Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Bisbee, My Love.
Coming back into Bisbee, Arizona feels like it does when I pass through Iowa City, where I went to college, or past an apartment on the west-ish side of Chicago where I lived when I first got to the city, raw and young and wrapped up in various compulsions. Nostalgia slaps me upside the head and memories wash over my brain and between the beatings and the floods, you can’t blame me for being exhausted by the past very quickly.
The streets of the little town are exactly how I left them. The Copper Queen Library hasn’t moved an inch in any direction. The coffee shop on the corner was my haunt during the morning hours and since it’s night now I see no one I knew, but the wicker chairs and the pastry cases are still holding court. It’s only been six months but it feels like I was here in another life, hanging out with another girl who looked like me.
And I’m never sure if my reaction to places I used to live is just standard issue wist* or if there’s something wrong with me. Do other people visit places they were and no longer are and feel such crippling longing? And what are we longing for, exactly? Because that part makes no sense. I don’t want to go back to last winter. I don’t want to live here. I want to take my husband out of his nearby base and go on with the next part, so why do I look around the streets of Bisbee and want to put my head down on the dashboard for awhile?
Maybe it’s just Proust. Maybe it’s just me, in search of lost time.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The Killer Queen.
I don’t know why and I’m ashamed to admit it, but somehow I neglected Freddie Mercury for a long time.
The first time I heard of Queen was when I saw the movie Wayne’s World in 1992. This is typical for people my age; most of us were too young to know Queen before Wayne and Garth and the two stoned guys in the back of the Gremlin rocked out to Bohemian Rhapsody. But that scene in the film made a huge impression on me and my peers. We sang shreds of Bohemian Rhapsody day and night, not especially knowing or caring who had originally recorded the song. Someone surely said, “It’s this band called Queen,” but the majority of us weren’t hitting the record store to buy the band’s greatest hits.
Hilariously, however, someone did find the sheet music to Rhapsody and brought it to our choir director. We were in 6th grade at the time and the chorus was popular. Tons of kids were in it and we had concerts twice a year. I remember that glorious day when Mrs. Beightol handed out the sheet music. We freaked out.
”Bohemian Rhapsody??!”
“Oh my God!”
“It’s the song! It’s the song!”
We were over the moon. We sang our hearts out, badly, and didn’t think twice about the lyrics, which are graphic and bizarre. Our joy didn’t last; the graphic and bizarre lyrics didn’t escape everyone’s attention. Less than a week later, Mrs. Beightol announced we wouldn’t be singing Rhapsody after all. We were crushed. Those of us who had been practicing headbanging with our best falsettos were miserable over the cancellation. It turned out that the super churchy girls in our class had been alarmed by the whole, “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me” line and the “Mama/just killed a man/put a gun against his head/pulled my trigger now he’s dead” B section, told their parents, their parents flipped out, called the school, and that was that.
Whatever.
To be honest, it amazes me we even had the sheet music in our hands in the first place. That song is a pretty difficult song to sing, first of all, and it does happen to be wildly inappropriate for a 6th grade chorus, even if we didn’t think so. And I moved on to Tori Amos and Bjork and Joni Mitchell and I forgot about Queen, and never “met” Freddie Mercury, not really.
Flash forward to now. I’m finding myself starving for anything Freddie Mercury-related. I’m watching interviews on YouTube, reading unauthorized biographies. I’m listening to everything. I recently Netflixed the Live Aid concert from 1981 and sat—I’m serious—with this dorky smile on my face for two hours. Mercury was magic. He was a wild animal. When you see a fox or a whale or a lion in their natural habitat doing what they have been designed/evolved to do so perfectly, you’re looking at pure nature, gorgeous in a holy way. Freddie Mercury, singing at his piano or prancing from one side of the stage to the other is like watching a fox in some leafy glen. He’s exactly where he should be, doing exactly what he was born to do. And holy was only half of it: he had the dark side down pat, too, which made him all the more unearthly.
One of the books I have is a compilation of hundreds of Freddie sound bytes and quotes. Here’s a good one:
“This is in my blood. The only thing I can do is to write music and perform, and that’s what I’m going to be doing—I think that’s what all of us [in the band] are going to be doing—until we die. If I didn’t do this, I don’t have antyhing telse to do. I can’t cook, and I’m not very good at being a housewife. I seem to have been doing this for so long now that I don’t know what else to do. I’d be very vulnerable and I wouldn’t know what to do, so I think I just have to keep doing it.”
