CLOSE-AT-HAND
When I went to see Marcia Wilkie, I thought she was going to do stand-up comedy. I hate stand-up comics. They always seem to be insulting their audiences or their mothers or themselves–anything to be funny, because funny is what stand-up is all about.
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Because more than anything Wilkie is a storyteller. She tells tales that could happen to you, or me, or the woman next to you. All five vignettes in Close-at-Hand are about women; three are about lesbians. These are stories a general audience rarely hears: about a 14-year-old’s desperate fear that her sister has caught her making out with her girlfriend; about a college freshman’s unrequited love for a woman with “perfectly shaved legs, even above the knees”; about a third-grade girl tortured by her classmates for befriending a mentally retarded girl; about a grown woman dealing with her parents in the wake of her coming out; about a homeless woman who loses her best friend. Between these stories Diana Laffey sings, and her soul mother’s voice provides calm transitions that somehow hold all the different pieces together.
Many of Wilkie’s characters show a self-deprecating or bittersweet humor. In “Any Connections,” a desperately sad woman leaves the Girl Scout camp where she’s fallen in love with a fellow counselor, “knowing that unless you create a reason, there is no reason to see that person again.” Suddenly, as she’s pulling out of the driveway, her friend comes running toward her, exclaiming that she wants to try a relationship. The woman stops the car, explaining that “I had best not drive, if I am hallucinating.”
I Survived St. Jude’s is supposed to explore such Catholic issues as celibacy, the church’s oppression of women, abortion, and “definitions of humanity.” But “explore” isn’t exactly the word–what Steele does seems more like pointing at an issue, acknowledging its existence, and then moving on. For example: We all know that Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy. We all imagine how hard that must be. Steele shows us. She reaches in her pants, pulls out a wonderfully lifelike penis, sticks it to a large foam hand of God descending from above, and receives the oh-so-coveted priest’s writ. Later the priest must resist the temptation that rises while viewing pictures of topless women in National Geographic. How many times have we heard this before?
