Artist Date 65: A Revelation

March 8, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

I just “shhh…d” the women next to me.

I feel like somebody’s cranky grandmother, but I can’t help myself.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. From Revelations. Photo: Paul Kolnik

This is my religion. The dancers and choreographers, my gods. And it requires my complete attention.

It feels like blasphemy as I type the words, but it is true. The stirring between my legs. It rises up my spine like Kundalini energy uncoiling, to my heart – which leaps, and spreads as a flush across my chest and face. What is usually reserved for sexual liaison – either alone or with a partner – comes to me in dance. Really good dance.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is really good dance.

This is my seventh time seeing the company, which may sound like a lot –until compared to Sheila, who I met during the pre-performance cocktail reception. She and her husband have seen Ailey every year since the company’s inception in 1958. It is, perhaps, their religion too.

The first time I saw Ailey I was 24. I watched, rapt. My former lover — the sexiest man I had ever known – at my side. We spent a month together. Twenty-nine days more than I expected. This was our only “real date.”

The second time I saw Ailey I was in the middle of an alcoholic relapse, although I didn’t know it at the time. Following yet another month-long stint without drinking, an effort to prove myself “not alcoholic,” I conveniently forgot all the reasons I had put down the drink and picked it up again that night.

I saw the company three more times. Each of them sober. In Chicago. Once, with my then-husband, the other two with girlfriends.

This is my first time seeing Ailey alone – Artist Date 65.

It feels significant.

Significant because I have treated myself to good seats. Dress Circle. Row AA.

I have learned I cannot watch dance from the cheap seats – looking down on it from up above. I have to see it straight on. As I do most things.

I’ve admittedly been spoiled. Much like the first time I flew overseas, when the German Consulate paid for my Business Class ticket on Lufthansa. It is hard to go back.

It is the same with men.

Significant because there is a cocktail reception before the show and I don’t drink, have a wing man, or a purpose for mingling other than “just because.”

Ever fiber in my body says arrive late, skip the schmooze and head straight for my seat. But I resist. I have been taught courage is not a lack of fear. It is feeling it and moving forward anyway. I am strangely curious to see what will happen.

I meet a gaggle of girls in their 30s. They have never seen Ailey.

We talk about their work. City politics. Chicago neighborhoods.

We talk about my Artist Date. My blog. Boys.

I meet the “since-1958 Ailey fans,” and their daughter – a dancer.

I navigate the plush stairs and the too-small type on my ticket on my way to my seat. My dance instructor calls out my name. We embrace and all at once, Chicago feels like a town. My sense of connectedness expands.

The theatre darkens. The dancers emerge.

“Night Creature.” From 1974. I have seen it before. Like “Revelations,” Ailey’s signature piece that closes every show. I remember the polka-dot light patterns on the floor.

It is both familiar and fresh. I feel the leap in my heart. And a knot in my stomach.

The women to my left are whispering – non-stop.

I pray for patience. For tolerance. I pray they will stop. Useless. I turn and put my finger to my lips. “Shhh.” It is quiet.

At intermission, I feel a hand on my shoulder. It is one of the women I “shhh-d.” She offers apologies, which I quickly and easily accept.

Two Dancers -- Khara and I. — Two Dancers — Khara and I.

“Do you dance?” she asks.

I tell her I do. She says that she used to, and everything melts between us. We are connected. We are the same.

Until she tells me about her dance history.

Although not a dance major, she danced seven days a week as an undergraduate student at Washington University, filling her free hours with courses in ballet, modern, and jazz. I reflect on my four years at Michigan State University – smoking pot and drinking with the big boys.

I do not feel like a dancer.

My five-plus years in West African dance classes – beginning at the age of 39 – feel small in comparison. Amateurish. Perhaps they are.

I ask her to take a picture with me for my blog. “Two dancers,” she announces, as if reading my mind.

I choose to believe her. To allow my status to be independent of her experience. Of Sheila’s.

It is a “Revelation.”

Artist Date 64: Not Too Much

March 1, 2014 LesleyPearl4 Comments

I do not do yoga.

As a massage therapist, I know it is kind of part of the gig. But I can’t.

It freaks me out. Holding poses for an extended period makes me panic. Whether I am in a big anonymous class or in a tiny studio with just three other students and the most gentle instructor imaginable, it is always the same. Open heart. Teary eyes. And a small voice crying out in the silence, “Are we done yet? Are we done yet?” I ignore her and…panic. More tears.

People tell me this is good. That it means I should do more yoga. That I am working something out. I ignore them and make a mental note never to discuss this topic.

Until now. In a yoga studio. Artist Date 64.

My friend, and clairvoyant genius, Debbie Taitel, is conducting a post-Valentine’s exploration of the 4^thChakra, the energy center of the heart.

I think I am safe because it is a meditation workshop and not yoga. And I meditate. I have for 12 years.

But I am wrong. The panic is there almost immediately. Stifling.

