Life your Life like it’s a Bonus Level

   Well, I survived the worst day of the year this week. School’s back and I must have been asked a hundred times how was my summer. But as happy as I felt waking up a little slower, and resting a bit more often, I feel like my response was never satisfying when asked. When my colleagues asked, they seemed more focused in discussing who had the most unique travel. When my boss asked I felt I was supposed to have done more to progress my teaching career. We didn’t really travel because we are saving for some big things coming up, and I didn’t really write or study because Amy worked summer school and there were family matters to look after and tend to. My oldest son is headed into his last year of high school. There were essays to compose, projects to complete, portfolios to create, and occasionally, there was downtime to cherish. It’s important at least once year to disconnect from the hustle and bustle of the world - all the noise of adults in the news and the traffic and the kids with their videos and games…

    My son and I played a video game together called Split Fiction. He thought I’d be interested because the two main characters are women writers who answer an ad and enter a machine that creates a virtual reality from their stories. Something goes wrong and they end up trapped inside the machine by some crazy capitalist who you learn is trying to steal their ideas. 

   It’s a fairly intuitive game that requires you do crazy tricks like leap onto the tip top of poles like you’re a parkour expert or swing on the vines of a magic tree. It’s designed in such a way that it’s not so hard even though there are shoot outs and bosses and puzzles. The story unfolds so that the women begin to reveal some complex backstory and characterization as they progress by working together. And it rarely repeats. It was a good play. It took some time to finish, but it was a great way for us to connect as we’re both creative types who stress about winning in an effort to merely not let the other down. We joked about the nature of the relationship between the women, and marveled as the different stories revealed similar themes and worlds kept increasing in complexity. We laughed out loud together for real whenever game play sped up and we each began accomplishing tremendous feats on instinct. At one point we got to ride these dragons that we’d found and been protecting. We’d found ways to feed them. They grew and eventually I could fly mine and he could punch and climb things with his. It really was a bit of a thrill. We just finished it the other day and afterwards, we were able to go back and do a couple of the most fun runs again. We switched characters a little bit - me punching and climbing and him and flying and spitting. We realized we were best suited for the roles we’d picked originally. The whole thing was a wonderful share, but the best part was going back and reliving our favorite runs. It’s still a bit intense. You have to demonstrate all those skills you learned, but your goals change and your perspective is different. This round, you can appreciate knowing it was a great part - a bonus level.

   I really didn’t connect at all with news this summer. Everyone seems worried about war, the economy, climate change, AI… I’ve been pondering my life’s purpose and whether we manifest reality or not. I’ve found a kind of resilience in just focusing on my own desires and the happiness of my family.

   Most of my life I’ve already spent worrying about the future. I mean I really didn’t think we were gonna make it here. I’m still surprised I made it through the 80s. My childhood was peppered with anxiety and depression over early losses and what I deemed inevitable nuclear war. College only furthered my understanding of the precarious nature in humanity’s rise despite a lack of arcane vision. And yet we’ve somehow survived through not one, but two terms of Trump having the football, a global pandemic, and a proxy war with Russia as well as escalation in the Middle East.

   I’m just in such a different space in my life. It feels like a different universe. There’s quite a bit of increasing scientific affirmation for Everett‘s Multi World Theory. Reality is looking more and more subjective. But even as the world feels more and more like it’s in fast forward, I feel better equipped to handle even the worst days of the year with ease. This is all starting to feel like a bonus level.

   There’s something so awesome about that though! Living life like you’re in a bonus level feeling like it all matters, but also kind of doesn’t, bouncing around obstacles focused more on a love of that buoyancy, the beauty of a challenge and the wish to serve and share. We get a few moments in school this week to talk with colleagues. I was discussing a library I wanted to create with one and we were naming the books we’ve read that our students could and should also access. We ended up discussing The Alchemist which I deem one of the greatest books of all time - but my colleague hated. She was frustrated when she realized the protagonist went through all these journeys and just kind of ended up back where he started. She expressed such authentic frustration at this that I had to laugh. 

