no real cleavers were used in this photo
I just came home from a week in New York visiting my friend Lilah. She has a new baby, a 6-week old infant son, Aro. We spent a lot of time in the car driving from Yonkers up north, down the West Side Highway, making our way across Manhattan and over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. It was grey and rainy, which was a welcome change from Phoenix, but also made me feel like I needed to re white-balance my eyes; my self? I’ve been so worried lately; so serious. Watching the watery Hudson River out the passenger side window — droplets of rainwater obscuring the view slightly — I let my mind drift.
I’ve been stressed out about money, and my own creative progress, and how the two are sometimes at odds. About what’s next? What’s next? Lilah has been known to say, “Just keep doing what you’re doing… more will be revealed.”
One time, Lilah and I won tickets from a radio station while driving cross-country. It was about 95 degrees and we were standing in the sun at a pay phone in Nashville, Tennessee. Lilah was dialing, trying to connect us with the Grand Ole Opry so we could purchase tickets for a performance â any performance. But somehow she misdialed and got connected instead with the radio station WSM. She started telling our story — we’re driving cross-country; we’re only in Nashville for a couple of days, we started our road trip in Upstate New York, we’re on our way to Arizona. Next thing you know, Lilah is put on the airwaves and the disc-jockey is yelling, “Guess what, you girls are going to the GRAND OLE OPRY!!” and we end up winning tickets to that night’s line-up of shows. We are jumping up and down at the pay phone with sweat dripping down our faces. What an incredible stroke of luck! We’re not even sure how it happened. That night we saw a great string of performances at the Opry: Porter Wagoner, Charlie Pride, Ricky Skaggs, Riders in the Sky.
We lived together for a bit in the East Village (on 2nd Street and Ave A) when it was still pretty sketch. Our one bedroom apartment had a bathtub IN THE KITCHEN, and at the other end of the kitchen a French door missing the glass in most of its panels opened into a closet-sized bathroom where there was a toiletâ just a toilet. You’ve heard the expression, “Don’t shit where you eat”. You know, said as a warning against having romantic relations with a co-worker or band mate. A warning against causing trouble in a situation in which one might regularly finds oneself. Well, in this domestic arrangement, we literally shat where we ate! We embraced it — bring it! — in this place was there an alternative?
Here we are, years later. I’m waking up to hold Lilah’s infant son in the mornings and talk with her over tea and the morning news. Smelling his head, staring into his deep eyes and delicious baby-ness. Marveling at the chirps and throaty suckling sounds he makes. Lilah is the friend that always reminds me about the malleability of perception; that people create their own meaning to life.
On the last day of my visit, one of Lilah’s classes for her graduate MFA program is having a Performance Art event at a Polish church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The class is broken into four groups and each has taken over a section of the large church basement to set up their interactive tableau. There was a group with masks inviting folks to join in, and a group serving tea, and a group compiling complaints. But the best part is that during a diaper change it’s discovered that the waistband of baby Aro’s pants are wet. Lilah hasn’t brought a spare pair so she sets his baby pants in a pot and turns the stove burner on and tries to dry them. But of course the wool-blend fabric begins almost immediately to smolder — filling the whole room with an awful smell. The little pants had burn marks all over them. In fact, they looked like a toasted marshmallow. The funniest part is Lilah holds them up and says, “Huh, they’re not so bad.” But they would have been, believe me, they would have been considered a minor disaster to many new mothers. I said, “He’s going to look like a s’more.”
SO my point is, Nevermind the well-read, Brooklyn MFA-bound artists, watching my friend sauté her sons pee-soaked pants was really the most inventive, best artistic “performance” of the whole afternoon. The thing that I wish I had been recording.
