That Time I Set My Soul on Fire Just for Show

Maybe the past few blog posts are sad. I had to conjure some real ghosts last night to get out from under the despair and bad thinking blanket I was under. It all started with asking for help, as it usually does. And as it usually does, I was denied help, then went into several days of hardcore seizures. When I get to a certain part of those meltdowns, I have to find a way to get free. I packed up my suitcase last night, ready to get on out of here and take an adventure. An adventure you can clearly see didn't go through as planned, because I woke up and realized my brakes on the car won't get me too far. Fulfilling the adventure isn't nearly as important as changing your mind, getting yourself into the place where you understand your own freedom. I could get on out of here any day of the week, for a day, a month or for forever, but this time I've made the choice to stay until I at least address the brakes. Boy, that's a metaphor for my life!

 I have to go through the past, inspect it, and get on with writing about what I want the future to look like. I'm rewriting my own story as a hero and survivor. When women tell their stories, people often accuse them of braggadocio, but when men do it, they're hailed as heroes. Don't believe me? Look closer, if you want to see truth.

They're just stories, and women need to be able to tell theirs. Personally, I want to leave them here, so that when I'm gone, could be today, could be 40 years from now, I'll leave the stories for my nieces and nephews, if they should ever be interested in them. I sure would love to read the diaries of my family, and I wish there were more writings by them I could find, aside from a tobacco tin full of songs (but I LOVE those songs, I just want MORE!). Piecing together the past makes sense of my life and guides me into the next phase, informed and unstoppable.

A thing I learned: always look at your hero's heroes. It's a cool way to get to the heart of that which you love. For me, Bill Hicks the comedian was always a hero, since I got turned onto him by a friend. Hicks loved Alice Cooper, something I didn't understand until I watched a show about what he was really up to, not just the songs on the radio. The next hero I came across was Steve Earle, and his hero was always Townes Van Zandt. Townes, as it turns out, was a lot of people's hero. I watch videos from his friends discussing stories about him and what he meant to them. He may well be one of the most under appreciated artists who ever lived, but he increasingly finds that wide audience I don't believe he even wanted when he was alive. 

Around 2003, I moved to New Orleans for the summer between graduate school, seeking to escape New England for a few months and clear my head. Bradley said, "C'mon down to New Orleans, Shug," he calls everyone Shug. Bradley split his time about evenly between NOLA and Las Vegas, going back and forth working in fine culinary establishments. I met him at my first job in Las Vegas, and when we found out our birthdays were both on April 2, we instantly became forever friends. I don't know why or how that happens with some people; it's just that you know you'll always be friends. And we are. I don't see him enough, and I intend to rectify that at some point.

I got to New Orleans and his place was in Mid-town, across the street from Rock N Bowl (now in Metairie, after the levee broke). The second day, I went across the street and got a job bartending, and though I had many years in the food and beverage industry, I'd never been a bartender. I lied and told them I had. The first night of work, the gal who trained me said, "You ain't never bartended a day in your life," and winked at me. We became fast friends and she pointed out, "You give 'em anything less than an 8-count pour in New Orleans, and they'll never come back." The standard is a 3 count, but New Orleanians are monsters of drinking. They even have drive through daiquiri bars down there. You can become best friends with someone on an escalator and be out drinking and dancing with them, meeting everyone in their circle, within hours. It's an incredible place. 

I got a ton of music education in Rock N Bowl and became friends with a few of the musicians. I got turned onto Zydeco, and my boss unfailingly found some of the greatest players to rock that place. The dance floor was always full, and if the bar slowed, bartenders and staff could go out and do a dance or two. I ended up dancing with people from 18-85, just having a blast. 

My friend Laura from high school flew down to hang out my last few days there, then ride back with me through the Delta, a sticky and strange place. The last night, before we were to head back to Nebraska and our respective colleges, we went to dance at the Spotted Cat, and that's where we met Adam. He was a wild character, bigger than life when he danced. He had a friend there, and Laura and I danced with Adam and his friend all night. 

Adam wrote me many letters after that, and we had a cute friendship based on old fashioned letter writing. He was getting a PhD from Tulane in Public Health, and he came to visit me once in Nebraska. "How are you from here? Who is even from here?" He saw my hometown in a way I did not, as impoverished, lackluster and a place nobody would choose to live. I kind of agreed with him on the latter. I love a lot of people there, but I've got a rambling soul, and being tied to that place forever would have been my nightmare. It just didn't suit me. I couldn't have forced it to.

He mentioned that he wanted to have me come back to Louisiana to go to the Angola Prison Rodeo, and I suddenly remembered something I'd learned from being a photo assistant. They never, and I mean, never checked press credentials. Nathaniel Welch, "Natty," was a freelance photographer I'd met while working at one of those "Yes, CHEF!" type restaurants in Las Vegas. He called me to assist whenever he got a Vegas assignment, which meant we spent a day at a drive through wedding chapel and a couple of days at the Darpa Challenge. The DARPA Challenge was set up by some government thing, in those days to begin working to create the very first self driving cars. Big technology colleges created teams of engineering students to make the first prototypes. The "race" was an obstacle course, and each car had to clear hills and go around big rocks and stuff like that. It took 48 hours for the first car to finish. Some of the cars didn't make it an hour. A bunch were stuck on some obstacle, unable to free themselves. It was pretty boring, more boring than I thought it was going to be, so we wondered around, smoking pot and watching people, and he occasionally took a few pictures. They were good pictures. He was a solid photographer, just more commercially trained than I was. My pictures were more like poems than illustrations of any event. I wanted to tell the story of my soul in photographs. That was all I knew, really. Trying to show someone how to look at this event or that thing, seemed a dangerous proposition. Who am I to tell anything but my own truth?

