Rocking the Apocalypse
1.) Amal already wrote about the weekend - and our Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours show - in Great Detail.
Showing here. With pictures. And captions.
What can I add?
Let's see.
2.) Re: Rehearsal process.
A.) The girls are better at inventing harmonies than I am. It is all I can do to hold my own. But I love harmonies so much. One day, if we ever have LOADS of rehearsal time, or at least a recording of our parts well in advance, I should like to do better at this.
B.) Singing with musicians is awesome because they can tell me what key I'm singing in. And they can strike that chord on their harp. Because otherwise, I'll sing in just any old key. I like being given a chord. I like it. I like it.
For the record: "Song for Jenny and John" is in D Minor. And "Sisters Lionheart" is in F Sharp Minor, just like Amal's "Stairs in Her Hair." Which was VERY USEFUL to know!
C.) When I am nervous or in doubt, I tend to sing stronger in my chest voice. What my dad used to call my "dragon voice." Or sometimes my "lion voice." What this does is make the break between my chest voice and head voice VERY apparent. I always had a head voice like a boy soprano. High and clear and pretty, but TOTALLY A DIFFERENT BEAST from the belt. When I am relaxed - or tired, say, after running an hour and a half show for the third time - and am just singing in my mixed voice, the result can be... startling. Because it's easy, because the music comes through and so does the story, because it's not so In Your Face, because I am not foisting or forcing the song on you, with my manic gesturing and my mobile clown's face.
Goal: to be able to sing like that when I am actually performing. I mean, I can deliver a performance one way or another. But to let the performance deliver ME. That's the trick.
D.) On top of all rehearsing, we managed to make a website. And by we, I mean mostly Amal. While Caitlyn was arranging something else internet-related. Something very important that I also couldn't do. Twitter? Something. Point is, those gals? GOT SKILLZ.
I felt singularly useless, since my greatest talent is to rhapsodize about a dessert breakfast food in facile verse. On the other hand, that meant we had an encore when it was called for. Embarrassing as that was.
E.) On top of the website, we also managed - IN THE FRIKKIN SNOW, while it was FALLING - to have a photo shoot. We all wanted to do this very much. I am glad it happened.
3.) The show itself.
A.) Nerves are strange. The closer we got to the venue, the more withdrawn I felt myself becoming. Everyone else was out of the car and walking when we discovered the doors to the Mercury Lounge were still locked. They went to get teas and cookies on the Market. I stayed in the car with a blanket and stared out the window. I recited "Little Sally and the Bully Fiddle God" and "Sea King's Second Bride" triple-time under my breath. I did a lot of breathing.
To be near people, to be out walking and talking and getting tea and cookies, that would have been anathema to me just then.
It was very difficult for me to form coherent sentences all that afternoon. If I wasn't on script, my tongue would not work. What's going on in the brain that makes that happen, I wonder?
(On the other hand, I couldn't form coherent sentences after the show either, but I put that down to not having eaten much since lunch. I was better by the next morning. Well, midafternoon. On the Mass Turnpike. I started getting my language back.)
B.) And then, once we were in, once the set up began, and the tangle of mic cords and sound check, and the people started milling, and the hour was closing in, I was consumed by a wave of fatigue that made me say out loud to Sita, "I'm too tired to do this show. Let's go home now."
This is... not a usual reaction for me to have. I think I was more tense than I thought I was. I think that was exhausting. And the adrenalin was not setting in. And I couldn't seem to force it. But then...
C.) But then Amal mentioned how very much she wanted to do this theatre warm up. The one where you stand in a circle, not touching, but hovering your palm just over and under the person's palms next to you, so that you feel the warmth of their hands. One hand gives, one hand receives.
She'd talked with great wistfulness of doing this thing, but then things got busy. And at some point, I watched her starting to be frantic-nervous, and I thought, "Well, I am not THAT fatigued, and I can do this with her. For her." So I hauled myself up and I presented my palms. And then, presently, Caitlyn joined us.
This was one of my favorite moments. Because it worked. The heat of our hands. The low but intensely voiced well-wishing for each other. The gratitude of being there, together. Caitlyn said, "I am about to cry."
I wasn't. But I felt myself starting to smile again, which was a Very Good Thing.
When we came apart, when I took back my newly blessed palms and laid them, charged, against my heart and stomach, my fatigue was gone.
The audience was seated. The sound was checked. We were ready.
4.) Look. There is nothing I like better in all the world.
Now, I love the writing. I always have. I used to say, "Writing is like breathing." In the beginning, writing wasn't anything I chose to do. It just happened. But I pursued theatre. I desired it. I bent my energy and my will and my education toward it.
All I wanted to do was be on the stage.
Much later, I chose writing first. In college, a year or so in, I ended up choosing it for my major and theatre for my minor. That was a break in a series of choices I'd made to that date. That set me on a new road. Writing became less like breathing and more like work. Good work. Work I chose. But work.
But if writing was like breathing, then theatre was always the reason I wanted to breathe.
Now.
To have both. At once.
This.
My writing community, my poet/musician/writer friends, my friends whose books I should have grown up reading, and instead am watching their own books grow up - in all their illimitable drafts - all together, all singing and proclaiming our own good work. On a stage. Giving breath to our words. Becoming conduit. Becoming instrument. Our bodies the book, our voices, our tongues. The stuff of dreams, the stuff of the page, in us. And then outside of us. Moving out in a ripple of sound to the sixty-six people listening.
At brunch on Sunday morning, Amal referred to theatre as ritual magic. She also called it the most self-destructive art form.
To me, the "Empty Space" of a theatre was always a temple. I felt the most - not at home, but - inside a holy place. The most myself, and the most strange to myself. Theatre does have all its deep, deep, katabasis-deep roots in ritual. It was always an invocation of the gods. And, yes, something that must be destroyed almost as soon as its created. Yes. Yes, ritual magic.
That's what we did.
And... It was perfect.
I am not saying we weren't imperfect, or that there weren't places where we might all improve. But the moment was perfect. The being there. The... The exchange.
Nothing good withheld from us.
***