Debbie first mentioned the workshop to me a couple of weeks ago, during one of our clairvoyant sessions. As I watched my heart tentatively open to hope and the possibility of love for the first time in what seemed like a very long time – for an almost bachelor, a man from my childhood, living nearly 700 miles away. (Artist Date 62)

Last week I told him I “couldn’t do it.” (Artist Date 63) Whatever “it” was. Seemingly falling head over heels over head for one another. He asked how realistic it was. I didn’t care. I wanted to find out about us. He said he did too. But when I sensed his wavering, come-here-go-away, and when the excitement in my stomach turned into a knot, I said “no.” And we somewhat sadly settled on friendship. At least for now.

I thought that with this grand gesture of self-love and adult decision-making, my feelings would go away. I was mistaken.

He has been dancing in my head for a good portion of the day and I am surprised.

So it is a relief when Debbie asks us to invite anyone “grounding” through us to please leave for the duration of the workshop. I ask, but he remains. Or I keep him near. I am not certain. It is the pink elephant in the room I have been told to pay no attention to.

I am embarrassed. Ashamed. I assume the shift is easy for him. But I do not know this.

I am consumed by the thought that I do not want to write about this. Especially as he regularly reads my blog. I feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. I want to run. Just like in yoga.

Debbie asks us to ground ourselves and I see a climber’s rope shoot out from my 1st Chakra into the earth, its metal claws digging into clay and dirt. Debbie saw me do this once before – during one of our sessions. She found it clever. A good way to shake off the too many grounding through me.

But today it feels unstable. I want an oak tree growing out of my ass, downward into the earth. But this is what I have.

(c) 2004. Andrew Hall, PortlandBridges.com

She asks us to create roses in our mind. To fill them with past hurts. Unrequited loves. Loves we either did not or could not return. And to destroy them.

I see the International Rose Test Garden in Portland. My ex and I visited here one winter when he was interviewing for jobs. The bushes are clipped. Dead.

My eyes get teary and my nose flares. I feel like I am on the verge of big, heaving sobs. I see my ex husband. My mother. My father. The first boy I took my clothes off with.

I see my first real boyfriend. And J – perhaps the love of my life, me with a dick. Mr. 700 Miles.

I feel Debbie lay a box of tissues on my thigh. I am afraid to move. That I will come totally unglued if I do and land on the floor, a throbbing puddle. I feel white energy leave through my heart and it is over.

I destroy the rose, stripping it naked, petal by petal, while those around me engage in more violent scenarios – skeet shooting or blowing them up.

In the final meditation, safely shrouded in golden light, I loop my own energy over and over through my 4^th Chakra, my heart. I feel nauseated. A wave slams into my gut and through me. If I were standing it would knock me over.

Debbie smiles. This is the energy I put into the universe, she explains. The kind that makes people “run for the hills.” I nod, as do most of those around me. It is the love energy, meant for me, mistakenly turned out and overwhelming others.

I think about the old idea I still carry around sometimes, that I am “too much.” It is quickly displaced by the realization that I no longer feel like running. Not from here. This place or this pose.

Not from this love. Not from myself.

Not too much.

Artist Date 63: True Blue

February 22, 2014 LesleyPearl4 Comments

2014-02-21 15.24.31 — TRBL by Christopher Wool

TRBL.

Christopher Wool’s iconographic piece. The words stenciled in red enamel. TR. Drop a line. BL.

Trouble. Yes.

“Or True Blue,” he offers from the stage at the Art Institute of Chicago. Artist Date 63.

Yes. And that is trouble too.

I have decided to do something I’ve done just once in my life. Leave first.

The one other time I did this, the relationship had turned abusive. I felt I had no choice.

I always have a choice, I am reminded.

There is no abuse here. Not even a relationship really. Not yet. An exploration. A friendship ripe with feelings and confessed crazy attraction for one another. And 700 miles between us.

He once commented it was 400 miles between us and I didn’t correct him. When he later said 700, I knew he had looked it up. “You’ve been thinking about this (visiting),” I said. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it,” he replied. We were on Skype. I saw myself bat my eyelashes coquettishly like a shy giraffe, without even thinking.

But 700 miles aren’t really the problem. It’s the every thing else. We are in decidedly different places in our lives. I am in the clearing, coming out of the forest. He is, appropriately so, tied up in the weeds. Almost available. Like the tables I would hover over at the bar in college, waiting to settle into. Almost.

Lately, there is more time between our communications. I find myself in knots. Wide open. Vulnerable. Uncertain of where I stand.

I wonder when I will talk to him. What is going on in his head. In his life. I don’t like it. I don’t like how I feel. This poor use of precious psychic energy.

2014-02-21 15.20.40 — SEX. LUV by Christopher Wool

I woke up Friday morning. As my knees hit the floor, I began crying. “I can’t do this,” I said, to no one in particular. “I need more.” Tears. Shock. Relief.

In the past, I would wedge my way into “almost available” anyway – finding an opening in a man’s attraction and desire for me. But untrue to myself and to him. Acting breezy, when I felt anything but. And soon pissed off when I didn’t get what I really needed. And lying to myself and to him about needing it at all.

This time feels different. I like him too much to ask that of him. I like me too much to ask it of myself.

