MIRACLE WHIPPED: An Interactive Performance

Miracle Whipped

The following is a rough outline of the text spoken during a performance of ‘Miracle Whipped’ on January 18th, 2007.  A few other people sat down to talk to the jar.  One man talked so softly that I could not hear a word he said.  But the jar heard him. 

At the end of Miracle Whipped, I wept briefly and then gave the Miracle Whip the type of burial the processed world has taught me to accept.  I threw the jar in the trash can.

It’s strange seeing you like this.  You are so many people and ideas.  Memories, like plastic, don’t die.  My mind is like a landfill of melodies and nightmares.  Sometimes I can’t separate the dreams from what actually happened.

I don’t know how or why you ended up in my refrigerator.  I don’t eat waspy things like you.  All I know is that you’ve been there for over a year, and it’s time for you to leave.  It says here you’re kosher, but you still seem very goyish to me.  I have a feeling that you have something to do with my ex-boyfriend.  He was kind of waspy. 

It’s like the way people deal with death, completely artificial and devoid of understanding.  You are not real.  Like the way people say, “Time will heal,” isn’t real.  They just don’t know what else to do or say and “time will heal,” is something they heard on television or in some maudlin movie.  They say it because they’re afraid, because they don’t want to think about their own mortality, because grief comes in a vessel too large to hold.  Because no one’s container is this large. 

That’s why you were left for me, I guess.  Because by some miracle you knew that I was going to need a container in which to hold my grief, my vile, horrid, disgusting, sobbing guilt-ridden grief.  And this is the best miracle that you can give me.  A container to put it in. 

People don’t really come back from the dead.  That whole Jesus thing is just plain silly.  Because if the only criteria for resurrection were a pureness of heart, then my father would still breathe.  His heart would still beat.  His mouth would still laugh.  But he won’t come back, and my people know it.  How perfect is it that there’s Klezmer playing right now.  The music of my people’s grief, of our ability to survive.  It only takes a few thousand years of exile and genocide to realize that death is forever.  That people don’t come back.  That there are no zombies, only ghosts.  I  pray for visitations.  Please, father, come and say hello.  Let’s do the monkey dance once more.

I have a secret that I’ve never told anyone.  Sometimes, I pretend that XX XXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXX.  XXX XXXX XX XXXXXXXX.  XXXX XX XXXX XXXXXX XXX.  But that would be a miracle, and miracles don’t actually happen.

© Harvey Rabbit  2007

Photographs by Mercedes Coyle