Post by the Scribe on Feb 20, 2021 15:08:30 GMT
LINDA RONSTADT: Trailblazer, Familiar, Friend
medium.com/@thesecretcity/linda-ronstadt-trailblazer-familiar-friend-941fbcd0e82
Chris Wells
Writer/actor/teacher. Creator and host of The Secret City. I live in Woodstock, NY with my husband, Robert Lucy. Just finished my first book. Mrchriswells.com
15 Followers
Follow
Oct 2, 2019·
13 min read·
Listen
I went to see The Sound of My Voice, the new — and wonderful — Linda Ronstadt documentary the other night. You could say I’m a lifelong fan, but there’s more to it.
I was a fourteen year old, overweight high school sophomore who had taken to wearing his down coat to school everyday to conceal his body, a body bloated from overeating. A year or so before, I had had my first sexual experience and realized I was gay; this had thrown me and my nervous system into a panic. I began to put on weight such that within months my belly stuck out; my thighs began rubbing together, wearing off the wales on the inner thighs of my back-to-school corduroys. I guess the good news was I now felt somewhat protected.
I lived in a small town in the Mojave Desert, surrounded by football players and pick-up trucks. One Saturday I was hanging out in my bedroom listening to KFI radio; they were having a call-in contest. First caller would win the Linda Ronstadt album collection, including her most recent, Mad Love, with three Elvis Costello covers.
I ran to the living room phone, grabbed the handset and dialed.
“Hello?”
“I’m calling about the Linda Ronstadt records.”
“You’re a winner!”
A week later a heavy, square parcel arrived at my suburban home. The year before I had moved into the downstairs bedroom which before then had been a sort of den. The room was now filled with my recently deceased Great Aunt Ruby’s blond and gold bedroom set — two twin beds, a large dresser and a mirror. The sheets and comforters were by Vera, blue and green and patterned with abstract sailboats. Not what I would have selected for myself, neither the furniture nor the sheets. But after sharing a bedroom with my brother Frank for years, I finally had my own room. And there was a record player on top of the dresser. I took the parcel inside and opened it to find ten records, the entire collection of Linda Ronstadt’s solo albums.
Up until that time I had a small selection of 45s — Captain and Tenille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together”, “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks, Cher’s “Half Breed” — the only album I recall owning was ELO’s Face the Music. I loved their song “Strange Magic” and would listen to it over and over until I wore down the grooves.
The bounty of Linda Ronstadt albums provided something I hope every one of us has had at one point or another: That feeling of intimacy when you find your musician.
Intimacy, from late Latin intimatus, past participle of intimare ‘impress, make familiar.’
A familiar is a creature or spirit that accompanies you on a journey. In olden times, a familiar was known to accompany a witch attempting to conduct magic.
Artists make great familiars, particularly musicians, and more particularly, singers. Those times back in Lancaster with Linda Ronstadt on the stereo, singing about being hurt or lost, sharing her longing for another place, the gorgeous yearning of her voice slipping, potion-like, into my ears, she became my familiar. Even once I discovered the theater and began to have community and intimates I knew in the flesh, Linda’s voice — her spirit — accompanied me as I embarked on adventures of my own, as I attempted the magic of adolescence.
Linda wasn’t a singer/songwriter like most of her peers, she was a singer who sang songs she loved. As I worked through her albums — Heart Like a Wheel, Prisoner in Disguise, Hasten Down the Wind — I began to learn about many of the great songwriters of the day: Roy Orbison, Neil Young, the McGarrigle Sisters, Warren Zevon, Karla Bonoff, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton.
Linda even appeared on a compilation of Philip Glass music which led me to The Roches, Laurie Anderson and more. Linda was mistress of the eclectic.
Linda’s first big hit was with the band The Stone Poneys. The song was “Different Drum” and it set the theme for her life and career. Here was a young woman who wouldn’t be constrained by the pressures of the music industry.
