Tag: Choir

Memories

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I love Facebook memories. Here’s a list of things I love about them:

From today:

I just put something together and I am freaking out. I posted a scholarly article the other day about how neurodivergent people are more likely to be queer. Check this out. It’s from my blog about a week ago:

It makes me happy today that I realized Bert from Sesame Street is coded as autistic. He has a paper clip and bottle cap collection. He likes to do like, five things. Anything else is annoying. He talks like he knows everything.

Ernie is an ADHD spazz basket.

I have been learning myself since I was two.

I just didn’t realize it until now.

From a year ago:

I don’t know why this randomly popped into my head, but it made me laugh so I’m writing it down for posterity. I used to have a tuxedo for performing in choir/orchestra concerts. A few days after one of them, I was sitting on a bar patio with friends when someone knocked over their beer. 90% of it landed all over me and I was miles from home. Thinking fast, I went to my car and changed. I’m walking back and one of my friends says to the other, “oh my God. She’s James Bond. She has a tux in the car.” Actually, I’d just forgotten to bring it inside after the concert, but I kept it in the car for three years after that (between washings, of course).

From 2016, this picture (I need a new prescription, btw):

From 2014:

Being at work while my nose runs is snot very much fun. In fact, it truly blows.

From 2013:

“Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.” -Doug Larson

So true. I have a jackass magnet on my forehead that must blink in neon letters “ALL CRAZY PEOPLE! I AM YOUR LEADER! YOU CAN TALK TO ME ABOUT ANYTHING!” because that’s what happens. I have been on public buses and learned that the driver is an alcoholic 7 hours sober. I have listened to miscarriages, divorces, broken arms, warts, you name it. I don’t know how to extract myself from crazy people so I just generally let them go until they run out of steam. As a result, I’m a good writer. What is the take-home message here? If you’re going to sit there and be weird, I’m going to watch you do it. And then I’m going to rat you out to the Fanagans.

From 2011:

I just downloaded the new Britney Spears album, and it’s just kind of meh. But then I imagined listening to it in a dark room full of sweaty gay men and neon lights. THEN it got better.

I can be funny sometimes.

According to Whom?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?

I just can’t with today. I got up early and started writing, and it was going pretty well. Then, the Jetpack (WordPress) app got put in the background. When I went back to it, nothing would render (no text appeared). My entry disappeared into thin air.

So I’ll start over, and it will be nothing like what I was thinking earlier because I’m not thinking about that now…. whatever it was. I had a better idea to introduce you to my life of crime, unintentionally, of course.

When you are in a choir, it is frowned upon and also common practice to copy things. It’s very illegal. But I have aided and abetted many times. I struggle with copiers, because I think they sense my fear.

The next time I unintentionally broke the law was when my friends were putting a giant amount of music on their servers and giving me access. “It wasn’t illegal” because my friends said it wasn’t. What they meant was that copying off their server was legal. I later found out that was not the case, but luckily, not because I was caught. The safest way to share music was to borrow CDs and transcode them yourself, which is where the term “sneaker pimping” originated. It was underground, like “Winds of Change” during the Cold War…. yet less inspirational and more sitting there waiting for the CD-ROM that copied at 4x speed and generally wrote two bad discs before a right one. That got better over time, but in the beginning, it was atrocious. The CDs were expensive and then half of them failed.

I unintentionally broke the law the other day when I installed Windows 11 in a Virtual Box. My key wouldn’t activate anywhere but my original machine, even though I wasn’t using it for that. So, it’s off to find another solution, because the longer I spend with Windows, the more I’m irritated by it. You mean I can’t change my own time zone, I have to connect to location services? No matter what I do, I can’t make it where you don’t get to access my location and the rest of my information, and who knows how deep they’re digging? I don’t have anything to hide, it’s just the principle of the thing.

Facebook and everything else is built on stealing your information, why they’re free. We’re just dependent on it now, because we’ve been on it since you could get an account. That’s probably 15 years for me by now.

So, it’s a little intimidating when it’s not apps you can choose to install. If I really thought that gathering my ad information was important, I could delete Facebook off my phone/tablet and clear my browser history. What do you do when the data mining is the operating system itself?

They’re not even breaking the law unintentionally….. because what they’re doing might be legal, but it’s nowhere near moral. And the bitch of it is that we could have open source and secure social media, but it would never take off to the degree that Facebook did…. so you either install Facebook or you’re cut off from most, if not all of your friends.

That’s because free software has two problems. The first is that few businesses will buy in because they have to have someone to sue if things go wrong. The second is that if you put it out there for free, people assume it has no value. It’s the opposite. It’s millions of coders giving their time to create something that doesn’t depend on reporting to any kind of mothership and doesn’t cater ads right in your taskbar. Well, not ads, but sensationalized news to get you to click when it’s just nonsense. And you can’t turn it off if you just want the weather icon. If you close the obnoxious news banner trying to keep you up to date, everything goes with it. If you leave it on, every time you hit that hot corner when you’re trying to do something productive will make you want to punch your monitor.

Last week I was in “game mode,” where there are no distractions. I thought I had a complete crash when Windows put the game on the taskbar to ask me how likely I was to recommend Windows 11 to a friend. Luckily, I have enough VRAM that I could go back to it, but not every piece of software is that stable. Windows is becoming cancer, and I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I just don’t have a choice.

If Windows games could run on Linux perfectly, I wouldn’t need it at all. Steam is making headway, but I don’t have a Steam library. I chose GOG because then you own the game outright. I did not know that it would be different in every way from the Steam version and new releases make it crash…. frequently.

Sometimes you make choices in life. They lead you down a bad road….. and in a church choir, no less…….

Human Long or Vampire Long?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

Twice or three times I didn’t think I’d make it this far. Bipolar disorder is a bitch. But thankfully, all the med checks I’ve had over the years have gone very well. I’m more relaxed in my body…… I can also feel time starting to drain away. I am lost, confused, and afraid. But everything will work out in the end because it always does.

Up and to a point.

I cannot imagine my daily grind until I’m 92, the age at which my grandfather died. However, I have so much in my life that’s feeding me, I tend to tap into my own resources, which is a polite way of saying I’m my own best company. I want friendships/relationships/whatever, but I am not dependent on them to provide anything I lack.

I didn’t get here until I’d lived alone for quite a while. Yes, I have housemates, but I do not interact with them much. For the most part, I am locked up in my room, and there are lots of reasons why, absolutely none of them having to do with me.

Here’s the bottom line:

Guy goes to the doctor and the results are really bad. Doc says, “you have six months to live.” Patient says, “six months? What am I going to do?” Doc says, “buy a pig farm. Move to Oklahoma. Marry the meanest woman you can find. You won’t live longer, but it’ll be the longest six months of your life.”

If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, it’s that a year can seem like 10 minutes, and one moment can last 10 years. Time is relative. I do not need to live a long time to live a lot. I keep this in mind every day because though my grandfather died at 92, my mother died at 65. I’m only 20 years younger than that, and I think I have more than 20 years left in me…. but I can’t be sure. Not only due to the nature of my mental and physical health, but also because if you learn anything from the sudden death of a parent (embolism- it blew, she was dead 30 minutes later from a broken foot), it’s that a long life isn’t guaranteed.

So, whether I get to finish out my life like my grandfather, or whether it’s going to be cut short by some unknown force, I will be ecstatic either way, because I’m not saving up writing my passions until I don’t have anything else to do. It’s what I do instead of going out, because I feel more driven to get all of this down than I do to interact.

That’s because when you’re not interacting with people, there’s less chance to make a mistake. That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to live a long time. I have communication issues and it is relentless. Because I’m neurodivergent, I process information differently than a good bit of the world. Therefore, I am the problem child, not of my parents, but of my employers. Neurotypical people cannot hear neurodivergent people without training, and vice versa. Even the way things are written, when they’re written, are sketchy because we don’t all have our neurotypical decoder rings on us.

A hundred percent of the time, it’s not that I’m not listening. It’s that I don’t understand…… but you do. “Everyone does.” I am not stupid or slow because I read the directions differently than you did. It’s because of the way the instructions were written, and again, no neurotypical in my pocket to check…… because you can go to a boss occasionally to manage priorities, but if they feel like they’re doing your work, then you’re out. And it takes surprisingly little to get you out if they’re convinced you don’t listen and can’t learn.

80% of autistic people are unemployed, and none of us have job security. I am trying not only to manage money well, but also to create something that will last long after I do. These are not just empty pages. This is not for me after I’m finished using it. People, again (from another entry, I can’t remember which), are going to want to know about the way we lived. I’m going to be a part of that, and so will my friends.

So, even though I wasn’t nice to Sam, I think I’ll still come out all right in the end……. because after I processed all the feelings from said breakup, I let go of the anger and was indeed nice to her.

I can quote the first line from memory….. “Wilhousky, you had me at hello.” The Wilhousky arrangement of the Battle Hymn of the Republic is one of the most glorious things I’ve ever done with a brass quintet. I’ve sung it a hundred times, too, but there’s big brass energy when you’re the lead trumpet player for the clarion calls. So, when Sam told me that she was a soprano in the Army choir, the first question I ever asked her was “how many times have you sung the Wilhousky arrangement?” A nanosecond later…. “a million, conservatively.”

Now, the first trumpet part is actually not that difficult, it’s just very, very exposed. You are hanging out on a ledge with barely any accompaniment, so any flaw is going to show. Any impurity in the sound. So, when I pulled it off, I was right proud of myself.

But I suppose if you’ve performed it a million times and not just a hundred, you might not feel so great about it. I hate “Amazing Grace” for the same reason Sam and Peter Wilhousky are never ever ever getting back together. Well, two reasons. The first is that I’ve sung it into the ground. It just feels like an old war horse to me. The second is that organists tend to drag……….. I don’t know what it is, but a good chunk of piano/organ accompanists slow down “Amazing Grace” and “Happy Birthday” to “funeral procession.” I’m not just picking on those two things. I already know that if I end up in hell, my penance will be singing the soprano part to the hallelujah Chorus on repeat. Hold it till you turn purple. In that instance, I would wish for a short life, but it’s hell. I could end up singing The Hallelujah Chorus, anyway, without Lucifer Morningstar on baritone. You know he knows it.

If I was going to live a long life, like, vampire long, I would have time to go back and get the training I need to actually do something with voice. It’s not that I’m so great, it’s that I love being in a group. I will do a solo if someone asks me to, but I will not offer.

