Cuddle

An Interspecies Collaboration

Our first exhibit at Femina Potens was called I Do and featured our Red Wedding ephemera. During the month-long exhibition, we premiered Cuddle, which would become one of our most popular performances. We did it once a week. At the time, we had a rescued black Labrador retriever named Bob. Bob loved to cuddle between us in bed and with others. We installed a double bed, a sign-up sheet, instructions, and a timer in the middle of the space. Once each week we donned red fleece cuddle outfits that we had made special at Haight Ashbury’s Piedmont Boutique and spent five hours cuddling gallery visitors, who were invited to remove their shoes and socks and snuggle between us under our security blanket. We then set the timer for seven minutes.

Sometimes the person wanted to talk, or spoon, or play footsies. Sometimes they simply wanted to be held in silence. All kinds of people would come for a cuddle, even some of Annie’s old porn fans. We never turned anyone away. Bob would join in the puppy pile, unless the person didn’t want him in bed. Bob loved it, and he may have had the most fun of all.

Cuddle was subsequently performed at the Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, and the Vortex Theatre in Austin, Texas. Once we did Cuddle at a fundraising event for the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco. Our cuddling proved to be the most popular and lucrative of the evening’s offerings, surpassing lap dances, spankings, and peep shows. We retired Cuddle after a couple of years. (Bob died in 2014.) In 2017, we would revive Cuddle to protest closing borders and immigrant/refugee detention centers in the age of Trump.