The following is an excerpt from a short solo performance piece I did in my dramaturgy class. Sharing it here for fun. ...When I was a kid my parents and I had an agreement that we would never lie to each other. We could joke around and tease, but if someone asked “Is that true?” you had to fess up.
So at age five, when I asked my mom about the tooth fairy she had to confess there was no such thing. In fact, parents were the ones slipping dimes or dollars under pillows.
However, instead of clearing things up, this just made it more magical. I suddenly had an image of my mom dressed as a fairy slipping into my room and doing some magical alchemy that transformed teeth to dollar bills
Now this idea wasn’t completely crazy. My mother was also the school nurse, and I have a vivid memory of her in front of my kindergarten class with a giant toothbrush and an oversized set of teeth teaching us how to brush. My mom saying there was no such thing as the tooth fairy was like Clark Kent denying the existence of Superman.
The truth contract was established to make me an honest, trusting kid, but it had almost the opposite effect. I had the growing sense that truth itself was unstable and multivalent. Perhaps even malleable.
I experimented a lot with truth as a kid. One time I thought the hard candy I was sucking on looked a lot like a tooth. I cradled it in my hand and brought it into the kitchen where my mom was cooking dinner: “Look mom, I lost a tooth.”
She looked down at it skeptically and uttered the magic truth fairy spell: “Is that the truth?”
My face grew hot and tingly. I was immune to the spell of her power. “Yes.” I said, hoping the force of my words would make it true. “I’m going to go put it under my pillow.” Needless to say, the tooth fairy didn’t visit that night.
I continue to struggle with the truth fairy. While I no longer attempt random subterfuge like the hard candy incident, little lies still slip out of my mouth before I can catch them. The edges seem blurry sometimes between believing, wanting to believe, wanting someone else to believe, wanting someone else to believe that you believe, and wanting to call something new into being through the force of shared belief.
Most artists know that sometimes the truth is truer told slant than it is told straight-up. And as I learned hearing my mother disavow the existence of her magical alter ego, sometimes the reductive act of telling only the mundane truth (when in fact multiple levels of increasingly ecstatic truths always abound) seems falser than a lie...