Many of Linda’s lifelong friends and colleagues appear in the film, speaking of her humility, her chops, her courage. How she was the first Queen of Rock n Roll, selling out stadiums and arenas with a slew of Grammys to her name. Unlike her peers — Stevie Nicks, Heart’s Wilson Sisters and then Chrissie Hynde — Linda was a solo act. At one point in the film, Cameron Crowe, the former Rolling Stone journalist and filmmaker, says that it didn’t really matter who wrote the songs, when she sang them, she took ownership.
Something like this happens with performers we love. We begin to feel a kind of ownership. But we don’t own them. Yes, there’s intimacy but it’s one sided. Or, rather, the performer is having an intimate experience with the music — words and melody, arrangements and instruments. This experience elicits feelings of love in the listener. But, when the performance is over, the performer goes back to their life. An audience is really a group of voyeurs.
Not long after winning the records, People magazine did a feature of stars before they were famous. Linda was one of the people they featured. She grew up in Tucson, AZ, and there was a photo of her from Catalina High School’s 1963 yearbook. Her face was much rounder in the photo, with signs of acne, she had a sad short bouffant of bleached blond hair. It wasn’t what you would have called flattering.
This photo horrified me in a couple of ways: What a breach of privacy — to show her at such an awkward age. And, what a disappointment to find that the adorable rock star hadn’t always looked like she did on her album covers. But, a small part of me felt a new, deeper kinship with her. How different were we, really? She was just further along, slightly up ahead, showing me the way.
Among the great live footage in the film is the concert where Linda wore a Boy Scout uniform. Fitting for one with such a sense of adventure.
The other day I was speaking to a friend who runs an arboretum up at the top of a mountain in the Catskills; he was a celebrated actor in NYC and had created a couple of renowned solo shows and then he went to study botany at the Bronx Botanical Garden. I was telling him how I suspect there’s a version of me that I haven’t met before, who wants something different from what I’ve ever had and he said. “Maybe he’s the same person, and his muse has just changed. That’s what happened for me. I became fascinated with something else.”
The art life can be challenging. I often wonder what it would look like if we weren’t driven to strive so much, if ambition was less a part of art making.
I have always had a secret, demonic-like obsession with becoming famous. I have fought against it all of my life and worked to hew to a purer path of authenticity and purpose. Lately I’m realizing my fame hunger is born of a kind of self-punishment. What part of me, exactly, keeps this hunger alive? It’s also entirely irrational: whatever success I have achieved I’ve never fully honored, not really. None of it is ever good enough. So what do I think fame would get me? Satisfaction?
You’re No Good
You’re No Good
You’re No Good
Baby You’re No Good
Linda was blessed with a magnificent voice and the temperament to contain it, wield it, carry it. And, as the film makes clear, she did this in a time when the music world was heavily dominated by men. However, it was her willingness to change that set her apart in the rock pantheon, and apart from her peers. Most often, artists are encouraged to find that thing that the public loves and then to repeat it ad nauseum. But what we want when we’re twenty surely changes by the age of thirty, then forty, fifty and so on. Throw in a powerful imagination, considerable talent and a restless spirit and, well, you’re bound to want something different.
Watching Linda learn how to sing the Mexican folkloric songs from her youth from Ruben Blades I thought, “this is one of her great powers: the ability to become a beginner, over and over again; to enter realms where she was not an expert and to learn.”
Shoshin is a word from Zen Buddhism meaning “beginner’s mind.” It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner would.
Zen master Shunrun Suzuki wrote, “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
The year after I got out of high school, Linda released What’s New, the first of several albums of standards with arrangements by the legendary Nelson Riddle. My best friend Jones and I went to see her in concert at the recently roofed Universal Amphitheater. She performed the entire album, I believe Mr Riddle conducted the orchestra. In addition to her voice, Linda is charming and a natural performer. I recall the last set of songs being sung in tight harmonies, a la the Andrews Sisters. Linda and her backup singers all wore sleeveless taffeta dresses. Toward the end of the show, a huge half moon descended from the ceiling and she sat in it and sang. Some of the details are murky but I can still see the moment when she took off her satin pumps and the opening strains of “Desperado” began and suddenly we were in her living room, in folk rock ballad territory.
