PROVOCATEUR. Activist. Author. Shit-stirrer. Fool. Rogue. Varlet. Lesbian. Intentional trespasser. Eavesdropper. Firecracker. Feral child. Topless runner. Jester. Tender heart. Obsessive maker. Rascal. Reveler. Mischief-maker. Breaker of fourth walls. Cape wearer. Wrestler of arms. Inhabiter of stages. Democratizer of art. Life drinker. F- Bomber. Gadfly. Ruffian of convention. Motley fool. Shrewd wench. Unruly woman. Merry wanderer. Puck. Sprite. Antic. Mad fellow. Bear poker. — OL, CT
THE MYTH OF CREATIVITY
Do you imagine yourself to be creative?
Well, here’s the misnomer about creativity: that you have to be sort of born or anointed in some special way, that you were born with like a specific body that can dance or a way of seeing the world that you can paint or interpret it. And that’s just bullshit, and proven.
So there’s two C’s of creativity. There’s a small c and a Big C. Big C is like, I’m a choreographer; I trained my whole life. Maybe I was born with some natural talents, and I kind of developed them over the years. But the little c is something that we’re all born with. Period, full stop.
We’re all born creative, which is to say we think divergently, having infinite solutions or ways of doing things. But what happens is there was a big study — Dr. George Land — longitudinal, more than a thousand five-year-olds, where he gave them a thinking test: how many solutions can you come up with based on this prompt? Ninety-eight percent of five-year olds were at the creative genius level. When they’re ten years old, it dropped to like fifty percent. And keeps dropping.
So life has a deadly effect on creativity?
Well, systems do. All systems. Within systems like school, religion, even socioeconomics, cultural community gatherings — very early on, I learned personally, there are spaces where my body, my way of thinking, my way of being does not belong. And those were both implicit and explicit in terms of these unspoken rules on the schoolyard, for example.
I grew up in poverty. I remember going to school sometimes and I’d wear the same outfit. And people would make fun of me. So it was like, Note to self: it’s not okay to be poor and have the same clothing, because that is a barrier to entry. And that’s part of the system.
The funny part was I had this pot belly, I wore glasses, and people would make fun of me and call me four-eyes and all this kind of stuff. And my hair was cut by my mom, who was not a hairstylist. So it would always be fucked up at least ninety-five percent of the time. And I thought I was cool as fuck. And I was just astounded that people didn’t think I was as cool as I thought I was.
NATURE, NURTURE, AND FERAL PARENTS
Where did that come from?
I think it comes from my parents. My parents were like feral people. You know how they say adult child of an alcoholic? I was an adult child of two children who just happened to have kids. My mom was twenty-one. She was from France. She wasn’t an American citizen. My dad was ten years older, New York cab driver, no formal education outside of high school. And they were just figuring it all out on the fly.
I was telling somebody recently, my mom had painted our teeny tiny Brooklyn apartment walls red. That’s why I’m fucked up.
My mom was wildly creative. She was always making our Halloween costumes, probably out of necessity and out of a sheer joy of creating. She painted wild abstract paintings. I mean, she wasn’t a painter, but she painted. And she went on — she kept a journal when we were babies. She said, I knew early on — the way you walked, you were either going to be a trucker or a lesbian. She had a keen way of observing the world. And my dad was just fucking feral and funny and wild.
I grew up with a mom who didn’t have the American hang-ups like, Put on clothes every second! What are you doing? You’re disgusting. So I ran around nude a lot. I was never ashamed for how I looked. I was supported.
And I was funny as a kid. And people — my parents would laugh and people would laugh. So I had kind of immediate affirmation of some of these certain natural skills or talents that were evolving.
One of your father’s activities was to hand you and your siblings BB guns and have you shoot at beer cans on the refrigerator.
My mom and dad divorced when my twin brother and I were about five. My sister was three. And so my dad was like quintessential single dad, living in some shit-ass apartment, maybe a studio apartment sometimes, maybe a one-bedroom, who knew? He took a job in Arizona selling, I think, filet mignon door to door in the middle of summer. It didn’t go very well. Aspiring entrepreneur, my father.
So he had this shitty little apartment, which we thought was fantastic because he had these moving boxes from the dump or something. We’d make forts in this studio apartment with these huge moving boxes. Somehow bought us a BB gun, because why not? And he had all these beer cans that he had formed into a pyramid on top of his dirty refrigerator.
