Let’s put on a show!

So last night I went to see a musical with my previous flatmate and dance journalist extraordinaire Lyndsey Winship.  The plot of said musical involved a derelict theatre in Nevada staving off foreclosure by putting on a show.  After some false starts and hard knocks the show was a hit and the theatre was saved.  Hooray!

Not only is this the plot of my favourite teen fantasy film Empire Records but its also an amazing solution to real-life problems that is never, ever applicable in real life.  When leaving the venue Lyndsey and I discussed various aspects of the future downfall of print journalism before she suggested: Brie, I know how to save the magazine!!! LETS PUT ON A SHOW!

We spent the next 20 minutes while waiting for the bus devising the plot line, impromptu tap dancing and singing random lines.  The random strangers were spotlight people who fell in love with us before saying our names, and one of us would be disguised as the other at some point.

If only, if only we could fix everything in life by just putting on a show!!

Leon Has a Stalker

My friend Leon came to see me in December for an A.Skillz show (a fateful night that had me sitting outside my flat at 2am with a locksmith drilling the door while Leon finished jamming to A.Skillz but I digress…)

Anyways, as we recounted each other’s romantic misadventures he told me of a girl at his uni who had taken a very, uh, keen interest in him.  So keen that he saw her everywhere.  At his work, classes, the library – she was just around.

Anyways, the culmination of this mild stalking happened when he came home from dinner one night and found her sitting in his dorm room.  She’d found it open, you see.  And she just wanted to see him.

“Don’t you realise,” I said to Leon, “that it means it wasn’t a coincidence she found your door open the one time you left it unlocked… it means she’s been walking by and trying the door all the time.”

And then I thought – hm, I should write a song about that feeling.  That feeling of sitting in someone’s room waiting for them to come back when you’re not supposed to be there.  That feeling of being a complete slave to your impulses, and living in fucking la-la land.  So I did.

What – your childhood was different?

Winking: the 2nd base of talking

My friend Jean came over tonight and we at pho.  She blogged about it here.

Drunk Girl on the Night Bus

The first verse of this song begins with ‘now, we’ve all been there once or twice’… and its so true.  I’ve been that crying girl on the night bus/last tube/outside the club (probably more times than I’d admit) and I’d challenge you to find a girl who spent her mid-twenties in London who hasn’t.

Living far from home and the prevalence of public over private entertaining means we’re all too often forced to play out major personal dramas in public in this city.  We have evolved a benign social etiquette – mostly we just ignore this poor girl in crisis, letting her think no one sees her.  Its way I prefer it.

I fell down the escalators at London bridge one night when I was 24 storming away from a fight with a boy.  I then stood at the bottom crying until he found me.  A real highlight of my life, let me tell you.  But I suppose that fall and those tears planted the seeds for this song – and the tender compassion I have for every drunk hot mess weeping on public trasnportation.

SLAM!

In keeping with the romance theme that appears of late – I’d like to share a lovely poem by slam mistress Sarah Kaye: A Love Letter between a Toothbrush and a Bicycle

Getting Older

It was strange that I ended up in your old neighbourhood tonight – when just earlier today my flatmate mentioned you – saying ‘you dated a <redacted south american nationality>, didn’t you?’ and I actually had to give pause for a moment and think.

I had literally almost forgotten.

Oh him! I exclaimed… oh yeah……

The slight melancholy that accompanies the realisation that you’ve somehow mentally erased a past lover is unexpected – for the first in my life (and inevitably not the last) I thought ‘so this is what its like to get old’.  Memories, part-formative part-past adventure disappear for moments only to be rediscovered, dusted off and put on that mental storage area of ‘a long time ago’ until the next time you have need of them.  Your brain gets cluttered – and the unimportant is thrown away.

I remembered you well enough tonight walking through Elephant & Castle – you weren’t a great love, a long love or an important love, but you weren’t worth forgetting.  So it wasn’t with poignancy I looked back, but a deep-seated desire to restore my personal narrative.

You no longer live in the neighbourhood but I glanced, just once, in the direction of your old flat and remember being led there for the first time as the sun came up years ago.  How much seemed possible with spring and sunshine.  You often criticized my Spanish a bit too much and it annoyed me, you would sing me mariachi songs in the morning in a charmingly tuneless way.  We ate tripe soup at a Colombian restaurant when our mission to get dim sum failed.

It was not sentiment – but a reclamation of my past.  I forgot who you were – only for a moment, and therefore I felt I knew myself just a little less well.  But with a furtive glance across an ugly roundabout – I remembered you, and then I remembered me.