About the project

Juniper is a multimedia storytelling show, blending photos, home videos, and various ephemera with stories about Monica shifting through personas to try to find something that fits.

Update #3: March 29, 2022

If you are following along with these updates, you will have read a lengthy essay about how I should have dropped out of film school. Here's some proof! I'm not missing footage, I simply don't like doing it. If you're not following along, here's a video about how being a musician didn't work out for me, and I'm not too worried about the blank spots.

Update #2: March 18, 2022

The first movie I ever remember watching was a My Little Pony VHS about a turtle who needed to deliver a message. When the tape wore out, I remember staring in horror as the sound slowed down, the image faltered, and the machine clicked and clicked until my grandmother ran over to hit the eject button. She ripped it out of the VCR and its winding plastic guts followed. 

“Well, no more turtle for you.” 

I remained inconsolable for days and huffed around the house like a restless divorcee, unsure of where my path would lead now that everything leading up to my current position had been torched. It led to The Care Bears Movie, and soon I filled my days with a story of orphans, bears, and a glowing green mask floating out of a book written in a dead language. The Care Bears Movie wasn’t like the tale of the turtle messenger. It was sick, and it was scary. I needed more. 

I saw 101 Dalmatians with my mom as a final outing before my little sister was born. I projectile vomited a cherry coke in the parking lot and tiptoed across my own puke. I remember looking up at my mom as she screamed at me to not step in it, neither of us knowing this would be one of the last times I would be this well supervised. 

On my fourth birthday, I watched Nightmare on Elm Street. I sat in a big chair and sucked the frosting off animal cookies before dropping them back into the bag. This is what I wanted. Freddy Kreuger jumped onto the screen, and I inhaled a wet cookie down my throat. I gripped the arm of the chair and attempted to hack the treat onto the floor with my eyes still locked to the TV. I watched blades glisten and blood flow as I struggled for air. My uncle slapped me on the back, and the cookie flew out of my mouth and onto the floor. 

“Pick that up.”

I scrambled to retrieve the soggy giraffe and slipped it into my pocket so I wouldn’t miss anything. It was the first of several movies I saw before I should have, and I wouldn’t take back a single one.

I would maybe take back watching the ‘clean’ parts of Poison Ivy with my grandma because I was deemed too young to go see Jurassic Park with my mom. But not watching Nightbreed as a ten-year-old and praying to discover Midian every day from that day forward. Not watching Dolls as I stood on the couch behind my mom and brushed her hair, as one does. Not seeing parts of Demonic Toys through my fingers and watching my toys from the top bunk bed every night, daring them to come to life. Daring them to just fucking try it, just once. 

I would probably take back watching The Piano as a family and getting nearly body slammed onto the floor when Harvey Keitel appears with his dick out. In my household, it was okay to watch someone get their face cut off, but nudity? Cover your eyes until I say it’s done. 

If I did receive the opportunity to undo one film experience from my past, it would be, hands down, watching Rushmore as a misunderstood teenager who already thought I was better than everyone. And this isn’t even because I think it’s a bad movie. To me, Rushmore was a gateway drug. It led to being an insufferable asshole with fine tuned MySpace lists that showcased my refined early 2000s tastes. It led to downloading a few Kinks songs and only wearing thrifted men’s pants that didn’t fit me. It led to me treating Catcher in the Rye like a sacred text and begging for horn-rimmed glasses. Worst of all? It led to The Royal Tenenbaums, and that dragged me to one of the biggest mistakes of my life. 

Picture this: You’re me. You’re out of school for the summer. You have a bag of Doritos and a cold Dr. Pepper, and your pants smell like the old man who probably died in them. You push a new tape into the VCR, you sit through the trailers (someone took the time to make it, so you take the time to watch it), and then your mind is instantly blown. Now you want to make paintings, you want to collect butterflies, you want to smoke cigarettes and be skinny, wear matching outfits, live in a hotel, decorate with curated colors, and play tennis. 

But then Luke Wilson is in the bathroom and everything’s blue. The saddest song you’ve ever heard starts to play, and once you see the razor, you know. You know because you’ve wanted that, too. You’re weeping and rubbing cheese dust on your face as you wipe away your tears, and instead of telling anyone what you’ve always wanted as you figure it out, you know what you do? You decide to go to film school. 

