INT. HIS BATHROOM – EVENING
Tonya is wearing a cute turquoise dress and stripey socks. She pulls her panties down, lifts up her dress, and sits on the toilet. From the other side of the door comes muffled music and the unmistakable sound of a knife being sharpened. Tonya smiles to herself and pees.
INT. HIS KITCHEN – MOMENTS LATER
Old, swampy blues music plays. Something simmers on the stove, and there are assorted vegetables and ingredients on the counter. He is sharpening a long, expensive chef’s knife with expert precision. There is the sound of a toilet flushing and sink running in the bathroom.
INT. HIS BATHROOM – MOMENTS LATER
TONYA
(turning off water, drying hands)
You knoooooow…Usually that’s not the sound a girl
wants to hear when she’s over at a guy’s house for
the first time and goes into the bathroom.
INT. HIS KITCHEN – MOMENTS LATER
He stops sharpening and looks up with a bemused expression. The bathroom door opens, and he turns around at the sound with the knife in one hand and the sharpener in the other. Tonya is standing in the doorway. He puts down the sharpener and advances on her menacingly.
INT. HIS KITCHEN – LATE THAT NIGHT
Moonlight streams in the window, glinting off the handle of the same knife stuck in the top of the wooden table. Something reddish is smeared across the blade. The dress and her panties, obviously shredded, are in a pile on the floor. The ingredients haven’t been touched and whatever was in the pot on the stove is burned beyond recognition.
He stands naked at the sink, shown from behind, it’s unclear whether he’s washing something or washing his hands. When he turns off the water, faint moans and groans are heard. It’s impossible to tell if they’re painful or pleasurable. He turns around and pulls the knife out of the table roughly, then moves back out of frame.
HIM (off-camera)
Don’t worry, I’ve got more for you where that came
from. I wanted to make this one last, but something
about you makes me lose all self-control.
INT. HIS LIVING ROOM – MOMENTS LATER
Tonya is curled up naked on the couch half-covered by a fuzzy blanket, eating something out of a bowl and making mmmmm noises of appreciation. She takes a swig out of an almost-empty wine bottle, looks up and smiles.
He is standing in the door to the kitchen holding the knife and a pie with a couple slices out of it.
TONYA
I can’t believe you have that. I swear I thought
nobody else but me liked strawberry-rhubarb pie.
He moves toward her. Tonya throws a look at what he’s carrying and raises her eyebrows.
TONYA (cont.)
You forgot a bowl and spoon for yourself.
He dips the tip of the knife into the pie. Slowly and deliberately, he smears the pie-filling on Tonya’s nipple.
HIM
No, I didn’t.
you make me
shiver
shudder
shake
you make me
scream
squeal
squirm
you make me
writhe in pain
beg for mercy
pray for more
you make me
bellow loudly
give completely
whimper softly
you make me
want it
wet and
wanton
you make me
come harder
go further
stay longer
you make me
naked
cherished
safe
you
make
me
It has finally happened. I, Tonya Jone Miller, have been immortalized in comic book form!!!
Inside of sinews and bone, an adventure is unfolding, unfurling, revealing itself. I climb into the space between our words, waiting to be discovered. Wooing his demons, dancing around them, tempting them further and further into the open. Into the light.
I rest for a moment in the eye of the hurricane as he circles me, contemplating.
He’s a hunter on safari within his own mind, stalking monsters that live in the shadows, catching them one-by-one. But not to slay them, no; to try them on. To slip into their skins and inhabit their ferocity.
The mischievous glint in his eyes warns me a new creature is springing to life, taking shape inside him. I can’t help shivering at the slow curve of his savage smile. It’s slightly exciting, somewhat arousing, and completely terrifying.
I suspect this unknown animal has sharp teeth. Vicious claws that poke and scratch. A rough tongue and a menacing growl, along with the softest fur and a comforting purr. He considers me with crazed bloodlust, yet inflicts his sweet tortures with swiftly calculated precision, always holding something back. I can see the battle behind his eyes: does he trust me enough to let go? Does he trust himself?
I take a deep breath and let my body settle into position, back arched, bottom pushed up and out, inviting. I look at him over my shoulder, wordlessly giving him permission to let loose, praying he will unleash himself. Hoping today is the day I finally meet the beast.
Oh holy jesus fuck. This is happening…
100: A Story of O’s
written & performed by Tonya Jone Miller
8:30pm Friday 23 May 2014
10:00pm Saturday 31 May 2014
Tickets $10 adv (+ $1.25 service fee)
Minion Solo Festival (May 23 – May 31, 2014)
Pocket Theater
Seattle Creative Arts Center
2601 NW Market Street
Seattle, WA 98107
**Show Description**
When Tonya takes a job as a phone sex operator, she has no idea how much it will change her life. Play voyeur as she learns the ups and downs of an in-and-out industry. Meet some of her more memorable clients and be possibly aroused (and likely disturbed too) by their unique fetishes. It isn’t long before Tonya discovers there’s a lot more to phone sex than just talking dirty, and some of her callers’ fantasies have become her own. Ride along on her hilarious, hot, and heart-warming journey to find out there might just be a little pervert in all of us.
