Bana's Brutal Autobiography
Bana Witt Performances
By Allen Whitman

Bana Witt shivers before a small audience in the dark echoing room. Her breath catches early on, but she recovers, her composure sound. She tells her stories, a couple of them. They're terrifying. Bana's performance is scary and descriptive. Serendipitous meetings with co-workers from the sex trade in the seventies. The ultimate emotional how-to guide for anyone considering work in the sex trade. She reads in full control of her breath and with complete involvement. The audience listens closely. There is nervous laughter. This stuff is true. Yes it's absurd, absurdly funny and absurdly horrifying, but it's the way it happened. No fiction could be as amazing and Bana Witt tells her truth beautifully. From the thule fog in the central valley of California, in Fresno, where America sleeps, to the beating heart of porn for profit, Bana weaves her story...

Artie Mitchell the infamous San Francisco pervert...fucking on a grey limo seat while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn, using paper money to sop up menstrual blood, being whipped hard and painfully by a man who only wants to inflict wounds, on-camera, until a co-worker on the filmset yells "cut!"...invitations to fuck dogs for money...the tales continue, told matter-of-fact and dispassionately.

She ends with a poem from the place that poems come from. That poetry place. Her celebration doen't resonate with the same horrific urgency of her life stories. She speaks of "sex like radar that wil never find me..." and "pissing on bushes to know where I've been..." She says "cunt", the word reserved for when you better fucking mean it. Suddenly it's clear. This is erotic poetry.

But her autobiographical talk is brutal. Her relating of her stories of early pornographic moviemaking, the angry, hurtling money-fueled powermad sexual hysterics of a girl from the valley in the seventies....you only thought stories like that were dreamed up by bored writers. No, they really happened. Read 'em and weep. If it gets you off, think about that while cleaning up after you're through.

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