girl power inc. - girl power inc. things written down

I am a writer of things.

Beautiful things. Plays. Books. Blogs. Grant Applications. Speeches. Tributes. Comedy Routines. All things writerly. Things written down. Things written for people to read, speak, think, say. Skits. Ads. Tributes. Letters of support.

I write things for people who want to write. I write things for people who have a vision and need the words. I write, therefore I am.

My grandfather’s name was never written down until I wrote it down. He was a journal keeper, a poet, a watcher of the weather, a sales clerk for the merchant man, a gentle soul who died too early. He was a playwright who wrote his plays out by hand and put them on in the communities of our isolated south coast. But, to quote my mother, his name was never written down, he was never published, nothing got into print, his name was never written down.

Write your name down.

I am a performer of comedy.

Grown up comedy, lady-like comedy, comedy for the soul and the spirit, feel good laugh out loud, giggle, aha me too kind of comedy. I can help you get your own comedy on, perform for you or your company, event, theatre, festival, workshop, get away from it all kind of got to get motivated workshop comedy.

The Life Changing Magic of Mess: Waking Up Alive!

July 15, 2018 By Berni Stapleton Leave a Comment

My house is usually immaculately clean except for most of the time, when it isn’t.

Once upon a time I was fanatical about cleaning in preparation for the afterlife.

Mine.

I didn’t ever want to walk out the door without having cleaned, in case it was someone else who had to come back in and deal with the madness. Kind of like: Always wear the good underwear in case you get hit by a bus.

I didn’t want anyone else to have to clean up after me.

Today I have perfect confidence in the fact that the spotlessness is there, beneath the spots. The cleanliness is a subtext, for the discerning. I want very much for someone, anyone, to clean up after me, dead or not. (Me, not them. But, them too, if that’s the case. I don’t care.)

I used to think along the lines of a place for everything. Now I prefer everything in every place.

I wanted to live in a pristine white house with only one thing in every room: one dress in the closet, one book on the shelf, one chair at the window. But then I realized that wouldn’t represent the magnificent mess I’ve made out of my life. My office is stacked with all plays I’ve written, so many theatre programs commemorating performances, evidence of cats loved and lost, lives lived and begun again, and again, and again, from scratch.

I was slipping a bit this week in my resolve to revel. I came home one day after rehearsal and vacuumed before I even opened the wine. I washed the dishes in the sink while there were at least FIVE other clean plates in the cupboard, crying out to be used.

This is not a romantic whimsical mess. This is not a bouquet of dried flowers languidly lounging across an open book of poetry. There ARE dried flowers, but they are the plants I forgot to water. There IS an open book of poetry, many many open books, happy to be picked up on a whim, happy to be laid back down and forgotten about until another time.

There are two cats involved who generate their own universe of fur, hairballs, kitty litter and random hork matter. I do accept it is my lot to be their personal maid, but I draw the line at becoming a hostage to dust bunnies.

Usually when in a rehearsal process, the day off is thought of as the time to ‘catch up’. The precious hours spent tackling all the dreary things, catching up with them as if we are in a race and the dirty laundry will reach the finish line before me. If my dirty laundry reaches the finish line ahead of me I hope it will send back a limo with some champagne.

What will people think, is what I used to think. What will my personal untidiness look like when seen through outside eyes?

I paid $8.99 for a cutlery drawer organizer because I thought it was the key to something. It has cutlery shaped outlines in it, with forks meant to fit in the fork shaped space, the spoons in the spoon shaped space, and so on. No square pegs in round holes.

Will my house look like an alien landscape, to be deciphered with archeological explorations? Or will the works of it be loaded into boxes and bags and carted off to another finish line?

These are the things I’m pondering today, just having tripped over the whipper snipper in the dining room next to the folded stack of towels which fit so nicely on the bookshelf.

Also, for sale: one cutlery organizer. Like new.

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Waking Up Alive: How to eat your cake and have it too.

July 9, 2018 By Berni Stapleton 1 Comment

I never said the thing they said I said.

A piece of my house is dancing merrily down the road and I wonder if I should chase after it, but that would mean I’d have to put down the piece of cake I’m eating.

There’s a certain kind of buttery icing that melts my heart, sets my teeth to tingling, and rivals sex. It tends toward the creamy side, rather than the sweet, and you just know that if a drop of it spills on your clothing it will leave a grease mark that will never come out.

After glow.

I like my cakes plain and moist. A mild vanilla, a subtle strawberry, a deep chocolate. Soft enough to soak in all that melting of the icing, so that when you cut a slice you can see where the line of demarcation has sunk in. Like a tide line on the shore.

Other things keep falling off my house in the constant winds of late: the top of my chimney. Pieces of my eaves. The incessant wind means that no one can climb up on a tall ladder to put those things to rights. The wind keeps howling things down. The wolf is at the door.