**Artist Bio**
Tonya Jone Miller is a lifelong lover, performer, and creator of theatre from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her work on Dance Naked Productions’ Inviting Desire with Eleanor O’Brien, and for her award-winning solo show, Threads, about her American mother’s experiences in Vietnam during the war. Tonya is a renowned phone sex operator and the owner of BayCityBlues.com, as well as being an openly kinky, sex-positive educator who teaches workshops on how to talk dirty and role-play. She has been featured in BUST Magazine, the upcoming full-length feature documentary Hotline, HBO’s Real Sex, Thrillist, Tits and Sass, and Forbes. Tonya is the proud owner of a dirty mind, a filthy mouth, and a clean conscience.
**Awards and Accolades for TJM’s previous work, Threads**
Best of Fest (Patron’s Pick)
2012 Winnipeg Fringe Festival
2013 London Fringe Festival
2013 Toronto Fringe Festival
2013 Winnipeg Fringe Festival
Outstanding Performance of 2013 – NOW Magazine Toronto
Outstanding Female Performance of 2012 – CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
#1, Top Ten Shows of 2012 – UMFM
“Subtle, smooth, sad and emotionally engrossing.” ~The Boston Globe
“Leaps off the stage with life…A consistently thrilling celebration of the places we go and the people we meet.” ~CBC
“A quietly engaging, understated performer with a thoroughly trustworthy air.” ~Edmonton Sun
“A true object of beauty – don’t miss….the best one-woman show of the fringe.” ~Winnipeg Free Press
“A wondrous ride…Miller is a charismatic, engaging storyteller.” ~Vue Weekly
“Miller’s understated performance is the perfect vehicle to tell this story.” ~London Free Press
“Quietly and effectively builds to a truly emotional conclusion.” ~Orlando Sentinel
Thanks to a dear friend from my previous life in the concert industry, I scored two comps for Queens of the Stone Age last night. I hadn’t been to a live show in ages and have a major soft spot for QOTSA- thats a whole other long story. My impromptu date and I had some tasty Vietnamese food and then headed over to the Keller just as QOTSA hit the stage.
And here’s where it gets weird for me.
I got my first job in rock and roll (security at LaLuna) at 18 and worked in concert and festival production for over a decade. I literally grew up in that club, but my penchant for live music actually started much earlier.
I became obsessed with Duran Duran when I was 8 or 9 years old. No joke. I papered the wall of my bedroom with their faces, saved my allowance to buy all their records, and humped my pillow while imagining John Taylor doing…something to me. (My fantasies weren’t quite as developed as my sexual curiosity at that age.)
I had moved on to really bad hair metal by the time I was 12, but my first concert ever was Duran Duran opening for David Bowie on the Glass Spider tour. My older sister’s friend had an extra ticket, and I begged her to take me my favorite band in the entire world. We smoked cigarettes in the bleachers of Civic Stadium and sang along to all the songs, and I felt so grown up. The rush of the crowd’s energy, being a part of something alive…It was a thrill I’d never experienced.
Fast forward a couple years to the days of blowjobs-for-backstage-passes. I was a cute teenage girl into dirty rock bands, and by the time I was going to shows regularly at 16, I got plenty of indecent proposals. Even though I had an active erotic imagination and masturbated daily, I was pretty inexperienced. I think I was also still buying into the slut-shaming programming I picked up in the “Just Say No” era.
My cute girlfriend and I managed to toe a very fine line between the autograph-seeking super fans and the shameless groupies who took delight in flaunting their rock star conquests. We’d end up backstage or on a tour bus, flirt a little, make-out with one of the crew (They appreciate your attention more and come back to town more often.) or band (Score! Bragging rights and better alcohol.) members, maybe even let them feel us up a little. But when push came to shove, our undies stayed on and so did theirs. There’s probably some derogatory tour lingo for girls like us…Baby groupies? Halfway ho’s? Or maybe just fucking teases. Heh.
I liked being backstage. I loved getting to breeze past the line of people waiting for autographs and flash my pass at the gatekeeper. I liked being on the other side of the fence. But I didn’t like how I got treated like a piece of meat. I could seriously write an I’m With the Band style book of our exploits. We were jailbait Lolitas with fake ID’s- I’m sure you can imagine our popularity. Certain friends, security guards, and club personnel even nicknamed me “Tour Bus Tonya” (or TBT), though it was actually more tongue-in-cheek than derogatory, since I was known not to put out.
