Song Doors

Some songs are doors you stumble through to a different time. Sometimes the air around you lightens and shifts direction with the notes of a particular tune. And for some reason, hearing songs on the radio gives them a weight and reality that playing them on your own just can't attain.

Fairytale of New York always stills me. American radio stations don't play it around Christmas, so when the season approaches (about October 3), I spend hours online hoping to catch the Pogues and Kirsty McColl warbling away on some UK station. And whole Christmas seasons have gone by without me catching more than the last seconds of the song - I always seem to be too late. But somehow, yesterday, (for St. Patrick's Day?), the station I was tuned into began the opening chords of Fairytale of New York.

Time doubled back on itself.

It's Christmas time in London. I am mashed into a car with four or five other people, all of us dressed outlandishly for the children's pantomime we are on our way to perform. Our drama school books about a weeks worth of performances for free in the area, and though I have never even seen a pantomime before this year, I am entranced by them. I am entranced by most of this experience - a year of school where the only thing I concentrate on is being an actor, a year in which I live in Britain, where the voices make different, beautiful shapes for me, the year of the cuckoo, for I have stolen the nest of the family I live with, a year of beauty and freedom and straining ever closer to becoming something I should be.

However, I am not entranced with this car and being mashed with this group of people. They frighten me, set me on my guard. The slim clear-eyed girl whose every gesture seems to say she is both right and entitled, the short, sharp boy whose affections are like a shaft of light that has yet to fall on me, these people are part of something I am not, and in the car I am acutely aware I do not belong.

On the radio, Fairytale of New York is just beginning.

"Oh, turn that up, turn that up!" the boy is fluttering, and his northern accent inverts the u sounds so that they are eggs and not cups. "This is the best Christmas song ever. It's not smarmy or sentimental at all, that's what makes it so great!" And off the song goes, into the drunk tank with a disappointed couple who listen to the NYPD choir singing Galway Bay, while the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.

And he is right, it is a wonderfully joyful song while being true, and sad and honest, and it is Christmas in a way that Away in a Manger can never be. (The Baby Jesus, no crying he makes? Sure, right....) As I recognize his rightness, a small window opens somewhere in my belonging. I am less isolated, liking this song with its status as an undisputed Christmas classic.

It takes much longer than a ride in the car, but my affection for the same people who previously intimidated me grows, and though I never become a native, a different set of walls opens up and I become part of something else there. And time passes, and though it is too romantic to say I love the song Fairytale of New York as my point of entry into another world, the song itself continues to strike me like a gong. And every time I hear it, I am in that car, and happy, and on my way to make very young children laugh with glee.

Makeover

I got my shoes polished the other day. "Shined" isn't demonstrative enough to describe how beautifully they were cared for, or how much I enjoyed the experience. My shoes themselves, about two years old, have never been shined before, and were looking much the worse for two years of wear. A sturdy, Swedish design, the black leather was worn through at the toes to a dull grey. They looked pitiful, I confess.

I had cash in my pocket, a lunch hour to squander, and the knowledge that in the bowels of this very office building there is a shoeshine setup, a little room, glass-lined on two walls, tv set mounted high in the corner. The two guys shining shoes were a study in contrasts, one an expansive, expanded chatter, the other a quieter, more focused gentleman. They were of that cheerfully intelligent class of people to which builders and house painters belong. I did want to offer them a cup of tea with three sugars, but since they were African-Americans, a Coke might have been more appropriate. Same gesture, different cultures. As I left, they gazed, spell-bound, at the television screen on which an attractive African-American female newscaster was shuffling papers.

"Man, she looks good."

"She's had a makeover, ain't she?"

"Whatever she did, she's looking mighty fine."

But all this distracts me from my point: it was fabulous. A day at the spa, practically. It felt like a massage to the feet, happily once removed due to the leather. (I've ticklish feet. Please do not use this knowledge for evil.) I was sitting high up and my knees blocked my view, so I could concentrate on the easy pressure of polish being applied, brushes shuffling back and forth, soft cloths buffing. It felt fantastic - that tingling feeling in the scalp was rustling around my head. I might have started drooling.

Best of all, when the gentleman (the studious one) was finished, and I moved my knees out of the way, my shoes gleamed like bowling balls. My shoes looked shiner than new, completely liquid black. My shoes were luminous.

