Cosmic
This is a mammoth post, and I haven't finished it yet (nearly there, red!), but it's dovetailing into my Murdoch-inspired thoughts about connection and resistance. The theme reminds me of my own time in Chicago, which was not nearly so momentous or cosmic--most of my time there I felt I was relying too heavily on my friend K. and her cousin, borrowing their friends rather than making my own, so that although I had a good time and a lot of adventures, it didn't feel quite mine, in the way my NYC life does. It wasn't until the end of my stay in Chicago that I made a truly good friend--a woman named Amy--it was my last month or so there, and I was doing the lighting for a show, and Amy was doing the sound. She and I made so many mistakes in our little booth that our whole bodies would shake with (hopefully) inaudible laughter, until the end of the show, when we would finally collapse in giggles and, fall all over one another with the release of tension. It was great. Through our booth bond, we started hanging out during the day and getting coffee and I remember touching on subjects with her that I normally found it hard to talk about--I was young, 23, and hadn't figured out some fairly important stuff yet, and I got some glimmering of an answer to questions I had about myself or about life in those conversations. They seem so fleeting now, because I did not end up staying in touch with her, but at the time something about her personality seemed particularly soothing to my anxieties--as though she represented the key to a great mysterious puzzle I was on the verge of solving. It's hard to describe exactly what she represented; perhaps some notion that you don't have to meet exalted societal standards of beauty to have adventures, amorous or otherwise, that what mattered was an understanding of yourself and what made you tick, and riding that wave of idiosyncrasy as far as it will go. She just shone, to me, and made everything quicken with possibility--a walking illustration of that design for living. But alas, I met her just as I was leaving, we mingled briefly in the lighting booth era, and never met again.
posted by fortuna at 8:25 PM
6 Comments:
Very, very nice. Any sense of whether she knew this? That she was having this effect on you? Or did you not know quite how to put it until it had passed? There are people who can show us these things without being quite aware of it themselves, that is, of how we're going to need to express it.
I think my mom was in a typing pool during the war sitting next to a girl who had the same effect on her. She's sometimes mentioned it. Now she's not remotely as articulate or introspective as you, but she's said enough to make the connection between what you've said here and that obvious to me. Jewish girl from Montreal, she said.
The Chicago side of this intrigues me; I've lived here most of the last 30 and all of the last 19, so we overlap.
//something about her personality seemed particularly soothing to my anxieties--as though she represented the key to a great mysterious puzzle I was on the verge of solving. //
I so so know what you're talking about there. So well said.
My studio apartment - the one I describe in the post - was the one on Melrose and Broadway - right by Unabridged! I know we have covered this before!
I remember where you lived but didn't realize it was that particular studio.
I'll bet there was something we had in common: Scenes Coffeehouse and Dramatis Bookstore on Clark just south of Belmont. We were part owners.
I went to those all the time.
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