VCU Lecture # 5: Sister Spit

Sister Spit is an all female, spoken word and performance art, traveling road-show. The show has been touring since 94’ and has featured many published writers. Although the cast changes from year to year, past performers will sometimes make a guest appearance as the tour travels the country. The overall collective of the 2007 tour includes but is not limited to lesbians, poets, feminists, visual artists, sex worker activists and novelists. There are seven artists on tour currently and each of them read a piece when they came to VCU last week. I was surprisingly entertained by Chelsea Starr who decided to read an old blog entry. I was impressed at how captivating someone could be with a computer in front of their face reading words from a screen. I feel that somewhere traditional spoken word artists and poets must be balking at the thought of this happening, like maybe it’s bastardizing the art form, but there was something intimate about the situation that was appealing, kind of like someone reading to you from their private journal. The second blog she read was about her experience of falling in love with an older nun while staying at a convent during a nervous breakdown she was having. It reminded me that I still really want to see those two nuns making out in Su Freidrich’s film. I enjoyed each artist’s work, especially Michelle Tea whose allegorical piece about pigeons almost made me cry. In the poem she challenges that a pigeon is really a dove, made filthy by the city that we’ve built up around it. Then we turn around and condemn the pigeon and hate it for learning to survive in the hostile environment that we’ve created. I’m pretty sure it’s all about prostitutes but it still works on that other level for pigeons. I mean, I have nothing against prostitutes but I really love pigeons, and possums. I have a soft spot in my heart for anything that ends up road kill in the city. Next Michelle recited a poem about her unhealthy relationship and eventual breakup with America. As I looked around the room I could tell that the rest of the students there seemed to be really responding to what the performers were saying. You could tell that about half in not more of these kids were gay (the show was put on through VOX and queer action from what I understand), and there were these two really young looking girls there. I felt really sad for a minute and wondered, if they grew up in Richmond and if it's hard for them to be gay here. I mean compared to being in DC or New York, I know it's not the same. In DC it seemed, to me anyway, like gays owned the city. It's strange how tolerance and culture can change so drastically in just less than two hours in this part of the country. I have spent time in Baltimore, Richmond and DC and I just can't get over the difference. I do think that Richmond is trying very hard to be progressive and it helps, especially those younger people, when groups like Sister Spit come speak, to give a perspective from other parts of the country.