SHARE 3

1.12.10. prompt: HOODWINK

Artists:
andrew dickson, performer
kelly neidig, painter
marie murphy, songwriter
emily chenoweth, writer
patrick long, illustrator
alyson osborn, actor
michael stone, actor
matt sipes, sculptor

returning SHARE artists: shawn bowman, interdisciplinary domestic artist; courtenay hameister, essayist/screenwriter; russ hoffman, illustrator; margaret malone, writer; kathleen lane, writer

Reflections of a hoodwinked hoodwinker by performance artist Andrew Dickson.

Kelly Neidig's "Chem-trail or Con-trail?"

Kelly: "they" are adding chemicals to our atmosphere via airplane and passing them off as con-trails. Conspiracy theory? Let the viewer decide. 

 

"Hoodwink: The Opposite of a Love Story," written and performed by Marie Murphy

Hoodwink upon hoodwink, rendered by illustrator Patrick Long.

HOODWINK: a four-part interpretation, by Alyson Osborn and Michael Stone

I. Alphabetical – a brief look at one of the ways we trick children into growing up expecting the world to be fair.

II. Compassionate Collusion – When deception between a caregiver and a person with Alzheimer's is a necessary kindness in order for both to win.

III. A literal hoodwink on lover's lane between two vehicles.

IV. A serendipitous, true story, which took place at 4:50 pm on 12 January, 2010.

"Your heart of hearts" by sculptor Matt Sipes. Materials: copper wire and knife.

Matt: This sculpture is about being deceived by a girl. A very bad girl. A girl who I thought was good but wasn't. She was bad. I loved her very much.

Trickery, by Emily Chenoweth

Of the numerous skills a person must develop in order to crisscross the country in a Winnebago with her grandparents, one of the most important is a capacity—a talent, even—for low-grade deception. As in, “No, Grandpa, you’ve never told me about that time Hank Buckalew got so drunk he fell off his roof and landed on his Great Dane,” or “Yes, Grandma, Air Supply is totally the greatest band ever.”

But that stuff is easy—you just have to nod and smile when you talk to them. Their hearing aids can’t pick up sarcasm.

What is slightly more difficult is to feign excitement at yet another campground that resembles not the leafy, rocky campgrounds of my youth, but rather a Wal-Mart parking lot. “You gotta go to the ones with the full-on hookups,” my grandpa says. “What’s the point of driving a rig with a toilet in it if you can’t use it?”

Or to pretend that I’m not homesick, which I am, despite the knowledge that my parents are currently dismantling the home I have known and loved, my father as he moves his possessions into an apartment two towns over and my mother as she goes from room to room painting the walls in pinks, mauves, and lavenders, colors she claims are healing to the spirit.

But what seems most difficult of all—right now, anyway—is to fool the boy I briefly met at a campground in Arizona and expect to see here in Utah at any moment into thinking that I am a) seventeen and b) significantly cooler and more experienced than I actually am.

The campground is silent, and above my grandparents’ RV the sky is like a great black bowl. There are so many stars that they look like snowflakes just stuck there, suspended in the air forever.

I step outside and stand beneath the lighted window of the kitchenette area. My grandparents have fallen asleep in front of CSI again, and even Buddy, God curse his soul, is snoring softly on his doggie bed, paws twitching in whatever nefarious terrier dream he’s having.

Graham will be coming soon. That’s what I tell myself, over and over again, like one of my mother’s mantras, but it doesn’t calm me. How could it? I’ll faint if he comes and I’ll die if he doesn’t—that’s what it feels like.

I reach into my pocket for the cigarette that’s in there and pull it out, slightly softened and crumpled. It looks harmless, even a little sad, the way it’s bent. I straighten it and then put it in my mouth. It hangs there, unlit, while I wait to see if Graham will materialize out of the darkness to light it for me.

When he doesn’t, I do it myself, though clumsily. I’ve never smoked a cigarette before and I suppose it shows. But it does succeed in making me feel… well, I would have hoped for older or glamorous, but different is the word that comes to mind. I’d wanted to look like a femme fatale or something, but I’m afraid I just look like one of those hoodlums who hang around the edge of school property when they’re supposed to be in gym.

I tap my foot against the ground, waiting. Graham had better come and find me soon because I only have one cigarette to impress him with.

“You’re not inhaling,” says a voice. Graham’s suddenly five feet away from me, wearing a pair of cut-offs and a faded t-shirt that says Virginia is for Lovers.

“I was before,” I say, pretending that my heart isn’t pounding in my chest. “I was just taking a break from it.”

He steps into the square of light from the window and holds out his hand. “Let me see it.”

