“
At the KGB reading, Jillian Weise started with an appendix, a list, taken from a real 1912 book, of “Files on Twenty Defectives.” It reminded me of that Marilyn Monroe suicide appendix, and of Marilyn’s real appendix that got taken out of the creamy white body she tried not to scar. The work I like best uses the author’s body a lot, his skin color and genitals, her defects. I went home and read Weise’s inscription in my book and it said, “Hi Elizabeth, thanks for putting my words in your neurons.”
And I did. I put Jillian Weise, or the Other Jillian Weise, inside my neurons, along with Arthur and Marilyn and Jeffrey Meyers and his index-making wife and Borges and the Other Borges and Oscar Wilde, and now you have me deep inside your neurons, patterning the thoughts in your very body. Or — did I put her in my skull, or just her words? There’s a great scene in The Colony where Anne is annoyed by her boyfriend’s lunches with his ex: “One time before Grayson went on a lunch, I told him it made me feel strange because he’d been inside her body. ‘Annie,’ he’d said. ‘What? It’s true. You’ve been literally five inches inside that woman’s body.’”
When we read a person’s book, or see their performance, they get even deeper inside of us than that. Because they stay in there. They stay in our neurons. I’m glad I chose Jillian Weise. But lots of times, we choose the wrong person, or the wrong book, to put inside of us. Sometimes we choose the wrong play to put inside of us, or the wrong tableau from real life. Sometimes we don’t choose, we just sit there in the audience, waiting to be entertained. Does the audience end up inside of the actors’ bodies, the way that Jillian Weise ended up inside of me? Or is it a one-way street, like Marilyn getting mobbed by her fans, fans who tried to touch her, who tried to take pieces of her, like she was less than a person and not just more than one?
”— Elizabeth Bachner, “Genius, Goddess: Reading Theatre”
