I remember my friend's sense of awe when I told him about the magical little black box called a Roku which would stream your Netflix queque live to your TV set, bringing instant gratification to your viewing experience. Now we can stream live from a cell phone, a computer, a blue ray player or a tablet but only a few years ago that seemed like a dragon's hoard of digital gold. Woah, he said, that's like Videocrack!
And indeed for the sad and searching souls, nothing can be so addictive as the illusionary social circle of a good television show. For me the most recently discovered (for time means nothing in the age of instant digital archives) addiction came in the form of the short-lived teen drama, My So-Called Life . Played with lip-quivering, luminous vulnerability by Claire Daines, this ground-breaking and short-lived show featured a creature as rare as a unicorn in all of televison, let along TV aimed at 90's teens: a bonafide introvert as protagonist. In the first episode, Angela, in an act of incredulous rebellion, dies her mouse-brown hair red with the help of her new friend, the Enkidu to her girlish Gilgamesh, the brash, alcoholic, trashy and irrepressibly likeable Rayanne.
Who among us absorbed, fantasy-prone scribbling dreamers hasn't had at least one aserbically outgoing friend who did not coax us out of our shell but dragged us kicking and screaming? Rayanne is both shadow and soulmate, swapping shoes and sharing gossip in that heads-together, enmeshed way of female friends who earnestly need each other, wanting to be each other and complete each other yet who bond through snide camaraderie yet never reveal the naked vulnerability underneath their fuck-it-all attitudes. Angela witnesses her self-destructive friend party her way into the hospital. She is there through the recovery process, goody-two-shoes gadfly, virgin firebrand to Rayanne's Mary Magdalene. And although this doesn't go in Sapphic direction of the delightful romance The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls In Love, when Rayanne beds Angela's broody-eyed boy obsession in a torrent of envy and misplaced identification, and Angela withdraws into the horror of being betrayed by her best friend. It is in this moment that we know their friendship is not without its introverted fire. Rayanne is Angela's sexual initiator when she blurts out, catching the direction of her friends furtive glances, "YOU WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH JORDAN CATALANO"....
Then Angela responds with the line that seared her forever into my heart: "Sex or a conversation" and I remembered my own worshipful adolescence, when those two things were equally improbable with a boy that had caught my eye, my heart, my poetic soul.
So in my moment of contemplation of conscious uncoupling from my long-term relationship when I needed a burst of inspiration of courage, of course I thought of my own beloved mutineer, my angry-young-Irishwoman, the Rayanne to my Angela who with solicitious friendliness at work penetrated the Neutral Zone between our cubicles and enlisted my opinion, my assistance, and, though she didn't know it, my eternal loyalty. She is brash, loud, sometimes needs a muzzle or a leash dropping names with aplomb at the local pub, where I naively assume she knows the people she engages in confrontational conversation. (It turns out she rarely actually does). And though our friendship has been fraught with its own codependent/addict power struggle, when I went to her house last night it was not for a restorative night on the town or a whisky-bolstered personal growth session into the wee hours it is with a bottle of cheap Intense Red hair dye from the Rite Aid down the street from the office where we both used to work.
She grins at my absurdity, as her tastes run from sporty Amanda Bynes comedies like She's The Man to cop dramas with strong female leads, and she probably would not get My So-Called Life at all, her own tough love hard-knocks story would give no credence to Angela's cloistered, suburban world. But there she is, earnestly typing away to meet the midnight deadline of her criminal justice class, calling up cops for esoteric knowledge of search warrants to get the insider's edge over the other students. Cutthroat, determined, she's still got that Irish fire even with her head bent to the academic grinstone and not blurting blarney in some pub. But now its concentrated with lazer beam focus and I now know that passion was wasted in interoffice triangulated battles between of absent parents, overachiver, slacker and the poor bastard in the middle (me)--hard fought battles that seemed to evaporate after she left.
