What the Body Knows

The story of my body is the secret history of my life

When I set out to write the story of my body, I didn’t know I’d be writing the secret history of my life.

But all the secrets I’d held onto for decades, all the shameful things I never told anybody, were all connected to my body. From pooping in the woods to masturbating with a purple dildo, I had a very provocative life story that lived behind the life story that everybody knew. This was the life story that only I knew.

Or that I didn’t really know, until I wrote this show. I didn’t realize I had a secret history, hidden in my body. It told its own story about me, one I’d never held to the light before. Looking at my life body-first showed me all the ways I was shaped by the culture, trying to be the girl or woman I was supposed to be. And all the ways that the things I tried to hide shaped the girl and woman I became.

Old Woman Naked is the story of how my body kept the score. (I wish I came up with that, but it was my LA producer Kate Juergens, who is a genius at distilling complex information to a clear and powerful idea.)

My show feels so daring partly because no other 73-year-old female writers want to make their playwriting and acting debut while standing naked on stage in LA.

“I would rather blow Stephen Miller,” said one writer friend.

True, revealing your darkest secrets along with your pubic hair is hellish, but it also might be the most creatively and personally satisfying thing I’ve ever done. To lay everything metaphorically and literally bare in front of a room of strangers, and feel so much love in return.

They love me naked.

This song has been playing nonstop in my head.

Writing is so much easier than performing, at least for me. When you write, you never have to experience anyone’s response to your work. And writing fiction provides yet another barrier between what you’re saying and how the audience receives it. Sex through a sheet.

The only way to really experience a story about the things only a body can experience is with the body, live, in person, with other bodies in the room.

There are things your body knows that you may not, secrets it can tell you. The things you’ve hidden from the world may reveal what you’re hiding from yourself.

One of my long-held secrets was that I always wanted to see an old woman naked. It became a micro-obsession that became more persistent as it seemed more elusive. Come on, I remember thinking: I only wanted to see a couple of naked old ladies. How hard could that be?

Quite hard, as it turns out, which is another focus of the play. We keep our bodies as hidden as many of the things we do with them.

In rehearsal, even reading the script to a friend, I’d always start crying at the last line. If you’ve seen the show, please do not reveal it: I’m going to talk about it in a few weeks in a video interview with the brilliant Valerie Monroe. When I first came up with that line, long before I imagined the play, I thought it had come to be by mistake and tried to give it to Val. I saw it as the title of a book she could write, but Val said she wasn’t interested in writing a book. I couldn’t see this line fitting into anything I would write, but I loved it too much to let it go.

As soon as I had the idea for Old Woman Naked, I knew that was the last line. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get to it, but it felt like the right destination. I’d always felt it captured something profound and true, a way of seeing my own body and everyone else’s with deep sympathy and love.

Performing this week, I got a lot back from the audience that moved me very deeply, as a person and as a writer. I’m acting only in the sense that I’m saying scripted words and moving in a planned way, but I’m talking about my real life and feeling first-hand how people are responding. When they laugh, when they cry, when they tell me they loved it, that’s gratifying in the deepest possible way.

I want to expand Old Woman Naked in several different directions.

I’ve started working with a director in New York, Wendy C. Goldberg, to develop Old Woman Naked with a celebrity playing me. I love the idea of slouching down in my seat anonymously, watching Jessica Lange or Whoopi Goldberg claim they’re the ones who wanted to touch my friend Ruth’s breasts. So I can go back into denial.

I’m more comfortable talking about How Getting Naked Made Me Powerful than I am at actually getting naked while walking and talking and trying frantically to remember my lines while trying to look like I do remember them. I’d love to talk about the experience of the show and the realizations behind it as a speaker, without a script and without taking off my clothes.

I’d love to do a podcast interviewing women about their bodies, and produce a story-telling series where women reveal everything they’ve been hiding, and write a book unpacking all the issues I deal with in the show.

Plus I’m finally ready to publish that long-lost novel about my tempestuous first love that I read aloud from in the show.

And I hope there’s still a place for me to perform the show myself. It’s agonizing but exhilarating to come up against my own discomfort. That’s what makes the experience so electric, for me and for the audience. Maybe my secret life is like a lot of people’s secret lives, and talking about it makes them feel like it’s okay to reveal what they’ve been hiding too, to finally let go of a lifetime of shame.

I hope people leave the show feeling what I discovered by writing it: The things that we hide are not in fact ugly and unacceptable, but deeply human and true and beautiful.

Of course I loved Deb Vankin’s piece about the show in the LA Times. Deb had the genius idea to interview me naked at WiSpa, and the Pulitzer Winner Christina House took the gorgeous pictures. I was trending ahead of the Torrance shooter and the snakebite — so proud!

And I can’t wait for the New York Times Style piece by Tammy LaGorce to come out, probably next weekend. Tammy’s a champion interviewer who first talked to me for this piece after the New York show, then followed up between the two shows last week.

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