YEAR IN REVIEW: my top five most-viewed posts
This is a picture of someone who knows exactly where she keeps her precious supply of fucks, and how many she has to give.
I was thinking about doing this year-end round-up, but dreaded having to sift through the stats. Then WordPress sent me a whole festive online report. I got a little sidetracked wondering why the hell 207 views from Brazil, but then I saw the post stats, and I was like… EASY, BAM. Here ya go, friends! It’s a year-end, In-Case-You-Missed-It special, JUST FOR YOU!
5) FIFTY SHADES OF GREY: the first of my highly personal responses (February)
In my first and possibly last attempt at movie criticism vis a vis depictions of alternate sexuality and kink, I took on the Fifty Shades machine and emerged alive, but shaken. There are other people writing better stuff about pop culture and the American psyche, and I so rarely go to a movie theatre that I’d rather not go there and have to watch whatever movie it is through the lens of criticism. HOWEVER, in this case, enough people were asking me what I thought that I felt it was my duty.
(Go ahead and search “fifty shades” here on my side to get to the two follow-up rants.)
4) IT HAPPENED TO ME: I told off a group of patrons for being assholes… and I’m not sorry (August)
Some of my best work, blogging and otherwise, comes up when I’m PISSED AS HELL, and this piece is no fucking exception. I just wanted to document what had happened to me at one showing of slut (r)evolution at the Edinburgh Fringe, and how I handled some really fucking rude patrons, and how that felt afterward to confront them. I don’t know if it changed their attitudes, when all is said and done, but it changed _mine_, fuck. And I feel like a good chunk of the traffic to this piece was other performers who have longed to just have it out with a shit audience member at one point or another.
3) When a client passes away … (November)
When a colleague asked me if I knew any resources for sex workers dealing with clients dying, I said no, but goddammit there really ought to be some. In most cases we are never going even know for sure that our clients have passed, let alone have access to socially acceptable rituals of mourning. This article was not meant to be resources, just exploring some of my own feelings about the subject, which I had touched on previously in storytelling nights, but never really laid it down in print. My colleague retweeted, and it seemed to strike a chord with a lot of other sex workers.
2) THE REACTION IS THE REASON: my fat body and the slut (r)evolution poster (June)
I don’t like it when my posters get vandalized, when my body gets criticized out there on the posters that I put up. but the fact that it happens, even on the Fringe circuit, tells me that I am on the right track, as a performer who is fat. My solo plays rarely address fat specifically as an issue, but they always feature me doing stuff and talking about stuff that people don’t think about fat people doing or talking about. You know, normal people stuff, like sex or food or just LIFE. This was the first post of mine to break the 1000-view mark. I guess righteous anger can be magnetic.
And now, the most-viewed post on my website, a surprise contender, one of my rare forays into local politics, because no place is really local for me, but if I had to say that one is, it would be New Orleans…
1) The silent crime happening on Frenchmen Street… (October)
With over 4,000 views, this little bit of satire ended up being the most clicked-on piece of my blog by a long shot, mostly because someone in the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans found the link on FB, posted it to their discussion group, and then someone put the link into a New Orleans sub-reddit. (Reddit, man, that shit can be NASTY up in there, but people read it.) The topic of what exactly street patrols are supposed to be patrolling for, in the tourist quarters of New Orleans, flared up at that time, and after my beloved Typewriter Row got threatened by a couple of different rent-a-cops in one night, I just… GOT MAD. Rather than rant, I turned to the hard-boiled detective style, 1930s and 40s, and decided to have a little fun with it. Because my anger wasn’t feeling fun. It was more like acid reflux. Art, though, that’s a lot of fun.
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I like that this year wound up being such a thought-provoking year, not only for my audiences and people who I share my work with, but also for myself. I like that visitors here are able to see a lot of variety in the kinds of things that I write. Perhaps if I were more savvy, I’d narrow it down a little more, but this is the reality of my patched-together world. There are many many strands in the tapestry. I like that I wrote a LOT this year, way more than I ever have, and 2016 looks to continue the trend. I like this life, and I’m looking forward to what’s ahead.
Happy New Year, everybody. I hope you get lots and lots of what you want in the coming year.
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