Touring

Currently staying at the apartment of a friend in Ames. The Festival takes place in Des Moines, about a half-hour away, but my check-in time isn't until 3pm.

Such an odd, vitriolic mix of different phobias -- my typical stage fright, combined with my fear of being miles away from all of my dozens of little comforting rituals. It's ironic that I'm such a big traveller -- that my latest show is in fact a travelogue -- and so much of travel just makes me so nauseous.

(There's an irony, too, that I find vacationing to be so terribly stressful -- I'm much more comfortable at home, chugging away at a variety of projects, than I am just about anywhere else. Part of it's my usual Catholic guilt, I'm sure -- the sense that I'm able to have a job that I love so deeply that it feels unjust for me to be taking time away from it. My whole goddamn *life* is a vacation.)

I've been playing the multicultural card a lot with this show, which makes me uncomfortable -- I'm a staunch opponent of affirmative action, viewing it as little more than a form of institutionalized racism -- I've passed up a lot of opportunities, grants, etc. because I'm so uncomfortable with being granted any kind of advantage because of the color of my skin. But this show -- hell, I got into the Minnesota Fringe this year via their multicultural lottery. (I can at least partly justify this by the fact that a significant topic of my show is multiculturalism.)

What's bizarre is the degree of coverage I've been getting because of it. Asian American Press contacted me, asking me to write about the local API community. It took me several minutes (and a frantic Google search) to figure out what the hell they were talking about -- the Asian-Pacific Islander community (and not application programming interface, as I originally suspected) -- because apparently I'm now some kind of expert on the subject.

The director of the Iowa Fringe has also been kind enough to introduce me to the, uh, "head of Asians" in Iowa, for lack of a better term (which makes it sound like some kind of exotic, solemn ceremony) -- in fact, here's a link to some info about her. It's hard for me to imagine that she has much in common with a foul-mouthed libertarian.

There's a part of me that feels a little guilt about this, like I'm somehow masquerading some kind of "yellow cred" that I don't really have. But then, I think that maybe that's not all that uncommon an aspect of the Asian-American experience, especially among ABC's like myself -- I have at least one friend who was rejected from an Asian-American club for "not being Asian enough."

What a strange animal this show is.