Desperado
Why don’t you come to your senses?
You’ve been out ridin’ fences
For so long now
“Desperado” is one of those songs that has entered the unconscious of our nation. As with many beloved popular works, it’s hard to hear it afresh. However, listening to her sing it in the film and then looking up the lyrics, I wonder now if it isn’t sung by an unreliable narrator. Can we trust the words of the song? Or is it a song sung by someone attached to an idea of safety above all, that part of ourselves that tells us not to stray too far, time to come in now. But isn’t the creative life akin to the life of the desperado — the loneliness of having a vision, the solitude from which many of our dreams and ideas come from, the relentless pursuit of something we may never achieve?
I lead writing workshops and at one point during our time together, I ask people to identify their mystery — that quality that threads through their life and work, their muse. For Orson Welles, it was the brass ring. For Charles Foster Kane, it was Rosebud.
For me, I suspect it is freedom.
Reminds me of that letter Martha Graham wrote to Agnes De Mille after she’d suffered a disappointment with her work. Graham wrote:
“No artist is ever pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others.”
Sounds pretty desperado to me.
Also in my workshops, I ask people to bring an item that is personally revealing. I open the weekend with folks sharing their object and telling us why they brought it. It’s a rich way to have people introduce themselves. Often people bring a family photo or a favorite rock or a memento of a loved one. Last weekend one participant brought in a pewter frog. She wasn’t sure why but she mentioned that she was having trouble finishing a project and sort of beating herself up for having changed her original idea of it.
In the cottage where I live with my husband in Byrdcliffe, the artist colony of Woodstock, NY, we have an old wooden frog mask over the fireplace. We were swamped with frogs right after we moved in— the entryway was a perilous frog obstacle course. Our friend Dina visited and brought some animal cards. We looked up frogs. Amphibians. Of course. Able to change. Adapt easily. We thought then that the cottage might turn out to be a place of many transformations and this has proven to be true.
If I had been a participant in the workshop — and not the leader — I would have brought a fork, to symbolize where I find myself right now: a fork in the road.
Recently I’ve become aware that I must make some fundamental changes to my life. Certain ways of operating are unsustainable and have been for awhile. A lot of this has to do with my traumatized body. I suppose I’m a desperado — I need to settle down. I’m being asked to let go of things. As my awareness of this grows, my days are marked by flashes of rage and spells of sadness.
Of course, this moment also presents tremendous opportunity.
The renowned theater director Anne Bogart, whom I worked with shortly after moving to New York, said, “You don’t need a transition, you have a body.”
The other night I received an award for my work. It was a great honor. I also experienced, as I know many of us do when we’re recognized for our achievements, feelings of fraudulence and self-deprecation. I’M NOT WORTHY. But, I was beautifully introduced, and I was able to put together some remarks which I felt pretty good about.
At the end of my speech I shared a quote by Susan Sontag, a towering figure among the intelligentsia. I admire Sontag from afar, meaning I don’t know her work incredibly well but I’ve read several of her essays and am familiar with some of her books. I greatly admired her piece in the back of the New Yorker the week after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But this quote — it came to me sometime right after I moved to New York City and became a driving force behind the work I created there. She wrote:
“I don’t want to express alienation, it isn’t what I feel. All of my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up.”
I am not certain about much these days. I’m working at becoming a non-expert. I’m investigating. I live in the woods now. I teach and write, perform occasionally. I don’t like crowds. I’m highly susceptible to competition so I avoid venues where I will be put in competition with other artists. My life looks nothing like what I thought it would but I’m open to the idea that it suits me.