As I headed back to work, completely contented, I began mentally counting pairs of shoes...tomorrow I could wear a different pair and get those shined. . . yeah. . . oh, yeah. . .

Time

I worry that my life is flying past me and all I see is this the blur of movement in my periphery as something swift moves the air around me. Events have occurred but I fail to inhabit them, the way you speed-read ahead in impatience but realize later you haven't absorbed anything in the paragraphs you rushed.

A co-worker of mine died about two months ago, and I still look for him on the street on the way to work. When someone passes my desk with a particular footfall, I look for his grin going past. I haven't found a way to accept his absence as permanent. His death was unexpected and at an odd juncture - he was old enough that you can't say he "died young", but young enough, and with enough left to accomplish, that his life was unfinished, a book left open. On the other hand, I perform a show for senior citizens two days a week and often I am dealing with people who are alive long after their lives have been finished - is that any better than dying before every 'i' is dotted and every 't' crossed?

How do you grieve appropriately for someone you weren't that close to, but whose absence makes such a loud noise?

In a separate case but still on the subject of missing what's happening to me, I've been spending a majority of my time with one person in particular but I'm reluctant to admit even to myself that this person becomes increasingly important. A simple pie chart of my week's activities would give me away, but does time equal emotion? Habits don't make feelings. Yet I wouldn't be there if I didn't enjoy it. Actually, the present doesn't worry me, it's the future. It would be far better for me to come to the end of my life and look at the person sitting next to me and say, "Amazing. Honey, look at that, we just spent our whole lives together," than have to make some promise to that effect early on.

Although, truth be told, what worries me is that, as my co-worker's death proves, it's not early any more. Perhaps I should get off the fence and love someone. Which is worse: missing your life as if rushes by you because you're afraid to invest in it, or having to negotiate the failures and successes of your investments as they evolve? Tricky. You only get to choose one course, so it's hard to make an objective comparison.

Waiting

You wait and wait, and just when you decide to do something else, the busy-ness you were so bored in preparation for overtakes you.

Headache

"There's just something about dialogue that really breaks up otherwise endless pages of prose, isn't there?"

"Yeah, I got stuck reading a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel once that barely had paragraph breaks, and my head hurt for weeks. I was praying for dialogue by the end."

"How's your head now?"

"Actually, it feels like a pine tree on fire, all straight lines ablaze with pain."

"You sound like Lorrie Moore."

"What?"

"Lorrie Moore. She does that in all her stories, makes everything into these long, complicated similes. 'Love without intimacy is an unsung tune', blah blah blah. It'll give you a headache if you don't have one already. After a while, you have no interest in her characters unless they all go through a course of Proszac. It's perfectly obvious none of them have ever had a good meatball sub."

"What on earth are you talking about? What's a good meatball sub gotta do with it?"

"Geez, you know those people, life is one big dreadful sadness. They've never had something wonderful break through their self-absorbed malaise. A meatball sub ought to be able to have an impact on you - heck, I don't know, you might not care for meatball subs. But you probably feel like about about some kind of food...chocolate chip cookies, maybe."

"Well, I am partial to a good piece of lemon meringue."

"Exactly. Lemon meringue...exactly. It dissolves into something magical."

"Hey, can we stop and get some lunch?"

"You are so suggestible! I bet if I started talking about bowling you'd wanta go."

"Well, no...it's just, like I said, I have a headache, and so maybe if I eat something...."

"Whatever..."

Charleston

I'm headed to South Carolina next week for a family tradition: my brother's birthday weekend in Charleston. Typically, this involves lots of seafood at GREAT dive restaurants (I'm not telling you where they are, I don't want them crowded next time I go) and lots of alcohol. It's been going on for almost twenty years, and my brother's in his thirties.

It all started because my father made us a deal as kids - he would take us out to dinner wherever we wanted to go, with whomever we wished to invite, on our birthdays. I grew up in SC, and originally in a smallish town, so choices started out fairly limited. In fact, as young children, our favorite place to go was Duff's, a truly horrible buffet restaurant that we loved for its plethora of desserts. The food was terrible, but if you're 6, you don't care about canned butter beans when you know you have a bank of sugar and chocolate to wade through once you've gotten the requisite peas and carrots out of the way. So early on, the parental deal became, "I will take you out anywhere you want to go...except Duff's." This remained part of the sentence long after Duff's closed forever, just in case.

