6/12/2025

Public Indecency: 36 Views of the Atlanta Fringe Festival

There’s more lingerie in my laundry than anything else today. It feels like a dinner table littered with the bones of a beast. It feels like a box of pizza rattling with crusts on its way to the trash. I ate my fill, and now there is just the mess.

For the last two weeks I’ve been performing a one woman show as part of the Atlanta Fringe Festival, a local chapter of the massive celebration of independent and off-kilter art. The show, 36 Views: A Story of Tits and Poetry, was a nonlinear memoir of my transition filtered through the prism of my tits, in thirty-six vignettes, styled after the woodblock print works of Hokusai and Henri Riviere. Riviere was so inspired by the Japanese master that he made his own tools to pastiche the ukiyo-e style. The show was my attempt at making my own tools as well.

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The work, the poems that I started two years ago, was initially planned as a book. When I noticed that all my Atlanta artist friends were talking about the Fringe Festival, I looked at the closest things I had to a coherent piece. I pitched my suite of tit poems. I knew hundreds would apply and the lottery system meant my inevitable rejection wouldn’t be personal or based on merit. I could grouse around with all the other unluckies in my friend group and watch the lucky ones who got in.

Then I got in.

And I had to convert my book of quiet poems into a stage show. I had to figure out a way to play a Bach prelude on a baby grand and make people forget cellos existed. I had performed poems before, but always as part of a larger show of disparate elements. Amongst burlesque, magic, and religious-themed drag, I was a brief and essential jet of calming air in a heady jungle climate of the debaucherous night. I was on stage for seven minutes at a time. Now I was responsible for forty. While my friends could play guitar or dance, I had my titty poems, time, and a microphone.

This began with maybe a slide show of paintings inspired by the poems, or maybe commissioning music to live underneath my words, or maybe interactive elements, but every time I considered a new element, it felt hollow and insufficient. Inevitably I did what all self-respecting artists do in the midst of creative crisis: I whined to my girlfriend about it.

She sighed and repeated the same maxim she always did, one I’ve heard often enough to recite along with, but one I never tire of hearing:

Art is a process of amputation.

This show was about connecting, about translating an experience and bringing people in. Pyrotechnics would only push them away. But how? What would I cut away?

Then I remembered those nights around burlesque dancers, and an idea formed. If I wanted these poems to feel transgressive, intimate, and immediate, I would need to put some skin in the game. I would take the quiet, private joy of wearing lingerie for my girlfriend and bring it to stage. As pieces of paper would fall from my podium, I would lose layers of clothing, until finally I would recite my final poem bare-breasted and invite the audience in. This show was about getting naked. I would have to take that literally.

Making a solo show is solitary work, just like writing poems. I would sit in my bedroom and arrange pieces of paper, tetris-ing blocks of poetry into new sequences and recite them to the empty air. It felt isolating. Even the comradery of my fellow Fringers and their processes had a hermetic distance to it. We were all nervous test-takers with our shoulders over our papers.

It left me wholly unprepared for the social explosion of the festival itself, bumping shoulders with over sixty performing acts, meeting traveling artists from as far as Wichita, Kansas and Anchorage, Alaska. Suddenly puppeteers were asking about my poetry, I was asking improv comedians about the drive down from New York. I was eating pizza in restaurants past closing. That click-cracked soda can feeling of all that was sealed away suddenly bursting out bright as Amaterasu from the cave. I am reminded, with a smile, that the sun was lured out with a bawdy strip tease from a literal goddess of revelry. The laughter of the gods shook the world.

That’s what these festivals feel like. From the national Poetry Slam events from my youth to now, it feels like the laughter of the gods after the dark of a shameful cave. I saw so many different and wonderful kinds of performance. I learned to trust my own. That’s the magic of these spaces. Improv comedians, noise guitarists, clowns, magicians, and playwrights, all brought their talents to bear on bars, theatres, streets, and art spaces across two weekends. I made a point of seeing the shows of other trans perfomers and marveled at how different our stories were.

My tit poems were different. They were enough. Performing them for audiences, casting their sheets of paper into the air to hit the stage floor like poisoned seabirds after each reading. I felt reinvigorated. I felt a kinship with these poems I’d admittedly gotten a little sick of. Connecting with my audiences, with my stage crew, my venue manager, and the other performers in my venue reminded me why I write these poems to begin with: to connect. I am trying to paint my experience. I am trying to translate the joy and despair, the uncertainty and terror, the spiritual ecstasy and godless abandon of being trans in these tumultuous into a language others will understand.

When I finished my first performance, a trans woman stopped me in the lobby and told me that my show made her feel “seen.” When I finished my third, my mother hugged me and told me she was proud of me. I felt seen, too.

Fringe was gathering of misfits and freaks. It was a parade of people like me trying to turn their strangeness, their vulnerability, their obsessions, their enormity into a beauty that connects. My tit poems began as moment where I felt completely alone with the enormity of inspiration. I was surrounded by a family that would not understand why a picture of the Eiffel Tower made me sit down and cry.

When I got home from the final performance of my show, I peeled away my last pair of nipple pasties. They pinched my skin before they let go. My show ended with a small private hurt in the dark of my apartment. After all the noise and color and light and wonder of two weeks spent hurling my veins to strangers’ hearts, I was left with this private moment. I looked down at the pastie. I looked down at my stinging breast. It hurt. But the hurt was worth it.

I smiled to myself. The hurt always is.

Yours with an open mouth,
-B

PS. I want to amend this letter with a vociferous thank you to the team behind the Atlanta Fringe Festival, who were endlessly patient and kind as I neurotically rocketed through this process. Thank you Executive Director, Diana Brown, Marketing Director Chris Alonzo, Production Director Nadia Morgan, and the amazing staff and crew at The Supermarket, who made this thing I scarcely dared to dream into a dream come true.

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5/7/2025