And after he cooked us dinner — which was basically those big crinkle-cut potato fries you get frozen; he put them on a baking sheet, doused it with butter, salt, and fucking baked it — we’d eat. It was the best. And then we’d shoot target practice.
My brother and sister both have a sense of humor, but they didn’t double down on it. My brother ended up being an executive director of a nonprofit that serves people with disabilities. And my sister is an early childhood educator. My mom was a social worker. My dad was a cabby. But I would argue that we’ve all taken those nature and nurture skills and talents — of humor, of observing the absurdity in the room — to our jobs.
THE CHEERLEADER INCIDENT
How did a young girl who is blessed with nature and nurtured with creativity, navigate through life?
The most critical point for me was in high school, as a teenager. I went to a new high school, didn’t fit in. Nobody wanted to be my friend. I’m like, Hey, you guys are really cool! And they’re like, …Are you?
So at some point, maybe sophomore year, I found speech and debate and drama. And my drama teacher, Mr. Fountain — bless his heart. He’s still alive. He came to one of my book readings not that long ago. He became like a mentor — not a mentor with a capital M, but he just saw something in me and he allowed me to do things that the other students weren’t allowed to do.
And I started competing in speech and debate, where you compete against other schools. There was one competition in Tucson at a high school that was original humor, and you could write your own piece.
I was like, This is my time to shine. And at this time, I’m also lying about my age and doing standup at local clubs. I was sixteen, seventeen years old. I’d get into these competitions that a lot of the comedy clubs were having, and that was kind of a good, stealthy way to get in. And I’d sign up and I’d fucking win them. So I was doing standup and then I created this piece for the competition. When you’re doing speech and debate in humor interp, you can’t move from the waist down. And basically you want to perform and inhabit as many characters as you can. So I wrote a piece about all the girls who hung out in the high school bathroom. And I became each one of them. I wrote all these characters, I performed them all, and people — it was like thunderous applause. Amazing. So then you go and you wait for who’s winning.
All of a sudden some little kid comes to me and says, The judges want to speak to you. A teacher and students accused me of plagiarizing. And I’m like, What? But you know why? Because it was so fucking good. They didn’t believe that a sixteen-year-old kid could have written it.
You have this recognition that you’re good at something. But the creativity and humor are tied inextricably together.
Completely. And actually, you’re triggering a memory of high school I hadn’t thought about. At all costs for me, creativity and humor — it’s reflexive. I can’t stop it.
So for example, when I first went to high school, I didn’t know anybody. Nobody wanted to be my friend. I tried real hard to no avail. So then it was Halloween, and I thought it would be really funny to dress up as a larger-than-life drag version of the cheerleaders. I mean, I didn’t know what drag was, but that’s what I did. I got extra boobies and lipstick all over my face. And I thought I was so funny.
But no one else did. In fact, they were really offended. But the point is, it’s so in my DNA and such a reflex to combine observing the world and then finding ways to perform it or put it out there, so that maybe somebody who sees the absurdity of what it means to perform femininity or what it means to be a cheerleader in high school might go, I got you. I see you.
Now, when I go into like an Expedia group or Uber and speak to engineers, I show them what they’re doing already and options for doing differently by telling them stories. Because we’re all motivated and moved by emotions first and thoughts second.
ARM WRESTLING FOR ART
But you’re breaking out of your own boxes all the time too.
What I found in all these systems is there’s a disconnect between what we say we’re doing, our mission, our vision, like why we exist, and then the on-the-ground realities. So here, I’m hired at a museum. What’s a museum selling? Transcendence, engagement, delight, awe, emotionally challenging situations, a reflection of society — that’s what they’re selling. And yet they’re doing that business like some corporate overlord — like an admin who follows the rules. That doesn’t make any sense.
So I’m like, Okay, I know what the metrics are. I know how you measure success. I see you. This is a real job. I get you. And we’re serving a community. But how we get there — who cares?
And so I started embodying what it meant to be a part of contemporary art. Contemporary art is about performance. It’s about a pile of candy in the corner, and you get to eat it. And it’s the body of a man who died of HIV. And then you find out about Félix González-Torres and stuff. So I just created my role. It was program coordinator at first, and then it became curator of performing arts because they couldn’t give me a raise. So I got a new title.
My job was to enliven a space within a contemporary art museum that had previously been a gallery, and I could break some of the rules. They were actually thinking rentals — renting it out for weddings, for parties. So you could drink in there. There were some rules you could break that you couldn’t break anywhere else in the museum. Drinking alcohol. You could play music. All the things necessary to have an event or a party.