All of this is running through my head, as I sit in a somewhat broken chair, listening to Wool speak. Everything he says reminds me of this relationship. My heart. What I have to do. Am afraid to do. Am afraid I won’t get the chance to do because I will either lose my nerve or he will somehow slip away without me having had the chance to speak my truth.

TRBL. Trouble. True Blue. Wool says art is most successful when it does what it says.

Does he do what he says? Do I?

I think about my vision board hanging from a wire on the wall in my apartment. Mr. 700 Miles asked about it the last time we Skyped. I brought the computer to it, showing him the words and images I’d torn from magazines on impulse and pasted on a large piece of cardboard. “Power of the Pen.” “Happiness is not for Sale.” “Effortlessly Simple.”

“In Full Bloom.” “Yourself.” ““Make love.”

“Find your true blue.” The words are small compared to all the others. In typewriter font like my tattoos that read, “left” and “write” and overlaid on a couple standing nose to nose. I pointed to the picture and the words and he just smiled.

More slides. SEX. LUV. He Said, She Said.

Wool talks about process. Creating images through loss. Drawing and erasing. Drawing and erasing. And sometimes even scraping. The tearing away became “the most interesting part.”

But he insists process isn’t that important. That the work should stand on its own.

It all seems a metaphor for my romantic life. My willingness to tear away from this man romantically to see what the universe has in store for me. For the first time – perhaps ever – truly believing I deserve more.

I wander through the exhibit after the lecture. FO. Drop line. OL. I laugh out loud. Yes. FOOL. TRBL. SEX. LUV. I am all of it.

Post Script: Later that day, I did say the words I first uttered on my knees, “I can’t do this. I need more.” To him. I felt sad and strong and sad again. But ultimately, I felt LUV. For him. For myself. True Blue.

Artist Date 62: Standing On…? Wondering Where I Am.

February 20, 2014 LesleyPearl10 Comments

Love is pain.

That is what the quilt says. Right in the center on a big red heart. All around it are stages, stops – like on a game board. Candy Land or Risk. Yeah, Risk.

Love. Joy. Desire.

Trust. Faith. Intimacy.

Jealousy. Anger. Betrayal.

Heartbreak. Wound.

Anxiety. Disillusion. Despair.

Loss. Grief.

It is Valentine’s Day. I am at the Greenleaf Art Center for the exhibit – Be Mine. I am meeting my girlfriends here, but they are stuck in traffic. So I am alone. Impromptu Artist Date 62. My second this week.

I step back and look at the quilt that greets me as I walk in the door, wondering where I am on it.

Joy. Desire.

I met a man. Or perhaps I should say, re-met. We knew each other once upon a time. Kind of. We are getting to know one another – not quite again – but now, for the very first time.

He is smart and funny, creative, sensitive and sexy. I’m pretty sure he feels the same way about me. We can talk for hours about anything and everything. We laugh a lot. And I find myself smiling a lot. Friends have noticed this.

There are about a thousand reasons why this will likely not work out and I will land on the square marked Heartbreak. I occasionally visit Anxiety already. I hate uncertainty. But I can’t not see this through. I want to find out about us.

Trust. Faith. I am trying to practice both in my life. Not so much with him, but with the universe, my higher power. Intimacy. Yes. We are building that — slowly. He lives several states away, so we are forced to go at this pace. Although the recent addition of Skype dates – we have one tonight – have added a heat to the flame.

I have not told him every single thing about me – emotionally vomiting, as if to say, “So can you handle that?” And, obviously, I have not slept with him. I haven’t led with my sexuality – my one-time calling card – either. Refraining from saying things like, “I think about you bending me over the butcher block and hiking up my dress around my waist.” I think them instead.

"Ungentlemanly Behavior." Artist, Cathi Schwalbe. — “Ungentlemanly Behavior.” Artist, Cathi Schwalbe.

Loss. Grief. I still find myself here sometimes too. Not as deeply entrenched as I once was. I am no longer up to my knees in it. I am standing in the sun, my feet wet, in a puddle left from the storm.

Post-divorce, grieving the loss of the fantasy, that that one person will be there no matter what. Always. That this love will quiet that part of me that silently screams “Don’t leave me.” It is a lie.

Day one of my life on the planet. Separated from my mother. I do not recall a second of it. Yet I know a part of my work here is to heal it.

I watch it get kicked up and manifest in unconscious, desperate attempts for control and certainty. As if that will heal me. But it doesn’t. Neither did a husband. Nor meeting my biological parents. The work is mine alone.

I move on to a series of men’s shirt collars embroidered with real messages from the artist’s experiences with online dating. “What kind of underwear girl are u?” “Every young man want to get laid by a gray hair lady.” “You want a naughty pic?” It reminds me I have not finished my Match.com profile. And that I probably won’t.

There are maps covered with pins and handwritten notes. Heart-shaped boxes filled with broken glass and newspaper clippings. A video of a woman covered in striped fabric dancing with a bee.

I return for a third time to a piece titled, “Love Letter.” It is long and tall, like a body. With hair at the top, words winding down the center, like buttons, and rocks circling the bottom. The artist, Sherry Antonini writes, “Love Letter is a meditation on listening inward and noticing outward; on persistence and on beginning again with what is left over.”

