During early summer of 2009 I was living alone in a 2nd floor apartment in a converted Victorian off Ellsworth and Logan. Nights were still cool but bearable for bare arms and legs. In a tank top and a skirt I’d refashioned from some old Carhartt pants I was standing on the roof, prepping for Titwrench Fest.
Glen and I were making set pieces for our act, Sybil Vane, an operatic-cabaret-performance art duo. Glen came over with a giant mirror he’d dumpstered. His idea: break the mirror and hot glue the shards into metal coffee cans in order to make footlights for the stage. Dangerous footlights. Watch your step.
It was my idea to throw the entire mirror off the roof to get good breakage. We were hysterical, each holding a side and slowly walking towards the edge while making verbal plans for what we would do, or where we would run if the cops showed. Blessedly, we got to enjoy the summer night uninterrupted while wearing gardening gloves and picking up dagger like pieces of mirror off the alleyway. We were still cracking ourselves up at the hijinks we were willing to go to to make some damn scenery. Titwrench was worth it.
A few weeks later we showed up at Rhinoceropolis. Me wearing a custom dress from an anarchist fashion designer and Glen in a drag costume of his own. He hauled an 88-key digital piano out of his sedan and I carefully cradled a box full of our homemade footlights. We lit the tea candles at the bottom and the audience knew, without having to be told, that crossing the invisible line established by the shards of mirror was a no-go for us. Rhinoceropolis was an open room with an open space in the back that led to the even more open living space/art space in the back. The only stage was the one people made from scratch. I remember the scraps of pink, red, fuschia, magenta, and blood stitched together to form a backdrop that the fest organizers had made. It was where your gaze was supposed to go. Glen and I had added a lip to the front of that stage. It was not an actual drop off of course, but a marcation of where we, the performers, would be, and where the audience would be.
I crossed the line before the last song - a punk rendition of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”. I broke through the barriers I’d made to protect my performance and I purposefully shattered that line in order to be in the same space as the festival goers. At the end of the fest, space was so sufficiently reclaimed that everyone became fan and creator at once.
I played Titwrench as Molly Growler in 2015 and 2017 and I attended nearly all the others, only missing Stockholm. I didn’t realize that 2009 was the first Titwrench until recently because it felt like it had always been. Just like it felt like Denver would always be mostly the same for the foreseeable future.
I think, with sadness, at how I couldn’t afford to live near Ellsworth and Logan today. And it’s not lost on me that bringing homemade candle holders into a crowded warehouse that doubled as a living space wasn’t dangerous for the shards of mirror, but for the fire that a bunch of DIY musicians and fans could never have controlled. We were just lucky that it all stayed in the coffee cans. It’s the same element that years later, and from a 1000 miles away, spelled doom for Rhinoceropolis. Later Glen moved to California and lost his 88-key digital keyboard in yet another fire. Titwrench, like all these spaces we’ve shared in the spirit of creative experimentation, was always going to be a temporary thing. I realize that now.
On the other hand, the matter and dimensional fabric that Titwrench was stitched out of has always been. It wasn’t just my imagination that I thought I’d been there before when I walked into the warehouse in 2009 - everything I had done up until that point, and everything all the other artists involved had ever done, all led to that moment. We had been there and now we were there together, finally manifesting our shit and gloriously letting it hang out and shine all over the place.
I think that Titwrench made me. Or rather, it rearranged me, as it did every single year that I bore witness to it and breathed it in and let my bare arms and legs become slick with it. And all my clapping along, sweating, communing rearranged this town too. If you were there, then you know you made it too.
This town, Denver, sometimes, today, looks nothing like the city I thought owed me an artistic home, but then I see the seams of brightly colored reds and other people’s blood, usually lurking in the corner of a surprise venue space, and I see that it’s all just been rearranged. If you look closely Titwrench is all around and it’s not going anywhere.
Make your dangerous footlights. Mark off your stages. The real danger isn’t the sharp edges or the fire inside them. It’s the danger that we won’t see its bright light reflecting in the community that’s gathered around them.