So she lends me a pre-stained dye towel and continues her homework sipping on a lite beer. I go into the bathroom, bottle in hand, not knowing what will emerge after the sitting and rinsing, a Dark Phoenix or Bozo the clown. We all know introverts are drawn to but terrified of any intensity and this Intense Red is my flag of warning and rebellion, my rebound out of self-inflicted emotional bondage into self-directed freedom. In the CSI scene I could see Dexter's Ophelia floating in the water as my vampire tears drained. But I was determined to honor transition and turn over my own leaf from green hope to crimson surrender. So I watched "the waters turn/from blue to red/as to the sky I offer it" as in the anthem of terror transformed into power "Rabbit Heart" by ginger-powered Florence and her mystical Machine.
But the thing about self-sacrifice is you never know if it is about suicide or salvation when the knife goes in. You only know it when you rise. And so I dried my hair and saw myself in the mirror with the strange alienation of all introverts when confronting their own outsides. I saw my mother, going bald at 40 liberated by her love of wigs and weaves, chosing her artifical crowning glory with the nonchalance of the elegant black women with impeccable suits and interchangeable hair extensions. I saw Bonnie Raitt, balm to heartbroken women everywhere and I remembered me and Rachel (a May West-like bodacious Rayanne from my timid college days) bonding over alcohol and country ballads. I saw my complexion get a little more dramatic, the lines around my eyes get a little deeper, a little older. I was sexy and sovereign. Like Angela, I knew I wasn't a little girl anymore.
I spent some time with my friend in casual, but heartfelt conversation, was admired as Ariel the crimson mermaid by her daughters, played trivia games on the big TV. I drove home in the insubstantial, magical snow and for the first time in a long time wanted to go home, not crash on her couch in order have to face the lonliness of an empty apartment. At home were the cats, the ocean, the sun in the morning to show my the glory of my new mane. I spent a weekend of kirtan on Saturday, and on Sunday played in the park with priestesses, avatars of Artemis and Peter Pan scrambling over rocks, honoring the ocean, sparkling incandescent waves rich with red algae. And to crown my weekend I went to a watering hole in Manchester-by-the-Sea to get my fix of folk music and share some poetry.
When I got there, I didn't know what to expect. I was shunning the bar scene, but Will and Janice are Gloucester music staples and when I got Janice's email I did a little dance of glee to catch a glimpse of the silver-haired flower child I whose music mesmerized me by the river's edge at the Essex Folk Festival in 2010. What I found was a three-fold interweave of women's voices--maiden, mother, crone--singing "Rhiannon" and sending shivers down my witchy spine. At the center was, you guessed it, my next Rayanne, a brash, irrepresible 56 year old grandmother of four and music scene veteran who invited me to sing harmony, who allowed me to pour conspiratorally through her sheet music and see her original songs, who lured me with that over-the-top interpersonal enthusiasm--those smiles, those bright eyes, those casual hand-touches--that we introverts tragically never really learn isn't personal at all.
"Are you on Facebook?", I asked, speaking of the introvert's senior prom, where the socially inept can share the floor with prom queens and kings in a one-sided epistolary waltz.
"Facebook!", she laughed, blasting into my face, "You might just as well walk naked down main street!" I laughed hard with her infectious braying, only crushed a little. You see I was already envisioning earning her friendship and trust through sharing You Tube videos of obscure folk covers and getting invites to private gigs with local legends. Entranced and rejected at once, I felt the hook, my truest eternal slow dance with Rayanne. I knew that I had found something wider, deeper sweeter and more piercing that anything I could have found going after a man with a belly full of liquid courage and vengeance in my heart. She admired my hair.. "Rebound in a bottle" I quipped, "best guilt-free remedy for a breakup. She said hey that's a great line for a song!"
I knew I would be back again in that local bar with those fearless, friendly honky tonk women. And maybe I would raise my timid Joni-Mitchell/Sandy Denny soprano in shared song and become the rocking Queens of Wands who had come before --Bonnie Raitt, Kate Bush, Tori Amos and lately Florence with or without her Machine.
I knew I would come back the next Sunday.
Wild horses couldn't drag me away.
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