I read the poem running down her torso again. It is still too much to take in. So I photograph it – in pieces.

“Keep time. But throw away most other things, including reasons to worry…Watch for signs, however small. Push through with ideas, envisioning them as even bigger than you think they deserve to be. Do this until you can once again see yourself shine…

"Love Letter." Artist, Sherry Antonini. — “Love Letter.” Artist, Sherry Antonini.

“Make a list of the things you hold at core. Those essences nearly forgotten, cast aside for too long…Months or years it is that you have been bound tight and stilled, silenced in some darkness. But the beauty of light is insistent…

“First, you fill up a room, then you empty it, one piece at a time and all in its right time. No one can tell you not to. Or that you can’t. That you never will. Or won’t ever again.

“When you rotate the stones point them in line with your heart’s desire, you put your hands once again on your own gleam of power and touch possibility.”

I head toward the front door as my friends are entering. Unplanned. Serendipity. I meet them, filled, spilling over. Love. Joy. And later, this man who makes me smile big, on Skype. He notices my grin and tells me he likes it. I read him the poem, still trying to sort my way through it. Intimacy. Faith. Desire.

Artist Date 61: Permission to Want Love

February 16, 2014February 16, 2014 LesleyPearl4 Comments

I cannot remember the last time I was carded. My friend Debbie reminds me that I don’t drink, so I am not often in bars. So my lack of recent experience with carding shouldn’t be a surprise.

But I am in a bar tonight –the night before Valentine’s Day. I have been “invited” for the final performance of “Solo in the Second City” – a live lit(erature) series about the nature of relationships. Artist Date 61.

I wish I would have known about this sooner, but I didn’t. And the only reason I know about it at all is because I participated in my first ever live lit event last week – Story Club, a monthly event featuring three invited storytellers, and three audience members whose names have been pulled from a hat. Except it’s not a hat, it’s a monkey carved out of a coconut with the words, “Have Fun” scrawled on it.

It is the winter of the Arctic Vortex in Chicago and only three people have put their names in the monkey. This is seemingly unheard of. I am one of them.

I climb up on to the stage, pull on my “cheaters” and read an extended version of my blog post “I Love You.” “Thank You.” About me and my divorce buddy. About walking through hell together. And learning to walk on my own. It is tender and raw and real. I feel like I have earned my place on this stage. It feels amazing.

I am followed by Carly Oishi, a featured writer. She weaves together three stories of love and loss. I am riveted. She is speaking my heart even though I do not recall her exact words.

At the end of the evening, I approach her and introduce myself. I tell her I like her piece. She tells me she likes mine and invites me to “Solo in the Second City.” I mention it to Debbie and we agree we will go.

And so I am here, at Beauty Bar, sitting on a low bench surrounded by 1950s hairdryer chairs, listening to stories of breakups and broken hearts.

One woman reads about watching relationships bloom and wither. But only watching. She has closed her heart off. Closed herself off. I know there is more because I am overwhelmed with feeling and identification, but I cannot access it.

Another reads, perhaps more accurately shouts, about when a man drops off the face of the earth without a word. Not a peep. A text. A fuck off. Nothing. She talks about body parts that are usually covered up meeting other body parts that are usually covered up. About giving someone VIP access to that place where her children were born from. She says it is a big deal.

It is a big deal. To give someone VIP access to that place. To literally let someone inside of you. For so many years I did not think so. There was no velvet rope. No line to enter. At least to my mind’s eye. And each and every one who came (no pun intended) was given an all access pass. Once upon a time. Now single again after 15 years coupled, and solo in the Second City, I can play it differently. I can have a different experience.

I am humbled by her cautionary tale of pain. For taking me back to how it was. And showing me how it still can be. How I can be.

Carly, the co-producer of the series, is the last to read. It is the story I heard last week. But this time I can hold on to the words. At least some of them. The part about love and how you will do anything for it. To taste it. To experience it. To feel it if only for a moment.

Yes. That is how I feel. How I have been ashamed to feel. The message I can discern from the noise and static surrounding me post-divorce is “You don’t need it.” “You shouldn’t want it.” “You need to learn to be alone.”

I know how to be alone.

I go to the opera alone. Dance performances alone. Art shows alone.

I live alone.

I work and dance and write. I have a large and diverse cast of characters I call friends.

I love my life.

And yes, I want love. That kind of love.

Hearing Carly’s words I feel somehow lighter. Less burdened by my desires. Free to let go of this misplaced shame.

I tell her so after the show. That I am grateful for permission to want love. She is visibly moved.

I remind her we have met and she admits she didn’t realize I live in Chicago. “So you ‘do this’?’ Write? Tell stories,” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

She smiles and tell me she is putting together a story-telling series of all women, and asks if I would be interested in reading my work.

I smile back and give her the only appropriate answer – “I would love to.”

Artist Date 60: It’s In The Genes

February 12, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

The first thing my birth father told me was that we attended the same university. The second thing was that he wouldn’t have gone there if timing were different.

It was the late 1960s. The United States was fighting in Vietnam. School kept him out of the draft.