I am not a stereotypical soprano. I only compete with myself over my last performance, not with everyone else in the room. Believe it or not, I’ve listened to myself enough that I knew it was a bad note before you called attention to it, but it was so sweet of you to point it out just in case I’m a little slow on the uptake. Voice is an instrument, just like brass. Not every note is going to be perfect because it depends on so much more than your throat.

Singing is a full-body workout, and after a choir rehearsal, my core feels like I’ve been tied as tightly as an old sea salt twists his rope. It’s always my diaphragm. The only good part about knowing how to work your diaphragm is that you can stop your own hiccups…….. most of the time. But, training takes money.

Once I got vampire money, I’d pick a university and just park it. I could stay there a hundred years and still not learn everything. I’d start by finishing the coursework I’ve already started, then branch out. Maybe a second bachelor’s in music, but I doubt it. That part of my life is so long over that I really would be starting at zero again in terms of a professional career.

I’d probably read law, eventually. Lindsay and I were talking about that the other day, that sometimes I still feel the fire in the belly….. but what I’ve figured out is that I thought I was a bubbly personality and I am……… but not long enough to last an entire day in court. Repeatedly.

No, if I read law I’d still be in academia. There’s a lot you can do with a JD that doesn’t require taking the bar….. and I’d need a vampire’s lifetime to figure out where I’d want to live/work. Because after 200 years, DC might not be home. Who knows? What I do know is that I have no plans to relocate, not even out of this house, for now. I just mean that eventually, I’d like to see more of the world and write about it.

Doctor Who focuses on chance meetings with interesting people from the past. My thought is, “why not go meet them now, before all you have left is their work?” I can tell you the exact day I realized it- January 19th, 2019. On the 18th, Tony Mendez found out from the Publications Review Board at CIA that “The Moscow Rules” was approved and would be on shelves. He died the next day, before I got to meet him and believe me that is not the important part in the grand scheme of things- it just makes me sad.

I did try, but by the time I got here, he had stopped doing public appearances due to the Parkinson’s Disease. But meeting would have been good for both of us, according to Jonna, his widow. We’re not really friends, but we’ve talked to each other at The International Spy Museum a couple times and she’s read at least one entry here with her name in it and I cried when I got the note back- that she loved it, and that I was very perceptive about everything that was going on in the room.

Tony didn’t live as long as anyone would have wanted, so I wrote about being sad. It was a celebration of his last book, the last one I’d ever get. And, of course, that’s what makes Jonna’s next book so exciting. Only in Spy Dust did they really alternate chapters so that you could distinguish Jonna and Tony separately. “In True Face” is probably going to be my favorite book of them all because I love women that write about intelligence. Not that I don’t think Tony didn’t hang the moon.

I just want to know the woman he sat with while he was up there. She’s just as funny as he was, but different, I believe. She, in an interview, said that “she was a real hard-ass,” which means two things. The first is that CIA is a boys’ club, or it used to be when Jonna started….. and I want the tea if there’s any to sip. The second is that CIA is overwhelmingly geared toward women now, and the next cup would be how they got there. They’ve embraced female leadership at C/DIA in a way the that FBI just can’t handle. Thoughts and prayers.

So, their library is going to be read and reread by me long into the future, because I need female heroes. I need to see women succeeding because if I can’t reach that level of discourse myself, I would at least like to read about it.

I don’t know what Jonna’s famous line is, but John Le Carré’s was “I’m the only friend you’ve got.” That seems like tradecraft 101, but just like in music, spies have no accompaniment, and are completely exposed. Any flaw will show, because they’re hanging out on a ledge….. generally during a time where if you lose your footing, you aren’t exactly sure whether the person who helped you up is friend or foe.

In thinking about Rebecca, which I often do because the character is actually from a novel I started a long time ago, actually called -frog.- Gregory and Leila are also from that story, but not “Robert.” Robert is the new man in my life, for all practical intents and purposes, because once a character gets in, it’s hard to get them back out. Rebecca and Robert have been talking in my head all day long, and they need to go to bed.

Just not together.

Robert is a mixed bag. He talks tough. He’s a little boy. He knows Rebecca could end him, and that’s why he likes her. But Rebecca and Gregory are a solid item, and Robert is actually ace….. you just don’t see it because of his tough guy exterior. What man would admit that to a beautiful woman on first meeting? It’s all about representation. I picked up ace representation from TJ Klune, who is one of my favorite novelists and lives out in Fredericksburg, VA. So, it’s possible that he’ll do a book signing in DC eventually. I’d love to get an autograph on “Under the Whispering Door,” because I liked “House in the Cerulean Sea,” but I thought it couldn’t be topped.

I was wrong.

Under the Whispering Door is about death. Long lives, short lives, somewhere in between? It explores the great mystery……..

Surrounded by tea.

First and Second Chair

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?

The title is a music reference, because when you’re the lead trumpet player, depending on where you live it’s called “first chair” or “first desk.” Everyone has a chair, and they’re ranked. Yes, I have been as low as 7th chair. I wish I’d done better on that audition. But I was 7th in the city of Houston. Beat that with  stick.

I was also 13 years old.

I am not a prodigy. I make a lot of mistakes.  I’ve splatted wrong notes on the back walls of MOST Houston auditoriums, but a time I didn’t and it went really well, I was on a television show called “Black Voices.” I was a soloist during Summer Jazz Workshop. Didn’t make it less funny when I was on camera. I am just picturing all my black friends falling over with laughter right now. “You were on what now?” My favorite was the logo over my big ass glasses.

Another time it went really well was when I was in one of the jazz bands (I was in Jazz II. I told you I wasn’t a prodigy. But again, different playing field. You know who else was in Jazz II? Robert Glasper from “The Robert Glasper Experiment.” and Jon Durbin from “The Suffers.” If I’d stuck with it, maybe I’d have a Tiny Desk Concert of my own, but I sincerely, sincerely doubt it. I loved performance. I was unconvinced by hard work. It’s not because I didn’t want to do hard work. It’s that my embouchure was wrong (how you set your jaw and ilps), which made practicing for more than a half hour complete murder, and it’s good concerts don’t last that long because I’m not sure I would have made it through all of them, either. For that reason alone, symphony was wonderful for me because in general, trumpet parts in classical music alternate between resting for 200 measures and the most majestic clarion call you’ve ever heard. It feels like being a goalie when your team is superb.

Most of the time, everyone is on the other end of the pitch, but when it’s your turn, you come up BIG. You have to have enormous balls for classical music, because a random eighth note high A in the middle of nowhere and perplexingly alone is not uncommon. The other thing s that I could hit a high A out of nowhere, but it may wander a bit in pitch from left to right until I find dead center. In classical music, this is not an option. It must be crisp and clean, every note tapered. The hard work was never the notes, though. The hard work for me was in reading music the first time accurately, which takes thousands of hours to learn how to do.

I have never been so relieved in my life than when I went to a huge ass choir competition in high school. The sight reading portion was lifted straight out of the United Methodist Hymnal. It was the first time in my life I had “sight read” anything so perfectly. And no, I did not tell anyone…. no trumpet player (or soprano, for that matter) would tell you they had an edge at something. Trumpets are line cooks. Sopranos are line cooks with nail polish.

I got into choir the same way. I auditioned, and I got into the junior varsity choir. I asked the choir director, “are you sure? I’ve done major works at my church…. messiahs and requiems and all that stuff.” Believe me, questioning her was the hardest work I’ve ever done, but I came up big. She gives me this contemptuous look and throws a Handel at me. Hard. Then, she picks the most exposed, most difficult entrance she can find……………… FOR HER. Bitch, I earned this. She thought she was so clever, but I’d been in the adult choir for three or four years by this point. You know what you do EVERY SINGLE YEAR? The Messiah, or at least highlights. Few churches put on “the whole thing” (in quotes because even that is redacted most of the time by taking out optional sections. It’s long. It’s really, really long. And you do “The Hallelujah Chorus” occasionally at Easter as well. This was not a piece with which I was unfamiliar. I’d memorized the highlights by now…. and if I could explain my voice type, it would be “Charlotte Church as a teen.” My voice (and hers) has matured, but still what people at Bridgeport used to call my “high, high, fluty voice.” I drove that audition like I stole it, and I was the first person in the history of Clements to be in varsity band and choir at the same time.

I’ve just noticed I sound like an obnoxious dick. It goes with the territory, but I figure I can tell you I’m good at something when I’ve spent so much time telling you all the ways in which I need to get it together and how my life is an emotional dumpster fire of my own making a lot of the time.

Additionally, I gave up trumpet a long time ago. I’ve taken prescription meth for a very long time (Adderall or Concerta, depending on what release schedule we’re doing this month……… eyeroll……..), and it has been murder on my jaw and teeth, just like for junkies. Therefore, playing my horn is painful because of the sound vibrations. The fact that I don’t play anymore has not occurred to the rest of my personality, because I have turned ego up to eleven when I need it. The key words are “when I need it.” I don’t need to walk around DC feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof all the time. I’m sure that if I dressed like a baller I could walk into any meeting anywhere and fake it. You cannot convince me for love or money that I do not have the smarts to be a Rep or a Senator. Not possible anymore. But I have the mental acuity to do the job. I am woefully unelectable, mostly because I would hate every minute of campaigning. I would frustrate the fuck out of my support staff because my answer to every problem would just be “let’s skip it. There will be people there. ” But if I was in Congress doing the job, I’d be as diligent as ADHD allows you to be, and on my worst day I would wipe the floor with Y’all Queda. I’d probably be censured by my own party for my language, but nothing I said would be untrue. Congress has issues and they scare me. The legislation doesn’t matter right now. The people are sub-par, and that’s okay now.

Because of all of these experiences (except working in Congress. I was a political science student, so I know about working in that part of Washington, I just don’t.), writing sets me on fire. I’m old enough now that I really have stories. It’s age that gives me credibility now, because I don’t have letters to fall back on. Graduating from college has been a shit show because I am barely capable of working a full-time job and going to school. I should have stayed the extra year in Houston to finish up, but I had a partner with a very lucrative job offer who said “go to George Mason. it’s right across the road.” I didn’t even get a chance to enroll and register for classes before that deal fell apart.