I marvel at how we talk as if we’re neighbors, as if it weren’t exquisitely strange that we have met here in the darkness, and that I am trying to get him and his family to follow me and my grandparents around on our winter peregrinations.

I don’t seem to have any feeling in my extremities.

I hand him the cigarette. “It’s a Benson & Hedges,” he said. “Only old ladies smoke these.”

Well, I think, I did steal it from my grandma.

“I’m very mature for my age,” I answer. He laughs at this, but not very convincingly.

Graham and his younger sister are homeschooled by his itinerant parents, who fancy themselves modern-day troubadours or upper-middle-class gypsies, or some similarly ridiculous thing. Since Graham has never been to a real high school, he doesn’t behave like the rest of us. He’s calmer and quieter, and he’s completely ignorant of the fads that help teenagers distinguish the cool kids from the lame ones.

Hence my chance to impress him. He just doesn’t know any better.

“Who do you like more,” I ask him, “the Replacements or the Ramones?” I had decided that this question would make me some knowledgeable, edgy.

“I don’t like the Ramones’ politics,” he says, giving me back my cigarette.

I pause, contemplate taking another non-inhale, and then shake my head. “Um, me either.” Thinking, Joey Ramone had politics? I should have read more about him.

The problem with deception and trickery is that it needs a willing dupe to work. My grandma wants desperately for me to validate her love of Air Supply, for example, so she wills herself not to see me sticking my fingers down my throat whenever that song comes on, the one that goes, “the beating of my hear is a drum and it’s lost and it’s looking for a rhythm like you….”

Or take my parents. For the seventeen long years of their now-failed marriage, my mother pretended she was the one person on God’s green earth who didn’t ever pass gas, and my father let her get away with it. “A miracle of digestion, that woman,” he’d say.

And as far as my grandparents go? Well, they’re really too old to trick each other, but they still try to. My grandma sneaks her cigarettes and my Grandpa claims that Buddy is truly housebroken, when in fact he routinely pisses on Grandma’s side of the bed.

So where does this understanding leave me? In the dark, with a boy I like, who is not yet at all impressed with me, and who has no natural inclination to be.

“I got into the Replacements a couple of years ago, when I was 15,” I say, trying again.

Graham nods. “Do they let you drive this thing?” he asks, tapping the side of the Winnebago.

I laugh. “Please. Do your parents let you?”

“When they’re drunk enough,” he says.

I sigh. So far, everything he’s told me about his life makes it sounds incredibly glamorous. His sister’s name is Peony, by the way. She wants to be a trapeze artist with the Cirque de Soleil.

“It’s okay, you know,” Graham says. The stark shadows on his face make it look like he has deep hollows where his eyes should be.

“What?”

“I know you’re not seventeen. I can tell. But I don’t care.”

I let myself slouch down against the cool metal siding of the RV. “Oh,” I say.

I could just hear my history teacher, Mr. Sanfillipo, who was my crush before this infuriating Graham person, chuckling to himself. “Trickery and treachery are the practices of fools that have not the wits enough to be honest,” he’d say, which would be some Founding Father quote or something. He was full of those, and could rattle them off like baseball stats.

“I have an incurable disease,” I tell him.

“No you don’t,” he says.

“I’m an orphan,” I say.

“Try again.”

“I’m actually albino.”

“Nope,” he says.

“I’m the youngest of seventeen children. Those are my parents, not my grandparents.”

“Please.”

I stare up at the sky and then down at my feet. And that’s when I see a dark shape slithering across the sandy ground—a king snake, by the looks of it, up way past his bedtime. “I’m not afraid of snakes,” I say.

And something in my voice tells him I’m not lying this time, and he turns around, and then he sees it, this hissing shadow sliding past him, barely visible in the dim starlight.

“Holy fucking shit,” he shrieks, and leaps toward the Winnebago, landing on the bottom step and scrabbling madly at the door handle.

“Be quiet,” I say, “You’ll wake the old people.”

“I hate snakes,” he whispers, as if this weren’t patently obvious.

“That one’s harmless,” I assure him, watching it vanish into the darkness.

“It’s the whole no-legs thing,” he says, loosening his grip on the door handle.  “It’s just not natural.”

“But it’s nature,” I say. And then I hold up my hand to him, as if he might need my help climbing down. For a moment he looks at my upturned palm as if he isn’t sure what to do with it, and then he grabs my hand and squeezes it.

It feels as if all the blood in my body rushes to those fingertips. He didn’t believe a word I said, and still, he’s holding my hand.

I smile up at him. “I’ll be sixteen in December,” I say.

“That’s cool,” he says, almost as if it really is.
SHARE 2 artist Russ Hoffman's "Mindgames"

OppositeDay.C.Hameister