Whitney Menzel & Kristen Merritt

Hana, man, mona, mike;
Barcelona, bona, strike;
Hare, ware, frown, vanac;
Harrico, warico, we wo, wac.
 
 
     I fell backwards from my fragile chair, not unusual for me, I fix things for a living so at home I like the freedom of disordered and broken things, I find comfort in it. I was never the goose on the playground, always the duck... like the kind of duck you see in the window of a Chinese deli in San Francisco hanging amongst brothers, it's not sad, each one is waiting to be freed from the hook, ready to become the antagonistic goose.  As I lay there on my back looking up at the corrugated metallic horizon of my home It occurs to me... a tiger won't holler and a duck is no match for a goose.
 
   My story isn't sad, it's not even a story so much as a thought or the feeling you have when you play with your sibling jumping from chair to couch to chair, feet never touching the ground. You know all along that the lava makes it fun, you know that you can open the heat register and free your mini-figs from lego jail, you know that paper and scissor will never be a match for rock. I put the ashes in my pockets instead of the posies, my chair isn't broken because we all fall down.

​
​by Whitney Menzel

---

video & choreography by Kristen Merritt