the secret garden (closet)
June 2002, chez moi, Minneapolis, MN
click to see a clip of the secret garden (closet)
“Here you go: I remember being astonished and a little concerned, perhaps misguidedly, that Gabrielle would open her home -her bedroom closet, that intimate holy-of-holies, walk-in girl-space supreme -to a randomly invited, unknown audience. But I need not have feared. All of the audience knew each other. We were an intimate and warm crew. We sat on Gabrielle's bed and watched. Her closet is a space of wonders, just like Gabrielle herself. She had all those fabulous clothes, some of which she changed into/out of…romantic long slips, etc. Against the backdrop were cutouts of Black porn images, very voluptuous ladies. [actually they were men—g.c.] Later DT asked her where she got them. The show was about private bookish-girl romantic/sexual longings and the wild spaces inside. It was quite touching as i recall and i related to it a lot. I also remember the landlord’s flower and small-tree garden as a thing of extravagant if contained beauty, complementing externally the beauty of the inner sanctum closet in the downstairs apt bedroom. It occurs to me just now that her landlords, an interracial gay couple, have in their own way turned a potentially claustrophobic closet-situation into a secret (?) garden of delight, desire and beauty just like Gab's clothes closet. I remember Gab swooning dramatically as part of the performance. Then afterwards we sat around and talked for a while, and D and his gfriend and Gab and I went to a Somali (?) restaurant. I enjoyed the gemütlichkeit (sp?) factor very much. I felt that the performance brought us into a friendly, if somewhat ephemeral, intimacy that was borne out in the post-performance sociability. It is in the retelling that I discover the many layers of intricacy of sensibility that Gabrielle was working with: the girlish yearning, the importance of reading in identity formation and in the development of a life of the mind of romantic and intellectual aspiration, and how that development is inflected by social location with sometimes ominous undertones. it was handled delicately and somewhat obliquely, or it struck me as oblique at the time, now not so much in the paraphrasing i'm doing. xo, md” —Maria Damon, poet and University of Minnesota English Professor