the truth about meditation

so...ten days/ten nights at twelve hours of meditation/day equals the complete script to my one woman show: Coochie Magic: a SpokenWord Musical Comedy.

this was the first time i broke the rules. i've done s.n. goenka's vipassana retreat 8 times over the last six years and this was the FIRST TIME I BROKE THE RULES! up at 4am and meditating until 9pm, but this time, during the breaks, i WROTE MY ASS OFF!! I wrote my first full length show and composed five songs in less than 10 days (because i really was trying not to write!) anis mojani started the whole writing thing by TEXT MESSAGING ME TWO DAYS INTO THE RETREAT AFTER I CLEARLY TOLD HIM THAT I WOULD BE AT A 10 DAY SILENT RETREAT WHERE I WASN'T ALLOWED TO WRITE!!! i have a friend who told me just before i went in that i needed a 12 step program for text messaging. he calls me "two thumbs and a blackberry", because of the long ass letters i text him every week. matter of fact, i curated the entire common ground benefit by text message right before i went on retreat. the beautiful thing about texting is that it's more immediate than email and less committed than a conversation...which suits my intimacy issues just fine...i can talk to you without really, well, talking to you.

back to my sript though... the shyt is hilarious. for the last six years i've been working on a project called "56: memoire of a black girls sexual coming of age" and i tell you, it's the never ending story. and the thing is, i've been so attached to telling the story as a book. but one of my master teachers has been telling me for years that when you attach yourself to an idea of how something is, you cancel out a whole range of possiblilities for what it could be. so, at the retreat, i just let go of my memoir being a book and it came to me that since i'd been excerpting pieces from it as spoken word anyways, why not just transform it into a theatre piece?? brilliant-eh?

anyways...am excited to see where it goes. will be testing it out this summer at workshops and open mics around nYc. i've never done standup before so i'ma take some of the monologues to standup clubs too...we'll see how it goes...more later...cbell