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November 14, 2008 

Visions of Joan

I'm always a bit hesitant to pull strings with my job, but sometimes you come across an opportunity so cosmically aligned that you'd be a fool not to harass every publicist you can find to make it happen.

My friends Stacy and Alexa and I made an election poster, a replica of an old Joan Baez anti-war poster called "Girls Say Yes." We did it on a whim, mostly to be silly and to show our love for Obama. We put it on the internet and people really liked it, so we printed out copies and plastered them around town and felt, on a small level, like we were a part of what was happening with Obama and the election and history.

The other day, Stacy sent me an email. JOAN BAEZ IS COMING ON NOVEMBER 13. I knew what I had to do. I emailed, and emailed, and emailed, and finally on the day before the show her publicist caved and said she would give us three after-show passes to meet Joan and give her our poster. We were ecstatic. But we wouldn't really believe it until we were backstage shaking Joan's hand.

The day of the show, the three of us piled in Alexa's car and giggled all the way downtown. We got there toward the end of the show (none of us got tickets to the actual performance), and a security guard gave us our wristband passes. We stood at the door to the auditorium and pressed our ears up to the crack. Her voice was wafting through above all the other instruments and applause, and it was immediately identifiable. Joan was in there.

"I'm going to cry," I said, my excitement billowing. Alexa and Stacy laughed. I wasn't kidding.

As the show let out, streams and streams of middle-aged, graying folks came out of the auditorium, smiling and reveling in their Joan experience. The three of us headed into the auditorium, the youngest in the crowd by about 20 years, and stood by a small group of people who were waiting to be taken backstage.

Before we knew it we were being led down three flights of stairs into the underbelly of the State Theatre. There was a small reception room for us to gather in, with wine and bottles of water that nobody touched, and just as we were starting to get fidgety she appeared.

She was tiny and beautiful, a shock of gray hair standing up on her head. She had changed into a starched white shirt and jeans; she looked like the image of the Unitarian hippie mom that everyone wanted to have. Her tour manager came up to us and eyed Stacy's hand, which was clutching a stack of our posters.

"Did you make something for Joan?" he asked, and we all giggled. He grabbed a poster and ran over to her, interrupting her mid-conversation with other fans to show her our poster. She bounded over, past all of the other people waiting to meet her, and held the poster up.

"Is this you?"

"Yes!" we cried in unison. Stacy started to explain why we made the poster, shoving the rest of the stack into Joan's hand.

"Oh yeah, I saw this on the internet!" Joan said. We all stood slack-jawed. "These are for me?"

She disappeared for a moment to set down the posters, and returned to give us hugs. She leaned in to hug me and as soon a she touched me a warmth shot through my whole body, my eyes welling up with tears. "It's so nice to meet you," I said, cutting myself off before the tears could start streaming down my cheeks. I hope she knows I really meant it.

The rest of the experience was a blur. She hugged Stacy and Alexa, and then signed the vinyl records they had brought. Stacy made some comment about "that one being REALLY old," which I thought was funny, considering they were Joan's records. We posed for a picture, and Joan seemed sincerely happy to meet us and see our posters. The tour manager said he would put our poster and our photo with Joan on her website. And before we knew it, we were already walking back up the stairs and out into the night, past the other fans who were gathered near her tour bus, past the strangers on the street who were hoping for a glimpse of Joan.

Stacy gave me one of her signed records to take home as a souvenir. But the part I'll never forget is when the famous folk singer touched my arms and my friends and I got to feel, for a moment, like we were the kind of women that Joan Baez wants to meet.

11:08 AM | |

November 7, 2008 

Girls say "yes we can"

I don't blog much anymore. You know that. I know that. When my music writing started to pick up I stopped having as much time write personally, save for the occasional sentimental goo that seems to seep into my reviews from time to time. Additionally, the last year of my life has been -- ah, again the hesitation. Every time I start to write about it, I stop.

The last year was both the best and worst of my life.

It's been hard to figure out how, or if, or why I should share these personal developments publicly. But I've come to trust the readers of this blog (save for you, anonymous Tijuana hooker guy), and I don't know if I can NOT write about it anymore. You know?

Where to begin: I got married in the late, hot summer of 2005. It was rushed, the whole thing. We moved in together fast, got engaged fast, got married fast. There was a momentum pushing us through the entire process, until one day we got home and realized we were married and had no idea what came next. I almost immediately slid into depression, fueled by an identity crisis and confusion about where I, where we, were headed. I did what I always do when I hit a wall. I started writing.

My writing started to take over all of my free time; I couldn't get enough of it. That winter, I started going to four or five shows a week, writing reviews of every single one. I wrote a whole goddamn novel and threw it away. Just to write. Just to feel like I was going somewhere.

The marriage wasn't all bad. I liked doing wife things; cooking dinner, cleaning, knowing I was taking care of something, tending to something. I liked the security. But a lot of things were off about the whole arrangement, and pretty soon there was a lot of fighting and a lot of growing apart. He started playing computer games relentlessly. I stuck to my writing and my music. There weren't many things we did together. It wasn't necessarily either one of our faults, even, it was just wrong. The way snow in May is wrong. The way an overdrafted checkbook is wrong. It just didn't add up to what I thought marriage would be.

I rode it out for a long time, hoping we could work it out. Eventually, it became pretty clear we couldn't. He became increasingly negative and mean-spirited, lowering my self-esteem to almost nothing. I stopped fighting back.

And then, one day, I stood up, collected my things, wrote a long letter, and left.

My entire life is different now. A week after I left, I got offered a new job. A full-time job, writing. I started rearranging everything in my life. I went back to being a vegetarian, stopped smoking, started exercising, bought a bike. I found love, a real and true and honest love, the likes of which I haven't felt since I was 18 years old and knocking my knees together over the idea that two people could light each other on fire, set each other free, act out the lyrics in so many songs.

Yesterday, almost seven months after leaving my husband, I got a letter in the mail saying that my divorce had been finalized. The letter was only one sentence long, but it's the most decisive letter I've ever gotten. Suddenly, my name was legally different than it was before. It was hard not to feel like an entirely different person than I had been a half hour before, driving home from the gym, thinking about what to have for dinner.

It's been a long transition, but it's over now. I did it. I survived.

Earlier this week, I watched with a lump in my throat as Obama laid out his plans for change. For the first time in years, I felt like I didn't have to be cautious about my optimism, my hope for the future. With all of this behind me, I know that Obama was right. The whole time, he was right. Yes we can. Yes we did. Yes we will.

I'm back, for now. I want to share these things with you. I want to let you in again. Can we still be friends?

ANDREA SWENSSON

2:38 PM | |