When I was about 9 we moved to Charleston and the culinary world exploded. Not that my brother and I were able to take advantage of that or even understand it at our tender ages, but at least the choices widened. I think one year my brother wanted to eat oysters, and asked to be taken up the coast to a place at Murrell's Inlet. My Dad's response was, if you want oysters, let me take you to a REAL oyster place.

We ended up at our now regular dive haunt. It's made of cinder blocks. The cinder blocks are covered with graffiti. The workers roast great shovelfuls of oysters on a grate over an open fire at the far end of the room, and when the oysters are sufficiently roasted, they carry the shovelful over to your table and dump them on the newspaper-covered table. You get a bucket to put shells in. You get plastic containers of melted butter. You get a dull knife to pry the oysters open. You get a packet of saltines. Go ahead, eat up.

Over the years, not all of the guests have been as excited as my brother about roasted oysters. Frankly, I'm a little shocked that my sister-in-law ended up part of the family while not liking oysters that much. A testament to true love, I think. But there's something so up front about the place you have to love it. It's dirty and old and plain and all of the energy is focused into getting you some good-tasting oysters. The oysters are great, and that's why you're there, and there's no wasted time. Decor? Who needs it? Shucking oysters is dirty work.

I am suddenly entirely homesick. There are things I don't love about South Carolina, but there are a lot more that I do, and I miss it. I miss the cadences of speech, and the bobs and twists of phrase, and I miss the decoding that comes second-hand to a native. The Midwest is a friendly place, but it's flat, and what you see it what you get. With Southerners, you get layers.

It's hard to explain to people who have only seen the South in Hollywood movies, all Spanish moss and people in rocking chairs on decaying porches with their hound dogs. That is, of course, not the South any more than a lone hog butcher is Chicago or a wisecracking, rugged policeman with a heart of gold is New York. A lot of the South is just like everywhere else nowadays, big box stores and chain restaurants and highways.

Maybe I shouldn't even try to explain it. In the end, it's home.

I should be more clever

Every so often, the phone rings at this desk and people ask for Carl Robards. Now, this is a business, and there has never been a Carl Robards working here. His WIFE, Frankie Robards, did indeed work in this office, and at this desk, but she hasn't been here for over three years. I know because I never met her, and I've worked here intermittently for about that.

Now, I'm curious how after three years, I can get a multitude of calls for a man who was, as far as I know, never actually in this office. No, it doesn't happen everyday, but it does happen about once a month.

Has someone finally managed to supply telemarketers or bill collectors with a number that's a true dead end? Why would you give anyone your wife's office number as your own regardless?

Moments ago, I got one of these calls. I take an insufferable pleasure in telling the caller that not only do they have the wrong number, they are so far off as to be incapable of reaching their desired party. I have no forwarding information. The trail goes cold with me.

But I have been exceedingly stupid. My pleasure at telling them how erroneously they dial has been a trap. I need to find out WHY they have this number, I need to ask questions before they know I am a dead end.

A: "Is Carl Robards there?"

B: "Why do you want to know?"

Hmmm....too accusatory. I must ask a question someone would conceivably answer.

B: "May I tell him what this is in regards to?"

No...it will be hard to explain I have no way of reaching him if I lead with that.

B: "May I ask what this is regarding?"

Better. The mystery will be solved....I will lie in wait....the next caller will not slip away with a glib warning from a goody-two-shoes. You have been warned.

Surprise!

So last night the Northern Lights appeared on my horizon, eerie and beautiful. I surprised myself in an audition.

I'm wary of trying to write this down, because such experiences are other-worldly, and often impossible to describe. I read someone else's description of such a moment recently and it just made me roll my eyes. Also, I have noticed recently that sometimes people I think aren't very talented are telling themselves the same things I am about why no one hires them. As you can imagine, this is disconcerting, and calls one's knowledge of one's own talent into doubt.

But any time you are involved in an audition or a play or, I imagine, any kind of creative endeavor, and your thoughts synthesize, leap beyond your conscious mind, and form something you couldn't plan, any time that happens, it feels fantastic. As if you have reached over the garden wall of your consciousness and plucked fruit from the trees that grow in the fertile soil of the unconscious.

