The fact the first installment of my 2009 – 2010 BlocBride Documentary Series (in the form of 36 videos) was seen as real — to the point of getting world-wide messages asking which dating site I’d met Tanja on — was beyond exhilarating. No one suspected Tanja was from Utah, with an M.A. in English; her ‘accent’ was confirmed by my (laughing) Czech and Polish friends, as believable. Perhaps it seemed extra real because the series followed the trajectory of my relationship with Tanja, complete with its ‘bittersweet’ ending in Bisbee, AZ, when Tanja read me the riot act and threw her little black book at me. Playing her bemused husband, on the “3 month installment plan” was a riot: for every real date, we had a glass of wine and filmed an episode — I became super adept at filming both of us with the camera in portrait mode — as if a third person were ever-present to capture my reactions to Tanja’s mystery and insanity. So real it wasn’t meant to be.
Now, perhaps to relaunch the episodes with my new BlocBride artwork … complete with resurrected (vintage) East Bloc polygraph. Tanja and I had an amicable ‘divorce’ — it would be fascinating to see our grievances of old aired again. (Would they seem … all the more frivolous?)