NOW WHAT

There’s a part of me, that people pleaser me, that almost feels like I should apologize for the rage that I poured out onto these pages last week. I have to stop and remind myself that I am practicing the allowance of all feelings good and bad. Contrary to what some may think, I don’t walk around breathing fire like a dragon or punching walls all the time. My rage stays contained inside this body until I can furiously type it all out. A friend of mine referred to it as “Beautiful rage” and I love that so much, I’ve been thinking about where to have those words tattooed onto my body. But I don’t want this space to just be a rage against the machine page.

Saturday morning, I sat down in my usual space at Heirloom and opened up my Fortune Cookie Journal (so few pages are left…I don’t know what happens when I fill them all). The music playing that morning were all the 90s bands that made up the soundtrack of the end of my HS years and into my college years. Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Cake. I knew the words to every song that played through those speakers and I was pulled back in time to a place of great happiness and naivety. Those years smelled like burnt coffee, used bookstores, cigarettes and incense mixed together. These were the years of learning the importance of finding meaning in words and oh how we dissected lyrics and movies and scripts. I was a biology major, living alongside english majors absorbing their coolness while memorizing biochemical compound structures. We were carefree even though we had no reason to be so.

I watched Past Lives over the weekend and I have been pondering those moments that feel like past lives for me now, much like the one described above. It took me longer to get around to seeing the film than I had intended. I knew that it would be beautiful in a way that feels prickly and it was. It was full of the what if questions, the kind of game I have often played on my own. There are the choices we make and there are the choices made by others that have a ripple effect on the trajectory of lives and all of these lead to questions of what if I had chosen this way instead of that. If everything in life is a choice, half of those choices are how we have decided to react to the choices made by others.

Perhaps I was a bird and you were the branch I rested on. - Nora, Past Lives

I joke that in a past life I was a devout Catholic, possibly even a nun. Guilt was often my motivator and I would constantly stress over doing the “right” thing. I’ve never really thought much about who (or what) else I might have been in other lives. I’ve never really thought about the what if I’d gone to a different college, accepted that full music scholarship to OU or at the very least sent my MCAT scores in and applied for medical school. I don’t really think about it because I know how unhappy I would have been with those choices. I knew at the time of decision that choosing those paths would not lead me to a life of joy. I never started playing the What If game until after Chris died. Then I questioned all the choices I had made and what life would be like if I had made different ones. Except, I haven’t played this game with myself in quite some time. I didn’t choose those other lives; I chose this one. Has it led me to a life of joy? I heard someone say once that we can’t have all joy all the time. This is true for me, but I do have joy.

This is my life and I am living it with you. -Nora

Next week, I’m dragging Michael back to New Orleans, a place where if past lives are truly a thing, one of mine was lived here. The last time we went was the first time I’d been back since before Hurricane Katrina and I thought that so much had probably changed since then that I wouldn’t feel at home there anymore. What happened during our last trip was I became so overwhelmed by memories of previous trips, that I froze. I didn’t make tentative itineraries or search out restaurants. We just sort wandered aimlessly and hoped to stumble onto good food. The wandering aimlessly was good, the food finds were not. Reservations are needed in this post-Covid landscape. This time around, we’ve made better plans and we’re even doing an activity that I have never done before any all the many times I have been to New Orleans. We’ve booked a swamp tour in hopes of seeing alligators in their natural habit.

We’re not leaving until next week, but I feel like taking a break from this space. Maybe I’ll spend some time updating some photos and thinking about what’s next. I need to spend more time with paper and ink. This is how I conjure up the experiences I want for myself and I’m a planner at heart. Don’t worry though. I’ll be back.

In this life I am still a blogger.

SUBSTANCE

Comedian Michael has been getting back into his comedy roots, doing five minutes here and there at different open mic nights. Last night he did fifteen mins in a comedy showcase at the Groundhog Day Theatre. It was the fit time I'd seen his act. He was good. Real good.

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We all have lives from before, people we used to be, things we used to do. Life changes, we change, and then suddenly we are doing different things. We become different people. In my former life, I was a dancer and a singer. I was a musician and a sidekick, a Harpo to Chris’s Groucho. Sometimes we go back to some of those things from our former lives, but I have no desire to go back to my stage days and my Harpo days are behind me. I found new things and different outlets, like yoga and photography. In Michael’s former life, he was a standup comedian. He bartended to make ends meet, then spent the rest of his time hustling for gigs. One day he reached a crossroads. He could either step up his hustle and really try to make it big time or he could switch gears entirely, go back to school and get a useful degree. Married, with a baby on the way, Michael chose the ‘switch gears’ option.

But he missed the stage.

