HEART-SHAPED ORANGE PEEL

I challenge anyone to show me that they spend their time in a more satisfying way than I do. Yesterday evening, I scratched tiny contact microphones against musty brick and mortar basement walls, fed an orange segment to an alluring young woman with dark eyes holding an iron, rolled around in the hay with two lithe dancers, participated in a Falun Dafa type tea drinking ceremony, accompanied singers and drummers improvising in a near pitch dark room on a typewriter, ah the list goes on... I was led blindfolded around a cramped and obstacle laden room with only a rope and soft strange hands to guide me. Barefoot, I walked on green onions, mint leaves, and toast, then had my feet washed by two obliging young women. I was given a heart-shaped orange peel on a string as an amulet or medallion. I'm wearing it now, though it is dried out and hard.
Throughout all of this, I was barefoot, yes, I was also wearing a soft blue mask that covered my brow, nose and cheeks, though I could see through two eyeholes. I felt like I was disguised from anyone who might know me, almost protected. In the future I will be unrecognizable to anyone who was with me yesterday evening. For one night, for a few hours, I inhabited not only a different world, a world of costume and sound, I inhabited a different body, a different personality I've never been before. Perhaps I once thought I could be this person, and perhaps I might think I could be again, but never wholly, only partially. I existed in that form and space for only one time, one moment. Maybe this is true for every moment; maybe it takes an extraordinary evening for me, or for you, to recognize it.

R. Murray Schafer's Theatre of the Senses