mike the driver gets lost, even though he's been here before. Why? He listened to riders with conflicting map-apps, rather than trusting his own knowledge of the Berkeley hills. As we wander, I feel hijacked by bad apps....

So we end up late and have to sit in back where I can barely hear--and it's Shakespeare, you NEED to hear clearly.

Still, the staging is fun--the troupe uses sails for backdrops, waves and weather, they dance and sing (my friend Nic Griffin is one of the musicians), the witch Sycorax is onstage as her strange backstory is told, Ariel's attendant sprites are visible too. Prospero's interesting--clearly unstable, benevolent one second then as snarling as Caliban--makes me wonder if his brother "usurped" his dukedom or took over to protect it. Caliban's played as a Caribbean woman. Her realm too has been stolen by a usurper: Prospero. Still, he relents in the end, frees the spirits and Caliban, lets his daughter Miranda enter the wider world...

THAT EVENING

I work hard on the text for Deer Vs. Pigs, a complex trio of furry dreams:

A talking doe faces high school

A classmate, a busty pig-girl, tries hard to be seductive, but it just doesn't work for me

A TV choir of My Little Pony figures--but adult, sexy, wingless, hornless, & in a different cartooning style

THAT NIGHT

A gifted girl, a groomed princess like Miranda in The Tempest, develops her talents to the point her Cutie Mark appears early. Apparently this world is like the My Little Pony universe; on the day when your find your life-calling, a brand declaring the New You blooms painlessly on your flank: a Cutie Mark.

I'm not clear how we could see the Marks, but we could. I know we were two-leg folks not four-leg, but I don't recall how we bared our Marks:

1. Did we have swiss-cheese holes sewn into all our clothes to show off our flanks? (Brrr....)
2. Were we full-on nudists? (Double brrr!) Or...
3. Were we like reared-up Ponies with hands (definitely hands not hooves), who saw fur as normal and clothes as unnecessary?

To illustrate the dream, I guess I'll have to pick one.

Or do I? Here, I'll draw all three versions of Miranda as Three Graces on a field of potential Cutie Marks...

Fur or not, clothes or not, in the dream you always showed your Cutie Mark--showed others who you are. Hide it, live in the closet? In Miranda's world that was just inconceivable!

Though visibility has disadvantages. In her teens, Miranda is kidnapped--and her abductors rely on her Cutie Mark to identify her as their target! And the mark reveals her special talents, so they know what tricks to expect. Escape's unlikely--her mark gives too much away.

But they forget--most teens have only recently won their mark; it defines them well. But Miranda was precocious--she won hers well before puberty. Just a few years, but a significant fraction of her young life. Even in the few years since then, she's been developing in directions her mark fails to show!

So both her kidnappers AND her rescuers define her the default way, by her Mark--and it's by now it's deceptive. Not false, but too narrow to reveal the full Miranda. She's going to escape, I know, using talents both her abductors and rescuers can see she lacks. But they're wrong; her Mark's out of date.

Do Cutie Marks change? If so, do they change fast enough to show the current you? Or do they always lag, lying a little? Seems like they do. Only question is, how much.

And does that timelag only fool jerks like kidnappers into thinking you're less than you are?

What if it fools you too?

NOTES

• Equine people, Cutie Mark: the dream I'm sketching, Deer Vs. Pigs, refers to My Little Pony; the Cutie Mark comes straight from that show; getting your mark is THE mark of maturity. You can reinterpret a cutie mark in the light of later maturation, but on the show, no mark's ever physically changed.
• Precocious: I was. Read at 2, puberty 8-9, mentally adult by 10. Developing fast, though, doesn't mean you stop...
• Tattoo bared: the actress playing Miranda in The Tempest had a huge tattoo on her arm. Startled me a bit--Miranda grew up on a desert island, where'd she get a tat? Not the fairies, surely, and not Dad. Suggests more intimacy with Caliban than we've seen.
• Kidnapped, outdated info: Mike the driver trusted a bad map-app that led us everywhere in Berkeley BUT to The Tempest. I felt kidnapped.
• Outgrown her mark, different talents now: the dream seems to be saying my self-image used to be realistic, but it's stayed static as a tat, and I've grown; need to update. But in what areas? The only clue is... Miranda, that bright but naïve and dutiful daughter of a reclusive wizard, who at the end of the play escapes her isolation.

NOTE A YEAR LATER

I'm still convinced my that my lifework is just to do the art, writing & music I dream (because no one else seems to dream stuff like this). But I'm equally convinced the dream was right; my lifework, my Cutie Mark, doesn't reflect new growth. Like Miranda, I've lived quietly, reclusively, working away... when I want more. A wider world than my magic island. Have I kidnapped myself, mistaken my lifework for my life? What about love and risk, what about... life-play?

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