Celebrity

Something my mother tells me finally made sense this trip, and I realized that I only get to understand her musings when situations are commensurate with regular every-day life with every-day people and not the zany, neurotic, exciting world of dance and entertainment. She often comments that I’m a star, at which point I pooh-pooh it immediately, filing her assessment in that special Mommy box of extraordinary judgments connected with umbilical cords and permanently imprinted baby pictures. Obviously I’m not Miss C, I only dance for her. I’m not an icon like Madge, I only caught huge glimpses of her lifestyle firsthand. And when I get done with this tour, I will not be directly associated with Hollywood glamour unless I do another such tour.

But what she means is that she thinks I’m a celebrity, which is slightly different. Tommy, one of Shanna’s neighbors and the guy who came closest to witnessing Shanna’s Wes Craven moment when I arrived Friday night, called today while I was on the phone with Ryan. I happened to notice his name on the caller ID and was tempted to answer, except that it wasn’t my house and I didn’t want to overstep my bounds (nevermind that I was in Shanna’s socks and had just finished cleaning her kitchen while she and her hubby were at church). When I realized it was Tommy, I called back and learned that he simply wanted to wish me off.

“It was cool meeting you and talking to you,” he said. “You lead a real interesting life and I sort of want to keep in touch and live vicariously. Some of us could only dream of that kind of a life.”

My colleagues catch themselves taking it for granted occasionally, as do I; it’s so easy to get caught up in the hardships of nomadic living that the routine aspects of this career (which used to widen our eyes with excitement) tend to be second-nature. We become like most people who think their jobs are mundane, like the guy in public relations who manages ties between his company and the agricultural communities of Manitoba. Or Darryl, who just finished his doctorate and spends his daily eight hours investigating the properties of nickel for its potential in testing bio-warfare agents and curing cancer. Or the couples in Brisbane who work for pharmaceutical companies selling performance enhancing drugs to doctors. They think their jobs aren’t worth talking about – I’d much rather tell you about theirs than mine.

But my mother makes sense. Perhaps dancers who do this type of work are celebrities for the reason that Tommy showed. Certainly those of us blessed with this tour have led extraordinary lives; I just never understood it in Mom's terms until now. For me, it's an amzaing life, I just never imagined that people who don't know me personally would be so interested in celebrating it.

Scream

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody’s face so amazed before.

And not without much effort either. First, without lying to her outright, I had to convince Shanna that I wasn’t available to come to her housewarming. I said things like, “I really want to come,” and “That sounds like so much fun,” with a longing that grabbed hands with her understanding of my touring schedule and led her to the natural conclusion that I wouldn’t be able to make it.

What she didn’t realize is that I had purchased my airfare while in Australia. God was part of the conspiracy, seeing to it that I did not connect with her on the phone directly except for one of the times I called, which is important because Shanna is brilliant. One of those women you can’t fool. Someone who smells when things are amiss.

And when I got off the plane in North Carolina, I called her from the airport and listened to her discuss the vegetable chopping and house cleaning she was doing in preparation. I got her off the phone and ate dinner at the airport, not wanting to add an impromptu meal for me to the list of thing she needed to do once she got beyond the surprise of my sitting in her kitchen.

But what is it about me and cabs? It wasn’t until later, when I got into a cab whose driver had no idea where we were going that the plan started to fall apart.

“Here we are, on Matheson.”

“No, no! No wonder I felt like we were going the wrong way. I need MADISON.”

The Ethiopian driver then stared quizzically at the street sign trying to put together that the thickness of his accent threw the dispatcher and took us on a path away from Shanna’s house.

Mind you, I had done everything I was supposed to do. Except go on map quest and print out directions. But I knew the general area and I remembered the directions from the freeway.

Two hours later, I arrived at Shanna’s door completely unprepared for the moment when no one answered it. I tried both doors. I rang doorbells. I walked around to the back. Gagnation set in. But it would be fine. This was the South and so I could leave my small bag pushed underneath random stacked furniture on her backyard patio. I then walked to the Excelsior a historic black establishment/club nearby that I remembered has fish fries on a pretty regular basis.

Unfortunately, this was a Friday night and people were still on cp time. No fish. Just a few scraggly folks with low energy, folks who looked at me odd when I walked in, searched me up and down, looked through the jheri curl juices and funky glasses to see what they could see. The woman insisted I pay and armed herself with a demeanor that suggested she thought I might fight her on it. I gave her my last few dollars and noted that there were no ATM’s.

