Nina Simone is an American and So Am I (the final installment)

Chicago reintroduced me to Nina Simone the summer of 2013. When I found a best of album (The Very Best of Nina Simone: Sugar in My Bowl 1967-1972), I discovered Nina's contribution to the civil rights movement and, subsequently, her slow disappearance into what I would later learn was bipolar disorder.

I waited tables that first year in the Windy City, and I would come home in the middle of the night, put in my headphones, and take Linus for long walks while I listened to music on Spotify.

I introduced myself to lots of artists that year because I had access, like I was getting away with something. To name a few, I explored the likes of Tupac, revisited the 90s, and stumbled upon Nina Simone's To Be Young Gifted and Black.I was growing up older, colder, and so was she.

I recall one evening hearing Mississippi Goddam for the first time.

Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

In the documentary, What Happened Miss Simone (Netflix 2015), there is footage of Simone asking Dr. Martin Luther King what to do with all her feelings of rage. He, of course, encouraged her to focus energy on the nonviolent protests that would later go down in history as true democracy in action. 

But they killed him. 

So she sang this song, raging in a glorious, vulnerable masterpiece that the time for silent protest was over. That it's taking too long. Moving too slow. 

And they ran her out of the country. She was destroyed politically and publicly. The beautiful black woman with the incredible voice was not singing the songs that everyone wanted to hear. 
She wasn't smiling or trying to be nice.

Today there are so many voices scrambling and screeching to be heard and so many lives lost to alcohol, pills, guns, and violence, corporate violence, that America is not what they told us it would be. Yet, "they," whoever they are, are still trying to tell us that we need to hold on...for freedom? For what America......was?

America enslaved, tortured, raped, and murdered, countless human beings. Take a day and listen to the words to songs like "Strange Fruit," and "Mississippi Goddam." Take a month....take a month that is longer than February, take two months, and listen to the voices of those that have been trying to play by a set of rules that offers them very little.

Just like rage that gets stuffed down for far too long, the urgency of the song builds:

You keep on saying "Go slow!" "Go slow!" But that's just the trouble...

"Do it slow,"
Desegregation
"Do it slow"
Mass participation
"Do it slow"
Reunification
"Do it slow"
Do things gradually
"Do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"Do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know"

The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is impossible in a nation controlled by large corporations.

The lies about black crime told to make white girls afraid. The false masculinity of the disillusioned men who rape and take what they have literally been taught is "rightfully" theirs by design. The white boys and girls that scream "all lives matter" who have been told the lie that the Black Lives Matter movement is a personal attack. It is not.

And the churchgoers that voted for our current president and still try to talk to me about love that surpasses all understanding.

We have all been lied to. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it?

Nina Simone's family found her years later, drowning in depression. It's hard to see the world for what it is as an artist, as a lover of what human beings can create through expression, and keep going.

When you see the lost, the unloved, the broken, and the hated, all marginalized and demonized so that one group of people can say they are better or stronger, so that someone can claim ultimate power and final say, it's hard not to drown in hopelessness because what's the point?

And that is what is happening to this country. It is ignoring the rage that it is due. Because we have all been lied to, been distracted, been in love. The Bible teaches that only the Truth will set you free.

So we are all in prison. Quietly, comfortably, wasting away in a prison that we don't have to accept.

You cannot live a lie. You can try. You can surely try. But it will eat you up, destroy you from the inside out. You can dress it up, buy all the best treatments for gaping wounds, but it will kill you in the end.

It's too slow. The admitting of our sins. It's time to admit them.

How long can we live in the safe notion that if we keep quiet and pray about it, it will work itself out? We are the answer to our prayers. We are the present and the future. What we do...not say....not pray....but what we DO is the only thing that matters.

It's not time to let go and let God. It's time to stand up, and be counted. And it's time to start paying attention. Those who are living are suffering...including you.

I am a terrible vessel.

History is full of prophets that we've chased away because they did what we were terrified to do: be completely vulnerable. Like Nina Simone.

America wanted Nina Simone to pay for her "sins," while it continued to ignore the sins that would bring it...bring all of us....to this point in history.

Maybe an angry black woman isn't the problem.

"Oh but this whole country is full of lies. You're all going to die and die like flies."

