Suffering in Beauty

Yesterday,
walking back
I passed
the muttering,
freaks
in the city.
A man covered in filth
kicking a can across the street
screaming profanities.
The can flying
endlessly,
like the kicking.
A woman on her cell phone,
holding a baby,
yelling at someone
who wasn’t paying her support.
I wondered if she even cared about what she was doing
to the eardrums of the child in her arms.
They were both so loud,
so miserable,
so completely insane,
it occurred to me
that it is not enough to have the sun,
or the flowers,
or the sea to gaze upon.
It is not enough to have plums,
and figs, and lemons at your fingertips.
Or to walk in the hills and smell honeysuckle
and eucalyptus at every turn.
Suffering exists,
even in beauty.

Forty Minutes

Tomorrow I’m getting on a plane
to fly to California.
Unfortunately, it’s not a non-stop.
It makes a stop in Denver,
which is weird because my parents live
in Denver and
I’m not stopping to see them.
I’ll only be in Denver for about fifty minutes.
In the old days my parents might have gotten
in their car,
driven to the airport
and met me at the gate.
We would have talked for forty minutes
before I would have gotten on the next plane
to go wherever it was I was going.
But now, everything’s different.
They can’t drive anymore.
And even if they could,
they couldn’t get through security anymore,
without a ticket.
There’s no more surprise visits to airports.
Nor is there any more hummus
or yogurt in carry-on bags.
It’s all so serious now.
It’s too bad.
I would have enjoyed seeing them
for forty minutes.

Why The Dead Sing

I know why the dead
sing,
underground,
in the dark,
bound in boxes.
They have no one
to tell them
they can’t.
They have no one watching them
to see
what they’ll do.
If they flail their arms about
like wet mop heads,
who will care?
If their faces contort
all sunken
like the ripest of cantaloupes,
and their tongues
flop from their mouths
pale and white,
and helpless,
who will judge them?
Who would dare criticize the dead?
To unearth
them.
To disturb their sonorous slumber?
A choir of corpses,
shrouded in linen and lace.
Man and woman and child
locked arm and arm
unfettered by worry
or fear
marching on.
Marching.
Marching.
Marching.
But to what beat?
There is no heartbeat to listen to.
No pulse.
No rhythm,
to guide them in their song.
Nothing to feel when their pale hands are placed upon their vacant chests.
And yet,
they sing.
They sing.

Expectations

If I had to use one word to sum up my first trip in support of l V it would be, ‘expectations.’
What I ‘expected’ would happen, vs. what I didn’t.

Mark and I left at 6:00am on Tuesday to begin the five hundred mile,
eight hour and twenty minute drive to Raleigh, North Carolina.
We expected rain, because I had checked weather.com
pretty much incessantly over the past few days,
but we didn’t expect a rain so fierce it would leave us straining to see
out of the windshield and force us and everyone else around us
to put on their emergency lights just to avoid being hit.
Luckily, that was only the first hour, and the rest of the trip was just cloudy
with a few sprinkles.

The night before we left, we booked a hotel on Priceline,
choosing a 3.5 star hotel because the little arrow said, “best deal.”
So, we placed a $50 bid, and when it was accepted, we were thrilled.
It was apparently a 64% savings, meaning it must be pretty nice.

When we finally got off the highway, and pulled up to the hotel
our visions of downy-duvet cushiness vanished.
This couldn’t be it. Could it?
Was this hotel even in business?
There was no one there, except for a team of workers frantically putting on a new roof.
Blue plastic tarp covered the section that had yet to be redone.
How could this be a 3.5 star hotel?
Just half a star short of 4?
Priceline screwed us!

We got out of the car and walked into the lobby hoping things would improve.
They did, some.
It was an old style lobby, with marble floors
and a small store where you could buy shaving cream, band-aids and Coke.
There was also an outdated gigantic dining room…with no one eating in it.

We were handed our keys and then walked to our room.
The hallways were covered in a flowery beige wallpaper
and the carpets were a swirl of red and green.
None of it seemed to go together.
When I opened the door to our room,
the crazy décor continued, with added mustiness.
When I got into the room I headed straight for the beds.
If they were bad, I would attempt to get out of this Priceline “deal,” a feat I’m not sure has ever been done.
I quickly pressed on them, and surprisingly, they were good.
They were Sleep Number beds.
I could adjust them to whatever firmness I wanted.
I think I finally settled on 40.
And the room had something else going for it - it was quiet.

Agreeing to stay, I decided to take a hot shower.
The shower, however, was old,
and went from scalding hot to freezing cold and back again,
even when the rusty knob remained set in exactly the same position.
After a few minutes of jumping around in the shower trying to avoid third degree burns,
I gave up, got out, and tried to focus on why I was there – for my interview with Frank Stasio on WUNC
and for my in-store at All Day Records.

I hadn’t seen Frank in over nine years, (since he interviewed me for Fantasia Ball)
and I was really looking forward to seeing him again.
Over the years we had exchanged emails.
I always enjoyed hearing Frank’s musings about the world, which were deeply insightful.
I was looking forward to sitting down with him after the show (he mentioned a possible lunch in one email)
or having dinner and catching up on each other’s lives.
Instead, the next morning, I got an email from him telling me
that he wasn’t going to be able to have lunch after all….
Show tapings etc.
“That’s ok,” I thought.
I’m sure we’ll still have some time to talk after the taping.
Again, ‘expectations.’