   She didn’t share my metaphorical love of a bonus level experience. I have an aunt I’m in a similar long term conversation with over the ending of the TV series, Lost. We’d both watched and loved the series as it had unfolded and I guess we’d expected to get all the answers to all the mysteries it had initiated, but most were basically left on our laps. She found that frustrating and I found it preserved the dynamic. It just seems like life is and will always be what we make of it. I mean, that’s the reality under all the questions that push us forward and out in all kinds of different directions. They are as different as they are similar and you can push forward into all the circles or get lost in all the eddies but in the end, we really are where we started. For all our rationalizations and justifications, all the learning we acquire, and all the judgments we make, it’s really about our own happiness. It’s really about how buoyant we are we when we bounced in and out of those challenges we set for ourselves. It’s about how happy we make the people around us and whether we brought the best of us, and whether or not we truly appreciated them. I had a great summer. Where did I go? What did I learn? What did do? I beat a video game with my oldest son, and I loved every single minute of it.

Tuesdays with Melissa Etheridge

   I rounded 50… recently. Yep, no getting around it. Definitely not gonna be anymore quite as long as it’s been. Getting older doesn’t feel as bad as I used to think it would however. And I believe it’s because I have figured a few things out over the years.  

Going it Alone

   It was a random Tuesday night when this really came together for me. I’d done something I’d never even thought to do in my life. I went to a concert, alone.

   I’m not sure what I was even thinking when I bought the ticket and my inclination as the day arrived was to blow it off. I mean - it was a Tuesday! Going alone would have sounded sad to my younger self. Thing is, I suddenly love my younger self so much now - bless her little naive heart! But if you ever get the opportunity, I have to urge you - this is a bucket list must! Just go - follow your heart. Find that perfect musician, smoke whatever you want and order whatever you feel like. Talk, dance, sing, scream, and do it with total abandon! Do it on a work night, or Sunday or whatever day you get - but go! It’s worth making random days amazing! You're worth it. Tuesdays are 1/7th of your life!

   Now let me tell you about this journey.

Melissa Etheridge, ME

   I’ve never met her (not for a lack of trying!) but I can still remember the first time I even discussed her decades ago. I was at a sad little hole-in-the-wall bar off Queens Boulevard called Reflections. I was just a 21 year old baby dyke on a date who had taken me to a movie. We saw - get this - “Schindler’s List.” That’s right. It was 1995 and I’d just endured 3 hours and 15 minutes of pure horror over the the most intimate depiction of the Holocaust I’ll (hopefully) ever experience, and I endured it all gripping my seat and shaking like a leaf. I sat trembling over every move the only real lesbian I’d ever met made. She worked at the Deli around my corner. She’d picked me up and drove 85 miles an hour from Franny Lew to QB via the GCP. I remember whooshing under the overpasses at that point just praying we’d live! l’d been out only maybe 2 years - aware I was gay only 5. I was desperately in a secret love affair with my best friend at the time so this was nothing more than a kind of rebound or initiation but such was life in the early 90s.  

   “Come to My Window” was playing on some lonely jukebox in the corner as my date went to the bathroom. I was suddenly accompanied by a young and beautiful crew cut blond much closer to my age than my date. 

   She and I began talking about love and God and deviance (all light topics of convo easily penetrated amongst our people) when I think I mentioned how I loved the song.  

   “Melissa Etheridge is just a screaming dyke” she mused.

     This spun me because Melissa Etheridge was just about the only publicly out woman I knew of. “Really?  You don’t find her relatable?” I think I said.

   I don’t remember how she answered, just that my date returned, and this girl my age quickly fell away. That bar was a downer so we left and hit a club I would later frequent called Hatfields, where the music was loud and fast and the bathroom should have charged by the hour. Half the time I spent in there I was terrified the cops would suddenly raid us (I think my impressions were permeated by news I’d seen on TV as a baby in the 70s!) 