Whenever I hear the song, "Please Come to Boston," I think of Natty and Adam, and a few others I lost to geography along the way. I had to stay on my path, and they on theirs. Whenever we tried to bend those two things to let us "be together," everything went south. 

I called Angola Prison, and told them I was assistant to the photographer Jonnie Andersen, and that "she" would be arriving with her writer, Adam ___, not sure he wants his name out there. I'll ask him. 

Sometimes you overshoot yourself, and find yourself thinking, "UH OH," and that's exactly what happened when we arrived and they made a huge fuss out of ROLLING STONE doing a piece on the rodeo. Adam kept looking at me like, "Dude! They're going to throw us in here if we get caught." I kept winking at him, making a hand signal for him to pretend to be writing things down. I handed him a notebook and a pen when we got out of the car, and told him to ask people to spell their names, then scribble any random thing in the notebook, so that we seemed legit. 

The warden introduced himself, and took us all over the prison, our own private tour. We met artisans selling things from cages beneath the rodeo grounds, and I bought the most incredible belt buckle by a master silversmith. I still have it... somewhere? Think it's in the barn by mom's house. I don't know I had to get rid of a bunch of stuff every time I moved, which was a lot. 

I was stopping to photograph here and there, talk with the artisans through the wires. Adam knew it would hurt me, showing me this. Afterwards we talked at length about this bizarre racist circus they showed off to the world without any sense that it was like caged black performers and a nearly all white audience, and it was just kind of WEIRD, man. 

The warden took us up into the top of the bleachers, where he introduced us as Rolling Stone people to Harry Connick, Jr. I was flummoxed at that point, if only because Harry was in one of my favorite Sandra Bullock movies, Hope Floats.

I spent grad school watching Sandra Bullock movies for comfort. The program I was in was a tough program, and some days all I could do was watch Sandy in Romantic Comedies to calm myself down.  I had so loved Hope Floats, where she returned to small town Smithville, Texas and fell for Harry's character. He'd gone out in the world and been a well known architect, then retreated to this small town to regain himself and live a simpler life. She didn't understand why he'd want to not use his incredible skills to do something bigger, but in the end you know, big is what you make of it. Big can be lame, meaningful is where it's at. 

Create a meaningful life, not a showy one, Sandy Bullock movies taught me, and I left grad school with no desire to enter the BIG BAD art world, because it felt like something I could never be a part of, more hoity toity than real. Good for making money, bad for making a life, or even art that meant something. It was like the Nashville that churns out "hits."  It was a trade off, where a country girl has to live in a city, and I couldn't do it. Many others made their own paths to museums and galleries without living in "the city," but I just kept working. I just kept making pictures that meant something to me and collecting stories. I met so many people I love so much to this day.

All of us knew we were dying.  Living is just preparing to die, and we all knew that all we had to leave behind were stories, so we tried like hell to make them great stories. Some of them epically succeeded, and we still tell those stories today. Some epically failed, and we tell those too. It doesn't matter, really. A good story is a good story. I'm leaving the names of some of these people, to tell you, "yes that totally happened," BUT let me tell you how I tell that one! That's what they'll tell you, if you ever find them and bring it up. I believe Natty's somewhere between New England, NYC and Florida, catching big fish and raising a son. The last time I found Adam, he was teaching Public Health at UCLA.

The title of this one is a reference to a Guy Clark song, where he tells the story of staying up all night with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Larry Mahan, "cowboyed all to tell" in a motel room, waiting to greet the sun as it came up. I love Guy, and everyone around him. 

Guy was originally with a woman named Johna, but when she ended her life, her sister Susanna fell for Guy and they had one heck of a love story. She was wild as a hare, and I believe one of the things Guy loved about her was that her whole life was story after story. She didn't let anything slow her down, except the death of Townes. She followed her heart, stayed true to herself, and loved the crap out of Guy and Townes and the whole crew. 

Susanna's been described as a muse to that entire era of incredible song writers, and they were all, by Guy's account, in love with his wife. He tells that with a giggle, because he really didn't care at all. Every movement needs a muse. She was a pretty fantastic one too, and a great painter in her own right. 

Sometimes women, and muses, get minimized in the telling of the stories of these famous men who turned country music on its head, made poetry and grand statements while a bunch of Nashville stayed focused on making hits and money. They stayed true to the ideal, and in large part because of Susanna. 

Rodney Crowell described Susanna as "the greatest adversary" he'd ever met, because she never let anyone slide, or not stay true to the commitment of making art, not just hits. I don't think any of those men minimized what she meant to that movement, but I think you can have long conversations about the songs created during that period, by all those guys, and very few people bring up Susanna. "Oh! Guy's wife!" NAWWWWWWW, one of the most important players in that music being so good. GET IT?