Besides, I got my money’s worth, anyway. I wasn’t one of Brene Brown’s kids at Graduate School of Social Work, but she was one of mine when I was the supervisor of their computer lab. I actually got into the Graduate School of Social Work contingent upon my BA. I’d just helped the Dean figure out a very complicated computer issue and she was very grateful. But I didn’t get into GSSW based on that issue. It was based on the conversation I had with her while trying to fix it. I always chat about nothing because people have no idea what I’m doing. All they hear is “blah, blah, blah, I’m done.” So, we engage in small talk and she’s the Dean of the GSSW and I’m an INFJ. I didn’t get in because of what I do. I got in because of who I am.

The thing is, though, I’d forgotten all about it because all I heard from Kathleen was “blah, blah, blah let’s go to DC.” And if I had thought about it, it wouldn’t have changed my mind because unless I’m at my family’s house and never leave to do anything, Houston feels like a toxic mess. The only exception to this is that Lindsay still lives there and introverts don’t make friends. An extrovert adopts you and drags you into public.

That’s the hard work right there. Being industrious enough to make my own friends and get my own dates. It took a lot of courage to lay it all out in front of Zac and say “this is what I’m dealing with, are you in?” In fact he was. ❤ The added bonus is that Zac told me that he was military intelligence the second time I met him, but not the first. So, I actually was brave enough to get my own date that time and manifested a really great partner, because my interest in intelligence doesn’t come from him. It just provides us with “intelligent” conversation.

He doesn’t emotionally overload me and I don’t do it to him. That’s because I process like a lesbian all day and by the time it’s evening I do not give a fuck about my feelings. (I just laughed so hard I would have made Oliver jump straight in to the air if he was here.) Zac doesn’t hear my bullshit, because I don’t need him for that. In fact, it’s great when he opens up to me about his problems, because I’ve spent enough time on myself.

Editor’s Note: Straight women are crazy. Absolutely insane. Why do you not date bi men when you’re all over gay men like white on rice? I would bet A LOT of money that my boyfriend smells better than yours and I’ve never even met him. Remember when we used to have a special term just for straight men who bathed? Straight women worry a whole, whole lot when his ex is male. They can save a lot of time and energy by not doing that.

Also, I’m a good enough writer that I could have gotten into a GSSW anywhere. You see all the stream of consciousness crap, but I clean up nice. 😉  I sometimes feel bad that you’re getting the B-sides and rough drafts, but at the same time, this is the hard work (said in Kristen Bell’s voice). Blogging is writing as a valid art form. It is a lesliecology of brain droppings in which I can cherry pick the best lines I’ve come up with and use them elsewhere. So much of my writing comes from e-mail and Facebook comments because I’m reflecting on something that someone else said, or something I’ve written previously works even better in another context. Making the commitment to write every day without fail. I got up to 63 days before I broke my streak for one. This is because writing is a muscle. I will not be a good writer until I can write in any mood, in any situation, in any anything. Creativity is a grind, and I will not be where I want to be without woodshedding, a music term that extrapolates nicely here.

When you’re practicing, some parts of a piece are really easy. The notes, that is. You still have to craft a narrative and that’s where the work comes in. That being said, you have to be technically accurate before you can craft the narrative, so you isolate the four measures in which you’re really going to be screwed during a concert if you miss. In a symphony, you have moments where if you miss a note, it won’t be noticeable because there are 150 people playing next to you. At others, there are three. When you’re out there all by yourself, it is frankly really fucking scary. You learn to manage, but it doesn’t go away.

Through voice lessons, I’ve become a phenomenon with singing comparatively.

It’s not how good of a singer I am, it’s what a train wreck of a trumpet player I was. I mean, obviously, there are high points to when I was living that life, but I feel so much more at home in my body as a singer because apparently the large amount of metal in front of my face was blocking my talent.But now that I’ve worked really hard in all things, given my whole heart to everything and everyone I’ve ever loved, I only have one thing left to say.

I am fulfilled.

Second chair no longer exists.

A Lot More Than People Think

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What brings a tear of joy to your eye?

I cry a lot.

I’m the most tenderheart bear you will ever meet in your entire life if you could, because first of all most of you aren’t American, much less close enough to see me in real life. Secondly, I said I cried a lot. I didn’t say that anyone saw me do it.

To be honest, most of my tears fall when we’re talking, because your side of the conversation isn’t in the room.

I wasn’t always this way. I used to cry in front of people all the time… mostly because I’m a musician and there are certain chord structures that control my tear ducts. If a dissonance resolves by dropping the bass so that the resolution expands deep into your chest, my physical reaction often includes tears. If it is a choir singing a capella, I can pretty much guarantee it.

I have even fallen apart in rehearsal.

There is really nothing like a basso profundo standing behind you, projecting a low E into the center of your back. I’m a soprano, yet basses make me happy. There have been moments I’ve wanted to cry during a performance, and luckily not because it was a train wreck (usually). Sometimes, the beauty of a moment descends upon you and you really don’t have a choice.

I had a conductor speak to this once, and it changed my life by helping me put on a game face. When we (the choir) are singing, it’s not our job to have a reaction. It’s the audience’s turn to have a reaction.

After that, touching moments during a concert were not for me to enjoy. I hadn’t paid for a ticket.

Writing brings tears of joy as much as music does, because I’ve already said that I cry when I’m writing to you. But there are television writers that can flatten me way faster than I can destroy myself. I have cried at long distance commercials, Hallmark movies, and knives “made for my family by a Boston silver smith named Paul Revere.”

The tears of joy started falling while typing out the last line.

It’s Going to Be Okay…. Eventually

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Write an open letter to your 15-year-old self.

Sometimes you see a writing prompt and you know it’s going to hurt. I’m going to be blessing and releasing a lot of pain. It’s not going to be easy, but I hope it’s going to be worth it.

Dear Leslie,

You are my precious, precious child and I wish I could protect you. You’ll learn to protect yourself, but it will take so long you’ll lose hope. Just when you think it’s never coming back, you’ll find the woman of your dreams. It’s not what you think. She’s safe. Do not fear her. You’ll know her by her suits and crap for work. She will hug you so tight all your pieces will glue back together. Please don’t be too jaded to let her. There’s going to be a lot more pain before It Gets Better. Love her to the best of your ability- it’s for life if you can learn to be kind even under stress because sometimes………..

Things Fall Apart

You need to learn about the Civil Rights Movement. I know you know what it is, but dig deep. You’re already thinking big thoughts. You want to be the Martin Luther King, Jr. of pink people. In some ways, you already are- but in order to be great, you’re going to have to find a way to be strong. You already know this, but I’m not sure you know how much. Those big thoughts will never go away, and you have a stunning ability to write and speak in a way that people will listen. The hard part will never be getting others to believe in you. The hard part is getting you to believe in both of us.

I know you’re fragile and broken. I know you don’t recognize love unless it destroys you. Just keep writing to deal with pain, and start taking Tylenol before school. The one thing I can tell you about the future is that we find out Tylenol also dulls emotional pain. The next three years will be the hardest of your life so far, and I’ll be 46 soon if that’s any indication. You’re going to grow in so many ways, but everything you know right now is not everything I know, and I cannot change anything because you are a child. It’s not our call yet. I know you don’t feel like a child, haven’t for a long time. But Leslie, you are…. even if this letter doesn’t convince you.

I know it will be hard for you to accept it as reality, but it is true. It will be true for a long time, longer than you thought possible. Just hang in. I cannot give you anything more specific, because if you don’t go through the hard parts, you won’t get where I am now. It’s all going to be okay if you can learn to walk through fire.

You are capable of leading your people, but you need to protect your energy until it’s time to step off a ledge. You will feel in your bones when it is time to jump. You’re a superhero, but no capes. it is very good advice. Live in the now, darling. It will be Incredible, and you think that being Incredible will come later, and it will in some ways. In others, you’re already the bravest person I know.

Being “out” at school is one of the most courageous things you’ll ever do. You will not be at your schools long enough to see what you’ve done, but it matters. People still talk about it as if you’re some sort of hero…… and yet, you’re just trying to survive. Stop listening to her music so you can hear your own. If you work hard, you’ll be as good as she is. There is no doubt.

If you work harder, you’ll be even better. Maybe don’t go to PVA for trumpet next year. I think you’ll have more fun in choir. Just don’t be a soprano. Be an alto if you want to survive. I know you already know this, but it bears repeating. You will turn out to be a lyric soprano, but it’s not your personality. Just “cigar and vodka it down” (that was a joke). Your inner diva will come out regardless when the right teacher comes along. You’ll be able to sing to the heavens while you’re in hell.

I can picture you walking the halls of High School for Performing and Visual Arts with your Walkman, because Jason Moran said that you needed to listen to everything and he had a Walkman, too. But only you and I know that it’s not jazz on the tape. It’s her.

I know this is the biggest heartbreak you’ve ever had, and there will be so many more. Some will be older, some will be younger… but if you’re not careful with picking a partner (this is a future word you will like), you’ll be exactly where you are now. Jumping up and down for an approval that will never come because of what has happened over the last two years. This will happen over and over until your person arrives, and even then it won’t go all that great. Just keep hope alive. With enough courage, you’ll gain a lot of respect. It’s just that no one will tell you that until years later. You’re going to think people don’t care about you, when in reality you’re their hero.

I need you to do something for me. I need you to take better care of Lindsay.

This is critically important. Tell her you love her in both words and actions. Protect her while you still can, because later on it’s her turn and you won’t want to feel like you haven’t done enough. You just don’t know how she’ll save you, and if I could tell you I don’t think you’d recover from the happiness. Through her, you’ll get to tell Jimmy Carper about the clock radio under your pillow, the story every teen in Houston has for him.

I know you’ve harbored a lot of pain. This is one of the things that will go right. She’s the best thing about your life. I know you already love her. Make sure she knows it goes to 11. If all goes according to the same plan, you’ll look up to her. Literally. I’m sorry, but you’ve grown as much as you’re going to grow. You’re going to be in her shadow, but I also know that you already know that’s where you want to be. Her shadow is The Grand Prize Game.

You’re going to get the new bike, Archway cookies, the Bun bars, AND the photogirrafic pimento.

Spoilers. However, I cannot tell you how much joy will come out of your pain. It’s coming out right now in this letter. That’s because you’ll learn how to look over your life as I have, like you’re doing right now. It’s going to change your life. Lean in, and enjoy the ride.