   This began my long, long mental relationship with the complexities of Melissa Etheridge, and my own social location.

    A friend told me around this time that I would not likely even remember my 20s. Boy was he wrong. I remember every thrill. I still feel every anguish. I muse over the rushes of excitement and appreciate the relief of occasional euphoria. And I can punctuate so many moments with Melissa Etheridge songs alone.

Not So Silent Legacy 

   He was a bit of a dick (that friend) but he was the “outest” of all my friends, so he and I went to my first Melissa Etheridge concert. It was the outdoor Jones Beach theater off Field 5 and it was the first time in my life I was surrounded by my people. It was - lol - on a Tuesday. June 27th, 1995 rain or shine! I wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like but home was pretty close and I kinda remember wishing that was where I’d left him! 

   The thing is - I was self conscious. What I couldn’t quite recognize at that time was the mixture of misogyny within my self consciousness, or the oppression of a patriarchy that ostracized my experience like a dome but that I couldn’t have begun to name at that time. It was all women and regardless we spent a lot of time talking about how that made him feel. But my mind was elsewhere. Melissa does this song “Silent Legacy” where she challenges the authority of the gods I’d been grown under and at the moment of the song’s climactic defiance - the skies opened up! 15,000 lesbians wearing white “Yes I Am” concert tees were suddenly drenched and consequently were being corralled together under the nosebleed tunnels to hide from lightning - I was weak in the knees on only a little out of fear from the heavens. When the storm cleared Melissa came back and did a song I’d heard before but never really listened to. Her performance called the artistry to attention though. She repeated the refrain over and over until I felt lulled into a trance and it became my inner mantra. Later, it became our mantra and the song my wife and I call our own - “All the way to Heaven” is Heaven...

   It was only a couple years later my wife and I were “discovered” making out in the back of her little red Mustang convertible about a half a block between my house and good old Deli Bizz - our cars parked next to each other that night each missing a headlight.

Thwarted Plans, Messy Life, More Concerts

   That concert was so memorable Etheridge herself even mused about it more than a decade later at concerts I saw her at in the Westbury Music Fair and at the Paramount. Smaller venues, and older crowds lead to a different kind of self consciousness but we were able to score 2nd row tickets at Westbury when my wife got to actually touch Melissa’s hand, and it wasn’t long before we were front and center with standing room only at the Paramount!

   The thing about Melissa Etheridge for me is the consistent evolution. For all her “screaming lesbian” vibe [insert eye roll here] ME was the first out celebrity I knew. Her revelation came at the height of my self discovery (and raging homophobia.) I can see my life through her words and I can feel my heart pound to her beats. It’s as scary as it is redeeming! I began listening to her at my lowest moments when I needed to know there were others like me in the world. As time went on and the world around me became more and more comfortable with love, her songs became anthems. ME concerts ignited a special place in my heart and projected a world I could hold my head high in. I began to go for all kinds of reasons. My wife and I took my stepmother and mother-in-law just after we got engaged to another Jones Beach show one year.  We thought it might be a creative way to share our community with them as they struggled to understand what an “engagement” for us meant (this was before marriage equality). We took our oldest for his first concert in Albany when he was barely a year old, (a selfish new parent lesson as we spent most of that one in the back soothing him). But that’s how you make God laugh right?  Make a plan? When she beat Cancer she pulled a friend of ours (who also beat Cancer) up on stage to celebrate and we all cheered sharing that hope. I remember watching her youtubes during quarantine, and my heart broke every time she suffered. Her divorce… her lost son. Facing the world head on, processing it all publicly, and then singing a kind of truth I only hear from her is a magic she gifts my world with.  