What interests me most nowadays, is finding ways to stay alive — and, yes, I have at times meant that in the anxious/depressed person way — but here I mean it in the way of staying alive to inspiration, alive to the new, to paradigm shifts, different fascinations and dreams. To not be attached to an old idea of myself.
Magic time.
For a theater performance I gave years ago one reviewer called me ‘Protean.’ I didn’t know the meaning of the word so I waited to decide if it was a good or bad review until after I looked it up.
Protean, related to the Roman god, Proteus, adjective: able to change readily or rapidly.
Good.
This has been a skill of mine as an actor — I now long to acquire it for myself. It’s one of the conundrums of being an artist: many of the skills we acquire to make our art, we lack in our own lives. Perhaps one of the benefits of developing a craft is that over time you’ll be able to apply those skills to the work of being human.
It’s no surprise how the movie ends, for it’s how her career ended: Linda was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2009 and gave her final public performance in 2011.
What is it to lose your source of joy? For a singer to lose their voice? What is it like to lose the thing that gave you power and agency and fame? How does that feel?
For someone used to changing, always forging a new way forward, a master at cutting loose from the trail and charging into the woods, I like to think she’s making something new and wonderful from that grief-filled place.
If I were going to build an altar — and I suppose I could, couldn’t I? I’m an adult, many years removed from that suburban bedroom with its heavy furniture, the sheets not of my choosing— I’d place a pewter frog at its center alongside a photo of Linda, or maybe several: One at her ‘hottest’ and one as she was in that old yearbook: awkward. I would have an index card with that Sontag quote written on it and another with the Suzuki quote. I would kneel at this altar and say to my unlikely cabal of familiars, “please help me change with as much grace as I can.”
And then I’d put on Heart Like a Wheel and cry.
More from Chris Wells
Follow
Writer/actor/teacher. Creator and host of The Secret City. I live in Woodstock, NY with my husband, Robert Lucy. Just finished my first book. Mrchriswells.com
Sep 9, 2019
medium.com/@thesecretcity/linda-ronstadt-trailblazer-familiar-friend-941fbcd0e82
Chris Wells
Writer/actor/teacher. Creator and host of The Secret City. I live in Woodstock, NY with my husband, Robert Lucy. Just finished my first book. Mrchriswells.com
15 Followers
Follow
Oct 2, 2019·
13 min read·
Listen
I went to see The Sound of My Voice, the new — and wonderful — Linda Ronstadt documentary the other night. You could say I’m a lifelong fan, but there’s more to it.
I was a fourteen year old, overweight high school sophomore who had taken to wearing his down coat to school everyday to conceal his body, a body bloated from overeating. A year or so before, I had had my first sexual experience and realized I was gay; this had thrown me and my nervous system into a panic. I began to put on weight such that within months my belly stuck out; my thighs began rubbing together, wearing off the wales on the inner thighs of my back-to-school corduroys. I guess the good news was I now felt somewhat protected.
I lived in a small town in the Mojave Desert, surrounded by football players and pick-up trucks. One Saturday I was hanging out in my bedroom listening to KFI radio; they were having a call-in contest. First caller would win the Linda Ronstadt album collection, including her most recent, Mad Love, with three Elvis Costello covers.
I ran to the living room phone, grabbed the handset and dialed.
“Hello?”
“I’m calling about the Linda Ronstadt records.”
“You’re a winner!”
A week later a heavy, square parcel arrived at my suburban home. The year before I had moved into the downstairs bedroom which before then had been a sort of den. The room was now filled with my recently deceased Great Aunt Ruby’s blond and gold bedroom set — two twin beds, a large dresser and a mirror. The sheets and comforters were by Vera, blue and green and patterned with abstract sailboats. Not what I would have selected for myself, neither the furniture nor the sheets. But after sharing a bedroom with my brother Frank for years, I finally had my own room. And there was a record player on top of the dresser. I took the parcel inside and opened it to find ten records, the entire collection of Linda Ronstadt’s solo albums.
