111. Black men can’t drive: quickie with an actor / writer / singer / director / educator

Hello horizontal lovers. horizontal is the podcast about sex, love, & relationships of all kinds that’s recorded while lying down, wearing robes.

 

A typical recording is long and languorous, and lasts between three and five hours. When I release it, I divide it into two parts (if we recorded for three hours) and four parts (if we recorded for five). The first half of the conversation is available in all the podcast places, and the second is available exclusively to patrons of the horizontal arts.

 

For access to The Full Horizontal, and to be a part of eradicating shame, diminishing loneliness, & alchemizing human connection, become a $7+ patron of the horizontal arts by navigating directly to patreon.com/horizontalwithlila

 

At the end of each longform conversation, I ask my guest to tell me a story, and the story marks the conclusion of our patron episode together. It can be any personal story that falls under the broad umbrella of intimacy — sex, love, or relationships of any kind. I’ve had stories of being carried down a mountaintop by a hunky guide (episode 10 with Elaine), watching your wife have a miscarriage, giving your father’s body to science (episode 92 with Dr. Alexandra Solomon), a friend breakup, and a particularly epic tale about the Cretan Resistance, thievery, journeying, and a real human skull (episode 31 with Matthew Stillman).

 

One of those stories on its own is a horizontal quickie.

My live event, the horizontal storytelling pajama party, is an eveningful of quickies. I get horizontal with my guest just like we do when we record a full episode, wearing robes, sharing a pillow, microphone above us, gazing upward as though stargazing, or post-coital, or whispering into the wee hours of a really good sleepover. At horizontal storytelling, there’s a whole audience getting horizontal with us in their pajamas.

 

When I ask my guest to choose this story, I tell them that it can have any kind of tone or outcome, as long as it’s a story that they truly desire to tell me — because if they have the impulse to tell it, and especially if they’re also a bit trepidatious to do so, it will be the right one: a narrative that others need to hear.

 

This quickie was recorded live in June 2019 at horizontal storytelling: the summer pride edition. We donned rainbow pajamas, noshed on milk and cookies, and curled up together, all 50 of us, to listen to five storytellers from across the LGBTQIA+ community.

 

In this quickie, I lie down with Christopher Burris. Christopher Burris is an actor, director and visionary creative from Asheville, North Carolina. He’s the Director of the Afrofuturistic Queer Sci-Fi Funk musical BRING THE BEAT BACK, by Derek Lee McPhatter.

 

I first met Chris when he directed a reading of "America's Favorite Pasttime," by Dennis A. Allen II, in which I got to play one of my favorite roles of all time, a Dominatrix mother, in a story with complicated issues of race and sex and transaction and correctness and parenthood.

 

The first day I showed up for rehearsal, the guy playing the young white friend of the young black male lead wasn't there yet, and Chris read the part.

 

CHRIS IS A GENIUS. He read that part (the part of a white kid who uses hip-hop slang and the n-word in casual conversation), better than any of the white guys who I saw read that part. He was Hysterical. I basically barely stopped laughing for long enough to read my own part.

 

So not only he is a generous, warm, thoughtful, space-holding director, but his talents as an actor and a mimic can't help but infuse the room with a robust sense of someone who understands the theatre deeply — like a dancer, a partner dancer, who knows both how to lead and how to follow.

 

Any chance I get to work with him, I jump — I LEAP to it, because I know it will confront me with the complexities of being human. And I know that in the rehearsal room, there will be laughter. So much laughter.

 

Christopher is also a patron of the podcast, and when I found out that he became a patron on Patreon, I wrote him this:

 

Dearest Chris. From one artist to another. You have my deepest thanks for your patronage of my work. I am moved to tears by your belief in me. Thank you thank you thank you.

 

You can find Christopher Burris on Twitter @misterburris.

 

In this episode, Christopher tells us a story about driving while Black, his best friend Satchmo, a Sponge Bob car, contact lenses, relationshipping, & really, really seeing.

 

Come lie down with us in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for a story Christopher titled, “Black Men Can’t Drive.”

 

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This episode was mixed and mastered by Irving Gadhoury, IGrecording.com on the interwebz. My cover art was illustrated by Shana Shay, whom you can find on 99designs. This remix of my original intro music was created by kidmental, an acapella beatbox musician, and a Black creator you can support right now. Get a theme song of your very own by hiring him on Fiverr (recommended!) or becoming his patron on patreon.com/kidmental