What I hadn’t ‘expected’ was Frank and his staffs’ decision
to bring up my past, when I was briefly a Television Writer for “Full House,”
with a “this is your life, Diana Darby” kind of moment, complete with clip from the show.
It wasn’t the arc I was hoping for,
or the mood I wanted to set,
but I went with it.
Seventeen minutes later, the taping was over,
and Frank, who was incredibly busy, was helping us to the door.
We didn’t get to sit down and talk as I had hoped
and I was back in my car
before I knew
what had happened.

I left the studio feeling like I had driven 500 miles for nothing.
The seventeen-minute segment felt like three seconds
and I felt like some wind-up monkey in a box,
playing one song after another with very little time to talk about anything
that mattered.

I returned to my 3.5 star hotel and soothed my sorrow
on the treadmill in the workout room,
muttering to myself about what I “expected”
would have happened on the show vs. what actually did happen.

At 5 o’clock we decided to go check out Happy Hour at the hotel bar.
It turns out they don’t actually have Happy Hour in North Carolina.
MADD banned “Happy Hour” according to the bartender.
Now they have “food with drinks”.
It looks like Happy Hour, but you can’t call it that and you have to buy a drink
in order to have any of the food.
Anyway, we had been given two free Breakfast Buffets and two free drink coupons
to make up for some crackers left under our bed,
the faulty shower,
and the a/c unit that seemed to have a mind of its own.
I left my drink coupon in the room and didn’t want to go back and get it,
so Mark and I shared a Chivas.
I ate a few of his chips when the bartender wasn’t looking.
A man at the end of the bar, who was sitting with another man,
heard us talking and offered to buy me a drink.
When I refused, he offered to buy Mark one.
Neither of us quite knew what to think.

Then the man walked up to us and said he was the marketing director
at the hotel and he had been hired to completely remodel the hotel.
Then he proceeded to tell us about his life,
about the theatre company he founded in Miami,
and about his artist son,
how he had lost him for a while,
but now they were really close,
and about how miserable he had been following the path of a businessman.
I had had no expectations what so ever about this man,
or the Happy Hour, but somehow the intimacy I was hoping for earlier
was now being given to me by a total stranger
over a bowl of guacamole and chips.
I marveled at his honesty.
Did he realize some people go through their entire lives
and never reveal as much as he had in twenty-five minutes?
I wanted to kiss him, or hug him, or something.
But I had to go and get ready for the in-store at All Day Records.
So, I thanked him for the conversation.
He said he’d leave us two drinks for later.
I said I’d take him up on it after the show.

We got in the car and drove to the record store.
By now I was wishing I were on my way home to Nashville.
I was tired and I had very little hope of this show being anything.
When I walked into the store there was virtually nobody there,
except for the two guys who ran the record store and two other customers.
It was eight o’clock.
I was supposed to go on at eight o’clock.
A million thoughts went through my head.
All of them bad.
One of the guys got a chair and put it on a raised platform
at the front of the store.
Then he got out two very large speakers and the rest of a sound system.
He put one of the speakers outside the door to attract people.
My ‘expectations’ were low, beyond low.
NO one was there.
And it was raining.

I sat on my chair and started playing.
There was one guy at the counter buying records,
and another man thumbing through vinyl.
They listened politely, and applauded with each song.
But after about two songs, something changed.
Something kicked in.
Maybe it was the unearthly sound they had gotten me on that tiny sound system,
or the rainy sky,
or the fact that there was a small crowd gathering,
who were sitting and listening,
really listening.
But all of a sudden, something took over.
And before I knew it I was deep into my songs.
“Heaven” was nothing short of an exorcism,
which left me and the audience absolutely stunned.
In fact, I was so moved/confused by it, I couldn’t figure out what to play next.
I didn’t write out a set list because I figured I didn’t need one.
I’ve played enough shows to be able to pull out 10-15 songs at random.
But there I was, unable to play anything.
I reached for “Kierkegaard” and continued my descent.
Then, “Elena”, which left my voice breaking.
My hair was in my eyes and face, and my body was swaying.
I could feel the audience with me and yet I was completely alone in my very weird world.
Song after song came – “Crazy”, a song I usually leave the stage with,
and then “Snow.”

When I finished, the applause was huge.
I had given probably one of the best performances of my life,
in that tiny record store.
I felt drained and exhausted and HUNGRY
to return to the stage.
The show I had had no expectations for turned out to be
the best part of the trip.
Just like meeting the stranger at the hotel
who had been so open and vulnerable with me.

We thanked Ethan and Charlie at All Day Records
for having me and got in the car.
As we started driving the radio was set to WUNC.
I saw Frank Stasio’s name and “The State Of Things” lit-up on the display
and turned up the volume.
It was me!
They were airing a re-broadcast
of my performance from earlier that day.
I couldn’t believe it.
The timing was really incredible.
I missed maybe thirty seconds of a seventeen-minute segment.
I sat there listening,
waiting to cringe as I had that morning when we taped,
but I didn’t.
It was better than I had expected.

The next morning,
I sat in the enormous dining room of our hotel
and enjoyed my free breakfast buffet and marveled at the employees
who had been with the hotel for the last thirty years.
I liked this place,
weird wallpaper and all.
It was better than any new, 4 star hotel with perfect décor.
This place had soul.
And soul is a heck of a lot harder to come by
than new carpet.