Up until that time I had a small selection of 45s — Captain and Tenille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together”, “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks, Cher’s “Half Breed” — the only album I recall owning was ELO’s Face the Music. I loved their song “Strange Magic” and would listen to it over and over until I wore down the grooves.
The bounty of Linda Ronstadt albums provided something I hope every one of us has had at one point or another: That feeling of intimacy when you find your musician.
Intimacy, from late Latin intimatus, past participle of intimare ‘impress, make familiar.’
A familiar is a creature or spirit that accompanies you on a journey. In olden times, a familiar was known to accompany a witch attempting to conduct magic.
Artists make great familiars, particularly musicians, and more particularly, singers. Those times back in Lancaster with Linda Ronstadt on the stereo, singing about being hurt or lost, sharing her longing for another place, the gorgeous yearning of her voice slipping, potion-like, into my ears, she became my familiar. Even once I discovered the theater and began to have community and intimates I knew in the flesh, Linda’s voice — her spirit — accompanied me as I embarked on adventures of my own, as I attempted the magic of adolescence.
Linda wasn’t a singer/songwriter like most of her peers, she was a singer who sang songs she loved. As I worked through her albums — Heart Like a Wheel, Prisoner in Disguise, Hasten Down the Wind — I began to learn about many of the great songwriters of the day: Roy Orbison, Neil Young, the McGarrigle Sisters, Warren Zevon, Karla Bonoff, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton.
Linda even appeared on a compilation of Philip Glass music which led me to The Roches, Laurie Anderson and more. Linda was mistress of the eclectic.
Linda’s first big hit was with the band The Stone Poneys. The song was “Different Drum” and it set the theme for her life and career. Here was a young woman who wouldn’t be constrained by the pressures of the music industry.
Many of Linda’s lifelong friends and colleagues appear in the film, speaking of her humility, her chops, her courage. How she was the first Queen of Rock n Roll, selling out stadiums and arenas with a slew of Grammys to her name. Unlike her peers — Stevie Nicks, Heart’s Wilson Sisters and then Chrissie Hynde — Linda was a solo act. At one point in the film, Cameron Crowe, the former Rolling Stone journalist and filmmaker, says that it didn’t really matter who wrote the songs, when she sang them, she took ownership.
Something like this happens with performers we love. We begin to feel a kind of ownership. But we don’t own them. Yes, there’s intimacy but it’s one sided. Or, rather, the performer is having an intimate experience with the music — words and melody, arrangements and instruments. This experience elicits feelings of love in the listener. But, when the performance is over, the performer goes back to their life. An audience is really a group of voyeurs.
Not long after winning the records, People magazine did a feature of stars before they were famous. Linda was one of the people they featured. She grew up in Tucson, AZ, and there was a photo of her from Catalina High School’s 1963 yearbook. Her face was much rounder in the photo, with signs of acne, she had a sad short bouffant of bleached blond hair. It wasn’t what you would have called flattering.
This photo horrified me in a couple of ways: What a breach of privacy — to show her at such an awkward age. And, what a disappointment to find that the adorable rock star hadn’t always looked like she did on her album covers. But, a small part of me felt a new, deeper kinship with her. How different were we, really? She was just further along, slightly up ahead, showing me the way.
Among the great live footage in the film is the concert where Linda wore a Boy Scout uniform. Fitting for one with such a sense of adventure.
The other day I was speaking to a friend who runs an arboretum up at the top of a mountain in the Catskills; he was a celebrated actor in NYC and had created a couple of renowned solo shows and then he went to study botany at the Bronx Botanical Garden. I was telling him how I suspect there’s a version of me that I haven’t met before, who wants something different from what I’ve ever had and he said. “Maybe he’s the same person, and his muse has just changed. That’s what happened for me. I became fascinated with something else.”