Monday, August 30, 2010
Bra-illiant.
I work with some pretty incredible people. I do various things I work with various groups of people and plenty of them are incredible too, but right now I’m speaking about the theater ensemble.
The kind of art we make at the Neo-Futurarium is highly personal. We don’t play characters, so what we say onstage is true to our lives in some way and that makes some of what we say—most of it, really—intense. Make no mistake: we have a lot of fun up there. Just because we’re speaking honestly about our lives, that doesn’t mean we only talk about the sad or achingly poignant. First of all, that’s boring and lame. Second of all, much of our lives happens to be hilarious (remember the guy who got de-pantsed on the treadmill?) and that is certainly reflected in the show.
But when we’re talking about ourselves without the net of a character, it can be terrifying. And before a piece goes into the show, it has to be pitched to the cast that week. We don’t just put anything in, you know. So you come on Tuesday night with these pieces that you’ve written and every single time, at least for me, it’s a risk to launch into the pitch. Everyone fails at some point. Everyone is victorious, too. It’s a weekly adventure. I’ve just ended a six-week run in the show and the six weeks were wonderful because the people in the show were so wonderful. There’s a delicate balance that has been struck over the past year or so that feels particularly sweet; we have the freedom to seriously, honestly critique each other without losing a supportive foundation.
It’s like a good bra. Sexy and pretty, with firm cups and a strong underwire. I have never been sure what an 18-hour bra is—I mean, what happens after 18 hours?—but I think that the cast of Too Much Light recently has been one.
Word, bra. Word.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Nellie Bly Interviews PaperGirl: Interview XX (Part One)
NB: Hi.
PG: Nellie Bly!
NB: Good to see you.
PG: Where have you been? It’s been months.
NB: I’ve been here and there. Intrepid reporting takes you away from stuff.
PG: But things are good?
NB: Yeah, yeah. Good.
PG: Great! You look great.
NB: Thanks. So…
PG: I know! I know. Who’s being interviewed here? (Laughs.) Go ahead, I don’t have a lot of time.
NB: That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. In the past, there was a new PaperGirl entry every single day, really without exception. You’d move heaven and earth to make sure you blogged every night. Lately it’s been a little sporadic. Why is that?
PG: I’m so busy. But busy in a new way. I kind of have a new job. Sort of.
NB: That’s great. What is it?
PG: You know how I’m on public television with my mom? I’ve done the quilting show with her over the years. In the past couple years, I’ve been doing more and more as I got better with my sewing and just wanted to do more of it. Well, over the past year, I’ve been churning out all these quilt tops and creating these quilt designs and immersing myself in all of it. I have lots and lots of what I believe are really solid ideas about how to connect with the newer quilters out there who didn’t have the sewing lesson or home ec- instruction that our mothers had. There are a lot of women—and a few men—who would really love making quilts but simply don’t have the skills to even be able to think about doing that. The American quilt has this incredible legacy that will fade totally if there’s not a kind of updated way of showing them how and why they would want to make a quilt.
NB: There’s a show involved, I see.
PG: It’s called Quilty. Do you love that title?? I love it. We have to have sponsors to go forward, but we’ve filmed the first four episodes and they’re amazing. It’ll all be online, since that’s where my generation gets all our information. The look and feel of the show is fresh, modern, engaging; it’s honestly really fun to watch. Cool motion graphics, special guests, and solid quilting instruction.
NB: That sounds great.
PG: You should make a quilt, Nellie Bly.
NB: I’ve made lots of quilts.
PG: Oh, right. You were born in 18. You know how to do all that stuff. You could probably make a damned house out of twigs and sod or whatever.
NB: Probably. Okay, so tell me about the Quilty blog. That’s part of the new job.
PG: Yes. But…
NB: Let’s come back to it.
PG: Yeah. Because I need to eat something or I’m going to eat your petticoats.
NB: Uh…
PG: Wait. That sounded sorta—
NB: Mm.
PG: I’m sorry.
NB: It’s okay.
PG: I’m going to get some dinner now. Need anything?
NB: We’ll see you when you get back.
PG: Peace! (She runs out the door.)