She said in an older interview, used in What Happened Miss Simone (Netflix 2015), that her biggest regret is not getting to play classical piano at Carnegie Hall. The interviewer was astonished. Nina Simone had played Carnegie Hall...but not classical piano. That means something to a musician, the dream of creating something beyond words in a space made for that very creation.

Instead, at Carnegie, she played what audiences wanted a black woman who could play and sing to play, and when they didn't like what she sang, they threw her in the fire, to burn.

And burn she did.

Before the truth can set you free, you need to know what it means to be free, but, more than that, you have to try to imagine what it means not to be.

Creation

From the Untitled Archives

I found this post the other day and realized I'd never actually put it out there...or maybe I put parts of it out there, or a different version or something, but, reading over it, I liked it, and wanted to share. I'm currently working on another time-line piece, but it's taking a minute to process through MY SOUL. So, forgive me. I spend about 20% of my time trying to figure out what I want to write about, 77% agonizing over actually writing, and maybe 3% actually writing. It’s a shame the way this writing messes around with my heart. Ya know?

So....this is back in the fall of 2016....a different time indeed.

Summer is almost over, and as the cooler air floats in and settles on the concrete, grass and astroturf of Chicago’s myriad of front stoops, I feel an all too familiar looming sense of terror. Winter is coming. And winter is going to hurt. It has me questioning every choice I’ve ever made as I spin out of control down the tunnel of sugary marketing ploys painted orange and yellow. It’s beautiful, but it’s also unsettling (and way too sugary), to say the least.

I am unsettled, and I know exactly why, for the most part. My therapist keeps telling me I’m more together than I’ve ever been since she’s been working with me, but I can’t get behind it. Of course, that’s always been my biggest problem: getting behind myself. I play a good game, but I really don’t trust my own instincts in that fiercely confident way that I want to. I haven’t given enough merit to my own accomplishments.

Sure, I like repeating that I have a master’s degree, especially when people ask if I can do things like, “hold this.” I can toss in a good multi-cultural factoid when the conversation turns to travel and world view. Heck, I can give you relationship advice as I’ve spent a gooooooood looooooooooong time analyzing my past relationships and doing my damnedest to see the whole picture, but I certainly can’t take my own advice, and I wouldn’t bet on my answer with a quiz team, and I’ve rarely relished in my own innumerable memories.

I maybe give myself credit once every….3 or 4 years?

So, I’m due for a “me” party, time to reflect on all the choices I’ve made and where they’ve led me. It’s natural for me to want to reconsider my choice of settlement during this time, as I’m more open to the time it will take to make the right decision. I’m not desperate….but again, winter is coming.

As I compose my list of pros and cons for going back south, I keep getting sabotaged by those old demons I've been fighting off for a while now. That's natural, I bet. When I lived in The South, home, I was always a little frustrated. I felt stifled, held under water as I kicked and fought my way to the surface of whatever I needed to learn about myself. Everywhere I went, I was followed, at my heels, by these memories, this PTSD, the beasts.

Describing the beasts, using literal terms, makes them seem ridiculous, even to me. Par exemple, A friend in a rocky, at best, relationship found an article about gaslighting and shared it with me a few years ago. Gaslighting is basically manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity. It's been popping up a lot lately, I think, in the media, part of the whole carnival ride paradigm shift. I had never heard the term before she shared the article, but it made sense to me.

I was awash in memories of old boyfriends turning on me suddenly, telling me I was yelling, I was out of control, crazy, when I didn't feel like that, like I was yelling. I didn't feel rage. I didn't feel out of control, but they said I was. They told me I was losing it. Instead, I saw myself as the little girl I used to be, with dirty knees and wide eyes feeling like she was being ignored, feeling like she was not being heard. It was confusion, desperation to understand. A little girl asking, "please help me understand. How can I help? What can I do? What am I supposed to do?" It was empowering to finally have a word for something that affected me so deeply, helped me recognize that little girl.

Not two days after my friend had shared the article with me and her boyfriend, I remember sitting in one of the classrooms of the old theater where I spent the first solid years of my thirties. It was after the usual Saturday night show, and we were drinking beers and trying to make each other laugh. I remember her boyfriend mentioning the article around the time all the mens' voices had raised at least a few volume levels. Everyone laughed.

"Gaslighting? Like I'm actually making her think she's crazy?! How crazy is that?!"

