This is my favorite scene in “Amelie”. . .when she’s sitting at home making her ‘famous plum cake’, daydreaming about her guy going to the market to pick up some stuff, then coming back to surprise her, dragging his fingers across her bead curtain when he arrives. Suddenly her bead curtain rattles. . .no guy, only her little cat sitting there.
Such a beautiful and touching scene.
Why is love in our city
contraband and counterfeit?
We snatch at promises through chinks in the door
and have to beg for letters
or for little scrolls
Why in our city
do they shoot down feelings as they shoot down birds?
Why are we like base metal?
What is left of a man if he is base metal?
Why are we two-faced about our thoughts and feelings?
mundane, underhanded, afraid of the light and the sun?
Why are the people of our city
torn apart by contradictions?
For in their waking hours
they curse braided hair and they curse skirts
and when night enfolds them
they embrace nude pictures.
~Nizar Qabbani, from “Diary of an Indifferent Woman”
I re-posted this from a friend’s blog, because it struck a chord.
So there are three sayings that I’ve had three different “dads” say to me. My friend and I were talking about this stuff this morning, and I got to thinking about all this.
1) “Excuses are like buttholes; everybody’s got one, and they all stink.”
–This gem is brought to you by my friend’s dad, who I actually heard say it three or four times.
2) “I’ve seen it all. . .I’ve been to Paris, France!”
–This one was from my stepdad, who has actually said it twice, so I daresay he believes it by now. And if you’ve ever met my stepdad, you know there’s never been a person who’s seen LESS. :) He’s a fundamentalist Christian, born and raised in Yakima, Washington. Still lives there. Never really been anywhere, except when he was in the Army, back in the late 50’s or early 60’s. But they did stop in Paris, which probably means they spent a day or a night in the Pigalle (“oo la la!” and all that) so he thinks he’s seen it all.
3) “You know, to the sexually sophisticated, ‘punishment’ could be construed as a form of sado-masochism.”
–Yup, you guessed it. This is from my dad.
When I was in high school I was in a band, and my friend wrote a song called “Punishment”, which was all about something innocuous like being stuck in detention or something. But my dad had to go and let us into the way his mind works. You know, the mind of the ‘sexually sophisticated.’ :) And believe me. . .this is the tip of the iceberg where my dad is concerned.
Episcopal priest, by the way. (You knew I was a preacher’s kid, right?)
Man, what IS it with dads, anyway? This is why I hope never to be one. I just feel like I’ll be horrible, and I’ll say some ridiculously insane things, like “You know, kids, excuses are like buttholes. . .” and my kids will be telling it to their therapists and writing about it in their blogs twenty years later. No thank you. It ain’t worth it. My family’s got a good track record of huge distance and estrangement–on both branches of the tree–so I’m gonna end the cycle. :)
Time for sushi!
It’s all very exciting being a member of a cool rock band, but sometimes it’s just plain hard work. Take last night, for example.
The show was at the Art Museum, in the ballroom on the 3rd floor of the new wing. It started at 5:30 and went until 7:30. I left work early, at 4:00, walked home in the pouring rain, and loaded all my Dirty Martini instruments into the car (guitar, amp, pedals, bag, accordion, keyboard). Then I had to change my pants, because the ones I’d worn to work were completely drenched from the walk home.
So by this time it was 4:40 before I could even leave. Show started at 5:30. Wish I could have been to the soundcheck (which was at 4:00), but with the day job, soundcheck is what usually has to give. So I finally left, and caught every single red light on the way downtown. Rush-hour traffic was in full effect, and with the rain, it was even worse than it usually is. Once I finally got over the Broadway bridge to downtown, traffic was even heavier, and it took until 5:25 to get to the Art Museum. I don’t think I’ve said “Fuck!” so many times before in my life. I parked in a 15-minute loading spot, and just then Steph called. “Where are you?”
“I’m here, I just pulled up. Traffic is nightmarish.”
“We’re going on in like 3 minutes. . .I guess we’ll have to have you on in the second set.”
So I took one load of my instruments up, and realized at that moment that in my mad dash to pack and leave, I’d forgotten the keyboard stand. Grrr. So I shoved the keyboard in the trunk and headed inside, steam coming out of my ears. “Is this the Mark Building?” I asked the front door attendant.
“Yes,” she replied. “And you’re with the musicians?”
“Yes. Where would I find the ballroom?”
“Third floor.”
“Thank you very much!” I grabbed my stuff and headed into the elevator, looking forward to thirty seconds of alone time to breathe and try to feel like a human being again.
