U Can't Kill the Baby

I was walking home from a client meeting today - which happened to be in the same bldg I had my last corporate job in 9 years ago. And it happened to be rush hour on a holiday weekend - I just walked back to the Tenderloin instead of dealing with the bus. The light was blinding, shadows were long, so much scaffolding. And I suddenly had a big blast of terror. I cannot believe this show, this thing I couldn't even describe to anyone for years, then couldn't find a place to perform it. It's going to New York!!

I was - or I thought I was - perfectly happy with this great consulting gig for these fantastic clients, its never been about what I make, but about how much I'm valued, and I am really valued at what I do. (And my freakin fantastic marriage (who the hell ever saw that coming - if there was ever a trainwreck it was my dating life in the 80s. . . and all the 90s till 1999).) I stopped performing years ago because singing was just boring and I felt there were people around me that NEEDED to be up there performing and for whatever reason I just wasn't one of them. Not that I wasn't good enough, but that I didn't need it and they did.

Then my freakin psychic tells me in 04 that no matter what I think I need my soul has needs to do this thing with stories and music that I thought I didn't even care about anymore. But now I've shit out this baby and - I can't kill it. But it does really terrify me sometimes. To have this THING made up of all my pain & personal shit out there, external to me, like a kid. It's like when I got married - it was like I was watching a movie of me doing something I could never actually do in life.

All I can say is, I'm really lucky this is happening in San Francisco. From the music industry to my blow through standup to solo performance, there has been such a great team of people whos hands I have passed through. Thanks to Bruce, Kamau, dear gentle Martha, mama Leslie, and all the rest (like they used to say on Gilligan's Island) as well as the hugely unlikely degree of separation that made all that possible, Sia Amma.

I tape my performances to see what works and doesn't (I don't watch most of them, cuz it's just too agonizing, but I always watch the end of the tape, that's the only time I get to see the audience - where people sat, their body language coming and going.

It's a great thing, but it scares me to care so much about something. I don't think that has ever happened to me before. Or maybe the post op meds from my eye surgery are just makin me all Lifetime Channel.