Then I started worrying. It turned out that Shanna’s cell phone was off and I’d have to wait until she got back to it to get to her. I had coffee. Spiked coffee since there was a $20 minimum to use my credit card. And no ATM. I stole away into the bathroom where I could open up my laptop less obnoxiously to pull her new home number off of Outlook. And when I called, she answered, just as enthusiastic. To get the most out of this, I kept her on the phone for the entire duration of my walk back to her house, knocked on her front door and listened to her while she questioned who it might be.

Had she been auditioning for Scream 4, she’d have at least gotten a callback. Neve Campbell might not be who she is today. It was great. She was appropriately wrecked. I had succeeded in surprising her totally. I was supposed to be in Australia. Speaking of Australia, I wasn’t done showing out. As a housewarming present, I brought back a piece of aboriginal art unframed because I knew she was reading the blogs lusting.

Then we went out to celebrate. She has a really gorgeous friend we ran into...another story altogether.

March 16
Frenzy

Over the past twenty years, people have begun to understand the magic of aboriginal art and as a result, there is more financial support available to maintain the cultures and fund programs geared toward educating the youth of the Australian indigenous communities about their past (imagine that). As history of the aboriginal tribes is ephemeral – the art they created on rocks and in the landscape 50,000 years ago lasted only as long as the natural substances used to create it – oral history and new aboriginal art is the best way to preserve the culture. All this to say that every time a piece of art is purchased, the buyer is contributing to the sustenance of a people.

Good enough excuse for me.

Only at this point I was a bit confused, the proprietor of the art gallery happy to accommodate my random acrylic-on-canvas selections of both traditional and contemporary aboriginal art, all originals, scattered across his desk for consideration. Because I had to have a pixilated piece that show water holes and campsites and pathways depicted in what an person ignorant about the cartography would assume is just abstract art; let me not front, I was one of these people about two weeks ago. And now I’m an expert – why you laughing?

An expert, uh huh, which is why I needed a snake or goanna or long-necked turtle depiction since these are all animals in the aboriginal version of creation. A snake would be especially nice since over here, long before King James edited the legless creature into evil villain of temptation, the aboriginals figured out that snakes carved windy canyons through the land to create rivers and streams, a task God put them here for. Or maybe I needed to buy a more complicated map to wonder how a flightless people are able to so accurately represent their land with no aerial view and no contemporary systems of measurement.

No, no, I had to have something with mimi spirits since, after all, they are the benevolent and dangerous ancient gods who taught the aborigines how to survive in the harshest of conditions. How to disappear. How to access the sixth sense.

“Ah, the warrior with boomerang and spear, we’re the only gallery who carries that artists’ work.”

“Of course, and since I’m not going to be back in Adelaide for a while, I should get it now?”

“I’ll just hold it for you for now,” the shopkeeper said.

“I read in this book by an aboriginal storyteller that the aborigines taught white settlers here how to use the boomerang.”

“Yes, and the aborigines painted on the boomerangs to give them extra power.”

“Hm,” I said, listening and rummaging through a third stack of paintings.

“The best book written about the culture though is by an American woman. She apparently wrote this small article in the New York Times about aborigines and some remote tribe in Northern Territory found it. They sent her a letter saying they were getting old and had no one to pass down these secrets and traditions to, so if she was interested they would be happy to teach her. She was supposed to be there two weeks. She stayed six months and did not want to leave.”

“Wow,” I said. I imagine I wouldn’t want to leave either.

“The first thing they did was tell her how badly she stunk with perfume and lotions and things. To solve the problem they buried her in the earth so that only her head was exposed to the sky, and it removed all the toxins from her body. She said she never felt so good in her life.”

Maybe I could do something like that too, fuck an estitician or a mud mask.

But first I needed to sort out these paintings. Course, the one I really wanted was $3700. Not going to talk about that one. Not it’s depth or the incredible richness of the oranges and ochres and earth tones, the impossible way she managed to create the inconsistent background of stone with variations of gray and white that made it appear as if she had really painted this on a rock 40,000 years ago. Or that she’s gaining on her husband Woodinda’s success by creating pieces like this, pieces that use his same materials and manage far more stunning visuals, replete with kangaroo symbols, spiny echidna, watering marks, and hand prints that appear as negatives in the background. We’re not going to discuss it though.

An hour and a half later, I still had too many pieces to narrow down. So I became obnoxious, setting each one on an easel and then moving backward to see what I liked.

“The crocodile is too hard to make out from a distance,” the shopkeeper said, complying with my lunacy.

“Yeah, it’s going to be those other three and the one on the left.”

I needed to do this all for under 500 bucks because I still had to purchase the paperbark pieces that use the natural paints and pastes made from crushed rock. And those are in Sydney.

