Today is the day I told myself I would write my Holly Fudge blog post, but, if I’m feeling honest, I don’t really feel like I’m in the self-promotion mood. So, while this post is still going to be related to Holly Fudge, rather than my typical link to ticket information at the very end you will find a link to donate to the victims of Club Q.
I’ve been saying a lot recently that I am not good at making sure people know that The Rise and Fall of Holly Fudge is a funny play. I talk a lot about the heart of it — how Holly Fudge is about a relationship between a mother and a daughter in the middle of monumental change. COVID. Protests.
Queerness.
There is a line that makes my soul ache that has been sitting at the base of my heart since I first read this script. Carol, Holly’s mother, is trying to understand why her daughter would “choose” queerness when she has dated men in the past and liked them. She says:
Who knows how long you two will be legal. Like a rubber band, the world could just snap back, they could haul you away.
I first started my work on this production in the spring of this year. Back then, it was one of many good lines that stuck with me, one of the many examples of Trista Baldwin’s honesty.
Then, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
I tried to read all of the opinions, tried to struggle through the legalese to really read what I was hearing about Justice Thomas’s opinion. The opinion that the court should revisit other court cases that relied on the Roe precedent of substantive due process.
Contraception, Griswold v. Connecticut.
SNAP.
Interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia.
SNAP.
Gay marriage.
Like a rubber band.
Who knew a show about a COVID Christmas would get more relevant the further we move from the winter of 2020?
This weekend, we put all parts of The Rise and Fall of Holly Fudge together in tech. I’d been in the theatre for so long that I didn’t see the news about Club Q until yesterday morning. How to describe the feeling of reading that headline? Pulse is a wound that still feels fresh and raw. How can I go into rehearsal tonight and watch the show and laugh at well-meaning moms not understanding queerness? How can I talk about this COVID Christmas story with humor and levity when the community at its core, a community I am part of, is grieving?
The answer, simply, is that I must.
For too long, these acts of hatred taught me fear. Fear for my loved ones, fear for my colleagues, and fear for, and of, myself. In 2008, when the rubber band snapped in California and I watched my classmates cheerfully condemn the “gay lifestyle” by celebrating the ending of legal gay marriage, I burrowed deep into the recesses of my closet. I didn’t even tell my own parents that I was queer until 2019, not because I feared what they would do, but because I was terrified of what it would mean to be out, fully, and own my queerness the way I have to own the mixed identity spelled across my face.
Today, the instinct to hide is still here. It’s insidious, whispering that no one cares, that me speaking will stir up too much, that it would be better, easier, wiser, to hide behind my loving cis-male partner and just pretend to be straight.
Instead, I can think of no better way to combat the hatred that took 5 lives and injured dozens more on Saturday than to find joy in my queerness. I am grateful to be working on a play that uplifts empathy and love as the way through discomfort and pain and fear. I am grateful to be working on a play about owning your identity, about loving your kid and trying to understand when you don’t. And I’m grateful that it is, in fact, funny and sweet and, yes, it has a happy ending. Right now, we all need one.
Donate to the Colorado Healing Fund, to assist in immediate and long-term care: