He Ain’t No Daisy, That’s for Sure | CharlestonToday

He Ain’t No Daisy, That’s for Sure | CharlestonToday:

Lord knows we need light cast on our truth, and it is certainly entertaining when someone does it for us. It is also unsettling. Not just to see ourselves like that, but to see someone else—Mike—go through the process right in front of us. Combined audience reactions of shock, relief, consternation, and humor were all palpable even in the dark theatre. It felt at times like having group therapy while watching one person negotiate his own session of psychoanalysis, if that’s what it was.

It seemed so, but then, even as Mike said at one point: “I’m just making all this bullshit up as I go.” And then adding: “If you don’t know that all stories are fiction, you haven’t been paying attention to how the world is put together.”

Mike relishes in realizing this and then telling the world about it. Like a comic, he peels off layers of our mutually self-imposed illusions about life. But unlike a comic, he does it with a directness that is startling, uncompromising, and sometimes ugly. This is bold stuff and the line he tries to navigate between our illusions, the truth, and his own fabrications is so delicate—dangerous, really—that his self-made project is just as likely to fail (as it did recently with his “scandal”) as fly into marvelous territory.