In keeping with today’s theme of the Sun-Pluto conjunction, I have a little personal history to share. For as long as I could remember, I sang. When I was five, my uncles would throw dollar bills onto the living room floor, telling me those were mine if I’d sing them a song. As a shy, reclusive child my mother had to push me out onto that living room floor to perform and be out among other people. It wasn’t long before I learned that one of the few ways I could be before other people without getting teased mercilessly by my older cousins — which happened a lot — was by performing. You might say singing saved my young life.
When I was eight, I started playing the piano and singing along to the radio. I mimicked operatic arias on the record player. I made up my own tunes. None of the music was complete enough to make a song, but I just played and played. I joined the high school choral group, making friends with the art crowd, freeing myself from needing the approval of the ‘cool kids’ who shunned me. I became a member of an art clique that nobody understood, but smart enough for all our teachers to favor. Music became a muscle that shielded me from nasty scrapes of cruel adolescence. But it was not enough to protect me from the cruelty of life.
I was 18 when my father died, two weeks before going away to school. I was then a soul amputee. Singing no longer had meaning for me. I could not bring myself to sing, and because of her profound grief, Mama could not bear to hear the sound of music in the house. I lost the music in my home and in my voice. But it had to find a way through somewhere. The music moved into my sexuality, used to fill the wound caused by my father’s loss.
It was in the halls of the art department that I found another part of myself previously declared missing. When I found acting classes in my senior year, missing limbs re-appeared. It was then for the first time in four years that I felt true happiness. I acted, danced. I was in a show at least once a year if not more. I had to work at a ‘real job’, because I needed to eat. This has been my life for the last 30-plus years since graduating college. The pieces sewn back together, the spirit alive and functioning as best it could. Yet, music was still lost to me. It was unreachable, a mystery. Inaccessible.