The director at the time knew me and knew I was a professional rule-breaker. So he mischievously brought me in, but once I was in, there was no buy-in from anybody else. I didn’t have a team. I had a budget of twenty thousand dollars per year, and my job was to create new revenue streams, new audience members, brand awareness, a brand that wasn’t a brand. I loved it.
And I found out that contemporary art is scary to a lot of people. It can feel intimidating because you’re like, Do I touch it? Do I not touch it? Am I too close? Oh wait, that person is the art. That person’s moving around me. All bets are off. For people who are in the know — great. For people who aren’t in the know, it just feels austere and uninviting. You don’t belong here. And also, you don’t want to tell anyone that you don’t understand it.
Because if you don’t have access — and access also means education, means a library — if you don’t have access to shit, how do you know? There’s a whole part of the population who does not even know what contemporary art is, is scared to ask, and shouldn’t be. So how do we invite people in who didn’t think they belong in this space but a million percent do, and actually have a voice in how we create this space and who we’re offering it to?
The first program I decided to do was something that was the great equalizer. I was thinking about art and how we acquire art — it’s complete privilege. I came up with an idea called Arm Wrestling for Art. I spent five thousand of my budget on an arm wrestling table, and I had the privilege of knowing some famous artists. Eric Fischl is a friend. And I’m like, Hey Eric, I want people to compete for a piece of your art. And he made a little piece of art and I charged ten dollars for people to come and throw down and potentially win a piece of art by Eric Fischl. So this way, we’re democratizing the acquisition of art.
How does the arm wrestling…
Right. I thought, as a kid, how do you win shit? How do you get stuff? You don’t have to be intellectual. You do rock-paper-scissors, you arm wrestle, you outrun each other. So we’re going to play a game that equalizes us, takes us back to our five-year-old childhood self that was free and creative before any system messed us up. Let’s do this.
And it transcended gender. It just allowed a lot of things to happen. But what I didn’t — I’m going to tell you this because it’s fucked up and I never talk about it.
So I’d never arm-wrestled professionally or watched it. And at a local mall in Arizona, there was an arm wrestling competition. So I had this idea, I bought the table, and while I’m waiting for the table to arrive, I signed up for an arm wrestling thing at a mall. I go to the mall, and you watch a few heats first. And these guys were arm wrestling and one guy breaks the other guy’s arm. His arm is like a chicken wing that was cut off at the tendon. And I was like, What am I doing? So I got waivers.
And then I competed. There was only one women’s division — very gender-specific. And she must have been about eighteen or twenty-something, and she was strong and wiry. But I kicked her ass.
All that to say, I had to make up crazy amounts of waivers for people to sign. The people who showed up — grandmamas, teenagers, everyone in between, donors, all the fancy-pants, and then people from the fitness community, people who just wanted to. So you had multi-generations, multiple cultures, all convening to arm wrestle for a piece of art.
It was primarily about convening community and the excitement. We literally had board members there who were the most uptight people throwing down, and people in the audience just being like, Fuck yeah!
It was about the excitement. And also about being in a space that we think of as some sort of anointed, religious space — and saying the F-word and sweating and desiring something and doing it all in real time.
THE SHOT IN THE ARM
This ability to take people out of themselves — how does that frame or influence what you’re doing now?
One, the shot in the arm. And as I say shot in the arm, I think it’s not just the permission to be creative, but to see how the things that we’ve been taught to leave off our résumé or to leave outside of the boardroom are actually the only things that create innovation or really great ideas or ways to connect. So what they’re expecting me to do is to share stories with humor and ethos and reflect a more universal truth for being alive.
When it’s all men, which is a lot — three-quarters men, a lot of tech conferences and summits — I’ll say, Any thespians here? And maybe one-eighth of the people are like, Ah! And then I’m like, Okay. Any lesbians here? And everybody laughs uncomfortably. And then there’s a sort of collective roar of laughter.
But the point is, whether they’re conscious of it in that moment or it sinks in — holy shit. There’s like one woman in this room. And she’s on stage. Or she’s one of ten women in a room full of two thousand people. And holy shit, she’s a lesbian. Are there gay people here?
