You're on an Airplane

by Parker Posey

  Before you do anything, focus yourself to the center, in that great in-between place in yourself, the slightly unfocused (or relaxed) place that’s actually focused.

  Imagine a softball has been thrown at you from underneath—it has the energy of being caught—and roll the clay ball, into and onto itself, tightening and strengthening it, getting those air bubbles out and the odd specks of hard clay dust, or tiny piece of paper or strand of hair—all that garbage on the beach.

  You’re in that strong stance, that lunge, so the strength of the rocking motion will roll the clay to wedge it. Your back won’t like you if you try to use it to do this, so don’t. Use your legs, slow and steady, like a bull—strong as an ox.

  It can take a while, but once you’ve wedged your clay, you finally bring it to your wheel.

  Here’s the fun part: Sit down, focus on the bull’s-eye of the wheel, and get ready to throw the clay hard, like a fastball. Throw it, BAM, onto the wheel, right into the center, where it lands, thwack!

  I got excited and wanted to get to the fun part first. I forgot to mention the necessities: a bucket of water to keep your hands and clay wet. It will be a container for the “slip” (the wet excess clay that will splatter around your wheel and onto your hands), towels to keep clean, and of course, your tools.

  Wet the clay just enough and get ready to push the pedal, full speed ahead—you’re going to be like a race-car driver, so prepare yourself. At the same time, you’re going to tackle that ball of clay like it’s that alien in Aliens. The stomach force you have at this point is like someone punched you in the gut and is refusing to take their fist away. Don’t ask why or you will lose, so keep your eyes on the road—pedal to the metal.

  Before I turn the wheel on, I straddle it and squeeze, like I’m on a horse’s saddle. Get ready to pounce on that clay with every aspect of your hands and body/mind force—not grabbing it like it’s going to leave you but like it was yours to begin with. Your mind’s eye is an archer, connecting to the center of the wheel and the center of you, like a fast-flying arrow. You are now in its energy, and that energy knows itself to be centered.

  You know your clay is centered when it’s not wobbling or shaking. There’s also a perfect little circle at the top of the mound, like the tip of a spinning top.

  If your clay gets dry, wet it, and if it hasn’t flown off the wheel by this point, you’re safe.

  Trust your hands as they begin to learn how to listen to the clay—where and how to move it and when—and here, you’ll begin to find your centering zone.

  Now, the technique of centering: You start at the base, and it looks like squeezing from the outside, but what’s really going on is that every muscle in your hand is like a chiropractor’s hands and body on a patient, positioning the body into alignment. What appears by this force is a phallus.

  Your hand is listening now, keeping your mind’s eye centered as you push it down with the heel of your palm, still using your strength.

  You’re raising the phallus at the base and then pushing it down to the center of the wheel. It goes up, then it goes down; it goes up, then it goes down. It feels so amazing in your hands that you could do it for hours. It’s an erotic thing, what can I say?

  Now, the speed of the wheel is very important. If you’re scared and too slow (it happens a lot in the beginning), your ball of clay won’t have the force to sustain itself and it will become a hardened, twisted blob. Defeated, you’ll need to take it off the wheel, throw it in the recycling bucket, and go back to the wedging table. I usually wedge three or four balls before I sit down at the wheel so I don’t have to get up so much.

  So now you make the walls. You slow the wheel ever so slightly. Your hands must be wet, especially your fingers. Put your strongest finger (usually the middle), at the center of the clay mound. Your other hand is protecting it with strength and sensitivity. With the wheel spinning at its fastest centrifugal force, press the center and let the clay take your finger to what your mind’s eye sees to be an inch above the base.

  The clay is spinning fast and your finger will go directly to the center if you’re not scared. Once you know the feel of the clay at its center on the wheel, you’ll trust it and have confidence.

  Now, to make the “walls” of the vessel, you slow the wheel down slightly. Your finger in the mound is about to draw a line, pulling the center back toward you. This happens quickly and naturally, if you trust it.

  The next step is to “pull up the walls.” Slow the wheel considerably. If you’re right-handed, you will use your left hand’s fingers to go into the vessel and the fingers of your right hand for the outside.

  Starting at the base, your fingers press equally on either side of the wall, bringing up your walls. Beginners make the mistake of thinking that they are the ones bringing up the walls, but it’s clay at the base that forms the walls naturally—you will tap the lip of the wall gently to strengthen it as it comes up—pulling up the walls just three or four times so you don’t exhaust the clay, otherwise it’ll get tired and collapse.

  Now you’ve made your vessel. The cosmic forces have taken shape to form in the material realm.

  My teacher’s name was Manousha, like “minutia,” which was funny because Manousha loved to go little; her pots were tiny worlds, teapots, mainly, with little spouts and lids, like Balinese rooftops the size of a pencil point. She was in her mid-forties, from England but of Russian descent, and she had distinct character. She piled her curly red hair high on her head, like a pioneer woman, and always dressed nicely—careful that clay would only chalk her apron. I respected her immediately. A few times, as I straddled my wheel, she told me I had an erotic lower back, to which I smiled and batted my eyelashes. Manousha was the epitome of femininity for me, at that time. Having produced exquisitely feminine teapots, which exhibited in galleries, she was in the process of trying to get pregnant to produce a baby, which she did in the years that she was my teacher.

