Cotswold Diary, Note 11, Debra

Caution: This post contains pole dancing.

I thought that would get you.

Would you believe there is another North Carolinian in Painswick? My friend Debra Drew (not a pole dancer, btw) is a dynamo from Charlotte who has lived here many years. Among her various artistic and civic projects, she is helping with the development of a new musical based on a true story that happened around here not long ago. Heavenly Bodies follows the plight of a tiny but devoted group of elderly ladies determined to keep their small parish church afloat—and crucially to repair the roof. The poor dears are at their wits’ end. Also at wit’s end is a pole dancing instructor (who may have been a stripper) looking for teaching space, and everyone has told her NIMBY* But the church ladies are desperate, and they’re like, whatever, and needs must. But the town gets wind of it and is not amused… I mean is this a great story or WHAT.

June 30–Debra invited me to dinner with the Heavenly Bodies creative team. Mostly London-based, they were here winding up a few days of script revisions etc. They had a temporary pole set up  right there in Debra’s garden. It is strangely alluring. Sniggering aside, the women who do this are incredible athletes, and not all of them are, you know, strippers. The show’s choreographer is a world class dancer who performed with the Cirque de Soleil. The Cirque de Soleil. She is also a preeminent installation artist. I mean everyone at that table was seriously talented with the credentials to match.

I am a such a bumpkin.

On the way home from dinner that night there was the most beautiful sunset across the wold. Wold which means gently rolling hills. Cot, btw, means sheep enclosure, or sheepcote. Hence Cotswolds.

1 July–Debra invites me for drinks with her girlfriends at the pub, but by the time I arrive it’s only Debra and her friend Jo. We got to talking like girls do and Jo told about how (in her 20s) she tried to explain to her mother why she was not marrying the boy of her (parents’!) dreams. “Well, Mummy,” she began shyly, feeling pressured to justify her decision, “things don’t exactly go the way they should in the bedroom.” Exasperated, her mother huffed, “Oh so you think it’s just all orgasms all the time, do you?”

Now I’m pretty sure Jo was pretty sure her mother never even had sex, the fact of Jo’s own birth and that of two siblings notwithstanding. Let alone blurt out the O-word at the drop of an engagement… I ‘bout fell out. Also some things just sound funnier in a British accent.

Cheerio, F

*NIMBY=Not in my back yard.