Early on, I had an awareness of being an atypical body in a different form that people needed to see. Inhabiting my body and putting it in places where we don’t see that. Maybe it’s less overt. Maybe you have some idea of what a lesbian looks like or what a woman looks like, and you either see her or you don’t. So seeing somebody from outside of that sometimes offers a unique perspective. And a lot of these places where I’ve spoken, where it’s predominantly dudes, will say things afterward — especially about their daughters. They’ll have an awareness. And I’m like, What about you, dude?
Explain how you use your words, your disposition, and the way you move.
I am literally an extrovert and I really love and find human beings and human nature fascinating. And that’s why all my writing in the beginning of my career was playwriting, because I got to imagine and inhabit human beings in terms of characters. Endlessly eavesdropping, just writing stuff down. I’m obsessed with the human experience.
And early on in playwriting, I learned two things. One is universal truths — the things that connect us, that we all need regardless of who and where and how we are in the world. And then two: Brecht. That motherfucker. I realized how influential breaking the fourth wall is. Implicating people. In my early writing, I always broke the fourth wall. And I loved it because it made people feel a part of it — uncomfortable, excited, weirded out, didn’t know what was going to come next.
I don’t feel the need to be provocative in a way that’s hurtful or harmful. That’s not my jam. But I do feel the need to be provocative in a way that gets people to interact, to maybe lighten up a little bit, to kind of get back into that playful part of themselves that maybe they lost.
IT WAS NEVER A DRESS
When you landed at the tech company and realized you didn’t know one thing about it — that’s where the social impact campaign It Was Never A Dress came from. What about that moment in the culture resonated so deeply that it went viral?
In 2015, I was hired by a small software company to be their evangelist. I literally did not know what that was. One thing I always do — and I used to think I’m a crazy person — is I put myself in challenging situations. I take risks all the time that can be maddening to some, but I realized recently that’s just who I am. I need a challenge.
My career at the contemporary art museum was going splendidly. It was the perfect time to leave. This tech company’s CEO had seen me at one of my programs and was like, I want her to be our evangelist.
I arrived there not knowing what the fuck their software was. Not even really knowing what — software, hardware, yes. The language. It was a language. So week one, I’m like, Okay, so what is this awesome software? Is it a program where it helps people write stories? And they’re like, No, it’s B2B project management software for project managers. And I’m like, Whatever you just said — and my soul glazed over. I had no idea. I thought I’d totally screwed my entire life.
And the developers were really sweet and tried to explain things to me. And evangelist — I didn’t know what that was either. I pretended I knew. I thought it was like a religious thing. But it’s really being a spokesperson and a salesperson-light, somebody who can tell stories about the software in a way that’s more colloquial. And I could not, in all seriousness, grasp for months what the fuck the software was — I didn’t get it at all.
So three months in, there was going to be a big Women in Technology summit for the first time in Arizona. And our CEO — a new CEO, a woman — pulled me and a younger colleague in and said, Let’s do something fun.
My brain did two things. One: You’re making twice as much money as that other job. You better think of something to save your ass, because you don’t know shit about that software and you’re never going to learn it. And two: my brain thinks about problem-solving like eating a bowl of yummy candy. I just can’t stop. It’s obsessive. It’s so much fun.
At the time, that was Gamergate. Some of the Breitbart kids, before people actually knew about Breitbart. They were basically systematically using technology to harass and threaten women in every form of violence possible — that women shouldn’t be in gaming. It was just the most horrific amplification of violence online at that moment. Reddit was having a moment too, of
completely unhinged violence towards women. That was the atmosphere.
And so the charge, the problem I aimed to solve, was how do we get more women in technology? There’s one problem we’re not addressing: you can’t invite women into a space if you don’t actually see women. If you don’t see women as powerful, if you don’t see women as able, if you don’t see women as talented — how can you invite somebody in? To me it was a foundational issue to address first.
And then the symbol — the women’s bathroom symbol — came to mind. Because I’d had the privilege of traveling overseas, and the iconic A-line dress and head — she’s in a lot of places in the world. So it was a symbol that was easily recognizable across genders, cultures. We knew this symbol.
And then I drew her out and I kept looking at her. And I’m like — I couldn’t shake it. There was a physicality to it. I remember I was in the office and I did this [gestures the A-frame shape]. Like, the A-frame there, right? What happens under it? We don’t know. I’m like, Maybe she’s wearing a cape. And at some point I convinced myself that was a good idea.
So I printed out the bathroom symbol and I literally took a pen and — one line, two lines, three, four lines. So it turned it, and instead of looking at her front, we were looking at her back. And really, she’s been wearing a cape. Revealed in like four lines.
