Joining In

In Wembley in 1984 it was fashionable to be a casual, something that has come to mean many things over the years. Girls shopped for bow blouses and pleated skirts at Bezaz and Marks & Spencer, and the lads were slick in Gabicci and Tachini. It was the beginning of my awareness of label-mania. I wore as much black as I could attach to my body, strange home made things made out of tights, crap stuck in my hair as well as second hand tat stolen from the charity shop where I worked on Saturdays. I wanted to be like one of the Stooges, but in reality I was a chubby misfit who more likely resembled one of Three Stooges.

During those years I had plenty of friends but I also experienced the crushing loneliness brought on by the rush of adolescent hormones. It was as though I had a secret life, that I could only be authentically me when I was alone in my room, and that other social interactions were an act. Teen alienation is kind of a cliché to me, but still I wanted someone to see my real self, to witness it and enable me to see that it was true, a feeling which continues today.

The truth is that I have spent large tracts of my life looking for my potential friends and wondering if they are all guests at a giant party going on somewhere, just out of my reach. As a teenager I had intense best-friendships with a series of unsuitable girls who eventually disappeared one by one from my life, but whom I still recall clearly, twenty years later.

I continue to see women in the street, and I know just by looking at them that we could be really amazing friends, that they must surely be able to laugh at my jokes and understand all my cultural references. I try to imagine where they go, who they live with, who they love.

London is a massive city that can swell and expand with a limitless population of strangers, but just as suddenly contract to a village of people with shared interests. I see the same faces over and over again. These are nameless, mysterious, glamourous individuals who appear in my life at random moments: the person who takes my ticket at a cinema, someone who blocks my view at an exhibition, people I catch out of the corner of my eye. I am fearless in many areas of life, but I never stop and say, "Hi, I know you, I have seen you."

I hate it when people blank you. Sometimes I get lucky and somehow I get involved with a chance meeting with someone I¹ve seen and want to know. I try and put on my best self, like a special outfit, a self to whom I hope they will warm. I spread out my most appealing words, and face, and thoughts like a market trader arranging ripe fruit. I take the risk, I join in, I show myself and before I know it I am having a conversation with that object of my fantasies who is impossibly hip, completely alluring, glamourous. It makes me feel that I can be those things too. They are saying my name and their name feels peculiar in my mouth but I practise saying it and it soon moves in, makes itself right at home. And their separateness melts away, they stop being the kind of people that only exist in magazines, they begin to be human, and you are enriched, and you enrich them.

I'm not so good at women-only things, I feel so sad leaving my gentle boyfriend behind, but the Sewing Circle is full of the kind of women I have always wanted in my life. It's always warm and there's always space to move. My thought processes go something like this: "Look at that DJ. Look at the women sitting round, chatting. Look how many gorgeous women there are here. See how easy it is to talk to strangers. They're playing my favourite record. They're playing something new that I love. Look at that beauty. Look at the films. Let's step outside of our normal lives. Let's allow high art to seep inside us. Let's talk about art and films as though we always do. Let's marvel at our creativity. Let's know that we can do anything we want to. Let's drink wine. Let's drink hot chocolate. Let's drink gin. Look at that incredible woman, who you might just pass in the street, look at her here, she's magnificent. Imagine all of us dispersed amongst the general population. Believe that if we are here then there must be more like us out there." And then you keep going back, month after month, and you make friends there, and you become part of it too, and each time you show a little more of yourself, peel away the petals, and each time it's good.

copyright Charlotte Cooper 2002

above: At the Sewing Circle.

The Sewing circle, was started by Ego, Mystique and myself two years ago it is a sort of hang out, where women can come and watch films and videos made by other women, and exchange their work, like small publications they have made, or details about projects they are involved in. There is also a part of it where people are actually knitting.

We show film and video work from Cinenova, Joanie 4 Jackie and from the 'and i will do' video distribution project .

Friends and strangers come to play their favourite records, and help out with organising different activities. We have started making small presentations about a film that we love, where a person brings a video tape with their favourite film on and plays a short clip, with the sound off. The person stands up in front of the screen and describes the scene and the film and why it has such a big affect on them, to a captivated audience.

We meet on the last Thursday of each month, at a cafe in the Ritzy Cinema, in Brixton, South London.