you don't love me yet and yet you love me still you don't love me yet maybe you never will ME..All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have." John Patrick Shanley
Female
37 years old
San Francisco, California
United States
Billie Holiday, Bill Evans, Adnan Sami, Antony and the Johnsons, Fabio Concato, The Stranglers, Cal Tjader, Shara Nelson, Howlin' Wolf, Anita O'Day, Rita Mitsouko, Caetano Veloso, Mina, old Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, Ohio Players, Afghan Whigs, Happy Mondays, Soundgarden, Chris Cornell, The Bellrays, Massive Attack, Morcheeba, Wilco, Citizens Here and Abroad, Keith Jarrett, Audioslave, Mississippi John Hurt, Etta James, BB King, Frank Sinatra, Isley Brothers, Henry Mancini, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Cassandra Wilson, Patsy Cline, Paula Frazer, Steppenwolf, Serge Gainsbourg, Chaka Khan, KC & the Sunshine Band, Stanley Clarke, The Clash, Tricky, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Supergrass, Banco de Gaia, Cibo Matto, Squeeze, The Beat, Brian Wilson, Angelique Kidjo, Johnny Cash, Sly and the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, Cocteau Twins, Vikter Duplaix, Patti Smith, Stereolab, the Housemartins, Joy Division, Scritti Politti, Seu Jorge, Keb' Mo', Emitt Rhodes, Beulah, Nina Simone, Anton Mink, Rebirth Brass Band, Extra Action Marching Band, pc munoz
Movies
Sexy Beast, City of God, Fresh, The Long Good Friday, Beau Travail, Z, Nuit et brouillard, The Sorrow and the Pity, Borat, Amores Perros, 24 Hour Party People, Santa Sangre, Sonatine, Hana-bi, Violent Cop, Time Code, Lilja 4-Ever, Babe, Ridicule, An Affair of Love, Un Coeur en hiver, Le Gout des autres, Guardie e ladri, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, Bad Lieutenant, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, The Wild Bunch, I Mostri, Ghost Dog, Roger Dodger, Tully, Paris is Burning, The Mahabharata, Etre et avoir, Maya Deren, Charles Burnett, everything by Allison Anders, everything by Fassbinder, everything by Mike Leigh, everything by the Dardenne brothers, everything by the Coen brothers, all of Margaret Cho's and Chris Rock's concerts, and more.
Television
Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Dave Chappelle.
Books
Authors: Camus, Jean Gonick, Sedaris, William Gay, Edward P. Jones, Alain de Botton, Flannery O'Connor, Junot Diaz, Larry Brown, John Patrick Shanley, Erich Fromm, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison, Don Marquis, Lisa Jones, Arundhati Roy, Langston Hughes, Paul Eluard, Tove Jansson, Leonardo Sciascia, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Saroyan, James Baldwin, Helen Oyeyemi, Will Eno, Gene Weingarten, Malcolm Gladwell, Anne Sexton, Harold Pinter, Eric Bogosian, Charles Mee, Flann O'Brien, and more; also the work of Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, Stephan Pastis, Gary Larson, Darby O'Connell, and I absolutely love George Herriman. The Tao Te Ching. The Curious George books. And Carolyn Hax rocks.
Heroes
People who try to live their lives with grace, dignity, and respect. That is to say, most people.
Winner of the Best Female Solo Award at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 2004 and 2006, and a Fresno Bee Rogue Top Five Pick in 2007 for “This Lily Was (Fontana)”, Mia Paschal returns with her third and newest solo play, "Along the Path of Larks and Swallows".
"If only you could break up with someone right at the beginning, it would take a LOT of the guesswork out of it, wouldn't it? Straight to the pain, straight to the point, straight to the goodbye, straight to a... true hello, maybe, even.
Ah, I can dream, can't I?"
A sleepwalking woman, caught between the storms of her dreams and the sharper side of life. A boxer, with a physicist’s mind and a jazz musician’s heart. The space between the family you’re given and the family you need is often overwhelming, but when love finds you, in all its wild, dark, and astonishing splendor, only one path will protect you.
But remember, zen detachment only gets you so far!