  She was a terrific teacher and we all adored her. She instructed us in the classic way to throw and the traditional teachings. Her own teacher had been from Japan and was a meticulous expert. She told us a story about how, before he even turned on the wheel, he’d spent several months practicing throwing the ball to the center over and over again. Throw, throw, throw, bam bam bam. He already knew how to throw, but his teacher made him go back to the very beginning. Before this, he’d wedged clay to the perfect size for his teacher for a year or something.

  Another potter Manousha talked about was a man who made huge vessels and would slash a giant X into each of them, with a pin tool, like a fencer. That was his signature. If the vessel collapsed, he tossed it; if it stayed, it was sold. How intense is that? The risk! We all paused for that one and I fell in love for a minute. We were just students, challenged in simply making what would be small dishes for earrings or containers for salt.

  * * *

  –

  In the beginning, throwing was the best—getting into the sensuality of the clay and centering for hours. My mind would go right to the stars and into the dirt and think about how we’re so disconnected from where things actually come from—that there’s so much more energy in things and objects than we give them credit for. I’d think of cavemen, and the first cavewoman who threw a pot from a kick-wheel. I’d think of how excited and pleased she must’ve been, how hairy her eyebrows were, or if one of her caveman friends ever threw a pot at her, how quick she was to duck out of the way and how fun that was for everybody. There was a time when vessels held offerings to the gods, and we know this because we’ve seen those pictures painted in the pyramids. We see now, in museums, how clumsy and childish those relics were.

  Manousha reminded me of Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons, corseted in her upright posture. There’s a scene where John Malkovich asks her how she managed to invent herself and she says, “Women are obliged to be far more skillful than men.” How
she stabbed a fork in her hand under the table because it drove her bonkers to be pleasant in the face of some disgusting troll-man. If I had directed that movie, I would’ve had bugs coming out of the wigs every now and then—allowing the scenes to have even more passion.

  I made composite pieces that Manousha described as “chaos/control.” I had improved some and would throw “off the hump,” where I’d center a bigger amount of clay (around four balls’ worth) to make vessels from the top of the mound. I’d catch the clay “fabric” that would spin off the mound, by accident and sometimes with intention by pinching my fingers, to catch the collapse. The torn pieces would then dry to “leather hard” along with the vessels, and I put them on a wood tray to cook under a heat lamp. They’d be assembled to form something that looked like a strange flower or wreckage from a spacecraft.

  I was invited to fire some of my pieces at a fellow student’s house upstate, where she did raku firings in her kiln, which take place outside. Raku is a type of Japanese pottery dating back to the sixteenth century. This process is fired by the atmosphere within the kiln, at the most molten state, a few thousand degrees Fahrenheit. A normal firing isn’t as hot. Your piece is glowing red-hot when it’s taken out of the raku kiln. With tongs, it’s placed into containers filled with your favorite combustible materials—sawdust, horsehair, leaves, paper, or copper wire. It will react, creating its own atmosphere. The result is left to the forces of smoke, forming an imprint designed by this new atmosphere. Filmmaker Rich Sibert has a beautiful video on Vimeo of the ceramics master William Shearrow called Raku. One of the things Shearrow says is “Every piece is unique and one of a kind and it’s that way intentionally. And it evokes an emotion inside you.”

  The studio became a co-op while I was there, so I joined. I got my own set of keys, and a group of us would go in at night to drink wine and whine about guys and throw. We tended to our pieces as if they were little babies, placing them carefully on a wooden board and wrapping them in cellophane to keep them moist. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to say, “Look! It’s a family!” and show you their board.

  As a member of the board, I had to perform certain duties, like clean the place, recycle the old clay into the new clay (hard work), wedge the clay (which hurt my back), sweep the studio (which was boring and dried out my nose). If you couldn’t or didn’t want to do the chores, you paid $15 a week. Well, I could spare the fifteen bucks and paid the money a few times to do away with the dirty work.

  I thought it was cool until one of the members came over to my wheel while I was in my zone and tapped me on the shoulder. A tap on the shoulder never feels good, does it?

  I jumped a little and took out my earbuds, interrupting my Brian Eno music.

  She squatted next to me. “You haven’t been doing your duties,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve been focusing, and, you know, meditating. I paid the fee, so . . .”

  She breathed in deeply, through her nose, and nodding to herself, said, “Well, I just don’t think that you want other people to think that you think you’re special.”

  I sighed and said, “But I am.”

  She looked at me, blank-faced.

  “I’m famous.”

  She blinked a few times.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to explain. “Say I’m standing looking at vegetables at the grocery store, holding a bag of carrots, and someone taps me on the shoulder and scares the crap out of me, and then says he’s a fan. That’s not an average day at the grocery store . . .”

  She took in what I had to say and went about her duties and left me to my centering.

  * * *

  –

  Every person is unique and one of a kind and it’s that way intentionally. Every person evokes an emotion inside you.

