Dainty Cuss

Oh happy happy joy joy, it’s officially Spring!

I can’t believe it. Exactly one year ago today, Groom and I were flying home from Japan, having spent two weeks retracing steps of an important journey I made years before. It was a dream come true to take Groom in hand and show him traces of my past.

In our modern culture, it is hip to express oneself through the art of tattoo, but mine are on the inside. I might have been born in the USA, but parts of me are definitely “Made in Japan.” That country has made indelible marks on me, and if I could peel back the layers, you’d see my interior embossed with cherry blossoms, the walls of my heart decorated with temple pagodas, the smell of aged wood and incense buried deep within.

A bittersweet moment was making the sojourn to one of my dearest friend’s grave. The Japanese have a single word to encompass the entire concept called Ohakamairi. It means to visit someone’s grave, to clean it, honor the person’s memory, light candles and incense, and pay one’s respects. Of course, it takes a string of English words to convey a similar meaning, but using one word or many, we made it to his temporal resting place on the 15th anniversary of his death.

I’ve thought of him every one of those days and I still miss him like crazy.

It was a calm spring day as we made the climb up the hill to his tombstone, the sun starting to show its muscle after a wintry rest. As we said our greetings, the wind suddenly kicked up, enough to catch a pile of leaves on fire from the incense ritual.

Interaction with the elements: Earth as in dust-to-dust. Water, I cried an ocean. Fire, spontaneous combustion. And Air. Something knew we were there and I found comfort that his reply arrived on the wind. When we finally said our goodbyes, the wind died down and it became hot and calm as before. Goosebumps.

It is now one year later, and the 16th anniversary of his leaving me behind (yes, I’ve taken his death quite personally), coincided with an especially bad moon-cycle. Aaargh, those nasty hormonal cocktails that the bartender in the sky uses to unleash March Madness.

So it was with prickly nerves that I made a little pre-production drama out of getting up to read my Oscar Wilde material at Poetry Night in Cottage Grove on Tuesday. The theme was “Irish/Green” and I took that directive quite seriously. I duded up in a Kelly-green wig and spent too much energy trying to memorize the whole thing, which served me not at all, because when I finally took the stage in front of the authentic 1970’s psychedelic lightshow, I just read the darmn thing and nobody knew the difference.

And had I only known. The poetry class from the University got wind of it and their professor was giving extra credit to anyone enrolled who would get up and read their original works. Well, first of all, only one other person bothered to dress up at all, and that would be Kimmmm, naturally. She designed a make you weak in the knees outfit that should have gotten air time at the Fashion Show, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

At 7 o’clock, as I was trying not to hyperventilate before my performance, I looked around at the crowd, or should I say, at the sea of flannel. The first poet of the night was a young girl, ever so casually dressed, who shlepped up to the front of the room, took her time ascending the mini-flight of stairs, and then made us wait (and wait) as she thumbed through her notebook, stopping every once in a while to mumble one of her scribbles. Completely monotone, none of us understood what she was saying. I don’t mean we didn’t “get her poetry,” I mean, it was just a jumble of microphone cack.

The second person dressed neither in green nor mentioned anything Irish. She read an uplifting tome about cancer and the burn of chemo. Great, ‘cause next it was me in my stripey stockings, steampunk goggles and giggles pertaining to Oscar Wilde’s emasculated tomb and then a limerick which went like this:

A limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Then one of the extra-credit slam poets tossed off this line which I appreciated.

“No one can make you feel less,

Unless,

You have something to address.”

Oh boy, seems like I’m always having something to address…

Kimmmm, in her crazy wild outfit, did her impression of a recording of William Butler Yeats, and my favorite take-away phrase from the evening was “Dainty Cuss.” I think that’s a great description. I told Zolo, who also got up to read two of his originals, that he and I were dainty cusses.

As if one trip in a week to Cabbage Groove wasn’t enough, Groom and I returned Friday night to witness the 4th annual Paradise Fashion Show at Centro del Sol with Kimmmm. We sat front and center, believing our choice of seats would provide ample opportunity to capture couture shots just like real fashion paparazzi. Ha! As you can see, I’ve got a lot to learn.

The models walked the gray catwalk and climbed a few stairs to a higher level, took a spin, and then walked back down. I did my best to represent, but this is what my camera angle managed to reveal. And when I told a few folks what I did over the weekend, the common response was, “Fashion? Cottage Grove? Aren’t those words mutually incompatible?” Well, I’ll let you be the judge of that. (For Kimmmm's photo take on the evening, visit her Flickr page: www.flickr.com/photos/lampadina/ )

On a final note, several of you have asked what song I sang at Karaoke when I did my stretch goal. Ah, it was Shania Twain’s Still the One. I sang it to Groom and it’s a love song about a couple who have been together for a long time and lo, after all these years,

“You're still the one I run to

The one that I belong to

You're the one I want for life

You're still the one that I love
The only one I dream of
You're still the one I kiss good night”

Well, some might consider that a romantic gesture, which was my intention, but as I described, it came out more like a comedy bit.

Yesterday, a street guy begging change told me I dropped something. I stopped and looked back, just in case. He said, “You dropped your smile, don’t step on it.”

To recap, my week has been filled with Japanese memories, the color green, a bit O’ the Irish, hormonal angst, dramedy, comedy, the Vernal Equinox, dainty cusses and smile-stepping fashion.

Oh, and in case you forgot, you can always click on any photo to enlarge, then just hit the back button to return to the blog. Did you notice in photo #2, the one with the statues having their own fashion show, that somewhere hidden in the fabric, it says, "Made in Japan?"

Kampai!

