Thursday, April 3, 2014

The Laurie Boris Emotional Idiot Grant


(This is a piece I wrote to perform at the Woodstock Writers Festival Story Slam. The topic, "I am an emotional idiot" was inspired by the work of author Maggie Estep, who died earlier this year.)

When it comes to breaking up with men, I am an emotional idiot at genius levels. Maybe that’s why I’ve been with the same guy for over twenty-five years.

See, I don’t want to HURT anyone…so I string out the breakups. I procrastinate. Maybe until… one of us moves to another city…or he gets married…

Breaking up with the average guy was hard enough, but I’m partial to creative men.

Creative men are so sexy. They sing songs about you, they write poetry about you, they want to paint you naked…holding fruit, for some reason. Or a kitten. Yeah, because when I’m hanging out naked, I relish the idea of eighteen razor sharp claws gripping my bare flesh. Or…fruit salad.

Creative men are great…or at least the ones I’ve chosen were. Until I had to break up with them. Until my vagina, that traitor, no longer wanted sonnets and glitter, but that angsty guy in the corner who smelled like turpentine. Or the one with the suspiciously long fingernail that could double as a guitar pick.

Oh, they were all basically nice about it while I was slipping the equivalent of a passive/aggressive butter knife into their hearts. I’m sorry for wasting your time, one said …I’m sorry, you need someone more assertiveI’m sorry, you need someone heterosexual… One of them who liked to cook for me told me I would starve without him. I did a particularly bad job of breaking up with that one.

But then, these spurned creative men went home and started … processing…and talking to their therapists. Or their men’s groups. Who told them to sublimate their pain into their art. I have inspired so much post-idiotic-breakup art that someone should name a grant after me.

I broke up badly with a comic book artist, and somewhere out there I am a she-devil of a villainess with a butt-ugly costume and the smallest rack ever seen on a comic book female.

I broke up with a musician, and I’m the subject of a song where the guy’s best friend runs off with his girl and he really misses him.

I broke up with a painter, so, in some avant-garde gallery in Boston, I’m naked with six eyes and three breasts and seven pieces of fruit and a double-pawed kitten.

I broke up with a writer and now I’m a series of evil bitches whose names begin with “L” in thinly veiled autobiographical fiction.

I even broke up with my husband while we were dating. In a case of pre-emptive emotional idiocy, I waited until he painted my portrait and carried it from New York to Boston on a train to break up with him.

If he dismembered me on canvas afterward, he was nice enough not to share it with the world.

Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for the hopeful recipients of the Laurie Boris Emotional Idiot Grant, the creative guy who would become my husband took me back a year later. The portrait still hangs in my writing room, fully clothed, without kittens, without fruit. Partly as a gift…and partly as a warning. Because there’s a hell of a lot of room on that thing for a few more breasts and eyeballs.

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