Just as I got in, a fifty-ish guy came running to catch it as well. He saw me, smiled and said, “Hey, I like your hairline.”
“. . .?” I’m sure I must have had the strangest expression ever on my face. “Thank you. . .? I grew it myself.”
“Yeah, well, I’m losing all mine too. I saw you guys down in Lake Oswego, actually.”
“Oh. . .great!” I said, trying to rally some enthusiasm.
“I just thought it would be interesting to do a photo essay about hairlines and the way different men lose their hair.”
“And don’t forget the women. . .some women have it happen too.” We both laughed.
Then the door opened, and it was freedom, at long last. He told me to “have a good show” and I asked the door person where I should go. He said that “the performers usually go back there. . .” so I went back there. If you’ve ever been to the backstage area in the Art Museum, you know that it’s frickin’ HUGE back there. I threw my stuff in the green room and tried to find the stage to let the band know I was there. I heard them being announced on stage, and peeked behind the first curtain I came to, only to find that the stage was up another level, and around the corner. “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck,” I whispered, and headed back down to park the car for real.
Once I got outside it was 5:35, and now it was the REAL rush hour. That, combined with the tons of people trying to get to the museum to come see our show, plus with the driving rain, the darkness, and tons of extra pedestrians, made for an extremely stressful driving situation. After circling around a few times, I almost hit a person, dressed in all black, as he and his girlfriend ran in front of the car. He jumped back and fell on the ground–in fright–but got right back up. I opened the door, stood up, and said, “Are you OK?” He kicked the bumper and said, “Man, you’re FUCKING STUPID!” He brushed himself off and they walked quickly down the street, looking back to flip me the middle finger. I went through the intersection and pulled into a no-parking zone to take a breath and fight back the tears that were starting to form in my eyes. No time to cry, I thought, this is ridiculous. I just want to pack my shit up and go home. I kept driving around, fruitlessly searching for a place to park. Finally at 6:15 I found one and parked.
This time, the elevator was packed with middle-aged women who were there to see the show. They saw my instruments and asked if I was in Dirty Martini. I said I was, and that the show was already started. We all agreed that it was ‘ugly out there’, but I told them I was really glad they were there. When the elevator got to the third floor, we could hear the music from the ballroom. (It was “Marmalade,” by the way.) I dropped my instruments in the green room backstage and followed my nose to the back-stage area. I met Keith and Ned, who were standing offstage while the three girls sang “When Doves Cry.” I apologized for taking so long, and they each gave me a hug and said, “Oh my GOSH, we’re SO glad you’re here!”
Then the girls came off for intermission, and we all decided that the best thing to do would be to just have me just plug in the accordion and that would be it. So we did, and then right up on stage we went. It took a few songs for me to relax and start to have fun, but I did have fun. The venue was beautiful, and there was a dance floor, and people used it. It was a great and successful show.
We came off and each of us had a piece of cake that was backstage. It was a huge, yellow pyramid-shaped cake from the Egyptian exhibit that just opened. We stayed around and talked for a little while, then started packing up, only to find that the elevators were not in service anymore. So we carried all our gear down the three flights of stairs and out into the rainy night. I walked the two blocks to get the car, and then it was back up and down the stairs a second time to get the rest of my stuff.
I got home at 8:30, ready to crash, feeling unpleasantly like I had been drunk. To quote Douglas Adams, “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “Go ask a glass of water!” (ha ha) I got out of my wet clothes, put on my pajamas and a T-shirt, and collapsed on the sofa to watch the second half of “The Princess Bride.” Fell asleep ON THE SOFA right after it was over, and woke up at 12:30, when I went to bed for real.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because the next time someone tells you how glamorous it is to be in a rock band, you can tell ’em that sometimes it ain’t all glamor. The real show goes on backstage, and behind the scenes, and it takes a TREMENDOUS amount of work. And I hope it also shows how much we all love what we do, because if we didn’t, we would stay home and have a much easier–but MUCH less fulfilling–life.
One morning as I was driving home from Vancouver (Washington) to Portland, I found myself thinking about something Kelly and I had been talking about earlier that morning, which was, “Wouldn’t it be fun to drive around and visit the places that both of us have lived?” With this thought in mind, I decided to stop by Officers’ Row on my drive home, because that’s a place that my dad and stepmom had an apartment for a short time, when the City of Vancouver first converted Officers’ Row into apartments and condos back in the late 1980’s. Unfortunately, the streets down there were all blocked off for some sort of event, so I couldn’t get down anywhere near that part of town.