  27

  It’s Mine

  Nora Ephron loved butter. Almost everyone at her memorial service spoke about her love of butter. Their speeches were savored, like butter. Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Meryl Streep, and other entertainers and artists I’d looked up to spoke so brightly and lightly, with such wit and intelligence, that it seemed Nora had written their material. She planned her service while she was in the hospital—what music would play and who would speak and in what order. I thought maybe she’d given everyone direction, something like: Be butter. “Don’t be better, just be butter.” My favorite note I ever got from Nora was “Just be funny,” which is why I was thinking that. The butter-talk spread its richness naturally into a creamy love and appreciation of the ingredient that savors everything it puts itself in and onto. It’s too rich for words, for words like mine.

  The memorial was at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. To the right and left of the stage were two enormous planters filled with white-bloomed flowers—the structures towered well over ten feet high. Her name appeared in an elegant font written on the screen as the song “As Time Goes By” played.

  Earlier that week, I’d had a dream that Nora and I were backstage before a show, hanging out in front of the dressing room makeup mirror. I reached into her makeup bag and found some blue eyeliner and put it on. We were standing up and we smiled at each other. I thought of taking the makeup pencil at a moment when she wasn’t looking. If I took it, I wouldn’t be able to come backstage to see her after the show so I could borrow it.

  The dream made me think of Mildred, because I wanted to share it with her. Nora had seen Mildred during her Heartburn years—the scandalous book about her former husband Carl Bernstein and the affair he had while she was seven months pregnant. The book was her revenge, and I’ll never forget her smile when I asked if the revenge had been sweet. It was a smile that said it had been. Mildred and her husband, Bernie Berkowitz, led a therapy group in their offices on West Ninth Street, off of Fifth Avenue, where Lynn Grossman was also “in group” with Nora. In fact, it was Lynn’s husband, Bob Balaban, who connected me with Mildred.

  We’d wrapped Waiting for Guffman and were doing Bill Maher’s show (at the time it was called Politically Incorrect) and it was there, backstage, that he’d asked how I was. It wasn’t a casual question but one to consider truthfully. Bob is someone I’d describe as “directly human.” I hadn’t been doing well and had found myself zoning out in my apartment, holding a pile of dirty laundry and not moving. I told him I was doing alright, but it wasn’t the truth and he knew it. And then he asked, “How are you handling your success?” I was taken aback and answered, “Is that what this is? Not very well.” He gave me Mildred’s number and I went to see her.

  Mildred Newman was an archetypal “great mother.” She was playfully nurturing and imaginatively simple. She’d say, “Your world is not so big as to make yourself so small, nor is your world so small as to make yourself so big,” and I’d think of Alice in Wonderland, who made herself both big and small, and the rabbit holes she got herself into. When I was in a state with a boyfriend, Mildred would say: “You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss / A sigh is just a sigh / The fundamental things apply / As time goes by.” She’d also say, “There are two parts to feelings: having them, and acting on them.” I would still sink in my feelings then, afraid to navigate in order to get out of them. The battery low, my flashlight flickering. She’d say, “Do what you approve of.” And like Jiminy Cricket says to Pinocchio, “Always let your conscience be your guide.”

  * * *

  –

  I met Nora before Dazed and Confused and she cast me in a little part in Sleepless in Seattle that got cut from the film. Afterward she wrote me a letter on her stationery, explaining that it had nothing to do with me, but the scene just didn’t move the story along. In the scene, I knocked on Tom Hanks’s door after hearing him on the radio, let loose a gush of fandom, and made a quick exit. In the letter, she said I was a gifted comedienne and that she would work with me again, which I felt was genuine, and her support meant everything. And besides, it’s not lik
e Sleepless in Seattle did any big business, so I wasn’t that upset about it.

  The next year, she hired me for a movie she was working on called Mixed Nuts. I was cast as Rollerblader #2 and Jon Stewart was cast as Rollerblader #1. So Jon and I learned how to Rollerblade at the Roxy, which was a nightclub in the Meatpacking District. On Sunday afternoons it turned into a roller rink, where we Rollerbladed to disco—looking like dorks in our helmets, wrist guards, and kneepads.

  We shot Mixed Nuts in Santa Monica, in the newly opened Shutters on the Beach, a gorgeous hotel right on the water where we had to stay for three weeks. We couldn’t believe that we had it so good, and we didn’t share more than fifteen lines in the film between us. We pretty much just had to Rollerblade past Steve Martin holding a Christmas tree. Now that I think of it, we didn’t even do that, because our stunt doubles did it for us.

  I gave Shutters my credit card to check into the place and Jon and I went out for burgers close by. When I went to the ATM to get some cash, all I had was $1.75 left in my bank account. My credit card was also my cash card and I shuddered. Nora happened to be walking by, and I showed her the receipt, like it belonged to someone else. She got her wallet out and gave me a hundred dollars.

  A dollar seventy-five in my bank account, isn’t that too much? It doesn’t make sense, right? But all those independent movies I did in the nineties were done on the cheap. I was counting coins, which I’d put in those paper roll-ups to take to the deli in exchange for cash. I would buy pasta to make for dinner. I didn’t know anyone else who was famous and broke.