You’re just not there yet, but already know you’re a disaster in the PVA hallway- a ticking time bomb that’s about to go off….. but I checked with me and it’s still okay for you to tell your nemesis to go to hell. Remember that nemesis rhymes with emesis. Do with that what you will.

You’re going to vomit up emotions until you’re dry heaving, and then you’ll keep on doing it because you don’t know how to stop. You already have a good friend, though. Dianne is safe. You’ll love her more as the years go by, and realize you were on the wrong track. The extra N means that she is a better person, even if you can’t imagine that’s true.

She’ll pick you up in her little green Volvo and it will change your life, in what you think are small ways, but here is the secret to life. The small things are the big things……. because she knows what you refuse to acknowledge at home- and think you’re hiding at church. She will hear the distress in your voice when no one else does. Love her to the moon and back. Love her until you think you just can’t and then love her a little more. She sees you, Leslie.

Look for the people who see you. Always. I give you permission to walk away from anyone. Protect yourself, but not so much you can’t receive love.

If you keep that in your mind and keep writing, you will go places and see things you never thought you could. You’ll meet people that define you, because you’ll love yourself when you’re with them. Cut yourself some slack. You’re a pretty great kid. It’s okay to love yourself, too….. even when it seems selfish.

The only thing I would suggest is that when Dana invites you for Easter dinner, go.

Love,

Me

She Stopped the Tape

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a positive thing a family member has done for you.

Bryn stopped the tape that I was worth nothing.

She didn’t do it with her words, although she did that, too. It was more than that. She told me I had something to say, and is perfectly fine with me going big or going home. We have had so many moments of just going home, my favorite thing in life. I was kidding her the other day that I loved being at her house, because I spend a lot of time there on Facebook Messenger video calls that are inordinately long because we’re both talkers (to each other, not so much in a crowd), and we don’t discuss people so much as concepts.

The biggest is that if you experience childhood trauma, and ours comes from many different sources, you are navigating the world with third degree burns and it changes everything around you. This is not a slam on either one of my parents, because my childhood trauma is not rooted in them, but in coming out privately at 13 and publicly just before I was 15. Coming out privately was the wrong tack, because I trusted the wrong person. It went from something sweet to a disaster very, very quickly.

This is because I lost myself in that relationship.

Like a lot of other women, I would imagine. She was a singer, and everyone was awed by her voice and treated her with that reverence all the time. Who even was I next to all that? Yes, she was gorgeous and I noticed. The problem came in where I was never sure whether she noticed or not. I feel like she noticed all of it, and before we could even have that conversation in an open and honest way, she’d already done things by inference that would have made being honest feel like a lie.

If you know, you know. She treats every friend like that. I was just the youngest. She has a tape in her that says you can’t be intimate with someone unless you’re romantic with them. And, of course, she’s never told me any of this, I’ve just watched it for decades. THAT’s why I freaked out at being told I was a woman she’d like to know.

Moving to Portland was enlightening as I watched several adults go through the same spectrum of emotions I did starting three months before I turned 13. In the very beginning, love was the type of excitement I felt at seeing my parents after a long day at school. Within a year, my hormones had kicked in, and at that moment, she moved away. Back then, Dallas and Portland were both long-distance calls. So I’d sneak off to talk to her when my parents weren’t looking and became the girl that sat by the mailbox, because if I didn’t and something came for me, my mother would confiscate it. Looking back, this is exactly what she should have done. I am just not the sort of person that backs away from large emotions, and the tape within me was “she needs me.”

In that time and in that place, I can believe it was true. I would like to believe that she couldn’t be honest with anyone else, because in order to function, she had to be her singer personality all the time. She didn’t want anyone to know her problems, either, because I was also very quiet about my struggle with being queer at all, much less a relationship with this woman on top of it.

I remember one friend being completely objective and shooting the shit out of all my assumptions, likening it to battered wife syndrome because there’s no way in hell I should have been responsible for being the keeper of those secrets at 14. I don’t keep them now. I will talk about what it was like, but only with Bryn, because she was there. It means a lot to me that someone who knows me that intimately is now my biggest cheerleader.

What Dana (ex-wife, beloved in my memory, no chance we’ll reconcile for those just joining us) failed to understand was why she couldn’t help me. She’d been roped into those people and that situation for as long as she’d known me. I never would have believed it was emotional abuse coming from her because to me, she had just picked a side, like everyone else when I started talking about what happened. I feel like she played all 90 minutes, but the score was equal until someone objective who didn’t know anyone in the situation at all won it for us on a penalty kick. I would have run from anyone who looked at the situation in a subjective manner, and we lived in the same house.

I know it was devastating for her that I believed someone else so easily, and you can’t imagine how much empathy I had for that. At the same time, I had never backed away from the situation so hardcore that I could look at what happened as it being in the past. I couldn’t be objective about any of our friends, including the women that came after me in the bubble that felt illicit. Her behavior didn’t stop, she just changed people, either dumping them so that they felt like they lost everything because they’d become just as suckered in as me…. or walking away when they realized their own sanity was being tested.

It surprised me when I laid all this out that people believed her charming, lovebombing personality and chose to ignore what had happened not only to me, but to their other friends. They watched all the fallout from every relationship this woman torched, and were so eager to be the chosen one that my words didn’t even matter. It wasn’t that I was right, it was that I couldn’t hack it. There was nothing wrong with what she was doing, there was a failure in me emotionally.

I could never explain to people who weren’t really listening that I’d been watching her do this to people since before I turned 13. That I knew what she was doing to her friends from decades of experience watching her do it. That me coming to Portland was the last thing that happened, not the first thing I saw.

The most fucked up thing ever is that she would do this in the congregation in her partner’s church, energies changing all the time between friends so that no one could ever be objective about anything. The more rocky it got, the more she asked of the church, like making her Minister of Music instead of the choir director when no pastoral care ever came from her at all. She was not the kind of person that cared about anyone else’s feelings. She was the type of person that wanted to put on a show about how much she cared. If the person that needed something wasn’t in her direct circle, their needs went unmet. I didn’t realize the extent of the show until it happened to me.

We stopped talking about anything important. She’d dumped me long ago because of course, she never did anything wrong. I was a problem. The biggest sleight of hand that she ever pulled was twofold. The first was when I went and told her about a conversation that I’d had with her friends where I was FNG (fucking new guy). They were very protective of her, and it devolved into them trying to prove to me that they knew her better than I did. That was a game I didn’t want to play, because the way I would “win” wouldn’t look good and would only anger them more. So, again, I told her about this because it was hurting me.

Then, several days later her partner confronted me and told me that she’d said that I was starting fights with her friends and she didn’t want to see that out of me anymore. So, I just took on all the emotions of these women who didn’t have a fucking clue and I was the bad guy, even though it was a game in which I’d already tapped out. I was done.

Then, years later, she picked me as a soloist for a requiem we were doing with a community orchestra. It was a big damn deal, my first time on a fairly large stage. She waited until dress rehearsal to have her moment in which she said that I was the closest thing she’d ever had to a daughter, and hearing me sing was like watching her little girl grow up… when that relationship had been gone for both of us from the moment I bothered to call her on her bullshit. Because no one does that. Ever.

I am sure that people believed the show, and I wasn’t going to embarrass her in front of everyone. I was just trapped in utter and complete bullshit…. which is why I married Dana and didn’t even bother telling her. I wanted to destroy her dreams of doing the same thing to me at my wedding…. which Dana and I never had. We got all the paperwork done and would have probably gotten married at Episcopal Church of the Epiphany if we’d put any effort into doing such a thing. I remember Dana asking her priest if we could get married there, and our priest asking us how long we’d been together. Dana said, “seven years,” and our priest said, “so it’s serious.” But laughing about it was as far as we got.

This is because by that time, I was vomiting up emotions I’d been keeping hidden for years on end. I was not very lovable at this point, which is why memories of Dana are so precious to me. Even when I was at my worst, she tried so hard. Because our relationship heated up to a physical fight, I knew I could never in a million years go back. But I don’t mistake the part for the whole, either.

During that time in my life, I was screwed up with love. It was coming at me from two directions, hers and the woman who gave me back to myself. Because I was close to both of them, I felt the pull between them all of the time, because I wanted to give them both everything in the world and it was hard to navigate.

I fell in love with honesty on both sides. It’s just that PK girl wasn’t gay and it quickly turned into a clusterfuck. In what world would I not fall for a white knight who loved me to the very best of her ability, even when I was completely unlovable? Love for her didn’t come out of nowhere. At that point, I hadn’t even really seen many pictures of her, so I knew at that point that I would take the whole package, sight unseen.

I had a keen awareness that it was never going to happen, but that didn’t stop those feelings from coming. I never wanted to act in a way that would alienate anyone, but I lost who I was and did, anyway… in a pattern that should seem familiar by now. I was tasked with turning off that trauma reflex, that I would live with unrequited love forever.

Putting on my big girl pants and acknowledging it was the height of my stupidity, but in retrospect I didn’t need her response. I could have gone a lifetime without knowing what would have happened. It was way more about me, and how I wanted to be different than the woman who abused me. To say open and honestly I have these feelings and I don’t know what to do with them, rather than roping her into a game she didn’t want to play. I asked for patience from her and Dana, and I got it up and to a point.

Dana’s patience with me ran out, and in some sense, I applaud her for that. Letting me deal with my shit on my own was the right answer. I wish that our relationship hadn’t ended the way it did, because I am back to my old self and have been for years. I wish she could see who I am now instead of who I was then, lost and confused.

“Lost and confused” had its limits, though. I was never jealous of the men in PK girl’s life. I wanted her to be all of her, and me to be all of me. Then I stepped over the line and our relationship crashed and burned…. but not entirely. It just became a shadow of itself, when I wanted there to be a time when I was her white knight as well.

The only thing I could do was close the door on both relationships, because at that point, there was no going back. It was just moving forward, acknowledging that I’d been an asshole but that I wasn’t one. That it was my behavior in the moment, not the sum total of who I was.

The reason the second relationship was so painful is that PK girl saw it, too, that it wasn’t the sum total of my being. That she wouldn’t hold me to my worst mistake….. sometimes. At others, her anger showed toward me in full force because she would skip over all the parts where I showed her I loved her the way she loved me, and go for the jugular.

I had to stop that pattern as well, because I tried to let her know how I felt so we could move past all that, and it was not well-received.