She becomes a superhero. And everybody got — at first, people are like, Superhero, women empowerment. But what I meant, and I wrote about it in Creative Trespassing — super just means really great. Hero just means going above and beyond. So to me, she was a superhero of the everyday. Being a superhero — I didn’t mean you can fly off buildings. I meant like, sometimes flying means just reaching out to somebody on the phone.
I showed it to my boss and she’s like, What the fuck? I showed it to my colleague Sarah, and she was just like, It was never a dress. And I’m like, That’s the tagline.
That tagline was so brilliant because it opens up — if it wasn’t that, what is it? And what can it be? It created a moment where people — not just women — felt seen, heard, and recognized. And that allowed them to see and recognize the women in their lives, or non-binary folks, or people who didn’t fit the traditional shape of the bathroom symbol.
ONE NIGHT STAND WITH CANCER
When I first got breast cancer, nobody was talking about it outside of hushed tones. There was like Terms of Endearment, where everybody in every movie died with cancer. There was no young, hot lesbian dating with no tits and no hair. That was just me. So before Tig Notaro had no tits and a book, I did.
But the point is, I’ve always felt the need to write or express somehow through stories about these conditions that feel isolating and hard and depleting, because I know that I’m not alone in feeling those things. With cancer, because I’d already had a journal-writing practice at twenty-one, it was a way — I literally brought my journal to my mastectomy. It was on my bed. And it was a way to both have distance — like my own biographer, a little bit of distance from what was going on that was really difficult — and also record things as they unfolded. I just found it fascinating. It was a way to both escape and inhabit this really hard landscape.
At what point did you decide you were going to run the breast cancer marathon shirtless?
I’ll tell you why it’s not strange. I went to the breast cancer race and I was astounded. I expected people there with breast cancer. And what happens is — just like so many people hiding in plain sight — we cover it all up. We bump it up because we’re scared of it. We feel shame and disconnect from our own bodies. There’s the personal thing and then there’s a societal thing — like, Well, if we see it, we might catch it.
I went to this thing and it was like — wait, a breast cancer race equals shitty plastic things that are pink that actually cause cancer? Or M&M’s and sugar that exacerbate cancer cells? None of it made sense to my brain.
At that point, I started thinking more like an artist. I’m actually a healthy body in a different form. And legally — I did research — no nipples? Fine in California. Areolas? Forget them. And I thought, The next race I’m going to run for my people, and I’m going to run it topless, so that I can show people — everybody talks about this word survival. I don’t actually like or connect with that word. I think it’s more like endurance. Because we’re all going to die. But we all endure things. Some of us make it to the other side and some don’t. But there’s no surviving.
So how do I show people that I’m a healthy body in this different form and I’m okay? I believed, for me — anybody could choose whatever they want — but I did not want more surgeries or medical interventions unless they saved my life. I was not interested in plastic surgery. And if I wasn’t alone in that, surely there were others like me. We just couldn’t see each other.
So what happened when you ran?
I was freaked out. Because, A, I’m a woman in Western civilization — we’re not encouraged to take off our tops unless somebody’s sticking dollars in our panties. And I don’t wear panties, so that wasn’t going to happen.
So I was scared and feeling really small and vulnerable about doing this act. And then there were thousands of people at the race, which I didn’t expect. And there was a woman really close to me on the sidelines, and I’m like, You know what? I’m just going to tell her. And I said, Hey, in a few seconds, I’m going to be taking off my shirt, revealing two mastectomy scars. I don’t want you to freak out.
She looked at me and took a beat and said, Can I hug you? And we embraced, and it was really sweet. Then the gun went off. I flung my shirt, and I ran.
And the funniest part is at the end of this race, the Cub Scouts of America were the volunteers — all these fucking boys with chintzy metals were like, Here you go.
Afterwards, the reception was complicated. I had people who were avoiding my gaze, side-eyeing — they wanted to look but didn’t. Some people just freaked out. And I look like — you know, I’ve had short hair and read as whatever gender you like for the evening. So that was confusing as well.
But then I had a group of teenage girls who approached me. Because teens, man. They were like, Whoa, my mom had breast cancer but I never knew what that looked like. Or, That’s what it looks like.
This isn’t why I set out to do it, but what a delicious byproduct: to create a visual representation of what your mom, your aunt, me, all these women and men too have gone through and will go through. And if you just saw it, maybe it would be a little more okay than if you hadn’t.