| Event | Dripping 2026 |
| Date | June 11 – 14, 2026 |
| Location | Camp Sacajawea, Sparta, NJ |
| Attended | 9-10pm Saturday |
| Performers | Breadwoman |
Mommy Issues
It looked like a Halloween set for Knott’s Berry Farm. On a throne, an old woman sat with a veil over her face. Islands of discarded bread populated the floor around her. They called her Breadwoman, the moniker for the performance artist Anna Homler from the punk scene in 1980s Los Angeles. I was sitting near the front row. The crowd, arranged like in a Greek amphitheater, watched as she slowly removed her veil. The audience cheered. What we saw was a face masked in loaves of bread that were contorted into a horrific visage that looked either metastasized with catastrophe, or had bloated after weeks decomposing at the bottom of a lake. It had no expression. In two dark openings carved in the bread mask, I could tell when she was looking at me directly.
At a glacial pace, she held up two loaves of bread in both hands like baby wolves carried by their necks. She rose and approached the audience in retarded horror, music swelling like her swollen face. Wind-up chimes swirled with oneiric synths, both ghastly and calm—the soundtrack to a nightmare that never arrives. Since 1985, when she released Breadwoman & Other Tales, she has collaborated with the musician Stephen Moshier by singing in an improvised language entirely of her own invention. Perhaps it’s because it sounded like an unknown lullaby—turgid, like a church dirge—that I associated her with a mother, the one who feeds. Then something strange happened. I was transported back to a time before memory, before I even knew what language was, or what a human was or looked like, and I was in my mother’s arms, staring into this face I didn’t recognize as what had birthed me. She was babbling to me, I had no idea what she was saying, or what she wanted from me. I was screaming in terror between desperate gasps, but I needed the bread this figure, whom I had come from, was trying to offer me.
Breadwoman twirled glacially like in a rat-infested carousel in the abandoned playground of a horror film. Why was I afraid? There was nothing Breadwoman was doing to threaten me, except this ugly, ugly face. This seeping agony felt familiar. I realized that we—everyone in the audience—were reliving that initial horror of seeing our mother’s face for the first time, so unassimilable that it repelled our ability to remember it.
I believe I hated her then. I hated her for being ugly, for being old, as all she tried to do was feed me and soothe me. What did I think my mother was trying to sing with this strange lullaby? All I know is that I could not stop crying. After that first long day on this planet, I was scared shitless about falling asleep, sleep unknown to me then, because how could I be assured I would ever wake up? This music—I thought she was singing to me so that I would fall asleep and die.
How can love be taught as anything but an act of aggression? Breadwoman loomed across the stage in her teasing malice, twirling bread like some talisman—a ritual of lifegiving. Even if I didn’t know what love was, I knew I didn’t want this. Only when she leaned back, tilting her head backward, did I begin to acknowledge her selflessness. Only then did I grieve her for this impossible task. I saw a harmless, pitiful old woman, with withered breasts and swollen cheeks, and even if I had no love for her now, I imagined that I could. But when she neared me again, hands up with arms raised, tingling her fingers, toying with me, as if she were flirting, my body flooded with anguish, and I thought, Get this woman away from me!
What triggered me to hate women like this? It was only when she wanted to play, when she showed desires of her own, that she became unacceptable. I needed her to be selfless and old and withered in order to deserve my love. I knew then—at 9:30pm on the night of June 13, 2026—that I was a misogynist, or that I had misogyny still in me. That’s performance art for you, baby. I believed I could not be a full and free person if my mother expressed fullness and freedom of her own. This is why when I looked at her face, all I saw was bread, not a human, because literal food is all she was to me, food that would one day become shit or waste.
But who was she singing to? She was looking at me, but she wasn’t singing to me, her voice was directed at something else, some third that was here but could not be seen. It didn’t have to be a father or God, it was simply something or someone who wasn’t me that told me she had a life away from me, and this is why I hated her. She had abandoned me when I needed her, to have a privacy of her own, which is how she allowed me, in my aloneness, to have my own privacy: her great gift to me that I would never have asked for.
I wanted the pagan chanting to stop. I wanted her to drop the bread. But as if carrying it in her arms like a child, she ripped off one end of a loaf, and pulled out colored confetti that she scattered across the floor. The stage lights glittered as if in a mystical ceremony. She was trying to teach me something more than hunger and nourishment, demand and satisfaction, but about life itself—that all that lives, dies. It was clear to my ears that this was an old woman singing. Breadwoman’s voice was not like it sounds in the recording from 1985. Now it was textured, wrinkled, strained, reluctant, resigned. At the exact moment I understood that she would one day die, I was able to love her. I committed. I loved her. I loved her. I loved her for her sacrifice, for her terrible lessons, her creepy ritual. Forgive me, Breadwoman. I didn’t want her to leave anymore. I loved her, and what good was that love, if she wouldn’t be there anymore to receive it? The love was mine, for the ugliness that she had gifted me and taught me to treasure as my own, for the life that I got to live now that hers was fading. Chords swelled in elegy, and her voice persisted. This was the final lullaby for that final day that I, too, would die, and Breadwoman would not be able to save me, except for this memory of a forgotten memory. The performance fucked me up for hours. I skipped prime time DJ sets to sit by the lake and ask unanswerable questions. I wasn’t moved, I was disturbed. The water looked glassy in its silence. Daniel, I needed this.