Ok, yes, that makes me sound like a wanker. (Begging the question that even using the word wanker as an American makes me sound like a wanker, but let's move on.) Perhaps the sort of lightning flashes that are what we call inspiration are impossible to write about. I don't have them often enough, and after a long spell without them I start to feel drab, because if all I have to approach the world is my conscious mind and what I know, that feels pretty limiting. But we know more than we think we know, and that's very powerful.

It's as if everybody has that magic carpet bag of Mary Poppins, but we don't all have the ability to use its magic all the time, being mere mortals. You reach in at times and all you find is more carpet lint. But sometimes, if you're relaxed and not trying too hard, you reach in and the most astonishing objects come leaping to hand: a lamppost, three figs, a river. The bag is full and endless and entirely fascinating, and you feel so special at being given, however briefly, the chance to explore it. And the figs are especially delicious.

That's what happened to me last night. I often think about things too much, so the experience of creating something without thinking about it is delightful. That I made people laugh is even better.

So, wanker or no, I'm spending the day in small but fervent dances of thanks to the magic of the carpet bag.

The Part I Like

I like going to the gym. Wait, that's a lie. I hate going to the gym, but I like leaving the gym. I like the sensation of having completed my exercise, and the rush of the endorphins. But this is commonplace. What I really like about the gym is looking at other women in the locker room.

Now, I am a woman, and have spent my life as a fairly modest and respectful woman. If I'm around someone else getting dressed, I don't stare. I don't tend to undress in company. But apparently none of the rules of modesty apply in a locker room. I don't remember this from high school locker rooms so it was a surprise. Women walk around stark-naked, stand under hairdryers stark-naked, put their clothing and makeup back on with the greatest nonchalance. And it is all easy viewing.

It's not a sexual thrill - I imagine if I were bisexual or homosexual it would be a thrilling place, however my enjoyment stems from utter fascination. I have never seen so many different women's bodies. The women in my gym come in such a myriad of shapes - tiny, taut women with pure muscle all the way to great, blubbery whales of creatures. Plus, and here's the part I love, everything in between.

It makes me realize how much I've swallowed the magazine myth. Sure, as an educated woman, I "know" women's bodies in magazines are idealized. I know Hollywood films have certain standards of beauty. I know television has a mold from which it rarely strays. But knowing intellectually that media has offered me a template from which all women deviate is different from being able to summon, in my mind's eye, a smorgasboard of different combinations. Tall, slender, with big hips. Large, short, bulbous. There's a woman who looks as if her muscles are steel but somehow she has about a half-inch of gelatinous flesh that covers these steel pistons. Another woman has absolutely no spare tissues between her muscles and skin, a sort of greyhound efficiency in her movement.

I have yet to see anyone in my gym who actually has a perfect body.

Interesting - that's what I mean. I say "perfect body" as if there is indeed one setup that I can refer to, as if anyone reading this would know immediately what I mean. In the dressing room I can hear the myths exploding, over and over, like a fireworks display.

I've never had such access to women's bodies, I find it electrifying. I especially like the large women who stand around naked, in no hurry to clothe themselves. I like the idea that, here it is, here's my body, and I don't have anywhere to be but in it, so don't expect me to cover it up like I'm supposed to be ashamed of it.

It is an education for an educated woman.

The Circus

My dreams last night were especially vivid and thought-provoking. I was on a tour package trip with my parents. The first day would be spent with a circus. I knew someone I once thought I could love, someone I haven't seen in a long while, would be on this trip . I felt a mix of dread and excitement and curiosity and indifference. That sounds an impossible combination but sometimes you care so much about something that you also just don't care anymore.

My agitation sent me out to the circus. It wasn't even a proper circus, more like a performance with singers and animals and a dirt floor. The headliner was an overblown, once-famous black woman singer, a woman who had sung the blues with great power and now lived inside them. She took me around backstage and talked to me in sentences that started with phrases like, "Now, I'm gonna be straight with you..." She was philosophical about her deterioration.

I wandered around, fascinated and distracted, until the afternoon performance was about to start, and combed through the crowd to sit with my folks on the lawn in front of the stage.

