Performing in Bogs

Telling the same story over and over again.

I’m not one to hate on my gay voice. I used to really fucking hate it, trying to convince others that I didn’t have the gay lisp. To be honest, I don’t really think of my voice as gay. Rather it just feels like something that’s offbeat from the status quo of “normal” sounding voices. I still don’t hear the gay lisp as clearly as others might. I know it’s there, but I don’t feel like it takes center stage. Does that make sense?

“When I first met you, I knew you weren’t straight. But I didn’t think of you as gay either,” a friend told me once in high school. My voice, to me, feels like my own self – formless and without gender. I’ve come to like my voice over the years. Which is handy, because I’m currently listening to a lot of it.

Last week I started up doing Moss-Covered Claws shows again. I don’t know when the next one will be, but for the past eleven months I’ve been ignoring a huge part of myself. The part that creates. That laughs. That is happy. I’m not losing that version of Jonah ever again, and I think these performances will help me keep them around.

Sometimes I worry I am being a one-trick pony with my show. “I try never to do the same thing twice,” my hero Imogen Heap once said. But maybe I’ve been pingponging too much over the years. I’m trying to find something I’m good at and just stick to it. I feel like Imogen performs the same show over and over again, too. She has to, especially when she goes on tour, right?

Here’s the gist: I read my short story “Boggy” for about twenty minutes. Usually there is some sort of puppet involved. Then we do a question and answer session after, and I sell copies of my book. It works well. I love speaking and performing, but I hate how acting requires you to memorize so much shit. So reading aloud is a happy medium for me. And everyone is distracted by the creepy green puppet around my shoulders. It’s a win-win. For the most recent iteration of this, I partnered up with Trista Heenan of the Olympia Oddities podcast to do a live show, along with local band Gorgeous Gorgeous Girls, at the new Odds and Ends curiosity shop in downtown Olympia. It went amazing. I’ve never performed this story for that many people before. Occasionally I’d glance up and see hoards of folks all looking at me, then I’d go right back down into my story, focusing on the performance. This goes for regular acting, too, but you can’t really process how many pairs of eyes are looking at you during these things. If you do, you’ll die. Let the performance swallow you up, and forget anyone is even there. It’s weird, man. But dude, I just fucking loved it.

We opted to just record the podcast parts of the show, because recording everything was too complicated for our lo-fi selves and we figured we could rerecord the performance parts later for the actual podcast episode. Which is why I am now clicking and dragging little bits and bobs of my voice over and over to try to get the perfect rhythm of telling this story out into the digital world. It’s fun, learning how to do this. Do you keep the bits where you breathe in? How come this software doesn’t have audio transitions/fading, like nonlinear video editors do? It’s a good time.

In the meanwhile, here is a hybrid recording of the very first one of these I did back in 2021. It’s a mixture of live recording, animations, music, and a bunch of other shit in a creative soup. I’ll let y’all know when the podcast episode is finally done. Enjoy