By the time I was 18 and actually of legal consenting age, I was over it. I started paying attention, and the only women backstage who were treated at all better (and in those days, it wasn’t much better, believe me) were working. So when a friend offered me a security guard job at LaLuna, I jumped at the opportunity. I was checking ID’s to get into the bar before I was of drinking age myself.
I worked my way up through the ranks, and over the next ten years, I did pretty much every non-tech, non-stage job there is in the concert industry, from box office to catering to runner to production assistant to site manager to promoter rep.
By 21, I was one of a handful of females in the country doing what I did, and probably the youngest by at least a decade. I loved my job as promoter rep, and I was good at it. The buses would arrive at load-in, and the same “oh great, they sent me an incompetent little girl” look would greet me on the production/tour manager’s face. By the end of the night, they’d be telling me I was their favorite rep on the whole tour.
Before I continue, please let me disabuse you of the notion that being either local or touring crew is anything other than really hard work. Oh sure there are some cool perks, but it’s a redundant cycle of long days, crappy food, and little glory. But I fucking loved it. I thrived on the constantly changing venues and personalities and solving the inevitable challenges. Kind of like touring the fringe festival circuit as a solo artist- a lot of people have no idea what they’re getting into and can’t hack it in the long run.
It wears on you. At 28, I was stuck in a miserable marriage and a job that regularly caused me to break down sobbing. I weighed over 200 pounds, and my hair was literally falling out in giant clumps. I felt like I was 50. So I walked away from all of it. I burnt my life down and started over. I returned to an old love- theatre- and went to acting school, which led me to doing professional phone sex, which led me to the world of kink and bdsm.
I’d do a one-off show every year or two, when one of the companies I’d produced for needed someone to fill in during the busy summer months, but the offers came less and less frequently and eventually stopped altogether. There are always eager, fresh-eyed, local FNG’s (that’s Fucking New Guy to the uninitiated) chomping at the bit to break into the biz, and I was more expensive. It has been three or four years since I’ve produced a show, and while I haven’t missed it that much, occasionally I’ll remember something from that life and realize how far removed from it I am.
Last night was a sucker punch to the gut. I was not expecting it at all. Standing there in the crowd, band killing it onstage, hot date by my side, and…how do I explain? I didn’t like it. Oh, I enjoyed myself, and I’m very grateful I got to see the show. But I realized I don’t like being a civilian at a concert. Apparently even after a decade out of the industry, I can’t cross back over the line. Where are my credentials? Who has my parking pass? Why didn’t the guy from catering bring me the bottle of wine he knows I like? How come I’m not watching this from monitor world onstage?
It’s not like I was expecting any of that last night. I certainly didn’t really feel entitled to it, but that’s what I got used to. That’s what I know. That’s what being at a concert is to me. Standing there, I realized I wanted the special treatment and unrestricted access, and that I don’t think I like going to shows without it. I don’t mind working for it, but I don’t want to just be a “normal” person. While that sentence is hardly surprising (haha), in this context it makes me kind of sad. Because that ship has sailed for me. I chose another path, another life.
I can’t go back. I can’t go back to that life, and I can’t go back to attending a show as just an audience member. I mean, technically, I could. I could probably milk what few contacts I still have and find work, but that would mean considerable adjustment to my lifestyle and require me to put theatre on hold for a while. Or I could smack the entitlement out of myself and learn to love going to a concert for the pure joy of the experience again.
But a long time ago, I crossed a line. I went from concert lover to concert worker. And for me, there is no crossing back to the other side. I’m not sure why, but the parallels between this and my discovery of polyamory and kink struck me last night. Once those doors are open, once those worlds have been willingly entered and pleasurably explored, you cannot just close them and pretend they don’t exist. They become a part of you, of your frame of reference, and trying to ignore them is futile.
So I’m not going to beat myself up over feeling unjustifiably deserving of treatment I haven’t really earned. I’ll simply avoid putting myself in situations very often where I don’t get what I want. If that means I skip a show or two, so be it. That’s the price I pay for my sense of entitlement. If I miss live music too much, perhaps it will motivate me to learn to enjoy it without the trappings I became accustomed to.
Whew, that was a mouthful. Somebody asked me via Twitter how the show was. I knew I couldn’t explain in 140 characters.
Oh Portland, this is why I love you so. Saw most of the lunar eclipse last night, and then on the way home…
fire burning underneath
light expanding from heat
waiting, wanting
knowing
when it happens
it will be deliberate
The documentary will be world-premiering at the Hot Docs Film Festival, April 24 to May 4 in Toronto!
I have orphaned my earrings all over town
left them abandoned
in hotels and bedrooms
and Fred Meyer parking lots
one half of every pair paid
the price of admission
the cost of a stranger’s hands in my hair
single studs and lone bangles
now have awkward first dates
in my jewelry box
while their mates languish, forgotten
in ballrooms and gutters