Patterns
Looking back on this year: Success and frustration. Invitation and promise and loss and sadness. I sit in a warm and cozy apartment with the wind howling outside and a dense fog is floating by the window. Perfect for my thoughts tonight. Loved ones here and those that have crossed over fill my mind. Choruses of “Auld Lang Syne” hum in my head.
Last New Year’s I was on the phone to friends in Italy at 6:00 pm. Luciano, “Italy won the World Cup, you’ll win too!” I told him. So many friends passed over this year. They are no longer reachable by phone. They are just out of reach. But not far from my heart this New Year’s. I made a promise to Luciano too, who feared for me. “You are lazy, just like me.” Five years ago he warned me how the world of art was changing. That world of music and “transfiguration” I adored so much was becoming a world riddled in a kind of petite narcissism. And there I sit, heavy. He warned me to get busy and stop hiding. “You have the best voice today, yet you do not sing!”
What happens to people? Countless biographies you read and reread on talented people with blind spots. I was being worse than lazy, I was digging in my heels in a useless fight. Pouting. It shouldn’t be about size, it should be about voice. Well, it ain’t, Blanche. So maybe Luciano leaving has been a call to arms, perhaps. It becomes clear for me only on stage, singing. It is one of the only places on earth where I am truly happy. Lifting a self imposed sense of exile, shaking off cobwebs, a reawakened desire to serve music. All very important and fragile. So many use the press as a confessional. If my walls could speak, what a tale would tell! I must gather the shards of what must be a shattered mirror of my self image and get busy. Sleeper, awake!!!
The future looks as bright as it has in a long while. Fingers crossed and purpose redoubled…… Perhaps the alternate reel has arrived?