Given his druthers he would have gone to New York to be a dancer.

I gasped. My secret-private-fantasy-if-I-could-do-it-all-over career was to be a choreographer.

“It’s in the genes,” he said.

I am walking down Lincoln Avenue to the Old Town School of Music for First Friday – a monthly event of music, dance and community. Tonight’s feature is a series of dance performances by students and instructors – tap, modern, Go-Go, Bhangra. Artist Date 60.

I dance here every Sunday at noon. Josh, Don and a couple of musicians whose names I can’t recall drum us through Idy Ciss’ nearly 90-minute West African class. My church. My masochistic joy.

I have been a consistent presence here for more than five years, and yet, I am nervous tonight. Sixty solo dates consciously chosen, and, at times, I still feel conspicuously alone.

This is one of those times – coupled with self-conscious questioning if I’ve earned my seat at the table, or, on the waxed wood floor, as it were. If I really am a dancer. My musings seem self-absorbed and displaced as I am not performing today, only watching. And yet, something is stirred in me.

A boy and a girl, about 9 or so, tap their way across the stage. They are dressed to match in grey trousers and lavender shirts. The boy is skinny and awkward and sweet. One day he will know how to swing a woman around the floor, showing her who’s boss. Quite possibly the sexiest gesture ever. But not yet.

A group of tween girls perform a Bollywood dance, waving colored scarves. The tiniest one slides into the splits. Like when I was a cheerleader – too small to be on the bottom of the mount, too big to be on the top. Kind of. She is completely present and at ease in her body. Each move seems effortless. I am certain I neither looked nor felt that way.

I think about my single year of ballet lessons, taken in first grade with Mrs. Gantz, Who Likes To Dance. That is what she called herself. I don’t know why I didn’t continue. Perhaps I didn’t like it. It wasn’t easy. Or I wasn’t that good. Maybe I got bored. I quit, setting in motion a pattern – with me opting out of piano, gymnastics and cheerleading later.

No one told me that only a few are truly, naturally brilliant. Geniuses. That the savant is rare. That most of us mere mortals toil toward mastery.

The girls remind me of “the popular girls” I knew in junior high – the ones that took jazz and tap with a woman named Miss Barbara. Strangely, I was talking about them last week. About the time they invited me to the movies. Just once. In seventh grade.

I still remember the film – Young Doctors in Love. A spoof on soap operas. It was rated R. And my mother didn’t allow me to go to R-rated movies.

Except this time she did.

Post-run, swing dancing. Another cool moment with my mother. — Post-run, swing dancing with my mother.

I am fond of saying my mother’s “coolest moment ever” was when she took me to see Prince, The Time and Vanity 6. It was pre-Purple Rain, when Prince was still dirty. And I was in the sixth grade.

But the movie exception was pretty cool too.

I find myself thinking about nurture over nature.

About swing dancing in the kitchen with my mother. And her jumping rope to the Pointer Sisters Jump! About me wearing a pill-box hat with a feather and a veil to high school and her asking if I think that I am one of the Pointer Sisters.

I think about her childhood in Saginaw, Michigan, raised essentially by her maid, Mother Flora Hill. About her Sunday mornings spent at Mount Olive Baptist Church – where she was almost baptized – and her summers at the congregation’s camp. There is a photograph of her and my uncle – two toe-headed Jewish kids – in a sea of dark-skinned, smiling faces. My mother loves sweet potato pie and knows all the words to Leaning on Jesus.

With my dance "partner" in Rwanda. — With my dance “partner” in Rwanda.

I think about her taking me to see Saturday Night Fever when I was in fourth grade because she wanted me to see the dancing. (Her no R-rated movie rule conveniently overlooked.) And about skating with my parents to Peaches and Herb on Tuesday nights at Bonaventure Roller Rink while most of my friends were tucked in at home.

I think about dancing with a troupe in Rwanda a few summers ago and their recognition that I could dance. About the beautiful, bald man who gave me the eye that said, “Follow me.” And I did.

Maybe the dance is in the genes. Maybe it is inside a 1977 Thunderbird with an FM converter box – my mother’s car for as many years as I can remember. It doesn’t really matter. What does is, at the end of First Friday, when the brass band calls the audience up to dance, I go. I quit quitting. So I claim my space on the waxed wood floor.

Artist Date 59: Waiting. On The Journey To Becoming

February 1, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

I am waiting on some news. Both personal and professional. Nothing scary or life-threatening…as a loving friend of mine recently asked. But all in G-d’s time, or at the very least, not mine.

The chime on my phone notifies me of messages received and my response is purely Pavlovian. Hope rises. And when I check my phone and discover I still have no news, hope falls. I feel my heart literally sink just a little bit. Awful.

Radio silence. My friend Michael says it is normal. Winter. “‘Tis the season.” His words, literally.

I want to punch him.

He sends me photographs of the shore of Lake Michigan, taken from the Indiana Dunes. This is what quiet looks like. It is at once both sad and beautiful.

He is right though. It is in the silence that I find my center, that I soothe myself…even though it is the silence, the not knowing, that has me so uncomfortable.