The art life can be challenging. I often wonder what it would look like if we weren’t driven to strive so much, if ambition was less a part of art making.
I have always had a secret, demonic-like obsession with becoming famous. I have fought against it all of my life and worked to hew to a purer path of authenticity and purpose. Lately I’m realizing my fame hunger is born of a kind of self-punishment. What part of me, exactly, keeps this hunger alive? It’s also entirely irrational: whatever success I have achieved I’ve never fully honored, not really. None of it is ever good enough. So what do I think fame would get me? Satisfaction?
You’re No Good
You’re No Good
You’re No Good
Baby You’re No Good
Linda was blessed with a magnificent voice and the temperament to contain it, wield it, carry it. And, as the film makes clear, she did this in a time when the music world was heavily dominated by men. However, it was her willingness to change that set her apart in the rock pantheon, and apart from her peers. Most often, artists are encouraged to find that thing that the public loves and then to repeat it ad nauseum. But what we want when we’re twenty surely changes by the age of thirty, then forty, fifty and so on. Throw in a powerful imagination, considerable talent and a restless spirit and, well, you’re bound to want something different.
Watching Linda learn how to sing the Mexican folkloric songs from her youth from Ruben Blades I thought, “this is one of her great powers: the ability to become a beginner, over and over again; to enter realms where she was not an expert and to learn.”
Shoshin is a word from Zen Buddhism meaning “beginner’s mind.” It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner would.
Zen master Shunrun Suzuki wrote, “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
The year after I got out of high school, Linda released What’s New, the first of several albums of standards with arrangements by the legendary Nelson Riddle. My best friend Jones and I went to see her in concert at the recently roofed Universal Amphitheater. She performed the entire album, I believe Mr Riddle conducted the orchestra. In addition to her voice, Linda is charming and a natural performer. I recall the last set of songs being sung in tight harmonies, a la the Andrews Sisters. Linda and her backup singers all wore sleeveless taffeta dresses. Toward the end of the show, a huge half moon descended from the ceiling and she sat in it and sang. Some of the details are murky but I can still see the moment when she took off her satin pumps and the opening strains of “Desperado” began and suddenly we were in her living room, in folk rock ballad territory.
Desperado
Why don’t you come to your senses?
You’ve been out ridin’ fences
For so long now
“Desperado” is one of those songs that has entered the unconscious of our nation. As with many beloved popular works, it’s hard to hear it afresh. However, listening to her sing it in the film and then looking up the lyrics, I wonder now if it isn’t sung by an unreliable narrator. Can we trust the words of the song? Or is it a song sung by someone attached to an idea of safety above all, that part of ourselves that tells us not to stray too far, time to come in now. But isn’t the creative life akin to the life of the desperado — the loneliness of having a vision, the solitude from which many of our dreams and ideas come from, the relentless pursuit of something we may never achieve?
I lead writing workshops and at one point during our time together, I ask people to identify their mystery — that quality that threads through their life and work, their muse. For Orson Welles, it was the brass ring. For Charles Foster Kane, it was Rosebud.
For me, I suspect it is freedom.
Reminds me of that letter Martha Graham wrote to Agnes De Mille after she’d suffered a disappointment with her work. Graham wrote:
“No artist is ever pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others.”
Sounds pretty desperado to me.
Also in my workshops, I ask people to bring an item that is personally revealing. I open the weekend with folks sharing their object and telling us why they brought it. It’s a rich way to have people introduce themselves. Often people bring a family photo or a favorite rock or a memento of a loved one. Last weekend one participant brought in a pewter frog. She wasn’t sure why but she mentioned that she was having trouble finishing a project and sort of beating herself up for having changed her original idea of it.
