Sandra Bernhard reacts to betrayal even if it isn’t there. Or so I recalled from With Nails (excerpted; oddball EMPHASIS sic):
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Sandra has invisible battle lines drawn, delineating to whom she will, or will not, speak. The room is divided decisively into Winners and LOSERS, the latter filling her larger register.
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I never really thought of RAGE as being sexual but, as displayed by Sandra, it somehow seems to be: Her frustration with the world is expressed in hyperventilating statements, and opinions are accompanied by flaring nostrils that hiss vixen-like at you. Like she might just DEVOUR you at any moment. Eyes bulging like Godzilla. Redeemed by laughter. She trips herself up with her extremism every now and again, and being with her is as close a return to the intensity of adolescence as you are likely to get. Her worship-filled passions are precisely fixed at 16. Or thereabouts!
And the penalty of her “alchemy” is the hovering possibility that you might be cast out AT ANY MOMENT. I am a willing lamb to her sacrificial style of friendship. For I have already “heard” her bleating beneath her wolf’s clothing. She is vulnerable despite the SPITE.
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Especially as she HATES being left out and can locate a thread of “rejection” in a yard of welcomes.
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I am preoccupied with the launch of L.A. Story, which is excluding, and exclusion is one thing Sandra is probably more acutely tuned to than anything else. In fact, she is the Chairperson of the Board, her catalogue of Exclusions vastly extensive.
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Sandra Bernhard has invited me to stay with her in the San Fernando Valley, but, as all my meetings take place in L.A., I decide to stay in a hotel in the city. This does not go down well with Sandra, who is never one to take anything too lightly, and I am cast in the role of the Betrayer and Treasonite.
(“Somebody hands you a tambourine.”)