2017 Wrap Up

Right now I couldn't even begin to think about making New Year's resolutions.  I can't think of anything I need to be doing (that's realistic) that I'm not already doing.  And I hope it's not a cop-out to say that so much of what is lacking in my life is about the lack of opportunities for someone with my level of talent in the environment I'm in.

As for how the outgoing year was, here's a wrap up.  (And please note, this is only about me and the people in my life. It is not about the year as a political saga.)

The Good

• My partner is finally settled on Medicaid with a package of services and a support team.  Barring her coming into money (unlikely), this can roll over from year to year.
• She is much healthier.  I am no longer worried that she is going to die within weeks or months.
• Through managing all of her care providers and coordinating services, I have acquired skills that, most importantly, give me a feeling of competence, and secondly, keep fresh the management skills I once used at jobs for pay, if I ever want to look for another one.
• I keep singing better and better.
• Through my involvement with her home care team, I have learned about many different ways to make a life, even here in New York.  There are people of different ethnicities, living in outerborough neighborhoods, with skills, talents, and beautiful souls, that have nothing to do with the world of Upper West Side successful professionals with performing arts degrees, around whom I feel like I'm the size of a mosquito.  I thank these women not just for the loving care they provide my partner, but for sharing their hearts and their lives with me.

The Disappointing

• Despite singing better and better, it seems harder and harder to find a place to sing.  Outreach venues don't call me back.  If I were to pay a modest fee to rent a studio, I would have to fill it with an audience, and with all the high-level performances here (many of them free), there won't be one.  Some people will no doubt come to be polite, but they really are not all that interested.  
• Despite repeated efforts, I have not been able to create a network of similarly situated aspiring performers (older adults with a certain level of talent and skill who are eager to perform and willing to invest a certain amount of work in throwing something together). The people I meet are either younger or more experienced and are plugged into networks of their own that would not be open to me or it they're my age, they're pretty much done unless something falls into their lap.
• I realize more and more that most of the people who have the life I want began on a path when they were in their teens or shortly thereafter.  At least among people I meet regularly, I seem not only to be one of the few without an advanced degree or some degree in a performing arts related field, but also one of the few who was never in a school show or an extracurricular performing arts group. This is time and experience I can never get back.
• Despite spiritually knowing better, I still yearn for a life I can't have: a life primarily defined by the arts.  To the world I am a freelance copyeditor who is a caregiver - oh, and I have a lovely voice, sort of as an aside.
• I can no longer even envision doing anything for a living, even part-time, that does not involve some iteration of "paper pushing" sitting at a desk.

Lesson of the Year

Since I apparently will never do well, maybe I have to settle for doing good.

My Years with the Lost Girls

Years go by and you never know who from the past is going to turn up.  A few weeks ago, two old friends of my partner's (one a former lover) who had been involved in a video group wth her, a few years before she and I met, asked me if they could come visit her and interview her on tape.  Of course I said yes.  The more lasting memories I have of her the better (a social service agency recently made a video of her talking about memories, which included some video clips of me singing). 

One thing led to another and I found out that these women, who had been sitting on boxes and boxes of reel-to-reel tape made by what was - I think - the only Lesbian video group in the 1970s, had converted most of it to digital format.  They now have a Facebook page and a vimeo link.  Viewing the videos brought me an enormous wave of nostalgia.  I was not in any of them; I got involved with this movement a few years later, but it was all familiar territory.

Looking at the videos, I was struck by the youth and innocence of it all.  There was a fairy tale quality to it, which I think is what drew me in all those decades ago.  Yes, I was a Lesbian, but no, I was not eager to don unisex clothing and throw away all my bottles and jars of makeup, high platform shoes, and dresses.  l was not angry at men, particularly, I just found them (for the most part) to be totally clueless about women's bodies, and rather dull at making conversation.  Most of the ideology espoused by the women I suddenly found myself involved with morning noon and night left me cold (I had heard most of it before from my Marxist, albeit heterosexual, mother, particularly the tut-tutting over the wastefulness of buying cosmetics).

And yet I was intrigued.  I saw that a group of women, mostly white and middle-class born, and mostly under 45 (my partner was one of the oldest) had found a way to live, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, in a never-never land where there was almost no contact with the "ordinary" world.  I don't think I had ever quite imagined anything of this kind. (Growing up, my Lesbian hero[ine] had been Elinor Eastlake from The Group: too smart and glamorous to bother with men, and snapped up like arm candy by a rich cross-dressing baroness.)  Recently I have been writing a memoir (totally unlike this blog) which is mostly about literature and religion, with only a nod to singing, and in one chapter I mention my lifelong love of the novels of Dickens, which began in adolescence with my fascination with the endless roll call of orphan children.  Well, these Lesbian-Feminist-Separatists were very much that.  They were girl-boy children who seemed not to have grown up and who had managed to live a life quite apart from "adults".  Most of them were on strained terms with their own parents if they communicated with their parents at all, which many did not. We had our own choruses, printing presses, art schools, coffee houses, food coops, movers, painters, exterminators, and others.  We had our own holiday celebrations (including a "solstice party" in late December, to avoid mention of "patriarchal" holidays). We had our own doctors and lawyers, too, but these were the "bridge" figures: they were of us but also of the world, and now, years later, most of them are settled, successful professionals, married (to other professional women) and moving quite comfortably in the "real world", but never compromising who they are. 

And there was our "Wendy".  Not me.  I was  a token "pretty girl" but most of my clothes still came from thrift shops and I was not a successful professional nor did I have a middle class home.  "Wendy" was a pretty, blonde schoolteacher, a "bar femme" from the era when Lesbians were sexy, not political.  (She had once been hauled off to jail with her butch lover, wearing a red baby doll nightie). Wendy was a trained singer, and she was the anchor in our chorus.  She was the professional people turned to, and the "mommy".  People came to visit her at Christmas and she led caroling.  She was one of the few people who encouraged me to sing, and I did land a solo spot in the feminist oratorio our chorus did (it was - is - a magnificent piece of music but has gone out of circulation as a result of a conflict between the composer and lyricist).

Of course it was not all a sweet fairy tale to remember with fondness.  As I have written of numerous times in these "pages", it was these very women who discouraged me from trying to seriously pursue an opera career (if I would even have been able to at the late age of 26 with no music degree and poor health habits, but who knows; with different influences and a true "champion", maybe I could have).  They told me not to "invest myself in a patriarchal art form like opera."  They made me so phobic about straight men that I was unable to act the roles I should have been singing.  (Actually I was not afraid of straight men; I was afraid of their disapproval.)

How different things are now.  Upwardly mobile professional Lesbians of subsequent generations are all marrying, finding high tech ways to procreate (don't ask!), and being house proud.  They are nicer, and much mentally healthier that the "lost girls" (there have been several Lesbian couples at the church where I sing and they are lovely, totally un-angry, "well adjusted", and comfortable with themselves), but I miss never-never land.  Eventually it vanished, and I was left as a middle aged woman who had never really grown up, scrambling to make something of myself in the real world.  I don't know what turn things will take now that I've come face to face with my 20s, certainly not something I was expecting!