Uncovered Abandon

   Last summer I drove with a friend up to Bethel to see her play with the Indigo Girls, but I had to leave early as ride my felt the drive home would be long. We even got to see her on Broadway. It was and still is heartwarming to me that my stepmother came to love and respect our lives so much that she scraped together the money to give us that beautiful gift for our actual anniversary - maybe three months before she died. We went, but again had to leave a little early to tend to something that came up with our kids. Life never goes exactly according to our plans does it?  Still, it’s life. And it’s beautiful to really live life.  

You gotta love Tuesdays

    When I saw Melissa was coming to play back at the Paramount only a few towns over, I decided to just Uber myself and go. So what if it was some random Tuesday night? I didn’t even bother to ask if anybody else I knew wanted to go or was going. I’ve seen her so many times and in so many different arenas - even Staten Island one year - my wife was cool with watching the kids this time so I was free to just go and stay as long as I wanted.

   I left about 7:30 and got dropped off right in front. I saw lots of familiar faces, but I didn’t even have to speak to anyone. I was even able to smoke a bit - not responsibilities, or even legal worries.

   I meandered in and up to the Skybar. No longer is the whole Paramount standing room only. I found my way to my section (the standing view basically on top of the entire theater.) I was about as far from Melissa as humanly possible in that venue but I  was happy to be there and not the least bit tethered or self conscious. I ordered myself a drink from the beer/wine bar and started talking with a lady next to me. I wasn’t worried about what she thought, or what anybody around me thought, or anything. Melissa came on and I began to smile and sway and dance. It was so easy to just relax. After a few songs, I asked Pam, the fellow teacher from Middle Island, to watch my jacket and hold my spot while I went to the bathroom. 

   On my journey I discovered a bar that served mixed drinks and was able to take in 2-3 songs alone from the middle balcony while I waited. I had a clear view over the floor seats locked to Melissa‘s eyes that whole time.  

   One thing led to another so that about halfway through the show I found myself inching along the side bar on the floor through the crowd. It’s amazing being only responsible for yourself. People move, things happen, and I could just glide freely through the bodies. After a little bit, some of those people started actually leaving early. Thankful I didn’t have to, I was able to slip into their places. I was about 3/4 up to the stage along the side bar when I wound up in front of this fairly rowdy guy. I’m always a little suspicious of the straight guys I see in a Melissa Etheridge crowd, especially if they’re alone, but at this point it was pretty crowded so I had to endure his yelling and dancing right behind me stoically in an effort to not lose ground. Before I knew it a woman near me met my eyes and seemed to notice my discomfort. She motioned me to move in front of her. Another did the same as it suddenly felt like a collective effort to usher me away from that guy. The next thing I know I was touching the stage! It was pure bliss to be that close. I was right under Melissa Etheridge! Ecstatic, uninhibited and very aware of how this moment would become part of my collective ME experience. I swayed with abandon and sang even though I’d lost my voice. I screamed my appreciation in celebration of all those relatable fears, true loves, spiritual journeys and inspiring thoughts that so sharply matched my own.

Pride.

   Melissa Etheridge for me captures a lifetime of first kisses and secret betrayals, true loves and spiritual crusades. My whole life from skydives to kids could be belted beautifully with just a raspy raw voice and an acoustic, but that dash of courage and gratitude ignites both the heart of my youth and the wisdom of my years. One of the first things she said when she emerged at the Paramount was that we should all first forget that it was Tuesday. But I love that it was a Tuesday. How many Tuesdays come and go and are forgotten? It was a Tuesday that Summer evening at Jones Beach - a moment I’ll never forget. If Melissa Etheridge can transform two of my Tuesdays into lifelong memories, that in itself is art. Music can be magic. Magic can be life! But life - starts with honesty, but only on the other side of self consciousness. I don’t care how old we get - in fact I now look forward to getting even older! I have another ticket bought for next month and even though I’m a teacher and it’ll be the end of my summer - I look forward to it. Especially, because it’s on another Tuesday!

UPDATE!!! 

SHE TOUCHED MY HAND!!!