In the cottage where I live with my husband in Byrdcliffe, the artist colony of Woodstock, NY, we have an old wooden frog mask over the fireplace. We were swamped with frogs right after we moved in— the entryway was a perilous frog obstacle course. Our friend Dina visited and brought some animal cards. We looked up frogs. Amphibians. Of course. Able to change. Adapt easily. We thought then that the cottage might turn out to be a place of many transformations and this has proven to be true.
If I had been a participant in the workshop — and not the leader — I would have brought a fork, to symbolize where I find myself right now: a fork in the road.
Recently I’ve become aware that I must make some fundamental changes to my life. Certain ways of operating are unsustainable and have been for awhile. A lot of this has to do with my traumatized body. I suppose I’m a desperado — I need to settle down. I’m being asked to let go of things. As my awareness of this grows, my days are marked by flashes of rage and spells of sadness.
Of course, this moment also presents tremendous opportunity.
The renowned theater director Anne Bogart, whom I worked with shortly after moving to New York, said, “You don’t need a transition, you have a body.”
The other night I received an award for my work. It was a great honor. I also experienced, as I know many of us do when we’re recognized for our achievements, feelings of fraudulence and self-deprecation. I’M NOT WORTHY. But, I was beautifully introduced, and I was able to put together some remarks which I felt pretty good about.
At the end of my speech I shared a quote by Susan Sontag, a towering figure among the intelligentsia. I admire Sontag from afar, meaning I don’t know her work incredibly well but I’ve read several of her essays and am familiar with some of her books. I greatly admired her piece in the back of the New Yorker the week after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But this quote — it came to me sometime right after I moved to New York City and became a driving force behind the work I created there. She wrote:
“I don’t want to express alienation, it isn’t what I feel. All of my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up.”
I am not certain about much these days. I’m working at becoming a non-expert. I’m investigating. I live in the woods now. I teach and write, perform occasionally. I don’t like crowds. I’m highly susceptible to competition so I avoid venues where I will be put in competition with other artists. My life looks nothing like what I thought it would but I’m open to the idea that it suits me.
What interests me most nowadays, is finding ways to stay alive — and, yes, I have at times meant that in the anxious/depressed person way — but here I mean it in the way of staying alive to inspiration, alive to the new, to paradigm shifts, different fascinations and dreams. To not be attached to an old idea of myself.
Magic time.
For a theater performance I gave years ago one reviewer called me ‘Protean.’ I didn’t know the meaning of the word so I waited to decide if it was a good or bad review until after I looked it up.
Protean, related to the Roman god, Proteus, adjective: able to change readily or rapidly.
Good.
This has been a skill of mine as an actor — I now long to acquire it for myself. It’s one of the conundrums of being an artist: many of the skills we acquire to make our art, we lack in our own lives. Perhaps one of the benefits of developing a craft is that over time you’ll be able to apply those skills to the work of being human.
It’s no surprise how the movie ends, for it’s how her career ended: Linda was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2009 and gave her final public performance in 2011.
What is it to lose your source of joy? For a singer to lose their voice? What is it like to lose the thing that gave you power and agency and fame? How does that feel?
For someone used to changing, always forging a new way forward, a master at cutting loose from the trail and charging into the woods, I like to think she’s making something new and wonderful from that grief-filled place.
If I were going to build an altar — and I suppose I could, couldn’t I? I’m an adult, many years removed from that suburban bedroom with its heavy furniture, the sheets not of my choosing— I’d place a pewter frog at its center alongside a photo of Linda, or maybe several: One at her ‘hottest’ and one as she was in that old yearbook: awkward. I would have an index card with that Sontag quote written on it and another with the Suzuki quote. I would kneel at this altar and say to my unlikely cabal of familiars, “please help me change with as much grace as I can.”
And then I’d put on Heart Like a Wheel and cry.
More from Chris Wells
Follow
Writer/actor/teacher. Creator and host of The Secret City. I live in Woodstock, NY with my husband, Robert Lucy. Just finished my first book. Mrchriswells.com
Sep 9, 2019