If you’re just getting here, you can start with part 1 or part 2.

I drove back from New Jersey in this haze, suspended somewhere between ecstasy and… bereft. Ecstasy because I was happy. And I’m not sure if I can really impress upon you quite what I mean when I say that, because you don’t have the benefit of having been inside my head for the last 38 years. I have had situations I’ve enjoyed before. I’ve been happy. But my emotional memory of just about anything is… nonexistent. It just doesn’t stick. But I drove from Chicago, through beautiful, misty, sun-dappled mountains, half-out-of-my-mind, shot like a pinball around New Jersey, and then back on the road home again, and I was happy. And that feeling stayed. I was bereft, yes, because it was over, but I did it. I did it, and I was happy. I climbed lighthouses, and I was happy. I found the best bagels in the universe, and I was happy. I touched my camera again for the first time in years in a way that didn’t feel like an obligation and I was happy. And, yes, I saw Johnny (and Jason and Jon and Alan and Billy and Dave and… Emily… and Kirsten… and STEEEVE…) but that was almost the least of it. Doing the actual thing was the least of it. It was beautiful, it was fantastic, it was magical, and it reminded me, forcibly, that there were things that I could do, that I could do well. That I loved doing. And that my head and my heart and my soul could contort and move in ways that I had entirely forgotten about. And that my capacity to appreciate and empathize with people was bigger than I had remembered. And I was happy.

And I got ten whole days to live with that happiness.

On the penultimate day of July, Kenneth, my partner, was supposed to have what was going to be a very routine, relatively minor surgery. It was not very routine or relatively minor. It was major. It was traumatic. I got to call everyone he’s ever known, just in case he died. (He didn’t.) …And I won’t pretend that anything I had to deal with, in that moment or in the ultimate aftermath is really anything compared to what he’s had to deal with, because it didn’t happen to me. I’m not centering myself in that narrative. But I also won’t be shy when I say that that happening, and everything that’s come after, has been a continual ice-cold plunge into the most base survival mode imaginable. And having to live with both of those things, that rosy, sun-kissed bliss twisting and writhing against seemingly endless, mindless exhaustion, is… it’s one of the most callously cruel things I’ve ever experienced. And it’s no one’s fault. It’s just some guttural cackle from the Universe.

And, somewhere, in the middle of that, I still had two tickets to two concerts.

Kenneth, and his sister, and my parents all made it possible for me to actually see those two concerts. Which probably looks a little selfish and assholey, if you’re looking at me from the outside. Which, fine. Fair. Whatever. One of them was legitimately non-negotiable for me. It was a front row ticket. I would have to die myself to give that up. The closest I’ll ever be. That’s all I wanted, from the moment I started this whole stupid thing. 18 years ago, I was in the back of the back of the pavilion at Pine Knob, and you couldn’t even see their faces. And all I’ve been able to think since was that I was not going to accept that the closest I’d ever been was the closest I’d ever be. But Kenneth was insistent. This was a good thing. I needed a break. I needed that happiness. So he made it possible for me to go on both nights.

And seeing that little U-Haul in the back of the Arcada, and the back of the Des Plaines was like a breath of fresh air. Seeing all these people again, in the midst of absolute mindless chaos, was like drifting into an eddy in a stream. The tiniest moment of calm.

The time since has not been kind. Not to any of us.

Someday, I do hope that I will wake up and be able to see their faces again in my mind. That, when I think of that time, I’ll have something more than leaning against the half-wall of a parking garage after the show, while Steve the roadie smoked on the tailgate of the U-Haul and the record bros debated figuring out how to break into the green room. Someday, I hope I’ll be able to see that look on his face again, the one just for me because he knew that I was wearing The Rainbow Tank, and what would you be thinking if some girl was down there wearing your clothes like she’d just walked into 1970 and taken them from your closet?

But beyond that, I hope that I’ll wake up someday and remember what it felt like for those 10 days when I was happy. When I finally knew what it felt like for a feeling to stay.

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Picking up where I left off in part 1…

I made it to New Jersey. Red Bank, if you’re wondering. I had zero idea of what to expect there, but it vastly outstripped anything I could have imagined. Red Bank, NJ is charming. I spent the entire time I was there wandering around muttering that I wished I had an extra day to spend there. The irony is, I was initially only supposed to see one concert that week, and I *had* added an extra day, for two specific reasons:

The first is that, immediately after buying my first ticket, I said to myself “that’s nice, but where the hell am I actually going?” and started trying to look at the area. And that’s when I found the lighthouse. Lighthouses. The Navesink Twin Lights are technically in Highlands, NJ, but it’s a very short drive (up a very steep hill) to get there from Red Bank. They are two lights, connected by a 300-some foot wall, and one of them was not only the first electrified light in the United States, it was also lit by a quarter-million candlepower arc lamp that could be seen in Battery Park on Manhattan island, 17 miles away. Clearly, I had to go. And, if I was going to need an extra day to climb lighthouses, and there just so happened to also be a concert that evening (half a state away, in Newton, NJ), then, oops, my hand slipped and I guess I have a ticket to that show as well. And, I mean, that was also going to be July 20, John’s birthday. AND and, that one time I got to see the Moodies all play together was ALSO on a July 20th, 18 years ago, so clearly that was some kind of sign. Cosmic permission, if you will.