The Court Jester Sings

Top O’ the Morning to you! We’re happy to report that we’ve just concluded a term’s worth of jewelry classes and even happier to mention that we attended every single one. Can’t say the same when we were enrolled at the University the first time around…

The other cool thing to tell you is that we finally finished the basement project! Ho boy, anybody who has clutter, whether it is locked away from sight in the attic, stuffed into a closet, or banished to the basement, knows how thrilling it is to get it all organized.

The problem for us is that we do our best to keep our house, where we also make jewelry for a living, relatively chaos-free (remember last week when my mom said my control issues “revolve around maintaining control of my personal space and not people?”). Well, not only do I come from a long line of Drama Queens, but part of my inheritance also includes pack-ratting.

I fight it tooth and nail. So while the main part of the house reflects that victory, the basement reveals the ugly truth. It has been a repository for all the minutiae we didn’t know what to with in the first place. I mean, how smart is that? By the time circumstances required us to dig ourselves out of the pile of overwhelming clutter, we must face the mountain of stuff all at once. If we didn’t know what to do with each item as an individual piece, how are we expected to excavate en masse?

Long story short, we pushed up our shirt sleeves and have been very motivated to set up our studio. So I guess the trick is to have a compelling enough reason to overcome the inertia and quit wasting valuable energy resisting the mess and just dive in. It didn’t take as long as we feared and the extraordinary thing was, even as we expended a ton of physical energy hefting and toting and sorting, with each thing we discarded or gave away, our energy returned to us many fold. My mother highly recommends a website called http://www.flylady.com/ for the clutter-whelmed.

On Monday, Brother-In-Law, who is a professional contractor, came over and helped Groom install a ventilation system, so we are now ready to rock and roll our new designs.

Eeek, and that’s where I’m having a little melt down. I have spent the last three months inspired and totally wired to get my hands into some different materials and practice my new metalsmithing skills. I’ve attended classes, researched and ordered new supplies and equipment, faced my mountain of mierde, lost many nights sleep to inspired ideas, and yet…

And yet, now that I have everything I need (I think, although there is always one more tool, one more required item) to get started, I am immobilized, paralyzed, staring at our new studio set up and not knowing what to do.

As the Art Fair results are starting to come in, we have stock to make! I would feel pressured if we were simply doing what we’ve always done, but to throw in the unknown, gulp, I’m feeling suddenly blank. There were endless ideas taunting me when I didn’t have the means to try them, and now that I do, they have disappeared and I’m feeling a little panicky.

Speaking of feeling a little panicky, I had an opportunity to channel a bit of that angst Friday night. Last week, I wrote about going to karaoke to support a friend doing a stretch goal. I love stretch goals. Of course, they are more fun for me when they are someone else’s, but I recognize their value and so I also do new things to keep my comfort zone pliable. It’s shockingly easy to become rigid in our beliefs. We hold mental images of ourselves as to the kind of people we are, what we are capable of. And for most of us, the images are far too small and limiting. “Being shy keeps you from your destiny.”

When our friend called us, asking for our support to sing, the first thing I said was, “Don’t expect me to get up there, I don’t sing, much less in public.” End of story. Or was it?

Watching all the other people grab the mike and underwhelm us, I began to consider, why were they more courageous than me? Many lacked stage presence, others could barely hold a tune, yet they managed their fears enough to get up and make an effort to entertain.

All last week I pondered. Could I ever do it? Could I get up in front of people and sing, knowing full well that I was not blessed with a pleasing voice? Could I stand up in front of a crowd and squeak out a tone-deaf rendition? The queer thing is, I am not tone-deaf, but my voice is and the worst insult the American Idol judges can bestow a contestant is to say, “That was like a karaoke performance.”

Okay, let me just tell you, that would be high praise indeed pour moi. Mine was like a very bad karaoke performance. I completely blew the first line, missing it entirely. So I jumped in on the second line and the crowd, who had been laughing and drinking seconds before, came to a screeching halt. Well, I might have been the one screeching, but they were definitely the ones doing the halt. It got silent.

No no no no no!! They were supposed to continue ignoring the singers, talking amongst themselves, laughing overmuch and creating a soothing din. They were NOT supposed to stop and listen. I was facing them and they were looking at me, well, there’s no other way to say it, rather shellshocked.

The people at the front table were actually giggling, okay, laughing. At me, not with me. Oh golly, I was so thankful I had worn my deodorant, because I was making man-sweat. When I’m by myself, say, in the shower, I might have fun belting out some tune or another, but even in my least self-conscious moment, my voice is not strong, kinda wobbly. Put me in front of a packed house, and here’s the kicker, SOBER, it comes out downright shaky. Eeeee gads.

When I finished, the room gave me a hearty round of applause, but me thinks that was because my performance was over, and not a reward for a job well done. One friend, said, “Ooooooh,” kind of in the same tone one might say upon seeing a badly scraped wound.

Groom just looked at me, smiled and shrugged, then gave me a hug. An enthusiastic friend did her best to point out all the things I did right. She told me that many people would have been permanently thrown if they’d missed the first line, but I recovered quickly and jumped right in. She said I smiled, gave the crowd eye-contact and moved my body in rhythm to the music. Her best compliment was that I did not look “D.D.” er, um “developmentally disabled.”

Really? That’s my best review? “She did not look developmentally disabled.” I’m sitting here by myself at the computer and I cannot type because I’m laughing so hard through the tears.

So to answer the question, can I get up in front of a crowd and make a fool out of myself? Why yes I can, and quite effortlessly, it would seem. I told you last week, part Queen, part court jester.

And as if that wasn’t enough, tonight I’m supposed to recite Irish-themed poetry in Cabbage Groove. In a green wig. And maybe a tiara?

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!