And there he was, sitting next to them...with what I suddenly knew in the eureka clarity of dreams was his fiance and her parents. And I sat down next to him and asked him how he was, as if we were acquaintances, since this other woman should not be made suspicious. He looked at me with misery in his eyes and said something I can't remember now, something like, I'm so unhappy. Then he leaned his head towards my chest, without actually moving close enough to touch me, as if he wanted to crawl into who I was an escape the people who surrounded us. I kissed him, carefully, on his head, as if to tell him I would let him.

I read over this and I have caught none of the intensity of it, the strange, dirty, road-weary performers, the presence of large bears and perhaps horses, or buffaloes, the self-mocking laughter of the blues singer who so clearly knew things I did not and amused herself with my naivete. I haven't captured how adrift I felt knowing I would see someone whose presence had once sparked such amazement, and whose absence left such a loud silence, like the absence of laughter for a joke you tell that should be riotously funny. And I haven't explained how his leaning and my kiss anchored something in me and in him, as if we both had returned home. Clearly he would marry the other woman, but she would never visit the part of him that rested there, in that moment, with me.

I woke up stunned. I think dreams are the subconscious' way of throwing out the trash, of forcing us to consciously confront the ideas that have been lurking in the shadows. Once exposed, they are destroyed.

I'm happy to dream of those I have lost, as it usually signals that my subconscious feels thoughts of them are taking up space and should be permanently removed.

But it may be a while before I shake that feeling of homecoming with someone I am not likely to see again.

I'm Sailing Away

And then delight flutters in like your own ticker tape parade. After a particularly glum series of weeks, I have regained my fabulousness. More accurately: I have regained my feeling of fabulousness. I may or may not be fabulous, according to the time of day and the odd preferences of the beholder, but I can deflect a lot of external woe with my relish in my own fabulousness. I have to work at it, or I lapse into muttering slumps of bitterness and envy. The fabulousness isn't me feeling "good" about myself - "Who-Hoo! Look at me! I'm so great and wonderful!" Fabulous catches the light when the ability to be yourself packs down so dense and concentrated that you are lofted for a time beyond the judgments of others, and, more rarely, beyond your judgments of yourself.

It's a nice place. There are large windows there.

I love to sing. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes badly. Unfortunately, too often the times I do it badly are in front of people who may or may not hire me based on how well I perform.

But last night I sang for a clutch of people, first to ask for some work, and then just because I love to sing. To warble, to soar. To dance around foolishly. To do a ride-out. I ask you, what more ridiculous movement is there than a ride-out? But as a finish to a song, it is a ride, unmistakably. It only makes sense when the song is a ride.

I have a distinct memory of being a small child in my nightgown in front of the woodstove my my house. The lights were all off, I was meant to be in bed, and I was just sitting by the fire, humming to myself.
"Michael row the boat ashore,
Alleluuuuuuuuuu-ia
Michael row the boat ashore,
Alleluuuuuuu-ia."
I was sitting on the carpet, with my knees tucked up under my chin, pleased with myself for staying up late. I was content.

That kind of content still lives inside the songs. Last night I squeezed some of it out.

One square in the distance

I have been discontented. I keep a fortune cookie fortune in my wallet, grimy now, as such items age badly, that says, "Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation." I hope this is the case, because otherwise, I have been petulant and recalcitrant to no purpose. That would just be a waste of time.

Inside the discontent about one aspect of my life is a careful exhilaration about a different aspect. I am not the person I would like to be. I am not engaged by my work in the way I wish to be. But someone may love the person I am right now, unperfected, in mid-stride. I am agog at such a possibility. Bewildered and doubtful, I nevertheless dream in brighter colours.

The joy inside the discontent is hard to identify, like an iridescent butterfly as the dusk grows deeper. I have taken to recalling good moments in my life, trying to remind myself that they were all bought with work or suffering, or simple patience.

But the boomerang of self-assurance I swing into the world comes back an arrow of defeat. Perhaps I misinterpret. Right now, it feels as if everyone else is winning, everyone else has eased their demons and begun to enjoy their rewards. Meanwhile, I long to go vaulting over the obstacles that taunt me. People wave at me from the far shore. Perhaps my demons, being harder to vanquish, force me to greater lengths, greater feats to defeat them. Perhaps eventually I will emerge stronger than I would have had the battle been swift and easy. Perhaps these arrows of defeat come from many sources, and my boomerang still hasn't arrived.

