An Immersive Actor's P.O.V.

Austin City Limits, the V.I.P Grove, & Hendrick's Gin

Good day to you my dears!

I hope doors to love and magic are opening for you this week, and that your personal growth is climbing like vines. Here is a little poem I wrote about my experience working as an immersive actor at a music festival recently, and a recorded reading of it. I hope you enjoy this bite of my bizarre opportunity to perceive such an event from a particularly unique angle.

Squishy fake grass
squeezing filth unto
my ballet slippers

as they prance about
below the squeals I hear
parading from my lips.

Austin City Limits.
Me, an immersive actor
cast as a faerie

creating bubbles
to the delight
of visitors, merry;

Sipping Hendrick's Gin
amid a garden of roses.
We help them make believe,

feel grateful that they
chose this; this dream
of heat and wristbands

that read V.I.P.

I'll tell you some secrets
now, observations of thine
garden visitors:

Men are the most playful
behind these hedges of
separation. Past the thresholds of the

city to the festival, festival to the
fanciful, sequestered. Their eyes
light up at a bubble & the pretend.

They prance to pop or dodge them,
dance with them or just smile in awe,
sometimes approaching in earnest

with deep compliments,
leaking heartfelt joy,
curious about my handheld toy.

Children also like to play,
although their methods are more
destructive. Pop Pop POP pop, Pop. POP!

They attack suddenly after staring fixedly,
sometimes even before the bubbles are
duly made. Usually before they escape

my fingertip's gaze. Babies are apt to watch
me as much as the bubbles. Young teens loiter,
arms crossed whilst eyes waltz up with the

rainbow rounds as they rise, imaginations curbed for
the time, as attempted maturity envelops their minds.
Women tend to hold the cameras. They are the least

likely to engage with the play. They'll comment on my
endurance, my aesthetic, my beauty. They'll take lots and
lots of pictures and video and ask me to do it again.

Curious I am about this, my friends.
Mulling over why the female V.I.P. kind
are the least willing to let their play shine.

Sweet as laymen can be, I prefer my sort.
The sort that gets here on a work shuttle,
the sort that hides in the back, slumping with

laughs when the audience can't find us. I prefer
backstage normalcy over the festie people sea.
After throwing myself into this gig, I'll race home

speedily, wrap myself in my lover's arms & snuggle
up with a cup of tea. Eighteen hours of intensity
behind me. Update: they scrapped the faerie for a

Victorian Lady! Our second weekend was easier, maybe.
Hotter, certainly. More fun, far less crazy. Manic pixie
energy tends to drain me. Either way, they paid me.

I contrived a new character for them. Hendrick's Gin
has an 1800s branding. Honestly, she made far more
sense even though a "magical garden" provokes

images of faerie. A Trans-Atlantic accent took us
into a world of inventions & dimensions of
quirky contraptions that produced bubbles of all

shapes and sizes. Sitting, drinking roses from teacups,
I found myself more grounded in this person, was able
to preserve some energy for myself, after hours, after this

shade of being, this pretentious version. Night five I was able to
escape the bounds of work for my own personal play. Join my
brother for a night of mushrooms and colored lights and music and

bike rides. PINK, sparkling in pink, flew high above us in spectacle.
Ah, the spectacle! The crowds and fun we found just for us
before I returned the next day, for a final round of bubble play.

Signing off! Aloha nui loa!

Your favorite poet clown in Texas,

Julia