I chose to focus on the family member who knew everything PK girl did, but could hear things like “I think this could become trouble. What do you want to do about it?” And maybe it’s just that my tone of voice seems so different with Bryn and not my actual words, because I don’t think I’ve consciously been a different person with anyone. I’m just me.

So now we’re the lockboxes for each other and it feels right, because we both struggle with the same “stuff” left over from childhood. It’s just that I can’t tell her story for her and she’s a tremendous writer.

But make no mistake. She knows what you did. 😛

…..and the tape has stopped recording.

The Big Yellow House, Part Two: Prologue

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In part one, we explored the first people I met when I came to Oregon and told their story. We started at The Little Grey House and ended at The Church That Used to Have Green Carpet. There is a prologue to The Little Grey House that starts in The Austin Stone Cathedral, and predates The Big Yellow House by about 12 years. If you think I don’t know what I’m risking with this subject matter, I’ve already talked it out. The people in the story outside the real issue would never know or even remember everything that happened in those 12 years, because only Bryn is close enough to me to have watched me since 1997, and there are a couple of people who remember from 1990, but I would never trust them and talk about it. The conversation would mostly consist of tears and guilt because I knew they were right and I didn’t care. The big secret of childhood abuse is that we crave it. We hate ourselves because abuse makes us feel so good (physically) until the lovebombing stops. With a narcissist, it generally comes pretty quickly after they realize they can control you easily and well.

In 1997, Bryn’s big brother Matthew was 16 (which I only remember because I was impressed he could drive… I was terrible at it and still am), Bryn must have been in the neighborhood of 14, which would have made younger sister Christy about 11? 12? I don’t remember the kids’ ages in score order, but I do remember each and every way they’ve enriched my life… and every sin I committed out of idiocy or malice or both.

In retrospect, the dark and the light combine into an amazing tapestry, because we were all loved by their parents. The fact that I wasn’t actually born to them is something that none of us have ever noticed, although I did date Matthew for a few months and that was confusing for all of us. Mostly because it was the first time I’d ever been attracted enough to want to date a boy as an adult. However, I will tell you that my experience with having a 7th and 8th grade boyfriend prepared me for some of it. This is only to say that at the time, bisexuality was not as understood by straights who are not okay and queers who aren’t doing any better. If you’re bi, you get it from all sides. No wonder I chose one too early. The two women I’ve mentioned previously took care of my magical thinking on that one. Once you’ve had sex with women, there’s no going back. It changes you. The way the abuse hurt still is that Alpha abuser thought it was a cute quirk and not real. She blabbed to all her friends about me when I wasn’t sure I wanted anything known about me. She knew this. I know she did. She just didn’t think. Now those friends have participated in my sex life as well, because they thought it was funny.

It was about March of 2003 or 4 (I’ve slept since then) that I had a pregnancy scare. It was devastating and exciting, but only a scare because I had no idea where I was in my cycle and whether it was even a real thing. I took a pill anyway, just to be safe. However, the reason I took the pill is that I didn’t want there to be any chance of me being a single mom. I asked Matt to be the boyfriend, and he turned me down, but very sweetly. He said that he didn’t think he was capable of being the boyfriend. I went on to meet someone else and so did he. It was not an ending, but a blessing and releasing.

Also, men are terrible. 😉

Luckily, I never had any of those hang-ups, because men relate to me in a different way. I’m sure that will change if I become another man’s wife, because me being married to a woman shut down their defenses. Most of my male friends are tenderheart bears who would die rather than show it. I know things about them that their wives never will, and it’s because friendship deserves secrecy. I treat all conversations as confessionals so it’s not weird for them to say they hate being married or WTF ever. The things you say to your friends to handle being married… The things you say to a woman who loves you but is not in love with you… The things I say to remind them of that fact. You’re not done, you’re just frustrated. Here’s how I fixed that issue in my own marriage. See if it works for you. No refunds.

Sometimes I’m wrong. Sometimes it’s “we’ve been talking more in the last two days than we have in the last two years.” After being married for almost eight years, there’s virtually no problem I haven’t dealt with (whether it’s good or bad). I also have excellent recall of those years, so anyone who comes to me and asks for my opinion will get one already fully formed.

The most consistent problem across sexual orientation and gender is communication. Mostly “they don’t treat me the same at home as they do in public.” We’re all guilty of curating our marriages, but it’s dangerous to do that too much.

I have lived in too many fantasies to think that’s untrue. I have loved the curated versions of several people, none more than the first and the last. The first created a Beautiful Memory Picture. The second one took the picture and destroyed it right in front of my eyes. What she did differently is not allow me to live in that bubble. To date, she is the best interrupter of my life. It sounds like a dig, but she uses my ADHD like a superpower. She knows I’m listening, and to turn my attention to something else is a blessing. Just like with everyone else, sometimes I do focus on her minutiae. But it’s not because I’m in love with her. It’s just because I love her. Alpha pretended, and the fantasy lasted as long for her as it did for me.

Here are two differences between real vs. pretend:

  1. Alpha presented as having feelings. She does not. She knows how to imitate feelings. Omega started with a truthbomb and has never wavered because of them. Her behavior and her words match. I have a PowerPoint presentation complete with annotated bibliography (my diaries and letters of the time, all gone now but the words are still in my mind) on how to love both of them. What I did not know was that Alpha was going to destroy me and Omega is still destroying me. One put in flashbacks and triggers. One is taking them out and looking at them with me, setting fires with a blowtorch and gasoline so that I can function again.
  2. Alpha’s friendship started with Schrodinger’s Seduction. I can get her to do whatever I want if I install the trigger that I’m the only one that can meet her needs. That my parents were sus. Omega’s friendship was never dependent on that because she’s not looking for it. Her clinical separation with the way I could fall for Alpha (I thought it was real due to context clues and not her actual words). We were both musicians, both singers, kindred spirits. The problem was that she blamed me for years over a trigger she installed. Omega will have her ass for it if she ever meets her.

It’s good to know a dragon in human form, especially when she lets me hold onto her tail. My hand fits firmly in her claws, which she uses to massage my head when I’m sad or angry. It helps, even in fiction. My ride or die is a muscle mass of fury, and I need it. Her “lead the charge into hell” attitude has saved me from so much trauma because I listen to her and parrot her opinions on a number of subjects, most of them about me.

We are both better people than we think we are. We both tend to give an enormous amount of love without receiving it, even though it is given freely. As I mentioned, if I pick up her coffee, she’ll turn around and do it for me. When it’s something special, she’ll buy me a book she loved and wants to share. She really listens, and picks winners. Everything from Stanley Tucci to Deborah Harkness to Karin Slaughter. We also talk other media, and she’s only given one recommendation that I liked and didn’t love. I was in a bad place when I saw it, and it scared me. I just couldn’t tell her why.

I’d started hanging out at the Spy Museum, practically living there when I had a membership because I was so dedicated to studying the world of intelligence. I am less interested in writing a novel about spies and being able to use that library of images correctly. As a result, I met regular people who used to be spies. The “regular people” put me through the ringer in terms of thinking about what it might be like to actually live that life. I’d love the travel and the worldview. I think if you’re CIA you become a citizen of the world… because maybe your job is at Langley, and maybe it’s in Kandahar with terrorists or drug runners at the Texas border. CIA charter says that they only work overseas, that anything happening is the United States is FBI. The crossover comes in with things like 9/11, where enemy combatants from other countries were arriving here.

My clinical separation was non-existent at that point. I was thinking about these friends being in danger, and the show she recommended was basically as close to a procedural as you’ll get from any US Intelligence Agency. It was called “The Enemy Within.” It didn’t deserve to get canceled, because it was brilliant. I will probably borrow structure from it at some point.

What wasn’t brilliant was all of the actors appearing as my friends if I picked up that telescope. I was zooming in on the feeling that being a spy is not all it’s cracked up to be. You have to lie a lot by necessity, and you have to worry about your personal and professional lives colliding in a very, very bad way. It is not for the faint of heart, and I could have done it given my experience with Alpha. If I was in operations though, I don’t think I would have stayed long. Living that way over time wears you down. I think I would have been very happy as a Feeb, and might check on their psychological requirements. Here’s why. What bothers me the most about military and intelligence is that there’s a very real chance they’re going to die. Most of the time, with intelligence the chances are a million to one. Sometimes they’re not. If you’re in the Armed Services, the percentage of death jumps by a large margin. Spies are able to live in the shadows, but are sometimes also forward deployed. And then you have DIA, which is basically CIA except you’re in the military. And that’s where I think about dying far away from home, like Daniel almost did… and an unlikely hero of mine, Harry Windsor. It was alarming how much I freaked out when I realized that the prince was in Kandahar at the exact same time as Daniel. Both of them could have died because of a terrorist.

I could have been there because I had to cut off my emotions to survive abuse. I could have been a spy because my reality cracked in childhood. I would have been very good. It makes me feel like a monster that I know how to get what I want from nearly anyone as long as I ask it the right way, and I am well practiced in making an ask………………………..

Two things about that. I don’t want a compartmentalized life, even if it comes with trips to amazing places. I also don’t want to be cut off from my emotions, because thinking about all my secrets and lies would undo me pretty quickly.

In short, I want to forget about Alpha, because imitating the way she makes every relationship transactional and tells you she loves you every single day without being willing to do even the smallest thing is toxic. I would not want to be that person, and yet I do have those tendencies. It’s why I work so hard on my relationship with Omega. I need a friendship that is rock solid and real. That if I fall, I will hit the ground. Nothing is bottomless or worth despair over when it was. That’s because Lindsay (younger sister) doesn’t even remember what she looks like. Why should I remember all this? It’s inspiring that I may get there one day.

I would still apologize and regret if I hadn’t figured out that the relationship was a fantasy on both our parts. The story I was telling myself is that I mattered to her. The story she was telling herself is that she was the perfect mothermentorsisterfriend and I was just bipolar and acting out. She used my diagnosis effectively in the destruction of our relationship, and I won’t forget that, either. I thought she was being abused, I wasn’t crazy. I thought she’d signed up for a lifetime of being railroaded into the ground, because patterns don’t come from nowhere. She has convinced a lot of people that she’s been amazing to me, probably hoping to make me look like an ungrateful spoiled brat because she’s “given me so much.”

She loved me when it was convenient for her (read: when she needed something from me; transactional). Her other friends were blind to this fact, and she thought nothing of telling me that she’d made one friend her “pet person.”

Gross.

