I do Facebook for a living. Day in, day out, I am almost always plugged into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more. To say I’m a nerd for the sociology and psychology of social media would be an understatement. So I found NOWNOWNOW to be a fascinating piece of introspection and commentary. In fact, now that I mention it, introspection and commentary are not only the two narrative devices that Sarah Rudinoff uses in her piece. They’re also the two primary themes she uses to playfully skewer our culture’s use of social media.

When Sarah Rudinoff found herself at the funeral of an acquaintance whom she mostly knew through the internet, she realized she had made a mistake. She had cast sweeping judgments about this person based on their online persona and dismissed them as someone who was not worth the effort of truly getting to know. But as she listened to the eulogies given by their close friends, by the love overflowing from their words, Rudinoff was forced to confront the fact that she had given nothing to someone who had deserved a great deal more.

photo by Truman Buffet

Part of the fun of lugging total strangers to On the Boards is that I get a dual surprise: I never know what to expect of either the show OR the person I'm about to meet. Awren Schwartz, my stranger for Dana Michel's Yellow Towel, did something awesomely unexpected and arrived at our platonic date with presents.

Where am I in this?

She is in it for herself.

That’s not a bad thing.

Joyce Liao is a post-disciplinary artist from Seattle, often using improvised and choreographed movement, writing, videos or visual images as her creative media. This piece of writing is a reflection of the story woven in her mind while watching the performance.

The Stranger's Rich Smith on Yellow Towel:

When I walked into On the Boards last night to view Dana Michel’s Yellow Towel I was already in a mindset of comparisons. It’s often how I process, by comparing things. It’s the wonder of simile and metaphors and the workings of a poet.  Kendrick Lamar’s new album, or rather EP “untitled. unmastered” was set to drop at midnight and as hip hop’s most influential artist currently (in my opinion) I was primed to see what would come of it after the immense success and risk taking and historical relevance that was his previous album To Pimp a Butterfly. See? Comparison.

i am a blonde woman.

i am a blonde woman who grows my hair out twelve inches or more at a time in order to chop it off and donate it.

i am a person who takes pride in my blonde hair.

i imagine it as a wig on the head of some white child with no hair of her own. i imagine her joyful.

there is a wig on stage, made up of some blonde hair.

a black woman. a blonde wig.

i have never before considered what my blonde hair might mean to that black woman.

Yellow Towel is a deep and unrelenting investigation.

When I came into the theater to grab the seat that I had reserved for myself earlier in the evening, it was taken. Laughing, white faces were sitting in my seat, and instinctually I knew not to raise a fuss, to find a seat elsewhere. When I looked around the only people willing to let me sit with them, were the only other black people in the crowd.