I turn off my phone at dinner with friends. No ringing. No vibrating. No notifying. Silence.

I am completely present with the people about me. I am not thinking about what I do not know. I am happy and serene…until I turn it back on and watch hope rise and fall again. And watch myself respond with a level of emotion that does not feel at all congruent.

Next day, at work, I turn the phone off again. And when I power it back on later, I ignore the notifications alerting me to the messages waiting. Instead, I bring my attention to my friend Nora, who is sitting across from me. I am again happy and serene.

I feel empowered.

It feels a little bit like when I quit smoking, nearly 15 years ago. That first week, I was high on not smoking. That feeling of “I can’t believe I’m doing this…”

The weeks that followed, sans cigarettes, were not filled with that same awe and wonder. But that is a different story. And a different lesson. Fifteen years later I am grateful for a different identity – one of a non-smoker. And the absence of the yellow stain on my second finger that I could not scrub off – my personal breaking point, my bottom.

My bottom here is that I fundamentally understand I am powerless over people, places and things, and yet, I sometimes still find myself allowing the actions of others to determine my sense of happiness, security and well-being. I watch myself hand over my serenity. It is painful.

And it is in this painful awareness that I recognize I have a modicum of control over the anxiety I perpetuate. That I can dial down my discomfort by simply turning off my phone, or ignoring its messages until I am in time and space to better receive them.

That I can receive the same relief by staying busy, and by pointing my attention to what is right in front of me.

Like Nora. Like the Artist Date penciled in my calendar. Number 59. Chicago Cultural Center for the “Wright Before the Lloyd,” exhibit.

I am here just a short time – about 45 minutes. Just long enough to feel the fog in my brain clear, making way for new information, and for my whole body to exhale.

The show is small – photographs, sketches and placards covering either side of a long hallway. It is a journey of becoming. The transition from Frank L. Wright, to Frank Lloyd Wright. A seemingly subtle, but significant, metamorphosis.

I read about his mother, determined that her son should become an architect, placing engravings of cathedrals in his bedroom for inspiration. His uncle with wild long hair, unconventional fashion sense, and a memorable three-part name who served as role model. His work with Adler and Sullivan and the “mistakes” he made on the way to creating his signature style.

I notice that many of the buildings shown on this trajectory from Wright to Lloyd Wright are no longer standing. Either burned down or destroyed. Gone. Like the yellow stain on my second finger.

I think about my own trajectory, and the people and experiences that influenced my becoming the woman I always wanted to be.

The one who dances on red soil in Rwanda and glossed, wood floors in Chicago. Who has been invited in to the intimacy of rooms where life begins and life ends. The one who listens with her hands and her heart.

The one with her own signature style – cropped hair, second-hand clothes and super-fabulous shoes – the kind that strangers inquire about. Who takes herself to museums, operas and lectures – comfortably alone. And out for strong coffee and a really good piece of cake.

The one who has learned to soothe herself. To quiet her own crazy. To be responsible for her own wellbeing.

Post Script: I got a call on some of the news I’d been waiting on. It was positive and it made me smile. But it didn’t change anything. Not my thoughts. My mood. My beliefs. It didn’t make me feel “ok.” It couldn’t. Because in my heart I already was.

Artist Date 57: California, Coming Home

January 17, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

My friend Sherrod was the first artist I knew personally who made money at her craft. Which meant she covered her expenses and then some.

I remember seeing her painting on Liberty Street, where I lived in San Francisco. Victorian houses in oil. She was prolific. One night, as the sun began to go down, I invited her in for dinner. It was the first time she met my then-boyfriend/now ex-husband. Being somewhat filter-less, she named him “Pretty Boy” on the spot.

That year Pretty Boy bought me a copy of one of Sherrod’s pieces for my birthday.

It was a view of Dolores Park, from above it, and downtown San Francisco in the distance. Done in watercolors. Light. Almost cartoonish. Nothing like her other work which was darker and moody.

Pretty Boy put it in a white-wood frame he found in the alley and hung it over our bed. It followed us from San Francisco to Oakland, Chicago and Seattle – where I left it – a little piece of our first shared home.

I get emails from Sherrod now and again, telling me about her shows in the Bay Area. But I hadn’t really thought about her work much until now, standing at the Art Institute of Chicago. I am at the “Dreams & Echoes: Drawings and Sculpture in the David and Celia Hilliard Collection” exhibit – Artist Date 57.

My friend Jack suggested it.

I like the sketches in the process of becoming – Degas’ “Grand Arabesque,” Matisse’s “Still Life with Apples.” The ripe, sexy suggestiveness of Rodin’s “Leda and the Swan,” Povis de Chavannes’ “Sleeping Woman.” The eerie, ethereal quartet in Toorop’s “A Mysterious Hand Leads to Another Path.” But I don’t quite see how it all hangs together.

2014-01-16 15.35.01 — Francis Towne’s “Naples”

Francis Towne’s “Naples: A Group of Buildings Seen from an Adjacent Hillside.” An accurate, albeit not terribly inspired, title. It is from 1781, done in pen and black ink, with a brush, and black and gray wash over traces of graphite. Italy. But all I see is Dolores Park.

