artist & creative guide
Why I Wiggle
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February 12th, 2019 | I am exhausted.
I'd just finished a freelance video project, it was the busiest month for headshots, I'm six weeks into recording/editing/doing nude shoots for weekly episodes of Sex Stories on top of The Radiance Project, the other pod I produce and edit weekly. And I was finally getting auditions for pilot season.
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But, uncharacteristically for me, I am feeling like I actually want to move my body. She is stagnant. She needs it.
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My friend Lola had been telling me about her daily bare minimum of physical exercise: wall sits, while she brushes her teeth. I am tired, it's late late late at night, I am brushing my teeth and decide that tonight is the night: I WILL DO A WALL SIT.
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I made it less than 5 seconds. My body was like, nope. So while I brushed my teeth, staring at the rings under my eyes, feeling lumpy, I decided I would do my own bare minimum, and just move a little bit.
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I began to wiggle.
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It made me laugh so much. So so much. Wiggling led to giggling, and I was slap-happy. Wiggle-happy. The way my wiggly parts moved was utterly delightful. Embarrassing, maybe, because...my stomach and arms and thighs...should they be flapping around that much? But in that moment, even as I was trying to judge myself and use this as evidence that I *must* really get serious about working out, I could help but love my wiggly parts. They make me smile. They made me want to move more!
Why hadn't I wiggled sooner?
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And then I got sad; these are not the parts of my body that I'm "supposed" to love or show off, at least based on the messaging from most beauty / health / wellness /lifestyle brands; there's (WOO HOOO!!!) starting to be some exceptions, but I noticed that even in my own brain, with my own very-real wiggly joy present, I felt shy about sharing my wigglejoy in public. But then I thought,
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What if wiggling took over the world...?
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And just like that, my body-positive sci-fi horror musical comedy (think Little Shop of Horrors meets Rocky Horror Picture Show) about an alien who crash-lands on Earth, accidentally releasing a seemingly unstoppable wiggle virus, was born.
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My work on the wiggle movie is currently on pause (again); by necessity, writing indie features has to be lower down on my list of artist priorities than the arts that help me feed myself, and the fact that this one kiiiiind of hinges upon a worldwide pandemic (spoiler alert: it's not a virus, it's alien technology that, yes, humans WILL harness) has led me to backburner it once again.
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But I am a big believer in The 15-Second Principle, and also a big believer in doing things that make me feel shy and embarrassed in an effort to make friends with my scareds.
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So now I wiggle every day, on instagram, live.
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I started on my 30th birthday; after a year of wiggling solo every day, I'm inviting wigglefriends to join me. Sign up ahead of time, or if I don't have a guest for the day, whoever requests to be in my video first while I'm live shall be The One.
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#wigglepower is a literal body-positive movement.