Didgeridon't

I was supposed to put my lips together and blow, but not to do what Marilyn described.

I submitted to looking foolish, making the little putter noise with my mouth to issue forth a miraculous sound from the other end of the wooden cylinder.

“Make this sound. See like this,” the tall dark man instructed. His fine, napless hair shook some as he did it, and his thin legs seemed fine to support his ample stomach and the lengthy heavy instrument.

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. This is what he puttered, only minus a melody and with lips vibrating. I tried once without the instrument. People at the Queens Market in Melbourne stopped what they were doing and watched; I waited for profuse laughter only to find that Jennifer, the reason you should shop by yourself on tour, was the only one indulging.

“You shut up.”

Amy was busy snapping pictures of this historic event.

I made a sound. If a pigeon got caught up in a muffler, the sound would be about the same.

Everything was as it should have been. The termites had already hollowed out the piece of tree, and wax had already been properly installed around its head. The aborigine teaching me had carefully engraved the intricate patterns. It was your standard didgeridoo. I just needed to learn how to play it and it was becoming more and more apparent that I would not learn today. After a few more efforts, I achieved a note or two, though it still sounded as though someone were stomping on my throat.

I bought the damn thing anyway.

It will be great for waking up people in my household the morning after the party. I needed to ask him what sounds mean, “Get up out. You don’t have to go home but you must leave here…"

Brisbane

My great aunt, the one who some of you remember gave me a gorgeous old photograph of my grandmother at age 16, has lost her only brother and now her only son within a six month period. I didn't know him, but I'm very worried about Aunt Clara. It seems too freakishly unfair (not that life is) to survive your children, and I can't imagine those levels of pain.

But times are still good nevertheless and I'm not going to leave you hanging in that somnolent cave of pathos. Here's a lil sumthin sumthin to make you laugh, and you don't have to know how to play bid whist to appreciate this integral part of my world.


Bid'ness

It’s become an addiction, a drug of choice.

“Four no.”

“You know you make my ass crack hurt,” Jennifer says and then picks up her cards.

“I might be lying.”

“It’s just a four,” adds Kevin, my partner.

Of course I am lying. I have nary an ace in my hand. But we have been playing cards so assiduously, the way smokers go through ciggie after ciggie until two packs are consumed and the day is over, that I know Jennifer doesn’t like to play no-trumps and can’t tell when I’m lying about one.

“You know the cards ain’t gon’ change just because you’re looking at ‘em,” I say.

“Oh hell no, I’m not letting you run no fucking Boston up in here. I’m going out the back door walking. Five,” she says.

“Five no,” Kevin bids behind her.

“Work partner! That’s what I’m talking about,” I say.

“Feel free to take a six, Addie,” Kevin says.

“Here kitty kitty kitty. Here kitty,” I sing.

“I’m so passing,” Addie says.

Amy, the turncoat cheerleader, the anti-Kiki Sheppard, prepares the kitty, along with a few choice nasty words to hurl at Kevin.

“Uptown,” he says.

Realizing that this is a no trump, and we don’t show the kitty on our No’s, Amy looks at the backs of the cards with exaggerated disgust and passes them on.

“That’s a wrap,” Kevin says upon first kitty inspection.

“You have to come by me,” Jennifer insists.

“You just make sure you follow suit. When you can,” I say, chomping a slice from the Pizza Hut pie we ordered.

This happens to be a day off in Cleveland. But in fact, the whistoholism has become a part of our workday. Kevin and Addie and I would come in with the rest of the dancers at around 3:30, do our rig check, maybe commence an abbreviated training session on the silks, and then find wardrobe to grab Amy and Jennifer around 4:30 or 5:00 and begin play. At around 6:30, Addie, who is a functional whistoholic, disappears to warm up for the show, our real job. At 8:00, after our tour manager, Nick, calls for half hour via the radios Jen and Amy have, we squeeze in one more hand (or game) before Amy polices us into the dressing room to do make-up for the show that moment ago was so beside the point.

But tonight, we are playing in a conference room appropriately called The Boston, presumably because the hotel staff felt our histrionics needed to be confined to a less public area than the lobby. A Boston occurs when the highest bidder and his/her teammate make all the books in a round. It’s always grounds for extraordinary shit talk.

“So is there a midnight train to Boston?” I say, scooping up the cards as Kevin runs them.

“That’s okay, Jennifer, we’re going to switch places next time because they’re dealing these horrible ass hands.”

“Did you want lemon with your tea?” I ask.

“No, they like sweet tea,” Kevin says, throwing down another card.

