Jackie was going on tour in full-out pop-star mode, big hair and singing girl-rock stuff like “Since You’ve Been Gone”. I was going to come out to LA for a week to do five of the shows with her, and was not very successfully learning the words to all the songs. But when I got there, I found out her dad had sort of stage-mothered the whole thing and she was freaking out and eating frozen lasagna and was not ready to do it at all. So there I was, with a week set aside and ready to sing in public and not having any venue to do it in.
Then somehow I was in England, and there was a very sweet, nervous St Vincent-type curly-headed indie girl who was trying to put on her own tour. I found her in a park trying to warm up for her first show, so I linked my arm through hers and said I’d back her up. We ran through the first song together, and she’d printed the lyrics on craftsy 5×7″ cards with rounded edges, so I could hold them and read them while singing. It was a very odd song about growing up in a quasi-rustic childhood with home-cured pork and… something. The girl had made a funny artsy music video to go along with it, and it was the kind of song where I could warble along without really knowing the tune and since she knew it, it worked in a folksy sort of way.
The time came for the performance and there we were, in the park with bleachers in front of us and the projector set up to show her music videos behind us. The Queen of England came (!!), as did the guy who played Friar Laurence in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (only he was American, and dreadfully clumsy, and he tripped over the Queen! but she was very amused, and said so), and my family, and a kid who cried when we got to the part about pig parts and he realized where pork comes from. My singing partner was still nervous, so I carried her through by talking to the crowd and explaining that we weren’t quite a pop group, and we weren’t classical, but we were something all our own, and we hoped they’d like it. And they did. We were both wearing red ballet flats and she was so pretty in a kelly green dress, and it just worked. We ended up only doing shows on that one weekend, but word spread and we were the new sensation in very small circles.
I’ve added a new tag: dreams, having realized I blog about them frequently. (Note: if you are reading this on my blog site and not on a feed, when you click on the link, it will look like the page hasn’t changed — but it has; now all the subsequent journal entries are entries with dreams in them.)
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