I’m not trying to tell her story at all. I am saying that in that moment, I figured out what was being done to me, what had been done starting a few months before I turned 13. I don’t think she ever did something like this to other young girls, but I’ve seen the pattern play out with more women than I can count. The one woman before me who was brave enough to call her on it also got dumped as the friend because obviously she was crazy. If you talk to Alpha, she has never done anything wrong in the history of either relationship, and if she has said the opposite, she said it because you had something she wanted.

If her dopamine levels are low, she’ll get a hit any way she can… and in my case, it was reaching out for adoration because she knew I’d never say anything negative. Then, I got mad. So I was discarded for telling the truth and now some of my former friends think that I am mentally ill. It’s true, but not about this. Some of those triggers helped to set up my valley of vulnerability, but no one remembers that, either.

Her reality cracked, and then mine because of it.

In this case, correlation provides all of its causation, but no one looks at it except me in any regular sense. Everyone else has moved on, because she has. Here’s the thing, though. As fake as she was, she also never would have left me. If there is someone on earth that she genuinely loves, it’s me. This is because life hadn’t hit her too hard when we met. I slid in under the wire and disarmed the bomb. My ire is directed at how love was presented. Being seductive while she told me we were family and then treating me like she didn’t know what the hell was happening “must have been confusing and upsetting to you.”

Must have been? No. I deal with all this every day. Every time I talk. Every time I sigh, every time I am looking in the mirror and one of her facial expressions appears. That is the one true fact that I know people can remember. My impersonation is dead accurate.

That’s because I curated it.

Long before we ever went to the The Big Yellow House, love was based on what I could do for her, and not what she could do for me. I would not believe that had I not spent 23 years in the trap.

I said that I was going to borrow structure from Wicked, and that Alpha might not even appear in the series because I wanted to focus on my friends other than her that came to me through the relationship. Then, I realized it was unfair to throw everything out there, only telling one side of the story.

I decided to say explicitly why it was hard, because no one recognized it back then. I was 19, but arrested at 14. Then, when the trauma started resolving, I had to develop coping mechanisms. For me, it’s writing- the lead the charge into hell that Omega exhibits comes in handy when I realize “now is the time I should unleash holy hell because I’m right.” I am being a judgmental bastard right now because here’s what happened.

When I was 36, the relationship ended for good. I was too upset that not only had Alpha done this to me, she had the audacity to tell people that she just didn’t understand why I was so obsessed with her. It’s because she put every single problem we ever had on me, particularly why it was wrong for me to be in love with her because she was an adult and I wasn’t.

…….without ever taking in that I was following her lead, just like in everything else.

The exact reason I went to The Big Yellow House in the first place and even have all these memories. To that I can attribute gratitude. The rest combined malice with idiocy depending on the day. I was sat there listening for days.

It’s just that for me, there are some core memories that are damaged from certain things that have been said or done. For me, it was one of the worst days of my life. For her, it was Wednesday.

Nothing You Could Say Could Tear Me Away

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been waiting for seven years to say that I’ve met someone and not have it be an April Fool’s joke or clickbait.

Today is that day.

I can’t tell you much about her because she’s a mom. Her kids know she’s dating someone, but not who it is. It’s too early for them to meet me, but acceptable for them to know that if their favorite sci-fi novels are missing, they haven’t been stolen. I hope they know what their mother has done having told me I could read anything I want. 😛

Editor’s Note: This week I borrowed “out of my mind,” by Sharon M. Draper. It’s about an 11 year old girl who has a photographic memory and is trapped inside her body. She can see everything, but she can’t tell anyone about it because she can’t write. She finally gets a voice, and not everyone is eager to listen.

I can give you details that have nothing to do with my girl’s current life, though.

She has a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Vocal Performance. When she’d gotten those done, she auditioned for one of the specialized choirs in the Army, and got a secured chair as an alto before she shipped off for basic training. After she retired from the Army, she directed church choirs for a while, then reinvented herself yet again. I absolutely wouldn’t tell you what that was, anyway, because it tends to make people ask her for things as if her time doesn’t cost money.

One of the things I truly love about my girl is that she reminds me of so many people I’ve loved over the years…. The professional musicians that raised me, including my biological parents, teachers at Clifton, HSPVA, Clements, private instructors in trumpet and voice, beloved choir directors, et al. are the lights that shine behind her, strengthening our connection with shared language. She’s also from New Jersey, not Texas, so she doesn’t remind me of any one musician from my past, or any of them if we’re strictly talking personality. The Texan church musician is an archetype all its own, can I get an “amen?”

And now you’re going to ask if her voice makes me cry, and I’m going to have to decide between snarky comeback and my vulnerable truth. I’m going to go with it.

The truth is that even when she’s just driving and singing absentmindedly, my heart flips. If I was sitting in the audience of one of her performances, forget about it… I’d be gone. She’s got the kind of heart that I know she’d be singing to me no matter how many people paid to be on the front row. What really makes my heart clench is singing together…… You can coax me into crying with that mental picture almost a hundred percent of the time.

But that doesn’t stop her from giving me shit about being a soprano and a trumpet player, and I love every second of it. Because she’s a choir director, she already knows all the inside jokes that are going to make me laugh, especially because her field choir traveled with a band and that rivalry never goes away. For instance, a lot of her friends have gone from the Army Field Band to professional work all over Washington and Baltimore. I am only one degree from Marin Alsop now, and I will not tell you anything about those conversations. I will only say that no matter what I’ve heard, it’s trivial. I’ve heard it all in my own musical life. I still want to see Alsop conduct. Whether she’s Jesus incarnate or Lucifer, every time she gets excited and does that little Bernstein hop, I’m drooling like a computer programmer at a Star Trek convention.

Here’s the best inside joke according to me:

My Girl: Voice is the superior instrument with choral music being perfection.

Me: Back the fuck up, Wilhousky.

Here’s why it’s an inside joke. Peter Wilhousky wrote one of the most famous, glorious arrangements of the Battle Hymn of the Republic I’ve ever heard in my life. My choir director at church from seventh grade to ninth loved it, so I’ve known every note to the soprano, first trumpet, alto, and second trumpet part since before I could type. I have also dabbled in first tenor because I will never drop out of the the a capella section in rehearsal. It’s just too chewy.

One of the first things I asked her was, “since you were in the military, just how many times have you done the Wilhousky arrangement?” She said, “a million, and I’m not even exaggerating.” One of the reasons I like it so much is that whether I was singing or playing, it was so damn fun.

My girl and I have other things besides music and the full on church experience regarding how the sausage is made, but I feel they might be too identifying, and thus, too private for now. But if we stay together long term, I’m sure more details will be allowed to creep out. I know we’ll be having discussions about how much I can say and when, and later on if things go really well, asking the kids themselves how much they want said about them because they’re teenagers. They can make up their own minds. I would also rather sign up for shock therapy treatment than become, for lack of a better term, a “mommy blogger.”

I’ll tell you right now, though, one of the kids and I are obsessed with the same thing. I’m not aiming to be a parent. The kids already have two parents. However, if neither of them are as into this shared thing as me and the shorty, it’s on like Donkey Kong. I tease my girl about it all the time…. I get fake disgusted with her assessment of something in said activity and say things like, “if I ever meet your kid, I’m going to assure them you’re only there to hold my bag and my water.” Teasing that hopefully never even gets close to the line of actually hurting is our thing.

This is the first potentially serious relationship I’ve ever been in where we’re not thinking about having kids. She has kids already. So, time is deliciously limited and every moment counts. It’s a little bit tricky because even though we don’t live that far from each other, it’s not really close enough to meet up on a whim. This is because I live in Maryland, a few miles further northwest than the line between Maryland and The District, still inside the beltway of the city. She lives in a suburb of Baltimore that’s closer to BWI, only 30 minutes from my house by car but two completely separate transit systems. The closest I can get is taking the bus to the Metro station and getting on the MARC train, with either my girl picking me up at the airport station (which thankfully, is very close to her house), or a quick Uber ride to get myself there if she’s tied up at work or something.

I downloaded the public transit app for Baltimore and added one ticket to BWI and a funds card with a few dollars on it. It’s for both of us. I can escape if something goes wrong and I just don’t feel like talking about it right that moment, and if nothing ever goes wrong, it’s just handy to be self-reliant. I’ve also watched too many couples break up because one person always has to do the driving… or if that wasn’t the main problem, it certainly didn’t help anything.

It’s something of which I’m aware, but I’m not as panicked as I would be if I lived in Houston. Now, I don’t have to be reliant on my girl to get me anywhere in either city/suburb. Any time she wants to pick me up to save me time or to spend more time together, it’s welcome and I am always grateful. I just don’t want to feel like a big issue later on…. Driving is one of those things that’s irritating enough if you’re rarely the driver… more so if you’re the only one who does it. When the honeymoon period wears off it’s generally the first knock-down drag-out fight.

Only one piece of the puzzle is left, and that won’t get solved until we decide to get really serious. If I move to the same city or the same house, we’ll gain the ability to do one more thing that we don’t have now…. being able to call each other up and say “I’m going to the pub with the crew. Meet us in 20.” It’s still possible if plans are made early enough in the day, but right now I’m at door to door in somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours. Her town is small enough that I could walk to a pub in 20 minutes if I was local. As long as I stay put, though, 90 minutes to two hours door to door is much faster than I could do it by car, because between traffic and construction there’s no time of day where it takes dramatically less time than others.

It’s so easy that next time my girl might not want to drive here, either. Our friends in Silver Spring would haul us around or we could Uber. So much better than sitting in traffic and driving. It’s sitting in traffic, reading and cuddling. The reason it’s not sustainable as a solution is that if we’re a committed couple, I would lose my mind getting to her or the kids if there was an emergency. Anything less than immediately is unacceptable. “Less than two hours” might fly in a long distance dating situation, but in a partnership is cruel to everyone. Being reliable is important to me.

For now, it’s a delicious thing to will time to stand still; things can progress slowly… I can take things out, try them on, think about them until they’re not foreign anymore. My girl and I can create a private bubble of writing to each other and dates where we really get to know each other with more senses than just reading words on an electronic page. If we’re playing for keeps, we need to be a team, starting with learning how the other one communicates.