And everyone laughed. The whole room roared with laughter.

I waited for the noise to die down so that I could point out the irony, but it didn't. He kept going, harping on what an idiot notion it was to even think of complaining about being made to think you're crazy, and how crazy she was. She was so crazy. They're all crazy. Crazy. Crazy. CRAZY CRAZY CRAZYCRAZY.

And I just sat there, expressionless...the beasts nipping at my heals. But I didn't turn around.

If I had been strong enough to turn around and face them, I would have said to him, in as non-threatening a voice as humanly possible, "Well, why do you think she feels that way? What's going on in her life that is maybe causing her to feel like she's losing it...if it's not you?" It seems like it should be easy, but as I ask the questions, I begin to feel the tension. He bristles, worried that I'm about to get angry, "crazy."

Weak me gives into the accusations. She buckles and cries out, flies off the handle. "I'm not crazy! I'm not yelling! I'm just....please let me finish!" She tumbles into her own trap and ends up in the fetal position, weeping the tears of defeat whilst listening to country music, the music of pain.

Strong me. Stops. Listens. Takes a deep breath, and says calmly how she feels, how she sees the world regardless of who is listening. She explains that she understands his point of view, that it's hard for everyone, for all of us, but we have to be able to have a dialogue, to ask questions, to be questioned without getting defensive, to give answers. We all get defensive. We all put up a wall.

And then, she is done, regardless of what is said after. She has said what she wanted to say. The rage of the subject before her, behind her, is noted, but not adopted. She turns inward to the little girl with the sticky tears on her face born of the confusion that comes from miscommunication, from being ignored, from being told to shut up, to sit down, to be different, to be different, to be different, and she embraces her.

I will dry her tears and hold her in my arms. Then I'll make a lot of cookies, and regardless of what the CDC says about cookie dough, I'll eat the hell out of it.

I think of other girls and women that face the same dance as society urges them to be a partner instead of a person. Relationships are a choice, after all, not a requirement. I think of men that face the same quandaries, the same unimpeachable ideals of how they should look and think and act. We are all in this together. Let's admit our fears. Let's be honest. For once.

If I can do this. If I can really trust myself. I can begin to trust others. I can begin to trust other women and men, young and old. I can carry my own suffering, not as a wound, but as a badge, tell the stories of my journey, lean in, leave my house...I can help, and that's all I've ever wanted to do.

He likes Righteous Babes. What can I say. 

*If you have never seen Beasts of the Southern Wild, stop everything and change that.

The Voices of Reason

The New York Times

I fell in love with the standup of David Cross during the last four years of George W. Bush's presidency. I was an angry girl, in recovery from the first time my heart was truly broken. He was recommended to me by multiple friends, and I laughed, but more importantly, I let go of the rage I was harboring deep in my belly.

David Cross was mad, and the title of one of my favorites of his is a good indication of that anger: Shut Up You Fucking Baby. It was glorious. He railed against Rumsfeld, the whole lot of goons surrounding the biggest goon in the White House; the tension in my neck relaxed. It was science, catharsis.

He took on 9/11 and the pure insanity that gripped the nation long enough to re-elect the man that got us there in the first place. Well, the man that opened the door for the men. I can't blame Bush for the shit that ensued in the years following my undergraduate study. I blame corporations. For everything. And David cross took it on with the kind of joy a child who has just received a Star Wars Lego set would exhibit.

And that was his job. The joker. Counsel to the king, to remind him that he is still human. I've been so confused these past months, feeling out of sorts, pulled apart, a bit undone, I feel less human and more experiment to see what happens to a woman in low boiling water.

During the Bush administration we had Jon Stewart for our unveiling of the irony within the political world, then we got Stephen Colbert, and even Larry Wilmore. Then, we lost them all. And for a moment, no one realized what was happening.

But now it's happened, and I honestly have no idea what tomorrow will feel like, or the day after tomorrow. I learned my lesson. I'm still awash with emotion, but I noticed Jon Stewart's name the other day in the closing credits for Stephen Colbert's new project: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, in which Colbert Executive Produces, writes, and stars.

I've been watching the opening monologues of a lot of late night hosts, including the lovely Samantha Bee whose show Full Frontal is on Wednesday nights on TBS, as well as the charming and intelligent Seth Meyers. They are all taking up arms, in a sense, aware of their jobs as the tellers of jokes, the tellers of truth. It's the worst of what we need to hear as a species, and that is why it must come to us in words that are gentle on our ears. Our laughter softens the blow without making the blow any less effective.

