REVIEW
by Biff America
Poet Jamie Cotton shared, in beautiful yet sometimes painful prose, her life to date with a packed theater at Colorado Mountain College. 'My Mother's Hand and Other Things That Burn' offered those attending a fly on the wall perspective of one woman's journey from abuse to love. Little was held back as Ms Cotton shared the pains of dysfunction, as well as, the carnal delights of sexual abandonment. Dressed simply, shoeless, in a tight black dress, while moving catlike across an unadorned stage, the performance was both candid and unrepentant.
When put in perspective, the artist's life: grief, growth, understanding, forgiveness, and finally-love, leaves one with the impression that the pilgrimage was worth the pain. However, reliving the passage with Ms Cotton seemed to scratch the scabs of passions of those attending. Was the happy ending worth the suffering endured to get to that stage? Only Jamie Cotton can answer that question. Was the currency and emotions of those attending in order to take the vicarious journey with Ms Cotton well spent?
Absolutely.
Review by Cara Goldstein
Sage aka Jamie Cotton is no stranger to the SF theater scene but in her one woman show, her conversational style of disclosure has an intimate frankness which takes on a new artform as she shares with the audience: the pain of her childhood in "My Mother's Hand", how lesbians have sex in "We Women Fuck" and what it may feel like to be at the SF dyke march in "The Queer Parade".
Her solo show is divided into poetic segments and begins with the emphatic line "my family hides things". She uses an empty box as a prop that holds all the metaphorical objects and memories of her past. "I wanted to open the box, touch things, taste them..." She claims "I wanted to hang each piece on a tree... I knew that box."
"My mother is beautiful, brilliant, Italian and angry", she reveals to an engaged audience as she confirms her mother's hand is inside the box.
Sage brings to light painful events by personifying her mothers hand in a way that the audience understands it has a mind of it's own. The hand symbolizes power, uncontrollable rage, and holds ripped hair. It's a source of pain until we are taken to a memory of her Grandmother who was gentle and later to her lover putting hands on her body where she discovers in love what a hand could do. She comes to the realization that " I am my mothers daughter, but I did not inherit her hand." Trusting her hand in love and in passion she finally finds the path of her own life and begins to experience the pleasure afforded a person who has fought her way out of a box and stopped fighting herself. Now she speaks to her lovers in prose pondering, "when you grow old will you still call my body church?" and singing triumphantly " the woman on my mind is the women in my bed."
Cotton has a way about her that makes one think the "Other things that burn" in her title, refers to her passion, love, and the sexy talent she brings to the stage which keeps an audience on their feet, even if they weren't volunteers for "The Queer Parade."