I find that I communicate best in writing, especially when I have to say something hard. I can take as long as I need to flip out about it, and then calmly craft a response. My emotions are enormous. Most people don’t deserve my kneejerk reaction. They deserve my response after I’ve walked off and written about it. Just one of the things that lets me be an INFJ on my own without scaring the bejesus out of anyone… and then when I get to the part where I need to say something out loud, I’m confident because I’ve worked it out on my own. I simply need input. If my girl feels strongly about something, my own conclusions need to change. If we’re chatting about it online, I have two things. The first is the ability to copy and paste my thoughts into a letter. The second is that a moment expands when I read about it later…. and in a much more beautiful way than if I just tried to think about the conversation and remember it that way. That’s like trying to read a series of novels and then being tested on which events happened in which book.

I love going back over our conversations and rereading, because different things jump out at me than they did the first time, because I’ve walked away and am looking at it from a different perspective than I was even ten minutes ago.

There’s another advantage to rereading our conversations, and it’s invaluable. Because I’m rereading our conversations and replying to things as they come up, it’s like conflict repellant, and every bit as effective as bug spray. One of my triggers is having someone tell me that my perceptions aren’t accurate. I spent so many years doubting my own perceptions and instincts when I am actually extremely astute. Not much gets by me, and doubting my abilities as a visionary and truth teller when I can bring the receipts is a flat out rejection…. yet another reason why it’s taken me so long to open myself up to a romantic situation.

Only once has this happened, but I went on a date several years ago with a woman who’d gotten the URL for this web site from my OK Cupid profile. Then, she asked me out for coffee. When I accepted, she turned out to be a drooling fangirl who wanted me to be the voice I am here. It’s something that doesn’t seem like it would be problematic. This web site is me. I am this web site. Here’s the rub. At no time during that conversation was I ever allowed to deviate from anything I’ve already written, as if writers are never allowed to change their minds. Particularly with bloggers, entries are just verbal pictures, not even videos. It’s 2D with a timestamp. She’d quote me to me and then accuse me of lying, even if it was 2016 (or whatever, I don’t even remember that much- just that it was before my mother died) and the entry was from 2014. It made me express something verbally that I’ve always known with my other senses. I love respect. I hate fame.

Blogging is a stream of consciousness first draft in which I’ve given myself permission to write absolute shit. This is nothing compared to the heights I can reach with research and dedication. In some ways, I should never have become a blogger in the first place. I laid out every problem I had, including my struggles with mental illness, in hopes of “leading from the back.” Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen, et cetera.

The pro was that people I didn’t know flocked here because I was saying things that connected. Those closest to me started trying to judge the stability of my mental health by my silly observations. I have the same relationship with my blog that I do with preaching in public. I can lead one person or a million, but not two…. as in, it’s very easy to talk to people I don’t know. People I do know tend to think that they are excellent detectives. Not once have they ever been right. They are right that occasionally I do spiral out, and as bad as they think. But not when.

The difference in my writing voice is not mania vs. depression. It’s “in the creative zone” vs. “I haven’t written in X number of days and I am itching to get everything out.” The other differences that are seen as lies are actually easily explained without being excused. I can only write one line at a time. My mind is a multi-core processor. Every time I tell a story, it includes thoughts from all the cores and not just the one I was using at the time the story was originally written. My details don’t get larger or smaller. They just get more dense…. or in layman’s terms, “I can bring the receipts. I don’t just make shit up.” Well, unless I’m preaching. One of the funniest things my little sister has ever said was “DAaad? Wassat true, or were you just preachin?'”

Returning to this moment, it’s foreign to me that someone wants to date me… will hold my hand walking down the street, will give me quick kisses and put her arm around me as if we’ve known each other our whole lives. It’s been 10 or 11 days. Nothing is being rushed about our relationship. It cannot be for all our sakes. We’re not thinking for two, exactly. Well, we are, but it’s not the two of us. I have an activity to do and she has a bag and a water to hold.

I’ve thought about kids two other times in my life, and shut the door permanently. I can’t remember what year it was that Dana and I went to the OB/GYN to check and see if we were good to go, but I was much younger then……. even still, it would have been a geriatric pregnancy. I am almost positive that if I had to make a choice between getting an abortion and having a child would be torture, because some kind of trauma was probably involved. I’ve also wanted a child since before my mother died, but I know my biological child would look like her even if the biological father didn’t. The flip side of the coin is that I would be much crazier than advertised if I decided to carry the pregnancy to term. I already have to choose between physically and mentally sick (physical drug side effects). A pregnancy would make that distinction as clear as it could possibly be. Both my medications (I think) are pregnancy approved…… but what if they don’t work for me while pregnant? Yes, I have thought a lot about this. Maryland has everything I need if something were to happen here, but I go to Texas more often than I travel anywhere else. Southern men are typically sweet and genteel. If they are liberal enough that they don’t have a problem with homosexuality, sometimes the flirting gets intense because we both know it’s not going anywhere.

If they’re a conservative crazy, and the percentage on that in Texas is not zero, it’s not impossible that they’d say they love Jesus while shooting me in the chest, or letting me live but raping me because “you’re only a lesbian because you haven’t had a real man yet.” Let me really drive it home for you. After the shooting in Colorado Springs, I had a panic attack. I was filled with survivor’s guilt. My only accomplishment that day was living in Maryland. I met my girl not long after, and it was like coming up for air after free diving. When she kissed me, I remembered what I was fighting for. I fall asleep thinking about her, and all I would do to keep myself strong so that she can lean on me. It’s all any couple wants. That the idea of support in government via marriage tax breaks and support in community through erasing prejudice is just crazy and we have to tear down all the progress we’ve already made is Looney Toons. Of the two, though, I’d rather have the love and support of the community. I’m kind of over entangling marriage and the government. Laws can move legal protections. They can’t change hearts and minds because that’s not what they’re designed to do.

As for me and my girl, we’re being careful not to become examples of the lesbian U-Haul stereotype. It’s good for the kids, but we see why it’s not that big a deal for other people (especially if it’s just the two of them in a very large house). Because of our shared language and library of images, I believe we could move in together tomorrow and with some counseling, make it work. There are multitudes of things that make us unique, but we are also extraordinarily similar. Both musicians, birthdays five days apart (although she’s four years older), both fluent in church lingo for an amazing understanding of my life before she arrived. It’s a whole bunch of things that would make us able to start off with good communication and get better at it, not constantly trying to make it work and needing counseling to keep from throttling each other. Getting by is just not the goal, though. It’s both of us thriving and growing together and not at each other’s expense.

Actually, there are ways in which it would be eerily difficult to tell us apart. There are others that are wildly different, but not in any way that would cause conflict. The kind where her life experience differs greatly from mine and brings a whole new skill set to the table. At her core, she’s the kind of peacenik musician you’d find at Interlochen and Julliard, but of course she also had to go through a program physically designed to make her fail to get into this professional-level program. It’s akin to winning a chair in a major symphony (or medalling in the Olympics). By contrast, I synthesize ideas very fast and often throw out thoughts before saying “do you have the bandwidth to listen to……” I am also highly adept at taking on the emotion of every person in the room, and thus have inside information as to their motivations. I’ve always had instincts in that direction, but I’m deadly accurate now that my bullshit detector has dropped.

Speaking of taking in the reaction of everyone in the room, my favorite thing is still being the only one not drinking. Sometimes I do, but I think it’s more exciting to relax with a non-alcoholic beer (especially in a glass) so that people forget two things. The first is that you’re not really drinking. The second is that you’re a diarist. You’re not talking to a reporter, but definitely reporter-adjacent. At parties, if I don’t know you and you have a dumbass attack in front of me, you’re probably going to become a funny story on this web site. If I do know you, I’ll at least ask you if I can write about it because you can laugh about it and I’m not hitting a real nerve. Live and learn.

I feel so good around my girl that it’s a great surprise she’s told me I do things for her that help. I don’t feel as if the relationship is one-sided. I feel wanted in a way that I haven’t in years, that I am a priority and she drops everything for me the same way she checks out of our relationship when we’re apart so that other people also get her full attention. It’s priceless, and feels healthier than trying to manage five conversations at once.

I honestly forgot how much all people need these feelings. I was so focused on independence that I forgot about interdependence, and how nice it can be as well. I’d let the pendulum swing too far into loneliness… particularly because I didn’t notice I was lonely. I used to be the real life Linus Baker, just American and not British…. also not from the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, but that’s neither here nor there.

Now, my life feels whole. I have amazing friends, and a chance at a real thing with someone I’m crazy about. It didn’t feel real until she told the kids, though. Doesn’t matter that she only told the kids she was dating someone. Fine for them not to know it was me specifically. It just made me feel important that she thought our dating life was important enough to mention. Maybe now she’ll let me have diet soda at her house (I can hear it now… “friggin’ sopranos…..”). Even if she doesn’t, there are times when I think my heart can’t get bigger; it always does.

Like when she took me to Ingrid Michaelson and held me while Ingrid sang… some dates are close to magic… when you can feel the night stretching to accommodate your wishes. We went for half smokes and fries at Ben’s Chili Bowl, then walked to Jeni’s ice cream for a “nightcap.”

The next day we took in a matinee of “Into the Woods,” and then it was time for her to go back to her real life. It was so hard to let her go, knowing that I was stepping out on faith that we’d find a way to keep seeing each other if our paths aligned.

My faith is in this being the start of something big. She feels the same way, but I don’t want to speak for her on anything more than that. Wanting to be together for keeps if we continue being successful at communication is the one thing I don’t have to fact check. How we feel is deep and intense, passionate in every color across the Scandinavian sky. At the same time, I’m 45. She’s older than me. Combining lives is not an easy process, and when kids are involved, sometimes love isn’t enough. Unclear communication regarding division of labor kills a relationship faster than lack of love ever will.

I have issues with having brilliant ideas and an interesting relationship with follow-through. Luckily, my girl has plenty of experience in dealing with people close to her that have mental health issues. My girl can recognize a coping mechanism and roll with it, or help me create one. I will never get over the idiosyncracies that my mental health presents, but I can always use more cognitive behavioral therapy to make it manageable. It’s the same with medication. I take meds to make it better, but it’s a pill…. not a magic wand.