Perhaps I need some success and not so much philosophy or metaphor.

I watch others philosophize, and I can see they use philosophy to shield themselves from the truth that they will never reach their goals, never succeed. It gives my own philosophy a bitter aftertaste.

In the end, the only absolute path to failure is to stop trying.

Best Behavior

It feels like I'm on a first date, and I'm not entirely sure what I want from the relationship. I'm at the table looking at a stranger, and I'm faced with the task of constructing a self for that person. I'm aware I could lie, that the beauty of the tabula rosa is the ability to redraw, but it's hard enough being truthful with oneself, why waste the effort with extra dishonesty?

So here I am, trying to decide what to tell you. Unlike a first date, I want to tell you whatever amuses me most in the telling. I say unlike -- I'd have much more fun if that were my thought on every date. I have a habit of responding to people in kind: that is, I try to adjust myself according to the company. Faced with the blank screen, all responsive cues are eliminated and I am adrift, briefly. It is not unpleasant.

Cross Words

Today, I did the crossword first, and it was easy. I know it was easy because I zipped through it, and only had to look up one or two words on the internet. (I'm sure someone out there knows the star system Draco is next to the Big Dipper, but it just looked wrong. I agree, it's cheating. I do it anyway.) I want to believe that I am so clever and word-rich that I am capable of ripping my way through any crossword, but last week I made that mistake. Five minutes into the New York Times crossword on the opposite page, I gave it up and went back to reading.

I blame my sister-in-law. She's the crossword demon. She infected my mother and I. Somehow, my brother and father have a deep resistance to crosswords, but send the family off on vacation, and give my sister-in-law the paper, and voila, there we women sit, stumped, for hours, doing the crossword. The three of us have a fairly wide range of knowledge together: My mother retains much of her French and the various details of being well-traveled and well-read throughout her life, I am the theatre and literature contributor (although I fail miserably when movie actors are involved), and my sister-in-law has a lifetime of dealing with crosswords, so she knows all the sneaky crossword tricks. Together, we have enough success to break even the New York Times crossword, but on our own, it's a struggle.

My mother, after a couple of years of only being drawn into the crossword only at holiday time, recently decided she could stave off intellectual flabbiness (and presumably, alzheimer's) by doing the crossword every day. My father initially supported this endeavor by buying books of crosswords as gifts, but soon we all realized what a time-intensive labour the crossword was for my mother alone. My father now refers to himself as a crossword widow.

"It's just that they're so sneaky," my mother frets, drugstore bifocals perched on her nose. She loses glasses at an advanced speed, so we buy her boxes of them from Eckerd or CVS, and never mind the exact prescription. "The crossword will give a clue that makes you think they mean ONE thing, but they really mean something else. I just can't think sneaky like that." She also bemoans the crossword habit of having a clue match the answer - an abbreviated clue means the answer is an abbreviation, a clue in the past tense means the answer ends in 'ed', tricky things like that.

When I call my folks some evenings, my father usually signs off first and my mother has additional gossip or news. In the past few months, that's turned into: "Wait....are you still there? Good...I needed to ask you something. Let's see...I need a five letter word that means 'form a gully'."

In the end, I understand. The crossword never tempted me before those group sessions. But once I'd had a taste of the satisfaction of fully completing a crossword, even as a team, I was hooked. As I filled in the final blanks today, I felt the self-satisfied content of the conqueror. In the back of my head, I am aware that success is often defined by the comparative height of the bar and not your ability to reach it. But completing a crossword, however simple, has within it the seeds of linguistic mastery.

Now, on to the New York Times.

*clears throat*

Well...hey, can I have a glass of water? Thanks. It's been a while since I spoke up, I'm a little rusty.

Introductions? No, I think not. If you're reading this because you already know me, it's pointless, and if you just stumbled upon it, I doubt that I can sum myself up to my own satisfaction.

And get off my back about the title being overly-dramatic. Byron: "There is that within me that shall tire/ Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire."

Maybe it's "which shall tire." Anyway, I like it. I could do worse for a slogan.

Hello, then.