Stephen Colbert has been especially hard on the newly elected president, not as his previous character from Comedy Central, but as himself, as we've come to know him through his many projects and interviews.

Stephen Colbert is mad. And he is not backing down. He is coming at what has happened with a collected fury, using as soft a voice as possible to shout that we must not normalize what is happening in our government right now. It must never be normalized.

Do you miss Jon Stewart? Don't worry. He is also an executive producer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He knows what his job is, and he is ready to work.

I know what it feels like to be that girl, to be confused and angry about everything that is happening around me. It's an exciting time, though, when you find your voice, your voice of reason. We all thought George W. Bush was the worst, but we were probably wrong. I hope we aren't, and I'm going to do my best to remain calm.

The Hardest Part

In Mr. Semore's Senior A.P. English class, we practiced writing without stopping. Every week We would get out a notebook, he would set a timer, and we would write until the timer went off. Ball points on paper for thirty minutes straight. It wasn't graded. It was practice. The hardest part of writing. The act of writing.

It feels like it ought to be simple. My brain is constantly full of words. Sometimes shouting. Sometimes singing. Laughing. Crying. My body is an extension of my brain; therefore, it must be simple to carry out the task of transferring what's in my brain onto a page. It must be. Simple mechanics. 

In my first college level acting course, we spent a lot of time focusing on breaking down a character into actions. Acting is, after all, action. Reaction. Experiencing stimuli and having to shift. Seems so simple to define a person's actions. Acting seems so simple. 

What do you want? That was the question that threw me in Acting One. When I started college, I had such a small view of the world. Oh, I made up for it in books and plays and band and choir. I spread myself across the full extent of my...seedling of a world view. But I didn't know what I wanted.....pizza? Not when I was nineteen. 

What will you write about today? That was the forbidden question in Mr. Semore's class. It is the poisoned dart, the words that scroll across my brain when I sit down and the timer starts. Because I can never ask it once, once I ask it, the question just increases in size, like a sea monkey, in my brain, until all I can think about is the damn question itself, and my brain refuses to send any signals to my hands so that my hands can put words on the page. 

Then there's the voices in my head, the ones that tell me I'm ridiculous. I'm wasting time. I'm wasting my time. I've taken workshops, sat through countless therapy sessions, and prayed on my knees to silence them, but they persist.

I know how to do things. I know how to write. I know how to act. I know how to make amazing chocolate chip cookies. I know how to eat an entire batch of amazing chocolate chip cookies. 

If I want more than that, something bigger, broader, more complex, my confidence wavers. Because I want to write about...I fun no...life, and I want to help. I want to help myself (by emptying this overstock of vocabulary and unfinished ideas that swirls around in the centrifuge of my mind non stop), and I want to help you.  

But what do I want to write about? When my heart is broken along with the rest of the country's heart? When I'm angry along with a million other women? When my worldview is stretching beyond what I thought possible? When I still feel I don't know enough and am not qualified in the least?

To be or not to be? We keep asking this question, shouting it up and down hallways, into the vast expanse of the night sky. What are we supposed to do? What are our actions? Why are we here? 

Shakespeare says, in Hamlet, that we're afraid to die because we think too much. Life is hard, and most of us do very little to change anything because we're too busy trying to calm ourselves from the thought of not being able to hear our own thoughts any more. We're afraid to die because we don't know what happens next, if anything, and we can't seem to come to terms with it. 

     Thus conscience does make cowards of us all

     And thus the native hue of resolution 

     Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 

     And enterprises of great pith and moment 

    With this regard their currents turn awry 

     And lose the name of action.         (1780)

The thing is, I'm not afraid of death. I don't know what is going to happen, but I'm not afraid of it. I don't WANT to die, but I know I must. I'm sure if someone told me it was going to happen tomorrow, I'd freak out and lose my mind, but I recently did that thing where I finally realized that it's going to happen, that it's inevitable, and suddenly, all the things that were cluttering my brain dissipated, even if only for a moment. 

How does this help me? You ask. I don't think about it. I stopped thinking about what to do to make sure I'm ready when I die. I stopped asking, "what do I want?" I answered the question. 