I am wistful and happy at the same time – remembering this place I used to call home, where the sun wasn’t a stranger in January and, rumor had it, Tracy Chapman lived on my street. This place where I met and married Pretty Boy.

It is the second time I’ve rubbed up against California today.

“Nevada Falls, Yosemite Valley, California,” painted in 1920 by Marguerite Thompson Zorach. The dreamy, translucent watercolors whisper to me of Sherrod’s Dolores Park.

2014-01-16 15.26.12 — Marguerite Thompson Zorach’s “Nevada Falls”

I know the view. I’ve seen it many time,s driving down from Badger Pass to the Yosemite Valley floor, coming through the tunnel carved into granite. Surprising and spectacular. I’ve hiked a part of it, along with Vernal Falls and the John Muir Trail, forming a loop. I was with Pretty Boy and our friend Tim –my first foray into camping.

We stayed in Curry Village in a canvas tent cabin with a wood platform and a single light bulb. Tim threw baby carrots to the squirrels, although the signs all around instructed him not to. Hilarious – until one scurried into our tent.

We bought water and painted wood disks strung on elastic at the adjacent store. “Camp beads,” I exclaimed, handing a strand to Pretty Boy. Not unlike the ones he had given me off his own neck on our first date.

I got boot bang on the trail descending and had to rip off my toenail. And once back at Curry Village, I jumped into the Merced River, and then sat on a rock, drying and shivering in the sun.

After that trip I graduated to a real tent, the lightweight kind I could use to backpack in for a few days.

2014-01-16 15.18.59 — Marc Chagall’s “Das Haus”

“Das Haus.” The Marc Chagall woodcut jumps from the wall. All four woodcuts, displayed in a row, do. But it is Chagall who paints my heart. Lead glasses my heart. Woodcuts my heart.

A house erupting from a man’s shoulders. According to the placard, it was produced following Chagall’s exile from Belarus. “…the work can be seen as an image of the artist metaphorically carrying his home with him.” Like the movie, Up. Like the painting in my living room, “You Can Take It With You,” that I bought from my friend Scotty before leaving Chicago in 2011.

I return to the placard at the exhibit’s entryway. It ends, “Even with its diversity of artists and time periods, the Hilliard collection possesses a remarkable consistency in sensibility: these works are unified by their ability to transport the viewer to other eras, other worlds.”

Chagall’s house. My stories. Towne’s Naples. My California.

Artist Date 56: Kind Of Like I Know You

January 11, 2014January 11, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

2013-06-04 17.12.55 — I coulda, shoulda
worn this hat this night.

It’s raining. Pissing raining. And dark. The snow from the storm which renamed this place Chi-beria is melting and I’m certain the city will flood.

And what look like parking spots in Rogers Park are a siren’s calling mix of ice, snow and deep water. My wheels are sliding under me. And then my feet, unsteady in the rain boots I never wear. The ones I bought a few years ago. That I thought could pass for winter boots as the shaft is made of grey flannel. I was mistaken.

I walk gingerly into the tiny theatre and choose my seat from the 25 or so, covered in red velvet. I lay my gloves, scarf and hat on the chair next to me to dry.

I smell like wet dog.

Eric Warner sent me an invitation to his performance –“A Life in Tending,” Artist Date 56 – on Facebook, just after his last performance, where he shared the stage with my friend Clover. Artist Date 45. The same night I realized I have danced with his fiancé years.

So I kind of feel like I know him, even though I don’t really. But he greets me at the door like I do. Even though Clover isn’t here. And neither is his fiancé.

He takes me into The Purple Hotel on Lincoln Avenue with him and his friends – long after it has closed. When the ground is grown over with weeds and the swimming pool is filled with black algae. When they snuck in, several years ago. Or more to the point, when they committed a felony in the name of urban excavation. Of bearing witness.

Which takes him into his grandmother’s home.

And he takes me there too, introducing me to the fierce, loving, tough-as-nails matriarch whose only rule was “Do whatever you want but don’t burn the house down.” Who, when informed her grandson’s classmates call him “fat” and “stupid,” asks, “Do you think you are those things?” Adding that people will tell him he is all sorts of things, what matters is that he knows who he is.

It is no longer that place since his grandmother died several years ago – even though his grandfather remains. He has taken to sitting in her chair, instead of staring at the empty space, where she used to be, from his own.

Pimp or Orthodox Jew? — Pimp or
Orthodox Jew?

Her walker, commode and oxygen tank sit, as though waiting for her to return. Tsotchkes line the kitchen table, sold for a song to feed his Keno habit. And perhaps also as a way of emptying the house, so his family won’t have to when he dies.

I think of my birthmother’s home, a place I visited just three times. Once to meet her. Once to say goodbye. And once to bury her.

On the first visit, I noticed the oxygen tanks in the kitchen – she was just 56. When I returned a few years later, a walker, shower bench and commode had been added.

On the third visit, we got rid of all of it. Me, my “aunt, uncles and cousins,” all of whom I’d never met until now. Except for my aunt. And her, just once, on my second visit.

