17. Running On The Spot

Anna Keir [1980?] Untitled drawing l to r Anna Keir, Marian Evans, Allie Eagle  26x33cm

When I get excited – by fear, grief, delight, anger, worry – adrenalin itches under and around my tongue. My pupils dilate. Multiple stimuli pour in. I lose my capacity to frame a sentence. To recognise an unnecessary parenthesis. And I run at the mouth: multiple blurts. It’s not pretty.

Intimates know to wait. Sit it out. Sometimes they smile. Put an arm around me. Ask a considered question or two. Ask me to PAUSE. Sigh. Laugh and roll their eyes. Tell me off. Etc.

Fortunately, I’ve learned to be calm. Most of the time. But not at the beginning of Prue Hyman’s interview for Wellington’s Lesbian Radio Show, a Radio Access programme I love.

I’m not sure what did it. I know I was worried about reading a Muriel Rukeyser poem. Prue had suggested Rukeyser’s Looking at Each Other, which seems to be about two women. It starts:

Yes, we were looking at each other
Yes, we knew each other very well
Yes, we had made love with each other many times

I’m not a poet. I don’t read poems in public. But I’d practised, and practised a little bit of The Speed of Darkness, too, because that’s where Throat of These Hours started.

And it was earlyish Sunday morning, when I’m usually carrying home vegetables and fruit from the waterfront market. And I’d had a solitary week, not speaking much. And there was concern that the Radio Access transmitter was down, affected by one of the 800 lightning strikes that hit Wellington a couple of days earlier; we learned that the show was going out only to computers. And the studio we were in was the model for some of the scenes in Throat of These Hours. It was the space where we’d filmed Tinkerbell, the 48Hours film that explores one of the Throat of These Hours themes. It was the studio where I record Wellywood Woman podcasts, where I was used to being the interviewer. And then, at the beginning of the interview, for a while everything I’d said seven seconds ago played softly through my headphones.