Do you feel like that gets easier as you get older?
Actually, I do, I think there’s less pressure. Which is in a way sad — that there’s less pressure. And why I say that is because everything is directed toward 20-something-year olds, you know? It’s just ’cause no one gives a fuck about anyone over 20.You know what I mean? Like some people think it’s ridiculous that I would rock out and I’m almost 40 or whatever. And its like, “No, you’re ridiculous for complying with what life is supposed to be again.” And I think that’s just part of my lifestyle and my politics and the way I wanna live and that’s why it upsets me when people follow blindly and it feeds into their own fears.
I read that you had been a teacher before and I didn’t know that, and I also read about the folk music stuff . . .
Well, I can explain all that. That was the job that I, again, I trail-blazed at the whole teaching-kids thing. I don’t have a degree in music or drama or education with kids at all.
And were you doing theater and music with them?
Yeah, I was just doing creative role-playing and music with kids because I hated the way I was brought up. It was all sick — like, put on this costume, your parents are coming, read this line, sing that note, you sang it wrong, we’re giving it to the next kid. And I think that’s a big problem with education, that they just lump creativity into, like, a math problem. And it doesn’t work that way, and you have to realize that creativity is something that you should bring with you all in your life or else you’re gonna get duped by car commercials that say, “Be creative, be the best that you can be.” You have to take control of your own resources, which is yourself, your creativity. That’s all you have.
So did you have an interest in working with kids?
Well, I was interested in a job cause I didn’t have one. I was actually working at a day care center and was so bored that I started a drama program with these kids. And it went really well, and I proposed to work at every day care center in the area, and it went really well, and I started teaching teachers how to be creative with their kids, and I was doing seminars for teachers, and then I just built a whole career, a 10-year career, by myself, with my own philosophy and nobody working over me or under me or beside me.
It’s so interesting to me that people are like, “Well, she was a teacher and then she re-invented herself as a rock musician or, you know, as an electro-person.” It wasn’t really that linear.
Why cant people understand that things are a process? Why do people have to take a word like “reinventing” — it’s a part of your process. You’re still human, you’re still growing. The whole point is to always find out who you are and I think people feel like after you’re 20 you’re supposed to know who you are. No. You never know. That’s why mid-life crisis happens. You have to keep doing your shit and being whatever you want and don’t feel like, “Oh, I’m this or that.” It’s ridiculous how it’s all about restrictions, especially in the Western world, what we’ve done to ourselves. You can be fun and creative until you’re 30.