So, the whole time I was schlepping around, sweating my face off, muttering about needing an extra day… was during the extra day.

…But back to the concerts. Show #1 (which was also the first stop on the tour) was at the Count Basie Center for the Arts. I took myself to dinner before hand at the Dublin House in Red Bank, because if there’s something I can always use, it’s a gigantic plate of fish & chips and a cider. Half the restaurant was headed to the show, and we all sort of staggered back to the theatre together. I was wearing that green dress in the first photo, which I found in an estate sale in Waukegan earlier this year, and my St. Christopher-in-a-Gemini-capsule pin that I found… in a completely different estate sale in Waukegan this year. Veteran Cosmic Rocker, and all that.

I was parked about a block away from the theatre, if you approached it from behind, which was only weird because I had to go back to my car like 4 times between when I parked there and when I finally got to the show, and I started getting really weird looks from the venue crew smoking on the loading dock as I kept passing by. The downside of being immediately recognizable in any given situation.

Parked in the loading dock were two SUVs, one hauling one of those *tiiiiiiny* U-Haul trailers. It’s kind of strange to say that someone’s random rental cars have become some kind of mental/emotional touchstone, but the familiarity of seeing them outside one venue… and then the next one… and then the next one… and then the last one… feels comforting at this moment. It’s hard to explain without derailing the narrative, I suppose, but my memory of the past two months is actually almost nonexistent at this point, for various reasons, but locking on to that little U-Haul trailer in my mind sort of helps pull everything back into some kind of focus.

…So we’re in the theatre. The whole show sort of meanders. Not in a bad way, it’s just obvious that this is the first time we’re doing this version of things. The mics go out at some point. It becomes a comical call-and-response of “can you hear me now?” colliding against the fact that… he can’t actually hear us with his monitors in. After a beat, he looks around at everyone and says “Well… if you can’t hear, you can climb up on the stage, and listen in my ears.” to which I instinctively heckle back “I don’t think security is gonna like that!”

…He didn’t hear me. I’m pretty sure Jason, his cellist did though.

The second show is tighter. I’m further away from the stage. People have brought birthday cards, balloons, tinsel, garlands, honest-to-god wrapped presents. Emily, his poor daughter (who is also his manager) is just trying to, you know, do her job and run everything, and is getting stopped like, every four feet by someone trying to hand something off. The stage manager in me empathizes, though I was never in a situation quite like that.

By the time I’m driving back to Red Bank, I can’t feel my feet. I collapse into bed, bereft, and have to wake up at dawn the next morning to drive all the way back to Chicago.

Part 3, coming soon…

The post Fiddling While Rome Burns part 2 appeared first on Revisionist Vintage.

When I first sat down to start regularly updating this blog again, I joked that I’d do it for about two weeks and then spectacularly flame out. The joys of ADHD, I suppose.

Well, I have spectacularly flamed out, but not quite in the way we might have predicted. And, as Great-Grandpa Alphonse used to say, “When ya’ don’t know where to start, go back to da’ beginnin’.” (If you’ve never seen Escanaba in da’ Moonlight, this will make absolutely no sense to you. It’s hilarious if you’re a Michigander, and probably completely opaque if you’re not. So, there’s that.)

The scene: probably… the beginning of July. The dates on my photos tell me it was actually the end of June when I started sewing what I affectionately refer to as “the Road Case Tee”, which is actually a True Bias Rio with contrast binding and some… artistic license. It was meant to look like the road cases that musicians cart their gear around in, with the silver latches and hardware, and the names of the band and artist spray painted on the sides. I was headed to New Jersey for two days, to go see John Lodge and his band. (If you’re keeping score at home, these were concerts two and three out of what is ending up to be SIX this year. I didn’t start out with the intention of being this unhinged, but the only time I got to see the Moodies perform together (and the last time I saw any of them individually until this year) was 18 years ago, in 2007.)

I finished the thing on July 7, with approximately 10 days to spare.

On the 18th of July, I packed up Melanie, my car, and started what was ultimately a two day drive. I made it through Indiana, Ohio, and about half of Pennsylvania before I stopped that night, and it was what I can only describe as carefully planned chaos, because I had intentionally aimed myself directly at Clearfield, PA, but I had no hotel reservation until about 5pm that evening, as I wasn’t exactly sure if I’d get there before I couldn’t go any further. I ended up rolling into the Super 8 in Clearfield, rolling directly through a shower, and straight into bed.

The next morning, I took the smallest side quest, in the form of a 15 minute drive into Curwensville, PA. My grandpa was born in a Sears kit house in Curwensville, and when I told my dad about it later, he tells me I could have turned the opposite direction on literally one street and driven past it. (Assuming it’s still there, of course.) I take this to mean that I just need an excuse to head back in that direction sometime soon. If you look in the slideshow, you’ll notice that there are no photos of this part of the drive. I used the big-girl camera for those, and since I’m too poor to buy the stupid subscription Adobe on this computer at the moment, you all just get to wait until that happens.

After that… at somewhere around 9:30 in the morning, I turned myself and Melanie once more toward the east coast. Four-ish hours after that, I arrived in the land of Jon Bon Jovi. (I did not take a photo of the Jon Bon Jovi TRAVEL PLAZA on the Garden State Tollway, and I am living to regret that decision.)

Part 2, coming soon…

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