To be here now. 

Despite everything. Despite the coming years and the dread I feel. Every minute I spend here makes up for a multitude of hours I've spent agonizing over what happens when I'm not here any more. 

It's self preservation. All signs point to "this sucks. die. you will anyway," but I want to stay alive just for now. To see what happens. To see where I go. To see what I can do to help. And I want to do the best with now that I possibly can. 

Just like Anne Frank, in spite of all the hurt and horror, I still believe in goodness. I still believe in hope. I'm saying I'm better than you. Obviously. 

It seems like it should be so simple, doesn't it? To make up my mind to be happy. To do my laundry in spite of the fact that I really don't know what I'm doing. 

The best advice I've ever gotten is seemingly as simple as they come. In the words of former Mayor of Memphis, the illustrious W.W. Herenton, upon one of the last victories in his seventeen year reign, "shake them haters off." 

And that, my friends, has been the hardest part so far. 

More. To. Come. 

Willie

Finger Wag

I'm currently overloaded with political nonsense. I can't escape the constant buzz of tension that comes from waiting to see what's going to happen next, nor can I escape the deafening silence of knowing that none of it matters. Because none of it really matters. I suppose.

Except, it does. It matters to me.

In 1988, I was in third grade (and it took me way too long to remember that). I turned 9 that year. I played way more pretend then, hand-copied the parts of the encyclopedia about space in preparation for graduate school, and was totally voting for Dukakis.

I don't even remember this. 

I also didn't have boobs, so the rest of the girls had no reason to be jealous of me. We told each other everything, how we felt, what we thought about things, no questions, judgements, just camaraderie.

Thus, it was perfectly natural for one of the girls in my class that came from one of them well-to-do families with a mansion and a heated pool in the back yard, to share her thoughts on the evils of the democratic party as such: "My brother and I saw some homeless people with Dukakis signs, and we asked our parents if we could spit on them, and they said yes, so we spit on them and yelled 'Bush Quayle!'"

As I reminisce, I feel a little bit of anger at the simple fact that I had to hear someone say that about other human beings at such a young age, which means they had to hear it from other human beings even before I heard it.

I don't remember a damn thing about Michael Dukakis, except that he was a democrat, and we were democrats, and we were always going to be on the losing side, especially in the south....and that some people think it's okay to spit on other human beings for showing support for a candidate that was promising to provide them with relief. They knew nothing but the black and white of it and that mom and dad said it was okay.

That girl, those girls went on to bully me through 4th and 5th grade, send me home crying to my powerless parents, "I don't know why they don't like me! I don't know why they do this to me!" I can't figure out why my mom and dad never told me the truth: Boobs. Instead, they told me my forehead was so big (it's a five-head) because my brain was so big....which is gross.

I've been going back there lately, exploring the upside down place of my childhood past, especially since the campaigns kicked off.

I keep getting frustrated and angry at the constant sprawl of negative media options. My politics haven't changed, although I find them to be a bit more middle of the road in a place like Chicago. There's a reason this city owns the state of Illinois when it comes to national elections. It's an opportunity to see the other side of the political spectrum.

I see random posts on Facebook from old friends that I've forgotten to hide about how voting for Trump is probably harmless and voting for Hillary would be like unlocking the gates of hell, and I see posts from new friends in Chi, talking about how voting for Hillary would be just as bad, if not worse than voting for Trump.

I hear and see the nightmarishly garish things Trump says about Hillary and the nasty things people say about Melania.

I hear the rage when an adult says in front of a child "I'll never vote for that bitch," or, "Hideous woman," or "no wonder her husband cheated on her," and the classic, "I just hate her."

Every time it happens, I think of that nine year old who won the giant bucket of candy hearts on valentine's day for guessing how many were in it, and I think of the things she heard from the mouths of other babes (with smaller bubes), and how those people treated her, and I'm sad all over again. For me, for other people that can probably relate, and for all the little girls and boys right now that get to hear and see the disgusting way women are being treated in this election.

Think how you want to think, and vote how you'll vote, but pay attention to the messages you're sending to each other. We need each other.

We can treat people better. We can do it better than anyone else can. Who else is going to do it, anyway? Politicians? Let's let them do their jobs and focus on what's right in front of us. This awesome blog. Read it again.

Bush Quayle!