I can’t blame being labeled ‘gifted’ in elementary, and I can’t blame the big fish/small pond complex I developed in high school. I can only blame myself for deciding to spike my future into a garbage can via attending college at a private art school. I liked writing, and I had made one movie in my junior year English class. Getting out of my hometown to study film seemed like the most logical jump. I wanted to learn how to create something that spurred the type of visceral reaction the Luke Wilson suicide scene had given me.

What I didn’t want was to learn anything else, but I fumbled my way through drawing classes and building half-assed sculptures during my first year so I could eventually get to what I really came for. And when it did arrive, I quickly realized I wasn’t good at it, but I could talk my way into making people believe I was at least okay at it. This realization robbed me of more sleep than anything else did for those four years. All I could think about was the massive loan payments waiting for me on the other side, and how my mom had worked so hard my entire life just for me to turn out a fuck up. The only thing that would have been more humiliating for me than telling people I went to art school would be telling people I dropped out, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cap off all my promise and potential with bowing out. 

So I kept going, and I kept talking. In a 16mm class, I shot a kids’ movie about a birthday party. A scene where the main character wakes up on the morning of her birthday turned out slow and out of focus. My teacher raved to me about its dreamlike quality, and I thanked him and explained I was trying to convey seeing the world in soft focus as a child with no problems. In reality, I didn’t know how to use the camera and was too proud to ask anyone for help, so it turned out mostly looking like shit. 

I shot most projects alone because I mouthed off too much during writing classes and didn’t feel like I could actually build a crew if I tried. I didn’t like anything that looked good but was written poorly, so everything I did was written just fine but hacked together in the last 72 hours before it was due. I wrote the majority of my scripts to be set during daytime, and I planned shoots around where the sun would be because I didn’t understand lighting. I gave monologues during critiques describing my use of natural light as being purposeful, and I tried to think of myself as a lonely auteur instead of a socially inept person who was terrible at working with others. 

I made another kids’ movie, this one about a girl wanting to become an astronaut, and felt totally incompetent next to the clusters of men making variations of Fight Club on cameras worth more than everything I own. I couldn’t give into the grittiness of the films that looked professionally made. If a guy in my program could make a movie that opened with a scene of a woman getting bleach poured down her throat, did it make me look like less of an artist when I made a ten minute romcom for the same class? To me it did, and the wind whistled out of my sails more and more every year. 

I took a class called Acting for Directors and fell asleep doing breathing exercises on the floor of a photo studio. I dropped a graphic design class because my teacher looked too much like Robin Williams and I couldn’t pay attention. I took Political Theory as an elective because my favorite band was Against Me! and I wanted to learn about anarchism, but it immediately reminded me that I’m actually just kind of stupid. 

My screenwriting teacher told me I had a huge future ahead of me, but also bragged about writing a draft of Bad Boys that wasn’t used. I sat through readings of other students’ scripts and one ended with a printed link that would result in the class being Rick Rolled. I wrote plays and a novella, but never felt proud of anything because I couldn’t make a film I was happy with. I had built, attempted, and destroyed my own dream on an abbreviated timeline, so by the time I graduated, I didn’t know what I was doing with my life because I didn’t really care. 

But I graduated. I graduated with an unfathomable amount of debt that I’ll likely never recover from. At my graduation, my grandma told me she wanted to see my name on the big screen before she died. Well, sorry. Maybe I should have just bought her a big TV, and we could have watched my unused demo reel as I thought about how my family’s greatest investment was my biggest failure. 

I didn’t touch a camera for years. When I finally made my first post-grad project, it was the first finished product I ever really liked, and other people loved it. I shot it with a thrifted VHS camera propped on a stack of books. All that time and all that money, and I found my Rushmore with twenty dollars. 

Update #1: October 11, 2021

About Monica Coleslaw

Monica Coleslaw is a storyteller, artist, and musician based in the Twin Cities. She hosts the podcast Demon Daddies and has produced the storytelling showcase One Up. Past performances include appearances as part of Shame As It Ever Was and Real Shit at Comedy Corner Underground.