Cake batter is as good as cake, maybe even slightly better. It’s that rare thing, the prologue to the main event that can stand alone, if need be. It’s OK if a person gets overcome and devours the batter before it can be baked into traditional cake form. Cake has many lives.

As a child I loved to lick the batter off the cake mixer beaters, the gooey softness a substitute for things I did not have, and longed to have.

The back of my house is also drunk and disorderly, the garden gnome toppled over into the long weeds, the grass is waist high, the wind ripples through everything. My house creaks like an old boat.

Who decided that cake has to come last in the pecking order of the meal? A cake can have its just deserts and serve as breakfast.

Oh, the bliss, of crushing the last crumbs of the cake with a fork and licking them off, and then licking the plate too.

Eating it and having it too.

Another piece of the front of my house rips off and twirls away. The wind beats at us, frolicking with vacuous intent as the sun shines upon the jagged edges of the place I call home. I imagine making a giant vat of cake batter and slathering it all over my tender home. My heart.

Some things just can’t be helped.

But cake is always possible.

Waking Up Alive: How to Weigh Nothing.

June 29, 2018 By Berni Stapleton 4 Comments

I’m obsessed with a video of two humpback whales floating beneath the ocean surface, observing a miniscule diver, who is in turn observing them through a camera.

These living monoliths hover, float, enigmatic, barnacle covered, taking a tiny break from orbiting the earth from within.

I thought of them yesterday while I was standing in line at the grocery store. The elderly lady ahead of me was struggling to get her 123 items checked through the Express Lane, so I had plenty of time to contemplate my paradoxical surroundings.

(She had offered to let me go ahead of her, this being the 1-20 items only lane, but I didn’t want to get caught red-handed by the Express Lane Police with my own 116 items, so I magnanimously declined and told her to go ahead and take her time, ignoring the heavy sighs of the man behind us clutching 1 carton of milk.)

To my right there was a wall built completely of sweets. In fact, I think the shelf itself was made of pink striped peppermint knobs. There were bars of chips, and chips of nuts, and nuts of lollipops. There were tiers of cellophane wrapped cakes sparkling next to the most colourful array of candies seen since Willie Wonka. There was Hard Case chocolate glowering at Less Judgmental chocolate, Milk chocolate necking with Lactose Intolerant Salt Infused chocolate, giving birth to Rainbow Glossy Yummy Bears. Yes, an orgy of sweets, everything up to, but not including Jigg’s Dinner chocolate. (Someone should get on that.)

To my left, opposite all of this, there was a disheartening array of “Women’s Magazines.” Each magazine blaring headlines such as “She lost ten pounds by just eating cabbage!” “How to get that body swimsuit ready!” (My swimsuit is sucking back the Hot Pepper Double Cream Chocolate with a Grand Marnier chaser and says “ Kiss my double latex bound derrier.”)

Other screamers included:

“Kate’s secret to losing the baby bump!”

“How to love eating nothing!”

“How to LIVE while eating nothing!”

“40 recipes for instant weight loss! Just add water! In fact, it’s ONLY water!”

Not one magazine in sight with a headline about great new books, carburetors, or tips for fuel efficiency, or how to survive the apocalypse, or how to train your zombie to devour victims while outside only, and not bring body parts inside as gifts. Or how whales float like feathers and refrain from eating tiny peanut sized divers.

A humpback whale can weigh as much as 79,000 pounds. It can propel itself out of the water in a vertical breach at a speed of 30 kilometers an hour, and never once wonders whether it can or not.

At the Express Lane there were bags of JuJubes, bags of “100 Calorie Only Cookie Micro Bites” opposite the magazine which proclaimed “Recipe your ‘weigh’ to success!”

When the elderly lady ahead of me was carefully and slowly packing her groceries into her bag, I noticed she had bought mostly tinned goods., all sale items marked: 3 for 5 dollars. 4 for 7 dollars. Way too many dark brown and ugly tins.

Humpbacks eat mainly Krill, which is to say, a lot of really tiny candy coloured fish.

There were bags of chips and healthy chips and vegetable chips and kettle cooked chips, kettle not included.

So much glittering food across from the headlines encouraging us to starve ourselves, while in reality with the power rates hijacking us, and the economy what it is, being able to eat at all is becoming a luxury.

I asked a friend of mine who is a diver about how a planet sized being can hover in the water like a delicate soap bubble, and she told me about buoyancy, and the weight of the water itself.

I’d like to say that when I gave the bag of candy to the elderly lady in front of me that we shared a Hallmark moment but she was suspicious, although she took them. The guy behind me with the single carton of milk accepted his also, still with the pained look on his face, although less gruff than before.

I walked home eating a full bag of Cheezies, the puffy kind that leave the artificial colouring all over your fingers and clothes and teeth. Moving slowly. Imagining it was me looking down at the peanut sized diver.

(Oh, and lest you think there aren’t any Express Line Police, a very harried man yelled at me recently to put the bloody magazines back in the rack in the same order in which I found them, madam!)