I tossed reams of paper into large, black garbage bags – notes on an unsolved murder mystery she was following, years old credit-card statements, meeting minutes from the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

I remember standing back as my cousins fingered through her jewelry. My uncle telling me to “get in there.” I didn’t want anything, but I took a brooch anyway.

A few weeks later my aunt sent me my birth mom’s fur hat and coat –her name embroidered on the inside lining. It had belonged to their mother, my “grandmother.” I have never worn fur in my life. I cannot decide if I look like a pimp or an Orthodox Jew in it. It hangs in my coat closet still, even on the chilliest of Chicago days.

This morning, my birth mom’s son, my “half brother” friended me on Facebook. We have never met, or even spoken. A few months ago his daughter wrote to me. We exchanged a couple of emails where I filled in the blanks, explaining exactly who I was.

The timing is not lost on me.

I want to tell Eric all of this. To share my story, because he has shared his. Because I feel like I know him. To say “me too.” But I don’t. I do not see him on the way out and I am anxious to get home.

When I arrive I look at the calendar hanging in the kitchen – a gift from my “real” mom, the one who raised me. I’ve written just two things for January. The anniversary of my spiritual teacher’s passing, and my birth mom’s birthday. They are the same day, January 12 – this Sunday.

Artist Date 55: Saving Myself. No Wand or Wings Required.

January 6, 2014 LesleyPearl4 Comments

I’ve been having a hard time getting myself out on weekly Artist Dates. Ever since I hit that “magic” one-year mark.

Carmel and I. Extras. Fans. And Friends.

Maybe it’s because, as suggested, I didn’t date for a year after my divorce became final. The passing of 52 Artist Dates meant that that year had passed. And perhaps on some subconscious level I thought it was time to date others instead of myself.

Even though nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed in my romantic life. Even though I don’t even have a crush. And for perhaps the first time in my life, the world still feels full of possibilities. That is a big change in my romantic life.

Or maybe it’s because maintenance is hard. Of anything. Eating well, moving my body and maintaining a healthy weight. Staying sober. Meditating. Artist Dates.

Each serves me, makes me feel better, be better in the world. It would seem I would only want to perpetuate these patterns. But somehow it doesn’t work that way.

My brain is a liar. It tells me “I’ve got this.” Which, when it does, is the exact moment I need to redouble my efforts. And I need other people to do that. To remind me that my brain is, in fact, a liar. And of what actions I can take anyway.

It’s why I work for Weight Watchers. Surround myself with sober individuals. And probably why I only meditate in the morning but not the evening, even though Vedic meditation is a twice-daily practice. I’ve been doing it alone ever since I left California in 2007.

The Artist Date is a solo process. No one would know, or probably care, if I did or did not engage in it. Except me. By stating my intention and blogging about it, I invite others in, and I stay in the action of it. Action that always makes me feel better.

So I was grateful when I saw a Facebook post from my friend Lori late Friday night, asking if anyone was available to be background talent for a music video she was filming the following day. Without thinking, I said “yes” – Artist Date 55.

“Who knows?” I thought. “Perhaps I will meet Mr. Right…”

By morning I wasn’t so sure about that. When I opened Lori’s email with details for the shoot, I found myself feeling incredibly resistant. So much so, I told her I may have spoken too soon.

I shared my “dilemma” with a friend who reflected back to me that I am a woman who does what she says. And so I did.

But when I arrived, the first words out of my mouth were, “Do you have enough people? Because if you do…” Yes, she said, adding, “If you have somewhere to be, go…”

But I didn’t.

Knowing that, something shifted. And I decided to stay.

I took a seat on an empty bench where the Windy City Rollers practice and watched the girls go around and around in circles, fading in and out of the fog of the smoke machine – the set for the music video, for a song written by one of the skaters, Xoe.

I joined about a dozen extras as a Windy City Rollers fans. Our job was to rush the red team after winning the bout. To jump up and down and high-five the skaters, and each other. Simple enough…even for a non-sports fan like myself. But first, we waited.

I watched the big cameras zooming in and out. Xoe’s stunt double — dressed like a guardian angel with wings, a wand and a sequined dress — “saving her” from herself, and knocking out a couple of the Rollers in the process. I looked at the snack table and thought it could use a makeover. That I would replace some of the donuts, Oreos and chips with fresh fruit and vegetables, hummus and low-fat cheese. But nobody asked me.

A woman I know just a little, but like quite a bit, showed up and she and I talked like old friends for the better part of the afternoon – telling stories about boys, our bodies and travel.

I noticed the high concentration of men on the set – lots of tattoos and wool hats. But I didn’t “recognize” my mate.

The day ended with a whack upside the head. Literally. It was an accident.

During a “pretend” fight scene,I leaned into the fist of a wisp of a girl standing next to me. She apologized profusely. I laughed. It somehow seemed right. Like I had definitely “connected.”

This morning, I put my hand to my forehead. It was sore. A little tender spot reminding me of how much I fight myself. And of how I can save myself – no wand or wings required.

A Wandering Jewess

My Journey Back To Self

Tag: Artist Date