“We still have to dress you tomorrow. I’d hate for yo’ ass to meet a safety pin or something,” Amy warns.

“We'll just worry about your ass. I know the whuppin’ hurts, don’t it?”

Bid made, and new hands dealt, it is now Jennifer’s turn to take a bid.

“Five low.”

“In what?” I ask, an incredulous look on my face.

“Hearts.”

“Yeay!” Addie shrieks.

“Well her partner clearly has a few.”

“Did you need any from the kitty?” Amy asks, throwing the six cards face up on the table. There is one heart.

About a minute into play, Addie’s phone rings. Everything in her body says that she is prepared to do what she normally does, let it ring. Because this bid whist and phone calls are irrelevant. Able-bodied and talented kids in my mother's generation almost did not make it into the cap and gown because of this game. But this time she sighs, compelled to pick it up.

“Hi baby,” she says, her head jutting forward in guilt, her cheekbones pulled more gloriously up into the light over the conference table. “Oh, nothing…yeah…oh good, good…really?...” She then drops the cell phone, without telling him to hold on, let's him talk to the air,nchanges her whole tone of voice to reflect the importance of her observation and scolds, “Is that four cards in that book, it looks like five.”

“Um, no, sugar,” I whisper and point slowly to her phone.

She picks it up as if she has snapped back from insanity and listens for a break in his conversation. "Yeah...uh huh...."

At this point we are struggling to contain our laughter. The man of her life, a beautiful and wonderful six feet four inches of loveliness and devotion, is on the phone and for reasons the other four of us totally and absurdly understand, he’s not as crucial right now as this very important bid.

“…okay…so I’ll call you back…yes…okay bye.” She tries to make a kissing noise into the cell but drops it again when I try to take Jennifer’s book.

“No!” Addie shouts, Ursula in her gut, black hair windblown by her card conviction and slams down the ace.

After they make their bid, we indulge the laugh that was suspended when she was on the phone.

“I’m so going to lose my man over this game,” Addie confesses.

“And the rest of us will never get one at this rate,” Jennifer says.

Keith Boykin, gay rights activist, social leader, and former staffer with the Clinton Administration, just wrote a book called Beyond the Down Low. The success he's had in making the NY Times Bestsellers list put him in a wonderful forum with a handful of our black leaders. The invitation to check out his page and hear about his positive and rather break-through moment with Louis Farrakhan could not have come at a better time for me. My response to Keith below says why. Please check out the link first and then read.


http://www.keithboykin.com/arch/001331.html

Keith,

Thanks for the udpates. Congratulations on the Farrakhan moment. It's a surprise to me, and I'm excited about his warm demonstration of inclusiveness. I had a troubling expreience here last night in Sydney, where we happen to be on tour during Mardi Gras. The parade was fabulous and this event seems to be the biggest celebration of homosexuality I've seen ever. But after I watched police march en masse to thunderous applause, undoubtedly for being the ones to marshall vilification laws (what a concept) and upholding gay rights, none were around to see three youngsters walk past Roger (a black colleague) and me and ask flippantly if we are gay. I ignored them; Roger did not. He yelled in affirmation at their backs. The ebony boys, Similac dripping from tarnish-free skin, came back to get in our faces (Roger's especially) and challenge us about it.

I was adamant about resisting a full-fledged and pointless fight with kids who were too ignorant to realize that four black men brawling on a gay thoroughfare in a country whose only inidgenous blacks live far from the city is inane, not to mention detrimental to the odd sense of deification Aussies have for black Americans. So I ignored them. Roger was less worried about repercussions and grew appropriately loud and ghetto, telling them to fall back unless they planned to do something about our gayness. All I could do is look at these boys and then at the excited crowd of sidewalk cafe patrons happy that these thugs (and I use that term lightly) were finally addressed in the wake of dousing Oxford earlier with random pitches of homophobia. One of the boys, unsure what to say since ass-kicking was out of the question, had a moment of guardlessness long enough for me to see the sadness in his eyes, crestfallen with disappointment. Through it, he said to Roger, "I don't believe you. You're black like me."

Well, it may not be completely relevant to the issues the black community has with embracing its same-sex-loving brothers and sisters, and perhaps Farrakhan's ability to wrap his arms (literally) around homosexual strength is too far removed from these African teenagers in Sydney. But I couldn't help feeling the connections, particularlys since the homophobia in the black community has the added fuel (and precedent) of cultural disdain in our homeland and in the West Indies. I don't need to tell you that Roger is a dark-skinned brother the youngster identified with and felt ignorantly ashamed of. To read about your experience with Farrakhan gives me enough hope to balance things out.