Inspired by the dreamscape collages of Joseph Cornell, the surreal whimsy of George Herriman's seminal cartoon "Krazy Kat", and the boxer Sonny Liston's powerful punch, "Along the Path of Larks and Swallows" is a poetic, magical, and darkly comic exploration of love.
SFFringe audiences said:
Reviewer: Melissa G.
5 Stars
Her words and movements are still trickling down my spine. The show was absolutely incredible!
Reviewer: Dave O
5 Stars
Mia's performance is powerful and intense, her show is packed with metaphor and dense with meaning and subtext. Come to see this moving, thought-provoking and sometimes disturbing one-woman show. Come prepared for an incredible journey as Mia takes you Along the Path...
Reviewer: John
5 Stars
I saw Along the Path... last saturday evening and still can't get the show out of my mind; the writing and the performance were both exquisite. The subject matter, an exploration of the heart and its yearnings, betrayals, honesty and unreliability could have devolved into a bad self-help monologue in the hands of a less capable writer and performer. However Mia Paschal brings a rare insight, honesty and humor that keeps you engaged from "the bleeding heart" right through to the "boxer on the beach". Highly recommended, 2-thumbs-up,5-stars, pink-guy-standing-on-his-seat-clapping... Michelin stars too if they did this sort of thing.
Reviewer: Marc Tognotti
5 Stars
I highly recommend Mia Paschal’s “Along the Path of Larks and Swallows.” Mia Paschal performing her own play is a double gift: you get the play, you get Mia. It's an ambitious, meaningful story and a heartfelt personal statement about what it takes to get to love in today’s world. At the beginning the pace is fast and verbally dense, even frenetic — reflecting, I think, the complexity and confusion confronted by a young, troubled heart. As the play moved forward towards its conclusion, though, I experienced the pace transforming ever so subtly, little by little. I think what I was experiencing was how, while Mia’s character learns and grows before our eyes and begins to move more surely and choicefully through her life, we the audience experience her world expanding in feeling and quality. I think this is part of what makes the ending seem all the more convincing and special, the arrival at a deeper level of awareness and a greater sense of strength than she started with. I figure it must have taken a lot of love for Mia Paschal to write a play like this. Mia gives a lot of love in performing it. In following Mia’s journey toward love I found myself reflecting on my own and felt moved, inspired and connected to Mia’s quest.
Reviewer: Emily
5 Stars
Mia Paschal's examination of the chaotic path that leads us in and out of love is ferocious and eloquent. Her writing is stunning in it's originality and the power of it's imagery. A truly riveting performance.
Reviewer: Marianna Klebanov
5 Stars
This was a very beautifully written performance. The humanity of the writing and the performance is very moving.
Reviewer: Victoria
4 Stars
A very dynamic piece and Mia is exceptionally passionate in her delivery. One man/woman shows are not usually my cup of tea, but the dialogue she has written is beautiful and poetic full of things to think about after you've left the theatre.
Reviewer: David
5 Stars
While I think the Saturday evening performance I attended might have been the first one, the piece felt unbelievably polished. There must be more words flowing through this incredibly packed hour that in any other festival production, but the confidence, clarity, drive, and pace never flagged. She's incredibly beautiful, open, insightful, and gifted. The lighting needs to catch up with her - particularly when she engages the audience in extreme close-up - but that's a minor quibble. Wonderful.
Reviewer: john
5 Stars
Love. Everything was said about it? I don't think so. It's a beautiful play, and original.
Interpretation was great, intense and the text is so poetic. You should run to see it!
Reviewer: Abby Schachner
5 Stars
Mia is gorgeous, so so very talented... so poetic... I wanted to stevie wonderize my head to her words. The lighting and the beautiful heart that I saw on the stage (both literally and figuratively)... well, I'm a fan. Very inspiring.
Mia is timeless.
Critic’s review:
Bay Area Reporter
Eryka M. Fraczek
Published: September 11, 2008
Along the Path of Larks and Swallows
Mia Paschal performs in her own poetic narrative a solo odyssey through lovers in the near and distant lives she occupies. The hour-long journey may be likened to gangsta rap performed by the Kronos Quartet in a musical transposition, though language is the medium here.
