Alison and Miss Piggy Talk Self-Love, Wishes, and Emergencies

Miss Piggy, my intended interviewee for this week's column, answered an invite to participate in a last minute traveling arts diplomacy tour which will follow in the footsteps of President Obama's trip to Asia. Today, she skyped me from Shanghai, where two drugstore chains have given her tentative offers to carry her line of strawberry-scented lip balms, Divine Swine.

MISS P: Did you link it?
ALISON: Yes, I just now linked to your product.
MISS P: Did it work?
ALISON: Yes, I clicked on it, and it took me straight to the page where fans can purchase Divine Swine.
MISS P: Great. You're a pal.
ALISON: I'm just such a huge fan. Just such.
MISS P: Thank you.
ALISON: Have you experienced any windfall hype from the Muppets' 40th anniversary last week?
MISS P: Small bit. You tube hits are up, my IMDB rose a few; nothing huge. I mean, I'm in China for God's sakes, pushing my lip balm. Times are hard, sister.
ALISON: I'll feel the pain all too soon when I leave graduate school this spring. Let's talk creativity, inspiration.
MISS P: Shoot.
ALISON: Your aggression is stunning. Were you always so in touch with your feelings?
MISS P: No. And I'll tell you what ten years of therapy might: I had to wear a lot of different goat masks before I came to own myself and realize that my feelings are worth something in this world.
ALISON: In the academic/creative setting, the Ivy Beret, if you will, I feel I've second guessed myself more than ever before. And I went to school to create and write my own stories, for God's sake! What was your breaking point? When did you stop wearing "goat masks" as you put it?
MISS P: People pleasing is is the toughest, least-paid job. And once you're stuck in it, you've got a head full of bees--I learned that expression from Dolly Parton.
ALISON: Love her.
MISS P: Moi aussi. Anyways, one day, after doing the Oink Circus number to please Donald, my first manager, he wasn't even in the audience to see the double header I had to do with the Klezmer Monkeys. I was in the green room, all alone--this is before the days when booking moi comes with a star and my name on a dressing room door--and covered in hay that was glue-gunned to my hooves, and I had never in my life felt so alone. And I didn't want to feel like a tacky oinker again.
ALISON: Mm Hm.
MISS P: So I quit. I quit Donald, I quit the Circus. I auditioned for the unthinkable: only the parts I had desired as I conceived of myself as a little piglet: the princesses, the intrepid female explorers, the Queens of Sheba. That sort of thing.
ALISON: And you found success??
MISS P: Nope. Not for eight long, no-callbacks years.
ALISON: How did you keep the faith?
MISS P: I looked at it like this: I could eat dried instant oats and mustard packets, struggling to be me and free, or, I could be a prisoner to someone else's idea of me.
ALISON: Goat mask.
MISS P: Did I say that?
ALISON: Up there you did.
MISS P: Ah. Well, once I started loving me, I just didn't care. And that's the hard part--recognizing that the changing point toward self-love is distinctive, but the visible results--the wishes granted, that sort of thing--that's long, long time in coming.
ALISON: I found a journal of mine from eleven years ago today.
MISS P: Mmm?
ALISON: And I'm still struggling against the notion of treating life as an emergency. Still trying to find my own voice amidst those close to me, still trying to become anchored and centered in what I want, and not what others want. I could literally rip a page out of that journal, and tape it in my current one, and there wouldn't be much difference. Do you feel that despite your Oink Circus turning point, you still struggle with versions of earlier challenges in your development of self love as an artist and a woman?






MISS P: I'd say yes and I'd say no. I do not struggle with ice blue eyeshadow any longer.
ALISON: (silence)
MISS P: But seriously, I love myself more, and that makes following a lark--say, a mash-up of the Addams Family theme song and Lady Gaga's Poker Face--ideas that come in the night, at the salon--I follow them without a thought to how they'll be translated, how they'll appear to an audience. You can't create and analyze at the same time. I think John Cage said that.
ALISON: All true.
MISS P: There are a lot of messages out in the world working against us dancing our own dance. I mean, it's not all about Mac vs. PC. Where's the emergency? The emergency, if there's any, is loving yourself. From there flows endless love, endless hope.

-----Skype transmission failed at this point; Miss Piggy was offline when I tried to resume the call.--------