Sometime in the Fall there was talk of a talent show happening at work and all of Michael’s coworkers encouraged him to do a comedy act. He started going to open mic nights to get ready and working on a new set list. His goal was to keep things clean, but also to not be mean. He was terrified of dropping an F-bomb on the high school stage. Then the talent show thing didn’t happen, but Michael kept going to the open mics, still working on new material. Which has been good. He needed something, some outlet, of his own and he’s enjoying the process. Michael’s open mic nights led to an invitation to do a fifteen minute set in a comedy showcase at the Groundhog Day Theatre Sunday night. He asked me to go mostly so I could video record his set for him and partly to pad the audience, but only if I sat where he couldn’t see my face. I’m a distraction. I sat in the back corner with my phone propped up on a tall stack of chairs.

Sometimes Baby needs to be put in the corner.

I sat there listening to the comics that came on before Michael and trying my best to find them funny. Stand up comedy isn’t really my scene. I enjoy it when it is good, but when the comic is bombing, I have internal pains for that person. Sunday night didn’t seem to go to well for most of the comics. The MC has potential and I could tell that he was at least working on his craft. When a joke would fail, he’d look at his set list and say “Okay….that one didn’t work.” and move on. The two guys that came on before Michael were lost in the weeds. One was high and the other one was drunk or at least pretending to be drunk. Maybe that was part of his act. It didn’t work in his favor. The first guy had some incoherent story or joke involving Wolfman Jack and his dad. The second walked back and forth yelling “Hey!” a whole bunch. It was a relief when Michael hit the stage because I knew he couldn’t be as bad as those two. He also has a no drinking policy for himself and would at least be coherent. The woman who closed the show has the potential to really make it big but she was also too high to maintain a train of thought. She lost track of where she was in her set and had problems enunciating.

Michael was the oldest and most experienced of all the other performers and it showed. From the moment he stepped on to the stage until the moment he left, he was on point. There was a clear cohesion to his set and there were great callbacks to previous jokes. It was together and professional. And it was funny. I laughed a lot. It was the first time I had seen him perform and I think this made us both nervous. He sheepishly asked me after the show “so…do I still have a place to live?” and I just laughed without answering his question.

I like to keep him guessing.

LOVE THURSDAY

In a past life, I was a magician's assistant. This was in the late 1800s in England, but we traveled all over to perform our act. The Magician had developed this amazing trick where he'd inject black ink under his skin and then, as I stood next to him, a black tree would start growing out of the tops of my feet and then twist and grow all around and up my body. It really was a great trick and of course other magicians wanted to know how the trick was done. 

The Magician carried everything in one of those traveling trunks. The trunk was unique because from the outside it looked like a regular trunk, but the inside was bigger. There was enough space to carry all of our things and a little sitting area where I could sit and read. It was very cozy and comfortable which was important because I'd often ride in the trunk when we traveled to save money on train tickets. Once inside the trunk, no one knew I was in there. This is where I was one evening after a show. I was sitting comfortably in the trunk, reading a book. The Magician had gone out for the evening. I thought I would have a nice quiet evening to myself until I heard the sounds of someone rummaging around our room. I quickly blew out my candlelight that I had been using to read with just in case the trunk leaked out any light and sat as quietly and still as possible. 

Suddenly the trunk lid popped open and I felt a hand grip my upper arm and yank me out of my cozy little spot in the trunk. The man shook me and demanded I tell him where the plans for our famous trick was kept. I told him over and over that I couldn't. You see, there were no plans. The Magician had never written it down and in fact really only knew how half of the trick worked. I knew the other half, but not the Magician's half. This was how we'd managed to keep it a secret all this time. Incensed, the man gathered up all the papers he could find in our room and trunk. Then he grabbed a length of rope, bound my wrists and threw me back into the trunk. His plan was to dump me and the trunk into the river. I could feel the trunk being dragged down the hall and bounce down some stairs. Then I could feel the rattle of being dragged across cobble stones. 

I screamed as I felt the trunk falling and then landing in the cold water below. The trunk started to take in water quickly. I frantically started looking around for a way to get out or something to cut the rope binding my wrists. One of the great things about being a magician's assistant is that you learn escape tricks. This was how I managed to wriggle my hands free of the rope, but when I shoved on the lid of the trunk to get out, the lid wouldn't budge. By now, water had almost completely filled the trunk and I barely had space to keep my nose out of the water. I took one last gulp of air, dived to the bottom of the trunk and then torpedoed myself at the trunk lid.  But just as I was about to hit the lid, it popped open and there was the Magician. He had been on his way home and just crossing the bridge when he saw a man shoving a familiar looking trunk over the ledge and into the water. The Magician grabbed my wrist and headed towards the surface, where we broke through the water gasping for air.

OK, maybe this didn't really happen in a past life, but is exactly what happened in a dream I had the other night.  Dreams can be scary. They can be weird and make very little sense. Dreams can be insightful, helping to solve a problem you've pondering. They can inspire us to do something great.  But for today, for Love Thursday, I'm honoring those dreams that spark the imagination. Because I believe that great things can grow from that spark.

Happy Love Thursday!