Open (Open (Close)

When I was a little girl, it annoyed me that my mother sang so often. Cooking banana bread, doing the dishes, making her way around the house: her voice floated through the freshly-painted rooms like a cloud of golden pollen. The songs she sang were ancient and full of imagery — all of them songs I’ve never heard since, with topics concerning the moon, saying grace, and royal women mistaken for swans in the forest, pierced by the hunting arrow of their lovers. She never trailed off or faded out. She didn’t falter on a single word or note.

I wondered how she could bear being loud like that, making everyone aware of her presence. As a child, I was anxiously quiet. I would close the door to my room and knit my brow, attempt to read. I worried that my  friends would walk by and hear her. 

As we grew up, my mother sang around the house less and less. Now I’m around the house less and less: some years only for a week or so around Christmas. This year a cousin of mine was getting married, and we were going to meet up in Little Rock for a few days instead of St. Paul: but on the day we were scheduled to leave, it wound up snowing a few inches in Boston and antagonizing everyone on the East Coast so thoroughly that all domestic flights were cancelled.

Jurvis and I got on the phone with our travel agent (because travel agents are amazing and completely worth their thirty dollar booking fee — even for part-time public radio employees). But Bob couldn’t help us on Friday. “There’s just . . . nothing,” he said. “I mean, if you want to put down another eighty bucks to guarantee you a seat on a flight tomorrow, we could arrange that, but to be honest, I think those flights are going to get cancelled too.” He looked up Amtrak schedules and Greyhounds: we briefly discussed the option of renting a car and driving the whole way. “Yeah, no, I guess that’s farther than I thought,” he sighed. “If you drove for twenty-two hours straight, with no breaks for sleeping or eating, and also taking for granted that weather conditions would be ideal – you might make it in time for the reception.”

I was standing on the Charles/MGH subway platform when we were trying to figure all of this out, a flurry of tiny snowflakes spinning around our hunched shoulders while the river hid glassily somewhere below. Cars weaved across the bridge. Every five minutes the red line roared by and I couldn’t hear a word he said. “Should we get back on the train, then?” I shouted at Bob. “Should we be heading to the airport, to arrange this in person?”

He thought this would be the best idea considering the craziness, yes. When we got off the phone, I stood there for a moment, staring into the dizzy white air. “I’m not going to make this wedding,” I realized.

Every Christmas since I’ve left home, I have stood next to my mother on Christmas Eve and sang with her. Unitarian services at first, then the family majority voted Lutheran, but I would always make sure to elbow stepbrothers, children and boyfriends out of my way so that I would be right next to her, and the confident pleasure of her voice. It presses into your palm, cues your turns, so that suddenly everything seems effortless and you’re wondering how you just did that: and then she begins harmonizing with you and you think everyone else should just quiet down for a moment so that they can appreciate the two of you, singing like that.

She called me on Christmas Eve, but I was in a used book store, hunting down old science fiction for my boyfriend, and told her I couldn’t talk right then. I called her back late on Christmas day.

“Mom, I had to sing without you last night,” I said. “It was terrible. I realized I don’t know how.”

A few months ago, one of Jurvis’ friends sent us a link to the music video of Francis and The Lights’ “The Top”, directed by Jake Schreier. I loved it the first time I saw it. The second time I saw it I loved it some more. Now it’s in my bookmarks bar at the top of my browser, and any time I click on it — about once a week — I watch it at least three times in a row, sometimes more.

In short, this video has kind of driven me insane. I keep trying to share it with other people the way it was shared with me — I explain beforehand that it was filmed on 35mm, with him singing live, and it was just one take — but nobody else seems to really dig it. “Meh,” they say. “Is this guy serious?” they ask. “I don’t really like how he’s not Prince,” they add.

The more I watch, the more difficult I find it to believe that you haven’t fallen in love with this. Seriously? Anyone? (Download the full-screenable mp4 here).

Hilariously — I discovered some time ago — I had developed a severe allergy to band-aids. Specifically the adhesive: medical tape was out, waterproof, sensitive skin, Snoopy decals. I’d wear one for an hour and sport the telltale parallel welts for weeks, waiting impatiently for the sweet fade into a less violent, more subtle chemical burn. This problem has proved to be more inconvenient than you’d think. Holding gauze against one’s skin for a couple of hours, while usually hilariously doable, isn’t always an option.

“Doctor,” I said, “I think I have ringworm.”

“Indeed you do!” he cried. “Sweet Lord!”

“Oh, oh oh oh wait,” I added. “See, I didn’t want my boyfriend to catch it while we slept, so I covered all of the rashes with band-aids — only I’m allergic to band-aids, which I knew, only as I’ve gotten older the allergy has gotten worse I guess, so I’m hideous. Just ignore that, that and that, and this over here, and also that. The things we do for love, right?”

He stared at me in disbelief. “Ringworm isn’t communicable.”

“What!” I cried. “That’s not what the internet said.”

Between Facebook updates, costume buddy icons, and gchat status updates, I’ve been a tad . . . single-minded for the past few weeks. Adam instant messaged me. “Wow. You are super excited about this show.” I un-wryly informed him that it was literally the coolest thing I had ever done in my life, like ever, for all of time, and that maybe he could understand one day when he waltzed topless onto a stage in front of nine hundred people of all ages, races and genders and the entire room boomed with the thunder of their applause and cheers.

Talk about seriously a-freakingfirming.

Fembots are programmed to document your panties. (Full album: Backstage at the Slutcracker.)

It was freezing cold in the backstage hallway where we would stand barefoot and draped in gauze, waiting for our cues. The Arabians wrapped their veils around my shoulders for warmth, a drag king waited ready with my wig for a quick change. Every time I wondered if this would be the time that I would run my tiny Chinese-steps onto the stage only to freeze in horror, staring into the layered abyss of faces and realizing wait, something is missing — oh that’s right it’s my clothes. 

But between scenes I would stand alone at the bottom of the basement staircase, while girls touched up their makeup and changed stockings in the adjoining dress rooms. You could hear the audience from this quiet island of cement, their howls with laughter, their screams and clapping and infatuation with everything from the pattern on Fritz’s socks to the gigantic plaster genitals whose base I had hot-glued with wrapping paper and tinsel four hours before our opening performance. It nearly brought tears to my eyes, hearing so many people happy like that.

“This crowd is amazing,” our director would say. “They’re getting jokes that I didn’t even know we put in there.”

I realized one evening, as my eyelids were painted with a thick coat of gold glitter and Ron Jeremy on speakerphone was telling us all to break a leg, that all throughout junior high and high school, theater was where I went to meet and hang out with my favorite people: it formed my entire social life, introduced me to writing, technology, hammy senses of humor and sewing machines. Then college came around and it suddenly seemed serious, something to major in — a high school sweetheart I should give up before we got married. I promptly dumped my people and moved on.

Wtf, mate?

Full album behind the scenes of this sexy freaky holiday zeitgeist spectacular here. (I’ve flagged three of the photos as “moderate”. If you want to see them, you’ll need to be logged in with a flickr account, and your privacy settings set to “safeSearch: off”. If you don’t want to see them, don’t log in, or make sure your privacy settings have the default safeSearch on.)

We sold out a 900-seat theater all three nights, and had an 800-count audience for our freaking Sunday matinee. Somerville Theatre wants more. (I’ll be at a wedding this weekend, but I imagine the show will survive.)

Don’t worry, mom and dad: you can almost see my boobs in one of these clips, but not quite.