I decided to head out to my favorite place that we lived. It was along the old Evergreen Highway.
Here’s a picture of the house. It’s about a hundred years old, and it was owned by some family friends of ours who lived up the hill. They were in their 60’s at the time, and her mother (who was in her 80’s at the time) had lived in the house for decades, and she couldn’t really manage living there by herself anymore. They didn’t want to rent it to anyone they didn’t know, and they really didn’t like the idea of such a beautiful house sitting vacant, so they offered to rent it to my dad and stepmom for $400 a month or something insanely low like that.
When we lived there, there were no other houses but ours and that of the owners’, up the hill. The land that the two houses were on was all owned by the owners, since it was a gigantic hundred-year-old lot. The hillside was wooded, and next door to us there was a field, and goats who lived on the hill. We would feed the goats and walk down to the river. I haven’t been by the place in quite some time, so I thought I’d see what it looks like now.
Well, here it is now.
None of the houses in the picture was there when we lived there, with the exception of the one you can see at the top of the hill, which was the first one that the owners built and sold. But the hillside was all woods and grass, and no houses were between ours and the Evergreen Highway (which is where I was standing to take the picture).
Continuing the nostalgic feeling, I decided to take a walk and see if I could still get down to the river, the way my brother and I used to. Well, surprise surprise, I couldn’t anymore. It’s all private property and fences and signs now. So I drove up a few blocks, parked the car along the railroad tracks, grabbed my camera, and headed out to see what I could find.
Obviously, it’s much more built up with waterfront McMansions now. That was just starting when we lived there. These days, almost all traces of river access have vanished. There are, however, still some vestiges of history. There’s an amazing little A-framed shack, a handful of hidden streams, gates, and waterfalls that look like they’ve changed little over the decades. There are a couple or three abandoned houses, which I would have loved to explore–one in particular–but it was surrounded on all sides by a huge barbed-wire fence, so I decided to give that one a miss. One abandoned house looked fairly modern, like it was built in the mid 80’s, but it had fallen into disrepair, and there was even a vacant lot next to it. ‘How is this possible?’ I thought, as I walked down as close as I could to the edge of the grass, before it fell away toward the river. By way of an answer, a train rumbled by, and I soon got my answer. Look how close the train comes to these two properties! No wonder they’re vacant.
So I kept walking, remembering how my brother and I used to sit in our upstairs window and look out over the river, at the boats and the airport, and I got a little nostalgic for being able to look out and see those things every day. I kept walking, and came to someone’s little bench they’d set up, apparently to watch trains, because whoever was sitting on the bench would have their back to the amazing view, and would be staring at the train track, its access road, and the ugly hedge that was just across the track. :) But I found that the bench made an ideal spot for a moody self-portrait.
So FINALLY I came to this beautiful little wooded area, whereupon I was greeted by this non-threatening sign, so I walked through. Once inside, it was too overgrown to really go anywhere, and there didn’t seem to be a trail down to the river, so I went as far as I could, and it looked like this was pretty much it. I mulled this over, thinking about how not so very long ago, this entire part of the country must have looked like that. Around this time, the sky started to look like rain was on its way, so I decided to head back in the direction of the car. I poked my head into a few more places that I’d missed on the way in, and it was a good thing I did, too, because there was a really amazing sailboat that was hidden behind a thick clump of trees at the river’s edge. I also managed to get a picture of Government Island, which really shows how much rain we’ve had lately, because the Columbia river has risen so high that there’s not really much of an island at the moment; it’s almost completely submerged!
The thing I kept thinking was that not only did I want to be able to have the experience of going and sitting by the river again (and not in some public park, either), but I wanted OTHER people to be able to have that, and it seems like that time may pretty much be gone now. My brother and I knew how rare it was, even then, to be able to have that luxury, which is why we went down there so often. Today I kept thinking that the only people who could have the experience we had NOW are the ‘few and the proud’ who can afford to buy the waterfront properties, proximity to railroad tracks notwithstanding. :)
I also wondered if there was a way to reverse this trend of using up every square inch of space on the planet. The little tiny strip of ‘resource conservation area’ wasn’t even that nice, because all the ‘good’ parts of the land had been bought up long ago.
Well, it may not be much, but I’ll sure take it over another McMansion any day.
I hope you had as much fun reading this as I did making it. My goal is to do more like this. My life is crazy, though, so I don’t know how often it’ll happen, but it WILL happen.
