Wednesday, November 24, 2010

is the grass really greener? (redux)

or are we honestly just fine in our own skin? would we, if we could, be anyone other than who we already are? to have the flash money of a Wall Street tycoon, the endless sexual opportunities of a rock star, the way-too-beautiful boy who draws moths to his preposterous flame, the leggy body of the model who walks the runway like fuck you, the outsized athleticism of the Olympic swimmer, the impossible leap of a dancer, the oceanic saxophone voice of a black blues singer or the power to move people as poet, novelist, painter, film maker. we lie in bed, heavy with the weight of the not done, the all we may never be, the relationships that are missing or too much with us, the families that drive us crazy, the cars that won't start, the jobs that don't pay enough for the shit we take, the books we never write, the plays we're not in and the races we're too scared to run. we collect so many debits and so few credits. but honest-to-god, we like who we are, don't we. we like our name, our silly astrological sign, our dysfunctional families, our besotted friends and our peculiar failures. the face that ain't gettin' younger is still the face that we quietly, reluctantly, love and the way our eyes in the mirror can not lie. the blur we see in the window as we imagine a younger, hotter self is a soft joke, amusing, familiar and oddly cool. so, when you get right down to it, we wouldn't ever want to be anyone other than who we are, right? the grass 'looks' greener, but it ain't, it's burnt. we own our Dharma path, no one else does. why would we trade that in for the unknown other? we can't and we wouldn't. our soul is not for sale.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

performing

at 9. first as a cub scout with a whiffle and singing a 'negro' spiritual in black face (burnt cork on grease paint). that was the first time i remember doing anything like this. the unfamiliar rush in my skinny chest in front of a crowd of easy-to-love-you parents. i think i'd seen my dad in the Pirates of Penzance and was bowled over. the lights, color, make-up, huge bellowing voices and pit band killed me, as well as the on-the-road Broadway musicals that hit Philly i went to with my family. the stage was lit up like a forest fire with dancing, gesticulating big busty broads and (did i know it at the time?) gay gay gay chorus boys. what was this? why did it hit me so hard? how was i drawn to this flame? this had to have inspired my show-n-tell boyhood. i'd whip a cape around my shoulders and jumped through windows onto the lawn as if to save the day. i busted through a barn wall into a room-within-a-room and imagined myself a Flash Gordon hero. i would mind-wander out a 3rd story window into an other-personality night sky and fantasize a dream cloud Neverland to which i belonged. i banged out 'original' piano improvisations at the Prout's Neck talent show. but when it really took hold was in choir and chorus at the Episcopal Academy. trying out with my thin reed of a voice, singing scales with earnest eyebrows and hoping to impress the choir master with my little boy/girl's voice. which i did, making choir-boy and chorus-kid. i was exuberant and red faced in my (brief) tremulous solo at the Big Moment spring concert. i giggled in chapel over smothered farts-in-robes, a hard in-the-pants pencil up against the boy soprano beside me. it weren't just foolin' around. it instigated a transformative shiver in the soul, all this showing off in front of any audience. i can't remember a time, since the cub scout Uncle Remus, when i was not in a play, chorale, glee club or living room show-and-tell. at Yale my entire social life revolved around singing groups. the white tie prestige, the complex arrangements, the dazzling eyes-that-won't-let-go-of-you effect on girls and closeted boys. the fat sound, acapella, that could fill a hall. i joined choir, glee club, The Duke's Men and The Whiffenpoofs. we were ginned-up songsters with tinkling cocktails leaning against mantle pieces, champagne badges of courage in a faux demi-monde, an icicle-keening tenor bounding across a college yard in the autumn frost. sex, music, art, performance was a Dagwood sandwich i ate up. still, i was singing songs i had not written, that didn't express my inner or outer life. when, years later, on a borrowed upright in an over-stimulated New Haven house, i began to write my own songs and my own music, a change occurred. i was not filling another's shoes, but standing in my own. i'm thinking about this now because a friend asked me recently why i perform. i didn't know what to say. i'd never been asked. i hadn't thought about it. Bob Dylan said 'the only time he felt like his real self was on stage' (off stage being less authentic than 'real life'). it is the exact same for me. i am my most-est self when i perform. in captivating ears, eyes and hearts one imagines an electric synapse with another. one synthesizes his microscopic view of self, life, friends, loss, trauma, love and sex on a safe proscenium, offered up risk free. and then there's The Zone. if you give it all you got, if you 'leave it all on the stage', you occasionally inhabit an ego-vanishing dimension. your 'you' vaporizes. you transmogrify into an energy that is not from, but through the Self. your 'muse' weegie boards an art wave. this is intoxicating and let's face it, you love the love even as you wonder how to win the anonymous heart. you invent reciprocity. the nightmare, the other side of the coin, is the uncertainty that lurks above every singer's watchtower. the hell possibility of fakery, of when you're 'acting and not being' spits on your face. 'who the fuck do i think i am? i suck! they hate me! my voice is gross. my songs are absurd! i'm overdoing it. anyone is better at this than i am. i'm wasting your time. etc etc.' - crash, burn, explode. or when the narcissistic star fucking groupie blow job staggers past an open door, or when the i-need-to-get-high post coital sadness storms in after leaving all your everything on stage, or when the intense need to be loved but not intimately hurls you into the dank house of horrors. 'they loved me minutes ago, where are they now?' it's lonely at the top (or the bottom), even for a weekend blues warrior, a fat Karaoke singer, a zit-faced shedding teenager doing 'moves' in front of a sweaty mirror with a hardon in his shorts. for all these reasons, pro or con, i do what i do on any given night on any stage that will have me. maybe, like the tenor Jussi Bjorling or like Mark Sandman, i will drop dead performing, no regrets, with slow-motion flowers falling like snow upon the stage.