There’s one last connection that we have that I can tell you about, because it’s probably the thing I feared the most in putting myself out there in terms of dating. My grief is deep, It is ever-present. There is no moment of any day that I’m not away from it. It’s a constant dream, waking and sleeping. Her mother is dead, too. So much I don’t have to explain when we share that particular frame of reference. You just join the shittiest club on record. It’s something you literally can’t explain to anyone else who hasn’t lost a parent, because the feelings are too deep to put into words. Losing anyone is painful. Losing a parent rewires you from the inside out. Putting things into words gets easier over time, especially for writers because they’re constantly exorcising their demons whether it’s fiction or not. My girl and I are also in roughly the same place in our process. It’s not overwhelming anymore. It’s a dull buzz that’s occasionally triggered into an alarm. It makes our music connection that much more intense and primal. If you know me in real life, you got here several paragraphs ago.

I need to write this down for posterity, because it is a moment I’ll never stop treasuring. I remember her sitting on my couch. I was kneeling on the floor so I could look into her eyes. It was too much. Too powerful. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. I said, “thank you for bringing the music back.”

Nothing you could say could tear me away from my girl.

It hit me all at once that I was dating someone my mother would have loved and wanted to adopt. James Lipton was famous for asking this question from the Bernard Pivot questionnaire…. “If heaven exists, when you arrive at the pearly gates, what would you like to hear God say?”

My favorite answer is Harrison Ford’s…. “You look just like me.” My own is a delicious smirk and “see what I did there?”

Beautiful Music

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am writing to extraordinarily beautiful music today, some of which is new and other pieces intensely familiar. It’s a playlist I created on Amazon Music called The Mozart Big Box. It’s the name of an album, but I also added all Mozart’s choral works. I am trying to stay focused when there’s a figure that astounds me, like a melisma. Mozart is not particularly known for them, so when they happen, I have to rewind. Handel and Bach are the masters. With both of them, it’s just Abs of Steel…. provided you are breathing down to your feet and only using your stomach muscles to sing. In order to do Bach and Handel correctly, you must study vocal technique, because the accompaniment is so sparing that it points out every flaw if you don’t. Mozart is much more forgiving, because as Emperor Joseph II says in the movie Amadeus, there are simply too many notes, that’s all. If you make a mistake, the accompaniment will catch you.

Melismas are the entire reason I muscled my way into Varsity Choir at Clements. My one claim to fame in high school is that my junior year, I was in the top choir and the top band at the same time, the first to do so. Originally, the choir director put me in Junior Varsity, and I said, are you sure? I’ve done lots of major choral works with my church choir. She pulled out a Messiah book and said, prove it, and flipped to (of course) the most difficult soprano passage in the whole friggin’ work, which I’d only done for the last five Christmases. Someone could wake me up in the middle of the night and I could sing it blind.

I flat nailed it, and the choir director said, I stand corrected. You’re in. I was lucky that I spent nearly an hour warming up, because my head voice (the top of my range) was incredible that day. I am not a diva by any means. I am quite humble about my abilities. But there are just certain days where I amaze myself, like I’ve never heard myself before. The reason I felt fantastic after that audition is that I’d never sung any soprano part in a choral work all by myself. I usually needed the other sopranos in my section to be able to sneak in breaths, which is what sectional sounds are for….. To me, nailing it was not only the notes being spot on, but being able to hold my own with breath control….. which does not come easily to the anxious.

The only time being in both bit me on the ass was that tryouts for All-Region Band and All-Region Choir were on the same day. I chose band, and I think in retrospect that I chose………. poorly. In soloing with my voice, I do not get the same stomach-churning stage fright that I do when playing my trumpet. Something I nail in an empty sanctuary is painful once it’s full. I did manage to get into High School for Performing and Visual Arts with instrumental music, but I’ve never been better than that. I peaked early.

I feel as if I should have known I was a singer and not an instrumental musician, because I got into the adult choir at my church when I was in Grade 7. As an adult, the two times I’ve had the feeling of being wowed at myself were singing the Pie Jesu movement of the Rutter Requiem with full orchestra in Portland and The Lord is My Shepherd from the same work in Houston with incredible pipe organ and the first desk oboe player at The Houston Symphony. The second link is actually me. The recording of the Pie Jesu is lost to history. Despite a few flubs that only I would notice, it’s the best recording of me I have. I forgive myself completely because I was not in great voice that day. I woke up with complete laryngitis and had to sit in the shower for almost an hour before I could even talk. I was relying completely on my diaphragm to get me through, and it did not fail. Because I was so incredibly sick, as soon as the solo was over all my adrenaline ran out and I just wanted Dana to take me home and put me in bed with the remote, some orange juice, and enough Nyquil to plunge a horse into unconsciousness. It was at that moment I realized I was introducing the choir at the next service. There may or may not have been a lot of damn its and oh, fucks involved.

One of my deepest regrets is that my mother heard me sing a lot in high school because she was in choir with me at church and my accompanist everywhere else… but as an adult, either we were too far apart geographically or she had her own church job. My only hope was that she would come to DC when I was singing after she retired. The school year ended in May, and by October she was dead. I was completely dumbfounded because it happened so suddenly, and losing that particular dream knocked me down with force. We were both such serious musicians that I really can’t take it when thinking that my mother and I will never perform together again. She heard the recording in the link above, but she was never in the congregation after a year of intense private lessons, when my opera voice flipped on (link is to a clip of one of my voice lessons that still cracks me up to this day).

The memory is still precious, though, because even though my mom wasn’t there, Dana’s was. She grabbed me after the performance and gave me the biggest bear hug on record, exclaiming, that voice! Where did it come from?! My only answer was a hell of a lot of hard work, woodshedding every measure until it was perfect. My garage had amazing acoustics, and I shudder thinking that I never apologized to the neighbors, because I have a big damn voice.

Although my favorite compliment came from The Divine Mrs. B, who said I should have an oboe player follow me around wherever I go. Believe me, I could not afford that particular oboe player, and a beginner will clear your sinuses.

If there is anything negative about all this, it’s that soprano sections are very competitive, and I generally make friends with the basses because of it. Bass notes make me happy, and I would much rather ignore all the singers in my own section, just put my head down, and do the work. One of the first things that I asked my choir director in DC was, are the sopranos mean? He said he was the only one who was mean. I told him I was in.

Luckily, he turned out to be right. That being said, I haven’t sung a note in a year. Eventually, I’ll get back to it. Right now, everything about church choir brings my grief extremely loud and incredibly close. I can’t sing and panic at the same time. I know. I’ve tried it.

I do listen to great sopranos, though. Nothing makes me happier than the Kathleen Battle and Wynton Marsalis duet, Let the Bright Seraphim (Handel). I feel like it marries the best parts of me, an intensely personal piece. Once I was driving and singing along to the recording and forgot the windows were down. I stopped at a stop light and the cop next to me with his windows down said, very nice.

Which is probably the only interaction I’ve ever had with a cop that didn’t cost $200. There are just so many things that beautiful music can accomplish.

The Power of the Universe

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I cannot stop thinking about Jeffrey Thames and all the work we have the possibility of doing in this community. I am serious when I say that meeting was my hot coal, the thing that took the fire in my belly and refreshed it anew in a way that I haven’t felt since the senior high youth retreat at Christ United Methodist Church. I was 15 or 16 then, and Mikal Bowman was my best friend, the one I could safely say I loved more than myself. I was just as invested in her happiness as I was my own. She was the one to whom I could submit in my daily life without even realizing it was happening. This was the day that realization became reality, both in the chord between us and in my own chord with God.

They put us in groups of two, and blindfolded one… me. There was thick, thick twine called the “lifeline,” and it was a trust exercise to get us to submit to our partner’s direction. We could hold on to the “lifeline,” but we couldn’t see. It was the partner’s job to make sure we didn’t run into anything, to be our eyes in the darkness. Mikal (whom my dad affectionately called “Mikalwave”) and I had gone about 15 steps when I GOT IT. My enormous ego crumbled into the dirt and I fell against Myke, crying so hard I COULD NOT EVEN.

Maybe there’s not a God, and maybe there is. I took Logic as a math requirement at University of Houston, because apparently Logic using symbols and Algebra are the same thing (never in three lifetimes). We spent the first half of the semester proving God exists, and the second half of the semester disproving. No matter what we did, we couldn’t prove it either way.

THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT ENTIRELY.

Faith is, as Elaine Pagels so eloquently says, “beyond belief.” The question is why? My answer is that God is too big to comprehend, and will never be proven with fact. This is because we cannot know that anyone is listening when we pray, but we see its effects every day when we are willing to submit to the idea that there is something greater than ourselves; a deep chord, manhole covered in size that can only be accessed by looking inward.

You will know this feeling intimately if you are a musician or singer, because there are two factors at play. The first is that in either singing or playing, you are breathing all the way down, using your entire body to focus on every breath. The second is what happens when everyone in the room is taking those breaths together.

Let’s extrapolate.

What would happen if everyone in a congregation saw God as individually breathing all the way down, and taking those breaths together? How would church politics change when everyone in the room is focusing on the chord that runs between them? How would church politics change when everyone in the room submits to it?

How would the American system of caring for “the least of these” change if we, as a country, were all breathing together?

Diane Syrcle has a great line about this, which she said in front of a treble choir (meaning it was all women), hands in a triangle around her uterus, that “singing is breathing all the way down into the power of the universe… because it is.” New birth, new life, new hope… the power of the universe so close we can touch it… literally. Catholics are onto something by praying to Mary, because it is praying to the power of birth… as tangible an evidence of faith as there is in this life.

If you can’t believe in a God, can you believe in a baby?

Can you submit to the power that comes with a tabula rasa, a clean slate that so many permutations of growth that it would take eons to calculate?

There is never a time when I feel more religious than Advent, because there we are, all waiting for the baby together. What kinds of growth will we do when we realize that we have the chance to be born again every single year? What kinds of ego will fall away? What kinds of sins will you release in the name of rebirth? How will you grow as that Holy Spirit touches a hot coal to your lips and burns away the old versions of you? What will you accomplish that you didn’t in the year before? How will you force yourself into a different reality? I often say that life is a series of learning to commit different sins rather than the same ones over and over. That is the very essence of acknowledging your humanness, that you cannot live life without flaws, but you can let go of them as you forgive yourself; they disappear into the ether as you grow.

The power of the universe comes into play when we’re all doing that very thing at the same time…. the way musicians breathe.

How you forgive yourself is the question with which we struggle- not once, but over and over and over. I cannot speak for you. For me, the answer is that feeling- the way my muscles stretch to accommodate so much more air. As Jeffrey would say, “when you breathe in, you take in the power of the universe.

Whether you believe it or not.

Amen

#prayingonthespaces………………………..