Among the first lovers, a little goldfish she takes home one day grows into a monstrous fish that takes over her house, leaving his toenail clippings in the sink and the narrator behind as nothing more than a catfish herself. She recovers and soon encounters “The Boxer” who invited her to tea, drifting through a sea of metaphors and mirrors as she identifies herself and pulls in an out of the relationship. She bumps into Name Deleted, a nonexistent potential lover possessed by a wife, in the grocery store, and finally comes to face her mixed race and all the associations that accompany it.
Along the Path of Larks and Swallows plays at the Phoenix Theatre, 440 Mason Street, 6th Floor, Thursday (9/11) at 7:00 p.m., Friday (9/12) at 10:00 p.m. and Saturday (9/13) at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $9.00 at the door (cash only) or $11.00 online. Full schedule of Fringe Festival shows available at www.sffringe.org.
“Mia Paschal gives such an impassioned performance in this “whirlwind” tour of life and emotion, and I DEFINITELY think she is much MUCH more than a catfish!“
“The beautiful Mia Paschal is a marvel in her new piece, which begins with a scream. Soul-baring, confrontational, sharply constructed, and thoroughly compelling. Go see it!“
“I feel at a loss to do her fantastic performance justice in a review, so I offer just these words: intense, deliberate, dreamy, poetic, rhythmic, entrancing, human in every sense imaginable, profound, and tornado (this last word her own, but a perfect descriptor). Check out this phenomenal one-woman show, but get there early – there were few (if any?) spare seats at her Saturday evening performance (the debut of the show).“
“Mia is a fabulous performer. I enjoyed every minute of her show.”
“I didn’t think she could wow me more than she did last year — but she did. This petite powderkeg of passion shares and bares her soul to all. This performance touched and moved me immensely. See this show!”
“This year is a journey through love and life with her, bobbing and weaving through uncertainty, abandon, heartache and heart’s home. As I watched I felt she had dived into my heart and soul, plucking out all those private triumphs and tribulations. But really she’s just acting out the truth of our collective, yet unique, experiences of romance, lust, comfort, belonging, and longing for connection.
Her voice was her own, and yet it could easily have been mine, or that of the person sitting at either side of me.”
“You speak such volumes of beauty and pain. I adore your use of the stage - your running and skipping, climbing between audience members, and then falling down to be a catfish! Who could imagine that being part of a show about love? And you pull it off brilliantly!”
“This is the type of performance one might be fortunate enough to catch just one and then remain long thankful.”
And a song...
You Don’t Love Me Yet
moonlight long behind me and so here I am again
drowning in tequila and the eyes of dreamwrecked men
a train cuts through the city its whistle blowing far
silence melts and sharpens the light behind the bar
faces fade away now tangled voices in their wake
praying that the sunlight will erase my last mistake
bitter laughter suits you and the darkness even more
turning round to kiss me in the shelter of the door
it may never happen but for a moment yes it was
revolving round each other for a moment just because
you don’t love me yet but maybe once you did
you don’t love me yet maybe you never will
caught within the thorned walls of desire and distaste
crushing darkened memories to impale our hearts in place
night gave voice to small truths blind and silent in the day
and sunlight finds us tangled in a sleep-unveiled embrace
stranger hands have held me and much kinder lies were told
kinder hands will hurt me and much stranger truths unfold
drowning in dark memories of all the men before
and the train rides on, its dying song cuts me to the core
it may never happen but for a moment yes it was
revolving round each other for a moment just because
you don’t love me yet but maybe once you did
you don’t love me yet maybe you never will
stranger hands have held me and much kinder lies were told
kinder hands will hurt me and much stranger truths unfold
drowning in dark memories of all the men before
and the train rides on, its dying song strands me here once more
Mia!!!! :) Rachel just asked me about yuo last night and I thought I should write to ya! :) Rogue is going wonderfully, it's hectic as hell, but it's going well. I'm insanely busy as per usual, but it's not a stress thing... Halo really helps out with that one. :) I miss you!!! I hope you can come down this weekend... if not I'll just have to go to SF and see Barry's show! :D
Hey lovely! I was thinking about you today and thought I'd say HI! Although you aren't doing a show for the Rogue I hope you can make it to Fresno to see some shows! :)
